In my last post, I argued that development in mainland China will increase the ability of Chinese to act more freely. This could interfere with their leadership’s plans because rising wealth in a market setting also correlates with rising economic liberties. This type of choice, once exercised in the market, is likely to spread to other parts of life for Chinese. This will give them power and such power must eventually find itself at significant odds with the existing cartel in the room: the Chinese government. With Chinese being more wealthy and the home government being a capable Orwelian state, it seems likely Chinese will vote with their feet and move abroad in increasing numbers. How will such a new and sudden influx of people live abroad? History shows us that people suddenly displaced or on the move frequently stay together. These expats could create a global network of interlinked communities, like mini-Singapores, too far away from Beijing to come under its control but also an extension of Chinese cultural and economic ties implanted onto foreign soil.
What are the realistic prospects to such a future? At the heart of this question is the future of legal and practical sovereignty, of what it means to live in an area and either be subject to its rules or to play around them.
Emigration in Chinese history has often been an expression of the realm’s internal turmoil, foreign appetite for cheap labor, or the inputs of a global trade network. In each community Chinese have settled at various periods, they have played different roles, most frequently as laborer or merchant. The general outcome for both Chinese and existing resident communities has varied widely. Migration into Thailand set off a centuries-long process of thorough assimilation, while Indonesia, Cambodia, and Malaysia are places that even in modern times have been defined by sharp ethnic cleavages and violence. In the mid 20th century, ethnic Chinese in both Indonesia and Cambodia, for example, suffered large scale persecution for their perceived rightist and leftist affiliations, respectively.
Wherever Chinese have gone that they have not assimilated well, for whatever reason, mistrust of them makes the question of power something to which both Chinese and ethnic foreigners are acutely sensitive to. In today’s Malaysia, when community relations between ethnic Chinese and Malays are often fraught, it remains taboo for Chinese to speak against economic redistribution policies in favor of ethnic Malay because of the backlash from people who feel the Malay are entitled to these resources.
It is no surprise that people perceive authority to stem from one’s attachment to a place. And those who feel the strongest attachment to this authority and ownership are, predictably, governments. For the mass of future Chinese moving across the world’s surface and away from problems at home, their wealth may help them open doors to residency but it won’t change basic skepticism from host countries and peoples. They will face a landscape contrary to that expressed in a global market, in which all items exist on a single, purchasable spectrum. They will enter the balkanized landscape of the human heart and its attachment to the soil, a relationship between people and land that one might describe as monopolistic (hopefully, the liberal in us might think, one generally agreed to by free and fair elections).
And governments, regardless of their stripe, are pretty universally against relaxing direct control over their territory. From French Polynesia, which recently decided against a floating city project in its territorial waters — equating it to building a Death Star to punish native inhabitants (portraying themselves in the same universe as Ewoks), to Thailand, which outright threatened to execute a couple living on a platform outside its territorial waters, modern states jealously guard their sovereignty.
If outright independence beside a willing host state seems unlikely and as strategic tension may reduce Chinese community immigration in the West, how else might a network of new Chinese diasporas take root as they seem to have need to? Perhaps the answer is partially revealed to us through China’s current style of economic interaction with developing countries, especially in Africa. Here, the Chinese preference for bringing in its own workers and staff could lay the foundation for a future of more permanent settlement, especially since it could be argued in Beijing’s strategic interests to build such a footprint. While the prospects of Chinese willingly relocating to Africa goes beyond what the present facts on the ground warrant, the great pressures that loom on the Chinese state make it possible that the essential nature of the setting — weak regimes desperate for foreign financial backing — could play host to such future developments. And while these expat communities would retain close strategic connections to Beijing, they would ultimately be far away from the imperial center and this distance would only grow over time.
As the history of emigration throughout time would suggest, people turn to new land when they desire to avoid a problem in their point of origin. In a purely functional sense, the landmass of the earth today is held by decision-makers with varying degrees of commitment to preserving control over this asset. In an environment in which there is such a differential, and people looking for a place to settle, no one should be surprised to see an exchange occur. We may (with good reason) lament such a process when it happens over the heads of people who live there, but happen it does. The only new ingredient is the personality who is buying in this equation. In this case, that could be a rising mass of Chinese caught between the dynamic market of China and its authoritarian supervisors, who are fighting a rearguard effort to stop Chinese from wanting things that grow with the maturation of want at the heart of a market economy.