Chinese Worlds – serie

Originating in the 1820s and used for 150 years thereafter, qiaopi is the name given in Chinese to letters written home by Chinese emigrants to accompany remittances. Their key function was to preserve family ties. Although such correspondence focused principally on the provision of economic support, the qiaopi also touched on cultural, political, educational, and gender themes. This book therefore seeks to examine the qiaopi from two interconnected perspectives. One views qiaopi from a political and institutional angle, the other from a financial and social angle. Bringing together the extensive research of a group of international scholars, this multi-authored volume sheds light on the larger significance of the qiaopi for modern China. Taking an empirical, evidence-driven approach, the contributors employ a wide range of primary sources in both Chinese and English and relate their findings to scholarship in both the Chinese-speaking world and in non-Chinese interdisciplinary fields. In so doing, this book helps to bridge the gap between Chinese- and English-speaking researchers in the field of qiaopi studies.As one of the first books in English on the qiaopi trade and its significance, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history and Chinese migration, as well in Migration Studies and Diaspora Studies more generally.

There are growing waves of ‘desirable’ migrants from Asia moving to New Zealand, a place experiencing increasing ethnic diversity, particularly in its largest metropolitan region Auckland. In purely demographic terms much of this diversity has been generated by policy shifts since the 1980s and the adoption of a comparatively liberal immigration policy based on personal merit without discrimination on the grounds of race, national or ethnic origin. Due to these changes, migrants from China, and Asia more broadly, have become increasingly significant in migration flows into New Zealand. This in turn makes New Zealand a valuable case study for understanding how Chinese migrants integrate into and affect their host nation.Wang attempts to close a gap in contemporary research by relating cosmopolitanism to migration, particularly in the Asian context. With a cosmopolitan gaze towards migration studies, she makes four key contributions to the ongoing scholarly discussion. Firstly, this is the first comprehensive study to use cosmopolitanism as a framework to study the lives of contemporary Chinese migrants, with implications for migration studies as a whole. It sheds light on the relationship between cosmopolitanism and migrant mobility, taking a new approach to examine the living paradigms of international migrants. Secondly, this book identifies the emergence and development of cosmopolitanism outside the domain of Western middle-class groups. The concept of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ is utilised to break down the Eurocentric notion of cosmopolitanism, and to show the role played by Chinese rootedness during the process of becoming cosmopolitan and encountering diversity. Thirdly, the book advances and enriches the knowledge of studies in ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, by focusing on ‘cosmopolitanism from below’, locating quotidian and ‘down-to-earth’ cosmopolitan engagements that are grounded in everyday migrant lives. Fourthly, it looks at the emotional dimension of migrants negotiating difference and engaging in cosmopolitanism, particularly the ways in which emotions undermine and promote the development of cosmopolitan sociability.

Rural enterprises have played an important role in the extraordinary success of China's economy over the last two decades. They have greatly increased off-farm employment in rural areas and brought substantially increased incomes and standards of living to many rural people. Jun Li provides a comprehensive analysis of the financing of China's rural enterprises over the reform period, and discusses the key aspects of rural enterprise development in China, including the growth of rural enterprises and enterprise-level behaviour, the role of state policy, rural financial institutions and local government. Brings new and challenging analysis to the current debate on the Chinese financial system and the financing of SMEs.

This book examines how Chinese family and business networks, focused around activities such as revenue farming, including opium, the rice trade, and pawnbroking, and related legal and labour organization activities, were highly influential in the process of state formation in Malaya. It shows how Chinese family and business networks were flexible and dynamic, and were closely interlocked with economic and social structures, around which government, and states, developed. It considers the crucial role of wealth and power in the process of state formation, and challenges accepted views of Chinese ethnicity and migration.

First Published in 2004. Chinese Enterprise, Transnationalism, and Identity focuses on one ethnic community – the Chinese – and examines the variety of issues surrounding enterprise development from national and transnational perspectives, starting with the role played by Chinese entrepreneurs in the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Using empirical evidence and theoretical debate, the contributors argue that Chinese enterprise is accelerated by intra-ethnic competition, rather than intra-ethnic cooperation, and that businessmen work in their own interest, not that of the Chinese community, as other literature dealing with the subject suggests. Themes which this book radically reviews include: • Culture and networks. • Family business. • Ownership and control. • Transnationalism and identity. By carefully tracing the emergence of new generations, the contributors suggest that new forms of ethnic identification and of national identity and affiliation have emerged. With its combined analysis of ethnic minorities in Asia and of Chinese business, this book will appeal to scholars of Asian and business studies alike.

