Later we will turn to World On Fire for Amy Chua’s analysis of the World Trade Center attack on 9/11/01. First, let’s look at her thesis on ‘market-dominant minorities’.
World On Fire by Amy Chua
Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School. She lectures frequently on the effects of globalization to government, business and academic groups around the world.
Chua is not an anti-globalist. But she presciently warns that, far from making the world a better and safer place, democracy and capitalist—at least in the raw, unrestrained form in which they are currently being exported—are intensifying ethnic resentment and global violence, with potentially catastrophic results.
Globalization and Ethnic Hatred
One beautiful blue morning in September 1994, I received a call from my mother in California. In a hushed voice, she told me that my Aunt Leona, my father’s twin sister, had been murdered in her home in the Philippines, her throat slit by her chauffeur. My mother broke the news to me in our native Hokkien Chinese dialect, but “murder” she said in English, as if to wall off the act from the family, through language.
The murder of a relative is horrible for anyone, anywhere. My father’s grief was impenetrable; to this day, he has not broken his silence on the subject. For the rest of the family, though, there was an added element of disgrace. For the Chinese, luck is a moral attribute, and a lucky person would never be murdered. Like having a birth defect, or marrying a Filipino, being murdered is shameful.
My three younger sisters and I were very fond of my Aunt Leona, who was petite and quirky and had never married. Like many wealthy Filipino Chinese, she had all kinds of bank accounts in Honolulu, San Francisco, and Chicago. She visited us in the United States regularly. She and my father —Leona and Leon— were close, as only twins can be. Having no children of her own, she doted on her nieces and showered us with trinkets. As we grew older the trinkets became treasures. On my tenth birthday she gave me ten small diamonds, wrapped up in toilet paper. My aunt loved diamonds and bought them up by the dozen, concealing them in empty Elizabeth Arden face moisturizer jars, some right on her bathroom shelf. She liked accumulating things. When we ate at McDonald’s, she stuffed her Gucci purse with free ketchups.
According to the police report, my Aunt Leona, “a 58 year old single woman,” was killed in her living room with a “butcher’s knife” at approximately 8:00 P.M. on September 12, 1994. Two of her maids were questioned and confessed that Nilo Abique, my aunt’s chauffeur, had planned and executed the murder with their knowledge and assistance. “A few hours before the actual killing, respondent was seen sharpening the knife allegedly used in the crime.” After the killing, “respondent joined the two witnesses and told them that their employer was dead. At that time, he was wearing a pair of bloodied white gloves and was still holding a knife, also with traces of blood.” But Abique, the report went on to say, had “disappeared,” with the warrant for his arrest outstanding. The two maids were released.
Meanwhile, my relatives arranged a private funeral for my aunt, in the prestigious Chinese cemetery in Manila where many of my ancestors are buried in a great, white marble family tomb. According to the feng shui monks who were consulted, because of the violent nature of her death, my aunt could not be buried with the rest of the family, else more bad luck would stride her surviving kin. So she was placed in her own smaller vault, next to—but not touching—the main family tomb.
After the funeral, I asked one of my uncles whether there had been any further developments in the murder investigation. He replied tersely that the killer had not been found. His wife explained that the Manila police had essentially closed the case.
I could not understand my relatives’ matter-of-fact, almost indifferent attitude. Why were they not more shocked that my aunt had been killed in cold blood, by people who worked for her, lived with her, saw her every day? Why were they not outraged that the maids had been released? When I pressed my uncle, he was short with me. “That’s the way things are here,” he said. “This is the Philippines—not America.”
My uncle was not simply being callous. As it turns out, my aunt’s death is part of a common pattern. Hundreds of Chinese in the Philippines are kidnapped every year, almost invariably by ethnic Filipinos. Many victims, often children, are brutally murdered, even after ransom is paid. Other Chinese, like my aunt, are killed without a kidnapping, usually in connection with a robbery. Nor is it unusual that my aunt’s killer was never apprehended. The policemen in the Philippines, all poor ethnic Filipinos themselves, are notoriously unmotivated in these cases. When asked by a Western journalist why it is so frequently the Chinese who are targeted, one grinning Filipino policeman explained that it was because “they have more money.”
