Seeing Transnationally: How Chinese Migrants Make Their Dreams Come True
Between the early nineteenth century and the 1930s, more than ten million Chinese workers were shipped abroad to the European outposts and colonies of the tropical world. This great wave of Chinese mobility drew to a halt in the early 1950s after the midcentury years of war and revolution. However, since 1978, when China’s reform policy lifted the ban on migration, Chinese subjects from the People’s Republic have been on the move again. This time, the movement has been directed largely toward Europe and the Western world itself.This volume of essays by Li Minghuan, an early new migrant-scholar herself, documents the extraordinary story of Chinese transnational migration. The book represents over two decades of untiring empirical field research, going where the migrants go—the Netherlands, France, Canada—and where they come from—Wenzhou in Zhejiang, Mingxi in Fujian—in order to observe, and to listen, with an unwaveringly sympathetic eye and ear, to what they, their families, their neighbours, their brokers, and their local officials have to say. Coupled with the historian’s craft of painstaking archival research, these village and community case studies not only cover an astounding geographical orbit of sending and receiving areas, but also a broad diversity and range of migrant types and situations both historical and contemporary, from illegal and refugee migration, to official labor export, to the migration of students and professionals.

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Seeing Transnationally: How Chinese Migrants Make Their Dreams Come True
Between the early nineteenth century and the 1930s, more than ten million Chinese workers were shipped abroad to the European outposts and colonies of the tropical world. This great wave of Chinese mobility drew to a halt in the early 1950s after the midcentury years of war and revolution. However, since 1978, when China’s reform policy lifted the ban on migration, Chinese subjects from the People’s Republic have been on the move again. This time, the movement has been directed largely toward Europe and the Western world itself.This volume of essays by Li Minghuan, an early new migrant-scholar herself, documents the extraordinary story of Chinese transnational migration. The book represents over two decades of untiring empirical field research, going where the migrants go—the Netherlands, France, Canada—and where they come from—Wenzhou in Zhejiang, Mingxi in Fujian—in order to observe, and to listen, with an unwaveringly sympathetic eye and ear, to what they, their families, their neighbours, their brokers, and their local officials have to say. Coupled with the historian’s craft of painstaking archival research, these village and community case studies not only cover an astounding geographical orbit of sending and receiving areas, but also a broad diversity and range of migrant types and situations both historical and contemporary, from illegal and refugee migration, to official labor export, to the migration of students and professionals.

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Seeing Transnationally: How Chinese Migrants Make Their Dreams Come True

Seeing Transnationally: How Chinese Migrants Make Their Dreams Come True

by Li Minghuan
Seeing Transnationally: How Chinese Migrants Make Their Dreams Come True

Seeing Transnationally: How Chinese Migrants Make Their Dreams Come True

by Li Minghuan

Hardcover

$79.50 
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Overview

Between the early nineteenth century and the 1930s, more than ten million Chinese workers were shipped abroad to the European outposts and colonies of the tropical world. This great wave of Chinese mobility drew to a halt in the early 1950s after the midcentury years of war and revolution. However, since 1978, when China’s reform policy lifted the ban on migration, Chinese subjects from the People’s Republic have been on the move again. This time, the movement has been directed largely toward Europe and the Western world itself.This volume of essays by Li Minghuan, an early new migrant-scholar herself, documents the extraordinary story of Chinese transnational migration. The book represents over two decades of untiring empirical field research, going where the migrants go—the Netherlands, France, Canada—and where they come from—Wenzhou in Zhejiang, Mingxi in Fujian—in order to observe, and to listen, with an unwaveringly sympathetic eye and ear, to what they, their families, their neighbours, their brokers, and their local officials have to say. Coupled with the historian’s craft of painstaking archival research, these village and community case studies not only cover an astounding geographical orbit of sending and receiving areas, but also a broad diversity and range of migrant types and situations both historical and contemporary, from illegal and refugee migration, to official labor export, to the migration of students and professionals.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9789058679017
Publisher: Leuven University Press
Publication date: 01/15/2014
Series: Series of Global Migration and China
Pages: 328
Product dimensions: 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range: 18 Years

About the Author

Li Minghuan is Professor at the Institute of Population Studies at Xiamen University, China, and consultant at the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council, China.

Table of Contents

Foreword ix

Introduction Field Research at Multiple Ends of Chinese Migration Networks 1

Part I Empirical Studies from Sites of Origin

1 "To Get Rich Quickly in Europe!" Reflections on the Motivations For Transnational Migration in Wenzhou 9

2 Qiaoxiang in Wenzhou Revisited: Understanding Village Loyalty in the Age of Globalization 25

3 Transforming Contingency into Meaning: An Emergent Qiaoxiang in South China 31

4 Making a Living at the Interface of Legality and Illegality: Chinese Migrant Workers in Israel 49

5 Playing Edge Ball: Transnational Migration Brokerage in China 69

6 Collective Symbols and Individual Options: Life on a State Farm for Returned Overseas Chinese after Decollectivization 91

Part II Empirical Studies from Sites of Destination

7 Formalizing the Transnational Network: A Study on European-wide Chinese Voluntary Associations 111

8 Making a Living in an Affluent World: Chinese Immigrants in Europe 133

9 Living between Three Walls? The Peranakan Chinese in the Netherlands 143

10 A Group in Transition: Chinese Students and Scholars in the Netherlands 159

11 Everybody Acts Independently: A Study of the Refugee Determination Process in British Columbia, Canada 175

12 The Chinese in Europe: Population, Economy and Links with Qiaoxiang in the Early 21st-century 183

Part III Learning from Archives and Literature

13 Dezelfde hè? "The Dutch Are the European Chinese" -Reflections 205

14 Understanding the Tandjoeng Cemetery Archives: Chinese Society in 19th-century Batavia 221

15 From "Sons of the Yellow Emperor" to "Children of Indonesian Soil": Exploring 19th-century Chinese Society Based on the Batavia Kong Koan Archives 243

Concluding Remarks Myths of Creation and the Creation of Myths: Interrogating Chinese Diaspora

Afterword 279

References 283

Endnotes 293

Index 311

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