Hokkien Merchants and the Kian Teik Tong: Economic and Political Influence in Nineteenth-Century Penang and Its Region

This article explores nineteenth-century Penang's Hokkkien merchants and their secret society or hui-the Kian Teik Tong (Jiande Tang)-which had a variety of roles and an extensive network.It contextualizes the merchants' secret society as a transnational socioeconomic and political organization rather than as an overseas Chinese criminal group in the wider Penang area.By recovering Kian Teik Tong and its network,it can be shown how these merchants secured and mobilized labour,capital,and allies in a way that cut across linguistic,ethnic,class and state boundaries in order to establish control of coolies and the lucrative opium,tin,and rice businesses,in order to exert political influence in the colonial and indigenous milieus of the nineteenth-century Penang region.They established a social contract through their Kian Teik Tong relief activities and initiation rituals,and thus were able to recruit thousands of members who were mainly labourers.With such a substantial social force,the merchants launched organized violence against their rivals to attain dominance in opium revenue farming and tin mining businesses in Penang,Krabi,and Perak.The widespread and strategic location of the Kian Teik Tong in Burma also enabled the same merchants to monopolize the Penang-Burma rice trade.The versatility of the Kian Teik Tong's functions allowed them to operate as an alternative political order vis-a-vis the colonial and indigenous powers.This arrangement allowed the Hokkien merchants to gain significant political clout in confronting the Siamese and Dutch authorities.     

A Surface-Based Approach to Measuring Spatial Segregation

Quantitative indices of residential segregation have been with us for half a century, but suffer significant limitations. While useful for comparison among regions, summary indices fail to reveal spatial aspects of segregation. Such measures generally consider only the population mix within zones, not between them. Zone boundaries are treated as impenetrable barriers to interaction between population subgroups, so that measurement of segregation is constrained by the zoning system, which bears no necessary relation to interaction among population subgroups. A segregation measurement approach less constrained by the chosen zoning system, which enables visualization of segregation levels at the local scale and accounts for the spatial dimension of segregation, is required. We propose a kernel density estimation approach to model spatial aspects of segregation. This provides an explicitly geographical framework for modeling and visualizing local spatial segregation. The density estimation approach lends itself to development of an index of spatial segregation with the advantage of functional compatibility with the most widely used index of segregation (the dissimilarity index D ). We provide a short review of the literature on measuring segregation, briefly describe the kernel density estimation method, and illustrate how the method can be used for measuring segregation. Examples using a simulated landscape and two empirical cases in Washington, DC and Philadelphia, PA are presented.     

浅谈志书美术编辑问题

市、县（区）志书要强化志书美术编辑作用的意识，把美术编辑纳入志书的总体规划组织实施，通过广泛征集照片、认真筛选照片、科学制作图照、做好图照编辑、规范封面设计、把好印刷关等办法，提高志书质量。     

Territorially-nested urbanization in China - the case of Dongguan

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the question of extended urbanization by arguing for the need to overcome dualistic views to properly address the political specificities of urbanization in China. To this end, this paper understands state-territorial relations as a process of étatization by drawing on the particular literature on the role of the party-state in urbanization. Through a brief history of Guangdong, it elaborates on the political modalities of territorialization through China’s administrative rank system. This has enabled the party-state to mediate the production of urban space. From this, I arrive at the concept of “territorially-nested urbanization”, moving beyond limited accounts of hierarchical state powers in Chinese urban studies. Next, from a short periodization of Dongguan’s urbanization, the paper exemplifies how a particular mode of territorialization has evolved into tense relationships between the city and towns in the ongoing dilemma of multi-centered versus concentrated direction of urbanization. Based on insights from in-depth fieldwork, the last part of this paper illustrates the contradictory mobilization of village collectives within extended state power through local government, and the development of villagers’ politics and activism in contested land transformations.