My family is part of the Philippines’ tiny but entrepreneurial, economically powerful Chinese minority. Just 1 percent of the population, Chinese Filipinos control as much as 60 percent of the private economy, including the country’s four major airlines and almost all of the country’s banks, hotels, shopping malls and major conglomerates. My own family in Manila runs a plastics conglomerate. Unlike taipans Lucio Tan, Henry Sy, or John Gokongwei, my relatives are only “third-tier” Chinese tycoons. Still, they own swaths of prime real estate and several vacation homes. They also have safe deposit boxes full of gold bars, each one roughly the size of a Snickers bar, but strangely heavy. I myself have such a bar: My Aunt Leona Federal Expressed it to me as a law school graduations present a few years before she died.
Since my aunt’s murder, one childhood memory deeps haunting me. I was eight, staying at my family’s splendid hacienda-style house in Manila. It was before dawn, still dark. Wide awake, I decided to get a drink from the kitchen. I must have gone down an extra flight of stairs, because I literally stumbled onto six male bodies.
I had found the male servants’ quarters. My family’s houseboys, gardeners, and chauffeurs—I sometimes imagine that Nilo Abique was among those men—were sleeping on mats on a dirt floor. The place stank of sweat and urine. I was horrified.
Later that day I mentioned the incident to my Aunt Leona, who laughed affectionately and explained that the servants—there were perhaps twenty living on the premises, all ethnic Filipinos—were fortunate to be working for our family. If not for their positions, they would be living among rats and open sewers without even a roof over their heads.
A Filipino maid then walked in’ I remember that she had a bowl of food for my aunt’s Pekingese. My aunt took the bowl but kept talking as if the maid were not there. The Filipinos, she continued —in Chinese, but plainly not caring whether the maid understood or not—were lazy and unintelligent and didn’t really want to do much else. If they didn’t like working for us, they were free to leave any time. After all, my aunt said, they were employees, not slaves.
Nearly two-thirds or the roughly 80 million ethnic Filipinos in the Philippines live on less than two dollars a day. Forty percent spend their entire lives in temporary shelters. Seventy percent of all rural Filipinos own no land Almost a third have no access to sanitation.
But that’s not the worst of it. Poverty alone never is. Poverty by itself does no make people kill. To poverty must be added indignity, hopelessness, and grievance.
In the Philippines, millions of Filipinos work for Chinese; almost no Chinese work for Filipinos. The Chinese dominate industry and commerce at every level of society. Global markets intensify this dominance: When foreign investors do business in the Philippines, they deal almost exclusively with Chinese. Apart from a handful of corrupt politicians and a few aristocratic Spanish mesiao families, all of the Philippines’ billionaires are of Chinese descent. By contrast, all menial jobs in the Philippines are filled by Filipinos. All peasants are Filipinos. All domestic servants and squatters are Filipinos. In Manila, thousands of ethnic Filipinos used to live on or around the Payatas garbage dump: a twelve block-side mountain of fermenting refuse known as the Promised Land. By scavenging through rotting food and dead animal carcasses, the squatters were able to eke out a living. In July 200, as a result of accumulating methane gas, the garbage mountain imploded and collapsed, smothering over a hundred people, including many young children.
When I asked an uncle about the Payatas explosion, he responded with annoyance. “Why does everyone want to talk about that? It’s the worst thing for foreign investment.” I wasn’t surprised. My relatives live literally walled off from the Filipino masses, in a posh, all-Chinese residential enclave, on streets named Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. The entry points are guarded by armed, private security forces.
Each time I think on Nilo Abique—he was six-foot and my aunt was four-feet-eleven-inches tall—I find myself welling up with a hatred and revulsion so intense it is actually consoling. But over time I have also had glimpses of how the Chinese must look to the vast majority of Filipinos, to someone like Abique: as exploiters, as foreign intruders, their wealth inexplicable, their superiority intolerable. I will never forget the entry in the police report for Abique’s “motive for murder”. The motive given was not robbery, despite the jewels and money the chauffeur was said to have taken. Instead, for motive, there was just one word—”Revenge.”
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My aunt’ killing was just a pinprick in a world more violent than most of us ever imagined. In America we read about acts of mass slaughter and savagery; at first in faraway places, now coming closer and closer to home. We do not understand what connects these acts. Nor do we understand the role we have played in bringing them about.
In the Serbian concentration camps of the early 1990s, the women prisoners ere raped over and over, many times a day, often with broken bottles, often together with their daughters. The men, if they were lucky, were beaten to death as their Serbian guards sang national anthems; if they were not so fortunate, they were castrated of, at gunpoint forced to castrate their fellow prisoners, sometimes with their own teeth. In all, thousands were tortured and executed.
