Category Archives: economics

by | 12 May 2025 · 3:42 pm

French Empire Overstretched, 1952

From Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam, by Fredrik Logevall (Random House, 2012), Kindle pp. 405-408:

The possibility of a French withdrawal seemingly grew more real that January, as Paris lawmakers prepared to begin a full-dress debate on Indochina in the National Assembly. De Lattre’s death on January 11, just a few days before the start of the debate, set a somber mood for the proceedings, and it was soon clear that a broad cross section of delegates questioned France’s continued commitment to the war. Views that a year earlier would have been labeled “defeatist,” or “unpatriotic,” were openly expressed, and not merely by the left. How could France afford, many delegates asked, to continue a struggle that in 1952 would consume between one-seventh and one-sixth of the entire budget? Answer: She could not, certainly not if she was also to build up a large army in Europe, which alone would enable her to pull her own weight in the organization of Western defense. “I am asking for a change of policy in Indo-China,” declared Pierre Mendès France of the Radical Party.

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Influential voices in the French press said in essence the same thing; Le Monde and Le Figaro both noted that, absent dramatically increased U.S. aid, France would soon have to choose between fulfilling her European responsibilities and seeking a rapid diplomatic solution in Vietnam. At the U.S. embassy in Paris, a despondent David Bruce saw French hopes for victory dashed and the public eager for peace. “A snowball has started to form,” the ambassador warned Washington. Absent greater American assistance for the war effort or some kind of “internationalization”—meaning U.S. and British guarantees to defend Indochina militarily—public sentiment for withdrawal would continue to build. The CIA, for its part, said that a full-fledged French reappraisal of Vietnam policy was at hand, with potentially major implications for the United States.

Ultimately, the Pleven government prevailed in the debate, and the Assembly approved by a wide margin the appropriation of 326 billion francs for land forces in Indochina during 1952. This sum, however, did not cover the air force or navy, and as in previous years a supplemental allocation would be required before long. Pleven declared that the government had secured a fresh mandate for the vigorous prosecution of the war, and he lauded French forces for their “magnificent” performance in the field; a year or eighteen months hence, he predicted, France could secure a negotiated settlement “from positions of strength.” His words rang hollow. The dominant mood in the Assembly after the vote, observed one journalist, was that “it couldn’t go on like this.” If the appropriation passed, “it was only because the French army in Indo-China could not be left high and dry without money or equipment.”

Two other factors no doubt shaped the outcome of the vote. One was the growing nationalist restiveness in North Africa, particularly in Morocco and Tunisia. In Rabat, the French faced growing pressure from the sultan, Mohammad Ben Youssef, to grant independence, while in Tunis negotiations had broken down just a few weeks earlier over nationalist demands for home rule. For some Paris officials, the North African tensions were an added reason for withdrawal from Indochina—in the words of Radical leader Édouard Daladier, so long as 7,000 French officers, 32,000 NCOs, and 134,000 soldiers were “marooned” in Vietnam, France would be hopelessly outnumbered in her North African possessions. The alternative view, and the one that won out in the end, was that early disengagement from Vietnam would only intensify nationalist fervor in the Maghreb. (If the Vietnamese can win independence, why can’t we?) For the sake of the empire, then, France had to stay the course in Vietnam. Second, Premier Pleven won political points for his announcement, timed perfectly in advance of the Assembly vote, that he had secured agreement for a three-power conference on Indochina, involving Britain, the United States, and France, to take place in Washington later in the month. Pleven assured delegates that France would press for a joint Western policy toward the Far East and direct Anglo-American support in the event of a Chinese Communist move into Indochina.

The prospect of a Chinese military intervention dominated the discussion of Indochina at the tripartite meetings, though there was a divergence of views on the seriousness of the threat. At the start of 1952, the PRC had about two hundred and fifty thousand troops in the provinces bordering Indochina, many of them ready to cross the frontier on short notice. Both the CIA and the Joint Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the likelihood of an invasion, and so did British intelligence. With the Korean War still ongoing and claiming vast Chinese resources, and with the Viet Minh holding their own against the French, these analysts thought Beijing would almost certainly be content to maintain its current level of support—arms and ammunition, technicians and political officers, and the training of Viet Minh NCOs and officers in military centers in southern China. The French, however, insisted on the very real possibility of direct, large-scale Chinese intervention and requested a U.S. commitment to provide air and naval support in that event. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council agreed it was important to decide on a course of action should the Chinese move. But which course?

Many of the French troops in Indochina came from France’s African colonies, some of the best from Morocco and Senegal. By 1952 “the fighting had killed 3 generals, 8 colonels, 18 lieutenant colonels, 69 majors, 341 captains, 1,140 lieutenants, 3,683 NCOs, and 6,008 soldiers of French nationality; 12,019 legionnaires and Africans; and 14,093 Indochinese troops. These numbers did not include the missing or wounded—about 20,000 and 100,000 respectively.” (p. 458)

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Filed under Africa, China, economics, France, Germany, Maghreb, migration, military, nationalism, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 21 April 2025 · 6:20 am

China’s Current Gold Rush in Africa

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 304-305:

The contours of Chinese small-scale gold mining in twenty-first-century Ghana and other gold-rich areas of West and Central Africa bear some uncanny resemblances to Chinese gold-mining and migration practices in the mid-nineteenth century: small companies with partners pooling resources; network-based migrations and brokers that pave the journey from home to foreign goldfields; and uneasy relations with citizens and governments in destination countries. These economic and cultural patterns are remarkable for their persistence and adaptability.

