This was the unofficial premise by which many people in my old research department operated...and quite often were proven correct.

The only trouble is when you actually put China next to these countries! But then again, I guess it is the Chinese 'immigrant' mentality at work, and not that of the Chinese that stayed at home (and lived through the hopeless incompetence of the Manchus, the warlords, the Nationalists, and the Communists) supinely accepting their fate.

This argument seems like a prime candidate for a lurking-variable rebuttal. Maybe "openness to immigration" like HK Dave hints at above.

The quote points out that it may be more about what happens to a diaspora than an ethnic thing. One point in mitigation is that once Deng unleashed (to some extent) China's market reforms, the country has grown at a staggering rate. It's almost a controlled experiment in contrasting the economic chaos of Mao's time with China today. Note I said almost.

Even if Micah's right, and I suspect it's probably a combination of factors that are really the cause, it's food for thought or maybe research...

I don't know about this theory. One, how many Chinese are emigrating to poor countries like Burma and Cambodia and Laos? In other words, they have it backwards: richer countries with higher GDPs attract immigrants. The immigrants aren't the cause of the GDP, the GDP is the cause of the immigrants. Obviously, it is way more complex than that, but you get the point. Immigrants are generally attracted to countries that have favorable economic conditions, where they have a potential to thrive.

Also, you could make a list of countries by percentage of white population. Countries like Norway, Ireland, Iceland, Denmark, and the US would be near the top of the GDP rankings. African countries with very small white populations would be at the bottom. Would this theory really be so different from the one above?

that is why we only chracterize it as correlation, not causality.

a number of factors are involved. eg.
1) as micah said, openness to immigrant
2) immigrants are more hardworking (lack of security)
3) chinese tradition which values knowledge and learning, which, although only serve for their own benefits, also uplift the overall knowledge/economy of the host country

yes, one can also do the same for european white. a more pronouncced analogy is perhaps to plot the same graph for Jewish people and their host countries.

p.s. most chinese immgration to SE Asia happened in 17-19th century, the economic development level in China was much higher than these countries, but China was overpopulated. as a result, the first generation immigrants are mostly the underprevileged in China, who had seen as their home (china) the importance of education.

sun bin,

The three points you listed are all valid; what I find questionable is the linkage of percentage of Chinese to GDP specifically. As you said, most Chinese immigration in SE Asia took place hundreds of years ago. If that is the case, then we are really talking about ethnic enclaves and not immigrants per se. Therefore, points like "immigrants work harder, don't have a safety net, and are more entrepreneurial" just evaporated. These points really apply to first- or second-generation immigrants. (Are tenth-generation Irish-Americans "immigrants?")

Another point: Let's look at Japanese immigration in the same countries and compare that to GDP. If the rates of Japanese immigration have a similar relation to GDP, what should we conclude? There is something about Japanese culture/education/values that affects GDP? We would be more likely to conclude that the correlation between the percentage of Chinese or Japanese in the population and GDP doesn't really tell you much specific to the "type" (Chinese or Japanese) of immigration.

So then we are back at Micah's point about "openness" to immigration in general. Sounds good, but what if there is no correlation between the percentage of Japanese immigrants and GDP? (Which I think is the case, actually, since the Philippines probably has the greatest number of Japanese immigrants in SE Asia). Do we then conclude that there really is something specific to Chinese immigration that correlates to GDP? If so, what is it? Are Japanese immigrants lazier? Are Japanese cultural and educational values less pecuniary than Chinese values?

The answer (to me) is that if you take an ahistorical, statistical approach to this type of complex issue, you'll end up with a bunch of reductionist correlations that don't really tell you much. You can draw correlations between all sorts of things that don't really tell you much. For example, blond hair and GDP.

The Chinese presence in many of the countries occured in the latter part of the 19th century which was a time when colonial occupation of much of southeast Asia combined with horrendous conditions in China (i.e. civil war, disease, famine) and a very active market in the export of Chinese labor brought most of the Chinese to the region. As mentioned before, the Chinese brought their immigrant mentality and their enterprise with them and it served them well wherever they went.

While some immigration from China have been happening for the last 20-30 years, largely the Chinese populations there are well-established for over a century or two, and the majority of them are 3rd, 4th or more generations in the country.

It is laughable for anyone to claim that the Chinese immigrants did not have a huge impact on the GDP of all of the economies in which they settled. Why else, for instance, does Malaysia have a bumiputra policy that tries to transfer some semblance of economic power from the Chinese to the Malays? Why did the Indonesians, during the riots after 1997, kill, loot and burn properties of wealthy Chinese? Why did the Viet Cong in the 1970s target wealthy Chinese landowners for re-education and sometimes liquidation?

Believe me, it is more causal than you think. But as I also imply from my examples above, the wholesale importation of Chinese labor and mercantile interests in the 19th century to these countries also has caused, in the post-colonial period, massive underlying ethnic tensions between the Chinese and the 'locals' of that area (I only put that in parentheses because for a country like Malaysia, a substantial portion of the 'Malays' actually emigrated from places like Indonesia at almost the same time).

Sun Bin's Jewish analogy is very apt here.

The fact is, 88, that the Chinese are still immigrants, because they have not been accepted as truly local by most of their 'host' societies. There is a huge difference between someone of Irish origin that has been absorbed into the American white melting pot, and a country largely envious of the Chinese success and hostile to their existence (not as true in Thailand as in other places in Southeast Asia), because the Chinese remain a race apart, and one with everything to prove. The 'immigrant mentality' remains, even if their families have been there for over a century, because they are still considered outsiders, both socially and legally.

A few points:

1) I'm not arguing that Chinese did not have an impact on GDP. Every group (or individual, for that matter) has an impact on per capita GDP. Blondes, as a group, have a significant impact on per capita GDP in many countries.

2) I'm not arguing that ethnic Chinese aren't a successful minority group in several SEA countries (really, though, Singapore doesn't belong on the list above at all, since ethnic Chinese are the overwhelming majority of the population.) However, you need to be careful when you directly link a certain characteristic to "affecting GDP." For example, in the PRC the elite mostly consists of CCP members. Should we therefore conclude that CCP members "increase" GDP? The implication being the more CCP members you have, the higher your GDP will be. (Party members must have some cultural trait or mindset that allows them to affect GDP in such a positive way, etc.) This is ass-backwards. It is way more complex. You need to look at a variety of historical, cultural, and economic factors and structures that have allowed party members to become the elite.

3) I'm suspicious of these grand, sweeping theories that cover ten different countries with very distinct histories and political and economic conditions. For example, why should we only look at the current per capita GDP of these countries? This is just a serendipitous snapshot. Let's look at their relative GDPs in 1950 or 1896 or 1973. Would this magic pattern still obtain? Maybe it would. I don't know the answer to that, but I'd have to see the evidence before I took this theory too seriously.

I believe in this case a correlation between the time of mass immigration of Chinese to the rise in GDP is necessary. In this case, I believe this observation will stunningly be supported.

my prevous comment somehow got lost here.

anyway, re:88s
yes, I believe culture/tradition on education and business is a main driver, and I believe you would obeserve similar impact from Japanese dispora.
however, since Japanese dispora do not comprise as large a % of the local immigration, the effect would be harder to be observed.

I'm trying to secure some figures on Vietnam if anyone can be so kind.

Population (in millions) 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006E 2007E

GDP Per Capita (USD)

Real GDP Growth

Consumer Price Inflation

Motor Vehicle Sales

Fingers crossed