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tougher market reforms, there festers among the region’s indigenous majorities deep anti-Chinese resentment, rooted not just in poverty but in feelings of envy, insecurity, and exploitation. Such resentment is ready at any moment to be catalyzed, whether by another economic downturn, a charismatic hatemonger, or simply a dispute between a Chinese employer and an indigenous laborer. Even during relatively stable periods the Chinese throughout Southeast Asia are repeatedly subjected to kidnapping, vandalism, and violence. Just recently a Muslim Filipino kidnapping gang known as “The Pentagon” executed two Chinese hostages, both employees of a multimillion-dollar irrigation project in Mindanao, and vowed to behead a third if a $10 million ransom was not paid. Reacting to another series of kidnappings last year, one Filipino official shrugged and said, reflecting widespread sentiment, “The Chinese can afford the ransom.”

Thus globalization and free markets in Southeast Asia have generated not only tremendous growth but also tremendous ethnic hatred and instability. During the 1998 Indonesian crisis I did a brief stint at the World Bank. At one point it was suggested that I join a delegation to Jakarta. A few days later, however, I was told not to go, as I was of Chinese descent and thus at risk. This surprised me; I thought my American passport and the auspices of the World Bank would surely be sufficient to protect me. One of my colleagues at the bank explained that Indonesian officials were apparently marking the passports of anyone “with Chinese blood” with a red stamp, Hitler-style. I don’t know if the rumor was true, but the sad truth is that it easily could have been, given the intensity of anti-Chinese fury in Indonesia at the time.

The situation developing in Burma today is dangerously similar to the one that eventually sent much of Jakarta up in flames. Indeed, in its pro-market, pro-Chinese military dictatorship, the Burmese government is openly modeling itself on Suharto’s Indonesia, despite the latter’s disastrous collapse. If anything, SLORC is even more universally hated than was the Suharto regime, and the Burmese Chinese—SLORC’s financiers—are seen as even more flagrantly plundering. Symbolically, near the border town of Ruili, a Chinese-owned factory houses three hundred Burmese brown bears. The wretched beasts are packed into cages one cubic meter in size and further restrained by metal harnesses used to collect the bile from their gall bladders.

47 The bile is a highly prized Chinese medicine, exported at great profit to Hong Kong and South Korea. As well-intentioned Americans and international human rights organizations properly celebrate the release of Aung San Suu Kyi, and earnestly demand democratization, they are completely oblivious that global markets, SLORC-style, have turned Burma into a powder keg.

CHAPTER 2

Llama Fetuses, Latifundia,

and La Blue Chip Numero Uno

“White” Wealth in Latin America

In the fall of 1999 a graduate student from Bolivia named Augusto Delgado raised his hand in my Law and Development seminar. Always frank and incisive, and one of the best students I have ever had, Augusto said: “I believe, Professor Chua, that my country is a perfect counterexample to your thesis. In Bolivia, we have all the conditions you mention. A very small light-skinned minority dominates the economy, while 65 percent of the population are impoverished Aymara and Quechua Indians. But in Bolivia today there would never be an ethnic movement against the market-dominant minority. The reason for this is because ethnicity has no appeal in Bolivia. No Indian would ever want to identify himself as an Indian. They are willing to think of themselves as campesinos, or peasants, but as indios—no.”*

Augusto’s comments are typical of a sentiment that has prevailed in Latin America for many decades: that “there is no ethnic conflict” in Latin America, certainly by comparison to Africa or Southeast Asia. There may be class conflict, or political conflict, but little distinctively ethnic conflict. The