But the Chinese gold rush to Ghana is quite different from the gold rushes of the nineteenth century. Gold is no longer the money-commodity and hence does not generate the same kind of global fever that it did in the past. Nevertheless, gold remains a premier store of value and is highly sought during economic recessions. Thus, Chinese mining entrepreneurs rushed to Ghana between 2008 and 2013 because the world price of gold hit historic highs after the 2008 financial crisis. Gold remains valuable, furthermore, for use in some industrial applications and especially for ornament. China and India are the two largest consumers of gold in the world, nearly all of it for jewelry. China is actually the world’s largest producer of gold (400 tons in 2018), but its declining reserves cannot keep up with domestic demand.

Chinese participation in small-scale gold mining, while not insignificant, is just one aspect of China’s mining interest in Africa. China also engages in industrial gold mining, with investments in South African mines, which are still producing after 150 years on the Witwatersrand but now at nearly two miles below the surface. In addition, copper, cobalt, manganese, bauxite, coltan (used in electronics and mobile phones), and dozens of other minerals and metals are critical elements in Chinese manufacturing, especially in top sectors like electronics, vehicles, and steel production. Africa’s rich mineral reserves and China’s voracious industrial appetite have made China the largest importer of minerals from sub-Saharan Africa.

Still, mining ranks but third in China’s African interests, after infrastructure (roads, railroads, ports) and energy (oil and gas). China’s annual foreign direct investment in Africa is enormous, growing from $75 million in 2003 to $5.4 billion in 2018. Approximately one-half of the capital comes from the central government’s state-owned enterprises and banks. Other Chinese investors and contractors include provincial-level state-owned enterprises and private companies and, at the bottom of the hierarchy, small entrepreneurial ventures like those in artisanal mining.

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by | 19 April 2025 · 9:27 am

Overseas Chinese and Qing Reforms

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 298-301:

After the Opium Wars, the Qing had struggled to figure out how to relate to the West, how to develop domestic industry, how to enact administrative reforms. But even as foreign businesses and culture were implanted in China, especially in the treaty ports and in industrializing areas, modernizing efforts were slowed by internal divisions within the Qing and by the weight of vested bureaucratic interests, not to mention the inertia of China’s long dynastic tradition. By the late nineteenth century, the Qing teetered on the brink of fiscal insolvency, the result of the high cost of the military suppression of the Taiping and other domestic rebellions, which had ravaged southern and central China (1850–64), and of its foreign indemnities.

Chinese emigrants living abroad in the Anglo-American world were not marginal actors in the history of the late Qing. Those who went to the gold rushes were among the first Chinese to experience the West first hand. Their participation in the gold rushes in North America and Australasia in the late nineteenth century and in the revival of the gold industry in South Africa in the early twentieth were integral to a new era of long-distance migrations and global trade that transformed international finance and political relations. Chinese gold miners contributed to the global financial hegemony of Great Britain, and then the United States, based on the power of the gold. Their contribution was doubly ironic. At one level, the gold rushes both materially and symbolically consolidated the shift to gold-based trade and investment in the global economy, which disadvantaged China. At another level, the presence of Chinese on the goldfields and in other industries gave rise to racial conflict and discrimination, violence, and finally, legal policies of exclusion from immigration and citizenship, which policies also disadvantaged China. Chinese exclusion did not directly cause either the West’s rise or China’s decline. But it was part of a constellation of policies that privileged Anglo-American settler nationalism, and that contributed to China’s oppression in myriad ways. The exclusion laws, moreover, loom large in nineteenth-century Chinese history because they were, along with the unequal treaties, the most potent symbols of China’s humiliation on the global stage.

But if Chinese emigrants were despised and marginalized by Euro-American societies, they were also conduits of knowledge and resources to their hometowns and regions. They built dense networks—migration, commercial, and political networks—across the Pacific that contributed to an emergent Chinese nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. The anti-American boycott exemplified this national consciousness, which connected diasporic communities with the urban middle classes in China and linked the injustice of the exclusion laws to China’s weakness as a nation.

The Qing, while fiscally enfeebled and burdened by a sclerotic bureaucracy, did try to assert its independence in the face of foreign encroachment and aggression. China refused to adopt the gold-exchange standard; it mattered that China was not a colony, like India or the Philippines, where imperialism arbitrarily imposed monetary policies that inscribed dependency. Qing diplomats intervened to protect Chinese merchants and laborers living and working abroad from discrimination and abuse, although not always successfully. European and American encroachments were bad enough; the Japanese were, in turn, arguably even more rapacious, seizing Taiwan, going to war to take Korea, long a Chinese tributary state, and building up its forces in Manchuria. The stakes became even greater with the Boxer Rebellion of 1900–1, a peasant uprising in North China against foreign missionaries that split the Qing court, led the Western powers and Japan to send troops into Beijing, and resulted in another raft of indemnities.

