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Jomo, Kwame Sundaram

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Title<Review Articles>Capital, Colonialism and Contradiction inthe Making of the Sino-Singapore BourgeoisieAuthor(s)Jomo, Kwame SundaramCitation東南アジア研究 (1980), 18(1): 162-167Issue Date1980-06URL http://hdl.handle.net/2433/56005RightType Journal ArticleTextversionpublisherKyoto UniversitySoutheast Asian Studies, Vol. 18, No.1, June 1980Capital, ColonialislD. and Contradiction in the Makingof the Sino-Singaporean BourgeoisieJOMO K warne Sundaram*A Review of Lee Poh Ping'sChinese Society in Nineteenth Century Singapore**Dr. Lee Poh Ping's project is no simpleone. That he succeeds in pulling it offas well as he does in this compact andvery readable book is indeed admirable.Inspired by the structuralist historicalmethod of Barrington Moore,D the authorseeks to interpret the chronic instabilityof Singapore Chinese society in the thirdquarter of the last century. He ana-lyses the structure of this community inthe context of the changing interests andstrategy of British imperialism in theregion. From such a perspective, thefour riots which occurred in this periodcan be seen as outcomes of the clash ofinterests as British free traders and theirChinese partners encroached upon thepreviously established Chinese plantation* Department of Development and Planning,Faculty of Economics, The National Univer-sity of Malaysia, Bangi, Se1angor, Malaysia** 1978. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford UniversityPress. 139+xiii p.1) See Barrington Moore, Jr., Social Origins ofDictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant inthe Making of the Modern World (Boston, 1967).162interests exporting gambier and pepper.This contradiction· is subsequently dis-placed with the extension of Britishadministration to the Malayan peninsulafrom 1874. The book is well organizedaround this theme with each chapterneatly unfolding into the next. It there-fore seems best to retain this structure insummarizing his argument.Before Raffles annexed Singapore onbehalf of the British, there already ex-isted a small but significant agriculturecum trading economy on the island.The gambier and pepper society inSingapore had its roots here and con-tinued to grow after 1819 when theisland went to the British. This agri-cultural economy consisted of small plan-tations employing no more than twentylabourers each. The latter appear tohave gained the lion's share of thewealth produced by controlling the exportof the commodities, by charging highinterest rates for credit advances to theJOMO K. S.:plant~rs and by often being the localshopkeeper and hence supplier of goodsneeded by the plantations. From top tobottom, this econon1Y was a predomi-nantly Teochew preserve.The free trade impulse was mainlydirected against the mercantilist tradepolicies of the English and Dutch EastIndia Companies. In Singapore, freetrade was promoted by the 'countrytraders,' i.e. those individuals allowed bythe English East India Company to takesome part in the trade with the East. InEngland, they were strongly supported bythe ascending industrialist interests whonlmany served as agents. To make asuccess of free trade, trustworthy inter-mediaries were needed to take care ofdistribution in the hinterland. These'compradors' dealt directly with or wereemployed by the European agents whoultimately dominated the import andexport trade. 2)In Singapore Chinese society then, thechoicest candidates for this role werethose who were more westernized andwho had investments and families on theisland or III other territories underBritish rule and who were thus dis-couraged from abscondence. The Ma-lacca Chinese, who were already emI-nently qualified according to these twocriteria, possessed yet another advantagein being more familiar with the Malay2) According to this definition then, the com-pradors do not include small merchant capi-talists - such as retailers and shopkeepers ---whose positions were not strategic and whowere dependent on the compradors, andhence enjoyed less lucrative profits.Book Reviewlanguage which was essential for dealingwith the population of the hinterland.Another important facet of SingaporeChinese society of those times was theexistence of secret societies. Lee arguesthat in the harsh Singapore environmentthen, and confronted with a hostile or atbest, indifferent colonial administration,such societies thrived. While inheritinga long and complex tradition from China,secret societies in Singapore, as elsewhereoverseas, were transformed to meet thespecial needs of the frontier society.According to Lee, the societies unitedthe unset tIed male population acrossspeech-dialect and clan divisions whichhad not yet become very pronounced inmid-nineteenth century Singapore society.With a combination of ritual, coercionand welfare facilities, the secret societiesmanaged to embrace much of the Sino-Singaporean population. The 'compra-dol'S,' who were predominantly MalaccaChinese, i.e. the most desinicized of theChinese, were enjoying privileges andprotection from the colonial state andwere largely left out of this. They cer-tainly did not exercise control over thesecret societies. Instead, it seems thatit was those not involved III compradoractivities who used the organizations totheir advantage. In this connection, Leetakes issue with J. C. ]ackson's3) sugges-tion that the hierarchy of the secretsocieties coincided with that of thegambier and pepper economy. Whilehe agrees with Jackson that the