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Europeans believed that Africa belonged to tribes and power should be distributed among "tribal chiefs", so Africans constructed tribes to which to belong. Europeans believed that India belonged to religious groups and that chairs for direct election should be distributed to separate religious groups, so India became polarized along Muslim and Hindu lines, and eventually divided into Pakistan and India.
In colonies which were overwhelmingly Chinese, Malaya and Hong Kong, for instance, British administrators were struck by the fact that the Chinese had no nationalism toward the respective colony: the British feared that Malaya would be colonized by Chinese settlers and would one day be part of China. Because of a similar fear, Singapore was excluded from Malaysia.
Unlike the cases of India and Africa, the concept of nationhood is readily available in China. Chinese settlers carried the concept along with them to the colonies. As a consequence, British rule in the overseas Chinese communities always faced enormous challenges which were exported from China. One of these challenges occurred at the turn of this century, when the concept of “China” and the method to present one's "chineseness" underwent very dramatic changes. The narrative of these changes went something like this: a Manchu China was overthrown by revolutionaries and then a Republican China was stolen by warlords. Before the Guomindang successfully promoted their ideology based upon the cult of Sun Yat-sen and unified China in 1927, China had already disintegrated into competitive regional powers. The overseas Chinese, linked to different competing groups, were drawn into this political arena in China. Their involvement was manifold. This short article deals with one aspect of this involvement - political investment in regional politics. It attempts to illustrate three points.
I) The Guomindang ideology of a Chinese Republic based upon the legend of Sun was absent in this period of time. With or without this ideology, China was a political landscape with layers of national and regional networks
2) British colonists commanded some, but not the final, authority over the colonial Chinese. To the overseas Chinese, the political arena that commanded their attention and participation was not in the colony, but in China.