A Historical and Comparative Survey of The Chinese Presence in The Latin American and Caribbean Region, With A Focus On The Anglophone Caribbean

Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243
brill.com/jco
A Historical and Comparative Survey of the

Chinese Presence in the Latin American
and Caribbean Region, with a Focus on the
Anglophone Caribbean
拉丁美洲和加勒比地区的华人历史和比较研究 —
以英语加勒比地区为例
Cecilia A. Green
塞西莉娅·安妮·格林
Associate Professor, Department of Sociology
The Maxwell School, Syracuse University
cagree01@maxwell.syr.edu
Abstract
In this paper, I first broadly map the historical patterns of Chinese presence in the Latin
America and Caribbean (LAC) region, as a way of distinguishing the primary locations
and forms of incorporation and settlement. This historical context provides a baseline
from which to examine patterns of the new post-1980s instantiations of Chinese pres-
ence in the wider LAC region and Central America and Caribbean (CAC) sub-region,
with particular reference to the English-speaking Caribbean, and, even more specifi-
cally, the Eastern Caribbean group of islands with no historical antecedent of an older
Chinese diaspora. To highlight this specificity, I include findings from preliminary
research conducted in several of these islands, and examine some of the key emerg-
ing configurations and complications of the new dual presence in the Anglophone
Caribbean of the Chinese state and private entrepreneurial immigrant.
* Cecilia A. Green is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at The Maxwell

School, Syracuse University. She writes on race/class/gender/sexuality in Anglophone
Caribbean history, as well as on the political economy of globalization and postcolonialism,
particularly in the Caribbean. She has been doing research on aspects of the “new Chinese
presence in the Eastern Caribbean” since 2012, in collaboration with graduate student, Yan
Liu, who is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on a related topic under her supervision.
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A Historical and Comparative Survey 207
Keywords
Chinese migration – LAC region – English-speaking Caribbean – Huagong and

Huashang – new entrepreneurial migration – Chinese state – development assistance –
infrastructural aid – middleman minority – diplomatic rivalry
摘要
本文首先描绘早期中国移民在拉丁美洲和加勒比 (LAC) 区域的活动模式，包

括初期落脚地点，以及他们融入当地社会和定居的形式。接着，以这个历
史背景为基础，探讨1980年代以后，中国新移民在拉美地区、中美洲和加
勒比 (cAC) 次区域的活动模式。本文聚焦英语加勒比地区，特别是毫无中国
移民历史的东加勒比群岛。本文列举了在这些岛屿进行的初步研究结果，
并探讨中国国有和私人企业移民在英语加勒比地区同时存在的现象，以及
其主要形态与挑战。
关键词
华人移民 – 拉丁美洲和加勒比地区 – 英语加勒比地区 – 华工 – 华商 – 新移民

企业家 – 中国国家 – 开发援助 – 基础设施援助 – 中介人少数族群 – 外交争端
In this paper, I first broadly map the historical patterns of Chinese presence in
the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region, as a way of distinguishing the
primary locations and forms of incorporation and settlement. This histori-
cal context provides a baseline from which to examine patterns of the new
post-1980s instantiations of Chinese presence in the wider LAC region and
Central America and Caribbean (CAC) sub-region, with particular reference
to the English-speaking Caribbean, and, even more specifically, the Eastern
Caribbean group of islands with no historical antecedent of an older Chinese
diaspora. The rest of the paper will be devoted to a discussion of some of the
key emerging configurations and complications of the new dual presence in
the Anglophone Caribbean of Chinese state and private entrepreneurial immi-
grant.1 These two main forms of the new Chinese presence are particularly
marked in those locations without the protracted sedimentation of a more
1 In reference to the migrants, who started arriving in the Eastern Caribbean in significant
numbers in the early 1990s and many of whom are still present, I use the term “migrant” and
“immigrant” interchangeably, and indistinguishably in terms of date of arrival.
Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243 Downloaded from Brill.com08/18/2022 12:34:14AM

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208 Green
complex and heterogeneous ethno-class configuration. To highlight this

specificity, this paper relies on findings from preliminary research — con-
ducted in collaboration with graduate student and research assistant Yan
Liu2 — in Dominica, St Kitts, St Vincent, and Antigua, four member-states of
the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), a sub-set of the larger
Caribbean Community or CARICOM grouping, as well as on secondary sources
from Jamaica and elsewhere.
The Classic Migration Period: Huagong and Huashang
In terms of a mass presence, the history of the Chinese in Latin America and
the Caribbean is closely associated with the colonial-era sugar plantation
and the “coolie trade,” by which Asian indentured workers were brought in to
supplement or replace colonial labor systems based on African slavery. As Hu-
DeHart (2002:70-71) has noted, “The use of indentured labor, based on formal
contracts, seemed to have been a common practice throughout the Chinese
diaspora in the nineteenth century, wherever European plantations thrived.”
Although this pattern defined the prime mode of encounter between the
LAC region and Chinese migrants, there were earlier Chinese merchant pres-
ences in Spanish Mexico and Peru that were offshoots of centuries-old Chinese
mercantile networks in Southeast Asia. Look Lai (2010b:37) has reminded us
that Chinese traders and producers had established a formidable mercantile
and industrial presence in Southeast Asia that “preceded the arrival of the West
in this region by several centuries,” and was “not always formally acknowledged
or encouraged by the imperial authorities.” He points out that the extension of
these networks to Mexico, through a Manila-Acapulco trade connection, in the
16th and 17th centuries has not been much researched. Moreover, there were
independent “free” migrations that occurred in the wake of the indentured
2 The research, titled “The New Chinese Presence in the Caribbean,” began as a small project
with initial funding from the Office of the Dean, Maxwell School, Syracuse University. Field
visits were made by Yan Liu and me or both of us to Dominica in 2012, St Kitts in 2013, and
St Vincent in 2014 and 2015. Some of the demographic information from Antigua is based
on notes kindly shared with me by Liu, who is currently writing a dissertation, under my
supervision, on relations among Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs, local governments, and
PRC (and Taiwan) diplomatic and aid institutions in Antigua and St Kitts. The earlier collab-
orative research was based on participant observation and some semi-structured but mostly
informal interviews with about two dozen Chinese shop-owners and half a dozen workers.
Interviews were also conducted with government, private sector, and other officials, includ-
ing the Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines.

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labor migration, and that, at least in some contexts, effectively re-configured

the image of the (Chinese) “coolie” and re-defined the status of the Chinese as
an ethno-class. Hu-DeHart (2002) has provided an enduring — if somewhat
stylized — framework for distinguishing these class-differentiated migrations
that were separated from each other by chronology and character by referring
to the Huagong (laborer) and Huashang (merchant) complexes.
Nonetheless, with few exceptions, the most widespread origins of the
Chinese presence in the region can be attributed to European colonialism.
Look Lai (2010b:36) has established a basic rule of thumb by pointing to the
“international racial division of labor” that defined global, and largely colonial
or quasi-colonial, migrations of the nineteenth century, which he refers to as
the “classic migration period.” He (2010b:35) has remarked on the “50 million
people leaving Europe for the temperate settlements, and another estimated
50 million people leaving India and China to work in the tropics on planta-
tions, in mines, and in construction projects.” While the latter number might
be an exaggeration and while there was some ethnic overlap “at the edges” of
the international racial division of labor, its dynamic was clear: “the Europeans
went largely to the industrializing and modernizing (and temperate) sector,
and the non-Whites, principally from East and South Asia, went mainly to the
tropical food producing and raw materials sector” (36). Elsewhere, he affirms
that “the paramount pull factor was the expanding labour needs of a globalis-
ing and industrialising Atlantic world-system” (Look Lai 2004:3).
Huagong and Huashang migrations occurred separately in the course of the
second half of the nineteenth century. Chinese contract laborers brought in to
work on Peruvian and Cuban plantations in the nineteenth century comprised
“the earliest system of huagong in the Americas, predating Chinese labor in
the US West which took on a different form” (Hu-DeHart 2002:69; see also
López 2013). Indentured migration, mainly, though not exclusively, from India
and China, became a key component of the labor systems of what is gener-
ally referred to in Caribbean (and Southern USA) historiography as Plantation
America. The major areas of plantation economy were Tropical Asia (compris-
ing the countries of Southeast Asia) and Tropical America (Beckford 1999).
Plantation America was almost universally founded upon Euro-colonial re-
gimes of enslaved African labor and staple export production, its main areas
of geographical concentration comprising the Caribbean Basin, north-east
Brazil and the southern United States. First, not all the plantation regions of
the Americas made use of the “coolie trade,” and, as Hu-DeHart has pointed
out, nineteenth-century Chinese labor migration to the US took on a different
form. Indeed, Look Lai (2010b:43) reminds us that “400,000 Chinese and 7,000
Indians who went to the USA and Canada went under different circumstances,

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210 Green
and were largely self-driven and self-organized, if not quite as ‘free’ as most
of their European counterparts.” He refers to this Asian migration as “a mar-
ginal non-white version of the large transatlantic European movements, mo-
tivated by the same overall expectations if not necessarily destined for the
same fates” (ibid.). (It should be noted that the opposite also occurred: where
certain groups of Europeans, like Madeiran Portuguese indentured workers
in the British West Indies, occasionally replaced unfree non-white labor
within the system.)
Second, while the largest uniquely Chinese deployment of contract workers
in the region went to Cuba and Peru, the British West Indies accounted for an
even larger total contingent of Indian contract workers (whose presence was
minimal in Hispanic America),3 but only about seven per cent of the Chinese
indentured-labor migration to the LAC region. A third point of interest is that
vastly more Chinese contract workers during this period went to Tropical
Asia — where reliance on the African slave trade was rare or non-existent —
than to Tropical America. Look Lai (2010b:43) informs us, for example, that
250,000 Indians and 750,000 Chinese “worked under indenture on the Malayan
sugar and rubber plantations, as well as the tin mines (mainly Chinese).” So
while the coolie system “emerged in direct response to the end of the African
slave trade and of slavery as the preferred system of labor on plantations”
(Hu-DeHart 1994:39), this correlation, while exclusive to the Chinese trade for
Spanish America, was more generally consistent for East Indian workers, who
made up 80 per cent of over half a million post-emancipation labor immigrants
in the British West Indian plantation colonies. Chinese workers also flocked to
new destinations of colonial production like Australia and New Zealand and
the Pacific islands, as well as to the British colonial (ex-slave) sugar planta-
tions of Mauritius and Reunion. Generally speaking, however, although the
indentured labor system accounted for the bulk of Chinese migration to the
LAC region in the second half of the nineteenth century, this system was more
closely correlated with migrants from British India in the context of the global
dispersal and, regionally, Britain’s West Indian colonies (Look Lai 1998:7-8).
The following numerical tables place Chinese indentured migration to the
LAC region in comparative perspective with regard to the Spanish and British
destinations (Table 1) and with regard to other (mostly) indentured migrations
into the British Caribbean only (Table 2). Left out of account are the sometimes
significant (but mostly non-Chinese) contract migrations to the non-Hispanic
and non-British territories (the largest of those, over 100,000 Indians and
3 Hu-DeHart and López, 2008:11.

