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The Straits Chinese Between Empires

 | 
Christian Jones

1. Introduction

Texte intégral

Once I thought and
felt being a
baba
was being Malayan, or Malaysian,
I see now
as clearly as night follows day
the changing mood,
rundown melody,
loss of meaning…

  • 1 Quoted in Neil Khor, “Malacca’s Straits Chinese Anglophone Poets and their Experience of Malaysian (...)

Ee Tiang Hong, ‘Heeren Street’1

  • 2 “Men of Three Worlds: Babas of Malaya,” Malaya Tribune, July 1, 1949.

1The rise of the nation-state across the world is one of the most dramatic transformations of the twentieth century. Its triumph appeared to signal the end of empire and the beginnings of a new world order. This transition from empire to nation-state, however, was not inevitable, nor were its outcomes assured. For the Straits Chinese, once called ‘men of three worlds’, the formation of a Malaysian nation state on narrow ethno-nationalist lines was a source of great discomfort.2 It marked the end of a period in which a cosmopolitan way of being could exist in the gap between empire and nation-state. As an in-between community stuck at the interstices of Britain and China, the Straits Chinese were not mere witnesses to these transformations but also active participants who sought to maintain a cosmopolitan ideal in the face of the increasingly restrictive scripts of sovereignty and identity available to them. As race was bound to nation and nation was bound to state, the Straits Chinese struggled to maintain their place between the three worlds they called home. This paper traces their formation as a separate community in the Straits Settlements and their role in the changing politics of empire and nation in Britain and China. It argues that this transitionary period and this urban space gave people like the Straits Chinese an opening to advocate cosmopolitan ideas about empires and nations, but that these openings were gradually closed off as race became affixed to nation, state and identity.

Cosmopolitanism, Identity and the City

  • 3 Jeremy Waldron, “What is Cosmopolitan?” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 227.
  • 4 Bruce Robbins, “Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond t (...)
  • 5 Pheng Cheah, “Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical—Today,” 24.
  • 6 Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, people, places (London: Routledge, 1996), 103.
  • 7 Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (London: Penguin, 2001 (...)

2Cosmopolitanism, here, refers to a particular ‘way of being in the world’ as Jeremy Waldron called it.3 This way of being embraces multiple, layered and overlapping identities and rejects the nation-state as the source of a terminal identity. While recognising difference between peoples based on their cultures or place of origin, it stresses the ultimate importance of hospitality and friendship over strangers and borders. As more recent accounts of cosmopolitanism have argued, this is not incompatible with a recognition that local attachments are important or significant, indeed cosmopolitanism can be ‘located and embodied’ or ‘rooted’ and ‘pluralised’.4 Indeed, early nationalists, like some of the ones I discuss here, combined their interest in achieving independence with an understanding of the ‘cosmological right asserted in the name of a common humanity’ which went against a world of discontinuous nation-states competing in an anarchic system.5 Unlike ‘locals’, who assimilate ‘items of some distinct provenance into a fundamentally local culture’ but leave their ‘structures of meaning’, ultimately unchanged, the cosmopolitan has a ‘greater involvement with a plurality of contrasting cultures’ and is transformed as a result.6 In Pico Iyer’s words, they have a ‘global soul’.7 I argue that the Straits Chinese embodied this cosmopolitan habitus, and that by looking at their lives from roughly the 1890s to the 1920s, we can see how they used this to interact with nationalist and cosmopolitan ideas.

  • 8 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond “identity,”” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 1-4 (...)
  • 9 Jean-François Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, trans. Steven Rendall (London: Hurst & Com (...)
  • 10 Ibid., 93.
  • 11 Lee Kuan Yew, My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore’s Bilingual Journey (Singapore: Straits Times Press, (...)
  • 12 Andrew Arsan, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (Oxford: (...)

