Fujian Ails

The rocky and mountainous topography and island-dotted coastline of the province of Fujian, which made farming difficult, set it apart from the more agriculturally productive provinces of the so-called heartland. Its unique location and geography pushed its residents – who were primarily Hakka and Hokkien people – to take to the seas as fishers and traders.Footnote ¹ The Quanzhou, Xiamen, Zhangzhou arc in the southern area of the province, known as Minnan, or southern Fujian, became a nexus of maritime activity as early as the Song dynasty.Footnote ² Before and between Ming and Qing dynasty maritime bans, these cities anchored a lucrative long-distance trading system that linked the region to the Philippines and areas beyond.Footnote ³

Dark days plagued Fujian in the Ming and Qing dynasties. According to historian Zheng Zhenman, by the Qing dynasty, “overpopulation and the shortage of arable land made it objectively difficult for the natural subsistence economy to be sustained.”Footnote ⁴ This fact, coupled with a “bureaucratic government in the Ming and Qing” that was powerless to “exert effective control over society,” led to the proliferation of extra-governmental family- and village-oriented organizations and enterprises that stepped in to support and sustain numerous seafaring and overseas business ventures.Footnote ⁵ Overpopulation, poor job prospects, and inconsistent and often counterproductive government policies in southern Fujian, mixed with ample opportunities overseas, led many residents of the province to pick up shop and move to Southeast Asia by the turn of the twentieth century.

Most Chinese who migrated to the Philippines came from a handful of villages in southern Fujian.Footnote ⁶ As they moved to the Philippines and elsewhere around the world, they maintained ties back “home” through native-place associations, clan or surname organizations, and trade or guild associations. They also built new institutions such as the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and physical meeting places, like the huay kuan, or huiguan. All these organizations, along with the financial wellspring provided by the China Banking Corporation, which served as the de facto financial arm of the Chamber of Commerce, helped steer the relatively vulnerable Chinese community in the Philippines through the tempest of the early twentieth century.Footnote ⁷ These organizations, which linked together multiple sites beyond southern Fujian, helped foster and support the “translocal practices” of Hokkien people.Footnote ⁸

Time and again, Fujian transformed into a battlefield as competing outside political entities, be they the Beiyang Army and Kuomintang forces, Japanese and Chinese adversaries, or the Communists and Nationalists, sent in occupying armies. The 1920s and 1930s, which historian Arthur Waldron describes as an epoch of “perennial and inconclusive quests for power,” proved particularly taxing for residents of southern Fujian and their families abroad.Footnote ⁹ In 1917, the nominal leader of Republican China, Duan Qirui (段祺瑞), appointed Li Houji (李厚基) the military governor of Fujian.Footnote ¹⁰ In that position, Li Houji launched an attack on Kuomintang-controlled Guangdong, which led to large-scale fighting in both provinces. Then, the so-called King of Minnan (闽南王), militarist and fellow Beiyang partisan Chen Guohui (陈国辉), entered the fray with his strong-handed anti-communist and anti-overseas meddling agenda.Footnote ¹¹ In other words, while many Hokkien farmers and laborers left the province in search of opportunity in Southeast Asia, many militarists stepped right in to replace them, leading, in turn, to a greater exodus.

National “reunification” under Chiang Kai-shek and the start of the Nanjing Decade in 1927 likewise “did not lead to peace” in Fujian, as sociologist Huei-Ying Kuo cryptically notes.Footnote ¹² In fact, soon after “reunification,” bandits kidnapped six government ministers, while local military leaders like Chen Guohui continued to call the shots.Footnote ¹³ The establishment of the Jiangxi Soviet in the neighboring province, like the laying of a minefield next to a munitions factory, multiplied the dangers for and increased the anxiety of those in Fujian as the province once again found itself in the crosshairs of conflict. Fujian became a key link in Chiang Kai-shek’s Encirclement Campaign to oust communist forces from neighboring Jiangxi.Footnote ¹⁴

Chiang Kai-shek sent the famous generals of the Nineteenth Route Army, Cai Tingkai and Jiang Guangnai (蔣光鼐), to squeeze out the communists and prevent them from gaining access to the coastline. However, the esteemed generals rebelled against Chiang Kai-shek, establishing a short-lived People’s Revolutionary Government that would ultimately succumb to Kuomintang air raids and yet another invasion from neighboring Guangdong Province. To put it another way, conflict and tribulations defined the lives of those in Fujian, and their sojourning family members in Southeast Asia could not help but look on with consternation. However, they refused to sit idly by while Fujian fell apart. With megaphones in hand, wallets at the ready, and capes rippling over their superhero costumes, the Founders hatched plans for redemption.

Honest Dee and Community

When introducing the lumber and banking tycoon Dee C. Chuan (Li Qingquan 李清泉) to a prominent Shanghai-based banker with the hope of seeing a “closer relationship established,” Albino Z. Sycip (Xue Minlao 薛敏老) wrote, “You will find in him a very loyal and useful friend.”Footnote ¹⁵ Sycip could have said, and likely did say, the same about other colleagues when introducing them to well-connected acquaintances across his vast network. However, Dee, who became something of a spiritual leader for the Chinese community in the Philippines, earned Sycip’s praise as he proved time and again not only his ambition and business acumen, but also his philanthropy, leadership, and reliability.

Although sometimes referred to as the “Lumber King,” Dee C. Chuan dabbled in far more than wood.Footnote ¹⁶ He founded two of the leading Chinese-language newspapers in the Philippines, the Chinese Commercial News and the Fookien Times.Footnote ¹⁷ He led the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in the Philippines for several stints. He cofounded the Philippine–Chinese Banking Corporation, the Fuquan Company, and the Li Minxing Company. He also embodied the new generation of Chinese leaders and entrepreneurs in the Philippines who built relationships with other prominent and connected Chinese, Filipinos, and Americans at the “Cosmos Club, Wack Wack Golf Club, Philippines Carnival Association,” and elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁸

Dee C. Chuan was born in Shizhen Village, a small town in Jinjiang, Fujian, in 1888. When old enough, he studied at the Xiamen Tongwen School, which his father had established, before continuing his studies at St. Joseph’s Anglo-Chinese School in Hong Kong.Footnote ¹⁹ Although relatively brief, Dee’s cosmopolitan education provided him with the requisite skills – English fluency, business acumen, and international connections – to begin his foray into business. Inspired by his education, he later founded, as we discussed in Chapter 3, the Longmen School, the Shizhen Moral Education Girls’ School, the Chengmei Elementary School, and the multifaceted Zhenshan Reading and Publishing Society.Footnote ²⁰

Dee C. Chuan and his well-to-do colleagues in the Philippines swooped into the despondent Minnan, or southern Fujian, with remittances, donations, and direct investments. Dee invested in long-term infrastructure projects, like peers, seawalls, concrete factories, and drydocks, as well as real estate, like shopping complexes and residential buildings.Footnote ²¹ After an initial ¥190,000 investment through the Li Minxing Company failed to secure reliable seawalls for Xiamen in 1927, he invited an expert from the Netherlands to assess and reconstruct the embankments, adding nine additional peers in what Dee envisioned as the first stage of a hundred-year development plan for the city.Footnote ²² And these investments were merely the tip of the investment iceberg.

In 1928, another Chinese entrepreneur from the Philippines invested ¥30,000 in the Anhai Electric Light and Power Company in his hometown of Anhai to electrify the village and spawn new business opportunities.Footnote ²³ A few years earlier, Chinese investors from the Philippines founded two transportation companies, the Quanzhou-Anhai Auto Company and the Quanzhou-Weitou Auto Company, to build roads connecting the modest villages from which they hailed to the nearby international ports of Quanzhou and Xiamen.Footnote ²⁴ YMCA leader and educator Lim Chu Cong (Lin Zhuguang 林珠光) founded the import–export Shengmei Company with a ¥30,000 investment in 1917. However, perhaps no investment topped Zheng Zhikun’s (鄭志坤) ¥270,000 investment in the Xiamen Zhengye Company in 1932.Footnote ²⁵ According to Huei-Ying Kuo, Chinese overseas investment in real estate in Xiamen amounted to 90.2 percent of all investment.Footnote ²⁶

Southeast Asian sojourners supplemented substantial donations and direct investment with equally staggering family remittances. According to the Xiamen Overseas Chinese Bureau, Chinese from the Philippines sent home ¥12.5 million in remittances in 1935 alone.Footnote ²⁷ This monetary lifeline helped many overburdened families, and it doubled as a form of “diasporic Chinese philanthropy.”Footnote ²⁸ Historians Gregory Benton and Hong Liu, who describe the remittance exchange system in the Philippines as “more cohesive and united than elsewhere in Southeast Asia,” link Philippine giving to a range of southern Fujianese projects involving religious sites, educational institutions, and political organizations.Footnote ²⁹ Hokkien people from the Philippines invested in and were deeply invested in the health and well-being of their hometowns.