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Table 1 Chinese Labor Migration to the Latin America/Caribbean Region, mid-1800s-1880s
Territory Numbers
Cuba 142 000 (51%)

Peru 100 000 (36%)
British West Indies 19 000 (7%)
Other (multiple small streams) (about 6% of total)
Total 278 000 (appr.)
Source: Look Lai 1998:6-7.
Table 2 Summary chart of immigrant labor brought to the British West Indies between 1834
and 1917
Territory Europeans Madeirans Africans Chinese Indians

(1834-1841) (1835-1882) (1841-1862) (1852-1893) (1838-1917)
Br. Guiana 30 000 14 000 12 000 238 000

Jamaica 5 000 100 10 000 5 000 37 000
Trinidad 2 000 8 000 3 000 143 900
Grenada 800 1 500 3 200
St Vincent 500 1 000 2 500
St Lucia 200 500 500 4 300
St Kitts 200 500 300
Antigua 2 000 2 000 200
Totals 5 200 36 100 35 500 20 000 430 300
Source: Greenwood, Hamber, and Dyde 2008:104.
Javanese combined, to the Dutch colony of Suriname4). However, these two

tables account for most of the Chinese and the larger proportion of the Indian
indentured-labor streams to the LAC region in the nineteenth-century.
The vast majority of indentured Chinese were contracted to work on sugar
plantations, either alongside enslaved Africans, as in Cuba, to completely re-
place the labor system based on African slavery, after its abolition by newly
4 In 1914, there were 961 Chinese recorded in Suriname (Tjon Sie Fat 2009:52).

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212 Green
independent Peru, or to fill the labor shortages created by slave emancipation,

particularly in the newer British colonies of Guiana and Trinidad, but also in
Jamaica, where a large unappropriated hinterland threatened, as an econom-
ic enclave of independent peasants, to rival the ailing plantations. Look Lai
(1998:15) notes that, already by the early 1870s, the Chinese in Trinidad “were
living beyond the plantations,” quickly gravitating towards retail trading activ-
ity, often after short stints as peasant producers. Brereton confirms this in her
foreword to Look Lai’s 1998 documentary history of the Chinese in the West
Indies, calling the Chinese post-indenture trajectory “unequivocally a success
story,” and summing it up as follows:
Once arrived, the Chinese quickly emerged as a classic “middleman

minority,” a small ethnic group carving out a niche in the shopkeeping
sector. They had virtually abandoned agriculture by the 1890s and nearly
all of the men had become retail traders, jostling with their competitors
(mainly Portuguese in Guyana, Indian in Trinidad).
Brereton in Look Lai 1998: xiii
In this post-indenture period, further migrations of Chinese took three forms:

a small return migration to China, re-migration (mostly from British Guiana)
to new destinations within the circum-Caribbean region, and a new “free
migration” from China, which took place in a period spanning the late 1880s
to the 1920s and 1930s (Look Lai 1998:16). This new free migration was partic-
ularly pertinent for Jamaica, as we shall see. In the meantime, another form
of mobility, reproductive mobility, which took place through inter-marriage
or casual unions with non-Chinese, “diverted” Chinese into mixed-race com-
munities that were likely to identify more as some version of “creole” than as
ethnic Chinese. This is particularly pertinent as so many of the migrants were
men, who had no access to Chinese women.5 According to Look Lai (ibid.), “the
intact China-born element continued to co-exist side by side with their more
westernised kinfolk, both the mixed and the ethnically homogeneous, and this
element was later reinforced by the new migrations which effectively began in
the last decade of the nineteenth century.”
The free migration of Chinese to the LAC region, beginning in the late nine-
teenth century, represented in part a diversion of the migrant circuit away from
the US, which passed the first of several Chinese Exclusion Acts (altogether in
5 Tjon Sie Fat (2009:51-2) speaks about the “dual family system” that sometimes emerged
among Chinese immigrants in Suriname, “in a Chinese hierarchy, with the main wife acting
as head of the family unit in China, and secondary wives/concubines abroad.”

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force for six decades) in 1882. It was this migration which provided the con-
text for Hu-DeHart’s exploration of the distinctive Huashang settlement in
Northern Mexico between the 1890s and 1920s. She notes that these migrants,
ranging between 3,000 and 6,000 in number, shunned low-paying menial jobs
and for the most part “started their own small businesses, or worked as part-
ners and employees of other Chinese in business” (Hu-DeHart 2002:77). In the
Caribbean, a similar mercantile migration of some 6,000 to 7,000 Chinese took
place especially between 1910 and 1940, going mostly to Jamaica and Trinidad,
with British Guiana, the main destination of the indentured stream, lagging in
third place this time around (Look Lai 1998:17). Indeed, Brereton (1998:xii) has
noted that “most of today’s Chinese families in the English-speaking Caribbean
are descended from post-1890 free migrants, not the earlier indentureds.”
This suggests the need for an important and more general qualification
in relation to the origin in plantation-based indentureship of the Chinese
presence in the LAC region. While this origin is historically fundamental, it
is largely irrelevant to the largest increments of Chinese population growth
in the LAC region outside of Peru and Cuba. The largest centers of Chinese
presence after Peru (which maintains its lead) in the LAC region today are in
Venezuela and (for the CAC sub-region) Panama, neither of which was a note-
worthy participant in the colonial-era coolie trade. Venezuela’s Chinese popu-
lation, surpassed today only by Peru’s, did not swell to its current proportions
until very recently, growing from relatively low estimates before the 1980s to
400,000 or more today (Lizcano Fernández 2005:201). This population expe-
rienced a number of growth spurts, beginning in the 1920s with the opening
up of the oilfields, in the 1950s and early 60s, when large numbers fled revolu
tionary governments in China and Cuba, and, most dramatically, as a result
of China’s recent opening up (Tinker Salas 2009). Secondary migration or
re-migration within the Americas has also accounted for a large share of
Venezuela’s Chinese population growth.
Given the size of their current Chinese populations, the tendency to over-
look the somewhat anomalous cases of Venezuela and Panama (and other
similar if less spectacular examples) in historical surveys raises the need for
a historiographical adjustment. Today, Panama has by far the largest and most
diverse ethnic Chinese population (approximately 200,000) in Central America
and the ethnic Chinese share of its national population (approximately
5 per cent) rivals that of Peru. In broad similarity to Venezuela, the history of
the Chinese in Panama is linked only minimally to indentured labor and not at
all to a plantation economy. As Siu (2005: 39) notes, “indentured Chinese labor
was short-lived in Panama.” Instead, the Chinese presence was driven primarily
by the independent migration — and re-migration within the Americas — of

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214 Green
merchants and workers, starting in the late nineteenth century, to centers

of US/foreign investment in railroad and canal construction. In other areas
like Venezuela and northern Mexico, Chinese immigrants were attracted to
mining sites opened up by US and other foreign investors. Spurts in Chinese
migration to Panama had a familiar pattern in this context: triggered by foreign
investment enclaves, the Chinese and Cuban revolutions, re-migration within
the Americas, and China’s more recent opening. The dramatic impact of the
post-1980 opening up is clear. Despite the close and longstanding patron-
age by the Taiwanese government of Chinese Panamanian associational life
(which recently came to an abrupt halt with Panama’s unceremonious ditch-
ing of Taipei, its long-term ally, in favor of Beijing), the majority of Chinese
Panamanians, according to Siu (2005: 46), even those coming from Hong Kong,
“can trace their ancestral lineage to the Canton (Guangdong) region of China.”
During the Noriega regime (1983-89), a large surge in mainland-Chinese migra-
tion into Panama brought mostly Hakkas from the Guangdong region (ibid.:
41). The prominence of Hakkas among immigrants from China and Hong Kong
is also particularly evident in Jamaica and Suriname among Caribbean coun-
tries (Ho 1989; Tjon Sie Fat 2009).
Despite the small numbers involved, the history of Chinese immigration
to the English-speaking Caribbean is well-served by Hu-DeHart’s Huagong/
Huashang bifurcated (LAC) historical model, accommodating, as it does, both
well-defined indentured labor and post-indenture free migrations. With regard
to the smaller territories that were not part of this historical framework, the
new (private) Chinese migration is more exclusively defined by entrepreneur-
ial and contemporary-global reference-points.
Christine Ho (1989) has provided a nuanced comparative-historical account
of the Chinese in the three principal Anglophone Caribbean destinations of
British Guiana, Jamaica, and Trinidad. Her approach has been to examine
comparative levels of creolization (cultural and racial hybridization) among
Chinese in the three territories. Due to remigrations in the post-indenture peri-
od, Jamaica displaced British Guiana as the most important site of Chinese set-
tlement in the Anglophone Caribbean, second only to Cuba in the Caribbean as
a whole. The “creole” societies into which the Chinese were incorporated were
dominated either by a largely African-descended population, as in Jamaica, or
by a more or less balanced combination of Indians and Africans, as in the “plu-
ral societies” of Trinidad and Guyana (previously British Guiana). Ho found a
widespread pattern of cultural and racial creolization or mixing, particularly
in the latter two territories, co-existing with the emergence and intensification
of a distinct Chinese-Caribbean middleman business role. The case of Jamaica
stood out, however, given the unusual level of cohesion achieved as a result of