3At the centre of this cosmopolitanism was identity. I take issue with Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper’s complaint that ‘identity’ is too often generalised and deployed unselfconsciously, and rather suggest that the danger with the term comes more from a tendency to essentialise, narrow and constrict, rather than to broaden and soften its contours.8 As Jean-François Bayart writes, ‘an individual’s act of identification is always contextual, multiple and relative.’9 When we identify ourselves to others in this relational way, we always have a ‘panoply of identities’ at our disposal.10 A cosmopolitan way of being allows us to make use of these. However, contra Bayart, when this identification is done by another person, such identities become reduced into a singular shorthand. For example, when Lee Kuan Yew arrived in Luzern and was asked by the hotel receptionist if he was ‘Chinese’ and Lee replied ‘No, Malayan’, the Swiss employee said, ‘Never mind, I’ll put you down as Chinese.’11 With his identity fixed in racial terms to the nation of China, Lee was denied the possibility of being a Malayan or even a Singaporean. This was, in some respects, the product of the transition that is the centre of this study. To quote Andrew Arsan, ‘in the time of the nation-state, travelling lives—and notions of belonging founded in webs of human community, rather than rooted in the soil of the territorial polity—became harder to countenance.’12 Through the marking of citizenship with categories like race, a process that was already taking place under empire, the cosmopolitan habitus I described above became harder to maintain. Thus, Babas like Lee Kuan Yew were made into merely Chinese, and thereby conjoined to the nation and state of China. I contrast this with the various ways in which the Straits Chinese sought to form their own cultural community and identity based on their creole background that was neither British nor Chinese nor Malay in essentialist terms.

  • 13 Mark Ravinder Frost, “In Search of Cosmopolitan Discourse: A Historical Journey across the Indian o (...)
  • 14 Su Lin Lewis, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920-1940 (Cambri (...)
  • 15 Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politi (...)

4The formation of a distinctive Straits Chinese identity was aided by the cosmopolitanism of the cities of the Straits Settlements. Out of the cities’ ‘wider imagined communities’, a social world was better able to come into formation in which creole peoples could articulate ‘specific cosmopolitanisms’ in spite of the pressures of competing nationalisms.13 Su Lin Lewis positions the city as an ‘arena for examining different layers of cross-cultural interaction’ where ‘civic communities were not imagined, but built through the intimate face-to-face interactions of individuals able to look to shared notions of community, despite racial and religious differences.’14 Moving away from a literature focused on segregation and difference, as Lewis does, we are better able to understand the formation of ideas that looked beyond the nation-state as the fundamental building block of the modern international system. Without this important social context, we would struggle to understand how the Straits Chinese straddled Britain and China, what this looked like in performative terms, and how this resulted in a more cosmopolitan politics than appeared elsewhere. As Leela Gandhi argues, we need to recognise ‘new and better forms of community and relationality hitherto unimaginable within the monochromatic landscape of imperial division.’15 This is something that rooted studies of in-between communities and their ‘affective communities’ in urban spaces better allow us to do, thereby breaking down the Manichean divide of self and other, empire and nation-state.

  • 16 Eric D. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and Entangled Histories (...)
  • 17 James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central Europea (...)
  • 18 Brubaker, referencing Ernest Gellner, in Rogers Brubaker, “Migration, Membership, and the Modern Na (...)

5It is precisely these binaries which nationalism and the international states system increasingly encouraged. The politics of nationalism and its fusion with the state in the wake of the First World War pigeon-holed people into national affiliations that may or may not have matched up well with their identities, thus laying the groundwork for their exclusion from the body politic even in non-totalitarian states. Eric Weitz described this as the shift from the ‘Vienna system’ to the ‘Paris system’ where ‘Vienna centered on dynastic legitimacy and state sovereignty within clearly defined borders’ and ‘Paris focused on populations and an ideal of state sovereignty rooted in national homogeneity.’16 We see this in the 1921 plebiscite of Upper Silesia which was meant to determine, following Wilsonian principles, to which self-evident nation its people belonged. What James Bjork finds, however, in his study of this moment, is how many people felt indifferent to the idea of national identity, often finding common community in the Catholic Church instead.17 Feelings of anationality and dual or multiple nationality indicated the gulf between the Paris archetype cultivated by the League of Nations and life on the ground in various parts of the world. In the Paris framework, the ideal form of nation-state represents a distinctive and bounded ethnocultural space in which all residents should be citizens, and all citizens should be residents. It is defined both internally and externally, and forms the basis of a patchwork of nation-states as discrete entities, a binary world of national ones and zeros. The reality of post-war Europe and the bulk of the colonial world was that few states lived up to this ideal. This gap generated tensions for states that sought legibility and coherency according to the limited scripts of sovereignty made available in the international system. As a result, states seeking to render their populations both legible and national had to police their boundaries of belonging. In other words, if the normative ideal of the nation-state as a territory containing all and only its ethnocultural citizens is something that was encouraged by the international system and which states therefore work(ed) towards, then states (tempered by, and in dialogue with, their existing citizens) must engage in a constant process of creating ‘congruencies’ and defining exteriorities, declaring who belongs and who does not.18