Chinese living overseas paired hometown investments and philanthropy with strategic spending on massive family compounds. Most built on the protected island of Gulangyu, which sat a stone’s throw from Xiamen Island. James A. Cook notes that the gated Gulangyu mansions, beyond providing a place to live, “presented an unquestioned statement of the wealth and talent of overseas Chinese.”Footnote ³⁰ Among Gulangyu’s big spenders, Dee C. Chuan’s uncle, Li Zhaobei (李昭北), and Dee’s close colleague and collaborator from the Dutch East Indies, Oei Tjoe, shared the crown, having invested in three “extravagant” villas on this island of villas.Footnote ³¹ Despite having lived overseas for most of their lives, many wealthy Chinese from Fujian still desired to retire in Minnan, even if it meant the gentrified island retreat of Gulangyu. At least the foods tasted familiar, the wharfs remained near, and the ocean breeze recalled memories of youth for these melancholic tycoons.

The Founders and other wealthy Chinese from the Philippines invested and donated substantial sums to build and finance schools, industry, infrastructure, and residences in their hometowns and nearby communities. They showed their affection for southern Fujian through their pocketbooks. Naturally, they sought to grow their own fortunes and improve the lives of their own family members in the process, but, based on their investment and donation patterns, Chinese in the Philippines had more than personal well-being in mind. They dreamed of a prosperous and safe Fujian. However, for many, this utopian Fujian felt frustratingly unattainable. The oft delayed and much maligned Xiamen–Longyan Railway epitomized both the audacious aspirations and dashed dreams of Chinese overseas.

Build the Damn Railroad, Pleads Oei Tjoe

Oei Tjoe, the patron, although not a long-time resident of the Philippines like the other founders of the China Banking Corporation, collaborated closely with Dee C. Chuan, Albino Z. Sycip, and other archipelagic acquaintances.Footnote ³² According to his biography, he came up with the idea and pledged the first funds for establishing what would become the China Banking Corporation during a long stay in Manila in 1919.Footnote ³³ The itinerant Oei Tjoe reminds us that the Sino–Philippine web spread far beyond the two polities into what Du Yongtao labels a “multi-place arena.”Footnote ³⁴ Chinese in Southeast Asia tapped into hometown associations, chambers of commerce, and family to expand business and political connections throughout Southeast Asia, across China, and sometimes even elsewhere around the world.Footnote ³⁵

Unlike many of his southern Fujianese colleagues from the Philippines, Oei Tjoe came from a poor and unconnected family from the more rugged, somewhat inland area of southern Fujian. Born in Shisun Village in Nan’an Country in 1868 on the heels of the Taiping Civil War, Oei experienced a childhood defined by hardship. Financial pressures forced him to drop out of school to support his family, and for the next eight years of his life, he became an itinerant barber, traveling first between the villages around his hometown before moving on to cities in the Dutch East Indies.Footnote ³⁶ Eventually, after acquiring a good grasp of Javanese, he cast his scissors and razors into the sea, opting instead to peddle household goods from his shoulder as a hawker.Footnote ³⁷ Then, from his meager savings, he opened a coffee stand, converted it into a grocery store, and transformed the store into a regional chain. From the grocery industry, he expanded into other industries like sugar, transforming into a prominent banker and international businessperson along the way.Footnote ³⁸

In other words, Oei Tjoe exchanged his rags for a quickly expanding bag of riches, which he used to build the aforementioned villas on Gulangyu. He was the quintessential underdog superhero, and like the quintessential underdog hero, he never forgot his roots. Beyond his personal investments, Oei flexed his philanthropic muscles, founding the Dou’nan School in his home county, the Ciqin Middle School for Girls in Xiamen, the Oei Tjoe Charity Hospital in his home county, and the Zhongshan Hospital in Xiamen.Footnote ³⁹ He also supported a library established by Dee C. Chuan on Gulangyu known as the Gulangyu Private Library.Footnote ⁴⁰ Like Dee C. Chuan, Oei invested staggering sums to construct new roads and buildings in Xiamen and Gulangyu.Footnote ⁴¹ And, of course, Oei invested in a railway.

Before Oei entered the scene, however, in the late Qing period, with the support of overseas investments totaling ¥3 million, a famous Qing dynasty official initiated the Zhangzhou–Xiamen railway project.Footnote ⁴² Completion of the railway took much longer than anyone anticipated, however, as new bureaus and new government entities tossed the project back-and-forth like a hot potato. After “over 20 years of great pains to build the enterprise by southern Fujianese,” construction finally began in earnest in 1927 and concluded in 1930.Footnote ⁴³ However, the train operated for less than a year as intended before a car company leased out the failed line. After twenty-four years of off and on construction, and after numerous rounds of investment, the railway failed to consistently carry any actual locomotives or cargo.

Undaunted by the numerous false starts, Oei Tjoe became the project’s most tireless cheerleader and financial backer, but he knew that the modest Zhangzhou–Xiamen line would serve little purpose and garner little support if it did not penetrate deeper into the interior of the province – far past the mountainous village he called home. Countering detractors who argued that it was a folly to invest in Fujian, Oei Tjoe argued, “The conventional wisdom is that the land is barren. In fact, it is the inability of people to explore buried treasures in the ground and to move products sitting on the ground” that prevented significant investment.Footnote ⁴⁴ To solve the problem, Oei proposed combining the rail and mining missions.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1922, donning his adventure hat, Oei Tjoe set off for the coal mines of Longyan, deep in the Fujian outback, but, before he could make it past Zhangzhou, his Dutch engineer and his sedan-chair bearers mutinied due to the approaching New Year.Footnote ⁴⁶ Oei Tjoe’s heart was in the right place, but he needed organizational support to see his dreams come to fruition.

When Oei Tjoe heard that his banking colleagues from the Philippines were organizing a “save the hometown” meeting on Gulangyu, he knew that a golden opportunity to win over hearts and minds for his railroad had arrived, so he threw in his support.Footnote ⁴⁷ In a speech during the second meeting of the organization in Gulangyu in 1926, Oei compared the railroad to blood vessels in a human body, arguing that one must “first restore one’s vigor before proceeding to treat the illness.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Or, in other words, Chinese overseas must invest in Fujian to restore its vitality before they could “save it” from militarism. To realize his goal, he led a subcommittee within the Save the Hometown Association to raise funds for the railroad.Footnote ⁴⁹ Convincing his colleagues was not the issue, however, because at the meeting “all present agreed that building [the] railway is the basic means of saving the home town.”Footnote ⁵⁰

After the meeting, Albino Z. Sycip and Dee C. Chuan showed their support for the railway with a media blitz.Footnote ⁵¹ Both argued for reallocating Boxer Indemnity funds, which foreign powers had levied after the so-called Boxer Rebellion, to support the construction of the railway.Footnote ⁵² Echoing Oei’s sentiments, Dee argued that the railway would have four benefits: aiding in the transportation of troops and supplies, helping eliminate banditry, supporting new business ventures, and increasing educational opportunities.Footnote ⁵³ Sycip even fished for support within his China network by mentioning the project to his banking colleague in Shanghai.Footnote ⁵⁴ Dee and Oei, meanwhile, took a lobbying trip to Beijing to “see what arrangements can be made with the Ministry of Communication to build a railway in the Province of Fukien.”Footnote ⁵⁵

