Have you not heard of the wanderers of Yueh
- Hsu Wu Key (Ancient Taoist Mystic)
Beijing has won the 2008 Olympics. This victory is widely
viewed as vindication of a model of economic development
that is centred on the strength of an authoritarian state.
Ccru is watching for what is brewing at the margins - since
this is where everything interesting occurs. It is the forces
seeping in from the periphery - not the dictates of the
Politburo - that is ultimately responsible for the development
of the mainland. China calls itself the Middle Kingdom but it
still has edges and increasingly the edges are taking over.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Shenzen, a small town on the
Pearl River Delta. In 1979 - when it achieved the freedom
granted to the Special Economic Zones - Shenzen was
nothing but farmland. Twenty-two years later its streets are
filled with skyscrapers and frenzied shoppers, the product of
an economy growing at a staggering 34% a year. The key to
this success lies precisely in its distance from the centre. In
Shenzen there is a saying: "the mountains are high and the
emperor is far away."
It is no surprise that economic activity flourishes on the
margins. State centred Confucian society was traditionally
hostile to traders. As early as the late Chou dynasty (1100
-770 BCE) undesirables were banished to the areas south of
the Yangtze River. Merchants were exiled to the edges of the
world, populated by pirates and Taoist sorcerers. In Chinese
hyperstitional lore these edges are known as the lands of
Yueh.
This zone -on the southern coastal edge of the mainlandbred a maritime culture of commercial dynamism and
entrepreneurial risk that was sharply distinct from the
inward-looking, land-locked, state power of the North. Yueh
spawned a hybrid population with an offshore mentality,
inspired less by the rigidity of Confucianism than by "the
underground anti-authoritarian counter-cultures of Taoist and
Zen Buddhist heterodoxies, that long have flourished on the
Chinese periphery." It is this hybrid, dynamic, peripheral
culture - rather than the state - that is the engine of economic
growth in the Chinese world.
For thousands of years Yueh culture spread outside its
borders. Coastal trade brought it to Siberia, Korea, Japan,
Indonesia, through the Indian Ocean, the Malay Peninsula,
and across to the Indian subcontinent. This overseas
movement dramatically accelerated when, in 1276, the
Mongols invaded and previously sedentary populations
swarmed down from the North. Forced outward by the
influence of the nomads the people of Yueh dispersed.
Today there are approximately 60 million Chinese living
outside the mainland. This makes the Chinese diaspora the
second largest in the world. By far the majority of these
originate from the southern coastal provinces, regions which
were once the ancient Kingdom of Yueh.
This diasporic population has an intense economic vibrancy.
This is produced through a distinct market culture unlike that
of the colonists, merchants and multinationals from Europe,
America and even Japan. Chinese business operates in an
exterior relation to state backed capitalism with its lumbering
bureaucracies, centralized decision making processes and
national headquarters. It functions instead through a true
transnationalism, planet-wide networks of communication and
connections (guanxi), and a proliferation of small and medium
sized businesses familiar with insecurity and limber enough to
manoeuvre in unfamiliar environments.
Recently this diasporic community has reconnected with its
home on the mainland's southern periphery. This link between a marginal land and its people - has introduced a
decentred, outward-looking mode of development based on
foreign investment and export oriented growth. The fate of
China is being transformed not by the authoritarian control of
the central committee, but by this 'opening up, which is being
engineered from the periphery.
Beijing has seven years to prepare to welcome the world
inside its borders, but the outside has already invaded. The
exiled wanderers of Yueh have returned.
Bibliography
Booth, Martin. The Dragon Syndicates. Bantam Books:
London, New York. 2000.
Gungwu, Wang. The Culture of Chinese Merchants. Working
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Ip, David, Constance Lever-Tracy, and Noel Tracy. Chinese
Diaspora and Mainland China: An Emerging Economic
Synergy. Macmillan Press. 1996.
Seagrave, Sterling. Lords of the Rim. Putnam's Sons: New
York. 1995.
Chaliand, Gerard and Jean-Pierre Rageau. The Penguin Atlas
of Diasporas. Penguin: New York. 1995