Society /
Chinese Workers Unpopular in South-East Asia
At the moment we are traveling throughout Vietnam and we can see, continuously small shops with the Chinese sign and this is as the history taught us the remaining immigrants who came from the Chinese cities in the last century, following the upheaval conditions present back then.
Nowadays most of the people you find in the areas where they have moved, Philippines, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos aren’t talking highly about them and instead are becoming increasingly unpopular.
Some of the Chinese immigrants who moved here opened shops and restaurants while others became the workforce for those places. But recently the Filipino people become stressed due to the uprising prices of the properties which is also influenced by the immigrants, especially Chinese who are getting recruited by online casinos in Manila and this due to the fact that the biggest customers are the Chinese.
All proceed peacefully till last month when a gang of 5 Filipinos pointed guns to some Chinese workers outside a restaurant in Manila’s Chinatown. They pushed the workers to the ground and one of them pointed the gun to the head of one of them who said’ I thought I was going to die’ while they robbed them of all valuables they had and even shot in the air before leaving them yelling.
Migrations from China to Philippines are dated long way back and while most of them have been dealt peacefully some of them ended in ferocious fights.
In the recent years Chinese markets grew richer so fresh waves of workers and investors ventured to Nanyang which is the Chinese reference to South Asian lands. While most of the companies still don’t apply it, others appear to favor people coming from Beijing. Moreover, anxieties about Chinese workers wax and wane, depending on myriad factors such as the prevailing economic situation, the tenor of local politics and other vested interests.
Thus, in recent years, for example, trade unions in Indonesia have accused Chinese firms of spurning local jobseekers in favor of their own nationals. In Cambodia instead traditionally residents of the beach town of Sihanoukville are saying that their calm beaches are transformed into Chinese huge casinos and resorts to host the increasing demands of tourists.
But among these countries, it is most likely the Philippines that has felt the heavy and inconvenient presence of Chinese workers the most in recent years. The government is currently finalizing new rules to crack down on illegal workers, but doubts linger about the difference the measures will make for such a big amount of people.
“The problem here is that there is a lot of corruption at the Department of Labor and Employment, and also the Bureau of Immigration. If illegal Chinese workers pay off the immigration officers and the department of labor, if you multiply that by, say, 100,000 to 200,000, that’s a lot of money,” says Pilo Halaby, a former solicitor general.
He represented the Philippines when it took China to an international tribunal at The Hague over conflicting sovereignty claims in the South China Sea as we were explaining some other times, Manila won the case in 2016, but Beijing refused to accept the court’s decision.
Many maritime Southeast Asian states were ‘indigenous states’ and were less open to migrants, especially Chinese migrants. But in the age of globalization, it is impossible to halt migration as it is everywhere with such easy possibilities to travel. That resistance has remained but is now targeted at a new type of migrant – one with a different culture that has emerged from a changing China. On top of that the Philippines are heaven for Chinese nationals, which are banned from gambling back home but are building empires and are strongly advertising on social media. Salaries for this type of employment are very high compared to Philippines ones and so the protest continues in all South East Asia.
