Locked in a tense geopolitical tussle, China and the United States have expanded their bitter rivalry into the soft power arena. In Malaysia, China’s increased presence is felt across the board: from trade investment and manufacturing to e-commerce and the digital economy. One of China’s recent initiatives to stand out has been the establishment of Xiamen University in Malaysia (XMUM), marking a milestone in education cooperation between the two countries. This chapter is a study of the XMUM project. It will look at the effect of China’s education outreach and examine the potential role of the overseas Chinese in shaping XMUM’s imprint on Malaysia and the wider region.

To set the context, the chapter begins with an overview of the soft power competition between China and the United States. Next is a review of the Sino-Malaysia relationship and the Chinese soft power projection in Malaysia. This is followed by a descriptive report on two key Chinese education projects in Malaysia; namely, the Confucius Institute (CI) at the University of Malaysia and the Xiamen University branch campus at Sepang.

The third part of the chapter will then develop three sets of evaluative arguments highlighting the XMUM’s importance and potential. The first will draw attention to XMUM’s broader significance beyond Malaysia; namely, China’s foray into the critical soft power arena—international higher education. The Xiamen move, I argue, signifies Beijing’s wider ambition to exert sway in this strategically vital sphere of influence that is still largely dominated by the West.

The chapter then makes the case that XMUM may also be transformed by its relocation to Malaysia. By moving out of the mainland, it could acquire features enabling the university to assume a wider role. One of these agents of change is the overseas Chinese factor. With a campus in Malaysia, Xiamen University is in fact returning to its Southeast Asia roots. Over time, XMUM is likely to re-embrace Malaysia’s multiculturalism and recapture the overseas Chinese traditional intermediary role. Transforming itself from a mere conduit of China soft power into a go-between institution, a two-way bridge linking China and Malaysia.

In the last two decades, the relationship between Indonesia and China has undergone a significant change. While in the past, particularly in the first two decades of the period of New Order Indonesia, the two countries had a tumultuous relationship, today their relations have been significantly enhanced. Such a good relationship began to develop in the year 2000, after President Abdurrahman Wahid entered his presidential term. President Wahid even made China the first country that he officially visited as the president. Since then, cultural exchanges between China and Indonesia have intensified, while their economic relations have increased unprecedentedly. Indonesia’s subsequent presidents have continued President Wahid’s friendly attitude towards China. In 2005, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono (popularly known as SBY) signed a strategic partnership agreement with President Hu Jintao, an agreement that was followed by an influx of Chinese investments into Indonesia. Less than a decade later, during President Xi Jinping’s visit to Jakarta in 2013, Indonesia and China signed another agreement that made both countries comprehensive strategic partners.

The above phenomenon has opened the way for much more frequent encounters between the Chinese and Indonesian people. Such encounters have not only occurred due to the increased visits by Indonesians to mainland China, but also as a result of the coming of Chinese people to this Southeast Asian country. In the last few years, people from mainland China have become among the largest groups of foreign visitors to Indonesia. While the majority of these people come for tourism, and hence only stay for a short period, a number of them arrive in the country for other purposes, including work, study and business. This latter group constitutes a group of ‘new Chinese migrants’ (xin yimin) in Indonesia.

These new Chinese migrants have a number of differences from the so called ‘lao yimin’ (old migrants), particularly in terms of levels of education, proficiency in the local language, values, and adaptability to the local situation. While the descendants of the Chinese old migrants have transformed into a major ethnic group—popularly known as the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (Chinese Indonesians)—and have also had a high degree of interactions with other ethnic groups in the country, these new Chinese migrants are relatively alien to the majority of the Indonesian people, who are usually called the ‘pribumi’ (indigenous) Indonesians.

Ever since Hun Sen’s state visit to Beijing in 1996, ties between Cambodia and China—or more accurately, between Hun Sen’s ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)—have only grown stronger. The state visit was a watershed moment. The Chinese had supported the Khmer Rouge regime (1975–78), while Hun Sen came to power under the auspices of China’s rival, the Vietnamese, who had pushed the Khmer Rouge forces towards the Thai border, and founded the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) (1979–89). The 1996 state visit not only signalled a rapprochement between China and Cambodia, but also China’s confidence that Hun Sen was Cambodia’s strongman in the making. The Chinese had invited Hun Sen but not Prince Rannaridh, whose Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Pacifique, et Coopératif (FUNCINPEC) had formed an unstable coalition government with the CPP after the 1993 elections organized by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC). Perhaps encouraged by China’s backing, Hun Sen ousted Rannaridh in a coup de force in 1997. In June 2016, roughly two decades after Hun Sen’s state visit and around US$3 billion in Chinese loans and grants later (Veasna 2016), warm ties were once again reaffirmed. Reportedly, as it had done in 2012, Cambodia demanded that ASEAN tone down its statement on China’s disputed claim over the South China Sea, and a few days later China pledged another US$600 million in loans and grants (Hutt 2016a).

