LAW AND THE CHINESE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA.

LAW AND THE CHINESE IN SOUTHEAST ASIA. Edited by M. Barry Hooker. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. 2002. x, 216 pp. (Table.) S$49.90/US$29.90, paper. ISBN 981-230-125-9.

The diverse conference-volume essays collected in this book pursue themes relating law to immigration, opportunity, mixed race populations, citizenship, property, business, family and personal affairs. The outstanding essay is by Charles Coppel, who closely considers the historical development of the widely known legal distinctions of Chinese and non-Chinese populations in colonial Indonesia, and its relationship to nationality and citizenship. Leo Suryadinata provides a useful historical overview of twentieth-century China's citizenship laws and the Chinese in Southeast Asia. The rest of the contributors seem to be more interested in the law than in the Chinese.

This symposium leaves me, at least, unsatisfied. The absence of essays on Thailand and the Philippines is one source of dissatisfaction. Granted that the amount of literature and researchers in Southeast Asian law varies across the region, would it not have been possible to commission post-conference essays on these two countries? Without that, we have a set of fragments as our base line for future conferences--fragments

that supposedly reflect the state of the art.

But does this collection reflect the state of relevant literature? It may do so for Western-language literature about Southeast Asia. But it does not represent the large, active and very much relevant field of studies of Chinese law. We are told that the dynamics of law in relation to the Chinese in Southeast Asia are governed by the interaction of Confucian norms and laws in China, past and present, plus colonial and post-colonial legal traditions and legislation in Southeast Asia. What we are missing here is the vast literature, especially in Chinese and Japanese, but even in Western languages, about law and custom in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Some of this is readily available in English. Reading Hooker's long piece on British colonial justice and Chinese polygamy, I immediately thought of the abundant reports and other documentation about British law and Chinese polygamy in Hong Kong. These were Cantonese and at least some of the Chinese in British possessions in Southeast Asia were Cantonese. For Hokkiens, another large segment of the Southeast Asian Chinese population, one could use the massive Japanese surveys of "Old Customs" and "Private Law" in Taiwan. These are just some of the sources. There is also the secondary literature in Asian languages. If we are to consider the experience of Chinese with the law and custom practiced in China and elsewhere, don't we need to be up to date with that? Can we still proceed as if Western languages are all one needs? In this symposium, only Suryadinata makes any use at all of works in Chinese.

Two additional chapters might have taken care of this problem. One might have drawn on the literature of Chinese legal studies to present a clear, sophisticated conception of Chinese customs and legal impressions, especially as experienced in the colonial environments of Hong Kong and Taiwan. Another chapter, perhaps by an anthropologist working on the Chinese in Southeast Asia, might bring to bear cultural perspectives to understand how Southeast Asian Chinese have seen the laws and norms they live with. That was not done, so this symposium, despite its useful individual pieces and value as a reference tool on specific issues, is much less than it could have been.

EDGAR WICKBERG University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada