About Us
Chinese Mining in Southeast Asia: Language and Labor Histories
School of Chinese International Workshop
Sponsored by the Louis Cha Fund for Chinese Studies and East/West Studies,
Faculty of Arts, HKU
Chinese Mining in Southeast Asia: Language and Labor Histories
Moderator: Prof. WONG Yoke Hin, Nicholas (School of Chinese, HKU)
Date: 25–26 April 2025 (Fri & Sat)
Venue: CRT-4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU
Language: English
Mode of Delivery: Face-to-face & Online (via Zoom)*
Registration: https://hku.au1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_86XB4o980R0azAy
Chinese miners, prior to colonial times, brought capital and industrial techniques to Southeast Asia, integrating frontier spaces into the global economy. Its continuity with today’s resource extraction in the global South via multiple, intensified forms, demands further study. This conference proposes a twofold approach via language and labor to study Chinese mining communities in mainland and insular Southeast Asia. Labor relations involve constant linguistic negotiation between migrant, colonial/state, and indigenous stakeholders and workers. The labor of language work by interpreters, scribes, and technology is often obscured, even the mundane hierarchies and creolized communication between different language communities. Similarly, language histories, as well as language use in administration and ritual, encoding forms of hegemony and resistance, register the subterranean flows of mining capital and commodities.
Language justice, such as reconfiguring the historical relationship of translation and extraction, is an implicit goal here. We will explore topics ranging from indigenous science, naming conventions and etymologies at extractive spaces, gender and kinship relations as mediated by translation, to minority language translation practices and theories. Focusing on the socio-technical histories of small-scale and state-corporate mining in Southeast Asia and its neighbors, we propose a comparative analysis of labor in mainland and insular Southeast Asian mining, attuned to the sociolinguistic dimension, and engage contemporary debates on pre-colonial, colonial, and new imperial formations.
*Note: The workshop will be conducted primarily in a face-to-face mode; Those who cannot attend the workshop in-person could apply for online participation (via Zoom) with justifications
Workshop Schedule
April 25, Friday (Day 1)
9:40 AM Registration
9:50 AM Introductory Remarks
10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Panel 1: Maps, Networks, and Transfers, Southwest and South of the Ming and the Qing
Nanny Kim (Cologne) “Approaches to the Foggy Premodern History of Chinese Mining Communities in Southwest China and Southeast Asia”
Joseba Estévez (HKIHSS) “Salted Entanglements: Salt Myths, Saltways, Trade and Tributary Networks, and their Transformations in the Sino-Lao Borderlands (late-18th Century–Present)”
Yijun Wang (NYU) “The Seven Chiefs: The Migrant Mining Community and the Social Technology of Mining in Gejiu, China”
[Discussant:] Bradley C. Davis (Eastern Connecticut State University)
2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Panel 2: Indigenous Relations, Guest Workers, and Technology in Pre-modern and Colonial Vietnam
Vũ Đường Luân (Vietnam National University) “Bridging the Distance: Mining, Transportation and the Social-Geographical Integration of Early Modern Sino-Vietnamese Borderland”
Bradley C. Davis (Eastern Connecticut State University) “清人 Thanh Nhân: Chinese Guest Workers and Multi-Ethnic Mining Sites in Nguyễn Vietnam before French Colonial Rule”
Léonie Brissiaud (EHESS-CRH) “Chinese Presence in Northern Việt Nam Mines during French Colonial Time: Two Sides of the Same Coin?”
[Discussant:] Olli Tappe (Heidelberg)
4:30 PM – 6:00 PM
Reports from the Field: Flowing Capital and Trapped Workers: The Contemporary Conditions of Transnational Labor in Chinese-Invested Mining in Indonesia
Jiahui Zeng (Tsinghua University)
Zhenhua Xu (International Journalist)
Yi Huang (Founder of Woodcut Wavement)
April 26, Saturday (Day 2)
9:15 AM – 11:30 AM
Panel 3: Printing Presses, Bilingual Dictionaries, and Sociolinguistic Histories in the Dutch East Indies and Beyond
Erman Erwiza (Research Center for Area Studies, Jakarta) “Chinese Miners, Language, and History in the Tin Mines of Bangka-Belitung, Indonesia”
Yun Xie (Ghent) “Hong Kong Type and Knowledge in Print: Forging Amoy and Hakka Dictionaries in the Dutch East Indies”
Audrey Heijns (CUHK) “A Hakka Dictionary (1912) as a Source of Dialectological, Ethnographic, and Historical Data”
Michelle Jia Ye (EduHK) “Scanning Transpacific Chinese Mining Cross-Medially: Lexicon, Newspaper, and Translation”
[Discussant:] Xiao Fang Yao Monica (HKU)
1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Panel 4: Capital, Labor Relations and Organization along the Southeast Asian Tin Belt
Yi Li (Aberystwyth) “Tin Mining in Nineteenth-Century Maliwun: Chinese Migrants and Secret Societies along the Thai-Burma Border”
Hui Yun Cher (NUS) “Miners in Motion: A Socio-Economic Approach to Chinese Labor in Japanese Iron Mines (Malaya)”
David Borgonjon (Columbia) “Vestiges and Contributions: Li Xu and Li Ren's Tin Island (1959) and the Chinese Capital Debate in Indonesia”
[Discussant:] Ghassan Moazzin (HKIHSS)
3:30 PM – 5:30 PM
Panel 5: Memory, Embodiment, and Popular Religion
Rungsima Kullapat (UNC) “Safeguarding Chinese Tin Miners’ Heritage: Supporting Creative Tourism along the Andaman Coast of Southern Thailand”
Alicia Le (HKU) “Tales from the Mining Land: Vietnamese Coal Mining Fiction from French Colonialism to Post-Renovation Era, 1943–1995”
Tim Shao-Hung Teng (CUHK) “Carceral Extraction and the Fugitive Archive: From Imperial Mining to Archipelagic Thinking”
[Discussant:] Yi Li (Aberystwyth)
5:30PM Closing Remarks