Political interdependencies have emerged alongside the influx of Chinese investments, businesses and economic migrants since the 1990s. Cambodia’s infrastructural development, including the construction of bridges, roads and hydropower dams, is largely undertaken by Chinese state-owned companies and financed by Chinese banks (Sullivan 2011). The majority of Cambodia’s garment factories, which account for over three quarters of total exports, are owned and managed by Chinese from ‘Greater China’ (i.e., mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau) (Ear 2016). China is the biggest investor in Cambodia, adding nearly US$5.3 billion between 2013 and 2017 (Hin 2019), and Chinese firms currently hold over forty Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) allocated for tourism development or the cultivation of crops such as rubber, sugar and cassava (LICADHO 2019).

Since Deng Xiaoping introduced his four modernization programmes in 1978, China has risen, and its impact on Southeast Asia has also been strongly felt. This chapter briefly examines the impact of the programmes on the nation-building process in Southeast Asia. It will begin with a general observation of the ethnic Chinese position in Southeast Asian multi-ethnic nations, followed by a discussion about xin yimin or new Chinese migrants in the region and beyond, and finally an explication of Beijing’s new approach towards Chinese living in five Southeast Asian countries and its impact. These countries were chosen based on the availability of information on xin yimin to the author.

Southeast Asian countries with majority indigenous populations regard their ethnic Chinese as ‘migrants’ or ‘descendants of migrants’. Therefore, they are expected to be integrated, even assimilated, into the indigenous population. However, some are more integrated into their host society than others. In other words, all have adopted different degrees of local elements—which have made them different from mainland Chinese. The factors that have contributed to the intensive localization of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia are complex. Apart from Southeast Asian government policies, Beijing’s initial policy of encouraging localization was undoubtedly relevant.

Shift in Beijing’s Policy on Chinese Overseas

The policy of the People’s Republic of China initially followed the Kuomintang (KMT) position, treating all overseas Chinese as Chinese nationals. But at the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung (also known as the Bandung Conference), Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai introduced a new policy later known as luodi shenggen (settle down and take local roots) to ease cooperation with the newly independent states in Southeast Asia and beyond. He encouraged overseas Chinese to take up local citizenship and integrate into local society. The majority of these ethnic Chinese have since become localized. In 1980, Deng Xiaoping issued the first nationality law based on single citizenship, which further encouraged Chinese overseas to localize and adopt local citizenship.

The rise of the Chinese following the success of Deng Xiaoping’s reform programme saw a new wave of migrants leaving China. Consequently, Beijing began adjusting its overseas Chinese policy.

Member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are encountering both opportunities and concerns in the face of an ever-accelerating Chinese economic expansion. For the countries in mainland Southeast Asia, especially along the Mekong, the concerns are all the more acute because of a shared riverine system and, in some cases, shared land border with China (Santasombat 2015, 2017). With the launch of the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) Development Programme sponsored by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and the corresponding China-sponsored Yunnan Gateway Project, it has become apparent that China’s national economic strategy in this area is to (1) create maritime accessibility for the ‘Greater Southwestern China’, (2) extract natural resources from the comparatively underdeveloped neighbouring countries, and (3) enhance the regional market as well as investment opportunities for Chinese enterprises. Where then does Laos stand in this context?

Laos is the only landlocked Southeast Asian country. Except for the proposed Kunming–Bangkok high-speed railway, most of China’s economic operations in Laos since the 1990s extend to resource extraction and the exploration of market and investment opportunities. It is worth noting that, among the three countries that share land borders with China—Vietnam, Laos and Myanmar—Laos is the only one to have not witnessed much anti-Chinese protests in recent years. While this is not the place to examine the sources of these protests—to what extent were they civic-led or partially government-induced—the fact remains that, compared to Myanmar and Vietnam, Laos is generally accommodating to the increasing presence of Chinese economic interests in the country. Shared political ideology contributes to this accommodation. Not only does communist comradeship and similar political-administrative mentalities between Laos and China provide a fundamental like-mindedness for the decision makers of the two countries, Laos is also the only nominal socialist country in the region that maintains an amicable relationship with China (Chiang and Cheng 2015, p. 90).

