THEY and their ancestors fled the poverty and hopelessness of rural China to seek their fortune across the ocean. Now they mix with kings and presidents and control fortunes that move effortlessly across national borders.
The overseas Chinese elite, among the richest people on earth, consider themselves citizens of the world.
One of them, James Riady, son of Mochtar Riady, or Li Wenzheng to give him his Chinese name, is a close friend of President Bill Clinton from their years together in Arkansas in the late 1970s, a frequent visitor to the White House and a controversial contributor to the Democratic Party.
The Riady family is one of those who have chosen to invest some of their fortunes in the towns they came from on the coast of Fujian province, southeast China. Fujian has a population of 33 million, with an estimated eight million migrants and their descendants abroad, most in Southeast Asia.
The town of Fuqing, 50 kilometres south of the provincial capital of Fuzhou, has been greatly changed by the largesse of two of the families among the 700,000 people that have emigrated. The present population is about one million.
One of its benefactors is Sudono Salim, whose Chinese name is Liem Sie Liong, head of the Salim Group, the largest company in Indonesia. He is one of the wealthiest of overseas Chinese. The other is Djuhar Sutanto, or Lin Wenjing, chairman of Indocement, part of the Salim Group, whose parents hail from the area.
The two men set up a group called Yuan Hong, which makes its presence felt everywhere in Fuqing.