After the Northern Expedition, Oei Tjoe continued to push for a railway for Fujian, his previous failures having only amplified his ambitions. He began to call for a line that extended not just to Longyan, but all the way to the provincial border in Tingzhou.Footnote ⁵⁶ Oei Tjoe found new allies in his mission in Jiang Guangnai and the Nineteenth Route Army, who had arrived in the province to govern and protect after their glorious battle in Shanghai in 1932.Footnote ⁵⁷ For a brief moment, it appeared as if Oei had struck gold as he stepped into the directorship of the Zhang–Long Railway and Mining Preparatory Committee under the new government. According to accounts, “with the help of the Committee’s technician they proceeded to work on the project in great haste.”Footnote ⁵⁸

However, it turns out that Oei had miscalculated when he called for restoring vigor before treating ailments. The Nineteenth Route Army ended up rebelling against Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government, creating an independent People’s Revolutionary Government that began to redistribute land in western Fujian. Generalissimo Chiang responded to this mutiny by bombing Fujian and sending in yet another trusted general to “restore order” in the province. After supporting Oei Tjoe’s railway and playing a critical role in its construction, the Nineteenth Route Army, to cover their tracks in retreat, tore apart the tracks of the railway, “thus ending” Oei Tjoe’s and other overseas Chinese people’s dream of a railway for Fujian in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ⁵⁹

Oei Tjoe used the metaphor of the circulation system as an aid to call for the construction of a railway in Fujian. This part, in turn, uses the railway as a symbol or microcosm of the broader political situation in Fujian. The railroad symbolized the political failure of successive regimes in Fujian and the limits of overseas Chinese philanthropy and investment, but it also provides a glimpse of the interconnected world of the Founders. In the end, despite their best efforts, Oei Tjoe, Dee C. Chuan, Albino Z. Sycip, and other founders of the China Banking Corporation failed to shape policy using only unflinching optimism and a substantial war chest. Superheroes needed more than positivity and deep pockets; they needed power. That is one of the reasons that they began to wade into the fraught realms of politics.

Tan Guin Lay and the Minqiao Moment

As a prominent educator and self-fashioned unpretentious businessperson in the distillery industry, Carlos Palanca Tan Guin Lay, the mixologist, brought an important perspective to the super-wealthy banking team.Footnote ⁶⁰ He was born in Xiamen itself, and he came to the Philippines as a teenager. Like his colleagues, after he had made his fortunes, Tan fulfilled the requisite hometown investment through his participation in a joint venture in a Xiamen-based paper company. Yet he also brought a no-knocks attitude that perhaps came from his long service as head of the Chinese Education Association of the Philippines.Footnote ⁶¹ More than anyone else, he felt he could bridge the worlds of industry and education, or, to put it another way, money-making and community service.

Channeling his supposed class-crossing credentials at the Southeast Asian Hokkien Overseas Save the Hometown Association meeting in 1924, Tan Guin Lay passionately appealed to his less endowed compatriots, saying, “patriotism doesn’t require money, if [you can] sacrifice and try your best, then you have succeeded in the pursuit of patriotism.”Footnote ⁶² Tan’s awkward attempt to connect with the masses betrayed some of the shortcomings and blind spots of the Founders writ large, and we will return to those shortcomings later, but it also hints at the passion and energy of some of the organization’s adherents. So, what was the Southeast Asian Hokkien Overseas Save the Hometown Association, and how did it captivate and divide Hokkien people in the Philippines?

The organization can be traced back to a meeting known as the Chinese Overseas Forum, which took place on Gulangyu Island on October 17, 1920. At that meeting, Oei Tjoe, Dee C. Chuan, Rafael M. Go Tauco (Wu Kecheng 吳克誠), and others gathered to discuss methods to oust the “warlord” Li Houji, unite different Fujianese organizations, and restrict military groups operating in Fujian.Footnote ⁶³ Organizers, including Tan Guin Lay, followed this meeting with another at the Oriental Club in Manila called the Philippine Chinese Overseas Association for the Advancement of Autonomy.Footnote ⁶⁴ This revamped organization developed a more sophisticated platform, calling for provincial autonomy, a provincial constitution, infrastructure and education investments, and local representation. Organizers also sought to grow the reach of the organization by contacting chambers of commerce and native-place organizations across Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁶⁵

In 1924, organizers in Manila rechristened the organization the Southeast Asian Hokkien Overseas Save the Hometown Association (南洋閩僑救鄉會).Footnote ⁶⁶ In a special bulletin that the organizers published after the Manila meeting, members outlined the updated objectives of the organization. They wrote: “The aim of this organization is to connect overseas Fujianese in Southeast Asia, rescue Fujian from its current political situation, relieve the suffering of our compatriots, restore local order, and construct a self-governing enterprise.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Aiming for professionalization and stability, leaders established a permanent headquarters and laid out plans for twenty regional branches across the Philippines.Footnote ⁶⁸

To grow the movement, the organizers of the Save the Hometown Association realized they needed to expose the suffering and desperation of Fujian to residents in the Philippines. After all, many Chinese in the archipelago had not been to the province for some time due to financial and legal constraints.Footnote ⁶⁹ With that goal in mind, one author painted this picture in a bulletin dedicated to the organization: “With the recurring turmoil of war, Zhangzhou, Xiamen, Quanzhou, and Yong’an were the most impacted … looking north to [our] native place, people and spirits all weep.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Educator Gan Bun Cho (Yan Wenchu 顏文初), who appeared in the previous part, wrote, “It is like there is no hometown to which [we] can return.”Footnote ⁷¹ Another contributor described the situation as follows: “Soldiers and bandits, bandits and soldiers, this land of southern Fujian has become a world of soldier-bandits.”Footnote ⁷²

The Southeast Asian Hokkien Overseas Save the Hometown Association, was, needless to say, laser focused on exposing and resolving Hokkien issues. Organizers notably used “Hokkien overseas (閩僑)” instead of “Chinese overseas (華僑)” in the title of their organization, for example, stressing their affinity for and connection to southern Fujian. The authors of the 1924 bulletin ended up using the character “Fujian (閩)” so many times that the publishers at the Philippine–Chinese Printing Press ran out of it, substituting it with a blank circle halfway through the document.Footnote ⁷³ While some scholars dismiss this hometown affinity as “parochial” loyalty or “provincialism,” others, as observed in the introduction to this part, are increasingly recognizing it as a more complete form of imagined community.Footnote ⁷⁴

Save the Hometown Association organizers possessed a shared language, mythical homeland, common “traditions,” shared struggle, and, with the new organization and its bulletin, a political forum and media organ to channel that energy. Perhaps they even had a shared race or ethnicity. Deep in the recesses of the 1924 Save the Hometown bulletin, one contributor wrote, “Saving the hometown is saving the race (type 種).”Footnote ⁷⁵ But to which “race” or “type” did the author refer? Was it Chinese, Hokkien, Asian, or something even more abstract? Perhaps the author sought refuge in ambiguity. However, it is safe to conclude that Hokkien people in the Philippines felt a deep attachment to their ancestral villages or hometowns, and they sought to “save” them through the Association.

Women played a critical role in the pursuit of this mission and the operation of the Association. Although few in number due to the legal impediments highlighted in Chapter 1, Hokkien women hosted a parallel forum at the Asian Theater in Manila in 1924 to promote the cause. Drawing inspiration from her Filipina compatriots, one speaker said, “Women in the Philippines have sacrificed so much energy and spirit for the independence question. They organized meetings, made calls, danced to help secure donations; [I] can’t forget [their efforts].”Footnote ⁷⁶ The speaker drew direct parallels between the Save the Hometown movement and the Philippine independence movement. A Lan (阿蘭), another contributor, argued that women should take charge of propaganda and dissemination efforts.Footnote ⁷⁷ Just as Tan Guin Lay attempted to bridge class differences, organizers like A Lan attempted to bridge gender divisions.

