A Historical and Comparative Survey of the Chinese Presence in the Latin American and Caribbean Region, with a Focus on the Anglophone Caribbean

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243

brill.com/jco

拉丁美洲和加勒比地区的华人历史和比较研究 — 以英语加勒比地区为例

Cecilia A. Green 塞西莉娅·安妮·格林 Associate Professor, Department of Sociology The Maxwell School, Syracuse University [email protected]

Abstract

In this paper, I first broadly map the historical patterns of Chinese presence in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, as a way of distinguishing the primary locations and forms of incorporation and settlement. This historical context provides a baseline from which to examine patterns of the new post-1980s instantiations of Chinese presence in the wider LAC region and Central America and Caribbean (CAC) sub-region, with particular reference to the English-speaking Caribbean, and, even more specifically, the Eastern Caribbean group of islands with no historical antecedent of an older Chinese diaspora. To highlight this specificity, I include findings from preliminary research conducted in several of these islands, and examine some of the key emerging configurations and complications of the new dual presence in the Anglophone Caribbean of the Chinese state and private entrepreneurial immigrant.

* Cecilia A. Green is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at The Maxwell School, Syracuse University. She writes on race/class/gender/sexuality in Anglophone Caribbean history, as well as on the political economy of globalization and postcolonialism, particularly in the Caribbean. She has been doing research on aspects of the “new Chinese presence in the Eastern Caribbean” since 2012, in collaboration with graduate student, Yan Liu, who is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on a related topic under her supervision.

Keywords

Chinese migration – LAC region – English-speaking Caribbean – Huagong and Huashang – new entrepreneurial migration – Chinese state – development assistance – infrastructural aid – middleman minority – diplomatic rivalry

摘要

本文首先描绘早期中国移民在拉丁美洲和加勒比 (LAC) 区域的活动模式，包括初期落脚地点，以及他们融入当地社会和定居的形式。接着，以这个历史背景为基础，探讨1980年代以后，中国新移民在拉美地区、中美洲和加勒比 (cAC) 次区域的活动模式。本文聚焦英语加勒比地区，特别是毫无中国移民历史的东加勒比群岛。本文列举了在这些岛屿进行的初步研究结果，并探讨中国国有和私人企业移民在英语加勒比地区同时存在的现象，以及其主要形态与挑战。

关键词

华人移民 – 拉丁美洲和加勒比地区 – 英语加勒比地区 – 华工 – 华商 – 新移民企业家 – 中国国家 – 开发援助 – 基础设施援助 – 中介人少数族群 – 外交争端

In this paper, I first broadly map the historical patterns of Chinese presence in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, as a way of distinguishing the primary locations and forms of incorporation and settlement. This historical context provides a baseline from which to examine patterns of the new post-1980s instantiations of Chinese presence in the wider LAC region and Central America and Caribbean (CAC) sub-region, with particular reference to the English-speaking Caribbean, and, even more specifically, the Eastern Caribbean group of islands with no historical antecedent of an older Chinese diaspora. The rest of the paper will be devoted to a discussion of some of the key emerging configurations and complications of the new dual presence in the Anglophone Caribbean of Chinese state and private entrepreneurial immigrant.1 These two main forms of the new Chinese presence are particularly marked in those locations without the protracted sedimentation of a more

1 In reference to the migrants, who started arriving in the Eastern Caribbean in significant numbers in the early 1990s and many of whom are still present, I use the term “migrant” and “immigrant” interchangeably, and indistinguishably in terms of date of arrival.

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 208 Green complex and heterogeneous ethno-class configuration. To highlight this specificity, this paper relies on findings from preliminary research — conducted in collaboration with graduate student and research assistant Yan Liu2 — in Dominica, St Kitts, St Vincent, and Antigua, four member-states of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), a sub-set of the larger Caribbean Community or CARICOM grouping, as well as on secondary sources from Jamaica and elsewhere.

The Classic Migration Period: Huagong and Huashang

In terms of a mass presence, the history of the Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean is closely associated with the colonial-era sugar plantation and the “coolie trade,” by which Asian indentured workers were brought in to supplement or replace colonial labor systems based on African slavery. As Hu- DeHart (2002:70-71) has noted, “The use of indentured labor, based on formal contracts, seemed to have been a common practice throughout the Chinese diaspora in the nineteenth century, wherever European plantations thrived.” Although this pattern defined the prime mode of encounter between the LAC region and Chinese migrants, there were earlier Chinese merchant pres- ences in Spanish Mexico and Peru that were offshoots of centuries-old Chinese mercantile networks in Southeast Asia. Look Lai (2010b:37) has reminded us that Chinese traders and producers had established a formidable mercantile and industrial presence in Southeast Asia that “preceded the arrival of the West in this region by several centuries,” and was “not always formally acknowledged or encouraged by the imperial authorities.” He points out that the extension of these networks to Mexico, through a Manila-Acapulco trade connection, in the 16th and 17th centuries has not been much researched. Moreover, there were independent “free” migrations that occurred in the wake of the indentured

2 The research, titled “The New Chinese Presence in the Caribbean,” began as a small project with initial funding from the Office of the Dean, Maxwell School, Syracuse University. Field visits were made by Yan Liu and me or both of us to Dominica in 2012, St Kitts in 2013, and St Vincent in 2014 and 2015. Some of the demographic information from Antigua is based on notes kindly shared with me by Liu, who is currently writing a dissertation, under my supervision, on relations among Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs, local governments, and PRC (and Taiwan) diplomatic and aid institutions in Antigua and St Kitts. The earlier collab- orative research was based on participant observation and some semi-structured but mostly informal interviews with about two dozen Chinese shop-owners and half a dozen workers. Interviews were also conducted with government, private sector, and other officials, including the Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines.

Journal of Chinese OverseasDownloaded from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 206-243 09:45:39PM via free access A Historical and Comparative Survey 209 labor migration, and that, at least in some contexts, effectively re-configured the image of the (Chinese) “coolie” and re-defined the status of the Chinese as an ethno-class. Hu-DeHart (2002) has provided an enduring — if somewhat stylized — framework for distinguishing these class-differentiated migrations that were separated from each other by chronology and character by referring to the Huagong (laborer) and Huashang (merchant) complexes. Nonetheless, with few exceptions, the most widespread origins of the Chinese presence in the region can be attributed to European colonialism. Look Lai (2010b:36) has established a basic rule of thumb by pointing to the “international racial division of labor” that defined global, and largely colonial or quasi-colonial, migrations of the nineteenth century, which he refers to as the “classic migration period.” He (2010b:35) has remarked on the “50 million people leaving Europe for the temperate settlements, and another estimated 50 million people leaving India and China to work in the tropics on plantations, in mines, and in construction projects.” While the latter number might be an exaggeration and while there was some ethnic overlap “at the edges” of the international racial division of labor, its dynamic was clear: “the Europeans went largely to the industrializing and modernizing (and temperate) sector, and the non-Whites, principally from East and South Asia, went mainly to the tropical food producing and raw materials sector” (36). Elsewhere, he affirms that “the paramount pull factor was the expanding labour needs of a globalis- ing and industrialising Atlantic world-system” (Look Lai 2004:3). Huagong and Huashang migrations occurred separately in the course of the second half of the nineteenth century. Chinese contract laborers brought in to work on Peruvian and Cuban plantations in the nineteenth century comprised “the earliest system of huagong in the Americas, predating Chinese labor in the US West which took on a different form” (Hu-DeHart 2002:69; see also López 2013). Indentured migration, mainly, though not exclusively, from India and China, became a key component of the labor systems of what is generally referred to in Caribbean (and Southern USA) historiography as Plantation America. The major areas of plantation economy were Tropical Asia (comprising the countries of Southeast Asia) and Tropical America (Beckford 1999). Plantation America was almost universally founded upon Euro-colonial regimes of enslaved African labor and staple export production, its main areas of geographical concentration comprising the Caribbean Basin, north-east Brazil and the southern United States. First, not all the plantation regions of the Americas made use of the “coolie trade,” and, as Hu-DeHart has pointed out, nineteenth-century Chinese labor migration to the US took on a different form. Indeed, Look Lai (2010b:43) reminds us that “400,000 Chinese and 7,000 Indians who went to the USA and Canada went under different circumstances,

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 210 Green and were largely self-driven and self-organized, if not quite as ‘free’ as most of their European counterparts.” He refers to this Asian migration as “a marginal non-white version of the large transatlantic European movements, mo- tivated by the same overall expectations if not necessarily destined for the same fates” (ibid.). (It should be noted that the opposite also occurred: where certain groups of Europeans, like Madeiran Portuguese indentured workers in the British West Indies, occasionally replaced unfree non-white labor within the system.) Second, while the largest uniquely Chinese deployment of contract workers in the region went to Cuba and Peru, the British West Indies accounted for an even larger total contingent of Indian contract workers (whose presence was minimal in Hispanic America),3 but only about seven per cent of the Chinese indentured-labor migration to the LAC region. A third point of interest is that vastly more Chinese contract workers during this period went to Tropical Asia — where reliance on the African slave trade was rare or non-existent — than to Tropical America. Look Lai (2010b:43) informs us, for example, that 250,000 Indians and 750,000 Chinese “worked under indenture on the Malayan sugar and rubber plantations, as well as the tin mines (mainly Chinese).” So while the coolie system “emerged in direct response to the end of the African slave trade and of slavery as the preferred system of labor on plantations” (Hu-DeHart 1994:39), this correlation, while exclusive to the Chinese trade for Spanish America, was more generally consistent for East Indian workers, who made up 80 per cent of over half a million post-emancipation labor immigrants in the British West Indian plantation colonies. Chinese workers also flocked to new destinations of colonial production like Australia and New Zealand and the Pacific islands, as well as to the British colonial (ex-slave) sugar plantations of Mauritius and Reunion. Generally speaking, however, although the indentured labor system accounted for the bulk of Chinese migration to the LAC region in the second half of the nineteenth century, this system was more closely correlated with migrants from British India in the context of the global dispersal and, regionally, Britain’s West Indian colonies (Look Lai 1998:7-8). The following numerical tables place Chinese indentured migration to the LAC region in comparative perspective with regard to the Spanish and British destinations (Table 1) and with regard to other (mostly) indentured migrations into the British Caribbean only (Table 2). Left out of account are the sometimes significant (but mostly non-Chinese) contract migrations to the non-Hispanic and non-British territories (the largest of those, over 100,000 Indians and

3 Hu-DeHart and López, 2008:11.

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Table 1 Chinese Labor Migration to the Latin America/Caribbean Region, mid-1800s-1880s

Territory Numbers

Cuba 142 000 (51%) Peru 100 000 (36%) British West Indies 19 000 (7%) Other (multiple small streams) (about 6% of total) Total 278 000 (appr.)