This collection of essays by and about Wang Gungwu brings together some of Wang's most recent and representative writing about the ethnic Chinese outside China giving the reader a deeper understanding of his views on migration, identity, nationalism and culture, all key issues in modern Asia's transformation. The book collects interviews, speeches and essays that illustrate the development and direction of Wang's scholarship on ethnic and diasporic Chinese.

This book originally examines how prominent communist intellectuals in China during the revolutionary period (1921 to 1940) constructed and presented identities for themselves and how they narrated their place in the revolution.

Incorporating research carried out over the last twenty years, this book documents the personal and collective responses of Chinese migrants and refugees to the prejudice and discrimination they have experienced. Using case studies of Chinese communities in Canada, Chan explores the different defence mechanisms Chinese migrants have created in order to escape the systemic and institutionalized discrimination they face. In particular, the book analyzes Chinese entrepreneurship, arguing that it is a collective response to blocked opportunities in host societies. Drawing upon empirical and theoretical literature on the sociology of race and ethnic relations, the book stresses the variety in Chinese culture and its ability to exploit an emergent ethnicity as individuals, groups and communities.

Drawing upon wide-ranging case study material, the book explores the ever-changing personal and cultural identity of Chinese migrants and the diverse cosmopolitan communities they create. The various models of newly-forged communities are examined with the added dimension of personal identity and the individual's place in society. With particular emphasis on the changing face of Chinese ethnicity in a range of established places of convergence, Chan draws on extensive experience and knowledge in the field to bring the reader a fresh, fascinating and ultimately very human analysis of migration, culture, identity and the self.

This comprehensive volume analyzes Chinese birth policies and population developments from the founding of the People's Republic to the 2000 census. The main emphasis is on China's 'Hardship Number One Under Heaven': the highly controversial one-child campaign, and the violent clash between family strategies and government policies it entails.Birth Control in China 1949-2000 documents an agonizing search for a way out of predicament and a protracted inner Party struggle, a massive effort for social engineering and grinding problems of implementation. It reveals how birth control in China is shaped by political, economic and social interests, bureaucratic structures and financial concerns. Based on own interviews and a wealth of new statistics, surveys and documents, Thomas Scharping also analyzes how the demographics of China have changed due to birth control policies, and what the future is likely to hold. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of modern China, Asian studies and the social sciences.

The Chinese overseas have long been relevant to China, especially to qiaoxiang, and vice-versa. Qiaoxiang refers to regions from where emigrants migrated overseas, where there are therefore ties with Chinese communities overseas. Unlike most other works, which cover either China or the Chinese overseas, this book examines both China and the Chinese overseas in relation to qioaxiang. With clearly presented chapters that examine the ancestral homeland, Chinese overseas, China and transnational networks, and the diversity of settlements and homelands, the expert team of international contributors of Chinese Transnational Networks have created a volume which will be essential reading for students and scholars of migrations studies, Chinese diaspora and Chinese culture and society.

Providing a crucial understanding of how globalization impacts on the development of Chinese businesses, this book analyzes the unprecedented changes in Chinese ethnic business due to the process of globalization, specifically economic globalization, in the key receiving countries of the US, Australia and Canada. Focusing on the main themes of economic globalization and Chinese community development, transnational linkages, local urban structures, homogenization and place attachment, the team of internationally known contributors place the subject of Chinese ethnic business in the bigger picture of ethnic businesses and globalization. Including excellent methodology such as ethnographic studies, historical analysis, geographic studies and statistical analysis, this volume makes an important contribution to the field of ethnic businesses.

The transnational and diasporic dimensions of early Chinese migrant politics opened in the late nineteenth century when Chinese radical groups bent on overthrowing the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) vied with one another to win Chinese overseas to their modernizing projects, and immigrants who had suffered discrimination welcomed their proposals. The radicals’ concentration on Chinese communities abroad as outposts of Chinese politics and culture strengthened the stereotype of Chinese as clannish, unassimilable, xenophobic, and deeply introverted. This book argues that such a view has its roots less in historical truth than in political and ideological prejudice and obscures a rich vein of internationalist practice in Chinese migrant or diasporic history, which the study aims to restore to visibility. In some cases, internationalist alliances sprang from the spontaneous perception by Chinese and other non-Chinese migrants or local workers of shared problems and common solutions in everyday life and work. At other times, they emerged from under the umbrella of transnationalism, when Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist activists overseas received support for their campaigns from local internationalists; or the alliances were the product of nurturing by Chinese or non-Chinese political organizers, including anarchists, communists, and members of internationalist cultural movements like Esperantism.Based on sources in a dozen languages, and telling hitherto largely unknown or forgotten stories of Chinese migrant experiences in Russia, Germany, Cuba, Spain and Australia, this study will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history, labour studies and ethnic/migration studies alike.

