A chapter on Chinese political identity in Southeast Asia may seem anomalous. Insofar as nationalism was ‘Chinese’ in Southeast Asia it was fixated on the fate of the Chinese state rather than a local identity. Yet Chinese, like the less numerous but more aggressive Europeans, carried to Southeast Asia a stronger sense of state-centred identity than was common in Southeast Asia, and developed particularly robust forms of supra-local community in market towns all over the region. Once a more balanced gender ratio and regular contact with China enabled them to reproduce that community in Southeast Asia, from the seventeenth century, they became ‘essential outsiders’ (Chirot and Reid1997), creating commercial and information networks essential to the birth of many nationalisms. The Chinese relationship to Southeast Asian nationalisms was crucial.

‘Chinese’ as a Southeast Asian concept

Labels have great power to unite and to divide, particularly when believed to be unproblematic and natural. One of the most divisive such labels in the long term has been ‘China’, which in Southeast Asian languages is both noun and adjective. Like many ethnonyms, this usage appears to have been fixed by outsiders, and pre-eminently in Southeast Asian encounters. The subjects of the Middle or Flowery Kingdom themselves had little need of it. It was in Southeast Asia that such subjects became detached from the imperial framework and began to be defined as if they were an ethnie.