Chen Xiaoqi (1900–1989), a native of Fuzhou, Fujian, was not one of the wealthy overseas Chinese leaders of Burmese Chinese society. Yet among Burmese Chinese organizations and among the overseas Chinese themselves, he was widely liked and respected. People called him “Xiaoqi Xian.”
He spent twenty years in education and thirty years serving the overseas Chinese community. At different times, he worked as secretary of the Burmese Chinese Education Association, the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, and the General Relief Association. After World War II, he also founded the Burmese Chinese Service Society and compiled the Directory of Rangoon Associations, Businesses, and Schools, providing valuable information for the postwar recovery and development of Burmese Chinese trades and professions.
What was most remarkable was that he had never studied sociology. It was simply through serving the community and handling the many small matters of daily life that he came to understand deeply how important it was to collect information. So, despite his busy work, he kept notes on important events day by day. In time, he compiled them into a book and, in 1950, published Forty Years of Major Events in the Burmese Chinese Community, hereafter referred to as the Chronicle.
Among overseas Chinese communities in the countries of Southeast Asia, the Chronicle could be called both unique and the first of its kind. It is a rare “reference tool” for studying the social, economic, and cultural development of the Burmese Chinese community.
In 2001, Feng Xundong, an elderly returned overseas Chinese from Burma, used the clues provided by the Chronicle and consulted historical materials concerning the Chinese in Burma to write A Century of Burmese Chinese History. Other institutions and individuals researching the history of overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia have also used information from the Chronicle in their studies.
The Chronicle records major events in Burmese Chinese society over the forty years from 1911 through 1950. It is not exhaustive—the compiler’s original purpose was to prepare a commemorative special publication for the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, so the contents have certain limitations—but its material is objective and detailed, and its value cannot be erased.
Through the Chronicle, we can see that ever since the 1911 Revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty and established the Republic, the overseas Chinese in Burma continued to move with the currents of history.
On March 10, 1911, Li Yannan, Zheng Yakun, and Fang Jinren, members of the Burma branch of the Chinese Revolutionary Alliance in Rangoon, left for Guangdong to take part in the Nationalist movement.
On April 28, the Alliance received a telegram from comrades in Guangzhou reporting that the uprising had failed. The Burmese Chinese comrade Li Yannan was killed, and Zheng Yakun was wounded. The names of these two Burmese Chinese martyrs are now carved among the Huanghuagang martyrs in Guangzhou.
After the Wuchang Uprising, the Rangoon branch of the Alliance held an emergency staff meeting and organized a “Fund-Raising Bureau” to support the construction of the government in the motherland. In less than a year, more than 287,000 Burmese dollars in donations were collected and remitted in installments to the Ministry of Finance in Beijing.
On May 5, 1921, Sun Yat-sen assumed the office of president. To support the Northern Expedition, the overseas Chinese in Burma organized the Patriotic Mutual Aid Association and contributed military funds. Seven remittances were sent, totaling nearly fifty to sixty thousand Hong Kong silver dollars.
During the War of Resistance Against Japan, the patriotic fervor of the overseas Chinese in Burma rose to an unprecedented level. They organized National Salvation Volunteer Corps, Anti-Japanese National Salvation Associations, Overseas Chinese Aviation National Salvation Associations, and others; donated money for relief; and organized overseas Chinese volunteer engineering teams to return to China for service.
The Chronicle also records vivid examples. Mrs. Ye Qiulian, wife of the Guangdong overseas Chinese Liang Rongxi, donated a two-story brick house, which the General Relief Association auctioned in its entirety for relief funds. A tobacco company donated cigarettes and gave the proceeds from their sale. The Crown Cinema held benefit film screenings to support relief, and so on.
In February 1940, the General Relief Association held an ambulance-donation ceremony and mobilized overseas Chinese organizations throughout Burma to raise funds through schools. Each ambulance was priced at three thousand Burmese dollars. A total of 151 schools participated, raising 145,000 dollars and purchasing ten ambulances, designated Burmese Chinese Students Nos. 1 through 10.
The Rangoon branch directly under the China Aviation Construction Association mobilized Chinese schools to raise funds for “Student” aircraft. A total of 240 schools took part, collecting 49,190 Burmese dollars and purchasing two airplanes, named “Burma Overseas Chinese Students No. 1” and “Burma Overseas Chinese Students No. 2.”
The Chronicle also records the brutal atrocities committed by the Japanese invaders during the occupation of Burma.
At five o’clock on the morning of June 11, 1942, Japanese military police in Rangoon surrounded the Chinese district and arrested more than six hundred people. Apart from several dozen, including Yang Mingti, Ye Kaishu, Lin Jiaqiao, Li Bosang, and Zeng Wenzhao, who remained imprisoned, the others were gradually released. On July 17, five men including Yang Zhong were taken by the Japanese military police to the Fujian cemetery at Kemmendine and executed by firing squad on charges of “undermining the New Order in East Asia and obstructing the advance of the Imperial Army.” Fifty-eight family members from the five households were deported back to China. Most were women and children. After a journey lasting dozens of days, eighty percent had died; only eleven reached Baoshan, Yunnan.
In the spring of 1942, at Kyaukme in northern Burma, several hundred Chinese soldiers died heroic deaths, including men captured by the Japanese invaders and collectively burned alive after gasoline was poured over them.
Mr. Chen Xiaoqi’s Chronicle recorded Burmese Chinese social history along the vertical line of time. Horizontally, he also made a major effort by compiling the Survey Directory of Rangoon Associations. Sixty years ago, in colonial Rangoon, where the economy was still waiting to recover and telephone and communications services were poorly developed, such a directory was as important as a walking stick to a blind person.
After World War II, overseas Chinese refugees who had fled back to China gradually returned to their second homeland, Burma. Those who had hidden in remote rural settlements during the occupation also came back to Rangoon. They rebuilt old businesses or opened new ones, and all urgently needed information. A handbook introducing Chinese associations and businesses in the Rangoon area was badly needed at the time.
As president of the Burmese Chinese Service Society, Mr. Chen Xiaoqi decided to lead members including Zhou Zhichang, Lin Yulin, Chen Zhaofu, and others in carrying out a timely social survey.
Telephones were still uncommon then, and business cards had not yet become widely used. The work could be completed only through the investigators’ own feet, hands, and mouths. In the Chinatown district where overseas Chinese were concentrated, the work was relatively manageable. But in districts where Indians, Burmese, British, and Chinese lived among one another, and in suburban areas beyond Chinatown, the survey was extremely difficult and laborious.
They went street by street, shop by shop, visiting, investigating, and registering. They recorded the proprietor, business name, address, type of business, and basic information about each establishment in both Chinese and English. In the end, they completed, edited, and published two directories, one for 1947 and one for 1948. They were printed in large octavo format, issued by the Burmese Chinese Service Society every New Year’s Day, and printed by the Greater China Printing Bureau.
Mr. Chen Xiaoqi was upright, sincere, and frugal throughout his life. After World War II, when I attended National Primary School, he left a deep impression on me. He was then in his forties, a tall man with a bald head, khaki shorts reaching to his knees, and long socks pulled up to the knee. He spoke slowly and kindly and never lost his temper.
After I transferred to a middle school in the suburbs, I once wrote an essay called “Grandmother Chen.” I used him as the model for a warm and lovable elderly man who was as gentle as a grandmother. Later, he returned to China and died in 1989. His achievements were rooted in the Burmese Chinese community, and his service benefited the country. He deserves admiration.
Originally published in the World Journal, March 29, 2007.