This book examines contemporary Chinese transnational mobile practices with special focuses on the ethnographic exploration of the lives, experiences, views, and narratives of the Chinese mobile subjects in three ASEAN countries: Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, and their interactions with the ethnic Chinese communities in these countries. This book is based on recent and updated original ethnographic research carried out by leading scholars in China and Southeast Asia. The work addresses questions of integration and social embeddedness, interrogating the possibility of whether the transnational Chinese diaspora can be simultaneously embedded into two or more nation-states and geopolitical spheres. It contends that in moving in the transnational space, the Chinese diaspora may experience a strong yearning for a cultural home that may not be in one space for bicultural or multicultural diaspora. It also asks whether the transnational Chinese diaspora is motivated to negotiate cultural membership and social belonging in a new country. Shedding new light on the ways in which the transnational diaspora negotiates cultural membership to adapt to situational requirements, this volume is relevant to scholars researching in China studies, anthropology, international relations, and in Asian, Southeast and East Asian regional studies.

Leading scholars in the field consider the profound importance of meanings of place and the spatial processes of mobility and settlement for the Chinese overseas. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Fast-paced economic growth in Southeast Asia from the late 1960s until the mid-1990s brought increased attention to the overseas Chinese as an economically successful diaspora and their role in this economic growth. Events that followed, such as the transfer of Hong Kong and Macau to the People's Republic of China, the election of a non-KMT government in Taiwan, the Asian economic crisis and the plight of overseas Chinese in Indonesia as a result, and the durability of the Singapore economy during this same crisis, have helped to sustain this attention.The study of the overseas Chinese has by now become a global enterprise, raising new theoretical problems and empirical challenges. New case studies of overseas Chinese, such as those on communities in North America, Cuba, India, and South Africa, continually unveil different perspectives. New kinds of transnational connectivities linking Chinese communities are also being identified. It is now possible to make broader generalizations of a Chinese diaspora, on a global basis. Further, the intensifying study of the overseas Chinese has stimulated renewed intellectual vigor in other areas of research. The transnational and transregional activities of overseas Chinese, for example, pose serious challenges to analytical concepts of regional divides such as that between East and Southeast Asia.Despite the increased attention, new data, and the changing theoretical paradigms, basic questions concerning the overseas Chinese remain. The papers in this volume seek to understand the overseas Chinese migrants not just in terms of the overall Chinese diaspora per se, but also local Chinese migrants adapting to local societies, in different national contexts.

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.

The importance of the Chinese diaspora is widely recognized. Wanning Sun examines the key role of the media in the Chinese diaspora. She focuses especially on the media's role in communication, in fostering a sense of community, in defining different kinds of 'transnational Chineseness' - overseas Chinese communities are often very different from one country to another - and in showing how media communication is linked to commerce, which is often a key activity of the overseas Chinese. Revealing a great deal about the vibrancy and dynamism of the Chinese-language media, the book considers the Chinese diaspora in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and Australia, showing how it plays a crucial role in the changing nature of the Chinese diaspora.

New perspectives on the past and present contributions of the 25 million strong Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia to the development of contemporary society. Case studies feature organisational, community, religious, and other arenas of Chinese activity and identity definition, and the book analyses the interplay of local, regional, global and transnational networks and identities.

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.