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the tightly networked chain migration based on Hakka (as distinct from
majority-Cantonese)6 ethnicity and kinship and explicitly entrepreneurial
goals. Continued ties with China enabled the Jamaican Chinese to use it as
a source of labor, merchandise, and capital, much as their twenty-first cen-
tury successors do today. Moreover, they replicated social institutions based
on ethnic and kinship traditions (including secret societies or tongs, but also
more modern ethnically exclusive associations), through which they “created
a bounded social system.” This system also served to keep out racially mixed
descendants, especially daughters, who “were usually incorporated into their
mothers’ kin group” (Ho 1989:15, 16). One other key feature was the fact that
the Chinese in Jamaica did not face the fierce competition from other “middle-
man” groups, like the Portuguese and Indians, encountered by their counter-
parts in Guyana and Trinidad. Bias against “shopkeeper” occupations on the
part of the white upper class and brown professional class in Jamaica left
the field wide open to the incoming entrepreneurial Chinese immigrants.
Finally, Ho attributes the difference in part to the size and urban concentra-
tion of the Jamaican Chinese population. In 1943, this population “was about
four times that of Guyana in 1946 and exceeded that of Trinidad in 1946 by
more than four thousand” (ibid.: 22). A larger, more spatially and strategically
concentrated, and more culturally homogeneous population, together with a
monopoly over the retail trade, appears to have facilitated the consolidation
of a distinctive Chinese Jamaican ethnic/economic identity. Violent eruptions
of anti-Chinese sentiment, which (within the Caribbean) have occurred only
in Jamaica (in 1918, 1938, and 1965), have been attributed to a combination of
black economic disenfranchisement, relative Chinese domination of the retail
sector, and their lower levels of assimilation or “creolization” (1989:15). These
insights may provide important lessons when considering contemporary atti-
tudes to the new and spreading Chinese merchant presence in the Caribbean.
During the 1980s, there was a third migration of Hong Kong and PRC
Chinese — prompted by the impending transfer of Hong Kong to the PRC —
to several circum-Caribbean areas of post-Plantation America (including
Suriname, Jamaica, and Trinidad), about which little has been written. This
1978-1990 migration emanated mostly from the Hong Kong branches of the
Hakka people and included some PRC nationals. The surge in migration from
the PRC, starting around 1990, resulted from the lifting of emigration controls
6 About 96 per cent of the nineteenth-century Chinese migrants to the Americas came from
one province in China, Guangdong, and most were men. Only 62 women went to Cuba dur-
ing the entire 1847-1874 migration period, and a mere six to Peru, while the proportions for
the non-Latin Caribbean amounted to about 14.7 per cent (Look Lai 1998:8).

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216 Green
by the Chinese state (as well as from the 1989 Tian’anmen Square Massacre),
and is mainly responsible for the “new Chinese presence” discussed in the fol-
lowing section. These four distinct migration streams (indentured migration,
the post-indentureship free migration, the post-1978 migration of mainly Hong
Kong and some PRC Chinese, and the ongoing post-1989 migration from
the PRC) have been documented in the first book-length study focusing on the
new PRC immigrants in the region, written on Suriname by Paul B. Tjon Sie Fat
(2009; also 2013). A broadly similar chronology, with different emphases, has
been identified by Siu (2005) for Panama.
The New Chinese Presence in the Caribbean: Emerging Aspects
Putting the New Relationship in Context

In looking at Chinese global migrations, a number of key factors emerge as
independently and intersectionally determinative: (1) global or world systems
and the fueling of mass migration through the demand for labor and goods;
(2) the positionality and role of the Chinese state; (3) a longue-durée tradition
of independent, transnational, entrepreneurial ethnic-Chinese activity and
networks (see Kwee 2013). Chinese migration fueled by mass demands for labor
(Huagong) or goods (Huashang) has a more particular resonance in countries
of the Global South than in those of the Global North, where student and
skilled or professional migrant circuits occupy a vastly more prominent and
expanding component. Huiyao Wang, a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy
School, noted in a 2014 presentation that “a remarkable feature of Chinese emi-
gration has been the growth of skilled migrants, including students-turned-
migrants, emigrating professionals, academics and chain migrants.” While he
concedes that “student migrants and other diplomats (such as journalists)”
are also increasing in the case of Africa, topping the list for that continent are
“temporary labor migrants” and “independent entrepreneurial migrants.” This
is the pattern for the Caribbean as well, as we shall see below.
The operation of the three variables mentioned above and their mode of
intersection have obviously shifted through time. Taking the long view of the
modern world, defined at its beginnings by the waning of Chinese dynastic
power and the rise of the West, one can demarcate four periods over the last
five centuries: (a) the immediate pre-colonial period (overlapping with the
early colonial period), (b) the colonial period, characterized by China’s sub-
ordination in the world economy and the mass supply of semi-voluntary
Chinese labor to various locations in Plantation America (and elsewhere in
the European-dominated world), but also featuring, between 1870 and 1930,
subsequent streams of free migrants or Huashang to select LAC locations;

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(c) the post-revolution period of Chinese communist isolationism and limited

engagement (during which migration mainly from Taiwan and Hong Kong
continued in delimited forms), (d) starting in the late 1980s, the “rise of China,”
signaled by the re-joining and new positioning of China in the world system,
and featuring an unparalleled “dual” thrust into countries of the Global South,
in the form of both state-based operations and new private migrant flows,
featuring individual entrepreneurial aspirants.
Today, therefore, the renewed flow of Chinese into the Caribbean region
is taking place under the changed circumstances of China’s rise in the global
economy and polity, and its autonomous and proactive state-to-state donor
relationship with the now constitutionally independent but still economically
dependent micro-states of the English-speaking Caribbean. The new Chinese
presence in the Caribbean, as elsewhere in the Global South, takes two main
forms: the Chinese state — as diplomatic ally, donor/development agent, and
(to variable degrees) direct purveyor, through state-owned enterprises (SOEs),
of investment and trade — and the private entrepreneurial immigrant (with
the associated coterie of family members and workers). Most contemporary
migration into the region is directly related to these two forms, and thus tends
to be of two main types: state-sponsored sojourners (professionals and labor-
ers) — associated with diplomatic and ongoing development (e.g., agricultur-
al) missions, large-scale infrastructural donor projects, and SOE investments
and operations — and private entrepreneurial immigrants, together with their
privately sponsored and more peripatetic and transient workers. As in Africa,
large-scale “proletarian” in-migrations tend to be state-sponsored, short-term,
and project-specific, given the well-known practice by the Chinese state (and
Chinese capital) of supplying its own home-contracted workforce for the large
infrastructural and other donor (or contract) projects it undertakes all over the
Global South. In many other parts of the world, particularly in the countries
of the Global North and Southeast Asia (but also including an “in-transit” flow
through Africa and parts of the LAC region), the Chinese diaspora encompass-
es a rather vast, relatively autonomous “transnational ethnic labour market,”
which essentially comprises a proletarian migrant circuit channeled almost
exclusively through the ethnic entrepreneurial niche (Ma Mung 2008:99). Ma
Mung sees this migration as part of “a transnational ethnic labor market which
gives rise to a form of diaspora organization specific to the Chinese overseas”
(101). Despite some evidence of smuggling rings using various locations in
the Caribbean Basin as a transit point,7 the Anglophone Caribbean is not a
7 Large groups of mostly female Chinese workers were sometimes brought in to work in
garment factories in export-processing (or free trade) zones in Jamaica and the Eastern
Caribbean during the 1980s and 1990s, and it appears that some of them stayed, at least in the

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218 Green
significant site of an independent “transnational ethnic labor market,” or, for

that matter, of “ungrounded empires” of ethnic-Chinese capitalism and related
professional networks (Ong and Nonini 1997). While this subject cannot be dis-
cussed at any length here, it is important to mention that the English-speaking
Caribbean has, to a disproportionate extent, been more significant as a con-
venient node in mass in-transit (or “offshore”) flows of Chinese capital than
of (trafficked) persons. Two important instruments of such flows have been
offshore financial centers or OFCs (especially in the Cayman Islands and the
British Virgin Islands) and, less spectacularly, the revenue-generating citizen-
ship by investment programs or CIPs instituted by five OECS governments.8
Some Comparative Considerations vis-à-vis the Wider LAC Region

In seeking to distinguish the differentia specifica of the Chinese presence in the
LAC region, one notes at least three key points of difference, though there are
others. One is the qualitatively different scope of state engagement in different
parts of the region; the second is the diplomatic divide in the region between
states aligned with Beijing and those still formally aligned with Taipei; and a
third is the difference, in the Caribbean in particular, between those states with
an already existing Chinese diaspora and those for which the Chinese presence
is entirely new, certainly in a substantive sense. I briefly consider these points
of difference in turn.
case of Jamaica, at the end of their contracts. Also, see Tjon Sie Fat’s (2009:188-200) discus-
sion of illegal migration or smuggling of “passport Chinese” to and through Suriname. On
the whole, however, the Caribbean does not appear to be a major transit point for “human
trafficking” involving Chinese.
8 The massive Chinese foreign direct investments in and usage of offshore financial centers
(OFCs) in the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands (especially up to 2008 when FDI
regulations changed in China) has been explored by Vlcek (2010, 2014) and Sutherland and
Matthews (2009). “Offshore activities” also include the controversial Economic Citizenship
(ECP) or Citizenship by Investment Programs (CIP) now run by five of the six independent
OECS countries as revenue-generating ventures. These programs, sometimes dismissed deri-
sively as mere passport-selling scams, typically confer citizenship in exchange for a large cash
fee or real estate investment. They continue to be mired in controversy, with many wealthy
Chinese, Russians, and Middle Easterners taking advantage of their lack of residency require-
ments and mostly attracted to the access gained to Global North destinations. Indeed, in
our own research, we found that few of the new Chinese SMEs in the Eastern Caribbean
had come in through these programs, although the numbers of resident “economic citizens”
have increased. Recently, there have been a number of controversies involving the sale of
passports to Iranian and Chinese nationals wanted for criminal activities by their own gov-
ernments, but the facts have often been in dispute.

