Engendering social suffering: a Chinese diasporic community in northern Thailand

Abstract

This paper examines how reproducing Chineseness has become a source of social suffering through the case study of a group of Yunnan Chinese who escaped Chinese communist rules in the Mainland in 1949 or shortly after and settled in northern Thailand in the 1960s. As self-proclaimed carriers of traditional Chinese culture, they worked arduously to replicate whatever they considered ‘authentic’ Chinese through a narrow interpretation of the Confucian moral tenets in daily life. The (re)establishment of a patriarchal social order in Thailand – a society with a relatively high level of gender-equality, has inflicted tremendous pain and suffering among women and youth in this reified society. Ethnographic fieldwork, upon which this paper was based, was conducted in Maehong Village, Chiang Mai Province, between 2002 and 2007.

Keywords:

• Yunnan Chinese diasporas
• the Golden Triangle
• patriarchal family
• Gender inequality
• Confucianism

Acknowledgements

Initial funding for this project was provided by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research under its International Collaborative Research Programs in 2002–03 and 2004–05, and by Iowa State University's Bridge Fund (2003–04). Follow-up research from 2006 through 2008 was provided by Academia Sinica under its Thematic Research Grant. Application for ethical approval of this research project was submitted to the Contracts & Grants Office at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, and was approved in 2002 before the funding request was forwarded to the Wenner-Gren Foundation. Conflict of interest: none.

Notes

1. The Yunnan Chinese are called Ho, Haw, Chin Ho or Chin Haw by the Thais and other hill tribes. But since these terms are closely associated with the Muslim Yunnan Chinese who are primarily caravan traders, they are not really appropriate autonyms for the Nationalist Chinese who settled in northern Thailand after 1960. For this reason I will use terms such as Yunnan Chinese, Nationalist Chinese or Yunnan Chinese diasporas in this paper and avoid the locally used terms completely.

2. Historian Arif Dirlik (1975) argues that the KMT's New Life Movement first announced in 1934 was not exactly a conservative movement launched by traditionalists who tried to restore the anachronistic Confucian morals. It was, instead, the Nationalists’ own modernization project that injected revolutionizing practices such as modern hygiene into ordinary Chinese life to purge the unhealthy habits of the people and to achieve national salvation. At the ideological level, the movement was engineered by the KMT as a counter measure to the two prevailing trends of the previous decade: individualism under the New Culture Movement and class struggle under Marxism. In this sense it is more counter-revolutionary than anti-revolutionary. While I agree with Dirlik's general argument, I also want to point out that many daily life practices and the social decorum established during the New Life Movement had become entrenched norms in Republican China.

3. The Thai system of local autonomy for the ethnic minorities in the borderland areas, called phuyaban, is for each tribe to appoint a chief who will be responsible for all administrative affairs, such as tax collection and judiciary arbitrations. When Yunnan Chinese settled in northern Thailand, the Thai government also applied the same phuyaban system to them.