From ‘sangley’ to ‘Chinaman’, ‘Chinese Mestizo’ to ‘Tsinoy’: unpacking ‘Chinese’ identities in the Philippines at the turn of the Twentieth-Century

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the historical antecedents of the terminologies ascribed to the Chinese in the Philippines, focusing on the late Spanish to the early American colonial periods. Many government records, newspapers, or books categorized the “Chinese” as either sangley, intsik, Chinese mestizo, or “Chinese/Chino,” in contradistinction to Christianized natives who were labeled as “Indios” and later “Filipinos.” Following dominant and nationalized classifications of race, past scholarship on the Chinese in the Philippines also tended to paint the “Chinese” in the Philippines in a binarist opposition against “Filipinos.” The essentialization of ethnicities has resulted in the perpetuation of a homogenized and monolithic “Chinese” identity that we see in the country today. Using government and non-government publications from the period under study, this paper seeks to demonstrate the power dynamic at particular moments in Philippine society that has led to the reification, reinvention, and reconfiguration of what it means to be “Chinese.”

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese in the Philippines
• Tsinoy
• mestizo
• ethnicity
• race
• intsik
• colonialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Collas-Monsod, “Why Filipinos Distrust China.”

2. Collas-Monsod is not the only contemporary popular Filipino writer who has written against the Chinese in the Philippines. F. Sionil Jose, a Philippine National Artist awardee, also has been largely criticized for his anti-Chinese writings. See Jose, “Can We Still Trust America,”; and “Chinese Connection.”

3. In this essay, I will be referring to ethnic Chinese in the Philippines as ‘Chinese Filipinos’ without the hyphen, as opposed to ‘Chinese-Filipino’ which I regard as an adjective (e.g. Chinese-Filipino newspaper). ‘Chinese Filipinos’ are Filipinos who still claim ‘Chinese’ lineage and heritage. Unofficial estimates place the number of Chinese Filipinos as consisting of 1.5% of the total Philippine population.

4. Brent Condura’s comment on Collas-Monsod, ‘Why Filipinos Distrust China.’ ‘Idioterte’ is a combination of ‘idiot’ and ‘Duterte’, a word used by critics of the president.

5. Hau, ‘Why I Distrust Solita Monsod’s “Why Filipinos Distrust China”.’ See also See, ‘Dear Mareng Winnie,’ Chu, ‘On Being Chinese Filipino,’ and Pimentel, ‘Solita Monsod’s Racist Rant.’

6. These islands are being claimed by five countries; namely, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, and Brunei.

7. However, many of the projects have either been scrapped or delayed. See Venzon, ‘Duterte Struggles.’

8. See Venzon, “Duterte Under the Gun.”

9. See ‘DTI Calls for Suspension.’ Moreover, prior to the CoVid-19 pandemic and lockdown, the Chinese have become the largest group of foreign tourists visiting the country.

10. Robles, “Chinese Workers “Flood” the Philippines.”

11. See Ang See and Ang See, “The Rise of China.”

12. Chinese Filipinos, who grew up or live outside of Manila’s Chinatown Binondo, have also been known to refer to anyone fluent in Hokkien, living in Binondo, and dressing and behaving like more ‘traditional’ Chinese and less ‘westernized’, as ‘G. I.’

13. Hau, The Chinese Question, 13.

14. The ‘n’ and the ‘l’ in Hokkien are sometimes interchangeable, so that 咱人 among Hokkien speakers can sometimes be pronounced as ‘Nan-nang’, ‘Lan-nang’, or ‘Lan-lang’.

15. The Chinese in the Philippines has been predominantly from the Minnan region of the southern Chinese province Fujian, hence, the predominance of Hokkien terms.

16. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 3.

17. An offshoot of Intsik called ‘Chekwa’ has been used to refer to the Chinese in a derogatory way, although this term seems to be slowly out of use. It has also been reclaimed by a Chinese Filipino named Kitty Go in her blog, referring to herself as ‘Chekwa’ and using the same term to apply to the Chinese community in the Philippines. See Hau, Chinese Question, 24, 49.

