Congregations and Associations: the Political Structure of the Chinese Community in Phnom-Penh, Cambodia

Abstract

The study of overseas Chinese has continued for some time as a series of somewhat unrelated monographs with little comparative analysis. One of the few important attempts at sociological generalization about Chinese communities in Southeast Asia was made by Maurice Freedman in an article entitled ‘Immigrants and Associations’, which appeared in this journal in 1960. In this article, Freedman suggested that ‘the associations which in a small-scale and relatively underdeveloped settlement express social, economic and political links in an undifferentiated form, tend, as the scale and complexity of the society increase, to separate into a network of associations which are comparatively specialized in their functions and the kinds of solidarity they express’ (Freedman, 1960: 47 f.). He proposed a continuum of types of overseas Chinese urban communities. At one end stands Kuching, Sarawak, ‘as the model of a simple and relatively small-scale overseas settlement’, while ‘Later Singapore is … the model of the most developed form of immigrant Chinese settlement in Southeast Asia’ (ibid.: 45). Singapore exhibits a great number of associations, based on criteria of recruitment that allow memberships to overlap to a great extent; the urban Chinese community in Sarawak includes fewer associations and consequently less overlap among memberships. Other studies in Southeast Asia suggest that this continuum might be a useful way of looking at the development of Chinese communities.