Ethnic Chinese Entrepreneurship in Malaysia

"The study of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia has a long tradition, and what is most striking in these studies is just how difficult it is to generalise about this ethnic group in the region. Whether or not they have been able to identify as Chinese has depended on different processes social and political engineering, which in turn make them more or less distinct ethnic group. In the case of Malaysia, national schemes such as the affirmative action policy indirectly force the Malaysian ethnic Chinese to conceive of themselves as a coherent collective, and yet, Chinese entrepreneurs maintain that despite the affirmative action policy ethnicity is not the defining factor when it comes to identifying business partners. This book focuses on the consequences of these kinds of policies in the field of inter-ethnic business practices and entrepreneurship in Malaysia within the wider context of the relationship between local, national and global markets. It focuses on the complexities of inter-ethnic relations and in particular, the strong economic position of the ethnic Chinese and their impact on the Malaysian economic scene as well as on the wider Southeast Asian region, underlining th