The Chinese Community in Cambodia: From Colonial Asset to Economic Powerhouse Amid Turmoil

From the end of the 1960s until 1990, no methodical and systematic census of the Cambodian population was conducted that would have allowed for an overall picture of the country's demographic evolution over these thirty years.

From the end of the 1960s until 1990, no methodical and systematic census of the Cambodian population was conducted that would have allowed for an overall picture of the country's demographic evolution over these thirty years.

The tragic events that occurred in Cambodia since the coup d'État of March 18, 1970, which overthrew Prince Norodom Sihanouk and plunged this small country, once an oasis of peace, into a war from which it is only slowly emerging today, have profoundly disrupted the economic and social benchmarks we had before 1970.​

W.E. Willmott, in an excellent book on the Chinese of Cambodia published in 1967, already rightly emphasized the absence of reliable statistics that has always characterized Cambodia, even during the French protectorate era.​

It therefore remains impossible, even today, to rely on real quantitative evaluations to analyze the situation of the Chinese community in Cambodia since 1975. If certain authors sometimes mention figures relating to the Chinese population or its current economic influence, these claims rest on no objective evidence in the absence of any reliable statistical apparatus, neither since the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in April 1975 nor under the People's Republic of...

In Cambodia, as in the rest of Indochina, French colonization considerably and definitively influenced relations between the different ethnic components of the Cambodian population. French policy toward them was alternately conciliatory or repressive, depending on the interests of the moment.​

Positive Image

Overall, the French had a rather positive image of the Chinese regarding their potential contribution to colonization: "Another effective way to bring the magnificent territory of Cambodia back to life and production would be to provoke by all possible means Chinese emigration (…) and to fertilize with the impure foam of the Celestial Empire the Mekong basin cluttered with the wreckage of fallen civilizations." This formula from a French administrator (quoted by Forest 1980, 465) well summarizes the thinking of French administrators and settlers regarding the Cambodian ethnic chessboard, particularly in the early years of the protectorate. Only the Chinese and Vietnamese seemed worthy of interest to the French and could, in their eyes, pull Cambodia out of underdevelopment and fratricidal wars in which it had been plunged for centuries (Khy 1973).​

Source of Conflict

In the first decades of the 20th century, as important competitors to French settlers, their clan organization became a source of conflict. The protectorate then took measures to limit Chinese immigration and toughened its fiscal policy. The "congregations" system, applied in Vietnam, was extended to Cambodia in 1891 and fixed the ethno-linguistic distribution of the Chinese community in Cambodia. The protectorate authorities, designating the heads of these congregations themselves and imposing on them strict administrative rules regarding immigration, public order, taxation, etc., thought they could more directly control the activities of this community.​

French policy toward this community, and in particular the creation of the congregations system, created a new situation for it in its relations with the indigenous population.

Integration, symbiosis with the Khmers, was no longer possible once the Chinese enjoyed a different status from that of the natives.​

W.E. Willmott claims that Khmers and Chinese grew closer under the protectorate due to the persecutions they were similarly victims of from colonial power (Willmott 1967, 40-41). This judgment seems hasty and biased. Although Cambodia never experienced, whether under the protectorate or in pre-colonial history, anti-Chinese violence—making it in this sense a true exception in Southeast Asia—relations between Khmers and Chinese seem on the contrary to have become strained from the early 20th century due to this difference in status. With the creation of a legal "foreigners" category, access to public office was definitively forbidden to the Chinese (Forest 1980, 480), thus widening the gap between the two communities. Nevertheless, the convergence of interests between Khmers and Chinese attenuated antagonisms and probably avoided the crystallization of potential conflicts between them. The very clear division of tasks—Khmers in administration and Chinese in the economic sector, with both communities sharing the agricultural sector—allowed for considerable Sino-Khmer social cohesion, but it also accentuated the blockage of society which, in a certain way, led to the major crises of the second half of the 20th century.​

Until 1975, this socio-economic configuration of the Chinese community and its relations with Cambodian society remained virtually unchanged.​

The Cultural Revolution

At the time of the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese of Cambodia temporarily emerged from the shadows, for the first time in their history. The privileged relations established, since the Bandung years, between Prince Norodom Sihanouk and China were momentarily threatened with rupture when the first traces of Cultural Revolution contagion appeared in Phnom Penh.​