Source: Look Lai 1998:6-7.

Table 2 Summary chart of immigrant labor brought to the British West Indies between 1834 and 1917

Territory Europeans Madeirans Africans Chinese Indians (1834-1841) (1835-1882) (1841-1862) (1852-1893) (1838-1917)

Br. Guiana 30 000 14 000 12 000 238 000 Jamaica 5 000 100 10 000 5 000 37 000 Trinidad 2 000 8 000 3 000 143 900 Grenada 800 1 500 3 200 St Vincent 500 1 000 2 500 St Lucia 200 500 500 4 300 St Kitts 200 500 300 Antigua 2 000 2 000 200 Totals 5 200 36 100 35 500 20 000 430 300

Source: Greenwood, Hamber, and Dyde 2008:104.

Javanese combined, to the Dutch colony of Suriname4). However, these two tables account for most of the Chinese and the larger proportion of the Indian indentured-labor streams to the LAC region in the nineteenth-century. The vast majority of indentured Chinese were contracted to work on sugar plantations, either alongside enslaved Africans, as in Cuba, to completely replace the labor system based on African slavery, after its abolition by newly

4 In 1914, there were 961 Chinese recorded in Suriname (Tjon Sie Fat 2009:52).

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 212 Green independent Peru, or to fill the labor shortages created by slave emancipation, particularly in the newer British colonies of Guiana and Trinidad, but also in Jamaica, where a large unappropriated hinterland threatened, as an economic enclave of independent peasants, to rival the ailing plantations. Look Lai (1998:15) notes that, already by the early 1870s, the Chinese in Trinidad “were living beyond the plantations,” quickly gravitating towards retail trading activity, often after short stints as peasant producers. Brereton confirms this in her foreword to Look Lai’s 1998 documentary history of the Chinese in the West Indies, calling the Chinese post-indenture trajectory “unequivocally a success story,” and summing it up as follows:

Once arrived, the Chinese quickly emerged as a classic “middleman minority,” a small ethnic group carving out a niche in the shopkeeping sector. They had virtually abandoned agriculture by the 1890s and nearly all of the men had become retail traders, jostling with their competitors (mainly Portuguese in Guyana, Indian in Trinidad). Brereton in Look Lai 1998: xiii

In this post-indenture period, further migrations of Chinese took three forms: a small return migration to China, re-migration (mostly from British Guiana) to new destinations within the circum-Caribbean region, and a new “free migration” from China, which took place in a period spanning the late 1880s to the 1920s and 1930s (Look Lai 1998:16). This new free migration was particularly pertinent for Jamaica, as we shall see. In the meantime, another form of mobility, reproductive mobility, which took place through inter-marriage or casual unions with non-Chinese, “diverted” Chinese into mixed-race communities that were likely to identify more as some version of “creole” than as ethnic Chinese. This is particularly pertinent as so many of the migrants were men, who had no access to Chinese women.5 According to Look Lai (ibid.), “the intact China-born element continued to co-exist side by side with their more westernised kinfolk, both the mixed and the ethnically homogeneous, and this element was later reinforced by the new migrations which effectively began in the last decade of the nineteenth century.” The free migration of Chinese to the LAC region, beginning in the late nineteenth century, represented in part a diversion of the migrant circuit away from the US, which passed the first of several Chinese Exclusion Acts (altogether in

5 Tjon Sie Fat (2009:51-2) speaks about the “dual family system” that sometimes emerged among Chinese immigrants in Suriname, “in a Chinese hierarchy, with the main wife acting as head of the family unit in China, and secondary wives/concubines abroad.”

Journal of Chinese OverseasDownloaded from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 206-243 09:45:39PM via free access A Historical and Comparative Survey 213 force for six decades) in 1882. It was this migration which provided the context for Hu-DeHart’s exploration of the distinctive Huashang settlement in Northern Mexico between the 1890s and 1920s. She notes that these migrants, ranging between 3,000 and 6,000 in number, shunned low-paying menial jobs and for the most part “started their own small businesses, or worked as partners and employees of other Chinese in business” (Hu-DeHart 2002:77). In the Caribbean, a similar mercantile migration of some 6,000 to 7,000 Chinese took place especially between 1910 and 1940, going mostly to Jamaica and Trinidad, with British Guiana, the main destination of the indentured stream, lagging in third place this time around (Look Lai 1998:17). Indeed, Brereton (1998:xii) has noted that “most of today’s Chinese families in the English-speaking Caribbean are descended from post-1890 free migrants, not the earlier indentureds.” This suggests the need for an important and more general qualification in relation to the origin in plantation-based indentureship of the Chinese presence in the LAC region. While this origin is historically fundamental, it is largely irrelevant to the largest increments of Chinese population growth in the LAC region outside of Peru and Cuba. The largest centers of Chinese presence after Peru (which maintains its lead) in the LAC region today are in Venezuela and (for the CAC sub-region) Panama, neither of which was a note- worthy participant in the colonial-era coolie trade. Venezuela’s Chinese population, surpassed today only by Peru’s, did not swell to its current proportions until very recently, growing from relatively low estimates before the 1980s to 400,000 or more today (Lizcano Fernández 2005:201). This population experienced a number of growth spurts, beginning in the 1920s with the opening up of the oilfields, in the 1950s and early 60s, when large numbers fled revolu tionary governments in China and Cuba, and, most dramatically, as a result of China’s recent opening up (Tinker Salas 2009). Secondary migration or re-migration within the Americas has also accounted for a large share of Venezuela’s Chinese population growth. Given the size of their current Chinese populations, the tendency to over- look the somewhat anomalous cases of Venezuela and Panama (and other similar if less spectacular examples) in historical surveys raises the need for a historiographical adjustment. Today, Panama has by far the largest and most diverse ethnic Chinese population (approximately 200,000) in Central America and the ethnic Chinese share of its national population (approximately 5 per cent) rivals that of Peru. In broad similarity to Venezuela, the history of the Chinese in Panama is linked only minimally to indentured labor and not at all to a plantation economy. As Siu (2005: 39) notes, “indentured Chinese labor was short-lived in Panama.” Instead, the Chinese presence was driven primarily by the independent migration — and re-migration within the Americas — of

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 214 Green merchants and workers, starting in the late nineteenth century, to centers of US/foreign investment in railroad and canal construction. In other areas like Venezuela and northern Mexico, Chinese immigrants were attracted to mining sites opened up by US and other foreign investors. Spurts in Chinese migration to Panama had a familiar pattern in this context: triggered by foreign investment enclaves, the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, re-migration within the Americas, and China’s more recent opening. The dramatic impact of the post-1980 opening up is clear. Despite the close and longstanding patronage by the Taiwanese government of Chinese Panamanian associational life (which recently came to an abrupt halt with Panama’s unceremonious ditch- ing of Taipei, its long-term ally, in favor of Beijing), the majority of Chinese Panamanians, according to Siu (2005: 46), even those coming from Hong Kong, “can trace their ancestral lineage to the Canton (Guangdong) region of China.” During the Noriega regime (1983-89), a large surge in mainland-Chinese migration into Panama brought mostly Hakkas from the Guangdong region (ibid.: 41). The prominence of Hakkas among immigrants from China and Hong Kong is also particularly evident in Jamaica and Suriname among Caribbean countries (Ho 1989; Tjon Sie Fat 2009). Despite the small numbers involved, the history of Chinese immigration to the English-speaking Caribbean is well-served by Hu-DeHart’s Huagong/ Huashang bifurcated (LAC) historical model, accommodating, as it does, both well-defined indentured labor and post-indenture free migrations. With regard to the smaller territories that were not part of this historical framework, the new (private) Chinese migration is more exclusively defined by entrepreneurial and contemporary-global reference-points. Christine Ho (1989) has provided a nuanced comparative-historical account of the Chinese in the three principal Anglophone Caribbean destinations of British Guiana, Jamaica, and Trinidad. Her approach has been to examine comparative levels of creolization (cultural and racial hybridization) among Chinese in the three territories. Due to remigrations in the post-indenture period, Jamaica displaced British Guiana as the most important site of Chinese settlement in the Anglophone Caribbean, second only to Cuba in the Caribbean as a whole. The “creole” societies into which the Chinese were incorporated were dominated either by a largely African-descended population, as in Jamaica, or by a more or less balanced combination of Indians and Africans, as in the “plural societies” of Trinidad and Guyana (previously British Guiana). Ho found a widespread pattern of cultural and racial creolization or mixing, particularly in the latter two territories, co-existing with the emergence and intensification of a distinct Chinese-Caribbean middleman business role. The case of Jamaica stood out, however, given the unusual level of cohesion achieved as a result of

