Employment Historically, Burmese Chinese have made their livelihoods as merchants, traders, and shopkeepers as well as manual labourers such as indentured labourers (pejoratively called "coolies"); dockers, municipal workers, rickshaw men, and pony cart drivers. They were also heavily represented in certain professions such as civil servants, university lecturers, pharmacists, opticians, lawyers, engineers, and doctors. Trade and industry Like much of Southeast Asia, Chinese entrepreneurs dominate Burmese commerce at every level of society. Burmese Chinese wield tremendous economic clout and influence over their indigenous Burman majority counterparts and play a critical role in maintaining the country's economic vitality and prosperity. As a disproportionate wealthy, market-dominant minority not only form a distinct ethnic community, they also form an economically commercial middle and upper class in contrast to the poorer Burmese majority working class around them.Much of Burma's foreign investment capital has been backed by expatriate mainland and overseas Chinese investors who channelled capital for new startup companies and foreign business acquisitions through bamboo networks (Overseas Chinese business networks). Many members of the Burmese Chinese business community act as operating agents, doing business and investment biddings for mainland and overseas Chinese investors outside of Burma. As Burmese Chinese entrepreneurs became more financially prosperous, they often coalesced their financial resources and pooled large sums of seed capital together to forge joint business ventures. In 1988, the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) came to power, and gradually loosened the government's role in the economy, encouraging private sector growth and foreign investment. This liberalisation of the state's role in the economy gave Chinese-owned Burmese businesses extra space to expand and assert their economic clout. Today, much of Burma's retail, wholesale, and shipping outlets are Chinese-owned. For example, Sein Gayha, a major Burmese retailer that began in Yangon's Chinatown in 1985, is owned by a Burmese family of Hakka ancestry. Moreover, Burmese businessmen of Chinese ancestry controlled the nations four of the five largest commercial banks in the 1990s and 2000s: Myanmar Universal Bank, Yoma Bank, Myanmar Mayflower Bank, and the Asia Wealth Bank. Newly settled Han Chinese immigrants following Burma's acceptance of free-market capitalism in the late 1980s began to capitalise on new business opportunities that they specialised in. Various businesses that have sprung up include Chinese-style patisseries and bakeries, noodle shops, watch repair, cosmetic shops, and grocery stores which soon at the forefront became the nerve-centers of economic life across various small towns