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Philippines Chinese and Chinese Mestizos
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
deep-seated Spanish suspicion of the Chinese gave way to
recognition of their potentially constructive role in economic
development. Chinese expulsion orders issued in 1755 and 1766
were repealed in 1788. Nevertheless, the Chinese remained
concentrated in towns around Manila, particularly Binondo and
Santa Cruz. In 1839 the government issued a decree granting them
freedom of occupation and residence.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century, immigration
into the archipelago, largely from the maritime province of
Fujian on the southeastern coast of China, increased, and a
growing proportion of Chinese settled in outlying areas. In 1849
more than 90 percent of the approximately 6,000 Chinese lived in
or around Manila, whereas in 1886 this proportion decreased to 77
percent of the 66,000 Chinese in the Philippines at that time,
declining still further in the 1890s. The Chinese presence in the
hinterland went hand in hand with the transformation of the
insular economy. Spanish policy encouraged immigrants to become
agricultural laborers. Some became gardeners, supplying
vegetables to the towns, but most shunned the fields and set
themselves up as small retailers and moneylenders. The Chinese
soon gained a central position in the cash-crop economy on the
provincial and local levels.
Of equal, if not greater, significance for subsequent
political, cultural, and economic developments were the Chinese
mestizos (see Glossary).
At the beginning of the nineteenth
century, they composed about 5 percent of the total population of
around 2.5 million and were concentrated in the most developed
provinces of Central Luzon and in Manila and its environs. A much
smaller number lived in the more important towns of the Visayan
Islands, such as Cebu and Iloilo, and on Mindanao. Converts to
Catholicism and speakers of Filipino languages or Spanish rather
than Chinese dialects, the mestizos enjoyed a legal status as
subjects of Spain that was denied the Chinese. In the words of
historian Edgar Vickberg, they were considered, unlike the
mixed-Chinese of other Southeast Asian countries, not "a special
kind of local Chinese" but "a special kind of Filipino."
The eighteenth-century expulsion edicts had given the Chinese
mestizos the opportunity to enter retailing and the skilled craft
occupations formerly dominated by the Chinese. The removal of
legal restrictions on Chinese economic activity and the
competition of new Chinese immigrants, however, drove a large
number of mestizos out of the commercial sector in mid-nineteenth
century. As a result, many Chinese mestizos invested in land,
particularly in Central Luzon. The estates of the religious
orders were concentrated in this region, and mestizos became
inquilinos (lessees) of these lands, subletting them to
cultivators; a portion of the rent was given by the
inquilino to the friary estate. Like the Chinese, the
mestizos were moneylenders and acquired land when debtors
defaulted.
By the late nineteenth century, prominent mestizo families,
despite the inroads of the Chinese, were noted for their wealth
and formed the major component of a Filipino elite. As the export
economy grew and foreign contact increased, the mestizos and
other members of this Filipino elite, known collectively as
ilustrados (see Glossary),
obtained higher education (in
some cases abroad), entered professions such as law or medicine,
and were particularly receptive to the liberal and democratic
ideas that were beginning to reach the Philippines despite the
efforts of the generally reactionary--and
friar-dominated--Spanish establishment.
Data as of June 1991
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