Journal of Chinese OverseasDownloaded from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 206-243 09:45:39PM via free access A Historical and Comparative Survey 215 the tightly networked chain migration based on Hakka (as distinct from majority-Cantonese)6 ethnicity and kinship and explicitly entrepreneurial goals. Continued ties with China enabled the Jamaican Chinese to use it as a source of labor, merchandise, and capital, much as their twenty-first century successors do today. Moreover, they replicated social institutions based on ethnic and kinship traditions (including secret societies or tongs, but also more modern ethnically exclusive associations), through which they “created a bounded social system.” This system also served to keep out racially mixed descendants, especially daughters, who “were usually incorporated into their mothers’ kin group” (Ho 1989:15, 16). One other key feature was the fact that the Chinese in Jamaica did not face the fierce competition from other “middleman” groups, like the Portuguese and Indians, encountered by their counterparts in Guyana and Trinidad. Bias against “shopkeeper” occupations on the part of the white upper class and brown professional class in Jamaica left the field wide open to the incoming entrepreneurial Chinese immigrants. Finally, Ho attributes the difference in part to the size and urban concentration of the Jamaican Chinese population. In 1943, this population “was about four times that of Guyana in 1946 and exceeded that of Trinidad in 1946 by more than four thousand” (ibid.: 22). A larger, more spatially and strategically concentrated, and more culturally homogeneous population, together with a monopoly over the retail trade, appears to have facilitated the consolidation of a distinctive Chinese Jamaican ethnic/economic identity. Violent eruptions of anti-Chinese sentiment, which (within the Caribbean) have occurred only in Jamaica (in 1918, 1938, and 1965), have been attributed to a combination of black economic disenfranchisement, relative Chinese domination of the retail sector, and their lower levels of assimilation or “creolization” (1989:15). These insights may provide important lessons when considering contemporary attitudes to the new and spreading Chinese merchant presence in the Caribbean. During the 1980s, there was a third migration of Hong Kong and PRC Chinese — prompted by the impending transfer of Hong Kong to the PRC — to several circum-Caribbean areas of post-Plantation America (including Suriname, Jamaica, and Trinidad), about which little has been written. This 1978-1990 migration emanated mostly from the Hong Kong branches of the Hakka people and included some PRC nationals. The surge in migration from the PRC, starting around 1990, resulted from the lifting of emigration controls

6 About 96 per cent of the nineteenth-century Chinese migrants to the Americas came from one province in China, Guangdong, and most were men. Only 62 women went to Cuba during the entire 1847-1874 migration period, and a mere six to Peru, while the proportions for the non-Latin Caribbean amounted to about 14.7 per cent (Look Lai 1998:8).

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 216 Green by the Chinese state (as well as from the 1989 Tian’anmen Square Massacre), and is mainly responsible for the “new Chinese presence” discussed in the following section. These four distinct migration streams (indentured migration, the post-indentureship free migration, the post-1978 migration of mainly Hong Kong and some PRC Chinese, and the ongoing post-1989 migration from the PRC) have been documented in the first book-length study focusing on the new PRC immigrants in the region, written on Suriname by Paul B. Tjon Sie Fat (2009; also 2013). A broadly similar chronology, with different emphases, has been identified by Siu (2005) for Panama.

The New Chinese Presence in the Caribbean: Emerging Aspects

Putting the New Relationship in Context In looking at Chinese global migrations, a number of key factors emerge as independently and intersectionally determinative: (1) global or world systems and the fueling of mass migration through the demand for labor and goods; (2) the positionality and role of the Chinese state; (3) a longue-durée tradition of independent, transnational, entrepreneurial ethnic-Chinese activity and networks (see Kwee 2013). Chinese migration fueled by mass demands for labor (Huagong) or goods (Huashang) has a more particular resonance in countries of the Global South than in those of the Global North, where student and skilled or professional migrant circuits occupy a vastly more prominent and expanding component. Huiyao Wang, a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School, noted in a 2014 presentation that “a remarkable feature of Chinese emigration has been the growth of skilled migrants, including students-turned- migrants, emigrating professionals, academics and chain migrants.” While he concedes that “student migrants and other diplomats (such as journalists)” are also increasing in the case of Africa, topping the list for that continent are “temporary labor migrants” and “independent entrepreneurial migrants.” This is the pattern for the Caribbean as well, as we shall see below. The operation of the three variables mentioned above and their mode of intersection have obviously shifted through time. Taking the long view of the modern world, defined at its beginnings by the waning of Chinese dynastic power and the rise of the West, one can demarcate four periods over the last five centuries: (a) the immediate pre-colonial period (overlapping with the early colonial period), (b) the colonial period, characterized by China’s sub- ordination in the world economy and the mass supply of semi-voluntary Chinese labor to various locations in Plantation America (and elsewhere in the European-dominated world), but also featuring, between 1870 and 1930, subsequent streams of free migrants or Huashang to select LAC locations;

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(c) the post-revolution period of Chinese communist isolationism and limited engagement (during which migration mainly from Taiwan and Hong Kong continued in delimited forms), (d) starting in the late 1980s, the “rise of China,” signaled by the re-joining and new positioning of China in the world system, and featuring an unparalleled “dual” thrust into countries of the Global South, in the form of both state-based operations and new private migrant flows, featuring individual entrepreneurial aspirants. Today, therefore, the renewed flow of Chinese into the Caribbean region is taking place under the changed circumstances of China’s rise in the global economy and polity, and its autonomous and proactive state-to-state donor relationship with the now constitutionally independent but still economically dependent micro-states of the English-speaking Caribbean. The new Chinese presence in the Caribbean, as elsewhere in the Global South, takes two main forms: the Chinese state — as diplomatic ally, donor/development agent, and (to variable degrees) direct purveyor, through state-owned enterprises (SOEs), of investment and trade — and the private entrepreneurial immigrant (with the associated coterie of family members and workers). Most contemporary migration into the region is directly related to these two forms, and thus tends to be of two main types: state-sponsored sojourners (professionals and laborers) — associated with diplomatic and ongoing development (e.g., agricultural) missions, large-scale infrastructural donor projects, and SOE investments and operations — and private entrepreneurial immigrants, together with their privately sponsored and more peripatetic and transient workers. As in Africa, large-scale “proletarian” in-migrations tend to be state-sponsored, short-term, and project-specific, given the well-known practice by the Chinese state (and Chinese capital) of supplying its own home-contracted workforce for the large infrastructural and other donor (or contract) projects it undertakes all over the Global South. In many other parts of the world, particularly in the countries of the Global North and Southeast Asia (but also including an “in-transit” flow through Africa and parts of the LAC region), the Chinese diaspora encompass- es a rather vast, relatively autonomous “transnational ethnic labour market,” which essentially comprises a proletarian migrant circuit channeled almost exclusively through the ethnic entrepreneurial niche (Ma Mung 2008:99). Ma Mung sees this migration as part of “a transnational ethnic labor market which gives rise to a form of diaspora organization specific to the Chinese overseas” (101). Despite some evidence of smuggling rings using various locations in the Caribbean Basin as a transit point,7 the Anglophone Caribbean is not a

7 Large groups of mostly female Chinese workers were sometimes brought in to work in garment factories in export-processing (or free trade) zones in Jamaica and the Eastern Caribbean during the 1980s and 1990s, and it appears that some of them stayed, at least in the

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 218 Green significant site of an independent “transnational ethnic labor market,” or, for that matter, of “ungrounded empires” of ethnic-Chinese capitalism and related professional networks (Ong and Nonini 1997). While this subject cannot be discussed at any length here, it is important to mention that the English-speaking Caribbean has, to a disproportionate extent, been more significant as a con- venient node in mass in-transit (or “offshore”) flows of Chinese capital than of (trafficked) persons. Two important instruments of such flows have been offshore financial centers or OFCs (especially in the Cayman Islands and the British Virgin Islands) and, less spectacularly, the revenue-generating citizenship by investment programs or CIPs instituted by five OECS governments.8

Some Comparative Considerations vis-à-vis the Wider LAC Region In seeking to distinguish the differentia specifica of the Chinese presence in the LAC region, one notes at least three key points of difference, though there are others. One is the qualitatively different scope of state engagement in different parts of the region; the second is the diplomatic divide in the region between states aligned with Beijing and those still formally aligned with Taipei; and a third is the difference, in the Caribbean in particular, between those states with an already existing Chinese diaspora and those for which the Chinese presence is entirely new, certainly in a substantive sense. I briefly consider these points of difference in turn.

case of Jamaica, at the end of their contracts. Also, see Tjon Sie Fat’s (2009:188-200) discussion of illegal migration or smuggling of “passport Chinese” to and through Suriname. On the whole, however, the Caribbean does not appear to be a major transit point for “human trafficking” involving Chinese. 8 The massive Chinese foreign direct investments in and usage of offshore financial centers (OFCs) in the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands (especially up to 2008 when FDI regulations changed in China) has been explored by Vlcek (2010, 2014) and Sutherland and Matthews (2009). “Offshore activities” also include the controversial Economic Citizenship (ECP) or Citizenship by Investment Programs (CIP) now run by five of the six independent OECS countries as revenue-generating ventures. These programs, sometimes dismissed deri- sively as mere passport-selling scams, typically confer citizenship in exchange for a large cash fee or real estate investment. They continue to be mired in controversy, with many wealthy Chinese, Russians, and Middle Easterners taking advantage of their lack of residency require- ments and mostly attracted to the access gained to Global North destinations. Indeed, in our own research, we found that few of the new Chinese SMEs in the Eastern Caribbean had come in through these programs, although the numbers of resident “economic citizens” have increased. Recently, there have been a number of controversies involving the sale of passports to Iranian and Chinese nationals wanted for criminal activities by their own governments, but the facts have often been in dispute.