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Beyond China’s dual role as state player and sender/source of private entre-
preneurial and other migrants, the particular circumstances of Chinese state
operations differ across the region. Thus, there is a relative distinction between
the role of the Chinese state as agent of diplomacy and sponsored development
and its role as state-capitalist purveyor of investment and trade. These roles
map unevenly onto the sub-regional demarcations of South America, Central
America, and the Caribbean. Richard Bernal, for example, has taken pains
to elaborate upon the point that, in contrast to its large-scale trade with and
related investment in South American countries, “[c]apital flows from China to
countries in the Caribbean have so far largely been composed of development
aid in the form of loans to fund infrastructure projects, built by Chinese enter-
prises” (Bernal, 2016:4). Large-scale investments in agricultural and extractive
resource industries for export to the Chinese market are restricted to the large
Latin American countries of Brazil, Chile, Peru, and Argentina (making China
their largest or second-largest export partner), and are not generally significant
for the Caribbean, despite some exceptions. McElroy and Bai (2008:228) note
that “[b]y Latin American standards, the PRC’s trade with the island Caribbean
is modest, accounting for less than 10% of the LAC total with the lion’s share
going to the large mineral exporters, Trinidad, Jamaica and Cuba, which supply
half of PRC sugar and a third of PRC nickel imports.”9 Investment in the tourist
sector is also growing in significance.
On the whole, however, “China’s FDI in the Caribbean is very small, both
as a share of China’s FDI and as a share of the total stock of FDI into the
Caribbean,” amounting to US$604.45 million in 2013 (not including the US$2.6
billion port facility in Freeport, Bahamas), with US$111.3 million and US$135.1
million going to Cuba and Guyana, the largest recipients, respectively (Bernal
2016:8, 7-9). The Caribbean has a spiraling trade deficit with China, while the
South American countries’ resource exports to China have sustained a more
balanced trade profile, and, in some cases, a trade surplus,10 albeit one which is
badly skewed towards primary exports and which will ultimately favor China’s
manufactures. Not only do the EU and the US remain the most important
(though relatively — and, in some instances, rapidly — declining) recipients
of Anglophone Caribbean exports, but the sub-region’s economic relation-
ship to China is mainly as an importer of aid/concessionary capital and cheap
9 A recent Aljazeera America on-line article roughly confirms this breakdown, putting
Chinese investment, over the ten years since 2005, at $115.9 billion in South America and
at $11.9 billion in the CAC sub-region (Chan 2015).
10 Brazil, Peru, and Chile (but not Argentina) had trade surpluses of varying sizes with China
in 2016. See the website http://www.tradingeconomics.com.

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220 Green
consumer goods. Bernal (2015:1414) notes that this sets the Caribbean apart,
not just from Latin America, but also from “Africa and developing countries
in Asia, where [exports to China] account for 10.5 per cent and 11.5 per cent,
respectively.” Indeed, there are persistent cries that China is adding to the
severe indebtedness of the CARICOM countries.
Second, the Central America and Caribbean (CAC) sub-region is uniquely
significant as one of the last remaining theaters of diplomatic rivalry between
the PRC and Taiwan (ROC). Before Panama suddenly (if not unexpectedly)
shifted to the PRC during the preparation of this paper, twelve of the 21 states
which still recognized Taipei over Beijing were in the LAC region, with all but
one (Paraguay) concentrated in the CAC sub-region. Even after the succession
of regional defections from the Taiwan camp that took place in the first decade of
the 21st century11 (and Panama’s recent switch), the region still accounts for
just over one-half of Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic alliances worldwide. In
addition to five Central American states, two of the largest island-states, the
Dominican Republic and Haiti, and three small English-speaking island-states
remain within Taiwan’s diplomatic fold, placing that group just one unit shy
of the group aligned with China in the CAC sub-region (but dwarfed by PRC
allies in the wider LAC region). Indeed, the six independent micro-states that
make up the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) are evenly split
between the PRC and Taiwan in terms of diplomatic ties.
The years between 2001 and 2008 comprised the period of the most intense
diplomatic rivalry, noted by Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves12 of St Vincent
and the Grenadines in a 2014 interview as a golden period of Taiwan’s gener-
osity towards his island-state.13 While the countries of Latin America and the
Caribbean were independently attractive to China, given its larger global tra-
jectory, the urgency of gaining a foothold was particularly strong because of
11 For an example of a particularly contentious switch, see Grenade (2013).

12 Prime Minister Gonsalves recently defended with great vigor his decision to “maintain
and deepen” diplomatic relations with Taiwan in a 2016 white paper.
13 This period, during which Taiwan’s more nationalist party, the Democratic Progressive
Party (DPP), was in power, was followed by a thaw in China-Taiwan relations with the
election of the Kuomintang party (KMT), a party more inclined to compromise on China’s
“One China” policy. Indeed, evidence from Wikileaks cables, widely reported in the
media, indicated that, from 2008 and 2009, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Dominican Republic,
and Panama had all expressed interest in recognizing Beijing instead of Taipei, but the
requests were denied by Beijing as a gesture of goodwill amid the “diplomatic truce.” In
2016, the DPP was re-elected to office, perhaps prompting an end to China’s self-imposed
reticence regarding diplomatic poaching.

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the need to displace Taiwan from its strongest regional base in terms of glob-
al diplomatic ties. As one author put it before the recent Panama defection,
the Central American and Caribbean Zone “is the only region in the world
where the Republic of China (Taiwan or Chinese Taipei) has more embassies
than China, raising diplomatic rivalries to a level not seen anywhere else”
(Navejas 2013:148). According to a number of observers, the loss of Panama,
previously Taiwan’s most strategically valuable global ally, is set to generate
a domino effect.
Lack of formal diplomatic status in some Caribbean countries has not
proved a major deterrent to either Chinese state-economic outreach or the
private Chinese migrants, who have settled and do business everywhere in
the Caribbean. In a recently published book, Ellis (2014:73-77) has documented
major, sometimes massive, infrastructural projects undertaken by Chinese
SOEs in Nicaragua, Panama, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize, all current or
previous Taiwanese allies. Despite its predominant diplomatic alignment,
Central America’s trade with China has far outpaced that with Taiwan, a pat-
tern increasingly seen among Taiwan’s remaining allies (China and Latin
America 2014, on-line). China has bypassed the lack of diplomatic relations
in Central America by sending trade missions, establishing trade offices,
sponsoring friendship associations with China, and striking, or attempting to
strike, far-reaching trade deals with the various countries. The modus vivendi
between China’s growing economic role and Taiwan’s diplomatic partnership
is worthy of further research, as China is not only one of the biggest sources of
imported manufactures but an increasingly critical source of foreign direct in-
vestment in these countries. China’s economic prominence in Panama’s Canal
Zone had been evident for some time.
Closer to home, the China-Caribbean Joint Business Council, the state-led
institutional vehicle for fostering business cooperation with the countries of
the region, includes the Dominican Republic and Haiti, Taiwan’s two biggest
diplomatic allies in the insular Caribbean (Bernal 2015:1412). Also, the vast
majority of recent ethnic-Chinese entrepreneurial immigrants in Taiwan-allied
CAC countries are from the PRC. Moreover, within CARICOM, state-owned or
semi-private Chinese firms are no longer limited to operating under the au-
thority of state donor projects and can bid on Caribbean contracts on their
own account. As Bernal (2015:1422) explains, “Chinese firms initially made
their entry based on tied aid from the government of China but have now start-
ed to win contracts through competitive bidding.” Indeed, because of China’s
(non-borrower) membership of the Caribbean Development Bank, their ac-
tivities easily cross diplomatic lines within the Caribbean sub-region when
they win tenders, on equal terms with local/regional companies, through that

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222 Green
institutional context.14 However, it remains true that those countries that have
accepted the “One China” policy are the chief recipients of Chinese aid, while
the others continue to rely on what appears to be less spectacular Taiwanese
support.
The third distinction of note is that between territories with a historical
Chinese diaspora and those without such a legacy. This distinction is exacer-
bated somewhat by an ethnic compositional divide between the preeminently
“plural” societies (Guyana, Trinidad, and, to some extent, Belize)15 and those
which are ninety per cent or more dominated by Afro-Caribbean ethnic popu-
lations. The implications for the historical Chinese middleman position in the
case of Jamaica has been noted previously. Thus, the pre-existence (or not)
of an ethnic-Chinese community bears directly on the investigation into the
contemporary Chinese flow, though its precise significance at the Chinese end
of things has not yet been researched (except by Tjon Sie Fat 2009 in the case of
the Dutch-speaking country of Suriname). For English-speaking Caribbean
territories other than Jamaica, Guyana, and Trinidad, the “new Chinese pres-
ence” is indeed new and unprecedented, since, as demonstrated in Table 2
above, these territories were not (or were insignificant) destinations for the
earlier Chinese indentured-labor and “free” migrations. This is particularly true
of the OECS sub-group of smaller and “less developed” CARICOM islands. The
Eastern Caribbean island of Dominica16 (pop. 73,000), for example, has a small
but unique indigenous ethnic/territorial enclave in the interior and, indeed,
a tiny, but economically prominent Syrian/Lebanese17 “middleman minority”
of long standing. However, as one of the most marginal sugar plantation colo-
nies, it was not the recipient of any post-emancipation indentureds, Indian or
Chinese (indicated by its exclusion from Table 2 above). As such, it represented
virgin territory for the new Chinese migrants. In a 2012 interview, a Chinese
embassy staff member offered the opinion that his entrepreneurial country-
men were attracted to Dominica because of an abundance of economic op-
portunities, and that they had the advantage of being able to offer goods at
significantly lower prices than the traditional Syrian/Lebanese merchants,
14 Interview with Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St Vincent & the Grenadines,
November 2014.
15 Suriname in the Dutch Caribbean would also fit into this category.
16 Dominicans’ lack of exposure to urban ethnic pluralism might well be implicated in the
experience reported by my Chinese graduate assistant of more ethnic name-calling in the
streets there than at other research sites.
17 Although there may be some genuine Syrians in their midst, most Middle Eastern mer-
chants in the Caribbean, generally referred to as “Syrians,” are in fact of Lebanese origin.

