The Accidental Imperialists: China’s middle class at the vanguard of its international ambitions
Part I: Imperial Echoes
110 years ago this April, the United States opened the Panama Canal. It was a feat of engineering and perseverance. Thousands died over the 60-year campaign to tame the jungle. To continue, laborers were brought in from all over, including coolies, Chinese indentured laborers mostly from Guangdong and Fujian.1
Some coolies moved onward to Jamaica, but others stayed, moving to squalor neighborhoods nicknamed Salsipuedes (leave if you can). They were caught in the rising Anti-Asian sentiment as Panama, like America, imposed restrictions on the rights of Chinese ethnic community. But the Chinese community in Panama remained, and today 1 in every 25 Panamanians are of Chinese descent.
One Chino-Panameño, whose name and story I do not know, had a dalliance with a mixed-race teenager2 from the neighborhood. A son was born, but the woman, to protect him I might guess, claimed that it must have been another man. Every so often, she would take her son to meet the man at La Pagoda China, the restaurant where he would chop up lapchong sausages to give to the kid.
75 years ago, the son, nicknamed Chino, returned to Panama after graduating from a degree in chemical engineering. He had earned a rare scholarship to study abroad in Bowling Green, Ohio, a truly incredible feat for someone who grew up in his neighborhood. He was lured to work for Kodak, who had a research institute on the American side of the Canal Zone. It was there that he worked on the impact of the tropics on film, research that went into the development of film used in spy planes and in Vietnam.
60 years ago, Kodak shut down its operations in the Canal Zone and asked Chino to relocate his family to Rochester, leaving behind his dream home and his life. The agent helped his family find a house on the rolling hills south of Rochester, a new subdivision on the land of an old farm. In those days, redlining prevented Latinos, Blacks, and Asians from owning homes in this part of town, but by luck or Kodak’s demand, the family moved into town.
50 years ago, two girls graduated from a high school in the suburbs near Rochester, NY. Chino’s daughter and a white girl. The white girl would go on to marry a man who went to work for Kodak, which was at the time the largest employer in the region. Chino’s daughter, at the age of 25, moved to Mexico to be with her aunt. She eventually stayed and started a family.
25 years ago, a husband, wife and two kids moved to Xiamen to open a Kodak factory. Kodak entered China as the leading film and photography company in the world. It was the early days of China’s opening, a world far less recognizable than it is today, but it began a near 20-year relationship between Kodak and Xiamen, which only ended in 2019 when it sold its last manufacturing facility.
10 years ago, Chino’s grandson—about the same age as his mother when she went abroad—left home and moved to China. At an American-BBQ themed restaurant, he met the Kodak woman. They were working in the education industry, supporting over 1 million Chinese to study abroad, part of a controversial knowledge transfer now at the heart of American politics.
6 years ago, Chino’s grandson moved to Indonesia with a Chinese company as a bold and aggressive China sought to move overseas. Over the years, he became an interlocutor for Chinese companies in their international ambitions.
This is my story. It is a story of luck. If my grandfather had been considered Chinese from 1941-46, his citizenship would have been revoked and he would have never studied abroad. What foresight my great-grandmother had. If I had been born only a few years earlier, my mother could not have conferred US citizenship to me, and I might have never left Mexico. It is a story of chance. Jody, the Kodak woman, and I met at that restaurant as I was trying to build relationships with colleges for a college consulting firm. We soon realized she not only came from my hometown but that she and my mother graduated the same year.
But the above is also the story of imperialism, America’s and China’s. A story of private companies and expats. It is a story full of echoes, but not precise replications. It is a story that has fascinated me since I was in graduate school, and it is what I have learned since that I wish to share with you below.
From theory to praxis
In graduate school, I focused on what I called ‘everyday imperialism’3 Empire is not just about bullets but also economics. The true ‘agents of empire’ (especially since the 19th century) are rarely soldiers but rather engineers and entrepreneurs. And the negotiations that occur at the edge of empire demonstrate how imperialism is a contested process. I was interested in how companies and people operated in these spaces that were a mixture of imperial and national lands.
