Read Online A Chinaman's Chance by Eric Liu - Free Book Online

comportment, he will make that instant adjustment and tell himself, “Oh—American.”
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    China’s arrival as a great power is the furthest-reaching geopolitical narrative of our time, more significant than wars on terror and Arab uprisings, more economically consequential than financial collapse and near-Depression. But it’s already been so assimilated as background knowledge, as a veritable law of nature, that it hardly occurs to us to imagine in detail the reach of the coordinated Chinese push for global domination. From time to time, though, a reminder of that coordination and intention arrives with sobering force. A simple world map in the New York Times accompanying a 2013 essay called “China’s Economic Empire” shows the places all around the planet, from Congo to Costa Rica, from Greenland to Siberia to Sudan to Uzbekistan, where Chinese foreign direct investment, Chinese laborers, joint ventures with Chinese state-owned enterprises, Chinese energy pipelines, Chinese extraction of iron ore and other commodities, Chinese pressure to force the relaxation of local rules on wages and standards, Chinese controlling interests in other nations’ iconic companies like Volvo and Smithfield Farms and Club Med, Chinese ownership of whole ports in Greece and other choke points of global commerce all add up to one thing: a plan to take over the world commercially, a push that the essay calls by turns “unstoppable” and “disturbing,” “aggressive” and “rapacious.”
    In his best-selling book When the Chinese Rule the World , the English political commentator Martin Jacques writes of the power of the “Overseas Chinese,” the worldwide diaspora of Chinese who have become something of an advance force—scouts, pioneers, infiltrators —for China’s imperial economic ambitions. During the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he writes, in some nations thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of Overseas Chinese organized to demonstrate in support of the Games (and to outshout critics of China’s Tibet policies). In Ho Chi Minh City, in Canberra and Nagano and other capitals, these prideful, increasingly vocal people of Chinese descent are just a small part of a vast forty-million-strong network of people who, according to this idea of the Overseas Chinese, are Chinese first and Chinese last.
    This idea long predates the contemporary era of Chinese might. Indeed, its origins lie in periods of Chinese weakness across the centuries. When the Qing Dynasty began to falter in the nineteenth century, its control of the country eroded by warlords within and imperialists from abroad, great waves of poor, unskilled Chinese dispersed to other lands. All across Southeast Asia, but also across Latin America and Europe and Africa, countless Chinese sojourned and settled. It is not surprising to learn there are over 9 million Chinese in Thailand or nearly 7 million in Malaysia. It is a bit more surprising to learn there are 600,000 Chinese in France, over 300,000 in South Africa, and 1.1 million in Peru.
    In most of the nations where migrant Chinese settled, their communities started out isolated and spurned and had to make a virtue of necessity. They maintained social and cultural coherence, creating closed networks and associations for mutual aid and investment. Most were coolie laborers, living in brutal conditions, though in many places they eventually became merchants and middlemen, brokers and bargainers. Some became prosperous; all were assumed to be part of a vast ethnic conspiracy, and they provoked resentment for their clannish ways, their alien tongue, their insider dealings and secret code for success.
    This, of course, is not just a Chinese story. So-called middleman minorities, like Jews throughout Europe and Indians in East Africa, have often achieved vastly outsized clout. But the Chinese diaspora is in a