MAY 28 - 30, 1999
BONN, GERMANY
Crisis Management
Chinese Entrepreneurs and Business Networks in Southeast Asia
From 28-30 May 1999 the Department of Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Bonn hosted an international conference entitled 'Crisis Management Chinese entrepreneurs and business networks in Southeast Asia' hoping to shed light on the complex and little understood interconnections between Chinese business in Southeast Asia, globalization, and the Asian financial and economic crisis triggered off by the devaluation of the Thai Bath in June 1997.
Although ethnic Chinese have been the key drivers in the region's rapid economic growth over the past three decades, global market forces and other external environmental factors are posing new challenges. Asia's economic malaise illustrates the fundamental socio-economic and political changes and threats to which Chinese business is being exposed on the local, regional, and global markets. The dark side of guanxi (connections), overexposure to non-productive sectors, paternalistic management methods, resistance to change, the IMF, increased competition, lack of credit, bankruptcies, dependence on Western technology, high import bills for components, insufficient branding, politico-legal insecurity, eroding strategic alliances with ruling power elites, and ethnic conflicts are some of the critical issues which they have to face.
In view of the latest developments in the region, the conference provided a timely occasion on which to reassess the role of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia and to examine assumptions so often taken for granted about the strength and uniqueness of what has been termed 'Chinese' capitalism, networks, and business culture in the age of globalization and global market expansion.
Sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and chaired by Solvay Gerke (University of Bonn), Hans-Dieter Evers (University of Bielefeld), and Thomas Menkhoff (National University of Singapore), the conference brought together sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists and economists from Germany, the Netherlands, the Great Britain, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, and the USA all leading scholars on ethnic entrepreneurship, the Chinese overseas and Chinese (business) affairs in Southeast Asia.
The first paper by Tong Chee Kiong and Chan Kwok Bun (National University of Singapore, Singapore) entitled 'Networks and Brokers: Singaporeans Doing Business in China' was geared towards trying to identify and examine on the basis of interviews with 34 Singaporean Chinese businessmen doing business in China, the dynamics underlining the various ways in which the Singaporean Chinese modes of doing business share characteristics with and differ from those of mainland Chinese.
The second paper („Entrepreneurs in China and Vietnam and Their Impact on Social and Political Change') was delivered by Thomas Heberer (Dept. of Political Science, Gerhard-Mercator-University of Duisburg, Germany) who presented fresh research on the new private sector data in China and Vietnam and its impact on political and social change. His material was collected during several months of intensive field research.
In his paper 'The Impact of The New Asian Realism on Chinese Business Networks in Asia-Pacific', Thomas Menkhoff (Dept. of Sociology, National University of Singapore, Singapore) outlined the consequences of Asia's 'new realism' on Chinese business. This term was coined to refer to the disruptions, hardships, and changing mindsets produced by the Asian financial and economic crisis.
In her paper „The Unfinished Agenda of the Overseas Chinese', Linda Low (Dept. of Business Policy, National University of Singapore, Singapore) developed the hypothesis that there is an „unfinished agenda of integration' as far as Indonesia's ethnic Chinese are concerned.
In her paper 'Mismatch at the Interface: Asian Capitalisms and the Crisis', Constance Lever-Tracy (Dept. of Sociology, Flinders University, Australia) dealt with „the different kinds of capitalism in our contemporary globalizing, multicentred economic system' with a particular emphasis on „Chinese network capitalism and its vulnerability'.
In 'Transnational Entrepreneurship and Chinese Business Networks: The regionalization of Chinese business firms from Singapore', Henry Wai-chung Yeung (Dept. of Geography, National University of Singapore, Singapore) examined the important role of entrepreneurship in the internationalization of business firms, in particular those well embedded in regional social and business networks.
Yao Souchou (Dept. of Anthropology, the University of Sydney, Australia) presented his innovative interpretation of the famous guanxi concept based on his research among Chinese traders in the small township of Belaga in Sarawak, East Malaysia.
Jahan Wazir Karim (School of Social Sciences, University Sains Malaysia, Malaysia) gave a paper ('The Globalization of Southeast Asia and Rooted Capitalism: Sino-Nusantara symbiosis') presented a theoretical discourse on family-centred business networks in Southeast Asia, showing that certain institutional structures which are contrary to trends of global capitalism prevail in Chinese business.
Based on extensive secondary research, E.T. Gomez (University of Leeds, Great Britain) examined how Malaysia's largest Chinese-owned enterprises have been developed despite working in an environment that has provided little support for their interests.
A comparative approach to the study of ethnic entrepreneurship was presented by Mario Rutten (NIAS Copenhagen, Denmark / CASA/IIAS Amsterdam, The Netherlands) in his paper entitled 'Co-operation and Individualism among Rural Capitalists in Indonesia, India, and Malaysia'.
The last paper of the conference ('Putting Global Capitalism in its Place: Economic Hybridity and Ritual Expenditure in Rural China') was presented by Mayfair Yang (Dept. of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, USA). She addressed the post-socialist 'hybrid economy' emerging in the 1980s and 1990s in rural Wenzhou, located on the southeastern coast of China, an area which combines economic privatization, household industry, entrepreneurial expansion across all China, some transnational capitalist linkages, the continued power of the state, and a revived ritual economy of expenditures in popular religion, community ritual, and festival. *
The conference programme is found on the following website: http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/sdrc
Papers may be obtained by writing to
PROFESSOR SOLVAY GERKE
Department of Southeast Asian Studies
University of Bonn
Nassestr. 2
53113 Bonn
Germany