  • 19 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 123.
  • 20 As done for example by Loubna El Amine, “Beyond East and West: Reorienting Political Theory through (...)
  • 21 Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empi (...)
  • 22 See, for example, Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and Fren (...)
  • 23 Prasenjit Duara, “The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism,” Journal of World History 12, no. (...)
  • 24 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” in Cosmopolitics, 91.
  • 25 Ibid., 94. See also, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: (...)

6This world of ‘hetero-nations’, as the Comaroffs call them, was not inevitable.19 Reading modernisation as nation-state formation overlooks the contestation and negotiation which produced this world in the first place.20 This narrative has been challenged by historians seeking to recover alternative possibilities imagined by anti-colonial actors working through the processes of decolonisation. As Tracey Banivanua Mar writes, ‘by exploring in their own context the ideas that would be dead ends… we can gain a multidimensional picture of the counter networks of the ends of empire.’21 Ideas and realities such as pan-Asianism, French Union, the British Commonwealth, the New International Economic Order and so on, all represented, at various scales and with differing relationships between their constituent parts, attempts at crafting political communities that transcended the nation-state.22 Such visions, often called cosmopolitan, could be based on precolonial civilisational, cultural and religious foundations or on nations as part of larger federal or confederal structures.23 However, one of the main faults with these revisionist accounts of empires and nationalism is that they too readily discard locative identities as a genuine concern for individuals and communities, and, furthermore, set these cosmopolitan visions in opposition to nationalism. Instead, this paper tries to find a middle ground for what Kwame Anthony Appiah called ‘rooted cosmopolitanisms’, which recognise local identities as being compatible with a cosmopolitan view of the world.24 This is a cosmopolitanism that accepts diversity over homogeneity and celebrates ‘different local human ways of being’.25 Thus, the Straits Chinese could be cosmopolitan while also retaining contingent attachments to China, Malaya and Britain.

  • 26 Saul Dubow, “How British was the British World? The Case of South Africa,” Journal of Imperial and (...)
  • 27 Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham: Univers (...)
  • 28 Straits Chinese British Association, Duty to the British Empire (Being an Elementary Guide for Stra (...)
  • 29 Lynn Hollen Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786–1941 (Cambridge: Camb (...)

7In our context, cosmopolitan imaginings appeared not only in social and cultural aspects but also in Straits Chinese attempts to appropriate and reinvent discourses of imperial citizenship in order to make claims for equality within Empire. In this sense, being Anglicised and claiming British citizenship allowed non-white colonial subjects to advance their interests in pursuit of a more cosmopolitan ideal. Here, I follow Saul Dubow who proposes the British Empire as ‘a more capacious category capable of including elective, hyphenated forms of belonging.’26 People such as the Straits Chinese made use of their British subjecthood to reconfigure the Empire on more egalitarian lines. Thus, in contrast to Daniel Gorman who takes a metropolitan perspective on imperial citizenship, I echo Sukanya Banerjee in viewing the question from the other side of the colonial difference where it played a central role in the formation of cosmopolitan subjectivities for the Straits Chinese.27 That this citizenship became marked by race, for example through racial restrictions on mobility, represented a double bind for the Straits Chinese who wanted to be both Chinese (racially/culturally) and British (legally/civically). As they argued during World War I, ‘do not confound race with nationality… Our Straits Chinese are Chinese only by race and by religion and customs. Their nationality is British.’28 While Britain’s ‘multiple, divided sovereignties’ created opportunities for claim-making within empire, it also simultaneously laid the groundwork for the division of empire on territorialised lines, with racial restrictions on immigration in the White Dominions truncating imperial citizenship.29 Thus, the Straits Chinese’s self-conscious labelling as ‘Chinese’ (increasingly so in this period) and identification by others as such, was difficult to reconcile with their claims to belonging within the British Empire. Their failure to rework imperial citizenship on cosmopolitan lines through organisations such as the Straits Chinese British Association (SCBA) aided in the transition to the narrower nationalisms we are more familiar with in the twentieth century. This forms one important thread that runs through the paper.