The Prince, already grappling, if not with a revolutionary insurrection, at least with the development of a communist obedience guerrilla movement, saw in these manifestations the hand of Beijing striving to use the overseas Chinese community to promote the export of its Cultural Revolution. However, it seems highly unlikely that this agitation was directly initiated and controlled by Beijing at the time, on the contrary (Fitzgerald 1972, 171).​

In spring 1967, an incident occurred on a Cambodian military base when Chinese technicians sent by Beijing delivered propaganda speeches, "Little Red Book" in hand (Pomonti and Thion 1971, 61).​

On September 1, 1967, the Prince decided, despite assurances given by Zhou Enlai to the Cambodian Foreign Minister, to close the Khmer-Chinese Friendship Association. Sihanouk, following a telegram sent a few days later by Zhou Enlai to this association—which he understood as a Chinese attack on his policy—reacted by demanding the resignation of the association's president, Hu Nim, from his parliamentary mandate and expelling from his cabinet his comrades Phouk Chhay and Chau Seng. He banned, in the process, the local bulletin of Xinhua agency, while affirming: "China is our friend and I still consider it as such" (Kiernan 1985, 262-263).​

By mid-September, Zhou Enlai had regained control of the Foreign Ministry, hitherto in the hands of Cultural Revolution extremists, and assured the Cambodian ambassador in Beijing of his boundless admiration for the Prince.​

In this affair, the Chinese community had remained relatively apart from the Khmer-Chinese polemic, desirous of preserving its tranquility, and only a few Sino-Cambodians engaged alongside the Communist Party of Kampuchea had taken a position. Several Chinese schools were nevertheless the scene, during 1967, of violence carried out by students against teachers or school officials (Kiernan 1985, 258-259), undoubtedly imitating their comrades in China. These incidents remained, however, anecdotal compared to those that occurred in other countries of the region, such as Indonesia and Burma. Zhou Enlai finally sent, in October 1967, a reassuring message to the Prince affirming that China had never intended to interfere in Cambodian internal affairs, signaling that the matter was closed in Beijing's eyes. The officials of the Khmer-Chinese Friendship Association, after Hu Nim's flight to the maquis in October, were arrested and thrown into the kingdom's prisons, from which they would not emerge until after the advent of the Republic and the Prince's ousting. Calm returned to relations between China and Cambodia until the Lon Nol coup.​

Interethnic Tension

In March-April 1970, interethnic tension provoked by anti-Vietnamese hysteria and Beijing's initially cautious support for Prince Sihanouk, exiled in China, led to a few incidents in Phnom Penh. On March 11, demonstrators marched on the Chinese embassy and were repelled by several hundred determined Chinese intent on protecting it (Pomonti and Thion 1971, 240). Several members of the Chinese community were arrested and Chinese schools had to close their doors. However, neither side wanted to go to the irreparable. The new republic had to rely on the extraordinary economic power of the community, and Beijing wished to spare the future and not cut all ties with the Phnom Penh government. A modus vivendi was therefore found.​

Beijing discreetly let it be known the price that the Chinese attached to the protection of their compatriots' interests in Cambodia. Representatives of the Chinese community hastened, on their side, to pledge allegiance to the new authorities and thus retained the right to continue their business in peace until April 1975.​

On the eve of the great socio-political upheaval of April 1975, the Chinese community was more powerful than ever.

Many provincial Chinese merchants had taken refuge in the capital. This exodus allowed speculators and all sorts of intermediaries to amass fortunes at the expense of populations ready to do anything to escape the civil war. Considerable capital had already flowed to banks in Hong Kong, Singapore, and other countries. Some Chinese businessmen had sent all or part of their family abroad, but many stayed, certain that a Khmer Rouge victory would not fundamentally alter their situation. Their analysis rested on Beijing's unwavering support for the revolutionary movement since the mid-1960s, which in their eyes made the Cambodian Chinese community a population acquired by the new authorities and protected by China. Their expectations were to be tragically disappointed.​

The Chinese of Democratic Kampuchea

On the very day of their victory, April 17, 1975, revolutionary forces undertook the total evacuation of the capital and all provincial capitals that had not yet suffered this fate. In a few days, two million Phnom Penhois had to take the road to the countryside in dramatic conditions. No distinction was made, neither in the first days nor during the three years that followed, between the Chinese community and the Khmer population.​

The only ones to suffer ethnic-targeted persecutions were the Vietnamese and the Chams. The Chinese were treated like the rest of the population, victims of the same living conditions and the same persecutions as their Khmer compatriots.

