World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [93]
Not all developing countries have market-dominant minorities. China is an important case in point. Although the market reforms of the last decade have dramatically benefited China’s coastal provinces (for example, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Fujian) over inland provinces, and urban areas over rural areas, China does not have any economically powerful ethnic minorities. On the contrary, the Han Chinese in China, comprising 95 percent of the population, have represented an economically and politically dominant majority vis-à-vis ethnic minorities like the Tibetans, Uighurs, and Miao for three millennia.
1 Needless to say, China has plenty of other problems: endemic corruption, immense wealth inequalities, and so on. It just happens not to have the problem of a market-dominant minority.
With China’s astounding growth rates over the last decades, many have suggested that China will soon join the ranks of the “Asian Tigers”—Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore—none of which is considered “developing” anymore. Along these lines it is striking to note that none of the Asian Tigers has ever had a market-dominant minority. In all the Asian Tigers, the ethnic majority—the Japanese in Japan, the Koreans in South Korea, and the Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore—is both economically and politically dominant.
Indeed, in Japan and Korea, ethnic minorities are not merely economically disadvantaged but practically nonexistent. (It was only in 1997 that the Japanese formally acknowledged the existence of an indigenous ethnic minority, the Ainu.) In Hong Kong the English and Chinese are both relatively prosperous, but the latter, at 99 percent of the population, are today by far the economically dominant group. In Taiwan, Han Chinese, including both the Taiwanese Chinese and the mainland Chinese (descendants of the group of Chinese that arrived in Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek in 1949), constitute roughly 99 percent of the population, with non-Han aborigines composing the other 1 percent. Even if the Taiwanese (roughly 85 percent of the population) and the mainlanders (14 percent) were viewed as distinct ethnic groups, the mainlander “minority” is not market-dominant. In Singapore, the Chinese constitute roughly 77 percent of the population and are an economically, politically, and culturally dominant majority vis-à-vis the country’s Indian and Malay minorities. Among other factors, the lack of a market-dominant minority in all these Tigers probably helps explain their economic success relative to the far poorer and less stable neighboring Southeast Asian countries of Burma, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines.
2
Nor are market-dominant minorities present today in most Eastern European countries; the terrible exception of the former Yugoslavia has already been discussed. While virtually all countries in Africa are marked by severe ethnic divisions, a few (for example, Botswana or Sudan) do not appear to have market-dominant minorities. The countries of the Middle East will be discussed in Part Three.
Thailand: An Exceptional Case?
A few years ago a graduate student named Kanchana came to my office to see if I would be willing to supervise a paper she wanted to write on legal protections for cultural artifacts taken from Thailand, her native country. After an interesting discussion about possible approaches to her paper, I asked Kanchana a question that, in retrospect, would probably be grounds for a lawsuit under today’s standards of political correctness—I asked whether she was an ethnic Chinese.
Kanchana’s reply: “But the Thai are Chinese.” She then instantly retreated: “Well—part Chinese. I have Chinese blood. Everyone in Thailand does. Well . . . almost everyone does.”
Thailand is a fascinating case. On the one hand, it shares with the other Southeast Asian countries the phenomenon of a wildly disproportionately wealthy, market-dominant Chinese minority. The Chinese in Thailand today, although just 10 percent of the population, control virtually all of the country’s largest banks