  • 30 Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the Predicament of Sovereignty: China, 1900-1945,” American (...)
  • 31 Shelly Chan, “The Case for Diaspora: A Temporal Approach to the Chinese Experience,” The Journal of (...)
  • 32 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of H (...)
  • 33 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: (...)

8The second major thread is the Straits Chinese’s changing relationship with the Chinese mainland. The Straits-born played a crucial role in what Prasenjit Duara called the ‘deterritorialisation’ of the Chinese nation. As Duara argues, ‘while territorial nationalism needs the discourses of race and culture for its own adequacy, it is not fully capable of containing them within itself.’30 In other words, given the lack of congruency between nation and territory, the nation has to reach beyond its territorial bounds. Such a view held special purchase in the Chinese case with its primary ethnic community increasingly spread across the world. Thus, both the late Qing Empire and the early Republic of China took on a deterritorialised vision of the Chinese nation. At the same time, we should not take this to mean that the diaspora was incapable of articulating its own form of transnationalism independently of the state. Through their involvement in particular ‘diaspora moments’, China came to be understood in more capacious terms from below and within diaspora than heavily methodologically nationalist studies have tended to recognise.31 Seeing their potential for advancement within the British Empire as limited, being courted by China, and adopting a racial language that made them belong more clearly to the Chinese nation, the Straits Chinese took a leading role in this deterritorialisation of China. Rather than merely supporting a narrow idea of the nation-state limited to the 18 provinces of China proper, their engagement with Chinese politics in this period helped redraw the borders of the ‘geo-body’, the imagined territorial construct which represents ‘the most concrete identification of a nation’.32 This also found its way into the early nationalist thought of figures such as Kang Youwei and Sun Yat-sen who drew on their encounters with the diaspora to express a culturalist and universalist understanding of China.33 While the Straits Chinese remained active participants in the new China after 1911, they also found it difficult to be accepted within their putative homeland given their distinctive background. Consequently, on the Chinese front, as on the British, the Straits Chinese were caught in a difficult position by virtue of the transformation of the international system.

  • 34 Tim Harper, “Singapore, 1915, and the Birth of the Asian Underground,” Modern Asian Studies 47, no. (...)

9This is the context that Ee Tiang Hong’s poem above speaks to. As a community defined by its ‘in-betweenness’, the Straits Chinese struggled to find a home in Britain, China or Malaya. The narrowing of nationalism that took place at the end of our period thus pushed them into an increasingly liminal position as the community came to be seen as a relic of the past, a reminder of days in which the British used the Chinese to rule over the Malays. By examining the ‘time between empire and nation’ and the ‘spaces besides empire and nation’ we can better see how the rise of the nation-state was contested by, but ultimately triumphed over, hybrid peoples such as the Straits Chinese.34

Notes

1 Quoted in Neil Khor, “Malacca’s Straits Chinese Anglophone Poets and their Experience of Malaysian Nationalism,” Archipel 76 (2008): 133.

2 “Men of Three Worlds: Babas of Malaya,” Malaya Tribune, July 1, 1949.

3 Jeremy Waldron, “What is Cosmopolitan?” Journal of Political Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2000): 227.