Since the late nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have moved to Russia and Eastern Europe. However, until now, very little research has been done about the initial migrants in the nineteenth century, the presence of the Chinese in Europe and Russia in the twentieth century before the collapse of the 'socialist' regimes or about the great wave of Chinese migration to Eastern Europe and Russia which occurred after 1989. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Chinese in Russia and Eastern Europe from the nineteenth century to the present day. Particularly important is the movement of entrepreneurs in the early 1990s, who took advantage of unmet demand, inadequate retail networks and largely unregulated markets to become suppliers of cheap consumer goods to low-income Eastern Europeans. In some villages, Chinese merchants now occupy a position not unlike that of Jewish shopkeepers before the Second World War. Although their interactions with local society are numerous, the degree of social integration and acceptance is often low. At the same time, they maintain close economic, social, and political ties to China. Empirical in focus, and full of rich ethnographic data, Pál Nyíri has produced a book that will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese studies, international migration, diaspora and transnationalism.

As we enter the 21st century it is clear that the economic growth China has enjoyed has been extraordinary. Although Western countries continue to dominate the world economy and financial markets, the capital markets of Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Shenzen have matured considerably and are eager to become major global players.As business owners in the rest of East Asia are predominantly of Chinese descent, or under Chinese cultural influence, the economic vitality of the rest of the region has been credited to the adaptability, flexibility and ingenuity of Chinese entrepreneurship nurtured by a particular (Confician) heritage. In Chinese Entrepreneurship in a Global Era Raymond Wong and contributors analyse the tremendous changes in the global, regional and local environments in which Chinese entrepreneurs operate and explores whether a new breed of Chinese entrepreneurs has developed in response to these changes. Including theoretical discussion and empirical case studies on Chinese entrepreneuship in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, the book will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars of Chinese and East Asian business and entrepreneurship.

Chinese companies have managed to perform well in Malaysia, especially after the recession in the mid-1980s, due to a clear change in the Malay dominated government's attitude to Chinese capital. Despite the problems that prevail among UMNO politicians, the government has provided a stable economic environment and offers opportunities for domestic private investment, even for the Chinese. Given these circumstances, it does appear that Chinese capital in Malaysia has reasonable prospects for further growth in the immediate future. This study examines the dominant role of Chinese capital in the economy, providing in-depth empirical research on its mode of development and styles of operation. Covering the period from colonial times to the present day this study identifies key issues pertaining to Chinese business operations in Malaysia: ownership and control patterns, style of growth, relations with the state, politicians and other Chinese businessmen, and the manner of development of business abroad, whilst debunking the theory that large-scale Chinese capital is not very entrepreneurial in nature.

Republican China attracted an uncommon diversity of foreign interests, groups, and individuals, which included missionaries, adventurers, diplomats, academics, humanitarians and refugees, as well as hedonists and tourists. By exploring the diverse nature of foreign activities in Republican China, this book complicates the dominant narratives of the imperialistic foreigner and Chinese victim, and moves beyond the depiction of foreigners as privileged and the Chinese as simply weak. The spaces and relationships examined in the essays in this volume reveal a complex series of interactions between foreigners and the people of China which go far beyond one-way transmission or exploitation. Indeed, this book examines how diverse and sometimes seemingly peripheral foreign individuals and communities influenced literature, education, trade, sexual morality, warfare, and architecture in China and in the process were themselves profoundly changed, in ways that are as remarkable as those experienced by the Chinese they had come to observe, meet, exploit, conquer, assist, or change. Bringing together the work of a diverse group of scholars on Republican China, this edited volume adopts a uniquely multi-disciplinary approach to the study of foreigners in China, and utilises the perspectives of historiography, literary studies, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and political science. As such, this interesting and innovative book will be of great interest to students and scholars from diverse fields including Chinese and global history, politics and international relations, Chinese studies, literary studies and gender studies.