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Beyond China’s dual role as state player and sender/source of private entrepreneurial and other migrants, the particular circumstances of Chinese state operations differ across the region. Thus, there is a relative distinction between the role of the Chinese state as agent of diplomacy and sponsored development and its role as state-capitalist purveyor of investment and trade. These roles map unevenly onto the sub-regional demarcations of South America, Central America, and the Caribbean. Richard Bernal, for example, has taken pains to elaborate upon the point that, in contrast to its large-scale trade with and related investment in South American countries, “[c]apital flows from China to countries in the Caribbean have so far largely been composed of development aid in the form of loans to fund infrastructure projects, built by Chinese enterprises” (Bernal, 2016:4). Large-scale investments in agricultural and extractive resource industries for export to the Chinese market are restricted to the large Latin American countries of Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Argentina (making China their largest or second-largest export partner), and are not generally significant for the Caribbean, despite some exceptions. McElroy and Bai (2008:228) note that “[b]y Latin American standards, the PRC’s trade with the island Caribbean is modest, accounting for less than 10% of the LAC total with the lion’s share going to the large mineral exporters, Trinidad, Jamaica and Cuba, which supply half of PRC sugar and a third of PRC nickel imports.”9 Investment in the tourist sector is also growing in significance. On the whole, however, “China’s FDI in the Caribbean is very small, both as a share of China’s FDI and as a share of the total stock of FDI into the Caribbean,” amounting to US$604.45 million in 2013 (not including the US$2.6 billion port facility in Freeport, Bahamas), with US$111.3 million and US$135.1 million going to Cuba and Guyana, the largest recipients, respectively (Bernal 2016:8, 7-9). The Caribbean has a spiraling trade deficit with China, while the South American countries’ resource exports to China have sustained a more balanced trade profile, and, in some cases, a trade surplus,10 albeit one which is badly skewed towards primary exports and which will ultimately favor China’s manufactures. Not only do the EU and the US remain the most important (though relatively — and, in some instances, rapidly — declining) recipients of Anglophone Caribbean exports, but the sub-region’s economic relationship to China is mainly as an importer of aid/concessionary capital and cheap

9 A recent Aljazeera America on-line article roughly confirms this breakdown, putting Chinese investment, over the ten years since 2005, at $115.9 billion in South America and at $11.9 billion in the CAC sub-region (Chan 2015). 10 Brazil, Peru, and Chile (but not Argentina) had trade surpluses of varying sizes with China in 2016. See the website http://www.tradingeconomics.com.

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 220 Green consumer goods. Bernal (2015:1414) notes that this sets the Caribbean apart, not just from Latin America, but also from “Africa and developing countries in Asia, where [exports to China] account for 10.5 per cent and 11.5 per cent, respectively.” Indeed, there are persistent cries that China is adding to the severe indebtedness of the CARICOM countries. Second, the Central America and Caribbean (CAC) sub-region is uniquely significant as one of the last remaining theaters of diplomatic rivalry between the PRC and Taiwan (ROC). Before Panama suddenly (if not unexpectedly) shifted to the PRC during the preparation of this paper, twelve of the 21 states which still recognized Taipei over Beijing were in the LAC region, with all but one (Paraguay) concentrated in the CAC sub-region. Even after the succession of regional defections from the Taiwan camp that took place in the first decade of the 21st century11 (and Panama’s recent switch), the region still accounts for just over one-half of Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic alliances worldwide. In addition to five Central American states, two of the largest island-states, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and three small English-speaking island-states remain within Taiwan’s diplomatic fold, placing that group just one unit shy of the group aligned with China in the CAC sub-region (but dwarfed by PRC allies in the wider LAC region). Indeed, the six independent micro-states that make up the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) are evenly split between the PRC and Taiwan in terms of diplomatic ties. The years between 2001 and 2008 comprised the period of the most intense diplomatic rivalry, noted by Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves12 of St Vincent and the Grenadines in a 2014 interview as a golden period of Taiwan’s gener- osity towards his island-state.13 While the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean were independently attractive to China, given its larger global trajectory, the urgency of gaining a foothold was particularly strong because of

11 For an example of a particularly contentious switch, see Grenade (2013). 12 Prime Minister Gonsalves recently defended with great vigor his decision to “maintain and deepen” diplomatic relations with Taiwan in a 2016 white paper. 13 This period, during which Taiwan’s more nationalist party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), was in power, was followed by a thaw in China-Taiwan relations with the election of the Kuomintang party (KMT), a party more inclined to compromise on China’s “One China” policy. Indeed, evidence from Wikileaks cables, widely reported in the media, indicated that, from 2008 and 2009, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic, and Panama had all expressed interest in recognizing Beijing instead of Taipei, but the requests were denied by Beijing as a gesture of goodwill amid the “diplomatic truce.” In 2016, the DPP was re-elected to office, perhaps prompting an end to China’s self-imposed reticence regarding diplomatic poaching.

Journal of Chinese OverseasDownloaded from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 206-243 09:45:39PM via free access A Historical and Comparative Survey 221 the need to displace Taiwan from its strongest regional base in terms of global diplomatic ties. As one author put it before the recent Panama defection, the Central American and Caribbean Zone “is the only region in the world where the Republic of China (Taiwan or Chinese Taipei) has more embassies than China, raising diplomatic rivalries to a level not seen anywhere else” (Navejas 2013:148). According to a number of observers, the loss of Panama, previously Taiwan’s most strategically valuable global ally, is set to generate a domino effect. Lack of formal diplomatic status in some Caribbean countries has not proved a major deterrent to either Chinese state-economic outreach or the private Chinese migrants, who have settled and do business everywhere in the Caribbean. In a recently published book, Ellis (2014:73-77) has documented major, sometimes massive, infrastructural projects undertaken by Chinese SOEs in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize, all current or previous Taiwanese allies. Despite its predominant diplomatic alignment, Central America’s trade with China has far outpaced that with Taiwan, a pattern increasingly seen among Taiwan’s remaining allies (China and Latin America 2014, on-line). China has bypassed the lack of diplomatic relations in Central America by sending trade missions, establishing trade offices, sponsoring friendship associations with China, and striking, or attempting to strike, far-reaching trade deals with the various countries. The modus vivendi between China’s growing economic role and Taiwan’s diplomatic partnership is worthy of further research, as China is not only one of the biggest sources of imported manufactures but an increasingly critical source of foreign direct investment in these countries. China’s economic prominence in Panama’s Canal Zone had been evident for some time. Closer to home, the China-Caribbean Joint Business Council, the state-led institutional vehicle for fostering business cooperation with the countries of the region, includes the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Taiwan’s two biggest diplomatic allies in the insular Caribbean (Bernal 2015:1412). Also, the vast majority of recent ethnic-Chinese entrepreneurial immigrants in Taiwan-allied CAC countries are from the PRC. Moreover, within CARICOM, state-owned or semi-private Chinese firms are no longer limited to operating under the authority of state donor projects and can bid on Caribbean contracts on their own account. As Bernal (2015:1422) explains, “Chinese firms initially made their entry based on tied aid from the government of China but have now started to win contracts through competitive bidding.” Indeed, because of China’s (non-borrower) membership of the Caribbean Development Bank, their activities easily cross diplomatic lines within the Caribbean sub-region when they win tenders, on equal terms with local/regional companies, through that

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 222 Green institutional context.14 However, it remains true that those countries that have accepted the “One China” policy are the chief recipients of Chinese aid, while the others continue to rely on what appears to be less spectacular Taiwanese support. The third distinction of note is that between territories with a historical Chinese diaspora and those without such a legacy. This distinction is exacer- bated somewhat by an ethnic compositional divide between the preeminently “plural” societies (Guyana, Trinidad, and, to some extent, Belize)15 and those which are ninety per cent or more dominated by Afro-Caribbean ethnic populations. The implications for the historical Chinese middleman position in the case of Jamaica has been noted previously. Thus, the pre-existence (or not) of an ethnic-Chinese community bears directly on the investigation into the contemporary Chinese flow, though its precise significance at the Chinese end of things has not yet been researched (except by Tjon Sie Fat 2009 in the case of the Dutch-speaking country of Suriname). For English-speaking Caribbean territories other than Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad, the “new Chinese presence” is indeed new and unprecedented, since, as demonstrated in Table 2 above, these territories were not (or were insignificant) destinations for the earlier Chinese indentured-labor and “free” migrations. This is particularly true of the OECS sub-group of smaller and “less developed” CARICOM islands. The Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica16 (pop. 73,000), for example, has a small but unique indigenous ethnic/territorial enclave in the interior and, indeed, a tiny, but economically prominent Syrian/Lebanese17 “middleman minority” of long standing. However, as one of the most marginal sugar plantation colonies, it was not the recipient of any post-emancipation indentureds, Indian or Chinese (indicated by its exclusion from Table 2 above). As such, it represented virgin territory for the new Chinese migrants. In a 2012 interview, a Chinese embassy staff member offered the opinion that his entrepreneurial countrymen were attracted to Dominica because of an abundance of economic opportunities, and that they had the advantage of being able to offer goods at significantly lower prices than the traditional Syrian/Lebanese merchants,

14 Interview with Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St Vincent & the Grenadines, November 2014. 15 Suriname in the Dutch Caribbean would also fit into this category. 16 Dominicans’ lack of exposure to urban ethnic pluralism might well be implicated in the experience reported by my Chinese graduate assistant of more ethnic name-calling in the streets there than at other research sites. 17 Although there may be some genuine Syrians in their midst, most Middle Eastern merchants in the Caribbean, generally referred to as “Syrians,” are in fact of Lebanese origin.