In 1905 the Empress Dowager Cixi initiated a series of reforms, including abolishing the examination system, building up the military, and streamlining the bureaucracy. But they were slow to be implemented (in part because the Qing could not pay for them), and popular opposition to the Qing only grew. By decade’s end, the idea of reforming the monarchy had given way to popular demands to overthrow it. Armed uprisings throughout China in the summer and fall of 1911, many associated with Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary party, finally toppled the Qing and with it, four thousand years of dynastic rule. The new Republic of China faced myriad challenges, from how to form a modern government on the ash heap of the Qing to how to end fighting among warlords and corruption at high levels. The Republican era saw the establishment of a constitution, a modern university system, investments in domestic industry, the end of foot binding, and a cultural renaissance. But the needs of the peasantry, the vast majority of the population, remained largely unaddressed. Instability, both political and economic, was endemic, especially with the burden of foreign indemnity payments continuing well into the 1920s. Just as the Qing had run out of time, so did the republic, when Japan seized Manchuria in 1931 and then invaded China proper in 1937.

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by | 17 April 2025 · 1:33 am

Labour, Het Volk, and Asiatic Exclusion

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 247-249, 253:

In 1906 and 1907 the Chinese Question on the Rand emerged as a key issue in two major political elections: the general election in Britain and the election for responsible government, or home rule, in the Transvaal. Both elections brought new parties into power that spelled the speedy demise of the Chinese labor program and, moreover, influenced broader political trajectories. In Britain, the Chinese Question helped the Liberal Party overturn more than twenty years of nearly unbroken Conservative rule and galvanized the trade unions to form the Labour Party, which would by the time of the Great War eclipse its Liberal ally as the main opposition to the Tories. The emergence of Labour as an independent political force was inextricably linked to a self-conscious identity that placed it at the center of an imperial white working class. Labour not only acted in solidarity with British workers in the settler colonies, it also expressed a self-interested vision of the colonies as destinations for working-class emigration as a hedge against domestic economic uncertainty. The trade union movement put its own stamp on social imperialism, claiming it from Milner and Chamberlain in a more class-based, yet eminently racialized, politics.

In the Transvaal, the Chinese Question emerged as a common complaint among diverse interests, which hurt the political fortunes of the establishment Progressive Party, dominated by the mining interest. It proved a sensational issue that helped stir Afrikaans-speaking voters to the new Het Volk party organized by the former Boer commandos Jan Smuts and Louis Botha. Het Volk won the election; a few years later, in 1910, Botha would be premier of the newly federated Union of South Africa, with Smuts in his cabinet. Their ascent signaled the electoral strength of Afrikaners in South Africa, even as Afrikaner politics would remain diverse across the subcontinent, from racial hard-liners in the Orange River Colony to moderates in the Cape Colony. Notably, Botha, and especially Smuts, while advocating for white supremacy and racial segregation, committed themselves to the mining interest and more broadly to British imperialism.

South Africa was the most bluntly racist of the British settler colonies. But it was of a piece with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, all established as dominions of the British Empire, the concept of “dominion” signaling not a colony but a polity akin to a country, and one that indeed signaled its own dominion over native peoples. Dominions possessed maximum autonomy within the British Empire, which protected the rule of local white settlers while conveniently distancing the metropole from the openly racist modus operandi of native removal, racial segregation, and Asiatic exclusion—tenets of white settlerism that had, in fact, been forged in the United States.

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THE ARGUMENT AGAINST Chinese labor was not just that it cost whites jobs. Critics believed that an additional, if not greater, danger lay in the prospect that indentured Asian labor would lead to a settled Asian population of merchants and traders. The use of indentured Indians on the Natal sugar plantations was an object lesson in the consequences of importing indentured colored labor. Indian indenture had led inexorably to a free, settled population, including merchants and traders who undersold white businesses. By 1905 there were more Indians than whites in Natal, and they were migrating to the Transvaal. Whites worried that the small population of Chinese merchants in Johannesburg would likewise grow, especially with an indentured labor force potentially offering an ethnic market. They warned that the “imported Asiatic gains a grip on a country with wonderful rapidity.” Although Natal passed laws to restrict immigration of Asiatics, the colony was “a back door wide open” because indentured Indian laborers were not required to repatriate at term: “the indentured coolie of to-day is the free man of tomorrow, and the free man becomes the trader.”

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Filed under anglosphere, Australia, Britain, Canada, democracy, economics, labor, migration, nationalism, New Zealand, South Africa, South Asia, U.S.

by | 3 April 2025 · 8:23 pm

Effects of Witwatersrand Gold

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 193-195:

THE MINING OF Witwatersrand gold had both global and regional effects. At the level of world trade and finance, the economic historian Jean-Jacques Van Helten argues that expansion of international trade in the 1880s and ’90s required an enlargement of the overall money stock and hence the world supply of gold. The gold standard was not yet universal, but since the 1870s it had become the basis of international payments among the leading industrial countries. Witwatersrand gold, along with gold discoveries in the 1890s in Western Australia and Canada, increased the global supply of gold and strengthened the position of Britain, which was already the center of the international financial market.

