OVERSEAS CHINESE AND TRADE BETWEEN THE PHILIPPINES AND CHINA: The Intertwining of Family, Social, and Business Interests in Promoting Trade

Description

Although it may occasionally generate useful empirical material with which to illustrate generic theoretical developments, the Philippines is rarely viewed as being anything more than a minor branch of area studies. Even the question of trade between this small and weak member of Southeast Asia, and China (a true economic giant), has attracted comparatively little attention in the academic literature. Yet the Philippines is of great importance to the wider Pacific region. It occupies a unique strategic position; it is predominantly catholic; it is strongly influenced by, and oriented towards, the Americas; and the Filipinos have formed communities in many countries throughout the world from Australia to Japan, from West Africa to Italy. Overseas Chinese, it is said, command the domestic economy. These are matters which, as Chinas economic, political and military strength grows, will require academics to take a broader and deeper interest in the Philippines and its people. This book contributes to the development of this interest in the archipelago. Its immediate purpose is to examine business organization, the practice of trade, and the political support of these activities, within and between the Philippines and China. As noted in the preface, this is a book with many aspects. It suggests that the heavy concentration on social relationships in everyday life in the Philippines compels social science to focus on the nature of social relationships and their instrumental and affective qualities. The experience of everyday life in the Philippines, and the emphasis on social relationships, also suggest that our instrumental and affective attitudes toward relationships cannot be cleanly separated from each other; our relationships are the substance of the social world; and without the choice to eschew instrumentalism, the affective comes to mean very little. In setting out the play of relationships, representations, and attitudes, this book begins to detail the nature of complexity and uncertainly in the social world, and the reasons why events on the ground differ so far, and so often, from our expectations. It also begins to uncover what the meaning of those deviations might be. Thus, Chinese dominance of economic activities, and the essentially corrupt, patrimonial, and factionalized nature of the Philippine economy, when viewed as representations which inform the detail of practice, takes on significance. What are taken to be the commonalities underlying this complexity, uncertainty and apparent differences are also revealed. Thus, in both the Philippines and China, we begin to see striking similarities in economic and social practice irrespective of ethnicity, international borders and time, and while in the authoritarianism of economic and political institutions and practice in both the Philippines and China, we find the seeds of liberalism.