Jumping Boats: InterAsian Wealth-Making and Social Protection after Globalization

Engseng Ho argues that the post-Cold War era of globalization — built on American-guaranteed security and self-regulating free markets — is ending, as the second Trump administration shifts from global protector to predator (Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, Greenland), collapsing the separation of politics from economics. As top-level global guarantees crumble, it's worth turning to the deeper, historically embedded layer of "InterAsia": the centuries-old web of mobile merchant societies (Arab, Persian, Malabari, Tamil, Malay, Bugis, Hokkien Chinese) who, unlike gun-bearing European traders, embedded themselves in local port-cities through intermarriage, partnerships and moral economy, paying modest protection to local rulers rather than relying on a single hegemonic guarantor. Lacking state backing, these mobile societies built resilient, self-protecting welfare institutions that absorbed market shocks without the backlash into socialism or fascism as seen in the West. Ho traces this logic into the present: Southeast Asian states and firms navigate US-China rivalry by hosting relocated factories, while Hokkien AI-chip tech CEOs (Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, AMD's Lisa Su, Broadcom’s Hock Tan, Intel’s Lip-Bu Tan) nimbly switch protectors — China, Singapore, the US — as circumstances demand, much as Hokkien traders/smugglers did among Ming/Qing bans and European empires centuries ago. He closes by reading Taiwan's TSMC, sited defiantly at China's doorstep, as the modern version of this Hokkien self-protection strategy: unable to rely on any external guarantor and unable to flee, Taiwan built its own irreplaceable "Silicon Shield," converting global tech indispensability into a kind of commercial, DIY protection that state power never provided.