18. Hau, Intsik: An Anthology of Chinese-Filipino Writing. Charlson Ong writes, ‘Chinese Filipinos should take to Intsik in the manner that Afro-Americans and other Negroes now call themselves Blacks and Rizal and his gang chose to name themselves Indios Bravos.’ See Ong, “Introduction: A Bridge Too Far,” xiv.

19. This was a year after the People Power movement, when many young Chinese Filipinos participated in the movement that ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos.

20. Hau, Necessary Fictions, 140.

21. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos. See also Wickberg, “The Chinese Mestizo in Philippine History.”

22. In this triangular trade, Manila was the nexus in which Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian goods were traded for Mexican silver. See Tremml-Werner, Spain, China, and Japan in Manila. For more information regarding the history of the Chinese in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era, see, for example, Wickberg, Chinese in Philippine Life; and Felix, The Chinese in the Philippines Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.

23. Boxer, South China in the Sixteenth Century, 261.

24. In Henning Klöter’s work, the Hokkien used in the seventeenth century was a conglomeration of the different Southern Min dialects, as the Chinese who came to the Philippines could either be from Xiamen, Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, and Chaoshan. He calls this patois ‘Early Manila Hokkien’, or EMH. See Klöter, The Language of the Sangleys, 152–172.

25. Niping Yan in a paper demonstrated that the words ‘Guangdong’ are inscribed in the fan of the male Chinese found in the portrait. See Yan, ‘Sangleys and the Boxer Codex.’ In highlighting this, she argues that not enough studies have been made to show the connection between Guangdong and Manila. Email communication, 24 June 2020.

26. Wickberg, Chinese in Philippine Life, 157.

27. Ibid., 155. Also, as I pointed out in my work, the Catholic Church continued to use it in their records till the turn of the twentieth century. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 73.

28. Comenge y Dalmau, Cuestiones Filipinas. It must be noted that in Comenge’s work, the word ‘Chino’ was not written as ‘Chino’, with a capital ‘c’. For this essay, I will be using the word as found in the records.

29. Ibid., 258.

30. Historian Lucille Chia reveals in her study of Spanish records and family genealogies that prior to the seventeenth century, majority of the Hokkien Chinese who came to Manila originated from Zhangzhou, a county closer to Amoy (now Xiamen). After the seventeenth century, Zhangzhou Hokkiens started to emigrate more to Taiwan and Java, as conditions in the Philippines during the two decades after the 1690s discouraged emigration to this country while these two places, along with other parts of the region provided viable economic alternatives. See Chia, ‘The Butcher, the Baker.’

31. See Go, “Guanyu quan Fei ge di Feiqiao yishan mubei.”

32. It was estimated that the Cantonese made up 10% of the total Chinese population. Wickberg, Chinese in Philippine Life, 177.

33. Kuhn, Chinese Among Others, 107–152.

34. Wickberg, Chinese in Philippine Life, 22.

35. Ibid., 111.

36. Comenge, Cuestiones, 172–3.

37. Ibid., 48.

38. Ibid. Note that for terms referring to different ethnic groups are normally capitalized except when quoted directly from source material.

39. Ibid., 48–49.

40. Ibid., 49.

41. Ibid.

42. Galang, “Vagrants and Outcasts,” 171. Galang also points out that ‘it was unscrupulous Chinese from the merchant class’ who usually were also engaged in ‘illicit’ or ‘illegal’ behavior such as the ‘use of fake passports, and fraudulent capitaciones personales, and contribuciones industriales.’ See Galang, “Vagrants and Outcasts,” 199–200. Another scholar writes that those in the ‘upper-class’ or ‘mercantilist’ class also had ‘bad eggs’ within their class, as many of them were also involved in piracy or smuggling. See Wilson, Ambition and Identity, 34.

