Individual medium post #1

To start with my post, I want to define what capitalism means. Capitalism represents an economic system that the properties are owned, produced, and distributed privately. After reading the article “Bigger than the Sound: The Jamaican Chinese infrastructures of Reggae” by Tao Leigh Goffe, I realized how important the role that the sound has played between the Chinese immigrants and the Jamaicans.

The Chinese people (mostly Hakka) immigrated to Jamaica as workers initially, because the U.K. Empire wanted to fill the blanks after the African slaves. However, as time passes, the Chinese workers settled down in Jamaica and opened their own shops in order to make money, and many of the shops are music shops that provides the service of playing the music for the locals, and made money at the same time. The Chinese people knew that the locals were too poor to afford a radio. After that, the sound system was invented the Chinese Jamaicans have monopolized the business of sound.

This is when Capitalism started playing the role. However, the relationship between the Chinese and Jamaicans went bad rapidly, the business of Jamaican locals were greatly hurt, and they blamed Chinese for taking money away from them. This is when the Capitalism destroyed the relationship between Chinese and Jamaicans.

However, because of the sound shops owned by Chinese under the capitalism, many of the Jamaicans had the chance to listen to music, and some of them got the inspiration to start their own music business, and this was then Reggae was invented, and Reggae gradually becomes one of the most popular music type around the world. Also, the Chinese sound shop (Chiney) created opportunity for Chinese and Jamaicans to talk and interact, which builds up the relationship between two races. This is when the Capitalism helped people form new relationship with each other.

In Honolulu, the situation was a lot different. Unlike in Jamaica that the Chinese people got to deeply interact with Jamaicans, because of the racism toward Chinese and the plague, the Chinese immigrants were separated with the local people, most of them were asked to quarantine in the Chinatown, and there were no interaction between Chinese and local people. In Honolulu, the Capitalism did nothing beneficial but destroyed the relationship between Chinese and Honolulu locals.