Social Discourse and Economic Functions: The Singapore Chinese in Japan’s Southward Expansion between 1914 and 1941

This chapter examines the strategies and effects of the Japanese-Chinese alliances in Singapore as well as their impacts on changing Japanese views of overseas Chinese in the South Seas (present-day Southeast Asia). The literature on Chinese in Singapore in the first half of the twentieth century has emphasised how the British colonial city port developed as the centre of Chinese anti-Japanese nationalism in the region from the 1920s to the 1930s (Akashi 1970; Leong 1977, 1979; Wang 1981; Yong 1987; Heng 1988; Yen 1989; Ku 1994; Horimoto 1997). Based on research into Japanese intelligence reports on the South Seas, this