Amy L. Chua (Chinese: born 1962 in Champaign, Illinois) is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School. She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School. Prior to starting her teaching career, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. She specializes in the study of international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization and the law. Chua has also written two books, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance - and Why They Fall (2007) - which examines seven major empires and posits that their success depended on their tolerance of minorities - and the New York Times bestseller, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), which explores the ethnic conflict caused in many societies by disproportionate economic and political influence of "market dominant minorities" and the resulting resentment in the less affluent majority. World on Fire examines how globalization and democratization since 1989 have affected the relationship between market dominant minorities and the wider population.
World on Fire
In the Philippines, Chua explains, the ethnic-Chinese minority has far greater wealth than the indigenous majority, with the result being envy and bitterness on the part of the majority against the Chinese minority -- in other words, an ethnic conflict. She believes that democratization can increase ethnic conflicts when an ethnic minority is disproportionately wealthy. "When free market democracy is pursued in the presence of a market-dominant minority, the almost invariable result is backlash. This backlash typically takes one of three forms. The first is a backlash against markets, targeting the market-dominant minority's wealth. The second is a backlash against democracy by forces favorable to the market-dominant minority. The third is violence, sometimes genocidal, directed against the market-dominant minority itself."[1]. Also, "overnight democracy will empower the poor, indigenous majority. What happens is that under those circumstances, democracy doesn't do what we expect it to do -- that is, reinforce markets. [Instead,] democracy leads to the emergence of manipulative politicians and demagogues who find that the best way to get votes is by scapegoating the minorities." [1]
According to Chua, other examples of ethnic market-dominant minorities include Chinese people in Southeast Asia; "whites" in Latin America; Jews in Russia; Croats in the former Yugoslavia; and Ibos, Kikuyus, Tutsis, Indians and Lebanese, among others, in Africa [2]. In her book, Chua discusses different reasons for the market dominance of different groups. Some groups achieve market dominance because of colonial oppression or apartheid. In other cases, it may be due to the culture and family networks of these groups. For many groups there is no clear single explanation. [3]
Americans can also be seen as a global market-dominant minority, which particularly when combined with using military might and flaunting political domination, cause resentment. [4]Chua states that she is a "big fan of trying to promote markets and democracy globally," but that it should be accompanied by attempts to "redistribute the wealth, whether it's property title and giving poor people property, land reform .... Redistributive mechanisms are tough to have if you have so much corruption." [5]
A professor at Yale Law School, Chua eloquently fuses expert analysis with personal recollections to assert that globalization has created a volatile concoction of free markets and democracy that has incited economic devastation, ethnic hatred and genocidal violence throughout the developing world. Chua illustrates the disastrous consequences arising when an accumulation of wealth by "market dominant minorities" combines with an increase of political power by a disenfranchised majority. Chua refutes the "powerful assumption that markets and democracy go hand in hand" by citing specific examples of the turbulent conditions within countries such as Indonesia, Russia, Sierra Leone, Bolivia and in the Middle East.
In Indonesia, Chua contends, market liberalization policies favoring wealthy Chinese elites instigated a vicious wave of anti-Chinese violence from the suppressed indigenous majority. Chua describes how "terrified Chinese shop owners huddled behind locked doors while screaming Muslim mobs smashed windows, looted shops and gang-raped over 150 women, almost all of them ethnic Chinese." Chua blames the West for promoting a version of capitalism and democracy that Westerners have never adopted themselves. Western capitalism wisely implemented redistributive mechanisms to offset potential ethnic hostilities, a practice that has not accompanied the political and economic transitions in the developing world. As a result, Chua explains, we will continue to witness violence and bloodshed within the developing nations struggling to adopt the free markets and democratic policies exported by the West.
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