싱가포르 화교은행(OCBC)과 동아시아 전시체제－동남아 화상(華商)기업의 전시(戰時) 위기대응과 생존－

Abstract

For thirteen years from 1937 to 1949, many Chinese entrepreneurs in both mainland China and Southeast Asia experienced harsh circumstances due to the Anti-Japanese War, the Asia Pacific War and the Chinese civil War. In particular, overseas Chinese enterprises with their business networks spreading to Southeast Asia and South China had to find ways of adapting and surviving. They had to react rapidly frequent changes in the external environment, such as the British colonial rule, the Japanese threat, the Japanese occupation and the British re-occupation after the war. Their reaction and adaption are the focus of this paper. Owing to Parks M. Coble's research on Chinese capitalists in Shanghai under the Japanese rule and Kuo Huei-Ying's concept, called 'Bourgeois Nationalism', on the overseas Chinese merchants, this paper deals with OCBC(Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporations), a major overseas Chinese-funded bank, as a case study. In 1932, OCBC incorporated other two overseas Chinese banks in Singapore, Ho Hong Bank and Huashang Bank, to survive the horrible economic crisis in Asia caused by the Great Depression and became the largest overseas Chinse-funded international bank. Until now (2017), OCBC has been an outstanding transnational bank having branches in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and South China. What this paper concentrates on is OCBC’s commercial activities to make balance between empires and regimes, such as the Britain, Japan and the Nationalist Government, before and after the war exploded. During the Japanese occupation, the Japanese military administration in Singapore, called 'Syonan-to', wanted to use the OCBC's transnational network and its contribution on the Malay local society to stabilize occupied territories in Southeast Asia. Based on several evidences, this paper finds that OCBC re-launched the commercial activities in Singapore, Malay Peninsula and Xiamen in China under the Japanese colonial rule, so called 'East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere'. On the other hand, the leaders of OCBC moved to India just after the outbreak of the War and pursued re-opening its business through the support of the Britain and the US. With the end of the War in 1945, OCBC could re-open its business in Singapore with the allowance of the British colonial office and re-connect the transnational business network straddling from Southeast Asia to South China as well. All these efforts of OCBC to survive and adapt to the changing circumstances during the wartime period help us conceptualizing the fundamental character of the overseas Chinese capitalists as 'Entrepreneurial Nationalism'.