Van Helten presents the late-century gold discoveries as a fortuitous meeting of a demand, but it also might be considered a stimulus, a new phase of capital accumulation, that powered the expansion of trade and foreign investment. Although this accumulation built on previous decades of gold discoveries in North America and Australasia, South African gold helped inaugurate a new period of capitalist development, the so-called New Imperialism, in which monopoly and finance capital came to the fore; when the great powers scrambled to carve up Africa, the last continent to fall to European colonialism; and Germany and the United States nipped at Britain’s heels for position at the top of the world economic order.

The supremacy of the pound sterling (i.e., gold) in international finance and trade lay at the heart of Great Britain’s strategy to maintain global dominance. The City of London reaped handsome profits from international investment and trade, both within the empire and without: the British compensated for desultory investment in domestic industries by exporting “old” English manufactures to sheltered markets within the empire. The colonies were induced to buy these products (often at artificially high prices) while they in turn sold primary products to the rest of the world (wool from Australia, cotton from India). These enabled Great Britain, in turn, to offset its trade deficits from importing wheat from the United States and Argentina for domestic consumption.

In southern Africa, labor patterns that had been established on the diamond fields carried over to the Rand. The rapid capitalization of diamond mining had reduced independent diggers to wage workers while the industry relied increasingly on African migrant laborers contracted on meager wages and confined to compounds. White miners adopted an aggressive racism to police the color line in order to protect their superior position and wages.

The mining of gold also shifted the center of economic power from the Cape Colony to the heretofore isolated and undeveloped Transvaal. Lord Selborne, who served as undersecretary to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain, considered the Transvaal “the richest spot on earth,” the key to South Africa’s future. “It is going to be the natural capital state and centre of South African commercial, social and political life,” he wrote in 1896.

By then, Johannesburg had grown to a cosmopolitan city of 100,000, with a large population of uitlanders (foreigners), British and other Europeans, who were aggrieved over political exclusions (fourteen years residency for naturalization and the franchise) and high taxes. Mine owners agitated against high railway tariffs and inflated prices set by state monopolies over essential resources (especially dynamite). More broadly for the British Empire, political instability in the Transvaal threatened to unravel the assumptions of its superior position in southern Africa based on commercial and financial domination, British immigration, and geopolitical power. After the failed Jameson raid of 1895 (a botched coup d’état backed by Cecil Rhodes and other leading mine magnates), ZAR president Paul Kruger stiffened his resolve. The British did not want the vote, he said. They wanted his state.

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by | 2 April 2025 · 7:13 pm

Australia’s Afghan Crisis, 1888

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 178-181:

THE CONFLICT IN AUSTRALIA reached a climax in 1888 when officials in Melbourne and then Sydney, backed by public agitation, refused to allow 268 Chinese passengers arriving from Hong Kong on the Afghan to disembark, including some sixty Chinese who held British naturalization papers. The crisis paralyzed British officials in London, while hysteria that the Afghan represented the leading edge of a new “invasion” swept Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. Cheok Hong Cheong led a committee of Chinese merchants to protest the agitation surrounding the Afghan affair, which tried to meet with Victorian premier Duncan Gillies but was continually rebuffed.

Cheong went on to deliver a public address and publish it. He rebuked Australia for waging a shameless campaign rooted in “the selfishness, the prejudices, and the shams, which form the warp and woof of the present agitation.” He asked, “Is it possible that common human rights, accorded to other civilized peoples, are to be denied to us? That it is to be a crime, punishable by imprisonment with hard labor, if man or woman of the Chinese race travels over the line separating any of the colonies without a permit?”

Cheong and his colleagues were constructing a rhetoric about China and Chinese rights on the world stage that mirrored the perspective articulated by Qing diplomats. Cheong echoed Marquis Tseng’s assertion of China’s awakening: “That such a time may come, nay, probably will come sooner than is supposed, when the presence and power of China as a great nation will be felt in these seas, and it lies with you to say, as wise men or otherwise, if this is to be for good or evil.”

Victoria placed the Afghan in quarantine and declared the passengers’ travel documents to be fraudulent, barring their entry. The ship then ventured to Sydney, where authorities also refused to land the Chinese, goaded by a crowd of five thousand demonstrators shouting “Out with the Chinamen” in front of the New South Wales Parliament. South Australia pledged that it would also refuse the ship. With three colonies vowing to refuse admission of the Chinese aboard the Afghan, the Chinese Question took center stage in intercolonial politics.

Taking advantage of the crisis, Premier Parkes rushed legislation through the NSW assembly that exponentially increased poll taxes and residence fees on Chinese and declared that NSW would no longer recognize naturalization papers, including those previously issued by NSW. He backdated the law so it applied to the passengers on the Afghan. It was not a full victory, however, because the courts heard the habeas cases of naturalized Chinese and ordered their disembarkment. The Afghan then returned to Hong Kong with the remaining passengers.

The Afghan affair raised disturbing questions. When the Chinese passengers aboard the ship obstructed the unloading of cargo, they threw open the idea that Australia could refuse people while welcoming goods. From a simple business calculus, Hong Kong shippers considered the Australian trade finished, as passenger fees had kept cargo rates down. In London, officials struggled over how to sever migration from trade, that is, how it might possibly accommodate Australians’ demands for immigration restriction while protecting its broader commercial interests in Asia.

