Singaporean Chinese Doing Business in China

Abstract

From 1979 to 1994, Singapore businessmen invested US$8.6 billion in China, in over 4,565 projects, making Singapore the fifth largest foreign investor in China after Hong Kong, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States. The pace of investments has quickened considerably since. For example, in 1995 alone, a total of US$8.67 billion worth of new direct investment contracts were signed, more than the cumulative total from 1979 to 1994. The chapter looks into how and why Singapore Chinese businessmen are investing heavily in China and compares business behaviour across spatial context but within ethnic bounds. It argues that guanxi relations continue to play an important role in business dealings with the China Chinese. Using the ideas of the social, the oral, the moral, as well as the conception of time, the chapter examines the paradox of ethnic sameness and ethnic differentness in business dealings between co-ethnics.

This chapter was first published in the book Chinese Business Networks: State, Economy and Culture, edited by Chan Kwok Bun, Singapore: Prentice Hall and Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, pages 71–85, 2000. I would like to acknowledge and thank the editor of the volume, Professor Chan Kwok Bun, as well as NIAS Press, for the kind permission to reprint the article in this volume.