large, an economic class: the commercial middle and upper class in contrast to the poorer indigenous Filipino majority working and underclass. Entire posh Chinese enclaves have sprung up in major Filipino cities across the country, literally walled off from the poorer indigenous Filipino masses guarded by heavily armed, private security forces. The Chinese Filipino community is economically influential owing to their business and investment prosperity, acculturation into mainstream Filipino society, and maintaining their sense of community, social, and ethnic cohesion and distinction through clan associations. The Chinese have been major players in the Filipino business sector and dominated the economy of the Philippines for centuries long before the pre-Spanish and American colonial eras. Long before the Spanish conquest of the Philippines, Chinese merchants carried on trading activities with native communities along the coast of modern Mainland China. By the time the Spanish arrived, the Chinese controlled all the trading and commercial activities across the Philippines, serving as retailers, artisans, and food providers for various Spanish settlements. During the American colonial epoch, Chinese merchants controlled a significant percentage of the retail trade and internal commerce of the country. They predominated the retail trade and owned three-quarters of the 2500 rice mills interspersed along with the Filipino islands. Total resources of banking capital held by the Chinese was $27 million in 1937 to a high of $100 million in the estimated aggregate, making them second to the Americans in terms of total foreign capital investment held. Under Spanish rule, the Chinese were willing to engage in trade and venture into other business activities. Filipino entrepreneurs of Chinese ancestry were responsible for introducing sugar refining devices, new construction techniques, moveable type printing, and bronze making. The Chinese also provided fishing, gardening, artisan, and other such trading services. Many poverty-stricken Filipinos of Chinese ancestry were attracted to business as they were prohibited from owning land and saw the only path out of abject poverty was by going into commercial business and entrepreneurship, through taking charge of their own financial destinies by becoming self-employed as dealers, marketers, vendors, retailers, traders, collectors, hawkers, peddlers, and distributors of variegated goods and services to the Spanish and American colonizers as well as the Filipino populace. Mainly attracted and appealed by the promise of economic opportunity during the first four decades of the 20th century, American colonization of the Philippines allowed the Chinese to secure their economic clout among