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| | THE INVISIBLE POWERHOUSE OF ASIA Eric Ellis |
 | | Hua qiao communities of various ethnic and dialectic extraction, but almost exclusively from the Southern Chinese provinces of Fujian and Quangdong, are not just prominent but dominate, often controversially, the economies of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia and, some might say, inner Sydney. |
 | | The ultimate hua qiao community is probably Singapore, where the 76 per cent majority of ethnic Chinese, Hokkien-based, physically control a country, the proverbial displaced Chinese island in a Malay Sea, increasingly setting the region's development and political agenda with its loud voice. |
 | | But while dialect links such as those through the Hokkien hua qiao and their sub-groups are playing less and less a role in modern Chinese commercial life, a tendency to do business with ethnic Chinese remains strong. |
| www.ericellis.com /chinaos1.htm (1214 words) |
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