From Pang to Community Leadership: Tan Kah-kee’s Power Base

The Chinese community in pre-war Singapore and Malaya was basically a pang community rather than a class society. Pang is an age-old Chinese concept to denote a socio-political grouping. When emigrants from the two maritime Chinese provinces of Kwangtung and Fukien settled in South-East Asia, they used the word to mean dialect grouping of immigrants from a more or less well demarcated emigrating area, for example, Foochow, Ch’uanchou, Changchou, Teochew, Canton, Ta-p’u, Hainan Island, etc. Thus, immigrants from Fukien who spoke the Hokkien dialect belonged to the Hokkien pang, likewise those from the Hakkaland of Kwangtung the Hakka pang…