Since the late nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have moved to Russia and Eastern Europe. However, until now, very little research has been done about the initial migrants in the nineteenth century, the presence of the Chinese in Europe and Russia in the twentieth century before the collapse of the 'socialist' regimes or about the great wave of Chinese migration to Eastern Europe and Russia which occurred after 1989. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Chinese in Russia and Eastern Europe from the nineteenth century to the present day. Particularly important is the movement of entrepreneurs in the early 1990s, who took advantage of unmet demand, inadequate retail networks and largely unregulated markets to become suppliers of cheap consumer goods to low-income Eastern Europeans. In some villages, Chinese merchants now occupy a position not unlike that of Jewish shopkeepers before the Second World War. Although their interactions with local society are numerous, the degree of social integration and acceptance is often low. At the same time, they maintain close economic, social, and political ties to China. Empirical in focus, and full of rich ethnographic data, Pál Nyíri has produced a book that will be of great interest to students and scholars of Chinese studies, international migration, diaspora and transnationalism.

This book originally examines how prominent communist intellectuals in China during the revolutionary period (1921 to 1940) constructed and presented identities for themselves and how they narrated their place in the revolution.

Drawing upon wide-ranging case study material, the book explores the ever-changing personal and cultural identity of Chinese migrants and the diverse cosmopolitan communities they create. The various models of newly-forged communities are examined with the added dimension of personal identity and the individual's place in society. With particular emphasis on the changing face of Chinese ethnicity in a range of established places of convergence, Chan draws on extensive experience and knowledge in the field to bring the reader a fresh, fascinating and ultimately very human analysis of migration, culture, identity and the self.

Providing a crucial understanding of how globalization impacts on the development of Chinese businesses, this book analyzes the unprecedented changes in Chinese ethnic business due to the process of globalization, specifically economic globalization, in the key receiving countries of the US, Australia and Canada. Focusing on the main themes of economic globalization and Chinese community development, transnational linkages, local urban structures, homogenization and place attachment, the team of internationally known contributors place the subject of Chinese ethnic business in the bigger picture of ethnic businesses and globalization. Including excellent methodology such as ethnographic studies, historical analysis, geographic studies and statistical analysis, this volume makes an important contribution to the field of ethnic businesses.

Based on a treasure trove of information collected through fieldwork interviews and painstaking documentary research through the Chinese and Western language presses, this book analyzes one of the most important reforms implemented in China over the past decade – the rural tax and fee reform, also known as the "Third Revolution in the Countryside". The aim of the tax was to improve social stability in rural China, which has become increasingly shaken by peasant protests, many of them large-scale and violent. By examining the gap between the intentions of the reform and the eventual outcomes, Göbel provides new insights into the nature of intergovernmental relations in China and highlights the ways in which the relationship between the state and the rural populace has fundamentally changed forever. The Politics of Rural Reform in China will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese politics, governance and development studies.

The Chinese overseas have long been relevant to China, especially to qiaoxiang, and vice-versa. Qiaoxiang refers to regions from where emigrants migrated overseas, where there are therefore ties with Chinese communities overseas. Unlike most other works, which cover either China or the Chinese overseas, this book examines both China and the Chinese overseas in relation to qioaxiang. With clearly presented chapters that examine the ancestral homeland, Chinese overseas, China and transnational networks, and the diversity of settlements and homelands, the expert team of international contributors of Chinese Transnational Networks have created a volume which will be essential reading for students and scholars of migrations studies, Chinese diaspora and Chinese culture and society.

As we enter the 21st century it is clear that the economic growth China has enjoyed has been extraordinary. Although Western countries continue to dominate the world economy and financial markets, the capital markets pf Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and Shenzen have matured considerably and are eager to become major global playersAs business owners in the rest of East Asia are predominantly of Chinese descent, or under Chinese cultural influence, the economic vitality of the rest of the region has been credited to the adaptability, flexibility and ingenuity of Chinese entrepreneurship nurtured by a particular (Confician) heritage.In Chinese Entrepreneurship in a Global Era Raymond Wong and contributors analyse the tremendous changes in the global, regional and local environments in which Chinese entrepreneurs operate and explores whether a new breed of Chinese entrepreneurs has developed in response to these changes. Including theoretical discussion and empirical case studies on Chinese entrepreneuship in Hong Kong, China, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, the book will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars of Chinese and East Asian business and entrepreneurship.