43. Andrew Wilson describes this behavior of the elites to switch loyalties or play with their ‘Chinese’ identities as ‘liminal virtuosity’. See Wilson, Ambition and Identity, 9, 17. For more information on how Chinese merchant families engaged in flexible practices, see Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 91–403.

44. The term qiao (僑) in ‘huaqiao’ is also a play on the similar sounding term qiao (橋) for ‘bridge’. This homonym connotes that the huaqiaos play (that of a bridge-builder) and points to their connections to China.

45. For more information on how the Chinese government ‘courted’ the ‘overseas Chinese’ in the Philippines, see Tan, The Chinese in the Philippines, 109–137. The nationalistic rhetoric of China’s leaders and thinkers was aided by the treatment that the ‘overseas’ Chinese themselves received in the countries where they migrated. Anti-Chinese policies in countries such as the United States, Canada, or Australia increased the sense of oneness among ‘overseas’ Chinese, including those in the Philippines, so that the ‘mistreatment, humiliation, and oppression, real or imagined, of Chinese [outside of China] appeared as a provocative factor to draw Chinese at home and abroad to each other, and cause them to recognize and feel themselves one nationality.’ See Tan, Chinese in the Philippines, 7.

46. Wickberg, Chinese in Philippine Life, 155.

47. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 5.

48. It should be noted that under the Maura Reform of 1893, an attempt was made to eliminate the Gremio de Mestizos and Gremio de Naturales and replaced by a single local government, and thus doing away with the distinctions between mestizos and Indios. See Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 252. However, the reforms were not carried out successfully, despite the fact that certain Chinese mestizos were beginning to identify as ‘Indios’ in order to ‘secure greater opportunities and be able legally to assume leadership roles in the civic institutions of the expanded majority population.’ See Doeppers, “Tracing the Decline,” 86.

49. He sought to publish his own ‘expert’ opinion on the Philippines. He felt impelled to publish his work because ‘no [other] English book does justice to the natives of the Philippines.’ His credibility lays in the fact that he had lived in Luzon for fourteen years, and was fluent in Spanish and, to some degree, in Tagalog, and had traveled widely around the archipelago. Sawyer, The Inhabitants of the Philippines, v.

50. Sawyer, Inhabitants of the Philippines, 292.

51. Ibid., 294.

52. Foreman’s publications were often cited or quoted when it came to the topic of the Philippines. Foreman, The Philippine Islands. Citations refer to the Filipiniana edition.

53. Foreman, The Philippine Islands, 118.

54. Cano, “LeRoy’s The Americans in the Philippines,” 4.

55. Le Roy, “Review of The Philippine Islands,” 388.

56. Le Roy, Philippine Life in Town and Country, 18–20, 41, 53–55, and 62. Citations refer to the Filipiniana edition.

57. Wickberg, “The Chinese Mestizo,”; and Chinese in Philippine Life.

58. I will not go into detail here on the history as this can be found in Wickberg’s and other scholars’ work. Aside from Wickberg, see Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 239–279, “The Chinese Mestizo,” 25–27.

59. Peninsular and insular Spaniards, including Spanish mestizos, were not required to pay taxes.

60. By around 1810, there were approximately 120,000 Chinese mestizos, or five percent of the total Philippine population of about 2,500,000. In the last half of the nineteenth century, the Chinese mestizo population was around 150,000 to 300,000, out of a mean population of 5,500,000. Wickberg, “Chinese Mestizo,” 63, 73–79. In 1898, a writer, estimating the population of Manila according to different ethnic groups, wrote that Spanish mestizos numbered around 12,000, out of a total of 300,000, with the ‘natives’, composed of chiefly Tagals at 200,000; Chinese mestizos 50,000; Chinese 40,000; Spaniards 5,000; and Europeans and Americans 400. See Hamm, Manila and the Philippines, 40. Sawyer, citing from an ‘anonymous author of a pamphlet called “Filipinas” (Madrid, 1891),’ mentioned that the number of Spanish Mestizos in the Archipelago, in 1890, was 75,000, while the number of Chinese mestizos was ‘at no less than half a million.’ Sawyer, Inhabitants, 292.