It is evident from numerous testimonies that if the Chinese community was largely decimated by repression under the Pol Pot regime, it was as a social class and not as a distinct ethnicity (Willmott 1981, 43; Jackson 1989, 154). Some testimonies do, however, report direct discrimination manifested, from the first months, toward the Chinese.​

One characteristic of the Chinese community that made it a target for the Khmer Rouge was the use of a foreign language. All foreign languages had been banned from daily life by the CPK, and those who expressed themselves in a language other than Khmer, by inadvertence or reflex, were immediately eliminated. This censorship also applied to Party cadres. Like in most other Chinese diasporas, Cambodian Chinese had retained, and still retain, their original language (one or more Chinese dialects and often Mandarin) within the family and in relations between community members. A number of Chinese were consequently arrested and executed for violating this linguistic rule. Khmer Rouge propaganda bears no trace of ethnic discrimination toward the Chinese community.​

It is however probable that at the local level some officials may have shown, on certain occasions, anti-Chinese sentiments fueled either by the dominant economic position of the Chinese in the old society or by the sense of superiority felt by the Khmer Rouge toward China, whose Revolution they deemed less perfect than theirs. But none of the texts of the Communist Party of Kampuchea available today mention this Chinese community as belonging, for ethnic reasons, to the category of "enemies of the Revolution."​

An overt discrimination against the Chinese community by the CPK could have had unfortunate consequences for Democratic Kampuchea.

China was indeed, from April 1975, the only country to provide the new Cambodia with economic and technical aid.

During the first months following the taking of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge accepted from China what they refused from any other country, notably rice aid and probably some other indispensable commodities (Jackson 1989, 116). Even this aid was accepted only very partially.​

On September 13, 1975, the two countries made public the signing of an economic and military aid agreement amounting to one billion dollars. This aid was described as the largest ever granted by China to a third country. As relations between Democratic Kampuchea and Vietnam deteriorated, Chinese support, particularly military, became increasingly indispensable for the regime's survival. Between 1975 and 1977, China's internal political evolution favored the development of an ultra-radical policy by the Communist Party of Kampuchea.​

The death of Prime Minister Zhou Enlai on January 8, 1976, removed from the scene the only Chinese leader maintaining friendly relations with Cambodia and a proponent of moderation in implementing the Cambodian revolution. Power then passed in China to the "Cultural Revolution group," and Hua Guofeng was appointed Prime Minister and first vice-president of the Central Committee. Deng Xiaoping's ascent thus halted, the Chinese left won a temporary victory that strengthened support for Democratic Kampuchea even after the arrest, in October 1976, of the "Gang of Four." Hua Guofeng, who owed his entire career to the Cultural Revolution, remained until the Vietnamese invasion of December 1978 a supporter of the Cambodian revolution.​

The fate of the Cambodian Chinese community could have constituted a major cause of conflict between Beijing and Phnom Penh if official discriminatory measures had been taken against it, as was the case in Vietnam during 1978.​

Several testimonies indicate that China did not wish to be involved in a conflict over this issue.

Some Chinese refugees report having encountered, during the Pol Pot regime, Chinese experts sent by Beijing (there were several thousand), whom they reportedly appealed to, begging them to alert Beijing to the fate of Cambodian Chinese and demanding aid.

These experts simply encouraged them to trust the leaders of the "Angkar"—the consecrated term for the Party—and to accept "sacrificing for the revolution." Thus, unusually, China chose to turn a blind eye to the fate reserved for Cambodian Chinese.​

This position aligns with Chinese policy toward overseas Chinese.