In addition to maintaining a warm relationship with China, a number of geographical and historical factors are also significant in the position of Laos towards Chinese economic expansion. Because it was landlocked, the area consisting of the current Laos was the last to be incorporated into French Indochina in 1893.

Since the period of rapid development in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) after the reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s, the world is experiencing a new wave of Chinese migration. Loosely defined as Chinese people who are outside of China to conduct business, work, study or join their family overseas, these new Chinese migrants—also known as xin yimin 新移民—have had a profound impact on their host countries. Their influence on local societies, economies and politics has been complicated by Beijing’s dynamic policy towards the Chinese overseas in general and towards the xin yimin in particular.

Before we proceed further, it is important for us to put Chinese migrants in a proper historical context.

A Brief Outline of Chinese Migration

The earliest contact between China and Southeast Asia can be traced back to the Han dynasty. However, significant migration to this region started during the Song dynasty of the twelfth century. The first period was from the Song dynasty in the twelfth century until the first half of the sixteenth century of the Ming dynasty. It lasted for about 400 years. During this period, the feudal economy in China was at its peak and the number of Chinese abroad also increased. This coincided with the period that Admiral Zheng He (Cheng Ho 郑和) embarked upon his seven expeditions to the West Ocean (later known as Nanyang 南洋). Groups of Chinese merchants and sailors ventured overseas and some of them remained in various sites from their voyages. Those who stayed long married local women; the number of the Chinese overseas in Southeast Asia during this period was between 150,000 and 200,000.

The second period started in the second half of the sixteenth century when there was a sea embargo for the ethnic Chinese until the eruption of the Opium Wars. This period lasted about 300 years. During this period, China experienced the rise of capitalistic elements, and the West began to colonize Southeast Asia. More Chinese left China for Southeast Asia. According to one study, there were about a million Chinese in Southeast Asia.

The Chinese language has become one of the most attractive foreign languages—it ranks only second to English in Cambodia. The demand for the Chinese language is driven by the influx of Chinese tourists and investments, especially after 2010 when Cambodia and China signed their comprehensive strategic partnership. China has invested a significant amount of resources in promoting the Chinese language in Cambodia, especially under the cooperation framework of the Confucius Institute, intending to enhance people-to-people ties and project a positive image of China. The Chinese language has become a critical source of China’s public diplomacy and soft power projection.

This chapter discusses the supply and demand of the Chinese language in Cambodia and the relationship between language education and acquisition with the political and social values of the learners. The chapter seeks to understand how language education and acquisition affect Cambodian learners’ perception of China. The research does not aim to provide a comprehensive Cambodian perception towards China—it only targets those who learn the Chinese language. There are two assumptions here. First, there is a relationship between the acquisition of the Chinese language and the learners’ perception of China. Second, the learners play an important role in promoting bilateral ties, especially under social and cultural cooperation. The chapter has three main parts: supply-side analysis, demand-side analysis and learners’ perception analysis.

Research Method

The study uses a mixed research method and data collection to understand the perception of Cambodian learners of the Chinese language towards China, including desk review, semi-structured interviews and an online survey. The online questionnaire includes questions relating to learners’ perceptions of the New Chinese, Chinese investments, the Chinese government, and China in general. The semi-structured interviews also focus on the informants’ perception of these issues. The informants are also Chinese language learners, but they did not participate in the online survey. The online survey and interviews were administered from 1 November 2020 to 10 December 2020.

Concerning the online survey, 250 online questionnaires were sent out to Chinese learners in Cambodia using the snowballing approach. As a result, 87 survey responses were collected.

On 7 April 2010, the Lao government signed an agreement with China that sets out the financing and the construction of a high-speed railway line (420 km) linking the capital Vientiane to southwestern China. The construction was initially set to commence on 25 April 2011 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and Laos. However, the project was postponed after the corruption scandal that led to the removal of China’s Minister of Railways in February 2011. Afterwards, the Chinese construction companies pulled out of the venture fearing the rail link would not generate enough profit. After several years of numerous setbacks and rumours of cancellation, the construction of the controversial China–Laos railway was officially launched on 25 December 2016, but labour issues and compensation for people displaced still linger (Radio Free Asia 2017). The railway is valued at US$6 billion, and is expected to be completed within five years. China holds a 70 per cent stake in the rail project, while Laos holds the remaining 30 per cent.