After extensive recruitment efforts across Southeast Asia, organizers from the Philippines deliberately shifted the center of gravity of the movement to southern Fujian itself to make it more representative of and accessible to all Hokkien people. Naturally, however, the Founders still occupied most leadership roles. On March 15, 1926, after several months of preparation, Dee C. Chuan traveled from Shanghai to the Cejin Club at 31 Fujian St. on Gulangyu Island to host the second major meeting of the organization.Footnote ⁷⁸ Because the meeting took place on Gulangyu, Carlos Palanca Tan Guin Lay could not attend, but Dee C. Chuan and Oei Tjoe served as able stewards in his stead. Over the next two weeks, leaders met six more times to lay out the operating rules of the organization, call for new infrastructure projects, like Oei Tjoe’s railway, discuss fundraising strategies, and offer and debate other proposals, such as converting Xiamen into a model city.Footnote ⁷⁹

Dee C. Chuan, in his opening message at the Gulangyu meeting, said, “Fujianese Overseas in the Philippines, due to their ardent enthusiasm, started the Save the Hometown movement, sending representatives to islands across Southeast Asia to spread the message and link together Hokkien overseas, working for common interests.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Even though Dee and others relocated the organization to Fujian, they still granted the Philippines a place of honor as the home of the Founders. And, even though they demonstrated a desire to diversify the leadership and bring in “compatriots of all walks of life,” as they curiously confided when inviting Carlos Palanca Tan Guin Lay to serve as the president of the Association, they still allowed business interests to dominate the organization’s agenda.Footnote ⁸¹

The wording of the invitation to Tan Guin Lay, which Tan Guin Lay himself reported in the bulletin, revealed some of the limitations of the Save the Hometown Association. If other leaders thought that the “Alcohol King” could serve as a link to the masses, or at least a link to students and educators, they were sorely mistaken. In fact, recounting a debate on the organization at a local school, one student noted that many Chinese workers did not have the means to return home, so they had little reason to support the organization.Footnote ⁸² By contrast, in his article in the 1924 bulletin, Tan Guin Lay, describing the vulnerable position Hokkien people found themselves in in the Philippines, argued that Fujianese overseas needed to invest in their hometowns as a backup plan in case the situation in the Philippines took a turn for the worst.Footnote ⁸³ Relocating to Fujian, however, was not an option for many, so his appeal likely fell on deaf ears. Transnationalism might have been a superpower, but it came with side effects, including delusion, callousness, and hubris.

One incident that took place in a village outside of Quanzhou in southern Fujian captures the limits of the Save the Hometown Association. It began with a local dispute between two families over access to burial grounds, but it grew into something much larger when a northern Beiyang government-appointed official responded by sending troops.Footnote ⁸⁴ Village residents, in turn, reacted to this influx of foreign Beiyang soldiers by attacking them, leaving twenty-seven dead. Before this incident, the Save the Hometown Association had emphasized the formation of local societies designed to enhance self-defense and self-governing capabilities at the village level.Footnote ⁸⁵ The formation of these local societies, however, only exacerbated problems as self-defense-trained villagers took up arms against perceived threats.

Needless to say, the loss of his soldiers angered the local Beiyang government official. Seeking to stave off yet another bloody reprisal, Dee C. Chuan, as a spokesperson for the Save the Hometown Association, stepped in to mediate. Dee dispatched several delegates to negotiate with the Beiyang-appointed official, but when the delegates arrived and told the official that they represented the Save the Hometown Association, the Beiyang official grew incensed. According to reports, he retorted, “I have never harmed the town, what [home]town is it that you are saving?”Footnote ⁸⁶ In the end, the Save the Hometown Association delegates would eventually achieve a breakthrough, but not through negotiations, as those were taken over by local officials. Falling back on their primary superpower, Dee C. Chuan, Oei Tjoe, Tan Guin Lay and other members of the Association appeased the Beiyang official by throwing money his way. Problem solved.

The Fujianese political movement began to show cracks just as the Kuomintang began its Northern Expedition to seal the much wider fissures that had torn China apart. Class differences and hubris shook Carlos Palanca Tan Guin Lay and his colleagues from their pedestals, and Kuomintang generals quickly moved in to occupy those vacated plinths. One Save the Hometown skeptic, who outlined in detail the mistakes of previous Hokkien attempts at organization and salvation, captured the contradiction of the organization when they lambasted the rich who “only wanted to protect the fengshui of their ancestor’s graves.”Footnote ⁸⁷ In the pages of the Association’s own bulletin, this critic took the Founders to task for their disingenuousness and haughtiness.

As the organization took on a more controversial political tone in 1926, which increasingly threatened to disrupt investments, the wealthy bankers blinked. Oei Tjoe, for instance, declined an official position as the Deputy of Fujian Province and Head of the Construction Bureau, instead opting to head up the private and unaffiliated Fujian Provincial Railway Association.Footnote ⁸⁸ As we will see, Dee C. Chuan, Albino Sycip, and several others also declined government positions. Decisions like these led the Association to slowly unravel.

I tend to avoid counterfactuals, but it is intriguing to speculate what might have happened to the Save the Hometown Association had the Kuomintang not achieved a semblance of national unity in 1928. Perhaps the Association would have spearheaded a loose Chinese federal union with other provincial leaders, or perhaps it would have pioneered an independent, Hokkien nation. We will never know. With the rise of the Kuomintang and the start of the Nanjing Decade, the Founders temporarily abandoned the Save the Hometown mission, but they experimented with a sequel in 1932 when an unlikely Hokkien hero, the Canton commander Cai Tingkai, arrived on the scene.

Cai Tingkai, the Unlikely Hokkien Hero

Lloyd Eastman, in his 1974 classic The Abortive Revolution, describes how the staunch defense of Shanghai by Guangdong Army veterans Cai Tingkai, Jiang Guangnai, and Chen Mingshu “resounded through the nation,” propelling them to legendary status overnight.Footnote ⁸⁹ While Carlos Palanca Tan Guin Lay, Oei Tjoe, and Dee C. Chuan attempted to buy their way to superherodom, the commander Cai Tingkai, who took over leadership of the Nineteenth Route Army in 1932, acquired his credentials through astounding military feats. Cai, who proved to be equally if not more effective at propaganda than at military maneuvers, leveraged his Shanghai victory to gain sympathy and support throughout China and across the world. During the skirmishes, he invited journalists from the international settlement to the army’s field headquarters to view his carefully curated image of a noble but underfunded army fighting off the “fierce tigers” of Japan.Footnote ⁹⁰

The Canton commander Cai Tingkai was an unlikely hero for Hokkien overseas, but he arrived at the right moment, and he sounded all the right notes for anxious diasporic compatriots. While he did not serve on the board of the China Banking Corporation, he did receive financial support from the bank, and he worked with many of the Founders to achieve their long sought-after goals. Cai was born to a peasant family in Luoding, a small city in the mountainous interior of Guangdong Province, closer to Guangxi than Guangzhou.Footnote ⁹¹ No stranger to poverty, he dropped out of school when he was twelve and helped his family farm and mend clothes before becoming a police officer and eventually a soldier.Footnote ⁹² As a soldier, he rose through the ranks, playing a prominent role in both the Northern Expedition and the Nanchang Uprising.Footnote ⁹³

On January 28, 1932, in the wake of the Manchurian Incident, when the Japanese army invaded northeastern China, the Japanese navy bombed and dispatched troops to northern Shanghai. The Nineteenth Route Army, against the better judgment of Chiang Kai-shek, offered stiff and memorable resistance, but when Japanese forces eventually outflanked them, the Nineteenth Route Army strategically retreated, leading to an armistice.Footnote ⁹⁴ The bravery of the Nineteenth Route Army captured the hearts and wallets of the Founders and others across China and overseas. On February 5, the Founders, through the China Banking Corporation, wired ¥22,000 to Commander Cai Tingkai and the “gallant soldiers of our army.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Later that same year, through the old infrastructure of the Save the Hometown Association, Dee C. Chuan, along with other members of the old crew, requested that Chiang Kai-shek dispatch the Nineteenth Route Army to Fujian to help end the “brutal behaviors of red bandits” and restore some semblance of order in the province.Footnote ⁹⁶ Perhaps recognizing the importance of overseas Chinese support to his bankrupt government, or the threat of the spotlight-grabbing, heavily armed heroes of Shanghai in his backyard outside Nanjing, Chiang Kai-shek complied. Chiang dispatched the army and its charismatic leaders to what some viewed as “exile” to China’s “wild” borderlands, Fujian, to participate in the encirclement campaign against the communists in neighboring Jiangxi province, thereby striking two birds with one stone as he turned two major threats to his power and popularity against one another.Footnote ⁹⁷

