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Southeast Asia
Organized Panel Session
The connection between Tsinoys, or Chinese in the Philippines, and business has long dominated popular and academic discussions regarding the community in the past and present. Perhaps the only discourse that can rival the Chinese-business axis is that of nationalism and the parochial, divided, or distracted loyalties of Chinese in the Philippines. While touching on these two topics by examining the China Banking Corporation of the Philippines’ (Chinabank, 中興銀行) China dealings and correspondence between the Philippine huaqiao businessman Albino Z. Sycip and Shanghai Chinese banker K.P. Chen, this paper attempts to move beyond questions of economics and politics by focusing on personal relations and convictions.
Albino Z. Sycip, a lawyer and businessman of Chinese descent who was born and raised in the Philippines, married into a prominent Shanghai family when he made his vows to Helen Bau. Yet he had no familial connection with Shanghai-based bankers K.P. Chen and T.P. Yang, nor did his frequent collaborator from the Philippines, Dee C. Chuan. Common economic goals and common political goals cemented a new “capital kinship” network away from the Amoy-Manila connection that had long dominated Hokkien huaqiao calculations. The personal correspondence between these business partners reveals concerns about politics, but more strikingly it also reveals concerns for personal well-being. Building on my earlier research that exposed the Shanghai-Manila connection, this paper examines friendship, comradery, and extra-familial business networks to highlight the compassion and humanity of elite members of the Philippine huaqiao community and their colleagues in the early twentieth century.
Phillip Guingona
Wells College