Should this megaproject materialize, China would be fully connected to Southeast Asia, from Beijing to Singapore. The rail project is part of the Belt and Road Initiative, which aims to develop infrastructure networks across the ancient Silk Road trading routes. It would join the multiples lines of communication that have been built by China over the past few years. The navigation on the Mekong River and the North–South Economic Corridor (NSEC) seemed unrealistic just a decade ago, given the very difficult terrain of this region. These Herculean works are rather emblematic as the Chinese are on track to achieve the mise en valeur of Laos that the French only dreamed of during their colonial rule but failed to implement (Stuart-Fox 1995).

French interest in Indochina was mainly to gain access to the Chinese market to the detriment of the British. That was why building railways and a water road along the Mekong River was crucial to the colonial government. A century later, the same scenario is being replayed, but this time the Chinese have become the dominant players, and they are considering the Greater Mekong Subregion (GMS) as the centrepiece of their “charm offensive” (Kurlantzick 2007, p. 10) in Southeast Asia.

Xin yimin (新移民), or new Chinese migrants, have continued to be a hot topic for discussion for the last three decades. In fact, it is now often difficult to distinguish which group of Chinese migrants and what period of entry can be considered xin yimin. This large-scale migration of the Chinese started in the early 1980s after China’s opening up when opportunities to study abroad, travel, do business overseas, and join families became more prevalent. In Southeast Asia, xin yimin refers to those who came in during the new millennium or the beginning of the twenty-first century. For the purposes of this chapter, I use the common practice in the Philippines to differentiate the laoqiao (老僑), jiuqiao (舊僑), xinqiao (新僑), and the xin yimin who are migrants who came in during the 1990s to date. I will focus on those who came to the Philippines in the new millennium, but particularly highlight new developments, issues and new organizations formed starting 2016, the beginning of President Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency.

Historically, there have been Chinese migrants to the Philippines since Spanish colonial rule. However, the contemporary influx of Chinese migrants into the Philippines started in the 1970s, especially after the establishment of Philippines diplomatic relations with China in 1975. It escalated in the 1980s with the market reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping and the opening up of China to foreign markets. This influx increased even more considerably after President Duterte was elected in 2016.

The influx of new Chinese migrants to the Philippines for the last two decades has been contentious, and President Duterte’s pivot to China has brought the problem to the forefront. Philippines-China bilateral ties have reached new heights and brought an increase in investments and infrastructure development and other much welcome economic benefits, but have also triggered an escalation of anti-Chinese sentiments due to many factors, founded and unfounded.

One of the key challenges is the fact that seventy per cent of the newcomers in the work force are hired in POGOs (Philippine offshore gaming operations) or are employed in the online gambling and downstream businesses related to them.

The boatman perches precariously on one end of a long bamboo raft, his hands clutching the long pole that guides the raft to the opposite bank. A traveller hops gingerly from the bank on to the other end of the raft, his right arm stretched out by his side to balance the weight of a heavy suitcase in the other. Stabilized, the boatman pushes off from the edge with his pole, artfully drifting across the river eddies and edging carefully to the other bank. It is dry season, the river is barely thirty metres wide, and the currents are gentle. The traveller strolls from one end of the raft to the other, hands the boatman some money, and hops off at the other end. This crossing of an international boundary has taken all of forty seconds.

This river is the international border between Yunnan Province, China and Shan State of Myanmar. And this illicit crossing has taken place in full view of the official border bridge just 200 metres upstream. The Chinese banks of the river are filled with gravel and larger rocks, dumped here as part of ongoing construction to build up its embankments. On the other side, sits Myanmar, but not really. It is a place called Wa Region, territorially part of Myanmar, but almost completely de facto autonomous, governed by the United Wa State Army (UWSA), an Ethnic Armed Organization (EAO) at odds with the Myanmar military (Tatmadaw) and Myanmar state. A ceasefire signed in 1989 when the UWSA was formed has never been broken, and an uneasy truce has held for thirty years. There are no Myanmar government representatives on the border; movement is regulated by the Chinese state and the UWSA.

Dozens of crossing points like this exist along the China–Myanmar border, perhaps somewhat surprising for two states which so jealously guard their national sovereignty. But such crossings are the sustenance of the borderland economy integral to China’s ‘going out’ policy: it circumvents the bureaucratic hassle of passports and documents; it provides commercial opportunities and livelihoods for border crossers, and eases pressures on the Chinese labour market.