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who had exercised a monopoly in the market and whose overpriced merchan-
dise was beyond the purchasing power of poorer Dominicans. This raised
direct questions about the potential impact of the new Chinese presence on
this older “middleman minority” group.
Continuing with the example of Dominica, which switched sides from
Taipei to Beijing in 2004, and since then has been the recipient of significant
Chinese infrastructural aid, my own research has revealed that it has already
become the center of a small re-migration of Chinese immigrants to North
America and to other OECS islands (notably St Vincent & the Grenadines),
often armed with Dominican passports and hence OECS-wide access.18 The
Chinese have built micro-highways, a sports stadium, a new state house, and
a state college, and have begun a $40 million upgrade of the main hospital.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Chinese are singlehandedly
re-shaping the landscape of an island that has long been seen as lagging
behind the rest of the Caribbean in terms of infrastructural amenities. Indeed,
with the help of the Chinese, Dominica appears to be playing catch-up.
Key Parameters of the New Presence in the Caribbean

The list of projects funded (by outright grants or soft loans or a combination
of the two) and built by the Chinese state in the Caribbean in the last fifteen to
twenty years includes roads, sports stadiums, deepwater port and airport facili-
ties, state colleges, cultural and convention centers, hospitals, housing develop-
ments, power plants, and shipyards. Brought in to work on the engineering and
construction of these projects and other large Chinese-financed commercial
ventures like luxury hotel resorts, tens of thousands (all told) of male Chinese
workers have sojourned in various parts of the Caribbean in the last fifteen to
twenty years, typically housed in makeshift labor encampments for the entire
duration of the projects, which sometimes last years. Ellis (2014:182) dramatizes
this phenomenon, no doubt with some exaggeration, by reporting the extreme
case of Chinese workers brought into Suriname with Chinese construction
projects, which “helped to swell the Chinese population there to almost 40,000
by 2011, 10 per cent of all persons in the country.” Certainly, imported Chinese
workforces of several hundreds, laboring on large-scale infrastructural proj-
ects in small islands of fewer than 100,000 persons, like the Eastern Caribbean
island of Dominica, can represent quite a novelty and visual spectacle, having
no parallel in living memory. Anger at the lack of opportunity for employment
18 But not access to Canada, as a group of Chinese attempting to enter Canada with
Dominican passports discovered (St Vincent Interviews, 2015). There has been freedom
of movement within the OECS since June 2013.

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224 Green
of locals on these projects has sometimes sparked protests of various kinds

against local governments and the Chinese authorities. But, as I have noted
elsewhere (Green 2015:105), the Chinese appear to have perfected the art of
parlaying a “speedy delivery of prestigious turnkey and essential development
projects” into a grudging popular acceptance for the “relative isolation of these
projects from domestic networks of employment, skills, and entrepreneurship
during the period of construction,” especially given the much slower delivery
record of western-financed projects and western or CARICOM contractors (all
of which use local labor).
The impact of the immigrant merchants has also been dramatic, despite
small overall figures (especially in the new destinations). The numbers of new
(post-1989) Chinese immigrants in the English-speaking Caribbean as a whole
are unknown, though one might speculate that those who have migrated to
Trinidad and Jamaica in particular are numbered in at least the low thousands.
It is not clear that the numbers are quite that high, given fairly modest cen-
sus figures. In the territories with an older Chinese diaspora, two things are
evident: (1) there has been a significant post-independence exodus of Caribbean
Chinese to North American and other destinations, reducing their numbers
considerably before significant new post-1980s immigration occurred; and
(2) new immigrations, from Hong Kong and China, have considerably diversi-
fied and transformed the Old Chinese communities. As a qualifier, it is impor-
tant to note that the decrease in population has also come from racial mixing,
causing a drop-off in the numbers identifying as Chinese. López (2010: 215)
has noted for Cuba, for example, that “the relatively low numbers of Chinese
women … led to a ‘mixed’ community by the mid-20th century.” Three con-
siderations, therefore, make it difficult to ascertain numbers attributable to
the new migration (particularly between censuses): (1) attrition of the Old
Chinese population by migration and (2) re-identification through racial mix-
ing, and (3) a high turnover (estimated at about thirty per cent in the Eastern
Caribbean) among the new immigrants. These help explain the modest figures
from 2011 censuses (the latest available).
Bryan (2004:24) reported that there were 11,710 Chinese in Jamaica in 1970,
but a massive exodus in reaction to the leftist government of Michael Manley
reduced that number to 5,320 in the ensuing decade. There was a third mi-
gration of ethnic Chinese (both workers and traders) to Jamaica from Hong
Kong and the PRC during the 1980s, bringing about a notable distinction
between Old Chinese and New Chinese (Shibata 2005). If the experience docu-
mented by Tjon Sie Fat (2009, 2013) for Suriname is any indication, the earlier
“New Chinese” phenomenon has been further transformed by substantial re-
inforcements from the PRC beginning in the 1990s. However, the extent of this

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is not clear, since the self-identified Chinese population registered by the 2011
Jamaican census comprised 5,223 persons. One source of information has been
a University of the West Indies doctoral dissertation by Win Yin Tsang, which
was based on a sample of 66 immigrant businesses owned by 33 Chinese immi-
grant entrepreneurs (with 41 of the 66 still operating in 2014). The majority of
research subjects were first-generation immigrants and included persons from
Hong Kong from the 1990s and from the PRC since 2000 (Tsang 2014:99-100).
Among the phenomena noted by Tsang is evidence from the 1980s of women
coming as part of “arranged marriages” (167), of the increased linguistic, cul-
tural, and financial-status diversity of Jamaica’s Chinese population (171), and
of an intra-regional migration from Suriname and Guyana, facilitated by the
CARICOM Single Market & Economy (170). One might assume that, in the
context of Jamaica’s development as a hub for China’s economic activity in
the region, the Chinese population there will expand and become even more
diverse.
Trinidad also experienced a post-independence decline in the self-identi-
fied Chinese population, numbers plunging from 8,361 in 1960 to 3,800 in 2000.19
In 2011, when the Chinese population of Trinidad & Tobago was registered at
4,003 persons,20 a newspaper report spoke of a “new wave of Chinese immigra-
tion … sweeping Trinidad and Tobago, triggering a baby boom and unearth-
ing a ring of exploitation which appear to go unnoticed by the authorities”
(Sookraj 2011). Again, this kind of anecdotal evidence of an influx of new im-
migrants awaits serious academic investigation.
The OECS islands share with Suriname and other regional destinations the
fact that “the bulk of Chinese migration … basically remains sponsored migra-
tion based on privately owned businesses of ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs”
(Tjon Sie Fat 2009:122). Despite some divergence at the margins, the Huashang
basis of the new migration is unmistakable, complete with the reliance on
kinship and informal labor networks originating in China. Most of the expan-
sion can be accounted for by chain migration, as my graduate assistant, Yan
Liu, and I discovered in interviews with shopkeepers in the Eastern Caribbean
(Green 2014, 2015). Also, most of the worker migrants are privately sponsored
and enter in small numbers into a pre-arranged private entrepreneurial niche,
within which they are tightly controlled. On the whole, workers’ lives are inex-
tricably tied to their employers’ enterprises, with very little access to indepen-
dent space or time.
19 http://broom02.revolvy.com/main/index.php?s=Chinese%20Trinidadian%20and%20
Tobagonian&item_type=topic.
20 Government of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago 2011.

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226 Green
Total numbers of Chinese immigrants for the OECS islands are estimated
to range (individually) from fewer than one hundred to about three hundred.
Precise figures are not always available, but estimates do exist. For example,
Antigua’s 2011 census enumerated the presence of 143 Chinese residents, in-
cluding children; however, this number has probably increased by at least fifty
per cent. Private sector representatives interviewed in Dominica in 2012 men-
tioned that they had conducted an informal survey which revealed 48 Chinese
establishments in the main town of Roseau (Dominica interviews, 2012). In
a July 15, 2013, posting on Sina Weibo,21 the Chinese Embassy of Dominica
released figures which placed the precise number of Chinese resident in
Dominica at 142: 98 overseas Chinese (or Chinese nationals), 41 ethnic Chinese
without Chinese citizenship, and 3 Taiwanese (retrieved by Yan Liu from
http://e.weibo.com). According to the release, these figures represented 29
Chinese households running 42 shops and enterprises, and employing 115 local
people. Given the small size of the private sector and its concentration in the
main town of Roseau (pop. 16,500), these numbers, which have subsequently
grown, represent a significant presence. An official list obtained from the gov-
ernment of St Vincent and the Grenadines (affiliated with Taiwan) shows 34
(private-sector) work permits granted to ethnic Chinese from 2011-2013, 31 of
them to mainland Chinese. In the small OECS islands in particular, because
of the specialized niche occupied by new migrants and the “small pond”
into which they have migrated (see Lin 2014), these small numbers can have
socially transformative rippling effects.
The “shopkeeper” or “middleman minority” image of the Chinese in the
CAC region may be the subject of negative and racialized stereotypes, but it is
not disconnected from reality. Siu (2005: 50) has noted with regard to Panama,
with its relatively large and diverse Chinese population, that “the most visible
occupation among ethnic Chinese is small (family) business ownership,” and
that “virtually every convenience store in Panama is owned and run by ethnic
Chinese.” This kind of generalization, however, requires a number of qualifica-
tions with regard to both Panama and the English-speaking Caribbean. While
the presence of ethnic Chinese in the OECS islands is practically synonymous
with the ethnic niche economy comprised of SME businesses, this is obviously
not the case in the old Chinese diasporas of Jamaica and Trinidad, where the
class structure among Chinese has diversified, mostly upwards and outwards
(far less so downwards). (Also, in ethnically diverse class communities or nich-
es, the Chinese stand out less.) The new immigration, however, has replicated
21 Sina Weibo has been described as a Chinese hybrid of Twitter and Facebook.

