Chinese as a Southeast Asian other

A chapter on Chinese political identity in Southeast Asia may seem anomalous. Insofar as nationalism was Chinese in Southeast Asia it was fixated on the fate of the Chinese state rather than a local identity. Yet Chinese, like the less numerous but more aggressive Europeans, carried to Southeast Asia a stronger sense of state-centred identity than was common in Southeast Asia, and developed particularly robust forms of supra-local community in market towns all over the region. Once a more balanced gender ratio and regular contact with China enabled them to reproduce that community in Southeast Asia, from the seventeenth century, they became essential outsiders (Chirot and Reid 1997), creating commercial and information networks essential to the birth of many nationalisms. The Chinese relationship to Southeast Asian nationalisms was crucial. 

Inside the world of Chinese characters in Northeast Asia, when a need arose to distinguish the civilised subjects of the empire from the 

It was the intense involvement with the early Ming Empire from 1368, and notably the Zheng He expeditions of 1405-33, which established the imperial reality of China in insular Southeast Asian consciousness, and fixed the term. This was virtually the only time when the Chinese presence in Southeast Asia was an imperial one, and it is understandable therefore that maritime Southeast Asians (unlike Chinese) came to use a single term for the empire, the various spoken languages, the written 

The position of Dai Viet, aspiring to (Chinese) civilisation but rejecting the bureaucratic authority of the empire, put this culturalism theory sharply to the test. On the one hand the ideal relationship was set out in one imperial letter to Dai Viet  

I am the Emperor, and having received Heaven s great mandate, I rule the Chinese hua] and the yi. The one language/culture provides a norm for the 

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ANTHONY reid is a Southeast Asian Historian now again based at the Australian National University, Canberra, but previously at the National University of Singapore (2002-9), where he established the Asia Research Institute, and University of California, Los Angeles (1999-2002). His other recent books include Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce (2 vols, 1988-93), Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (1999), An Indonesian Frontier Acehnese and Other Histories of Sumatra (2004), and, as [ ] editor, Islamic Legitimacy in a Plural Asia (2007), Chinese Diaspora in die Pacific (2008) and Negotiating Asymmetry China s Place in Asia (2009). 

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