61. Comenge, Cuestiones, 212–213.

62. Comenge, Cuestiones, 212.

63. Wickberg, “Chinese Mestizo,” 96.

64. Ibid., 87.

65. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 258–259.

66. Wickberg, Chinese in Philippines Life, 148.

67. Wickberg, “Chinese Mestizo,” 95. Gremios, or guilds, were quasi-administrative units created by the Spaniards to govern different ethnic groups.

68. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 244–279.

69. Ibid., 304–305.

70. Up until 1967, in the United States sixteen states still prohibited the intermarriage of two individuals from different races. See Cott, Public Vows, 4.

71. Other scholars have pointed out that though the ‘Chinese’ in the Philippines did not participate directly in the fighting against the Americans, some of them participated indirectly, such as donating money or items in kind. See Ang See and Juan, “The Ethnic Chinese in the Philippine Revolution,143–147.

72. Carlos Palanca Tan Quien-sien, for example, testified that ‘As soon as everything is settled there will be more work and (Chinese businessmen) will be able to get more (coolies).’ See Ginsberg, “The Chinese in the Philippine Revolution, 148–149.

73. Quoted in Ginsberg, 149.

74. Ibid., 149.

75. Official Gazette, 301–303.

76. Circular No. 51, 52. ‘Straits Chinese’ was a term used for English-educated Chinese of British Malaya and Singapore, as opposed to peranakan used by the Malay-speaking population. See Clark and Pietsch, Indonesia-Malaysia Relations, 145.

77. Circular No. 51, 52.

78. Circular No. 51. The date of the publication of this circular is 31 July 1902.

79. Circular No. 94. The last sentence ‘the child of two parents, neither of whom is of pure or unmixed blood, is not a person of Chinese descent’ seems to adhere to Carlos Palanca Tan Quien-sien’s definition of who was ‘Chinese mestizo’. See U.S. Philippine Commission, Report of the Philippine Commission, 224.

80. One of my aunts, the wife of my paternal second uncle, was of Portuguese-Chinese lineage. Her father was ‘Portuguese’, but she kept this fact hidden from her own children until a few years before she died in 2015.

81. RG 0350 Bureau of Insular Affairs, File 370–194.

82. See Circular No. 198, 52–53.

83. See note 81 above.

84. RG 0350 Bureau of Insular Affairs, 1 August 1908, File 370–199.

85. Ibid.,208.

86. In the metropole, the lack of ‘clear-cut, consistent definitions about racial classifications’ also led to contestations between local bureaucrats or officials on the one hand, and individuals of mixed race on the other. See, for example, the case of Rafael Lopez De Onate in Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion, 1–10.

87. Wildman, Aguinaldo: A Narrative of Filipino Ambitions, 369.

88. Bryan, Our Islands and Their People, 563–4.

89. Ibid., 570. As an empire, Spain was depicted by the U.S. as depraved, but its people in more favorable terms. How did Americans explain the dichotomy of an empire they criticized and the ‘race’ (white) they identified with? Was there a conflation between American and Spanish people as ‘white’? For the racial discourse on American mestizos (and comparing it with the discourse on Spanish mestizos), see Molnar, American Mestizos.

90. Bryan, Our Islands and Their People, 551.

91. Ibid., 572.

92. Ibid., 604.

93. Ibid., 604.

94. For other books contrasting the Spanish and Chinese mestizos, see Halstead, The Story of the Philippines, and Sawyer, The Inhabitants.

95. Ibid., 652.

96. Ibid., 700.

97. Ibid., 700.

98. Ibid., 726.

99. Ibid., 714.

100. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 315–336.

101. This does not mean however that Chinese and Filipinos stopped having children together, but that these children were a product of consensual, instead of formal, unions. See Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 335.