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and rejuvenated old patterns, as seen in a series of Jamaican newspaper ar-

ticles discussed later in this paper.
The late Jamaican scholar, Carl Stone (1991: 243), in a conceptually expansive
piece entitled “Race and Economic Power in Jamaica,” placed Jamaica more
broadly within a group of Third World countries where “the distribution of
power, rewards and opportunities between big corporations, petty capitalists
and workers is based largely on ethnicity, which was built into the very fabric
of the colonial ethno-class structures.” These societies “were stratified sharply
between powerful Whites who controlled plantations and big corporations, an
intermediary grouping of minority ethnic groups who dominated petty capi-
talist and small entrepreneurial sectors, and the majority ethnic group [Blacks
in the case of Jamaica] that comprised most of the wage labour force and most
of the small peasant farmers” (244-5). A shift occurred with political indepen-
dence, when most of the new economic power was appropriated by (urban-
based) intermediary or minority ethnic groupings (Jews, Lebanese, Browns,
and Chinese). According to Stone, the Chinese in Jamaica emerged from their
intermediary role, where they, along with Browns, had lagged behind the
Lebanese and Jews, to ultimately join these groups in “reconstitut[ing] a
new and powerful capitalism which included the Whites but eliminated the
latter’s ascendancy and dominance” (251). Stone saw the Chinese (though still
secondary to Whites, Jews, and Lebanese) as one of the groups that had been
pushed “upwards and out of the intermediary grouping into becoming part of
the dominant ethnic grouping in the Jamaican economy” (253). By the 1980s,
despite (ultimately unsuccessful) politically facilitated attempts at inroads by
Blacks, “the Browns, Whites, Jews, Lebanese and Chinese [were] evolving into
a single unified ethnic minority of powerful families controlling the country’s
corporate sector” (262).
Whatever one’s assessment of the finer points of Stone’s ethno-class
paradigm, it clearly is not representative of the new entrepreneurial
immigrants in the Eastern Caribbean or even in Jamaica itself, where many
of the newcomers are small merchants who avoid the larger and more estab-
lished Kingston market and who bear a striking resemblance to their Eastern
Caribbean counterparts profiled below. Whether or not they are destined to
join their co-ethnics in an upward trajectory, their presence has considerably
diversified the sub-ethnic and class base of the Jamaican Chinese popula-
tion (Shibata 2005). At the same time, it should be noted that larger-scale
Chinese capital, separate from “developmental” state-assisted/SOE activity,
is beginning to be evident in the Eastern Caribbean, some of it as a condition
of “economic citizenship.”

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228 Green
In the Eastern Caribbean, the vast majority of contemporary Chinese im-

migrants occupy an ethnic entrepreneurial niche, either as (SME) owners or as
workers. (It is important to note that in our research we also came across the
odd Chinese bus or taxi driver.) Some immigrants, particularly in the higher-
income Leeward islands of St Kitts and Antigua, are re-migrants from or have
roots in older Caribbean Chinese communities, but most are newcomers from
China. And while the largest number come from traditional migrant-sending
coastal areas, the total picture is much more mixed (with everyday Mandarin
more evident in some islands, like Dominica, than others). Guangdong is the
most common province of origin for (mostly Cantonese-speaking) immi-
grants in St Kitts and Antigua; however, certain idiosyncrasies characterize
each island, probably as a result of chain migration. A majority of Chinese
immigrants in St Kitts, for example, are specifically from Jiangmen prefecture
in Guangdong, while in Antigua they are from multiple prefectures. Another
popular province of origin is Fujian, and smaller numbers come from Zhejiang,
Henan, Jiangsu, Hunan, Anhui, and Hubei. In Dominica, the immigrants most-
ly hail from four core provinces: Guangdong, Fujian, Jiangsu, and Shandong.
With many Dominican passport-holders now residing and doing business in St
Vincent (allied with Taiwan), the origins there are similar.
In St Kitts, where many of the Chinese entrepreneurs have ties of business
and kinship to the nearby Dutch island-territory of St Maarten (and appear to
be of older vintage than other Eastern Caribbean groups), the most common
businesses are supermarkets and restaurants, a deviation from the prevail-
ing pattern of variety stores and restaurants. Interestingly, Tjon Sie Fat has
pointed out that the Old and New Chinese in Suriname occupy different mar-
ket niches, with the older group embracing a “supermarket” ethnic-economy
model, while the newcomers are typically in the (non-food) “baihuo business,”
roughly translated as “variety stores.” According to him, “what made [the new-
comers] absolutely ‘new’ to the general (non-Chinese) public was their shops
which sold an enormous variety of PRC-made commodities for very low prices”
(Tjon Sie Fat 2009:123). In this system, the merchants purchase a “wide vari-
ety of cheap goods of uneven quality” in China and ship them in containers
to the Caribbean, where they often engage in under-invoicing of the contain-
ers to evade import duties and taxes, and in order to bring the goods to the
market as cheaply as possible (127). The profit margins are reportedly higher
than in the supermarket business (and in the restaurant business, as we were
told in Dominica), causing resentment among Old Chinese merchants in
Suriname (129).
The densely stocked variety store (“baihuo”) — featuring shelves and dis-
play racks crammed with a wide assortment of clothing and other wearable

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and personal items, as well as cheap household and electronic goods, all im-
ported from China — has become a hallmark of the new Chinese presence. In
some of the islands, particularly St Vincent, small eateries catering exclusively
to low-income clients and featuring a repetitive menu of fried chicken, fried
rice, and chow mein (fare clearly adapted to certain acquired local tastes) have
popped up along the downtown corridors, becoming a secondary hallmark of
the Chinese presence. Other businesses include home electronics and cell-
phone stores, restaurants catering to a more middle-class clientele, and small
light manufacturing or service operations such as window assembly, water bot-
tling, and air-conditioning installation. Most operations are small and family-
run, but some are components of multi-island businesses or multi-business
operations (typically managed by extended family members), while one sees
the beginnings of more upscale ventures, such as real estate development, as
a condition of economic citizenship in islands like St Kitts and Antigua. Some
of the ancillary business activities mentioned by some of our respondents
were unexpected and pioneering for the Eastern Caribbean, such as a small
but robust operation exporting Caribbean lobsters to China by one variety-
store owner in St Vincent. Overall, the most modest operations appear to be
the tiny eateries catering to low-income customers and not dependent on
imports from China (Chinese ingredients can easily be procured from nearby
Trinidad). Across the economic range, chain migration often extends the
original family nucleus bilaterally, with members of both the wife’s and
the husband’s family joining their relatives in the Caribbean (see Green 2014
for some examples). A growing feature of Chinese baihuo business, whose
down-market specialization in small shops selling cheap goods can be deceiv-
ing, is expansion across several islands with the assistance of extended kin
networks.
A question that repeatedly comes up is whether the Chinese shopkeepers
are “sojourners” or “immigrants” in the Eastern Caribbean. It is clear that the
situation in the Eastern Caribbean is in flux, with many Chinese exercising
a version of “flexible citizenship” entailing an instrumental or opportunistic
relationship to the Caribbean as an in-transit stop on the way to North America
or to supra-national capitalist success, or as a strictly delimited opportunity to
make money and return to China. There was evidence of all of those trajectories
in the islands we visited, and the relatively high turnover of businesses is an
ongoing feature of the Chinese immigrant community in the Caribbean. How
ever, since none of these scenarios is peculiar to the Eastern Caribbean, there is
little reason to believe that it will be different from other destinations in the LAC
region, where economically or politically triggered fluctuations in the Chinese
population have not led to the latter’s disappearance or prevented its structural

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230 Green
incorporation, sedimentation, and evolution, despite ongoing difficulties with

full integration. At the very least, it is too soon to tell, even based on inten-
tions articulated by the immigrants themselves, many of whom have taken
great care to become citizens of one OECS state or another, granting them the
freedom to locate themselves or their businesses in any of the member-states.
To be sure, we found a range of resident and citizenship statuses among the
migrants, from transient illegal worker to non-citizen business owner, to citizens
naturalized through the regular channels and (more rarely) “economic citizens.”
Nearly 30 per cent of the Chinese population in Dominica in 2012 no longer held
Chinese citizenship (Chinese Embassy of Dominica, Sina Weibo post).
Emerging Areas of Conflict