Journal of Chinese OverseasDownloaded from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 206-243 09:45:39PM via free access A Historical and Comparative Survey 223 who had exercised a monopoly in the market and whose overpriced merchandise was beyond the purchasing power of poorer Dominicans. This raised direct questions about the potential impact of the new Chinese presence on this older “middleman minority” group. Continuing with the example of Dominica, which switched sides from Taipei to Beijing in 2004, and since then has been the recipient of significant Chinese infrastructural aid, my own research has revealed that it has already become the center of a small re-migration of Chinese immigrants to North America and to other OECS islands (notably St Vincent & the Grenadines), often armed with Dominican passports and hence OECS-wide access.18 The Chinese have built micro-highways, a sports stadium, a new state house, and a state college, and have begun a $40 million upgrade of the main hospital. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Chinese are singlehandedly re-shaping the landscape of an island that has long been seen as lagging behind the rest of the Caribbean in terms of infrastructural amenities. Indeed, with the help of the Chinese, Dominica appears to be playing catch-up.

Key Parameters of the New Presence in the Caribbean The list of projects funded (by outright grants or soft loans or a combination of the two) and built by the Chinese state in the Caribbean in the last fifteen to twenty years includes roads, sports stadiums, deepwater port and airport facili- ties, state colleges, cultural and convention centers, hospitals, housing develop- ments, power plants, and shipyards. Brought in to work on the engineering and construction of these projects and other large Chinese-financed commercial ventures like luxury hotel resorts, tens of thousands (all told) of male Chinese workers have sojourned in various parts of the Caribbean in the last fifteen to twenty years, typically housed in makeshift labor encampments for the entire duration of the projects, which sometimes last years. Ellis (2014:182) dramatizes this phenomenon, no doubt with some exaggeration, by reporting the extreme case of Chinese workers brought into Suriname with Chinese construction projects, which “helped to swell the Chinese population there to almost 40,000 by 2011, 10 per cent of all persons in the country.” Certainly, imported Chinese workforces of several hundreds, laboring on large-scale infrastructural projects in small islands of fewer than 100,000 persons, like the Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica, can represent quite a novelty and visual spectacle, having no parallel in living memory. Anger at the lack of opportunity for employment

18 But not access to Canada, as a group of Chinese attempting to enter Canada with Dominican passports discovered (St Vincent Interviews, 2015). There has been freedom of movement within the OECS since June 2013.

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 224 Green of locals on these projects has sometimes sparked protests of various kinds against local governments and the Chinese authorities. But, as I have noted elsewhere (Green 2015:105), the Chinese appear to have perfected the art of parlaying a “speedy delivery of prestigious turnkey and essential development projects” into a grudging popular acceptance for the “relative isolation of these projects from domestic networks of employment, skills, and entrepreneurship during the period of construction,” especially given the much slower delivery record of western-financed projects and western or CARICOM contractors (all of which use local labor). The impact of the immigrant merchants has also been dramatic, despite small overall figures (especially in the new destinations). The numbers of new (post-1989) Chinese immigrants in the English-speaking Caribbean as a whole are unknown, though one might speculate that those who have migrated to Trinidad and Jamaica in particular are numbered in at least the low thousands. It is not clear that the numbers are quite that high, given fairly modest census figures. In the territories with an older Chinese diaspora, two things are evident: (1) there has been a significant post-independence exodus of Caribbean Chinese to North American and other destinations, reducing their numbers considerably before significant new post-1980s immigration occurred; and (2) new immigrations, from Hong Kong and China, have considerably diversified and transformed the Old Chinese communities. As a qualifier, it is important to note that the decrease in population has also come from racial mixing, causing a drop-off in the numbers identifying as Chinese. López (2010: 215) has noted for Cuba, for example, that “the relatively low numbers of Chinese women … led to a ‘mixed’ community by the mid-20th century.” Three considerations, therefore, make it difficult to ascertain numbers attributable to the new migration (particularly between censuses): (1) attrition of the Old Chinese population by migration and (2) re-identification through racial mixing, and (3) a high turnover (estimated at about thirty per cent in the Eastern Caribbean) among the new immigrants. These help explain the modest figures from 2011 censuses (the latest available). Bryan (2004:24) reported that there were 11,710 Chinese in Jamaica in 1970, but a massive exodus in reaction to the leftist government of Michael Manley reduced that number to 5,320 in the ensuing decade. There was a third migration of ethnic Chinese (both workers and traders) to Jamaica from Hong Kong and the PRC during the 1980s, bringing about a notable distinction between Old Chinese and New Chinese (Shibata 2005). If the experience documented by Tjon Sie Fat (2009, 2013) for Suriname is any indication, the earlier “New Chinese” phenomenon has been further transformed by substantial re- inforcements from the PRC beginning in the 1990s. However, the extent of this

Journal of Chinese OverseasDownloaded from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 206-243 09:45:39PM via free access A Historical and Comparative Survey 225 is not clear, since the self-identified Chinese population registered by the 2011 Jamaican census comprised 5,223 persons. One source of information has been a University of the West Indies doctoral dissertation by Win Yin Tsang, which was based on a sample of 66 immigrant businesses owned by 33 Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs (with 41 of the 66 still operating in 2014). The majority of research subjects were first-generation immigrants and included persons from Hong Kong from the 1990s and from the PRC since 2000 (Tsang 2014:99-100). Among the phenomena noted by Tsang is evidence from the 1980s of women coming as part of “arranged marriages” (167), of the increased linguistic, cultural, and financial-status diversity of Jamaica’s Chinese population (171), and of an intra-regional migration from Suriname and Guyana, facilitated by the CARICOM Single Market & Economy (170). One might assume that, in the context of Jamaica’s development as a hub for China’s economic activity in the region, the Chinese population there will expand and become even more diverse. Trinidad also experienced a post-independence decline in the self-identified Chinese population, numbers plunging from 8,361 in 1960 to 3,800 in 2000.19 In 2011, when the Chinese population of Trinidad & Tobago was registered at 4,003 persons,20 a newspaper report spoke of a “new wave of Chinese immigration … sweeping Trinidad and Tobago, triggering a baby boom and unearth- ing a ring of exploitation which appear to go unnoticed by the authorities” (Sookraj 2011). Again, this kind of anecdotal evidence of an influx of new immigrants awaits serious academic investigation. The OECS islands share with Suriname and other regional destinations the fact that “the bulk of Chinese migration … basically remains sponsored migration based on privately owned businesses of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs” (Tjon Sie Fat 2009:122). Despite some divergence at the margins, the Huashang basis of the new migration is unmistakable, complete with the reliance on kinship and informal labor networks originating in China. Most of the expansion can be accounted for by chain migration, as my graduate assistant, Yan Liu, and I discovered in interviews with shopkeepers in the Eastern Caribbean (Green 2014, 2015). Also, most of the worker migrants are privately sponsored and enter in small numbers into a pre-arranged private entrepreneurial niche, within which they are tightly controlled. On the whole, workers’ lives are inex- tricably tied to their employers’ enterprises, with very little access to independent space or time.

19 http://broom02.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=Chinese%20Trinidadian%20and%20 Tobagonian&item_type=topic. 20 Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago 2011.

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Total numbers of Chinese immigrants for the OECS islands are estimated to range (individually) from fewer than one hundred to about three hundred. Precise figures are not always available, but estimates do exist. For example, Antigua’s 2011 census enumerated the presence of 143 Chinese residents, including children; however, this number has probably increased by at least fifty per cent. Private sector representatives interviewed in Dominica in 2012 mentioned that they had conducted an informal survey which revealed 48 Chinese establishments in the main town of Roseau (Dominica interviews, 2012). In a July 15, 2013, posting on Sina Weibo,21 the Chinese Embassy of Dominica released figures which placed the precise number of Chinese resident in Dominica at 142: 98 overseas Chinese (or Chinese nationals), 41 ethnic Chinese without Chinese citizenship, and 3 Taiwanese (retrieved by Yan Liu from http://e.weibo.com). According to the release, these figures represented 29 Chinese households running 42 shops and enterprises, and employing 115 local people. Given the small size of the private sector and its concentration in the main town of Roseau (pop. 16,500), these numbers, which have subsequently grown, represent a significant presence. An official list obtained from the government of St Vincent and the Grenadines (affiliated with Taiwan) shows 34 (private-sector) work permits granted to ethnic Chinese from 2011-2013, 31 of them to mainland Chinese. In the small OECS islands in particular, because of the specialized niche occupied by new migrants and the “small pond” into which they have migrated (see Lin 2014), these small numbers can have socially transformative rippling effects. The “shopkeeper” or “middleman minority” image of the Chinese in the CAC region may be the subject of negative and racialized stereotypes, but it is not disconnected from reality. Siu (2005: 50) has noted with regard to Panama, with its relatively large and diverse Chinese population, that “the most visible occupation among ethnic Chinese is small (family) business ownership,” and that “virtually every convenience store in Panama is owned and run by ethnic Chinese.” This kind of generalization, however, requires a number of qualifica- tions with regard to both Panama and the English-speaking Caribbean. While the presence of ethnic Chinese in the OECS islands is practically synonymous with the ethnic niche economy comprised of SME businesses, this is obviously not the case in the old Chinese diasporas of Jamaica and Trinidad, where the class structure among Chinese has diversified, mostly upwards and outwards (far less so downwards). (Also, in ethnically diverse class communities or niches, the Chinese stand out less.) The new immigration, however, has replicated