In a report to the National People's Congress in September 1954, Zhou Enlai emphasized that China was ready to encourage overseas Chinese to comply with local governments' laws and observe local customs. The deportation of urban populations to the countryside and the living conditions imposed within Cambodia being the same for all, Beijing apparently saw no reason to intervene in Democratic Kampuchea's "internal affairs." The Chinese community therefore remained, during the three and a half years of the Khmer Rouge regime, subject to the same rules as other Cambodians.​

This situation changed rapidly with the Vietnamese invasion and the foundation of the People's Republic of Kampuchea.​

The People's Republic of Kampuchea and the Chinese Community

After the upheavals Cambodia experienced under the Pol Pot regime, it is difficult to determine, even approximately, the size of the Chinese population in 1979. W.E. Willmott estimates the urban Chinese population at about 400,000 individuals at the beginning of 1975 (Willmott 1981, 43). Deported to the countryside and not subject to systematic discrimination policy, we can imagine that this community was victimized by the Khmer Rouge concentrationary policy in the same proportion as the rest of the Cambodian population. A survey conducted by Steve Heder in Thai refugee camps, based on 1,500 interviews, gives an estimate of 50% deaths between 1975 and 1978 among the urban Chinese population (Ablin and Hood 1990, 135), which, applied to Willmott's figures, gives about 200,000 deaths within this population.​

According to a testimony collected by W.E. Willmott (1981, 45), the Khmer population showed strong anti-Chinese sentiment from the beginning of 1979, blaming the Chinese community for Beijing's support to the Pol Pot regime.​

The presence of Vietnamese troops and Vietnam's political domination over the new regime installed in Phnom Penh on January 7, 1979, initially favored the development of this sentiment. However, it quickly faded among the Khmer population, which traditionally felt no resentment toward this community, while Vietnam sought to implement discriminatory rules toward this population. Thai military sources indicated in mid-1979 that Vietnam was seeking to expel all Cambodians of Chinese origin from the country (Van der Kroef 1980, 480), judging based on the apparently massive arrival of Chinese refugees at the Khmer-Thai border.​

W.E. Willmott also cites a refugee testimony corroborating these Thai claims, while noting that, according to this refugee, Vietnamese authorities had defended Chinese residents by convening a mass meeting and explaining to Khmers that Cambodian Chinese had suffered as much as they had under the Khmer Rouge regime (Willmott 1981, 45). J. van der Kroef, for his part, asserts without citing any supporting source that the Vietnamese undertook in Cambodia, after the Sino-Vietnamese war of February 1979, an active discrimination policy toward the Chinese, expelling them from cities, closing their shops, and sending them to remote cooperatives (Van der Kroef 1980, 486). This idea is echoed by Joseph J.

Zasloff in a September 1980 report on Cambodia. The author even claims that Chinese were then sent to re-education camps. The Vietnamese policy of prohibiting Cambodians access to city centers in the first half of 1979 would have been applied with particular vigor toward the Chinese (Zasloff 1980, 123).​

Contemporary testimonies are therefore often contradictory and highlight above all the political confusion that reigned in Cambodia in 1979, as a new political regime was being established. During the year following the fall of the Pol Pot regime, the Cambodian Chinese community felt targeted through the propaganda campaign against China launched by the new Phnom Penh authorities under Vietnamese impulsion, and chose, in uncertainty about this new regime's attitude toward it, to emigrate en masse, fearing being made a scapegoat (Scalabrino 1989, 123). The new administration installed in Phnom Penh by the Vietnamese does indeed seem to have shown particular mistrust toward the Chinese and denied them access to public office at the time.​

It is also likely that some Vietnamese officers or advisors, coming from Vietnam where the conflict with China over the fate of Vietnamese Chinese had been particularly acute since March 1978, took local discriminatory measures toward this community, measures that did not necessarily stem from a policy decided by Hanoi.​

During the first years of the People's Republic of Kampuchea, Vietnamese experts and advisors largely controlled the Party and State apparatus in Cambodia.

In 1979-80, the new Cambodian leaders' room for maneuver vis-à-vis their "advisors" was extremely limited.

Vietnam's fear of a potential "fifth column" among the Cambodian population of Chinese origin led it to prohibit access to the Cambodian Party and government for the Chinese.​

In the confusion of the immediate post-Pol Pot period, thanks to the destruction of civil records by the Khmer Rouge, many Sino-Cambodians then took Khmer-sounding names. The Central Committee of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party (KPRP), on CPV instructions, issued "Circular 351," which insisted on the need for Party members to show the utmost vigilance toward their compatriots of Chinese origin and prohibited the latter from Party membership status. Until 1981-82, with access to the Party closely controlled by Vietnamese experts, Chinese could only access it when they had very good relations with them. Access for Cambodians of Chinese origin was therefore, at that time, reserved for "courtiers."​