Pál Nyíri (2001, 2011, 2012, 2013), the Hungarian anthropologist, who has made a
substantial and longstanding case for the emergence of a new Chinese “trans-
national middleman minority” in “poor” and “transitional” economies, has
pointed out that the Chinese state shifted from a more or less anti-emigration
stance before the 1980s to a position which “celebrat[es] migration itself as
a patriotic and modern act, thus encouraging transnational practices among
people who are in the process of, or just preparing for, leaving China” (Nyíri
2001:635). According to him, after 1989, entrepreneurial migration from China
developed on a mass scale, with “these new entrepreneurial migrants going to
countries with no recent tradition of Chinese immigration, but where there
was high demand for low-cost consumer goods produced by China and a lax
regulatory environment” (Nyíri 2011:145). He notes that “contemporary Chinese
migrant entrepreneurs have been heavily dependent on China in ways their
predecessors were not.” Whereas “[c]olonial ‘middlemen minorities’ mar-
shaled trade between the colonies and the metropoles and made use of China
largely as a source of labour,… [f]or contemporary migrants, China is a source
of labour, merchandise, and capital” (Nyíri 2011:147).
In many ways, the Caribbean fits Nyíri’s criteria. Although the English-
speaking Caribbean territories, with the exception of Guyana, are all consid-
ered “upper middle income” to “high income” countries, most are struggling
with deeply entrenched legacies of historical dependency, post-preferential
economic uncertainty, high levels of indebtedness, and small-island ecologi-
cal and market-size fragility. The end of EU preferential regimes for bananas,
predominantly a small-farmer crop, and sugar, the classic colonial-plantation
product, has left the islands previously dominated by one or the other of these
export regimes particularly vulnerable. Apart from rival diplomatic alignments
between Taipei and Beijing and diversity in ethnic make-up, these territories

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are differentiated by size and resource base and by mode-of-production com-

plex. The larger territories of Jamaica, Trinidad & Tobago, and Guyana have
larger populations, ranging from 2.8 million to 771 thousand in 2016, as well
as a significantly more complex natural resource endowment, including oil,
bauxite, gold, and timber among other extractive industries. Barbados and
the Bahamas, with populations of 285,000 and 394,000 respectively, and other
kinds of resource strength, could be said to belong to an intermediate group
in terms of “size,” while the Central American territory of Belize (despite its
middling population of 367,000) and the OECS islands occupy the other polar
extreme. The second division is between largely wage-labor economies and
“hybrid” or “dual” small farmer/wage-dependent economies, which correlates
neatly with the high income/middle income distinction, but not with size.
Hence Jamaica and Guyana both belong to the (relatively) poorer group, while
the OECS islands are split between the high-income islands of St Kitts-Nevis
and Antigua-Barbuda, both classic-plantation-turned-classic-tourist-econ-
omies, and the middle-income islands of Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, and
St Vincent & the Grenadines, the recent banana-exporting cluster, which are
themselves becoming increasingly dependent on tourism and offshore activi-
ties (see Green 2001). Despite the differences, what remains clear is that all the
units share certain basic historically shaped vulnerabilities pertaining to in-
frastructural and institutional underdevelopment and economic dependency.
Unsurprisingly, two kinds of contentiously framed questions tend to swirl
around the new Chinese presence in the Caribbean: Is the new bilateral rela-
tionship an expression of South-South and “win-win” solidarity, as the Chinese
are wont to frame it, or are we seeing a new form of imperialism or quasi-
imperialism? Second, what is the relationship between the parallel inflows of
Chinese state diplomatic and economic capital (and its ambassadors and pur-
veyors) and private entrepreneurial immigrants? While careful research has
called into question the notion of China as a “rogue donor” and the double
standards involved in such judgment (see Bräutigam 2009, 2011, among others),
and while the attractiveness of the Chinese model of development assistance is
not hard to fathom for countries that have been starved of basic infrastructural
capacity and left to languish in a global neoliberal abyss, there is still much
that we do not understand about the nature and extent of Chinese economic
activity in the region, and the complex relationship between China’s export
of capital and patronage and export of persons. Certainly, it is important to
reject conspiracy theories about “secret invasions” and “colonization schemes”
through the mass movement of Chinese people, as well as to acknowledge the
independent motivations and initiatives driving the new Huashang arrivals;

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232 Green
however, it is also critical to examine the structural impact of the new encoun-
ters between and among differently positioned actors, both public and private.
A sustained examination of structural impact must await a separate paper.
However, I want to mention a few areas of tension and conflict that have char-
acterized the new Chinese presence, in terms of both state operations and im-
migrant entrepreneurs. Criticisms of or outright opposition to various forms of
both come from different constituencies, depending on the circumstances, but
they are often common targets. To a striking extent, the view that Chinese state
activities and immigrant enterprises are all-of-a-piece and part of an inten-
tionally common project is shared by ordinary citizens, workers, local business
people and their representatives, opposition politicians, and even lower-level
government bureaucrats. However, it is important to distinguish the two main
circumstances in which adversarial expressions are voiced: (a) private-sector
competition from immigrant entrepreneurs and the alleged erosive impact on
local businesses, and (b) the (perceived) impact of labor forces imported for
Chinese state-financed mega-projects on local employment conditions. The
reality on the ground tends to be even more complicated.
Chinese state-financed projects, whether investment- or aid-related, have
frequently proven to be very controversial in the context of Caribbean eco-
nomics and politics. One of the most spectacular examples is that of Baha
Mar, a $3.5 billion, 1000-acre mega-resort project in the Bahamas, which finally
opened in 2017 after years of delays and in-fighting. This project is particularly
significant as it has been reported to be “China’s largest overseas commer-
cial real-estate project” (Karmin and Wirz 2014), as well as the largest single
resort in the Caribbean, involving the largest single deployment of foreign
Chinese workers in the English-speaking Caribbean (roughly 4,000). The con-
troversy in which it became mired involved a three-way debacle among China
Construction America (CCA) — an SOE subsidiary which finessed a $2.5 bil-
lion loan from the Export-Import (EXIM) Bank of China, and invested $150 mil-
lion for its own equity stake in exchange for serving as the resort’s contractor,
using Chinese workers — the financier Sarkis Izmirlian, a Swiss-born devel-
oper who conceived Baha Mar and invested $850 million (and was eventually
ousted from the project), and the Bahamian government (Jett 2016).
The Bahamian government sided with CCA in its drawn-out dispute with
Izmirlian and liquidated the company after refusing to recognize the bank-
ruptcy filed in a US court by the private developers. Although the govern-
ment eventually found a (Hong Kong-based) buyer for the company, not all
Bahamians agreed with its decisions regarding the project: disgruntled opposi-
tion parties, unpaid Bahamian sub-contractors, and a vocal vanguard among
2,000 Bahamian workers who had been left stranded when the project shut

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down,22 blamed the Chinese for the problems and lodged a series of com-
plaints. Signing themselves “Disenfranchised Baha Mar Citizens,” a group
of workers sent a letter to the Bahamian Prime Minister in which they were
quoted as saying, “The question is simple: do we want jobs for Bahamians
or do we want to simply forfeit jobs over to the Chinese?” (Turnquest 2016).
Others accused the government of collusion with the Chinese and of selling
out Bahamian interests by offering them big concessions as a quid pro quo
for salvaging the stalled project. In response to these accusations, the Prime
Minister denounced what he saw as shameful anti-Chinese prejudice: “This
orchestrated anti-Chinese rhetoric does not bode well for the friendly rela-
tionships that exist between the Government of the Bahamas and the People’s
Republic of China” (Jones Jr. 2016).
Another example is particularly interesting for us because of the new inter-
elite implications it signifies for future Caribbean (and OECS in particular) rul-
ing-group relations. This case addresses a question posed earlier in the paper
regarding possible clashes between older and newer ethnic-minority “middle-
man” elites in the small islands. For four years until an out-of-court settle-
ment in 2016, the government of Antigua was locked in a conflict with a local
Lebanese-Caribbean family-owned company, the Antigua Power Company,
which had a government contract to supply the island with additional mega-
watts of electricity. According to Antigua’s Daily Observer (DO, September 13,
2016), a leading newspaper on the island, “APC owns two of the three better
functioning power plants on the island, producing near 90 per cent of power
consumed.” APC brought a US $228 million suit against the Antigua govern-
ment for breach of contract after “[t]he government of the day decided to
invest in its own power company and contracted a Chinese company to con-
struct the Wadadli Power Plant,” reneging on its contract with APC. In a pattern
of Chinese concessionary largesse increasingly familiar in the Caribbean, the
plant was built and financed by Beijing Construction and Engineering Group
Limited and China’s EXIM Bank and became part of the state-owned Antigua
Public Utilities Authority (APUA). As part of the final settlement, the current
government of Antigua extended APC’s contract for the supply of electric-
ity from one of its plants for another fifteen years, at the end of which the
plant would pass into government ownership at a much lower re-negotiated
price (DO, January 5, 2017). It is interesting to note that the former government
had appealed to the Hadeeds (the family company) to be “patriotic” and ex-
clude the Chinese company and EXIM Bank (also named in the suit) from the
22 Various settlements on outstanding sub-contractor fees and workers’ wages were later
undertaken.