The Afghan crisis also accelerated the movement to federation. Parkes had long been a proponent of federation, a strategy to strengthen Australia’s position in Asia and within the British Empire. The Chinese Question provided a racial urgency that rallied the masses and brought divergent colonial interests into closer alignment. In June 1888 an intercolonial conference in Sydney discussed the need for the uniform restrictions on Chinese immigration. Much was riding on the outcome. The southern colonies hoped to bring the tropical colonies firmly to the side of restriction and to present a united front to London. The Colonial Office hoped that the conference would produce an agenda reasonable enough—or at least not as obnoxious as standing colonial policies—to take to the Qing as the basis for a new treaty. London asked the colonies to behave as responsible imperial partners, expressing to them the hope that the “Conference will endeavour to conciliate the susceptibilities of [the] Chinese Government as far as practicable.”

The conference agreed that immigration restriction should be secured simultaneously through imperial diplomacy and by uniform colonial legislation. But it could not get unanimous support for all its resolutions. Tasmania and Western Australia abstained on a general statement in support of exclusion and on specific legislative models, which included the continued criminalization of unauthorized intercolonial travel and stricter shipping regulations. Tasmania balked at the blatant disregard for the home (British) government’s authority and discrimination against Chinese who were British subjects. Western Australia’s reticence lay in the territory’s use of Asian labor in the northern maritime industries, although in 1886 it had banned Chinese from work on the huge goldfields discovered at Kalgoorie. South Australia agreed to all points in the interests of intercolonial unity, but it insisted that restrictions should apply only to Chinese and not to Indians or Pacific Islanders, who continued to work in the Northern Territory, which South Australia administered. Although unanimity eluded the conference, the basis was laid for further negotiations toward a full White Australia policy.

In 1891 the Privy Council, the official advisory body to Queen Victoria, conceded broader discretion to the colonies over Asiatic restrictions, ruling that foreign aliens had no legal right to enter British territories. Although the rule did not cover Chinese in Hong Kong or Singapore, who were British subjects, it confirmed the colonies’ use of local legislation to restrict Chinese immigration.

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by | 28 March 2025 · 6:16 pm

Sad Fate of Sihanoukville

From Sihanoukville: Rise and Fall of a Frontier City, by Ivan Franceschini, with photos by Roun Ry, Global China Pulse, September 2024:

From quiet seaside town known mostly as a backpacker destination, the place turned first into a booming frontier city with aspirations to become the ‘new Macau’ and then into a notorious haven for online scam operations. How did it come to this? How did a city once famous as a destination for low-end tourism turn into a hub for human trafficking and modern slavery linked to cybercrime?

Founded in the mid-1950s around a then new deep-water port funded by France and named after the late Cambodian king and long-term ruler Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012), the Sihanoukville of old [once known as Kampong Som] is often remembered as an enchanted place. Youk Chhang (2021), director of the Documentation Centre of Cambodia, a nongovernmental organisation (NGO) that played a fundamental role in documenting the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, has described how, when he was growing up in Cambodia in the 1960s, he used to hear about the city in popular music. Although he had never visited the place, his youthful fascination was also fuelled by the fact that Jacqueline Kennedy had travelled there in 1967 to inaugurate a boulevard named after her late husband, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. As his words in the epigraph to this essay show, his first visit to the city in the early 1990s did not disappoint.

I had a chance to visit Sihanoukville myself in the early 2010s and have some very distinct memories of a somnolent town of low-rise buildings, with seaside resorts beside white-sand beaches where one could lie in a hammock and simply relax. The temptation to nostalgia is strong. Yet, even at that time, it was widely known that, behind the beautiful scenery, the city was an imperfect paradise. Not only were certain areas a haven for sex tourists, including several notorious paedophiles, it was also a favourite haunt of a handful of Russian oligarchs and gangsters, who for years dominated the city with their extravagant behaviour and penchant for violence.

In the early 2010s, Sihanoukville was the long-term home of a growing community of about 200 former Soviet citizens and attracted as many as 5,000 to 6,000 Russian-speaking tourists every year (Plokhii 2011). They had their own Russian-language newspaper, a monthly Russian community meeting, at least six Russian restaurants, street signs in Russian, and a Russian-owned beachside disco. There were also plans to build the first Russian Orthodox church in the city, which came to fruition a few years later (Orthodox Christianity 2014). Money—often of uncertain provenance—was pouring in. Yet, the situation on the ground was quickly shifting as new Chinese investors began to eye the lucrative opportunities in the city.

In fact, China’s presence in Sihanoukville goes way back. Under the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–79), the city was the site of one of the main Chinese aid projects in what was then known as Democratic Kampuchea: the reactivation and expansion of an oil refinery that had been built by a French company in the 1960s and abandoned due to continuous attacks from Cambodian and Vietnamese communist insurgents and US bombing in May 1975.