21 Sina Weibo has been described as a Chinese hybrid of Twitter and Facebook.

Journal of Chinese OverseasDownloaded from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 206-243 09:45:39PM via free access A Historical and Comparative Survey 227 and rejuvenated old patterns, as seen in a series of Jamaican newspaper articles discussed later in this paper. The late Jamaican scholar, Carl Stone (1991: 243), in a conceptually expansive piece entitled “Race and Economic Power in Jamaica,” placed Jamaica more broadly within a group of Third World countries where “the distribution of power, rewards and opportunities between big corporations, petty capitalists and workers is based largely on ethnicity, which was built into the very fabric of the colonial ethno-class structures.” These societies “were stratified sharply between powerful Whites who controlled plantations and big corporations, an intermediary grouping of minority ethnic groups who dominated petty capitalist and small entrepreneurial sectors, and the majority ethnic group [Blacks in the case of Jamaica] that comprised most of the wage labour force and most of the small peasant farmers” (244-5). A shift occurred with political independence, when most of the new economic power was appropriated by (urban- based) intermediary or minority ethnic groupings (Jews, Lebanese, Browns, and Chinese). According to Stone, the Chinese in Jamaica emerged from their intermediary role, where they, along with Browns, had lagged behind the Lebanese and Jews, to ultimately join these groups in “reconstitut[ing] a new and powerful capitalism which included the Whites but eliminated the latter’s ascendancy and dominance” (251). Stone saw the Chinese (though still secondary to Whites, Jews, and Lebanese) as one of the groups that had been pushed “upwards and out of the intermediary grouping into becoming part of the dominant ethnic grouping in the Jamaican economy” (253). By the 1980s, despite (ultimately unsuccessful) politically facilitated attempts at inroads by Blacks, “the Browns, Whites, Jews, Lebanese and Chinese [were] evolving into a single unified ethnic minority of powerful families controlling the country’s corporate sector” (262). Whatever one’s assessment of the finer points of Stone’s ethno-class paradigm, it clearly is not representative of the new entrepreneurial immigrants in the Eastern Caribbean or even in Jamaica itself, where many of the newcomers are small merchants who avoid the larger and more established Kingston market and who bear a striking resemblance to their Eastern Caribbean counterparts profiled below. Whether or not they are destined to join their co-ethnics in an upward trajectory, their presence has considerably diversified the sub-ethnic and class base of the Jamaican Chinese population (Shibata 2005). At the same time, it should be noted that larger-scale Chinese capital, separate from “developmental” state-assisted/SOE activity, is beginning to be evident in the Eastern Caribbean, some of it as a condition of “economic citizenship.”

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 228 Green

In the Eastern Caribbean, the vast majority of contemporary Chinese immigrants occupy an ethnic entrepreneurial niche, either as (SME) owners or as workers. (It is important to note that in our research we also came across the odd Chinese bus or taxi driver.) Some immigrants, particularly in the higher- income Leeward islands of St Kitts and Antigua, are re-migrants from or have roots in older Caribbean Chinese communities, but most are newcomers from China. And while the largest number come from traditional migrant-sending coastal areas, the total picture is much more mixed (with everyday Mandarin more evident in some islands, like Dominica, than others). Guangdong is the most common province of origin for (mostly Cantonese-speaking) immigrants in St Kitts and Antigua; however, certain idiosyncrasies characterize each island, probably as a result of chain migration. A majority of Chinese immigrants in St Kitts, for example, are specifically from Jiangmen prefecture in Guangdong, while in Antigua they are from multiple prefectures. Another popular province of origin is Fujian, and smaller numbers come from Zhejiang, Henan, Jiangsu, Hunan, Anhui, and Hubei. In Dominica, the immigrants mostly hail from four core provinces: Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu, and Shandong. With many Dominican passport-holders now residing and doing business in St Vincent (allied with Taiwan), the origins there are similar. In St Kitts, where many of the Chinese entrepreneurs have ties of business and kinship to the nearby Dutch island-territory of St Maarten (and appear to be of older vintage than other Eastern Caribbean groups), the most common businesses are supermarkets and restaurants, a deviation from the prevail- ing pattern of variety stores and restaurants. Interestingly, Tjon Sie Fat has pointed out that the Old and New Chinese in Suriname occupy different market niches, with the older group embracing a “supermarket” ethnic-economy model, while the newcomers are typically in the (non-food) “baihuo business,” roughly translated as “variety stores.” According to him, “what made [the newcomers] absolutely ‘new’ to the general (non-Chinese) public was their shops which sold an enormous variety of PRC-made commodities for very low prices” (Tjon Sie Fat 2009:123). In this system, the merchants purchase a “wide variety of cheap goods of uneven quality” in China and ship them in containers to the Caribbean, where they often engage in under-invoicing of the containers to evade import duties and taxes, and in order to bring the goods to the market as cheaply as possible (127). The profit margins are reportedly higher than in the supermarket business (and in the restaurant business, as we were told in Dominica), causing resentment among Old Chinese merchants in Suriname (129). The densely stocked variety store (“baihuo”) — featuring shelves and dis- play racks crammed with a wide assortment of clothing and other wearable

Journal of Chinese OverseasDownloaded from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 206-243 09:45:39PM via free access A Historical and Comparative Survey 229 and personal items, as well as cheap household and electronic goods, all imported from China — has become a hallmark of the new Chinese presence. In some of the islands, particularly St Vincent, small eateries catering exclusively to low-income clients and featuring a repetitive menu of fried chicken, fried rice, and chow mein (fare clearly adapted to certain acquired local tastes) have popped up along the downtown corridors, becoming a secondary hallmark of the Chinese presence. Other businesses include home electronics and cell- phone stores, restaurants catering to a more middle-class clientele, and small light manufacturing or service operations such as window assembly, water bot- tling, and air-conditioning installation. Most operations are small and family- run, but some are components of multi-island businesses or multi-business operations (typically managed by extended family members), while one sees the beginnings of more upscale ventures, such as real estate development, as a condition of economic citizenship in islands like St Kitts and Antigua. Some of the ancillary business activities mentioned by some of our respondents were unexpected and pioneering for the Eastern Caribbean, such as a small but robust operation exporting Caribbean lobsters to China by one variety- store owner in St Vincent. Overall, the most modest operations appear to be the tiny eateries catering to low-income customers and not dependent on imports from China (Chinese ingredients can easily be procured from nearby Trinidad). Across the economic range, chain migration often extends the original family nucleus bilaterally, with members of both the wife’s and the husband’s family joining their relatives in the Caribbean (see Green 2014 for some examples). A growing feature of Chinese baihuo business, whose down-market specialization in small shops selling cheap goods can be deceiv- ing, is expansion across several islands with the assistance of extended kin networks. A question that repeatedly comes up is whether the Chinese shopkeepers are “sojourners” or “immigrants” in the Eastern Caribbean. It is clear that the situation in the Eastern Caribbean is in flux, with many Chinese exercising a version of “flexible citizenship” entailing an instrumental or opportunistic relationship to the Caribbean as an in-transit stop on the way to North America or to supra-national capitalist success, or as a strictly delimited opportunity to make money and return to China. There was evidence of all of those trajectories in the islands we visited, and the relatively high turnover of businesses is an ongoing feature of the Chinese immigrant community in the Caribbean. How ever, since none of these scenarios is peculiar to the Eastern Caribbean, there is little reason to believe that it will be different from other destinations in the LAC region, where economically or politically triggered fluctuations in the Chinese population have not led to the latter’s disappearance or prevented its structural

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 230 Green incorporation, sedimentation, and evolution, despite ongoing difficulties with full integration. At the very least, it is too soon to tell, even based on intentions articulated by the immigrants themselves, many of whom have taken great care to become citizens of one OECS state or another, granting them the freedom to locate themselves or their businesses in any of the member-states. To be sure, we found a range of resident and citizenship statuses among the migrants, from transient illegal worker to non-citizen business owner, to citizens naturalized through the regular channels and (more rarely) “economic citizens.” Nearly 30 per cent of the Chinese population in Dominica in 2012 no longer held Chinese citizenship (Chinese Embassy of Dominica, Sina Weibo post).