102. The earliest reference to this word can be found in Yang, Feilubin huaqiao nianjian.

103. Chu, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 395.

104. Chu, “Rethinking the Chinese Mestizo of the Philippines,” 46; and Wickberg, “Anti-Sinicism and Chinese Identity,” 177.

105. The term is also used in Indonesia, as ‘encik’ or ‘cik’ but does not have the same derogatory connotation as ‘intsik’ in the Philippines or the term ‘orang cina’ used in the former. See Hau, Intsik, 301–302.

106. Absent documentary evidence available to me, the term could have been created much earlier.

107. Moreno y Diez, Manual del Cabeza de barangay, 29. Depending on the sources, the word is spelled differently. Today’s spelling which uses ‘ts’ in ‘intsik’ is meant to reflect the way the Filipino language transliterates or spells out the ‘ch’ sound as in ‘Chinese’, hence, ‘China’ is ‘Tsina’ and ‘intsik’ is spelled the way it is pronounced. Other spellings of the word will be used only when quoting from direct sources.

108. Comenge y Dalmau, Cuestiones. Which period this term assumed derogatory connotations is subject to further study. During the American period, the term was used in a ditty with the phrase ‘intsik viejo, tulo laway’, to mean ‘Old Chinese drooling’. See Hau, Intsik, 301.

109. It is not within the scope of this paper to examine the Tagalog newspapers that came out during the Spanish colonial period, including Diariong Tagalog, which was the first bilingual newspaper and established in 1882 in Manila. For a history of local newspapers published in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial period, see Cano, ‘Filipino Press between Two Empires,’ 401.

110. ‘Insik’ or ‘insic’ was also used to refer to people of China, as seen in ‘Ang Pagparito ng Insik.’

111. The Union Obrera Democratica was the umbrella organization formed in February 1902 by Isabelo delos Reyes, print union leader Herminigildo Cruz, Dominador Gomez, and Lope K. Santos. The federation ‘brought together more than 85 unions’ in the country. See ‘A history of trade unionism in the Philippines.’

112. ‘“Ang Meeting” sa Teatro “Nacional”.’

113. The meeting also pointed out the opposition of the federation versus inmigracion negro (‘Negro’ immigration), which led to the sudden black-out of the convention site. It was revealed that one of the attendees was a ‘negro’ married to a Filipino woman, who got upset by the opposition to ‘negro’ immigration. The leaders had to explain to him that they were not against ‘negroes’, but only their immigration, pointing out that they appreciated the solidarity expressed by black Americans to their cause.

114. I want to thank Joi Barrios in assisting me in the translation.

115. Bagamaspad, Baguio Chinese.

116. Ibid.

117. Ibid.

118. The same could be said about Mindanao and other parts of the Philippines outside of Manila, such as Iloilo and Cebu which had significant Chinese populations.

119. Limahong was a Chinese pirate who threatened to take over the Philippines from Spain in 1574, but was thwarted by the Spanish and native forces.

120. “Senate Resumes Hearing.”

121. How contemporary legal regimes misuse or misappropriate ‘Chinese’ can be the subject of further research.

122. This ‘yellow peril’ also included the Japanese.

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Richard T. Chu

Richard T. Chu is Five College Associate Professor of the History Department at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His main research focuses on the history of the Chinese diaspora in the Philippines and centering on themes of ethnicity, race, gender, empire, and nationalism. He is author of Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila: Family, Identity, and Culture 1860s to 1930s (Brill, 2010) and Chinese Merchants of Binondo in the Nineteenth Century (University of Santo Tomas, 2010); and editor and co-editor of More Tsinoy Than We Admit: Chinese-Filipino Interactions Over the Centuries (Vibal Foundation, 2015) and More Tomboy, More Bakla Than We Admit: Insights into Sexual and Gender Diversity in Philippine Culture, History, and Politics (Vibal Foundation, 2021), respectively.