In Brothers in Arms, Andrew Mertha (2014: Ch. 5) documents in painstaking detail the bureaucratic and personal challenges that Chinese workers faced as they attempted to rebuild the refinery—their long-ago voices resonating with the complaints of some of their successors of today as they bemoan the lack of skills of Cambodian co-workers and the impossibility of understanding who is in charge of what (Franceschini 2020). The refinery would never be completed, the project reaching a premature end due to the onslaught of the internal purges in the Khmer Rouge bureaucracy and then the Vietnamese invasion. As the Vietnamese forces entered Kampong Som, the place ‘became noteworthy’ as a ‘site of the disorganized and panic-ridden retreat of the Chinese’ (Mertha 2014: 117). Convinced by Khmer Rouge propaganda into believing that all was well on the Vietnam front, Chinese technicians and workers took a while to realise the impending danger. It was then too late for them to escape and as many as 200 became de facto prisoners of war.

Fast forward two decades. In the newly pacified Cambodia of the 1990s, Sihanoukville gained renewed importance as the country’s only deep-water port, which made it an important hub for international trade. In the new millennium, Chinese businesses began to gain a foothold in the city and the surrounding Preah Sihanouk Province. An important event in this sense was the establishment of the Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone—a development that would later be branded a landmark project of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Cambodia (IDI 2021). A priority of both the Chinese and the Cambodian governments since its approval in 2006, the project showcased the alignment of their agendas in that period, with Cambodia prioritising the zone’s development to attract foreign capital to build its export capacities, and China eager to push its well-established manufacturers to head overseas and seek lower-cost production bases and explore access to foreign markets (Loughlin and Grimsditch 2020; Bo and Loughlin 2022).

The transformation of Sihanoukville began abruptly in the mid-2010s, accelerating around 2017, as online gambling operators set up shop in the city. They soon spread rapidly across Cambodia, but Sihanoukville was the perfect location: relatively good access to the capital, Phnom Penh, a functioning airport, and plenty of land—much of it already grabbed by local elites—available for purchase or rent; an already thriving in-person gambling industry; and very lax law enforcement. Possibly, it was made even more desirable by the impending construction of China-funded infrastructure, especially a new expressway that would connect the city to Phnom Penh, dramatically cutting travel time between the two cities.

Given these considerations, industry operators began to descend en masse on the city, investing not only in their online activities, but also in a host of new casinos, hotels, and entertainment venues, most of which were targeting the rapidly growing Chinese market. This generated a bubble that, at its peak in 2019, produced annual revenue conservatively estimated between 3.5 and 5 billion USD a year, 90 per cent of which came from online gambling (Turton 2020). The Chinese population in the city grew exponentially, as did the percentage of businesses owned by Chinese nationals, which in mid-2019 was a staggering 90 per cent of the total in the city (Hin 2019).

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In January 2018, authorities in China launched a three-year campaign known as ‘sweeping away the black and eliminating the evil’ (扫黑除恶), to root out ‘underworld forces’ (Greitens 2020). Destinations like Sihanoukville likely presented an enticing prospect to gangsters trying to avoid the crackdown. It was around this time that reports of kidnappings, human trafficking, and forced labour to fuel the burgeoning online gambling and online scam industry in Sihanoukville started appearing with increasing frequency in Chinese-language media. As the presence of illicit online operations became better known, in July 2018, the Chinese Embassy in Cambodia released a warning about the ‘high-paying traps of online gambling recruitment’—one of the earliest instances of such advisories that we were able to locate (Chinese Embassy in Cambodia 2018). The embassy encouraged Chinese nationals who planned to come to Cambodia, especially young people, to be vigilant about offers of well-paid jobs as ‘typists’, ‘network technicians’, ‘network customer service’, and ‘network promotion’, regardless of whether these were promoted in online advertisements or introductions by friends or relatives.

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The day in 2019 when then prime minister Hun Sen announced the online gambling ban, 18 August, was a watershed moment for Sihanoukville. No-one was more aware of this than the Chinese nationals in Cambodia, who began to refer to the event simply as ‘818’—a supposedly auspicious number transformed into a symbol of doom. If up to that point the city’s economy was soaring, afterwards the edifice showed hints of cracking. Signs began to emerge that many operations had closed and rushed to relocate, dragging with them not only their workforce but also that of ancillary industries. According to some reports, an estimated 10,000 Chinese fled Sihanoukville in the space of a few days after the ban was announced (Inside Asian Gaming 2019). Reports followed of more Chinese leaving the city and Cambodia and, in January 2020, Cambodia’s Immigration Department revealed that about 447,000 Chinese nationals had left the kingdom (Ben 2020). While this is a huge number, there was no breakdown of how many of these departures were residents and how many were short-term visitors. During the same period there were 323,000 inbound Chinese travellers, meaning the net influx of Chinese was down by more than 100,000 people. While it is not possible to isolate any other potential factors that could have caused this drop, it can be assumed that 818 had an impact.

