Yearbook   of China 199$ and Overseas : Chinese Business Networks J in Asia	.
rooted sense of insecurity and impermanence. "We'll be here as long as there's money to be made," is a frequent refrain of theirs throughout Asia. This outlook, not unlike that of an illegal street vendor ready to roll up his merchandise and disappear before the police arrive, is reflected in the way in which many smaller overseas Chinese businesses operate. They favor gutsy investments in industries such as garment manufacturing, shoes, toys, textiles, plastics, and electronics, while spreading their investments around the world in order to minimize risks from political or economic collapse in their own fields. Deals are often marked by access to reliable, timely information and quick action, both of which are made possible by far-flung business networks forged along the lines of kinship and common dialects as well as by the family structure of the businesses themselves.
Wl*en ks 'n family, things are more exible; there is more trust,  says the irector of a publicly traded real estate company in Hong Kong. (Like many overseas Chinese business executives, the executive s uns puicity, asking to remain anony-ous.) here isn t so much of a corporate
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35. Chinese Diaspora
ierarchy. People genuinely work for the fam-y s interests, not to prove themselves and iimb the corporate ladder. Traditionally, visions are made more quickly. There s no eed to jump through the hoops of board leetings and shareholders  meetings. 
Of course, there is nothing peculiarly '.hinese about these networks or patriarchal imily businesses.  Just look at the Rocke-Jler family,  says a Chinese American with a master s degree in business from Columbia Jniversity who once worked for a major Jnited States corporation. He is now helping o restructure his family s manufacturing msiness, which has operations in Asia, North America, and Latin America.  There is noth-ng ethnic about it. American businesses start mt small, too, and they have the same amily-oriented structure. But as the business ;rows, accountability and reporting become note and more important. Westerners don t mow much about the Chinese, so they like to omanticize them. And they are wrong!  
Says Peter Li, a Hong Kong-born soci-)logy professor at the University of Saskatchewan:  The West has not been pay-ng attention [to ethnic Chinese business levelopment], and when it finally did, it was surprised and felt locked out. When you lon't know what's going on, you look for ill sorts of cultural explanations. This happened to the Jews as well."
The crudest, most commonly expressed cultural explanation is that Chinese people succeed because of their work ethic: Chinese entrepreneurs are the very embodiment of diligence and thrift. Herman Kahn, the founder of a United States think tank, the Hudson Institute, observed as early as 1979 that so-called neo-Confucian societies create dedicated, motivated, responsible, and educated individuals with an enhanced sense of commitment, organizational identity, and loyalty to various institutions. These so-'aeties, Kahn argued, are superior to those o the West in the pursuit of industrializa-on' affluence, and modernization.
, .There are overseas Chinese who promote s cnaracterization as well. Wang Gungwu, a Prominent Indonesian-born historian and a retired vice chancellor of the University of n  ng Kong, has observed many ethnic Chi-pCSe living to embrace their historic culture.
example, dozens of conferences on the erseas Chinese have been held in Hong Pr^  Taiwan, Singapore, the United States, PanT rrHd Netherlands, with numerous f's discussing such matters as the role of Reculture in business.
Pertst	too invites overseas ex-
top- 0 seminars and conferences, on such teristi ^oc aKsm with Chinese Charac-tuted On the capitalist reforms insti-Parent ^eng Xiaoping. Overseas Chinese s Previously uninterested in Chinese
AT HOME ABROAD
Population and percentage of ethnic Chinese in selected countries
	Unese	% at total
Courtly	population	poprtatiM
Taiwan	20,370,000	97.0%
Myanmar	7,805,000	17.5
Indonesia	6,552,000	3.5
Hong Kong	6,174,000	98.0
Thailand	5,800,000	10.0
Malaysia	5,510,000	29.0
Singapore	2,079,000	77.0
United States	1,645,500	0.7
Philippines	1,200,000	2.0
Vietnam	1,000,000	1.4
Canada	587,000	2.2
Macao	446,200	97.0
Cambodia	250,000	2.5
Japan	110,000	0.9
Laos	50,000	1.3
Sources: Overseas Chinese Business Networks in Asia, by the East Asia Analytical Unit of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; 1990 United States Census; 1991 Canadian Census; United States State Department; World Bank
culture are now pushing their children to learn the Chinese language and study their heritage in order to be in a better position to exploit the new opportunities proliferating through ethnic ties. For example, during a 1989 conference on Confucianism held in China, China's president, Jiang Zemin, appealed to overseas Chinese to show support for China's precious cultural heritage. The overseas Chinese have, at times, answered such calls, such as when they donated $700,000 for the reconstruction of a shrine to the Yellow Emperor (the mythical ancestor of all Chinese people) in central China.
One of neo-Confucianism s top promoters is Singapore s senior minister, Lee Kuan Yew. Lee is a former Anglophile, who is proud of his Cambridge University education. His is a well-ordered society, buttressed by Lee s interpretation of neo-Confucianism. He has been outspoken among those attributing Asian successes to  Asian values,  often a euphemism for strong rulers, obedient citizens, and hard work. Lee argues that democracy as understood and practiced in the West, is not conducive to rapid economic growth and that Asians strongly desire that kind of growth.