Grateful to have the famous war heroes help bring order to their hometowns, Fujianese overseas continued to flood the Nineteenth Route Army’s coffers.Footnote ⁹⁸ Leaders of the army, in turn, reciprocated by implementing a program of opium eradication, bandit suppression, property protection, and infrastructure development, including Oei Tjoe’s railway.Footnote ⁹⁹ They also strategically fostered an image of transparency and openness by hosting a grand meeting in Hong Kong to listen to the needs and aspirations of prominent leaders of the Fujianese diaspora, like Eduardo Co Seteng (Xu Youchao 許友超), who directed the Philippine Chinese Chamber of Commerce at the time.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Nineteenth Route Army leaders even invited Dee C. Chuan and Eduardo Co Seteng to take up positions in the newly organized Fujian government. As alluded to earlier, Dee declined the invitation, but Co Seteng accepted and became mayor of Xiamen.Footnote ¹⁰¹

After multiple decades of chaos and misery, it appeared to many that Fujian was finally on the mend. However, as alluded to earlier, when Cai Tingkai and other Nineteenth Route Army officials began implementing a policy of land reform in western Fujian, and when they declared the independent Fujian People’s Revolutionary Government, the Founders and their wealthy comrades reassessed their support. The newly branded revolutionaries continued to sound all the right notes, however, by acknowledging that China had suffered through the pain of militarism and misrule, and by focusing outwardly on economic issues and resistance to Japan.Footnote ¹⁰² Cai Tingkai himself demonstrated to potential Chinese supporters in Southeast Asia that he understood their plight, describing how people from a “weak country with no diplomatic presence,” or Chinese overseas, faced oppression by local governments.Footnote ¹⁰³

Seeing the tide of public opinion turn against them, leaders of the Nineteenth Route Army attempted to reinvigorate support in Southeast Asia by sending a representative to the region and by doubling down on constructing popular infrastructure projects. However, when potential allies in Guangdong ignored overtures, communists in Jiangxi refused to coordinate, and Chiang Kai-shek orchestrated an aerial bombardment of the People’s Revolutionary Government, Fujianese overseas support quickly evaporated.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Co Seteng, who had by that time been promoted to the governor of a newly subdivided Fujian, maintained his support initially but submitted his resignation as Chiang-allied troops moved on the province.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

In late 1933 and early 1934, the Nineteenth Route Army suffered a string of defeats on the battlefield before surrendering and dissolving.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Overall, fighting was erratic and half-hearted, as many of the leaders either submitted to Chiang or moved into exile.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Cai chose the latter, fleeing to Hong Kong, where he continued to champion a proactive and defiant stance toward Japan. Despite his unceremonious departure from Fujian, however, the Canton commander still commanded a following among Chinese in the Philippines. During a brief stopover in the archipelago on his way to Europe in 1935, he delivered a speech at a massive rally in Rizal Tennis Stadium, receiving a thunderous applause from the local crowd.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Then, in 1936, the editors of a commemorative volume for the Philippine Chinese Chamber of Commerce invited Cai Tingkai to contribute an article. Like an aged rock star singing all the old tunes, Cai described banditry and destitution in Fujian, and he praised how Chinese overseas had created the Save the Hometown Association, comparing it to the sacrifice of the Nineteenth Route Army.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ He called once more for provincial autonomy and substantial investments in infrastructure.Footnote ¹¹⁰ And people listened. A year later, when he traveled back to Manila, Dee C. Chuan, Eduardo Co Seteng, and many others met him at the wharf with open arms and toasted him at the city’s prominent clubs.Footnote ¹¹¹ The Save the Hometown movement might have ended, and the Fujian People’s Revolutionary Government might have collapsed, but the dream of a prosperous and autonomous Fujian, or even independent Hokkien nation, lived on.

China Aches

While Fujian ailed, China ached. The early twentieth century made up the latter half of what people have referred to as the “Century of Humiliation” that lasted from the first Opium War through World War II. Conflict and change marked this tumultuous epoch. Internal turmoil brought about by the Taiping Civil War, the Nian Rebellion, the Miao Rebellion, the Panthay Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the so-called Warlord Era, and the Chinese Civil War upended and ended lives while frustrating all attempts to unify and govern the country. And partially external challenges, including the Opium Wars, the Sino–French War, the Sino–Japanese War, and World War II, brought more suffering to families while slowly tearing away at Chinese sovereignty and financial solvency.

The individual and collective tragedies of this century are seared into people’s memories and history books to this day. Tobie Meyer-Fong captures the general atmosphere of fear and anxiety during the Taiping Civil War when describing hair politics: “The Qing and their militia allies massacred civilians with hair on their foreheads; the Taiping killed those with freshly shaved pates.”Footnote ¹ Peipei Qiu, Su Zhiliang, and Chen Lifei, meanwhile, capture the incredible pain and suffering of so-called comfort women who were forced into sexual slavery during World War II and faced ostracization if they were fortunate enough to return to their communities after the conflict.Footnote ² Testimonies from the Taiping Civil War in the mid-nineteenth century and World War II in the mid-twentieth remained strikingly similar though the technologies of torment had changed.

For people living through the first half of the twentieth century, an elusive salvation dangled frustratingly out of reach, and setbacks and disappointment remained the rule. Late Qing reformers attempted to bring about much-needed change through the Hundred Days of Reform spearheaded by Kang Youwei (康有爲) and the too little, too late New Policies led by the reluctant Empress Dowager Cixi (慈禧太后), but those reforms failed. Radical writers and martyrs, like Qiu Jin (秋瑾) and Zou Rong (鄒容), along with new global revolutionary discourses like anarchism and communism that helped inspire them, produced “a general revolutionary atmosphere” in the first decades of the twentieth century that threatened to dismantle old centers of power.Footnote ³ This atmosphere produced the Wuchang uprising and the foundation of the Republic of China in 1911, and the Northern Expedition and the establishment of the Kuomintang government in Nanjing in 1927. However, as described elsewhere, these new governments failed to alleviate systemic problems across China.

Japan’s invasions of northeastern China after the Mukden Incident, Shanghai a few months later, and the rest of China after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937 extended and expanded the pattern of calamity in China. China’s emaciated air force and deficient antiaircraft defenses exposed most of China to Japanese bombers throughout the war.Footnote ⁴ And Japanese bombers did not hold back, unleashing carnage on people and infrastructure, especially in the wartime capital of Chongqing.Footnote ⁵ Air raids ended many lives, but the face-to-face pogroms and individualized violence in Nanjing in 1937 represented a whole different scale of holocaust.Footnote ⁶ This destruction demanded the attention of Chinese in the Philippines.

The same way a collapsing building might draw attention away from a superhero who was holding a bus in suspension, the broader destruction across China began to draw attention away from the Founders who had spent so much time propping up the Fujian bus. Of course, the story was more complicated than simply pivoting from Fujian to China. Many Chinese people in the Philippines felt perfectly justified supporting Hokkien and Chinese nationalisms simultaneously, but Japan’s outright invasion demanded a direct response.Footnote ⁷ Like aspiring superheroes, the Founders attempted to save people both on the bus and in the toppling building. However, especially after the war threatened to expand to the Philippines, the Founders redirected most of their attention to Chinese politics and Chinese “national salvation.” Fortunately for them, the Founders had slowly built valuable connections across China in the preceding years that would prove handy in their mission.

