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What binds overseas Chinese communities together? Traditionally scholars have stressed the interplay of external factors (discrimination, local hostility) and internal forces (shared language, native-place ties, family) to account for the cohesion and "Chineseness" of these overseas groups. Andrew Wilson challenges this Manichean explanation of identity by introducing a third factor: the ambitions of the Chinese merchant elite, which played an equal, if not greater, role in the formation of ethnic identity among the Chinese in colonial Manila. Drawing on Chinese, Spanish, and American sources and applying a broad range of historiographical approaches, this volume dissects the structures of a...
In The Price and Promise of Specialness, Jin Li Lim revises narratives on the overseas Chinese and the People’s Republic of China by analysing the Communist approach to ‘overseas Chinese affairs’ in New China’s first decade as a function of a larger political economy. Jin Li Lim shows how the party-state centred its approach towards the overseas Chinese on a perception of their financial utility and thus sought to offer them a special identity and place in New China, so as to unlock their riches. Yet, this contradicted the quest for socialist transformation, and as its early pragmatism fell away, the radicalising party-state abandoned its promises to the overseas Chinese, who were left to pay the price for their difference.
Reading Chinese Transnationalisms responds to the growing interest in transnational cultural studies by examining Chinese transnationalism from a variety of perspectives. In interrogating social practices and literary and filmic texts which frequently cross national borders in imagining Chineseness, the contributors to this volume also challenge received notions of Chinese transnationalism, opening up new perspectives on the topic. The structure of the book is clearly subdivided into sections on society, literature, and films for quick reference, and each essay is written in accessible language without sacrificing intellectual rigor and critical relevance. The international list of contributors and the wide-ranging subjects they address make Reading Chinese Transnationalisms a unique work in its field. This volume will appeal to all with an interest in Chinese transnationalism, and in particular those who come from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds in the humanities and social science.
Employing the classic Chinese saying “returning home with glory” (man zai rong gui) as the title, Michael Williams highlights the importance of return and home in the history of the connections established and maintained between villagers in the Pearl River Delta and various Pacific ports from the time of the Californian and Australian gold rushes to the founding of the People’s Republic of China. Conventional scholarship on Chinese migration tends to privilege nation-state factors or concepts which are dependent on national boundaries. Such approaches are more concerned with the migrants’ settlement in the destination country, downplaying the awkward fact that the majority of the ov...
Annotation. The rough camps and shantytowns built by nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Chinese immigrants to the West eventually became settled Chinatowns across the globe. Because it opens a new approach to the study of recent Chinese migration, this volume will be of vital interest in the fields of both general and Chinese migration studies. But, bringing to life as it does the momentous changes now sweeping the Chinese world in all parts of the globe, it will also attract a far wider readership.
Challenging global history's Euro-American orientation, this study centres China and the Philippines in the early twentieth-century.
This book describes the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce's changing relationship with the state and with businesses in the region. Some of the wealthiest and most influential businessmen in Singapore and Malaysia have served as leaders of the Chamber. Drawing on archival materials and extensive interviews, Visscher provides lively biographical sketches that highlight the circumstances and personal values that propelled these and other leading Chinese businessmen to success and to prominence. He also examines Chinese business practices, considering cultural elements as well as state and market forces, and highlights unique features of the Chinese experience in Singapore. By viewing Singapore from the perspective of a well established non-governmental organisation as it struggled, negotiated and cooperated with the state, this book offers an alternative to conventional political histories.
In China's Left-Behind Wives, Huifen Shen tells the extraordinary story of an overlooked group of women who played an important role in one of the largest waves of migration in history. For roughly a century starting around 1850, large numbers of young men from southern China travelled to Southeast Asia in search of work. Some were married and others returned to marry, but they routinely left their wives in China to handle family affairs. Drawing on in-depth interviews, archival materials, local gazetteers, newspapers and periodicals, the author describes the experiences of left-behind wives in the Quanzhou region of Fujian from the 1930s to the 1050s, a time when war and political change ca...
Inspired by recent work on diaspora and cultural globalization, Adam McKeown asks in this new book: How were the experiences of different migrant communities and hometowns in China linked together through common networks? Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change argues that the political and economic activities of Chinese migrants can best be understood by taking into account their links to each other and China through a transnational perspective. Despite their very different histories, Chinese migrant families, businesses, and villages were connected through elaborate networks and shared institutions that stretched across oceans and entire continents. Through small towns in Qing and Republican China, thriving enclaves of businesses in South Chicago, broad-based associations of merchants and traders in Peru, and an auspicious legacy of ancestors in Hawaii, migrant Chinese formed an extensive system that made cultural and commercial exchange possible.
China’s rapid economic growth has drawn attention to the Chinese diasporic communities and the multiple networks that link Chinese individuals and organizations throughout the world. Ethnic Chinese have done very well economically, and the role of the Chinese Diaspora in China’s economic success has created a myth that their relations with China is natural and primordial, and that regardless of their base outside China and generation of migration, the Chinese Diaspora are inclined to participate enthusiastically in China’s social and economic agendas. This book seeks to dispel such a myth. By focusing on Guangdong, the largest ancestral and native homeland, it argues that not all Chine...