In Rwanda in 1994, ordinary Hutus killed eight hundred thousand Tutsis over a period of three months, typically hacking them to death with machetes. Young children would come home to find their mothers. Fathers, sisters, and brothers on the living room floor, implies of severed heads and limbs.
In Jakarta in 1998, screaming Indonesian mobs torched, smashed, and looted hundreds of Chinese shops and homes, leaving over two thousand dead. One who survived—a fourteen-year old Chinese girl—later committed suicide by taking rat poison. She had been gang-raped and genitally mutilated in front of her parents.
In Israel in 1998, a suicide bomber driving a car packed with explosives rammed into a school bus filled with thirty-four Jewish children between the ages of six and eight. Over the next few years such incidents intensified, becoming daily occurrences and a powerful collective expression of Palestinian hate. “We hate you,” a senior Arafat official elaborated in April 2002. “The air hates you, the land hates you, the trees hate you, there is no purpose in your staying on this land.”
On September 11, 2001, Middle Eastern terrorists hijacked four American airplanes. They destroyed the Wold Trade Center and the southwest side of the Pentagon, crushing or incinerating approximately three thousand people. “Americans, think! Why you are hated all over the wold,” proclaimed a banner held by Arab demonstrators.
Apart from their violence, what is the connection between these episodes? The answer lies in the relationship—increasingly, the explosive collision—between the three most powerful forces operating in the world today: markets, democracy, and ethnic hatred.
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This book is about a phenomenon—pervasive outside the West yet rarely acknowledged, indeed often viewed as taboo—that turned free market democracy into an engine of ethnic conflagration. The phenomenon I refer to is that of market-dominant minorities: ethnic minorities who, for widely varying reasons, tend under market conditions to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, the “indigenous” majorities around them.
Market-dominant minorities can be found in every corner of the world. The Chinese are market-dominant minority not just in the Philippines but throughout Southeast Asia. In 1998, Chinese Indonesians, only 3 percent of the population, controlled roughly 70 percent of Indonesia’s private economy, including all of the country’s largest conglomerates. More recently, in Burma, entrepreneurial Chinese have literally taken over the economies of Mandalay and Tanoon. Whites are a market-dominant minority in Sought Africa and, in a more complicated sense, in Brazil, Ecuador. Guatemala, and much of Latin America. Lebanese are a market-dominant minority in West Africa. Ibo are a market-dominant minority in Nigeria Craoats were a market-dominant minority in the former Yugoslavia. And Jews are almost certainly a market-dominant minority on post-Communist Russia.
Market-dominant minorities are the Achilles’ heel of free market democracy. In societies with a market-dominant ethnic minority, markets and democracy favor not just different people, of different classes, but different ethnic groups. Markets concentrate wealth, often spectacular wealth, in the hands of the market-dominant minority, while democracy increases the political power of the impoverished majority. In these circumstances the pursuit of free market democracy becomes an engine of potentially catastrophic ethnonationalism, pitting an “indigenous” majority, easily aroused by opportunistic vote-seeking politicians, against a resented, wealthy ethnic minority. This confrontation is playing out in country after country today, form Indonesia to Sierra Leone, from Zimbabwe to Venezuela, from Fussia to the Middle East.
Since September 11,2001, this confrontation has also been playing out in the United States. Americans are not an ethnic minority (although we are a national-origin minority, a close cousin). Nor is there democracy at the global level. Nevertheless, Americans today are everywhere perceived as the world’s market-dominant minority, wielding outrageously disproportionate economic power relative to our size and numbers. As a result, we have become the object of mass popular resentment and hatred on the same and that is directed at so many other market-dominant minority around the world.
Global anti-americanism has many causes. One of them, ironically, is the global markets are bitterly perceived as reinforcing American wealth and dominance. At the same time, global populist and democratic movements give strength, legitimacy, and voice to the impoverished, frustrated, excluded masses of the world—precisely the people, in other words, most susceptible to anti-American demagoguery. In more non-Western countries than Americans would care to admit, free and fair elections would bring to power anti-market, anti-American leaders. For the last twenty years Americans have been grandly promoting both marketization and democratization throughout the world. In the process we have directed at ourselves the anger of the damned.
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The relationship between free market democracy and ethnic violence around the world is inextricably bound up with globalization. But the phenomenon of market-dominant minorities introduces complications that have escaped the view of both globalization’s enthusiasts and its critics.
To a great extent, globalization consists of, and is fueled by, the unprecedented worldwide spread of markets and democracy. For over two decades now, the American government, along with American consultants, business interests, and foundations, has been vigorously promoting free market democracy throughout the developing and post-socialist worlds.