Sycip’s Sales Pitch

Albino Z. Sycip, who was “beloved and honored by Chinese and Filipinos alike,” also was “regarded warmly as a strong tie between the American continent and the Asian world.”Footnote ⁸ Always a man well connected, Sycip grew up on the posh Calle Jolo in Manila’s central business district where neighbors included Sergio Osmeña, a prominent politician who would serve as president, and Simplicio del Rosario, an original signatory of the 1899 Malolos Constitution of the First Philippine Republic.Footnote ⁹ Unlike Oei Tjoe and Cai Tingkai, who received little formal schooling, Sycip spent his formative years in the classroom. He studied at the Anglo-Chinese College in Fuzhou before undertaking advanced studies at the University of Michigan, where he served as a leader of the Chinese student association and editor for the Michigan Law Review.Footnote ¹⁰ With this training and connection to overlapping elite circles, Sycip, the communicator, facilitated connections and built partnerships for other Founders.

Returning to the Philippines after his stint in Michigan, doctorate in law and ample confidence in hand, he gained fame as a hotshot lawyer who argued high-profile cases for the Chinese community in the Philippines, such as the challenge to the Bookkeeping Act that we learned about in Chapter 2. Eventually, he swapped vocations, trading his life as a lawyer for a considerably more comfortable existence as a businessperson. Simultaneously relying upon and enhancing his broad network of acquaintances, he entered into and excelled in the import–export business. Although business prerogatives frequently took him away from the Philippines, he carefully attended to his connections back in the archipelago through golf matches at the Wack Wack Golf Club and his memberships to the Rotary Club and Cosmos Club.Footnote ¹¹ Through World War II and the years of recovery afterward, he served as the president of the China Banking Corporation, steering the institution through uncertainty.Footnote ¹²

Sycip used the connections at his disposal to build bridges. In 1923, Kiang Kang-hu (Jiang Kanghu 江亢虎), whom we encountered briefly in Chapter 4, got into a heated argument with Dee C. Chuan and Carlos Palanca Tan Guin Lay during his trip to the Philippines. After complaining that Dee and Tan Guin Lay could not speak (Mandarin) Chinese, Kiang wrote, “The two gentlemen know nothing of courtesy, [they] look down upon people with the haughty aspect of a capitalist.”Footnote ¹³ In this tense moment, the communicator, Albino Sycip, stepped in to mediate. Although Kiang still ended up broadcasting his gripes about Dee and Tan Guin Lay in the book he published upon his return to China, he admitted that Sycip had helped smooth things over. Nonetheless, Kiang rendered a familiar verdict on the Founders when he strongly chastised them for charging a sum, which thereby created a barrier for the non-wealthy to join the Education Association.Footnote ¹⁴

When Sycip married Helen Vonglin Bau (Bao Fenglin 鮑鳳林), whom he had met in a chance encounter on a steamship coming back from the United States, he became part of a prominent Shanghai family that owned the Commercial Press, among other businesses. Bau and their children stayed in Shanghai with Bau’s family for long periods for health reasons, and Sycip frequently joined them on business trips.Footnote ¹⁵ Likely leveraging the connections of his in-laws, Sycip received an honorary PhD from St. John’s Academy in Shanghai, cementing his position as a “dominant player” in the city.Footnote ¹⁶ As historian Parks Coble notes, “In a city the size of Shanghai, the dominant players in every sector often interacted with one another in settings such as the Chinese Ratepayers Association, the alumni association of the prestigious St. John’s Academy, chambers of commerce, and so forth.”Footnote ¹⁷

Because of his connections, Sycip often served as the recruiter or interlocutor for Chinese interests in the Philippines and Philippine interests in China. In 1914, shortly after his return from the United States, Sycip traveled to Shanghai to recruit merchants to showcase their products at the Manila Carnival the following year.Footnote ¹⁸ In the city, Sycip met several members of the Chinese National Products Preservation Society who showed him sample textile products from local factories.Footnote ¹⁹ Applying subtle nationalist-infused shaming, Sycip delivered his pitch, noting that comparable textile producers from England, Germany, France, and Japan dominated the Manila tradeshow. Sycip then discussed the details of the exposition with his Shanghai acquaintances for three full hours before retiring. In recruiting trips like these, Sycip and his colleagues laid the foundations for future partnerships between prominent Chinese in the Philippines and members of China’s business and political elite.

Years later, Sycip returned to China to recruit once more for the Manila Carnival, but this time around he was no longer a young and unproven lawyer. In 1928, after he had already made his mark on the world through his leading role in defeating the Bookkeeping Law, successful import–export company, marriage into a prominent Shanghainese family, membership in elite international organizations like the Rotary Club, and position as a director of the China Banking Corporation, he returned to recruit. By this time, he was a Founder. As a result, Sycip traveled directly to Nanjing to meet with the Kuomintang Minister of Finance, H. H. Kung (Kong Xiangxi 孔祥熙), who confided that Sycip had had a “positive influence” on him.Footnote ²⁰ Kung agreed to sponsor the Chinese trade trip to the Manila Carnival.

In a report to the Executive Yuan after the trip, H. H. Kung described how a lot of merchants had taken part in the Far Eastern Exposition of the Manila Carnival.Footnote ²¹ While Kung did not personally attend the exposition, he attached a comment from his representative who highlighted the warm atmosphere and pleasant welcome everyone had received at several business banquets. In the report, economic issues quickly faded to the background as Kung’s representative slipped into politics, promising a government of the Three People’s Principles that could both learn from and teach people in the Philippines.Footnote ²² Just as investment and relationships had led the Founders into politics in Fujian, trade and connections led them into politics in Nanjing.

Like Oei Tjoe and Dee C. Chuan, Albino Sycip stumbled upon a government position, but, also like Oei Tjoe and Dee C. Chuan, he passed on the opportunity. In 1928, soon after the formation of the Nanjing government, K. P. Chen (Chen Guangfu 陈光甫), Sycip’s banking colleague from Shanghai, wrote to inform Sycip that H. H. Kung had selected him to serve as the vice-minister of the Board of Industry and Commerce. Chen wrote, “I wired Mr. Kung recommending you for the post because you are the only man, whom I know of having the necessary qualification to do this important work for the country.”Footnote ²³ Sycip must have considered the opportunity, but in the end he informed his colleague, “I cannot entertain such an offer because my ability is not equal to the job.”Footnote ²⁴ Sycip’s careful fostering of relationships in the United States, the Philippines, and China had begun to bear fruit. An invitation to work directly for the central government in China had dropped at his feet.

Supporting China and shaping its future had long occupied the minds of wealthy Chinese in the Philippines. Before the establishment of the Republic, on the heels of the Boxer Rebellion, organizers in Manila had founded a branch of the Protect the Emperor Society.Footnote ²⁵ In 1911, under the guidance of local Kuomintang leader Tee Han Kee (Zheng Hanqi 鄭漢淇), a physician whom Albino Sycip would later vouch for in a 1928 correspondence with his Shanghai banking colleagues, Chinese in the Philippines opened a local office of Sun Yatsen’s revolutionary organization, the Tongmenghui. The local branch ended up raising over ₱300,000 for the revolutionary cause.Footnote ²⁶

Just like the Nineteenth Route Army, the Kuomintang proactively dispatched allies and advocates to Southeast Asia to rally support for their agenda and raise money. In 1915, for instance, Kuomintang leader Sun Yatsen dispatched Hu Hanmin (胡漢民) to Europe, and on his way there, he stopped by Singapore and Manila.Footnote ²⁷ At a banquet in the Philippines, Hu delivered a speech disparaging Beiyang leader Yuan Shikai and praising the Kuomintang. He noted for readers back in China that Filipinos in the audience expressed their “enthusiastic approval” to his speech. Although it sounds far-fetched, according to Hu, one spectator could not help but stand up and deliver their own impromptu speech expressing ardent support for China’s revolution.Footnote ²⁸

With the establishment of the Whampoa Military Academy and the reinvigoration of the Kuomintang in 1924, the Founders and many of their colleagues recommitted to the nationalist organization and its leaders. This, of course, happened just as the Founders began to experiment with provincial politics. Over fifty different Chinese organizations in the Philippines signed on to a letter expressing support for the Kuomintang in 1925. With that support came some suggestions, however, as the letter’s authors wrote, “Chinese citizens should work hard to eliminate domestic compliance with imperialism and the scourge of warlord politicians to plan a reformed China.”Footnote ²⁹ The Founders had a long list of priorities, and they saw in the Kuomintang a potential avenue to achieve some of their goals.