The character of immigration is often shaped by the conditions of departure. Why and how people leave their country, as well as the state of the country they leave behind, influence their attitudes and the relations they share with host societies. In the case of Southeast Asia, Chinese immigration over the centuries has been characterized by different levels of settlement and integration. There have generally been four waves of Chinese immigration into the region. The first wave saw scattered flows of Chinese merchants and traders between the tenth and fifteenth centuries into parts of Southeast Asia such as Sumatra, Cambodia and Campa, and later, Malacca from the fifteenth century. Many of these merchants and traders settled down to marry local women and integrated into local communities.

The second wave was triggered by conflict, wars, starvation, and corruption in the hinterland from the nineteenth century to 1949. This wave, also known as the “coolie pattern”, was made up of “large numbers of coolie labour, normally men of peasant origin, landless labourers and the urban poor” (Wang 1991, p. 8). During this wave, many migrants spread to different parts of the globe, including the United States, Canada, Latin America, Australia, Malaya and Indonesia, less as traders and merchants but more as indentured slaves and coolies to provide menial labour. Again, like the previous wave, many did not return to China but instead settled down in their destination countries and, in the case of Southeast Asia, to engage in the struggle to be recognized as members of newly formed nations. These waves of Chinese immigration came at a time when China was not the power it is today. Centuries of economic insulation and the ‘100 years of humiliation’ during which China was subjugated to Western powers, together with famines and war, had shaped the character of Chinese immigration and the way immigrants engaged and settled in host societies.

China’s 1978 open-door policy kick-started the third wave in Chinese immigration. Seen by some as the ‘New Chinese Migration’ (Wong 2012), this wave differed in scope and character from the previous two waves.

A Confucius Institute (CI), essentially, is a language school that teaches Mandarin (the standard form of modern Chinese) and operates outside China. It functions as a partnership between a Chinese university and a host university of the country (or administrative district) in which it operates. The former will provide teaching materials and instructors as well as an administrator known as the Chinese Director. Whereas the latter supports the running of the institute by providing infrastructure such as teaching facilities and local connections as well as an administrator known as the Foreign Director, who usually is a faculty of the host university and whose duty is to ensure the institute complies with the academic, administrative and fiscal statutes and regulations of the university.

The effort in establishing CIs worldwide was initiated by the government of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to assist the international community to develop a capacity for teaching Chinese language and culture in their own nations, a facility which was very much non-existent or scarce in most of the countries in the world. In the early 2000s, the Chinese government set up a bureau called Hanyu Guoji Tuiguang Xiaozu Bangongshi (汉语国际推广小组办公室), or Office of Chinese Language Council International, to realize this initiative. This office, located in Beijing, was to become the central agency overseeing the CIs that had proliferated rapidly over the globe in the one and a half decades since 2004. It was more widely known by its acronym ‘Hanban’ (汉办), or the Confucius Institute Headquarters.

The first CI in the world was established in Seoul, the capital city of South Korea, in 2004. Ten years later, 475 CIs were operating in 126 countries. By 2018, the number had further increased to 548 CIs in 154 countries. The phenomenal growth of CIs, coupled with the rising economic power of China, however, is viewed by some as alarming. These institutes, entrusted with the primary duty of teaching Chinese language and culture, have come to be seen as a platform for the PRC to exercise its ‘soft power’.

On 7 January 2014, a bulldozer was sent by a Chinese firm—the Kings Romans Company, which runs the Golden Triangle Special Economic Zone—to clear land to construct an international airport in Ton Phueng district. An area of 236 hectares of rice fields had already been taken by the company from forty-one families, but the villagers refused to accept the offered compensation as it was well below market value. Though the original land dispute was not yet settled, Kings Romans demanded an additional 6 hectares of land to complete its construction. Refusing to comply with the perceived unfair deal, a group of farmers who had cultivated the area for several generations protested in front of the bulldozer, prompting the company to seek intervention from the Lao police. Policemen armed with AK-47 assault rifles were sent to enforce the order by Kings Romans, resulting in a stand-off between villagers and government officials. This was a rare protest by citizens against a developmental project in post-Socialist Laos.

The case of Ton Phueng is just one among many throughout the Lao PDR of local communities similarly affected by the government’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs), defined as the creation of large-scale zones of fenced-in industrial estates to attract foreign direct investments. Since the 2000s, Laos has followed its Chinese neighbour in creating SEZs to serve as a new economic engine where special economic policies and flexible governmental measures conducive for business can be implemented.