British Chinese - Society and Commerce

Society and Commerce

At the turn of the 20th century, the number of Chinese in Britain was small. Most were sailors who had deserted or been abandoned by their employers after landing in British ports. In the 1880s, some Chinese migrants had fled the US during the anti-Chinese campaign and settled in Britain, where they started up businesses based on their experience in America. There is little evidence to suggest that these "double migrants" had established close ties with Britain's other, longer-standing Chinese community. By the middle of the 20th century, the community was on the point of extinction, and would probably have lost its cultural distinctiveness if not for the arrival of tens of thousands of Hong Kong Chinese in the 1950s.

Starting a small business was the main way the Chinese coped with their limited ability to find employment in a generally alien and hostile English-speaking environment. They forged inter-ethnic partnerships to overcome the twin problem of raising funds and finding employees. In the first half of the 20th century, most Chinese were involved in the laundry business, while migrants who arrived after the Second World War worked primarily in the catering industry. As these businesses grew, so too did the demand for labour, which entrepreneurs met by exploiting kinship ties to bring family members into Britain. Business partnerships broke up and evolved into family firms, starting and gradually reinforcing the move away from community-based enterprise. With this, competition escalated, since most migrants were involved in the same sector of industry.

This competition necessitated the community's geographical dispersal which further hindered its attempts to struggle collectively for greater protection from the authorities against racial discrimination. In urban areas, the experience of racism forced the Chinese into "ethnic niches", consisting primarily of restaurants and takeaways, thus heightening competition and placing further limits on communal cooperation. The more entrepreneurial of these migrants would strive to leave these enclaves and were usually the ones who achieved social mobility. Later arrivals—the seafarers (in the first half of the 20th century) and immigrants from Hong Kong (from the 1960s)—were unable to cooperate to challenge the policies of the British government which were designed to prevent them from entering other economic sectors, even as part of the labour force. In addition to the generalised racism that they encountered, these Chinese migrants were trapped by policies to remain in economic spheres where their links with the majority population were curtailed and competition with the latter was minimized.

Government policies also had an important bearing on the issues of integration and enterprise development. The Conservative government under Margaret Thatcher in the late 1970s and early 1980s actively promoted the setting up of small enterprises, essentially as a mechanism to deal with the problem of racism. The government was then of the view that since immigrants preferred to concentrate on small businesses due to the hardships and difficulties, in the form of language barriers and racial discrimination, they experienced in the UK they would opt for opportunities for business ownership rather than employment with or by non co-ethnics.

While small enterprises have helped migrants to cope with the problem of their isolation and alienation in the new environment, a good segment of their children, on the other hand, have done well in education, notably at the tertiary level, and have made a prominent presence as professionals and in the high-tech sector.

By the turn of this century, the Chinese in the UK could be broadly categorized into four main categories:

• Hong Kong Chinese from the rural New Territories who started arriving in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. Many of them moved into catering and food wholesaling and retailing.
• Southeast Asian Chinese, who also started arriving in the 1960s. Primarily from middle-class, professional backgrounds, some of them have also gone into business, including catering.
• Arrivals from mainland China and urban Hong Kong in the 1980s, who have gone into business related to technology and manufacturing.
• British-born Chinese, whose members are mostly well-qualified and work in hi-tech industries.

The lists of directors and shareholders of Chinese-owned companies provide no evidence of interlocking stock ownership or of interlocking directorships. A number of them were created and ran as partnerships before coming under the control of one individual or family. Most of the start-up funds for these businesses have come from personal savings or put together by family members. There is little evidence that they have had access to ethnic-based funding, and there are very few instances to suggest that financial aid has been provided on intra-ethnic grounds; rather, such assistance was for the mutual benefit of both borrower and lender. An example of an ethnic Chinese who capitalised on his ethnicity to create a Chinese-based business center in the UK is W. W. Yip. An immigrant from Hong Kong who started out as a waiter, Yip became a restaurateur and later built his reputation as a leading wholesaler and retailer of Chinese food products. He is the owner of Britain's largest Chinese enterprise in terms of sales volume.