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The bamboo network () or the Chinese Commonwealth is used to conceptualize the links between businesses run by overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia (in a narrower sense with the Min Chinese speaking community). It links the overseas Chinese business community of Southeast Asia, namely Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, the Philippines, Myanmar, Brunei, Laos and Cambodia with the economies of Greater China (mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan). Overseas Chinese companies in Southeast Asia are usually managed as family businesses in a centralized bureaucratic manner. In an article in The New York Review of Books, Indian critic Pankaj Mishra called it the "largest economic force in Asia outside of Japan".
Bamboo networks are also transnational, which means channeling the movement of capital, information, and goods and services can promote the relative flexibility and efficiency between the formal agreements and transactions made by family-run firms. Business relationships are based on the Confucian paradigm of guanxi, the Chinese term for the cultivation of personal relationships as an ingredient for business success.Pablos (2008), p. 201
Some overseas Chinese businessmen include Malaysian dealmaker Robert Kuok, Indonesian banker and retail proprietor Liem Sioe Liong, and his son, financier and money manager Anthony Salim in addition to fellow Fuqing native and Salim Group co-founder and investor Liem Oen Kian, Filipino billionaire Henry Sy, and Hong Kong business tycoon Li Ka-shing.
Much of the business activity of the bamboo network is centered in the major cities of the region, such as Mandalay, Jakarta, Singapore, Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Ho Chi Minh City, Phnom Penh, Vientiane, and Manila.Weidenbaum, Hughes (1996), p. 8.
Since 1500, Southeast Asia has been a magnet for Chinese emigrants where they have strategically developed a bamboo network encompassing an elaborately diverse spectrum of economic activities spread across numerous industries.Weidenbaum, Hughes (1996), p. 24. The Chinese were one commercial minority among many including Indian Gujaratis, Chettiars, Portuguese and Japanese until the middle of the seventeenth century. Subsequently, damage to the rival trade networks the English and Dutch in the Indian Ocean allowed the enterprising Chinese to take over the roles once held by the Japanese in the 1630s. (1997). 9780295976136, University of Washington Press. ISBN 9780295976136 Overseas Chinese populations in Southeast Asia saw a rapid increase following the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 which forced many refugees to emigrate outside of China causing a rapid expansion of the overseas Chinese bamboo network.Joint Economic Committee Congress of the United States (1997). 9780765601278, Routledge. ISBN 9780765601278
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