This book aims to make sense of the recent reform of neighbourhood institutions in urban China. It builds on the observation that the late 1990s saw a comeback of the state in urban China after the increased economization of life in the 1980s had initially forced it to withdraw. Based on several months of fieldwork in locations ranging from poor and dilapidated neighbourhoods in Shenyang City to middle class gated communities in Shenzhen, the authors analyze recent attempts by the central government to enhance stability in China’s increasingly volatile cities. In particular, they argue that the central government has begun to restructure urban neighbourhoods, and has encouraged residents to govern themselves by means of democratic procedures. Heberer and Göbel also contend that whilst on the one hand, the central government has managed to bring the Party-state back into urban society, especially by tapping into a range of social groups that depend on it, it has not, however, managed to establish a broad base for participation. In testing this hypothesis, the book examines the rationales, strategies and impacts of this comeback by systematically analyzing how the reorganization of neighbourhood committees was actually conducted and find that opportunities for participation were far more limited than initially promised.The book will be of interest to students and scholars of Chinese Studies, Development Studies, Urban Studies and Asian Studies in general.

Overseas Chinese in the People’s Republic of China examines the experiences of a group of persons known officially and collectively in the PRC as "domestic Overseas Chinese". They include family members of overseas migrants who remained in China, refugees fleeing persecution, and former migrants and their descendants who "returned" to the People’s Republic in order to pursue higher education and to serve their motherland. In this book, Glen Peterson describes the nature of the official state project by which domestic Overseas Chinese were incorporated into the economic, political and social structures of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s, examines the multiple and contradictory meanings associated with being "domestic Overseas Chinese", and explores how "domestic Overseas Chineseness" as political category shaped social experiences and identities.This book fills an important gap in the literature on Chinese migration and Chinese transnationalism and will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars of these subjects, as well as Chinese history and Asian Studies more generally.

The transnational and diasporic dimensions of early Chinese migrant politics opened in the late nineteenth century when Chinese radical groups bent on overthrowing the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) vied with one another to win Chinese overseas to their modernizing projects, and immigrants who had suffered discrimination welcomed their proposals. The radicals’ concentration on Chinese communities abroad as outposts of Chinese politics and culture strengthened the stereotype of Chinese as clannish, unassimilable, xenophobic, and deeply introverted. This book argues that such a view has its roots less in historical truth than in political and ideological prejudice and obscures a rich vein of internationalist practice in Chinese migrant or diasporic history, which the study aims to restore to visibility. In some cases, internationalist alliances sprang from the spontaneous perception by Chinese and other non-Chinese migrants or local workers of shared problems and common solutions in everyday life and work. At other times, they emerged from under the umbrella of transnationalism, when Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist activists overseas received support for their campaigns from local internationalists; or the alliances were the product of nurturing by Chinese or non-Chinese political organizers, including anarchists, communists, and members of internationalist cultural movements like Esperantism.Based on sources in a dozen languages, and telling hitherto largely unknown or forgotten stories of Chinese migrant experiences in Russia, Germany, Cuba, Spain and Australia, this study will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history, labour studies and ethnic/migration studies alike.

Documentaries have recently become a favourite format for Chinese state-directed media to present an officially sanctioned view of history. Indeed, this is not confined to Chinese national history. In stark contrast to the earlier self-centred preoccupation with Chinese history, there has been an upsurge in interest in foreign history, with a view to illuminating China’s role not only in world history, but also on the global stage today, and in the future. This book examines three recent Chinese documentary television series which present the officially sanctioned view of the rise of the modern West, the reasons for the end of the Soviet Union, and the legitimisation of the present-day Chinese government via a specific reading of modern Chinese history to argue for a ‘Chinese rise’ in the future. With a focus on these documentaries, Gotelind Müller discusses how history is presented on screen, and explores the function of visual history for memory culture and wider society. Further, this book reveals how the presentation of Chinese and foreign history in a global framework impacts on the officially transmitted views on Self and Other, and thus provides a keen insight into how the Chinese themselves regard their ‘global rise’.Documentary, World History, and National Power in the PRC will be welcomed by students and scholars working across a number of fields, including Chinese studies, East Asian studies, media studies, television studies, history and memory studies.

Incorporating research carried out over the last twenty years, this book documents the personal and collective responses of Chinese migrants and refugees to the prejudice and discrimination they have experienced. Using case studies of Chinese communities in Canada, Chan explores the different defence mechanisms Chinese migrants have created in order to escape the systemic and institutionalized discrimination they face. In particular, the book analyzes Chinese entrepreneurship, arguing that it is a collective response to blocked opportunities in host societies. Drawing upon empirical and theoretical literature on the sociology of race and ethnic relations, the book stresses the variety in Chinese culture and its ability to exploit an emergent ethnicity as individuals, groups and communities.