Session Name: Family, Clans, Friends, and Co-Religionists: Chinese Community Networks from the 16th -20th centuries
2 - Culture, Context and Concerns: Chinese family enterprises across regional global orders in the long twentieth century
Tuesday, July 30, 2024
14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract Chinese businesses have long been seen as playing important roles in the economies of colonial Southeast Asia, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth century, in as much as Chinese migration had also transformed the demography, economy, and politics of the region, especially in British Southeast Asia, in the Straits Settlements, the peninsula, and northwestern and northern Borneo. While culturally deterministic explanations of Chinese business success have been much critiqued vis-à-vis a more balanced approach involving both culture and context, kinship, family, place and region of origin—as well as linguistic and cultural ties—continue to be seen as important dynamics and connections facilitating Chinese business expansion in Southeast Asia. The first half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of several big Chinese business conglomerates in Singapore or with a base in Singapore. This paper compares three major Chinese business empires with a base in Singapore and their transformations after the Second World War, namely those built by Oei Tiong Ham, Eu Tong Sen, and Aw Boon Haw. It examines the ways in which global dynamics, changing China-Southeast Asia relations, as well as family and inter-generational change, and changing social and cultural, as well as political and economic contexts in Singapore and other parts of Southeast Asia brought about important changes in the shape and fate of these business empires, while also bringing in examples in other parts of Southeast Asia to provide a wider background and context for these transformations.
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