The Kuomintang, for its part, continued its outreach abroad after the success of the Northern Expedition, sending Hu Hanmin on yet another trip to the Philippines in 1929. This time around, Hu met with local congress members and appealed for more support.Footnote ³⁰ However, after having spent several years of organizing the Save the Hometown Association, which focused almost exclusively on Fujian, and after repeatedly having their hopes dashed with Chinese national politics, Chinese in the Philippines appeared to have lowered their expectations regarding what could be achieved on the national level. Nonetheless, they made efforts to ensure they stood on the right side of Chinese nationalism.

While Sycip and other Founders supported nationalist-inspired protests and boycotts, like those that accompanied the 1925 May Thirtieth movement in China, they tempered that support when money was on the line. Tugging all the right nationalistic heartstrings by recognizing how his “compatriots hated the cruelty and pain of imperialism,” Sycip, as the head of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce of the Philippines, sent a letter to the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce requesting that protestors refrain from boycotting the mixologist Tan Guin Lay’s La Tondeña Distillers.Footnote ³¹ Sycip and other Founders feared that their status as wealthy Chinese outside the so-called mainland might link them to imperialist forces during Chinese nationalistic upheavals. After having fumbled through a legal obstacle course put up by the Philippine government with the Bookkeeping Act, the Founders did not want to dive through even more hoops imposed by China.

It was tricky to balance Chinese, Philippine, hometown, and personal and professional goals, but Albino Sycip, the communicator, channeled his unique superpowers to glide across the balancing beam. He also helped his Founder colleagues do the same. When his colleague, Guillermo Cu Unjieng, shared a desire to invest in real estate in Hankou, for instance, Sycip sent a letter over to K. P. Chen in Shanghai asking for advice.Footnote ³² Sycip later sent a follow-up to another Shanghai banking colleague asking if he could secure low-rate loans for both Dee C. Chuan and Cu Unjieng.Footnote ³³ In the next section, we will follow Sycip’s colleague, Cu Unjieng, as he balanced personal and national imperatives.

Compadre Cu Unjieng, Camaraderie, and Capital

Guillermo Cu Unjieng, the compadre, or co-parent, rocketed from poverty to incredible wealth before falling back through the stratosphere burdened by debt. He first migrated to Manila as a teenager in 1882 where he worked as a cook, cleaner, dyer, and clerk before saving enough to start his own business.Footnote ³⁴ He got his start in the import–export industry before branching into insurance, real estate, and banking.Footnote ³⁵ However, when the Great Depression hit, Cu Unjieng found himself overburdened with poorly timed debt. The Shanghai Hong Kong Bank of China filed a lawsuit against him for defrauding the bank, and the case made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court.Footnote ³⁶ For a time, however, Cu Unjieng was one of the wealthiest and most influential residents of Manila.

Like many of his Philippine colleagues, Cu Unjieng donated to his hometown and supported Chinese nationalist causes. In 1911, after hearing news of the Wuchang uprising, for instance, Cu Unjieng donated ₱5,000 to the revolutionary army.Footnote ³⁷ Cu Unjieng also watched out for his own, extending a system of compadrazgo, or co-parenthood, to the Founders. Joshua Kueh describes how this system of “fictive kinship” created “networks of mutual obligation and aid within their own community.”Footnote ³⁸ In 1904, along with twenty-four other prominent members of the community, Cu Unjieng founded the Manila Chinese Commercial Council – a precursor to the Chamber of Commerce. He served as the first president, and he held the position four more times from 1904 to 1920.Footnote ³⁹ From this spot, Cu Unjieng nurtured his foundlings and grew his wealth.

By the 1920s and 1930s, however, the tables had turned, the compadre having transformed from a powerful agenda setter to a man who relied on his “children” to maintain his waning stature and influence. This was the backdrop to Sycip’s introduction of Guillermo Cu Unjieng to his Shanghai colleagues in the previous section. Sycip had also vouched for Cu Unjieng a year earlier when he first introduced him to K. P. Chen.Footnote ⁴⁰ Then, in 1928, after Cu Unjieng had become a “valued client of this bank,” Cu Unjieng sent his son and wife to honeymoon in Shanghai, and the Shanghai bankers played host.Footnote ⁴¹ The relationships grew more multifaceted as personal, professional, and national goals expanded along with the fictive family.

Capital and power folded together into a vortex of possibility as the Founders and their colleagues in China strengthened the bonds of their relationship by championing a common cause – the Chinese nation. Dee C. Chuan, in an interview published in a Manila newspaper soon after the Northern Expedition, broadcast his praise for the new Kuomintang government and its leader, Chiang Kai-shek, whom Dee described as “an able general and highly efficient and excellent administrator” whose “honesty is unquestioned.”Footnote ⁴² Sycip and Dee also used their positions to squash rumors circulating in the Philippines that Chiang Kai-shek had been severely injured during the fighting.Footnote ⁴³

In addition to building business relationships with colleagues in China and making public and private declarations of support for the new Kuomintang government, the Founders also attended to relationships on a more personal level. Dee C. Chuan and Alfonso Sycip, Albino’s older brother and fellow Founder, contributed to a memorial fund for a prominent Shanghai banker who had recently passed.Footnote ⁴⁴ Albino also wrote to his Shanghai colleagues, “You and K. P. are my big brothers and so I feel that I have the privilege of expecting you to look after my interests as well as my duty in any matter that may come to your attention.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The Founders, perhaps planning for an uncertain future in troubled times, shored up their relationships across China.

Cu Unjieng acted as the compadre of Dee C. Chuan, Albino Sycip, Carlos Palanca Tan Guin Lay, and others. Meanwhile, the Founders adopted new “brothers” in the Shanghai bankers who, in turn, developed close if not complicated relationships with those in power in nearby Nanjing.Footnote ⁴⁶ In other words, these ultra-privileged capitalists and politicians became part of a convoluted and clamorous extended fictive family. Within this family, Sycip and Dee enjoyed an especially close relationship with the aforementioned Shanghai bankers, K. P. Chen and T. P. Yang (Yang Dunfu 楊敦甫), which would come in handy later when coordinating a meeting between leaders of the Philippines and China.Footnote ⁴⁷ These close personal relationships helped build the necessary rapport needed to address complicated political issues, but they would have been far less effective without parallel relationships in the Philippines.

The Founders’ fictive kinship networks extended throughout the archipelago. While Cu Unjieng, Sycip, and Dee funneled money into projects in Fujian, Shanghai, and elsewhere in China, they also crafted an image as model Philippine citizens and indispensable members of the proverbial Philippine family. They so effectively embodied this image that even a Chinese author who wrote about them noted, “Chinese overseas from Fujian, except when sending money to their hometowns, kept their investments in Philippine businesses.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Strategic investments and carefully calibrated friendships brought the Founders influential Filipino “family members.” Some of Dee C. Chuan’s children, for instance, had as godparents “distinguished Filipinos like Manuel Quezon and Sergio Osmena.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Finally, in addition to fostering fictive kinships, the Founders and their wealthy colleagues in the Philippines employed a strategy that scholar Aihwa Ong calls “flexible citizenship,” which entailed “acquiring a range of symbolic capitals that … facilitate their positioning, economic negotiation, and cultural acceptance in different geographical sites.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Scholars like Richard T. Chu have extended Ong’s argument to the Philippines, exploring how Chinese people there used flexible “border-crossing” practices and held “shifting and multiple loyalties.”Footnote ⁵¹ With citizenship laws still fluid in the Philippines, Albino and Alfonso Sycip (Figure 6.1), who were born in the Philippines in the late Spanish colonial period, used their Philippine citizenship to their advantage, while others from the Chinese community maintained their Chinese citizenship and sent their kids to China to keep a foot in both worlds.Footnote ⁵²

Figure 6.1

Unchong Sycip, Alfonso Z. Sycip, Albino Z. Sycip, and Felisa S. Godinez. From John SyCip family collection provided by efforts of Addie S. Cukingnan and Leslie C. Samaniego.