Emerging Areas of Conflict Pál Nyíri (2001, 2011, 2012, 2013), the Hungarian anthropologist, who has made a substantial and longstanding case for the emergence of a new Chinese “transnational middleman minority” in “poor” and “transitional” economies, has pointed out that the Chinese state shifted from a more or less anti-emigration stance before the 1980s to a position which “celebrat[es] migration itself as a patriotic and modern act, thus encouraging transnational practices among people who are in the process of, or just preparing for, leaving China” (Nyíri 2001:635). According to him, after 1989, entrepreneurial migration from China developed on a mass scale, with “these new entrepreneurial migrants going to countries with no recent tradition of Chinese immigration, but where there was high demand for low-cost consumer goods produced by China and a lax regulatory environment” (Nyíri 2011:145). He notes that “contemporary Chinese migrant entrepreneurs have been heavily dependent on China in ways their predecessors were not.” Whereas “[c]olonial ‘middlemen minorities’ mar- shaled trade between the colonies and the metropoles and made use of China largely as a source of labour,… [f]or contemporary migrants, China is a source of labour, merchandise, and capital” (Nyíri 2011:147). In many ways, the Caribbean fits Nyíri’s criteria. Although the English- speaking Caribbean territories, with the exception of Guyana, are all consid- ered “upper middle income” to “high income” countries, most are struggling with deeply entrenched legacies of historical dependency, post-preferential economic uncertainty, high levels of indebtedness, and small-island ecologi- cal and market-size fragility. The end of EU preferential regimes for bananas, predominantly a small-farmer crop, and sugar, the classic colonial-plantation product, has left the islands previously dominated by one or the other of these export regimes particularly vulnerable. Apart from rival diplomatic alignments between Taipei and Beijing and diversity in ethnic make-up, these territories

Journal of Chinese OverseasDownloaded from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 206-243 09:45:39PM via free access A Historical and Comparative Survey 231 are differentiated by size and resource base and by mode-of-production complex. The larger territories of Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, and Guyana have larger populations, ranging from 2.8 million to 771 thousand in 2016, as well as a significantly more complex natural resource endowment, including oil, bauxite, gold, and timber among other extractive industries. Barbados and the Bahamas, with populations of 285,000 and 394,000 respectively, and other kinds of resource strength, could be said to belong to an intermediate group in terms of “size,” while the Central American territory of Belize (despite its middling population of 367,000) and the OECS islands occupy the other polar extreme. The second division is between largely wage-labor economies and “hybrid” or “dual” small farmer/wage-dependent economies, which correlates neatly with the high income/middle income distinction, but not with size. Hence Jamaica and Guyana both belong to the (relatively) poorer group, while the OECS islands are split between the high-income islands of St Kitts-Nevis and Antigua-Barbuda, both classic-plantation-turned-classic-tourist-economies, and the middle-income islands of Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, and St Vincent & the Grenadines, the recent banana-exporting cluster, which are themselves becoming increasingly dependent on tourism and offshore activities (see Green 2001). Despite the differences, what remains clear is that all the units share certain basic historically shaped vulnerabilities pertaining to infrastructural and institutional underdevelopment and economic dependency. Unsurprisingly, two kinds of contentiously framed questions tend to swirl around the new Chinese presence in the Caribbean: Is the new bilateral relationship an expression of South-South and “win-win” solidarity, as the Chinese are wont to frame it, or are we seeing a new form of imperialism or quasi- imperialism? Second, what is the relationship between the parallel inflows of Chinese state diplomatic and economic capital (and its ambassadors and pur- veyors) and private entrepreneurial immigrants? While careful research has called into question the notion of China as a “rogue donor” and the double standards involved in such judgment (see Bräutigam 2009, 2011, among others), and while the attractiveness of the Chinese model of development assistance is not hard to fathom for countries that have been starved of basic infrastructural capacity and left to languish in a global neoliberal abyss, there is still much that we do not understand about the nature and extent of Chinese economic activity in the region, and the complex relationship between China’s export of capital and patronage and export of persons. Certainly, it is important to reject conspiracy theories about “secret invasions” and “colonization schemes” through the mass movement of Chinese people, as well as to acknowledge the independent motivations and initiatives driving the new Huashang arrivals;

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 232 Green however, it is also critical to examine the structural impact of the new encounters between and among differently positioned actors, both public and private. A sustained examination of structural impact must await a separate paper. However, I want to mention a few areas of tension and conflict that have characterized the new Chinese presence, in terms of both state operations and immigrant entrepreneurs. Criticisms of or outright opposition to various forms of both come from different constituencies, depending on the circumstances, but they are often common targets. To a striking extent, the view that Chinese state activities and immigrant enterprises are all-of-a-piece and part of an inten- tionally common project is shared by ordinary citizens, workers, local business people and their representatives, opposition politicians, and even lower-level government bureaucrats. However, it is important to distinguish the two main circumstances in which adversarial expressions are voiced: (a) private-sector competition from immigrant entrepreneurs and the alleged erosive impact on local businesses, and (b) the (perceived) impact of labor forces imported for Chinese state-financed mega-projects on local employment conditions. The reality on the ground tends to be even more complicated. Chinese state-financed projects, whether investment- or aid-related, have frequently proven to be very controversial in the context of Caribbean eco- nomics and politics. One of the most spectacular examples is that of Baha Mar, a $3.5 billion, 1000-acre mega-resort project in the Bahamas, which finally opened in 2017 after years of delays and in-fighting. This project is particularly significant as it has been reported to be “China’s largest overseas commercial real-estate project” (Karmin and Wirz 2014), as well as the largest single resort in the Caribbean, involving the largest single deployment of foreign Chinese workers in the English-speaking Caribbean (roughly 4,000). The controversy in which it became mired involved a three-way debacle among China Construction America (CCA) — an SOE subsidiary which finessed a $2.5 billion loan from the Export-Import (EXIM) Bank of China, and invested $150 million for its own equity stake in exchange for serving as the resort’s contractor, using Chinese workers — the financier Sarkis Izmirlian, a Swiss-born devel- oper who conceived Baha Mar and invested $850 million (and was eventually ousted from the project), and the Bahamian government (Jett 2016). The Bahamian government sided with CCA in its drawn-out dispute with Izmirlian and liquidated the company after refusing to recognize the bank- ruptcy filed in a US court by the private developers. Although the government eventually found a (Hong Kong-based) buyer for the company, not all Bahamians agreed with its decisions regarding the project: disgruntled opposition parties, unpaid Bahamian sub-contractors, and a vocal vanguard among 2,000 Bahamian workers who had been left stranded when the project shut

Journal of Chinese OverseasDownloaded from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 206-243 09:45:39PM via free access A Historical and Comparative Survey 233 down,22 blamed the Chinese for the problems and lodged a series of complaints. Signing themselves “Disenfranchised Baha Mar Citizens,” a group of workers sent a letter to the Bahamian Prime Minister in which they were quoted as saying, “The question is simple: do we want jobs for Bahamians or do we want to simply forfeit jobs over to the Chinese?” (Turnquest 2016). Others accused the government of collusion with the Chinese and of selling out Bahamian interests by offering them big concessions as a quid pro quo for salvaging the stalled project. In response to these accusations, the Prime Minister denounced what he saw as shameful anti-Chinese prejudice: “This orchestrated anti-Chinese rhetoric does not bode well for the friendly rela- tionships that exist between the Government of the Bahamas and the People’s Republic of China” (Jones Jr. 2016). Another example is particularly interesting for us because of the new inter- elite implications it signifies for future Caribbean (and OECS in particular) ruling-group relations. This case addresses a question posed earlier in the paper regarding possible clashes between older and newer ethnic-minority “middleman” elites in the small islands. For four years until an out-of-court settlement in 2016, the government of Antigua was locked in a conflict with a local Lebanese-Caribbean family-owned company, the Antigua Power Company, which had a government contract to supply the island with additional mega- watts of electricity. According to Antigua’s Daily Observer (DO, September 13, 2016), a leading newspaper on the island, “APC owns two of the three better functioning power plants on the island, producing near 90 per cent of power consumed.” APC brought a US $228 million suit against the Antigua government for breach of contract after “[t]he government of the day decided to invest in its own power company and contracted a Chinese company to con- struct the Wadadli Power Plant,” reneging on its contract with APC. In a pattern of Chinese concessionary largesse increasingly familiar in the Caribbean, the plant was built and financed by Beijing Construction and Engineering Group Limited and China’s EXIM Bank and became part of the state-owned Antigua Public Utilities Authority (APUA). As part of the final settlement, the current government of Antigua extended APC’s contract for the supply of electricity from one of its plants for another fifteen years, at the end of which the plant would pass into government ownership at a much lower re-negotiated price (DO, January 5, 2017). It is interesting to note that the former government had appealed to the Hadeeds (the family company) to be “patriotic” and ex- clude the Chinese company and EXIM Bank (also named in the suit) from the