4 Bruce Robbins, “Actually Existing Cosmopolitanism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, eds. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 2-3. Carol A. Breckenridge, Sheldon Pollock, Homi K. Bhabha, and Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Cosmopolitanisms,” in Cosmopolitanism, eds. Breckenridge et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 8. A similar idea appears in Richard Sennet, “Cosmopolitanism and the Social Experience of Cities,” in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, eds. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 42-7.

5 Pheng Cheah, “Introduction Part II: The Cosmopolitical—Today,” 24.

6 Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, people, places (London: Routledge, 1996), 103.

7 Pico Iyer, The Global Soul: Jet Lag, Shopping Malls, and the Search for Home (London: Penguin, 2001).

8 Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond “identity,”” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 1-47.

9 Jean-François Bayart, The Illusion of Cultural Identity, trans. Steven Rendall (London: Hurst & Company, 1996), 92.

10 Ibid., 93.

11 Lee Kuan Yew, My Lifelong Challenge: Singapore’s Bilingual Journey (Singapore: Straits Times Press, 2012), 33.

12 Andrew Arsan, Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 254.

13 Mark Ravinder Frost, “In Search of Cosmopolitan Discourse: A Historical Journey across the Indian ocean from Singapore to South Africa, 1870-1920,” in Pamila Gupta, Hofmeyr, Pearson eds., Eyes Across the Water: Navigating the Indian Ocean (Pretoria: Unisa Press, 2010), 75. “Specific cosmopolitanisms” comes from James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 308. 

14 Su Lin Lewis, Cities in Motion: Urban Life and Cosmopolitanism in Southeast Asia, 1920-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 10-11.

15 Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 5-6.

16 Eric D. Weitz, “From the Vienna to the Paris System: International Politics and Entangled Histories of Human Rights, Forced Deportations, and Civilizing Missions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 5 (2008): 1314.

17 James E. Bjork, Neither German nor Pole: Catholicism and National Indifference in a Central European Borderland (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008). See also, Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900-1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

18 Brubaker, referencing Ernest Gellner, in Rogers Brubaker, “Migration, Membership, and the Modern Nation-State: Internal and External Dimensions of the Politics of Belonging,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 41, no. 1 (2010): 67-8.

19 Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 123.

20 As done for example by Loubna El Amine, “Beyond East and West: Reorienting Political Theory through the Prism of Modernity,” Perspectives on Politics 14, no. 1 (2016): 102-120.

21 Tracey Banivanua Mar, Decolonisation and the Pacific: Indigenous Globalisation and the Ends of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 21.

22 See, for example, Frederick Cooper, Citizenship between Empire and Nation: Remaking France and French Africa, 1945-1960 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860-1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

23 Prasenjit Duara, “The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism,” Journal of World History 12, no. 1 (2001): 99-130, Cemil Aydin, The Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia: Visions of World Order in Pan-Islamic and Pan-Asian Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

24 Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” in Cosmopolitics, 91.

25 Ibid., 94. See also, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2006).

26 Saul Dubow, “How British was the British World? The Case of South Africa,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 1 (2009): 2.

27 Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), Daniel Gorman, Imperial Citizenship: Empire and the Question of Belonging (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

28 Straits Chinese British Association, Duty to the British Empire (Being an Elementary Guide for Straits Chinese) During the Great War (Singapore, 1915), ch 2.

29 Lynn Hollen Lees, Planting Empire, Cultivating Subjects: British Malaya, 1786–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 6.

30 Prasenjit Duara, “Transnationalism and the Predicament of Sovereignty: China, 1900-1945,” American Historical Review 102, no. 4 (1997): 1030-1051. See also, Elena Barabantseva, Overseas Chinese, Ethnic Minorities and Nationalism (London: Abingdon, 2011).

31 Shelly Chan, “The Case for Diaspora: A Temporal Approach to the Chinese Experience,” The Journal of Asian Studies 74, no. 1 (2015): 107.

32 Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), x.

33 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 74-6.

34 Tim Harper, “Singapore, 1915, and the Birth of the Asian Underground,” Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 6 (2013): 1811.

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