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234 Green
litigation (DO, February 11, 2015). In an ironic twist, the bid by the government
to own and control power production in the island — and wrest control of
this sector from its traditional private-sector patrons, with the help of its new
transnational state patron — nearly foundered on the rocks of the chronic
malfunctioning of the new Chinese-built plant.
A third example highlights the Chinese practice of financing “vanity,” “sta-
tus,” or “showcase” projects enhancing the public façade of states in the Global
South which seek to prop up national pride by putting a shiny gloss on their
domestic and global self-presentation. Among the favorite projects of this sort
for which the Chinese are known are sports stadiums and state houses (or pal-
aces, as they are sometimes called). A new state house, costing several million
dollars, was one of the cornerstones of the combined grant-cum-loan package
Dominica received when they switched diplomatic affiliation from Taipei to
Beijing in 2004. The state house project occupied the headlines and island poli-
tics for months, pitting opposition forces and their supporters against the gov-
ernment and its popular ruling party led by Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit.
A group calling itself Citizens Awareness Program put up huge billboards in
various locations around the island (including in the capital town, Roseau)
protesting in bold letters, “What a Waste/27 Million Dollar Plus — State Palace/
While Our Children Are Starving/What State Malice.” Responding in late 2012
to the opposition charges of wasteful and morally unjustifiable expenditures
on a new state house, Mr. Skerrit urged his countrymen and women, on their
next trip into the capital city to “stop by the state house and watch it from
outside and you will see how much pride you have in yourself and see that
our country slowly but surely is coming of age” (Green 2015:105). As suggested
earlier in this paper, and unfortunately for the opposition parties, mobilized
outrage from a significant portion of the Dominican population (including
protests over the use of imported Chinese labor for this and other projects)
was not enough to overcome the strong appeal of Mr Skerrit’s exhortations
among citizens of an island-state starved of status symbols and of both real
and imagined indicators of “development” and “progress.”
While popular disaffection in the context of large-scale public works or
commercial ventures revolves around the tied employment of Chinese con-
tract workers and the virtual exclusion or minimal and low-level use of local
labor and contractors, the charges leveled in the case of private entrepreneur-
ial immigrants are the familiar ones of unfair Chinese competition and the
undercutting of local businesses with sales of cheap and flimsy merchandise
directly sourced from China. Here too, local governments are often accused of
being pro-Chinese, of extending special, unauthorized, under-the-table con-
cessions to them, and of turning a blind eye to Chinese violations of tax, labor,

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and immigration laws, as well as more egregious misdemeanors such as smug-

gling (Green 2014, 2015). Overall, however, the response to the Chinese SME
merchants is mixed, depending on the constituency and the circumstances.
Private sector representatives in Dominica and a labor representative in St
Kitts confirmed in interviews that consumers, indeed, favored the Chinese and
their offerings of cheap versions of “global” middle-class lifestyle goods (Green
2014:36-37). At the same time, Liu (personal communication)23 reports from
his research in Antigua that the consumers there do not balk at complaining to
the Consumer Affairs Division about shoddy, hazardous, and malfunctioning
goods purchased from the Chinese shops; indeed, division staff admitted to
him their reluctance to act on those complaints, not wanting (in their minds)
to risk alienating China.
Although they may have some capital to begin with, most of these entrepre-
neurial immigrants do not start off wealthy: they come to the Caribbean and
other destinations in the Global South to get wealthy. They have clear advan-
tages which favor their success, from the networks in which they are embedded
and the portable cultural/economic institutions and practices that they deploy
to their access to the symbolic and political referents of global Chineseness
(centered in and backed up by the Chinese state), as well as, most significantly,
their ability to tap into Chinese supplies of capital, labor, and commodities.
They also face enormous anti-Chinese prejudice and misconceptions, most-
ly fueled by widespread convictions regarding a conspiracy among China,
Caribbean governments, and the private immigrants as sponsored agents and
secret ambassadors of the Chinese government, aided and abetted by their
Caribbean state “clients.” As stated above, such imagined scenarios were
repeated, with varying levels of passion and conviction, sometimes with qualifi
cations, but with surprising consistency in the details, by respondents across
the board. There were claims, for example, by a number of private-sector rep-
resentatives in the islands visited that the Chinese government regularly paid
the commercial rents of the private immigrants. One official stated that the
Chinese EXIM Bank facilitated financing and remittances for the merchants,
calling this alleged scheme a “brilliant plan hatched by the Chinese govern-
ment” (Dominica interviews, 2012).
Antigua was the only one of the four research islands where the Chinese
merchants had formed an organization of their own, called, notably, “The
Association of Chinese Expatriates and Overseas Chinese in Antigua and
Barbuda.” The private sector representative interviewed in St Kitts in 2013 ve-
hemently rejected the idea of inviting the Chinese merchants to join the local
23 See n2,1 above.

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236 Green
chamber of commerce, accusing them of encroaching upon the rightful place

of Taiwan, St Kitts-Nevis’ diplomatic partner, with the underhanded compli-
ance of the government of the time. While organizational officials seemed
more open in Dominica24 — indeed, the Dominica Employers’ Federation
spokesperson claimed to have invited the Chinese to join the organization, with
little result — recent events called into question this apparent willingness. A
few months before the 2012 interviews, the CEO of the Dominica Association
of Industry and Commerce (DAIC), a returnee who had lived in Canada for
several decades, was pressured to resign following complaints about his
vigorous defense of Chinese merchants (against charges of government favorit-
ism and “unfair advantages”) as likely to be economic citizens and therefore
“Dominicans like the native-born entrepreneurs with an equal right to conduct
business affairs in Dominica” (cited in Green 2014: n2, 43).
Occasionally, the public gets an opportunity to hear the immigrants talk
back. A recent series of articles in the Jamaica Observer on “the growth of
Asian businesses in sections of Jamaica” found the by-now familiar mixed set
of reactions to the spreading presence of mostly (immigrant) Chinese busi-
nesses in rural areas, away from the Kingston and St Andrew metropolitan
core. Dubbing the phenomenon the “Asian invasion,” the staff writer went on
to sound an ominous note in his opening paragraphs: “Despite their invasion,
they have not assimilated well into the community” (ibid.). This preemptive
judgment pervading the report was redeemed somewhat by two of the six ar-
ticles which gave voice to Chinese feelings about the racism (or prejudice) that
they allegedly experience from “Jamaicans.” One interviewee voiced his frus-
tration at the casual use of racial epithets in everyday discourse to refer to the
Chinese, the lack of appreciation of Jamaicans for the Chinese contribution to
the economy (importing low-cost goods, investing in business, and employing
Jamaicans), and the double standard applied in attitudes to the Chinese vis-
à-vis “white people.” According to him, “White people come in here and what
they do? They do a big factory, they get their big money and they go away, but
you guys love white people; nobody complains” (Carter, October 23, 2016). One
of the two final articles of the series, titled, “Chinese shun Jamaica” (Carter,
November 6, 2016), features two Chinese nationals who claim that racism and
crime forced them to abandon their businesses in Jamaica and migrate over-
seas (to Australia and the US respectively).
24 This openness was prompted in part by representation from the Chinese Embassy.

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Concluding Remarks
Patrick Bryan wrote in 2004 that “[a]fter a hundred and fifty years, the Chinese
community remains a racially distinct minority, and despite a significant adap-
tation to western culture in Jamaica has not gone the path of full assimilation”
(Bryan 2004:24). The observation is still a pertinent one, both because of and
apart from the unprecedented prominence of the Chinese state in the lives and
identities of overseas Chinese today. On the one hand, the link to China more
than ever enables the reproducibility of a separate Chinese ethnicity, sustained
through ongoing, and sometimes politically promoted, transnational cultural
and commercial links to the PRC. On the other hand, Chinese “transnational
ethnic entrepreneurship” has been able to sustain itself on the edges of state-
hood and statecraft for centuries, using timeworn, portable and seemingly
universally replicable cultural institutions and practices, rooted in ancestral
traditions and extended kinship (Chen and Tan 2009; Kwee 2013). Small-scale
would-be or actual merchants leave the crowded field of the Chinese retail
marketplace and venture forth to “small ponds” in the Global South partly
because they can, and partly because of pre-existing gaps in their countries
of destination. Ultimately, it is the structure of the encounter that needs to be
analyzed. As I pointed out in an earlier article (Green 2014: 29-30),
on the site of a typical Eastern Caribbean location, there is a three-way

intersection among the “spatial-circuit” of China’s outbound “develop-
ment aid-and-investment” trajectory, the “spatial-circuit” of the island-
state’s inbound development partnership operations and regulated and
unregulated migrant flows, and the “spatial-circuit” of private immigrant
Chinese transnational entrepreneurial networks. It is important to main-
tain a sense of both the relative autonomy of each spatial-circuit and
their in situ mutual interaction.
One can seek to debunk claims of Chinese plots, Chinese imperialism, the non-
employment of local labor on large-scale projects, the clannishness25 and en-
clave character of Chinese merchant communities, and the unfair competitive
25 On this claim, one interviewee in Jamaica protested defensively, “But you guys just like
to say Chinese help Chinese and not help Jamaica … even though we employ Jamaicans.
We do good for Jamaicans, but turn around is what we get back; people thief you, come
carry in other people for them to rob you, so why you going to help? Chinese and Chinese
develop trust; we first pay to trust other people, but the trust people turn back to us can’t
be trusted, so what you going to do? You going to continue keep the trust?… We call it

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238 Green
advantage that they wield, and, indeed, many have done so to great effect, es-
pecially in the case of Africa (see in particular the work of Sautman and Yan
2007a, 2007b). However, this kind of analysis, though necessary, is not suffi-
cient, since it still seeks to explain and justify the world primarily from one
side of the equation. This is particularly inadequate in the Caribbean, given the
big difference in size and power in the context of the role of the Chinese state
as development patron. The examples I have provided were meant to high-
light not good intentions gone awry (after all, the Chinese have successfully
delivered many critically needed infrastructural projects) — nor, for that mat-
ter, ungrateful and racially prejudiced Caribbean nationals — but the skewed
structure of the encounter, which is marked by an uneasy mix of new global
patronage and sustained dependency. However their interests are configured,
one is moved to ask: are Chinese state actors helping the Caribbean to over-
come its structural dependency, or merely to manage it in new directions and
as a way of shoring up particular groups of elites? Are there particular syn-
ergies between state and private transnationalisms that increase the impact
one way or another, especially given the historically “enclavist” character of
Caribbean dependency?
This paper assists in providing a context for examining these questions,
rather than addressing them directly. In the final analysis, we must study the
structural effects or outcomes of both the two-way and the three-way encoun-
ters, as well as the structured intentionality of the vastly more powerful or stra-
tegically favored party to such encounters, whichever the case. Moreover, we
must attend to these projects with an intersectional sensibility and with equal
urgency.
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A Historical and Comparative Survey of The Chinese Presence in The Latin American and Caribbean Region, With A Focus On The Anglophone Caribbean

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Journal of Chinese Overseas 13 (2017) 206-243