22 Various settlements on outstanding sub-contractor fees and workers’ wages were later undertaken.

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 234 Green litigation (DO, February 11, 2015). In an ironic twist, the bid by the government to own and control power production in the island — and wrest control of this sector from its traditional private-sector patrons, with the help of its new transnational state patron — nearly foundered on the rocks of the chronic malfunctioning of the new Chinese-built plant. A third example highlights the Chinese practice of financing “vanity,” “status,” or “showcase” projects enhancing the public façade of states in the Global South which seek to prop up national pride by putting a shiny gloss on their domestic and global self-presentation. Among the favorite projects of this sort for which the Chinese are known are sports stadiums and state houses (or pal- aces, as they are sometimes called). A new state house, costing several million dollars, was one of the cornerstones of the combined grant-cum-loan package Dominica received when they switched diplomatic affiliation from Taipei to Beijing in 2004. The state house project occupied the headlines and island politics for months, pitting opposition forces and their supporters against the government and its popular ruling party led by Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit. A group calling itself Citizens Awareness Program put up huge billboards in various locations around the island (including in the capital town, Roseau) protesting in bold letters, “What a Waste/27 Million Dollar Plus — State Palace/ While Our Children Are Starving/What State Malice.” Responding in late 2012 to the opposition charges of wasteful and morally unjustifiable expenditures on a new state house, Mr. Skerrit urged his countrymen and women, on their next trip into the capital city to “stop by the state house and watch it from outside and you will see how much pride you have in yourself and see that our country slowly but surely is coming of age” (Green 2015:105). As suggested earlier in this paper, and unfortunately for the opposition parties, mobilized outrage from a significant portion of the Dominican population (including protests over the use of imported Chinese labor for this and other projects) was not enough to overcome the strong appeal of Mr Skerrit’s exhortations among citizens of an island-state starved of status symbols and of both real and imagined indicators of “development” and “progress.” While popular disaffection in the context of large-scale public works or commercial ventures revolves around the tied employment of Chinese contract workers and the virtual exclusion or minimal and low-level use of local labor and contractors, the charges leveled in the case of private entrepreneurial immigrants are the familiar ones of unfair Chinese competition and the undercutting of local businesses with sales of cheap and flimsy merchandise directly sourced from China. Here too, local governments are often accused of being pro-Chinese, of extending special, unauthorized, under-the-table concessions to them, and of turning a blind eye to Chinese violations of tax, labor,

Journal of Chinese OverseasDownloaded from 13 Brill.com09/28/2021 (2017) 206-243 09:45:39PM via free access A Historical and Comparative Survey 235 and immigration laws, as well as more egregious misdemeanors such as smuggling (Green 2014, 2015). Overall, however, the response to the Chinese SME merchants is mixed, depending on the constituency and the circumstances. Private sector representatives in Dominica and a labor representative in St Kitts confirmed in interviews that consumers, indeed, favored the Chinese and their offerings of cheap versions of “global” middle-class lifestyle goods (Green 2014:36-37). At the same time, Liu (personal communication)23 reports from his research in Antigua that the consumers there do not balk at complaining to the Consumer Affairs Division about shoddy, hazardous, and malfunctioning goods purchased from the Chinese shops; indeed, division staff admitted to him their reluctance to act on those complaints, not wanting (in their minds) to risk alienating China. Although they may have some capital to begin with, most of these entrepreneurial immigrants do not start off wealthy: they come to the Caribbean and other destinations in the Global South to get wealthy. They have clear advantages which favor their success, from the networks in which they are embedded and the portable cultural/economic institutions and practices that they deploy to their access to the symbolic and political referents of global Chineseness (centered in and backed up by the Chinese state), as well as, most significantly, their ability to tap into Chinese supplies of capital, labor, and commodities. They also face enormous anti-Chinese prejudice and misconceptions, mostly fueled by widespread convictions regarding a conspiracy among China, Caribbean governments, and the private immigrants as sponsored agents and secret ambassadors of the Chinese government, aided and abetted by their Caribbean state “clients.” As stated above, such imagined scenarios were repeated, with varying levels of passion and conviction, sometimes with qualifi cations, but with surprising consistency in the details, by respondents across the board. There were claims, for example, by a number of private-sector representatives in the islands visited that the Chinese government regularly paid the commercial rents of the private immigrants. One official stated that the Chinese EXIM Bank facilitated financing and remittances for the merchants, calling this alleged scheme a “brilliant plan hatched by the Chinese government” (Dominica interviews, 2012). Antigua was the only one of the four research islands where the Chinese merchants had formed an organization of their own, called, notably, “The Association of Chinese Expatriates and Overseas Chinese in Antigua and Barbuda.” The private sector representative interviewed in St Kitts in 2013 ve- hemently rejected the idea of inviting the Chinese merchants to join the local

23 See n2,1 above.

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 236 Green chamber of commerce, accusing them of encroaching upon the rightful place of Taiwan, St Kitts-Nevis’ diplomatic partner, with the underhanded compli- ance of the government of the time. While organizational officials seemed more open in Dominica24 — indeed, the Dominica Employers’ Federation spokesperson claimed to have invited the Chinese to join the organization, with little result — recent events called into question this apparent willingness. A few months before the 2012 interviews, the CEO of the Dominica Association of Industry and Commerce (DAIC), a returnee who had lived in Canada for several decades, was pressured to resign following complaints about his vigorous defense of Chinese merchants (against charges of government favorit- ism and “unfair advantages”) as likely to be economic citizens and therefore “Dominicans like the native-born entrepreneurs with an equal right to conduct business affairs in Dominica” (cited in Green 2014: n2, 43). Occasionally, the public gets an opportunity to hear the immigrants talk back. A recent series of articles in the Jamaica Observer on “the growth of Asian businesses in sections of Jamaica” found the by-now familiar mixed set of reactions to the spreading presence of mostly (immigrant) Chinese businesses in rural areas, away from the Kingston and St Andrew metropolitan core. Dubbing the phenomenon the “Asian invasion,” the staff writer went on to sound an ominous note in his opening paragraphs: “Despite their invasion, they have not assimilated well into the community” (ibid.). This preemptive judgment pervading the report was redeemed somewhat by two of the six articles which gave voice to Chinese feelings about the racism (or prejudice) that they allegedly experience from “Jamaicans.” One interviewee voiced his frus- tration at the casual use of racial epithets in everyday discourse to refer to the Chinese, the lack of appreciation of Jamaicans for the Chinese contribution to the economy (importing low-cost goods, investing in business, and employing Jamaicans), and the double standard applied in attitudes to the Chinese vis- à-vis “white people.” According to him, “White people come in here and what they do? They do a big factory, they get their big money and they go away, but you guys love white people; nobody complains” (Carter, October 23, 2016). One of the two final articles of the series, titled, “Chinese shun Jamaica” (Carter, November 6, 2016), features two Chinese nationals who claim that racism and crime forced them to abandon their businesses in Jamaica and migrate overseas (to Australia and the US respectively).

24 This openness was prompted in part by representation from the Chinese Embassy.

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Concluding Remarks

Patrick Bryan wrote in 2004 that “[a]fter a hundred and fifty years, the Chinese community remains a racially distinct minority, and despite a significant adap- tation to western culture in Jamaica has not gone the path of full assimilation” (Bryan 2004:24). The observation is still a pertinent one, both because of and apart from the unprecedented prominence of the Chinese state in the lives and identities of overseas Chinese today. On the one hand, the link to China more than ever enables the reproducibility of a separate Chinese ethnicity, sustained through ongoing, and sometimes politically promoted, transnational cultural and commercial links to the PRC. On the other hand, Chinese “transnational ethnic entrepreneurship” has been able to sustain itself on the edges of state- hood and statecraft for centuries, using timeworn, portable and seemingly universally replicable cultural institutions and practices, rooted in ancestral traditions and extended kinship (Chen and Tan 2009; Kwee 2013). Small-scale would-be or actual merchants leave the crowded field of the Chinese retail marketplace and venture forth to “small ponds” in the Global South partly because they can, and partly because of pre-existing gaps in their countries of destination. Ultimately, it is the structure of the encounter that needs to be analyzed. As I pointed out in an earlier article (Green 2014: 29-30),

on the site of a typical Eastern Caribbean location, there is a three-way intersection among the “spatial-circuit” of China’s outbound “development aid-and-investment” trajectory, the “spatial-circuit” of the island- state’s inbound development partnership operations and regulated and unregulated migrant flows, and the “spatial-circuit” of private immigrant Chinese transnational entrepreneurial networks. It is important to maintain a sense of both the relative autonomy of each spatial-circuit and their in situ mutual interaction.

One can seek to debunk claims of Chinese plots, Chinese imperialism, the non- employment of local labor on large-scale projects, the clannishness25 and enclave character of Chinese merchant communities, and the unfair competitive

25 On this claim, one interviewee in Jamaica protested defensively, “But you guys just like to say Chinese help Chinese and not help Jamaica … even though we employ Jamaicans. We do good for Jamaicans, but turn around is what we get back; people thief you, come carry in other people for them to rob you, so why you going to help? Chinese and Chinese develop trust; we first pay to trust other people, but the trust people turn back to us can’t be trusted, so what you going to do? You going to continue keep the trust?… We call it

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 09:45:39PM via free access 238 Green advantage that they wield, and, indeed, many have done so to great effect, especially in the case of Africa (see in particular the work of Sautman and Yan 2007a, 2007b). However, this kind of analysis, though necessary, is not suffi- cient, since it still seeks to explain and justify the world primarily from one side of the equation. This is particularly inadequate in the Caribbean, given the big difference in size and power in the context of the role of the Chinese state as development patron. The examples I have provided were meant to highlight not good intentions gone awry (after all, the Chinese have successfully delivered many critically needed infrastructural projects) — nor, for that matter, ungrateful and racially prejudiced Caribbean nationals — but the skewed structure of the encounter, which is marked by an uneasy mix of new global patronage and sustained dependency. However their interests are configured, one is moved to ask: are Chinese state actors helping the Caribbean to overcome its structural dependency, or merely to manage it in new directions and as a way of shoring up particular groups of elites? Are there particular syn- ergies between state and private transnationalisms that increase the impact one way or another, especially given the historically “enclavist” character of Caribbean dependency? This paper assists in providing a context for examining these questions, rather than addressing them directly. In the final analysis, we must study the structural effects or outcomes of both the two-way and the three-way encounters, as well as the structured intentionality of the vastly more powerful or strategically favored party to such encounters, whichever the case. Moreover, we must attend to these projects with an intersectional sensibility and with equal urgency.

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