Belt and road
It seems that he’s unavoidable. Last week in Chiang Mai, Thailand, the keynote speakers at ICAS, one of the largest conferences of Asian Studies, found it impossible to avoid complaining about Donald Trump, even while nominally discussing China’s new trade networks in Southeast Asia. As an editor at Palgrave living in Shanghai, I often feel that while the Western intelligentsia obsess over passing trends and political vulgarities, a much larger shift is in process, as the Chinese party state systematically builds networks and power structures outside its domain. The Belt and Road initiative seems not to get much attention, but everywhere I go in Asia, Chinese people, language and money are more and more present. Tourists from Guangzhou on Mumbai’s suburban rail searching for fish curry, pipelines in Kazhakhstan and ports in Pakistan, department stores in Seoul where the attendants are trained to speak Chinese: without fanfare, a new world order is emerging. Nowhere is this more apparent than Southeast Asia.
Historically, Chinese emigrants have long settled in Southeast Asia (called “Nanyang”, or the south sea, in Chinese), bringing language and folkways with them. However, in times past, this emigration was largely responsive to China’s own domestic turmoil – villagers from Fujian and Guangzhou fleeing poverty or local tyrants. Effectively, Chinese are what the historian Yuri Slezkine calls “service nomads” in much of Southeast Asia – they form a loose but coherent network, avoiding politics in favour of business, which they deem safer and more reliable. In countries such as Thailand and Indonesia, most of the biggest fortunes are those of ethnically Chinese – and backlash has been frequent (one example being the 1960s Indonesian pogroms depicted in The Act of Killing). But the Chinese state is strong now, and it superimposes its logic onto the more diffuse networks of commerce. Chineseness itself is as vague as any category enclosing billions of humans must necessarily be; indeed, the Chinese language differentiates between China as a polity (中国) and as a culture (中华); many of Asia’s tensions and conflicts, from Hong Kong’s umbrella movement to the island-building movement in the South China Sea, hinge on the fact that many who are culturally Chinese nonetheless oppose the state that calls itself China;
in many cases, the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are there because they fled from that same state. The sheer weight of the Chinese state and the population it represents can flatten these distinctions, in the process displacing older social structures.
It’s vaguely embarrassing to be a European in Thailand: many are sex tourists. The conference had attracted more than a thousand people, but although understanding contemporary Asia and particularly China is one of the defining challenges of our era, there is a shocking lack of competent scholars. Until quite recently, many professors of Chinese history couldn’t even speak the language. In truth, some of the best scholarship today is happening in Asian institutions, in the arts as well as academe – Hong Kong’s Asian Art Archive, China’s LEAP magazine and the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore’s “Gillman Barracks”, to name a few examples. Scholars such as Anna Tsing have studied the environmental transformation that is taking place; and David Teh in Thailand and Patrick Flores in the Philippines, among others, have studied a new constellation of artists grappling with the changing faces of their society. These scholars either live full-time in Southeast Asia or spend lots of time on fieldwork there. If Asia is “futuristic”, that’s in part because our global future is replete with challenges, from the environmental crisis in Indonesia and Myanmar to Islamic insurgency in the Philippines, or the crony capitalism of Vietnam and the social structure of Singapore, an authoritarian technocracy. It seems as if the Asian present may be the Western future.
After the conference, I stopped by the new MAIIAM museum. An hour from the city and surrounded by ramshackle suburban villas, MAIIAM is another of these peculiar institutions one comes across in Asia these days – world-class, brilliantly executed, ambitious, virtually unknown even to residents of the town it is located in. I left with a monograph on Navin Rawanchaikul, a Thai artist previously unknown to me. Southeast Asia isn’t just coconuts and beaches – and there’s a new world of thought emerging, if only we would start paying attention.