That my professional life has come to mirror my academic research is not a coincidence. I moved to China precisely because of the echoes. I left on a sabbatical from graduate school. I justified moving to China to further my own theoretical understanding of what happens at the edge of empire, especially as the balance of power was beginning to shift. I stayed because I felt a power and an energy in Chinese enterprises that I hoped would make the world better.
Soon, I became committed to the China model as an alternative form of development. I saw it as an answer to the middle-income trap, the problem that has affected countries in Latin America for over 70 years.4 Chinese companies—with tactics refined in a low-trust environment and low labor costs—were a better corollary for emerging economies, I thought. It was then that I decided to roll up my sleeves. In a way, I too became an agent of empire.
As I came to understand my colleagues, competitors, and contacts, I noticed how the contours of Chinese imperialism was far less dogmatic than America’s of a century before. I studied American and European imperialism, and I knew how lockstep industrialists like Weetman Pearson5 or Bradley Palmer advanced government interests abroad. Chinese efforts lacked such obvious coordination nor ideology. It was not a replication. This insight gave birth to this thesis.
A critical flaw in modern American commentary on China is our failure to understand the relationship between Chinese citizens, Chinese companies, and the Chinese state. Most Americans ascribe onto China an Orwellian vision, often cherry-picking evidence to defend our imagination. The truth is a lot more subtle.
China is a one-party authoritarian political system, complete with all the limits on self-determination and competition. I was born in Mexico when it too was a one-party authoritarian state. I know all too well the dangers of such a system, but I also know that despite it or perhaps because of it, people yearn to control their own lives and their own destiny. The contours of China’s authoritarian system are tested daily by its people, both challenging autocracy itself but also forcing China’s system to accommodate to the interests of its people.
This series is a story of Chinese people and companies that have set sail from China for virgin markets across the world. I hope to contextualize their thoughts and their actions within the milieu of a rapidly advancing China, one that only a short 50 years ago was marred in a bloody civil strife that left many in deep poverty. It seeks to demonstrate that apathy toward ideology has led Chinese firms to care more about personal economic gain than national interest.
I call it accidental imperialism precisely because most of the ‘agents of empire’ lack the consciousness of American or British vanguards of Empire had in decades past. There is a naivete and an ignorance in going abroad that is the source of many blunders but lack the sophistication and planning that would command greater scrutiny. How does this challenge our understanding of China? How does it help us better interpret the actions of ICBC and Shein?
My hope is that this essay leads many to question American and European policies to contain China. Chinese entrepreneurs are some of the most resilient organisms on Earth. Not even the heavy-handedness of the Chinese state could expunge them. How could we have a policy of national security that takes into better consideration the people such policies impact?
But I also write this for my former colleagues and friends that work at Chinese firms in far off places. I write this as a child of the Global South, fully aware of the long scars of imperialism have on countries and people. I write this as an American, living with the burden of my country’s past and current forays into overseas markets. My hope is that it implores my Chinese friends to realize, despite wishing it not to be the case, your actions will be misinterpreted as the will of statecraft. There is an extra burden on your shoulders. I hope it doesn’t dissuade you from going overseas but rather to do so with more care.
Mae Ngai’s Impossible Subjects and Fredy Gonzalez’s Paisanos Chinos are fantastic read about the complex world of Chinese laborers and the impact of Anti-Chinese laws.
My family is unclear about where my great-great-grandmother came from besides the fact that her name was Elida Walters and she was either from Jamaica or St. Thomas
I borrow this idea from Gil Joseph’s work on government bureaucrats in rural Mexico bringing people in line.
I am still waiting for a better model than the Washington Consensus or multinationals that care more about profit than improving domestic industry.
Pearson’s engineering company is now the publishing behemoth Pearson, and while he pursued large construction projects in Mexico often backed by British banks, he also was a MP in the House of Commons and was known at the time as the Member for Mexico.