This new love of Confucianism by people in business, no less is strange. In the Confucian world, merchants were always frowned upon because their main motivation was profit instead of learning. And although China s ruling bureaucracies historically colluded with merchants to control the peasant population, and merchants were sometimes allowed to elevate their status by paying off officials, merchants were generally kept at the very bottom of the Confucian social ladder.
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6. ASIAN AMERICANS
Starting in the late nineteenth century, every Chinese leader who attempted to pull China out of the backwardness and misery of the feudal age saw Confucianism as a curse. Getting rid of its pervasive, stultifying influence was critical, they thought, if China was to emerge as a modem nation in the twentieth century.
Coastal traders from southern China in the 1700s and 1800s sailed across the South China Sea to escape the restrictions placed on them by the Confucian state. They went as far as they could from the seat of Confucian authority Beijing in pursuit of the freedom to trade and make a profit. All the Asian economic miracles have so far occurred on the periphery of China's Confucian civilization: Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and now the special economic zones in coastal China. These booming areas are very much heirs to the old colonial treaty ports, areas that were the most exposed to the influences of Western civilization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
I m successful not because I m Chinese,  says Casey Foung, the New York-based executive.  I m not Chinese. I grew up an American in the United States, and had to learn Chinese late in life. I am successful precisely because I am American, bringing American know-how to the Chinese. Americans can be helpful in Chinese economic development, and they can take advantage of their knowledge of marketing, advertising, international finance. The Chinese are so new to this that they can use any help they can get. That s precisely what I did. 
Foung s vision contrasts dramatically with other theories about why members of the Chinese diaspora have been so successful and in turn what it takes to be successful in China and the rest of Asia. If success is implicitly attributed to membership in an exclusive group, doesn t that mean that competition is unfairly stacked against people who aren t of that group? Overseas Chinese businesses do help one another, pool their resources, and feed one another information within their business networks. But too frequently, all that is distilled into a simple cultural explanation: To do business with the Chinese, you have to be Chinese. At the very least, Westerners feel they need guanxi, connections to break into the networks of this alien culture, or a Chinese mediator who can provide such connections.
 Old-boy  networks based on college affiliation, club memberships, or ethnicity are common in the United States and elsewhere, but knowing the right people can be even more important in an environment where the legal system is weak, as in China. In this sense, men such as Singapore s Lee
cannot claim to share in China s socialist values so Confucian culture becomes a form of guanxi. For example, at the Second World Chinese Entrepreneurs Convention in Hong Kong in 1993, Lee enthusiastically hobnobbed with some of the top overseas Chinese businesspeople, such as Hong Kong s Li Ka-shing, the head of Hutchison Whampoa, and Malaysia s Robert Kuok, who controls Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, stressing that guanxi is an important advantage of the overseas Chinese that they should put to use as they compete against Western rivals for business opportunities in China. Guanxi, Lee said, will be useful for about twenty years, until China develops a legal system that will assuage foreign investors.
One businessman, who as a college student in the United States in the 1960s was a Maoist but is now an investor in chemical factories in China, doesn't underestimate the importance of having an understanding of language and culture that overseas Chinese might bring to the negotiating table. But their expertise often boils down to something far more vulgar than a deep knowledge of China's history, language, or literature. "When you operate in Asia, you are talking about doing business in areas where there are no written laws," he says. "Doing business means dealing with officials and bureaucrats at all levels and bribing them to leave you alone. The real advantage for Chinese expatriates is that the officials expect you to understand that. They find it easier to open their mouth to ask for bribes openly."
The overheated economy of the mainland is still hobbled by a myriad of bureaucratic restraints. All new ventures there require commercial permits; licenses to buy, own, sell, or lease property; land-use permits; construction permits; licenses to import raw materials; permission to exchange currency the list goes on and on.  Doing business in China is a constant problem,  says a manufacturer from Taiwan who recently set up a factory in the city of Changchun, in the northern province of
  ^rSt y u sPen<^ a lot of money to obtain licenses. Then you entertain local officials. You pay high rents, you bribe lyour way] around housing regulations it cost us a mint just to wine and dine the offi-cia s m charge. It took six months to get e operating license, then another three months to get the land permit to build the c ory. oing business in China is not just about the business operation: You are really dealing with people. Without a legal system, t0 tat\sfy a11 the Pe Ple in charge. nd although they won t let you do busi-S  6 k their Palms are greased, the officials in charge find it difficult to tell you
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35. Chinese Diaspora
act]y what they want with people they jn tknow. 
Overseas Chinese entrepreneurs in Asia  e accustomed to this kind of bribery, hich is prevalent throughout the region, xecutives from United States companies, a the other hand, are not. In fact, the For-gn Corrupt Practices Act makes bribery legal. One Chinese American consultant -as hir