The fact is that in the last two decades, the American-led global spread of markets and democracy has radically transformed the world. Both directly and through powerful international institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization (WTO), the United States government has helped bring capitalism and democratic elections to literally billions of people. At the same time, American multinationals, foundations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have swept the world, bringing with tem ballot boxes, and Burger Kings, hip-hop and Hollywood, banking codes and American-drafted constitutions.
The prevailing view among globalization’s supporters is that markets and democracy are a kind of universal prescription for the multiple ills of underdevelopment. Market capitalism is the most efficient economic system the wold has ever known. Democracy is the fairest political system the world has ever known and the one most respectful of individual liberty. Working hand in hand, markets and democracy will gradually transform the world into a community of prosperous, war-shunning nations, and individuals into liberal, civic-minded citizens and consumers. In the process, ethnic hatred, religious zealorty, and other “backward” aspects of underdevelopment will be swept away.
Thomas Friedman has been a brilliant proponent of this dominant view. For globalization’s enthusiasts, the cure for group hatred and ethnic violence around the world is straightforward: more markets and more democracy. Thus after the September 11 attacks, Friedmand published an op-ed piece pointing to India and Bangladesh as good “role models” for the Middle East and arguing that the solution to terrorism and militant Islam is “Hello? Hello? There’s a message here. It’s democracy, stupid!:—”multi-ethnic, pluralistic, fee-market democracy.”
By contrast, the sobering thesis of this book, World on Fire, is that the global spread of markets and democracy is a principal, aggravating cause of group hatred and ethnic violence throughout the non-Western world.
Markets and democracy may well offer the best long-run economic and political hope for developing and post-communinst societies. In the short run, however, they are part of the problem.
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“Markets,” “democracy,” and “ethnicity” are notoriously difficult concepts to define. In part this is because there is no single correct interpretation of any of these terms. Indeed, I hope precisely to show in this book that the “market system” currently being urged on developing and post-Communist countries are very different form the ones now in place in contemporary Western nations; that the process of “democratization” currently being promoted in the non-Western world is not he same as the one that the Western countries themselves went through; and the “ethnicity” is a fluid, artificial, and dangerously manipulable concept.
In the West, terms like “market economy” or “market system” refer to a broad spectrum of economic systems based primarily on private property and competition, with government regulation and redistribution ranging from substantial (as in the United States) to extensive (as in the Scandinavian countries). Ironically, however, for the last twenty years the United States has been promoting throughout the non-Western world raw, laissez-faire capitalism form of markets that the West abandoned long ago. These measures characteristically include privatization, elimination of state subsidies and controls, and free trade and proforeign investment initiatives. As a practical matter, they rarely, if ever, include any substantial redistribution measures.
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I am emphatically not attempting to pin the blame for any particular case of ethnic violence—whether the mass killings perpetuated by all sides in the former Yugoslavia or the attack on America—on economic resentment, on markets, on democracy, on globalization , or on any other single cause. Numerous overlapping factors and complex dynamics, such as religion, historical enmities, territorial disputes, or a particular nation’s foreign policy, are always in play.
The point, rather, is this. In the numerous countries around the world that have pervasive poverty and a market-dominant minority, democracy and markets—at least in the form in which they are currently being promoted—can proceed only in deep tension with each other. In such conditions, the combined pursuit of free markets and democratization has repeatedly catalyzed ethnic conflict in highly predictable ways, with catastrophic consequences, including genocidal violence and the subversion of markets and democracy themselves. This has been the sobering lesson of globalization over the last twenty years.
I suggest that the United States should not be exporting markets in the unrestrained , laissez-faire form that the West itself has repudiated, just as it should not be promoting unrestrained, overnight majority rule—a from of democracy that the West has repudiated. Ultimately, however, I argue that the best hope for democratic capitalism in the non-Western world lies with market-dominant minorities themselves.
Moonshiner note: this last argument is where her critics step in and challenge her. There seems to be enthusiasm for her analysis yet when she argues against the proliferation of democracy and that “democratic capitalism in the non-Western world lies with market-dominant minorities themselves”, she seems to be just arguing for the preservation of her own family’s power. However, in her own argumentation, she points out that the United States does not have a democracy of majority rule so we shouldn’t be exporting a variation due to the risks of ethnic conflict. Origianlly the United States was a democracy opened only to those who owned property. Currently the United State is dominated by a minority of millionaire’s, billionaire’s and special corporate interest groups.
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