financiers3) J. C. Jackson, Planters and Speculators (KualaLumpur, 1968).163and more successful planters probablydominated the secret societies in the earlyyears, Lee insists that this control wasunlikely to have continued after thesuccessful financiers moved to the towns.Lee argues that the secret societies weretaken over by the unsuccessful plantersand their workers. Unfortunately, hedoes not offer any actual evidence of suchcontrol, choosing instead to deduce thisinterpretation from the nature of theresponses of the secret societies to variousCrIses.With this background, the author goeson to explain the four major riots involv-ing the Chinese community in nineteenthcentury Singapore. The 1854 and 1876riots have been viewed by most observersas involving clashes between rival dialectgroups of Chinese. While not dismissingthe religious, regional (or dialect group)and secret society divisions in this turmoil,Lee successfully explains these socialboundaries in the complex web of con-tradictory class interests. The incidentsare then seen as consequences of thebusiness expansion of the free traders, whowere strongly supported by the colonialstate, and the ensuing intrusion on extantChinese capitalist interests. Thus, at-tempts by free traders to wrest control ofthe lucrative Siamese rice import tradeand China remittance service from Teo-chew businessmen resulted in the 1854and 1870 riots respectively. Over boththese issues, the Malacca Chinese andtheir Hokkien retailer partners - whoboth stood to gain from British success -came down on the side of the free traders.16418rJll %The 1857 general strike organized bysecret societies has been described as theresult of misunderstanding by hawkersand vendors of the good intentions of thecolonial administration. With the rapidgrowth of Singapore's population in the1850s (due to increased immigration) andthe displacement of the gambier andpepper economy, many people turned tohawking and other petty trades for sur-vival. The resultant disorderly clutteringup of the city stood in the way of thesmooth expansion of the free trade econ-omy. Government efforts to give someorder to this mess hurt such petty bour-geois activity, though this was denied bythe authorities. Secret society initiativein the resistance was therefore in responseto this apparent government threat.This also suggests that the Chinesepopulation in Singapore's colonial entre-pot economy was essentially petty bour-geois in character.The author goes on to argue thatBritish intervention in the Malayan pen-insula greatly increased the profitableinvestment opportunities for Chinese busi-nessmen in the Straits Settlements, thusdissipating the economic basis for theearlier contention - between the freetraders plus their allies on the one hand,and the incumbent mercantilists andplanters on the other - over the limitedpie offered by the entrepot economy.Almost simultaneously with this inter-vention, the British stepped up theirefforts to regulate and control the Chinesecommunity. While an official ChineseProtectorate was established in 1877, theJOMO K. S.:primary regula tory mode was through theeXIsting secret societies. However, whenthis arrangement appeared to have out-lived its usefulness in the late 1880s, thecolonial authorities began to deprive thesocieties of some of their power. Thesecret societies duly organized riots inprotest, thus providing the governmentwith a pretext for proscription in 1890.Thereafter, the Crown established anadvisory board, consisting of prominentChinese, to serve as an intennediary fordealing with the Chinese community atlage, while also seeking to cultivate'friendly' Chinese organizations. Theseclan and dialect group associations wereled primarily by merchants, manufac-turers and clerks, i.e. people who werenot expected to fundamentally challengethe status quo. These organizations alsobuilt upon the economic specializationwhich had developed along dialect grouplines. The new colonial policy towardsthe Chinese community encouraged thedevelopment of local businessmen whowere less linked to the secret societies. Insome measure, this group was also in-debted to the British for their enhancedpolitical, social and economic positions.Lee also points out that, as many non-Malacca Chinese emerged to be compra-dol'S in the growing commercial networks,the l'vlalacca Chinese responded bymoving into the professions or occupationsrequiring heavy financial commitments,such as banking. Thus, the overwhelm-ing domination of Malacca Chinese underthe hegemony of the free traders gaveway to the challenge from immigrantBook Reviewentrepreneurs from China. Nevertheless;by moving into the professions and byotherwise ingratiating themselves withthe authorities, the Malacca Chineseelite managed to perpetuate its admittedlyeroded position of legitimate politicalleadership until the recent past. Hence,until recently, there has still not been anunambiguously strong correspondence be-tween the business leadership (eg. asembodied by the Chinese Chambers ofCommerce) and the political leadership(eg. as embodied by the MalaysianChinese Association) of the Chinese capi-talist community. This is not to denyany similarity of interests. Rather, thisdistinction - eroding as it is - remindsus not only of the different cultural milieuof the two groups (eg. in terms oflanguagemedium to schooling), but more im-portantly, of the different economic inter-ests involved.But this is not all. As if by way of anaddendurn, Lee also treats us to an alltoo brief discussion of the emergence - inthe wake of the 1929 