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Many Chinese developers decided to write off their losses and flee. Having lost faith in the future of the city and worried about the contractual obligations that bound them to pay exaggerated rents even in the face of an economy that was collapsing, many chose to evade their legal obligations and return to China. In so doing, they left behind hundreds of buildings at different stages of completion. On one hand, this spelled the ruin of local landowners, many of whom had sought to capitalise on the gambling-fuelled boom. As one of them complained to a journalist from Voice of Democracy (VoD) in July 2022: ‘I borrowed money to buy land worth more than $200,000 because I thought it was a great opportunity … We could earn $7,500 [per month]—why wouldn’t we dare to pay $2,000 per month [in loan repayments]? The banks were happy to lend money between $200,000 and $300,000’ (Mech 2022b). On the other hand, this caused mayhem among the Chinese and Cambodian workers employed on these sites, many of whom were not notified that their bosses had fled and continued to work for weeks or even months without being paid.

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I was in Sihanoukville between December 2019 and January 2020, right before the pandemic hit, and encountered several of these workers. While by that time many Cambodian workers had already returned to their homes in the provinces, having received the back salaries they were owed—which were much lower than those of their Chinese colleagues—or having given up on being paid at all, many of their Chinese counterparts were still stuck in the city. Many were living in conditions of destitution in the half-finished construction sites, unable to go home either because they did not have the money or because they were still clinging to the hope of retrieving the often-significant amounts they were owed. As I recounted at length elsewhere (Franceschini 2020), this was a heartbreaking experience.

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Although the online gambling ban had clear immediate impacts, paradoxically, this marked a point when awareness of the scale of the online industries and their associated crimes really came to the fore. Scam operations had existed for years in the city, discreetly hosted within the same operations that were home to ostensibly more legitimate gambling activities. As news emerged of the hardships occurring in Sihanoukville, it became clear that business was still booming in many of the larger hotel and casino-based online scam operations, and in the major compounds that proliferated across the city. Many companies providing real online gambling services (rather than rigged games or scams) likely left, and recently arrived scam operators and smaller players with less well-established connections probably got cold feet. However, at the same time, the compounds became increasingly secretive, and failing casinos converted premises to provide more space for online operations. In both cases, security increased and the movement of workers in and out became tightly restricted.

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Filed under Cambodia, China, economics, industry, labor, migration, Russia, slavery, U.S., Vietnam, war

by | 23 March 2025 · 10:48 pm

Roles of Chinese Huiguan

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 51-52:

The huiguan [会馆] were Chinese versions of the mutual aid organizations that virtually all immigrant groups formed on the basis of a common regional origin, known among eastern Europeans as Landsmannschaften and among Mexicans as mutualistas. In China huiguan dated at least to the Ming Dynasty, when traders and sojourners in big cities formed hostels and guilds where they could commune among people from their home districts, speaking their own dialect. Chinese formed native-place huiguan wherever they emigrated abroad, including North America and Australasia.

Chinese in America translated huiguan as “company,” not in the narrow sense of a business but more generally as a corporate entity. The first huiguan to organize in California were the Siyi (Sze Yup) Company and the Canton Company or Sanyi (Sam Yup) Huiguan, both in 1851. The Siyi people were the most numerous, but the Sanyi Huiguan’s concentration of cosmopolitan merchants from Guangzhou and its three surrounding counties gave it disproportionate influence. In the 1882 the California huiguan formed a coordinating body called Zhonghua Huiguan, formally translated as Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association but familiarly known as the Six Chinese Companies. In Victoria, Siyi and Sanyi people also formed huiguan, as well as associations for people from Xiamen in Fujian province (Figure 9).

Huiguan served as organizations of both solidarity and social control. A new immigrant arriving at San Francisco or Melbourne would find a representative from his home district at the dock, who would take him to the huiguan’s headquarters in the Chinese quarter. There he would find a place to sleep, a hot meal, information about mining and other job prospects, and where he might find his cousins and village friends. The individual merchants who financed credit-tickets that covered emigrants’ passage collected debt payments through huiguan. The associations adjudicated disputes among members, cared for members who were sick or indigent, buried those unlucky enough to die in America, and at a later date, sent their bones back home. Some huiguan provided translators and paid legal fees for members who ran afoul of the law.

Huiguan leaders represented the community to white society in public discourse, in formal meetings, and in bringing civil rights lawsuits. The larger and wealthier huiguan bought land and erected buildings in San Francisco and Melbourne for their headquarters. Their offices boasted full-time officers and staff, including a secretary, a treasurer, clerks, a translator, cooks, servants, and altar-keepers. They often had representatives in the goldfield towns wherever there was a concentration of Chinese.

Merchants traditionally ranked at the bottom of the Confucian social hierarchy, below farmers, workers, and soldiers. But through their leadership roles in emigrant communities, Chinese merchants found prestige and power. Their social status would filter back to China as well. But Euro-Americans imagined that huiguan were despotic organizations that brokered slave labor and exercised total control over their members. White Americans and Australians who were actually familiar with the Chinese community understood that huiguan were mutual aid associations similar to those organized by other immigrant groups. Chinese themselves considered their membership in huiguan not as enslavement but as integral to the networks of trust forged through native-place and clan lineage. They also considered the repayment of debts a matter of honor, and most Chinese cleared their debts fairly quickly, in less than a year in Australia.