Whereas real families tied the Founders to their hometowns and provincial politics, fictive families and flexible citizenship strategies linked the Founders to China, the Philippines, and a broader world of politics. So, when an opportunity arose for the Founders to make a connection between the leaders of the Philippines and China in 1927, they, like the superheroes they imagined themselves to be, leaped into action. This high-profile and understudied meeting would not have been possible without the extensive networks cultivated by Cu Unjieng, Sycip, Oei Tjoe, and Dee over the preceding years.

Quezon’s Quest

Manuel L. Quezon, the statesman, occupies a treasured place in Philippine history. He has already appeared several times in this book, so there is no need to detail his life, but a few comments on his upbringing will help set the stage for the story that follows. He was born into a family of teachers in Baler in eastern Luzon in 1878 where he excelled in school, eventually going on to study law at the University of Santo Tomas.Footnote ⁵³ He temporarily dropped out of the program at Santo Tomas to join the revolutions against Spain and the United States, gaining a reputation as a “fearless, impulsive, quick-tempered but kind-hearted” soldier.Footnote ⁵⁴ When the war turned south and General Emilio Aguinaldo surrendered, Quezon turned in his rifle, completed his degree, and took up the law.Footnote ⁵⁵ From there, he launched a career in politics, serving first in the House of Representatives, then the Senate, then as President of the Commonwealth of the Philippines.

Manuel Quezon’s training as a lawyer provided him with a natural connection to the communicator, Albino Sycip. This connection would come in handy when Sycip pulled some strings to introduce Quezon to the leader of the Kuomintang and the Republic of China, Chiang Kai-shek. Before we get there, however, let us set up Quezon’s visit. Sycip laid the groundwork for the meeting with a preliminary visit to Shanghai in May of 1927, which took place right on the heels of the Shanghai–Nanjing offensive of the Northern Expedition. During his visit, “Sycip conferred with all the high officials of the Nationalist [government] including General Chiang Kai-shek.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Sycip’s meeting set the stage for Manuel Quezon’s visit two months later.

Manuel Quezon left for Shanghai on the Empress of Asia on July 9, 1927, to “pay his respects to General Chiang Kai Shek.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The patron, Oei Tjoe joined Quezon, and the spiritual leader, Dee C. Chuan, promised to make the trip soon after in “service of the national cause.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Before making his way to Nanjing to meet with Nationalist leaders, however, Quezon charmed Shanghai’s wealthy with a banquet speech, saying, “I believe that the cause of Nationalist China is the cause of humanity. I think that it is only through the recognition of the fundamental principles of the rights of every nation to be free and independent and on an equal footing with other nations on earth that real peace and universal prosperity throughout the world can be established.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Ever the politician, Quezon serenaded his hosts with colorful Enlightenment rhetoric.

On July 19, Quezon received a telegram from Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek himself stating, “Your visit to Nanking will be most welcomed.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Quezon then proceeded to Nanjing to meet with Kuomintang leaders, like the diplomat Hu Hanmin, whom we encountered earlier, and, of course, Chiang Kai-shek.Footnote ⁶¹ What did Quezon and Chiang discuss during their meeting? Plans to combat communism? Japan and the United States? Enhancing trade relations? Unfortunately, we will never know unless someone uncovers an account of the meeting. Nonetheless, the symbolic value of their encounter cannot be understated.Footnote ⁶²

As the highest-ranking Filipino official, Quezon granted Chiang’s government a type of recognition that no other major power had yet extended. For Chiang, Quezon’s visit represented a de facto recognition of his newly established Nanjing government. For Quezon, the Nanjing trip provided an opportunity to act as an autonomous and proactive head of state who pursued his own foreign policy and agenda. Chiang’s reception of Quezon represented a de facto recognition of Philippine autonomy. For both the as-yet unsecure Kuomintang government and the colonially occupied Philippine government, the meeting served as an important political statement. And it would not have been possible without the Founders, who rallied different members of their disparate fictive family to make it happen.

After Quezon had safely returned to the Philippines, Dee and Sycip sent a letter to Chen thanking him for hosting Quezon and organizing the meeting. They wrote, “We know that all of the courtesies President Quezon receives in Shanghai are entirely due to your efforts.”Footnote ⁶³ For his part, Chen expressed his admiration for Quezon. Chen wrote, “I saw him [Quezon] several times during his sojourn and am impressed that he is a very enlightened and energetic leader. He assured me that he would endeavor to promote a still better feeling between our people and the Philippinos [sic].”Footnote ⁶⁴ The Chinese Consul General in the Philippines likewise praised Quezon for “strengthening of the bond of friendship.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Like a superhero politician, Manuel Quezon sliced through international quandaries with the sword of diplomacy.

For the Founders, the newly extended fictive family came with upkeep costs but tangible benefits. While most people had to rely on news reports radioed into news offices, Albino Sycip used his direct connections in Shanghai to get the most recent updates on events in China.Footnote ⁶⁶ Sycip no doubt used this information to align the financial decisions of the China Banking Corporation. After receiving an update on the Northern Expedition from K. P. Chen later in 1927, Sycip returned an inspiring message, writing “In spite of the many adverse reports I feel quite confident that those who truly fight for the cause of nationalism, democracy and humanitarianism will … win at the end.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Dee C. Chuan and Albino Sycip, rallying the Founders, put their wallets where their mouths were, organizing the sale of a staggering ¥60 million in bonds for the Nationalist cause.Footnote ⁶⁸ But it was a small price to pay for membership to this powerful fictive family.

Over the years, Albino Sycip helped orchestrate other prominent political exchanges.Footnote ⁶⁹ For instance, he introduced representatives of the Radio Corporation of the Philippines to Nationalist leaders in China to help work on technology transfers.Footnote ⁷⁰ However, no introduction topped that of Quezon. The Founders, along with their second adopted hero, Manuel L. Quezon, worked hard to achieve and ensure Chinese national unity even while, with their first adopted hero, Cai Tingkai, they struggled to achieve Hokkien national objectives. In the end, the arrival of the Second World War mobilized a powerful Chinese nationalist sentiment that tilted the scales toward China and its salvation.

Part III Conclusion, “National” Salvation

With the rise of Japanese militarism, Chinese overseas and the Kuomintang spearheaded the “National Salvation Movement,” which is an umbrella term used to describe a series of boycotts, protests, fundraisers, and other resistance measures implemented to resist Japanese military encroachments.Footnote ⁷¹ Alfonso Sycip, a Founder who led the Chamber of Commerce at the outbreak of the Second Sino–Japanese War, formed the Philippine Resist the Enemy Committee, which helped raise nearly ¥260,000 for Chinese forces by August 1937.Footnote ⁷² The Chinese Women’s Association of the Philippines, meanwhile, also raised money for war goods, including airplanes.Footnote ⁷³ In other words, the Founders and their allies continued their pattern of fundraising and financial support during the war. This does not mean that they forgot about Fujian, though.

Back in 1927, after praising General Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalist cause in a well-publicized interview, the spiritual leader Dee C. Chuan confided that even though he believed in “strong central government as do all Chinese Nationalists,” he still hoped that the new regime would provide a form of “provincial autonomy like that of the United States.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In other words, Dee hoped to achieve the best of both worlds: a united Chinese government, and an autonomous and secure Fujian. As historian Liu Hong observes, “there was an increasing tendency during the first half of the twentieth century to link localistic agendas with broader nationalist issues.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Chinese and Fujianese nationalistic issues became intertwined as leading Hokkien people in diaspora began to reconcile dueling nationalisms.

Through the years, as the Founders built their wealth and created new infrastructure for investment and influence, some things remained unchanged. The Founders continued to be blinded by their privilege and stymied by the limits of their capital interventions. They attempted to augment their social and financial capital by using citizenship and fictive kinship, and they attempted to leverage that social and financial capital to influence politics. They remained faithful to both their hometowns and the broader, more amorphous Chinese geo-body, though the war demanded outsized attention to the latter. And, through it all, they remained committed to one another and confident in their diverse, if not always effective, superpowers.