economic crash - ofSino-Singaporean business interests lessdependent on international trade andinvestment and with a greater stake inthe growth of the domestic and regionaleconomy. Chinese capitalists turned tomore nationally based investments (suchas light industry) in response to the de-pressed prices for export commodities andto colonial policies favouring British inter-ests over local (mainly Chinese) businessesand the (predominantly Malay) peas-antry.4) While this aborted trend was notsufficient to create a fully fledged inde-165pendent local bourgeoisie, it allowedsufficient economIC autonomy to en-courage political as well as other activitiesby Chinese businessmen at variance withBritish preferences. This small but none-theless significant development furtherreduced the complementarity betweenBritish interests and Chinese businessconsidered as a whole. The Englisheducated Chinese elite, especially theprofessionals, proved themselves to be themost acceptable of the Chinese from thecolonial perspective.While there may be much else to queryabout the overall structure or specificaspects of Lee Poh Ping's thesis it seemsbest for this reviewer - who is onlysuperficially acquainted with Sino-Ma-layan social history in the period underconsideration - to confine the remainingdiscussion here to those issues which im-pair the overall cogency and internalcoherence of his argument. Despite thegeneral subtlety of his treatment, theauthor occasionally resorts to over-sim-plifications. For instance, while insistingthat secret societies transcended dialectgroup distinctions, Lee does not explainwhy secret society-led riots often involvedopposing dialect groups. Similarly, hesuggests that the colonial authoritiesdecided in the late 1870s to use the secretsocieties instead of the Kapitan Chinasystem to regulate the Chinese commu-4) For rubber, see P. T. Bauer, The Rubber In-dustry: A Study in Monopoly and Competition(London, 1948). For the tin industry, seeYip Yat Hoong, The Development of the TinMining Industry of Malaya (Kuala Lumpur,1969).166nity. Yet, we know that where the lattersystem was in force, as in Selangor forexample, the Kapitan China was moreoften than not also the leader of the mostpowerful secret society. Of course, vari-ations are possible but unfortunately thisis not clarified in the book.Another important ambiguity is to befound in Lee's book. There are severalreferences to a strain inherent to Singa-pore's free trade society before Britishpolitical intervention in the Malayanpeninsula from 1874. However, onecomes away from the book left in the darkabout what causes this strain and whatits social manifestations were. In hisdiscussion, this strain is distinguishablefrom the other, more clearly elaboratedtension arising from the expansion of freetrade activity and its consequent clashwith the gambier and pepper economy.Lee may well be referring to the need forthe sphere of free trade activity to expandbecause of capital accumulation, but ifthis is the case, it is not clear from thebook.It is also unfortunate that Lee forgetsto discuss the implications of the fate ofgambier and pepper exports after the1820s. These goods were increasinglyintegrated into the growing East-Westcommerce. Hence, it is unclear how theexport of these commodities alone poseda threat to the British free traders. Thissuggests that the real basis for the con-tention, so eloquently discussed by Lee,was at the level of production, and notat the level of circulation of the commodi-ties concerned. Contention for control oflOMO K. S.:the factors of production, such as landand labor, is hence clearly at the centerof the tensions.All this having been said, the signifi-cance of Lee Poh Ping's contribution tothe analytical reconstruction of Singa-porean, and hence Malayan historycannot be diminished. By attempting toemploy a sensitive class analysis, he hasundermined several prevailing mythsabout his subject matter while implicitlyvalidating the perspective that socialhistory is essentially the unfolding of classcontention. He has also explored someinteresting aspects of the much touteddistinction between comprador and na-tional capitalist interests. His evidenceunderscores the view that few businessmenmay be unambiguously identified exclu-sively with either category; the greatmajority are to be located in variouscomplex intermediate positions, thus con-tributing to the amorphousness of thisclass. As he suggests, the nature ofBook ReviewChinese business in contemporary Singa-pore and Malaysia may be traced to thefree trade period and the subsequentrestructuring of the Malayan hinterlandby colonial expansion.Yet, despite the class analysis that itemploys, Lee Poh Ping's study of Singa-pore Chinese society is essentially elitist inperspective in so far as it does not breakfundamentally with focussing on thecapitalist class, albeit in a sensitive andcomplex manner. Little serious attentionis actually paid to the other Sino-Singa-porean classes, except wherever andwhenever they walk right on to centerstage and hence cannot be omitted fromconsideration. Given the nature of his-torical sources available, this is under-standable; it poses a very difficult problemto surmount, especially in the prevailinghistoriographical climate. Yet, in thelong run, the necessary next step in theprocess of scientifically reconstructing ournational heritage cannot be avoided.167

<Review Articles>Capital, Colonialism and Contradiction in the Making of the Sino-Singapore Bourgeoisie

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