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by | 23 March 2025 · 11:43 am

First Australian Gold Rush

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 26-27:

THE POLYNESIAN also circulated to Sydney, Australia, via Pacific whaling ships, bringing news of California gold to the antipodes. Between April 1849 and May 1850, some eleven thousand people left Australia for California. Mostly they came from Sydney, a combination of fortune seekers and former convicts. White Americans on the goldfields disliked the Australians, considering them to be criminals of rough and immoral character, claim jumpers and “hardened thieves and robbers.” The stereotype contained an element of truth in the predations of a San Francisco street gang known as the Sydney Ducks, so called for the convicts’ bowed legs and peculiar gait that resulted from years of wearing leg irons. But most Australian gold seekers were not former convicts; the California census of 1852 showed that Sydney men were more likely to be married with children, working, and noncriminals than Americans.

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Colonists in New South Wales had noted the presence of gold since at least the 1840s, but authorities had not encouraged prospecting. In 1844 Governor FitzRoy quashed news of gold discoveries in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney, believing it would inflame rebellion and disorder among the large population of convicts and former convicts; in 1849 Charles LaTrobe, the superintendent of Port Phillip district, broke up a minirush near Melbourne on grounds of trespass on crown lands. But news of California gold convinced colonial leaders that Australia’s future prosperity might lie in gold, not least to spur “a healthy emigration” of miners and workers to diminish the influence of convicts and paupers. FitzRoy appointed a geological surveyor in 1850 and announced his offer of a prize.

Hargraves set out to find gold. “I knew I was in gold country for 70 miles,” he wrote, before finding water to wash the earth at Auroya Goyong, near Bathurst, in February 1851. He enlisted three young men to help him, teaching them how to use a pan and build a rocker, skills he had learned in California. Hargraves claimed the reward (cutting out his three assistants), renamed the spot Ophir, and publicized his findings broadly. Within a few months there were several hundred people at the diggings, farmers and shepherds from the countryside and clerks and mechanics from Sydney.

The Australian gold rush was on. Observers remarked that Sydney virtually emptied of people as carpenters dropped their tools, merchants shuttered their shops, and house servants fled their masters’ homes. Not a few people from Port Phillip (Melbourne) trekked north up to Bathurst, but prospecting spread westward in earnest. In July 1851 the Port Phillip district of New South Wales separated and founded the new colony of Victoria. A month later gold seekers hit a rich strike north of Geelong. By mid-October upward of ten thousand people made their way to the central midlands of Victoria; many diggers were taking out an ounce of gold a day (£3). Most important, perhaps, Hargraves had introduced the “California rocker” to Australia, which enabled more efficient washing than tin pots and dishes. Over the next decade 170,000 colonial settlers (nearly half the entire nonnative population) moved to the goldfields, and another 573,000 gold seekers arrived from abroad, mainly from the British Isles, as well as continental Europe, California, and China. Chinese called Victoria Xinjinshan, or New Gold Mountain, and renamed California Jiujinshan, Old Gold Mountain. To this day Chinese call the city of San Francisco Jiujinshan.

Honolulu was, and still is, called Tanxiangshan (Sandalwood Mountain) in Chinese.

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Filed under Australia, China, economics, Hawai'i, labor, language, migration, Pacific, U.S.

by | 21 March 2025 · 5:56 am

South China’s Gold Rush Diaspora

From The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and  Global Politics, by Mae Ngai (W. W. Norton, 2021), Kindle pp. 32-36:

THE VAST MAJORITY OF Chinese gold diggers in California and Victoria hailed not from Shanghai but from southern China, especially the Siyi, or four counties, that lay on the western side of the Pearl River delta in Guangdong province. Remarkably, the vast majority came from just one county, Xinning [= Taishan]. Xinning was a poor place, owing to its rocky soil and hilly terrain, its cycles of drought and flood, and its relative isolation from the market. The land produced only enough rice to feed its people for half the year, so farmers grew sweet potatoes and peanuts on the hillsides to supplement their crops. Instability from British economic penetration and local political violence made conditions worse. Families sent sons and brothers to nearby cities for seasonal work as laborers, peddlers, and factory workers. No one knows who were the first Chinese from Xinning to venture to California, but they had probably already migrated from their home villages to Guangzhou or its environs. What is clear is that they established a classic pattern of chain migration to California and Victoria and, soon afterward, to the goldfields of Canada and New Zealand. Gold seekers from the Siyi founded the Chinese diaspora in North America and Australasia.

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THE GOLD RUSHES BROUGHT large numbers of Chinese and Euro-Americans into contact with each other on an unprecedented scale, far surpassing the limited experience of European colonial enclaves in Chinese port cities or the occasional Chinese visitors to the United States and England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The San Francisco Customs Office noted 325 arrivals from China in 1849 and 450 in 1850; in 1850 Chinese comprised only one percent of the California mining population. But 2,700 Chinese arrived in 1851 and 20,000 in 1852. Chinese comprised about 10 percent of the total population of California by the late 1850s, and upward of 25 percent in the mining districts. A similar pattern exists in Australia. By 1859 there were at 40,000 to 50,000 Chinese in Victoria, roughly 20 to 25 percent of the mining population. Historians of the Australian rush have remarked that many Britons had never “mixed so freely with foreigners, especially the Chinese.”

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