Development Of Chinese Community Research Articles

Inspiration from New Urbanism to the Development of Chinese Communities

After the World War II, cities expanded rapidly. Some social problems such as traffic jam, air pollution, land waste, inner town’s decline and so on are brought about by the suburb development mode which is represented by low-density single-storey houses and car’s traffic. On the background, New Urbanism which stands for the community living theory that corresponds to suburbanization, rose from the end of 1980s in the U.S., expanded rapidly and formed the design trend of thought which influenced the world. It proposed to renew the tradition of townlets and towns planning before the World War II, modeling communities of compact type possessing towns living atmosphere which substituted suburb’s spread mode. Theory and practice of New Urbanism which receives much attention from the masses, news media and public voice complies with the modern mode which puts emphasis on traditional culture and seeking sustainable development, gets business success and becomes the significant genre in the field of city design and planning in recent years.

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

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.