EXPATRIATE CHINA has only four percent of the population of mainland China, yet its power is driving the modernization of the mainland, leading the takeoff of the Pacific Rim economy, and reshaping world economics.

Offshore China is an empire of 55 million people.... It is an empire without borders, national government, or flag. It is deliberately opaque--an invisible empire of conglomerates. In recent decades, more than a hundred large corporate conglomerates have emerged in Southeast Asia (not counting Hong Kong and Taiwan), nearly all owned or controlled by ethnic Chinese, a number of them U.S. dollar billionaires. They live and work in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, but all have their roots in South China. In keeping with tradition, these billion-dollar corporations are passed down from father to son like neighborhood stores. They are run by the superrich heads of secretive Chinese commercial syndicates, some of which (like the Hokkien and Teochiu) have been in existence for more than a thousand years.... The Overseas Chinese have one of the world's deepest wells of liquid capital. A Singapore banker estimates they control liquid assets of as much as $2 trillion, not including securities--assets that are salted all over the world, out of reach of any predatory regime.... Offshore China is not rich merely because it is clever and industrious beyond belief. Its power is not based only on a rare ability to save and invest. It rests also on unusual ethnic solidarity, underground networks, political pragmatism, exceptional information, and the capacity to adapt quickly--faster, even, than the Japanese.... Financially and organizationally, the Overseas Chinese dominate the entire Pacific Rim, the world's biggest market and cheap labor pool.

That power has been building, largely in secret, for many centuries. Seagrave tells the sensational tale--"stories of murder and betrayal, bravery and corruption, of triads, syndicates, kingmakers, merchants, emperors, generals, spies and pirates."

Then we are taken on a tour of present reality--the hidden structure of political and economic power in Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the current metamorphosis of China itself. Policy makers in the West, long obsessed with how Japan works its economic magic, have a new study to undertake. And places like Vancouver, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have a new wave of superbly skilled immigrants to welcome, as they flee unpredictable transitions in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Indonesia.

The fate of China is a classic "critical uncertainty" of the contemporary era. GBN books have explored its origins in the history of the north Pacific, Let the Sea Make a Noise, and the significance of transnational ethnic groups, Tribes. The current situation is portrayed in The Pacific Rim Almanac, in Who Will Feed China?, and in GBN member Orville Schell's two books, Discos and Democracy and Mandate of Heaven. Schell commented recently that the commercial barons of the overseas Chinese have all the pragmatism, drive, and avidity of their peasant origins, but they have as yet no tradition of responsibility outside their loyalty networks. —Stewart Brand