친공(親共)과 애국 사이 — CIA 문서를 통해 본 냉전초 동남아 화교화인의 대중(對中)인식 —

초록

The event that Tan Kah Kee, a business tycoon of Malaysia and Singapore accumulating its fortune through the rubber industry, had left Singapore, his business basement, to Xiamen of China in 1950 has been mysterious and remained unsolved. Tan’s returning home was a symbolic event on the diverse features of the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia during the Cold War period regardless of what the exact reason was. This paper traces back his perspective on the socialized home country and re-considers the typical contradictory concept on the Cold War like pro-communists vs. pro-democratic through Tan Kah Kee’s political activities and perspectives. This paper finds that there had been constant intention of the Communist Chinese government to control the overseas Chinese politically and economically for the regional hegemony under the Cold War situation through CIA documents. At the same time, in facing this kind of ambition of their home country, the overseas Chinese community in Singapore and Malaysia showed diverse reaction which could not understand with the dichotomy perspective of the Cold War. This research also tries to re-conceptualize the reaction of Tan Kah Kee normally called as the pro-communist and the patriot. CIA and NAS documents clearly indicates that Tan Kah Kee’s reaction on the Cold War and the Communist Chinese intention had been a hometown(Qiaoxiang)-centralized perspective rather than the nationalistic or patriotic one. He had been still stayed somewhere between the Communism and the patriotism. This is the key argument of this paper. Tan Kah Kee’s trajectory and symbolic confusion between the Hokkien identity and the nationalism during the early Cold War as a marginal businessman has still lasted today. It is observed that Chen Jia Geng(Tan Kah Kee’s Mandarin pronunciation) has been honored for the patriotic entrepreneur hero by the People’s Republic of China while he has been admired by the descendants of the overseas Chinese in Singapore and Malaysia as a founder of the Chinese capitalists’ culture.

키워드