The new Cambodian leaders, for their part, do not seem to have attached great importance to the ethnic origin of their collaborators, as evidenced by the very rapid rise in the State apparatus of figures like Cham Prasidh, Hun Sen's economic advisor, or Sok An, a very influential advisor on foreign policy issues, both of Chinese origin.​

A few Chinese even seem to have played a key role economically from the first years of the regime, particularly a certain Hap, who had provided support during the civil war to Say Phouthang, a Thai-ethnic Cambodian who became, from 1979, No. 5 in the Political Bureau of the Kampuchean People's Revolutionary Party. This Chinese "businessman" would have, according to some sources, benefited until 1985 from the monopoly on smuggling with Thailand and Singapore.​

Another community member, Triv, would on his side have obtained in 1991 the monopoly on exporting the 6 products whose sale the State had officially prohibited (rice, corn, tobacco, beans, soy, and rubber), in exchange for a 50% profit payment to the State. He would also have leased, at the same time, all the country's tobacco companies. These examples nevertheless remain exceptional under the People's Republic of Kampuchea.​

At a more modest level, many small Chinese traders were then settled in markets, denying however any Chinese origin. Their presence remained very discreet.​

With time and the progressive decrease in direct Vietnamese influence on Party and State affairs, instructions regarding the Chinese community were less and less respected.

More and more Cambodians of Chinese origin accessed public office, and their presence in the administration became commonplace by the late 1980s. Display in Chinese characters was not then authorized, and nothing allowed the layperson to distinguish Chinese from Cambodians or Vietnamese. However, although Chinese teaching was officially prohibited, most families of Chinese origin retained the use of their original dialect in family relations and made a point of teaching it, or even Mandarin in many cases, to children. Kept thus on standby, this Sinic character of the Cambodian Chinese-origin community only awaited the opportunity to be reborn. This was the case with the last years of the regime installed by the Vietnamese and the establishment of UN trusteeship over Cambodia in 1992. In the course of 1991, as negotiations between the various Cambodian factions slowly progressed toward an agreement and Cambodia's economic situation deteriorated, the Chinese community began to openly display its presence.​

Since the departure of Vietnamese troops in September 1989, "big Chinese families" had regained very broad control of the Cambodian economy and had become indispensable to the State of Cambodia government.

But it was only in 1991 that the first Chinese signs appeared on restaurants and other businesses in Phnom Penh. The massive arrival of Chinese businessmen from Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, or Hong Kong favored the use of Mandarin or Chinese dialects that began to be heard in the capital's public places.​

Commercial relations also developed with Taiwan and the People's Republic of China, giving the Cambodian Chinese community an essential intermediary role with these Chinese commercial partners and investors.

During the late 1994 ministerial reshuffle, Cham Prasidh was moreover appointed Minister of Commerce, which could only favor the development of these relations. According to unofficial estimates given by some leaders of the Cambodian Chinese business community, it would today control about 80% of the country's economic activity.​

On the cultural level, private Chinese schools appeared in turn under UNTAC, replacing Cambodian schools that operated in the utmost deprivation. Chinese schools would today host more than 15,000 students for a Chinese community estimated at 80,000 people, to which would be added more than one million Sino-Khmers (Pho Pheng 1995, 20).​

In 1994, a first Chinese bookstore opened its doors on Monivong Boulevard and offered publications in Chinese language mainly from China.

Two Chinese-language dailies also saw the light of day in 1995, Huashang Ribao, published by Mme Pung Peng Cheng, former Health Minister of Prince Sihanouk and former deputy in the National Assembly, and Yazhou Ribao, published in Bangkok. These two publications marked the official return, to the Cambodian political and economic scene, of the Chinese community.​

The community also began to structure itself through a "Cambodian Sino-Khmer Association" which aims to govern all activities of Cambodian Chinese and their relations in all domains with the power in place. Cambodia's difficult economic situation since the 1993 elections, the pressing need for foreign investments and fresh capital, presage a continued development of the influence of the Cambodian Chinese community on the national economy and politics.​

No Cambodian government could today afford a conflict with this community without triggering a serious economic crisis that could jeopardize a fragile civil peace. National reconstruction cannot be undertaken without the active participation of the Chinese, who remain the most enterprising and best-structured community in the country.​

Lionel Vairon for l’Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient (cc)