Asia: ethnicity, accumulation, violence

[Eubulides <paraconsistent@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Full piece at:
http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/Start.asp
Vengeful majorities

December 2003

In many poor countries, markets concentrate wealth in the hands of
prosperous ethnic minorities. In these places, democracy can be an engine
of vengeance

Amy Chua


One morning in September 1994, I received a call from my mother in
California. In a hushed voice, she told me that my Aunt Leona, my father's
twin sister, had been murdered in her home in the Philippines, her throat
slit by her chauffeur. My mother broke the news to me in our Hokkien
Chinese dialect. But the word "murder" she said in English, as if to wall
off the act from the family through language.

The murder of a relative is horrible for anyone, anywhere. My father's
grief was impenetrable; to this day, he has not broken his silence on the
subject. For the rest of the family, though, there was an added element of
disgrace. For the Chinese, luck is a moral attribute, and a lucky person
would never be murdered. Like having a birth defect, or marrying a
Filipino, being murdered is shameful.

[snip]

My uncle was not simply being callous. My aunt's death was part of a
common pattern. Hundreds of Chinese are kidnapped or murdered every year
by ethnic Filipinos. Nor is it unusual that my aunt's killer was never
apprehended. The police in the Philippines, all poor ethnic Filipinos
themselves, are notoriously unmotivated in these cases.

My family is part of the Philippines' tiny but economically powerful
Chinese minority. Although they constitute 1 per cent of the population,
Chinese Filipinos control about 60 per cent of the private economy,
including the country's four airlines and almost all of the banks, hotels,
shopping malls, and big conglomerates. My own family runs a plastics
conglomerate and owns swathes of prime real estate - and they are only
"third-tier" Chinese tycoons. They also have safe deposit boxes full of
gold bars, each one the size of a chocolate bar. I myself have such a gold
bar. My Aunt Leona sent it to me as a law school graduation present a few
years before she died.

[snip]

Nearly two thirds of the roughly 80m ethnic Filipinos in the Philippines
live on less than $2 a day. But poverty by itself does not make people
kill. To poverty must be added indignity, hopelessness and grievance. In
the Philippines, millions of Filipinos work for Chinese; almost no Chinese
work for Filipinos. The Chinese dominate industry and commerce at every
level of society. Global markets intensify this dominance: When foreign
investors do business in the Philippines, they deal almost exclusively
with Chinese. Apart from a handful of corrupt politicians and a few
aristocratic Spanish mestizo families, all of the Philippines'
billionaires are of Chinese descent. My relatives live literally walled
off from the Filipino masses, in a luxurious, all-Chinese residential
enclave, on streets named Harvard and Princeton. The entry points are
manned by armed guards.

[snip]