This book covers various aspects of New Chinese Migration in Suriname in the 1990s and early 2000s. It is an ethnography of New Chinese Migrants in the context of South- South migration, but also a first ethnography of Chinese in Suriname, as well as an analysis of Surinamese ethnic discourse and ethnopolitics. Starting in the 1990s, renewed immigration from China changed the dynamics of the Surinamese Chinese community, which developed from a Hakka enclave to a culturally and linguistically diverse, modern Chinese migrant group. Local positioning strategies of Chinese had always depended on ethnic entrepreneurship and political participation, but were now complicated by anti-immigrant sentiments.

In this volume, Li Wei brings together contributions from well-known and emerging scholars in socio- and anthropological linguistics working on different linguistic and communicative aspects of the Chinese diaspora. The project examines the Chinese diasporic experience from a global, comparative perspective, with a particular focus on transnational links, and local social and multilingual realities. Contributors address the emergence of new forms of Chinese in multilingual contexts, family language policy and practice, language socialization and identity development, multilingual creativity, linguistic attitudes and ideologies, and heritage language maintenance, loss, learning and re-learning. The studies are based on empirical observations and investigations in Chinese communities across the globe, including well-researched (from a sociolinguistic perspective) areas such as North America, Western Europe and Australia, as well as under-explored and under-represented areas such as Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, and the Middle East; the volume also includes detailed ethnographic accounts representing regions with a high concentration of Chinese migration such as Southeast Asia. This volume not only will allow sociolinguists to investigate the link between linguistic phenomena in specific communities and wider socio-cultural processes, but also invites an open dialogue with researchers from other disciplines who are working on migration, diaspora and identity, and those studying other language-based diasporic communities such as the Russian diaspora, the Spanish diaspora, the Portuguese diaspora, and the Arabic diaspora.

The Chinese migration to the Latin America/Caribbean region is an understudied dimension of the Asian American experience. There are three distinct periods in the history of this migration: the early colonial period (pre-19th century), when the profitable three-century trade connection between Manila and Acapulco led to the first Asian migrations to Mexico and Peru; the classic migration period (19th to early twentieth centuries), marked by the coolie trade known to Chinese diaspora studies; and the renewed immigration of the late 20th century to the present. Written by specialists on the Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean, this book tells the story of Asian migration to the Americas and contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the Chinese in this important part of the world.

This book will enlarge our grasp of global migration phenomena, offering insights into the fascinating, at times startling, realities of human migration in Asia. The chapters presented in this volume offer variety in not only theme but in approach to migration in Southeast and East Asia. Particularly welcome for a volume on migration studies, a discipline that has long been dominated by economists, sociologists, and geographers, are the chapters that approach the subject from an anthropological or ethnological perspective. These chapters bring to our attention details of the lives of migrants and their communities that are often lost in studies of migration statistics, the economic aspects of migration, or aspects of urban geography with which we have become more familiar. Some chapters are more theoretical in nature and herein lie some of the most important reasons for studying migration involving Asian countries: migration studies have, until relatively recently, developed their theoretical insights on the basis of European migration to North America. Asian migration offers new theoretical challenges to migration scholars; its dynamism is such that predictions of what is to come are not for the risk averse. The empirical studies here provide fascinating details of the strategies used by asylum seekers, of marriage migration, of the role of homeland languages in education, of the workings of ethnic entrepreneurs, of the media’s role in sustaining Chinese communities, and on the incentive structures that are helping to shape return flows to China. For readers who are from Asian countries, this book will illuminate the changes that are taking place in your region as a result of migration. For readers from developed and other societies, it will provide new insights into migration involving this understudied part of the world, an area that supplies the lion’s share of immigrants to developed economies, and the area whose rapid economic development will soon make it their greatest competition for migrants, especially the highly skilled.

This book analyzes the Chinese-centered globalization ‘from below’ brought about by China’s entrepreneurial migrants and conceived of as a projection of Chinese power in the Belt and Road Initiative partner states. It identifies the features of this globalization ‘from below,’ scrutinizes its mutually reinforcing relationship with China’s globalization ‘from above,’ and shows that these two globalizations are intrinsically related to the construction of a new international order. It outlines how the actors in China’s globalization ‘from below’ include Chinese emigrants who are located in informal transnational economic networks. It reveals that Beijing has enacted many laws that compel these emigrants to contribute to the development of their country of origin but also influences them through the successful promotion of a specific type of deterritorialized nationalism; and that China is ready to impose harsh punitive actions on political elites in partner states which fail to protect its migrants or limit their economic activities. Finally, it argues that China’s globalization ‘from below’ is fundamentally different from the non-hegemonic globalization ‘from below’ represented by, among others, Lebanese and East Indian traders, and that China’s globalization ‘from below’ is rather a self-interested national strategy intended to support the construction of a Chinese-centered international order.

In 1602, the States General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands chartered the first commercial company, the Dutch East India Company, and, in so doing, initiated a new wave of globalization. Even though Dutch engagement in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans dates back to the 16th century, it was the dawn of the 17th century that brought the Dutch into the fold of the general movement of European expansion overseas and concomitant globalization. This volume surveys the Dutch participation in, and contribution to, the process of globalization. At the same time, it reassesses the various ways Dutchmen fashioned themselves following the encounter and in the light of increasing dialogue with other societies across the world. As such, Exploring the Dutch Empire offers a new insight into the macro and micro worlds of the global Dutchman in Asia, Africa and the Americas. The result fills a gap in the historiography on empire and globalization, which has previously been dominated by British and, to a lesser extent, French and Spanish cases.

An analysis of the new physical presence of Chinese companies operating in Latin America and the Caribbean, the associated challenges that they face, and how they are impacting the region and its relationship with the PRC.