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Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820-1980

Online ISBN:
9780520970540
Print ISBN:
9780520298415
Publisher:
University of California Press
Book

Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820-1980

Gregor Benton,
Gregor Benton
Cardiff University
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Hong Liu
Hong Liu
Nanyang Technological University
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Published online:
24 January 2019
Published in print:
24 July 2018
Online ISBN:
9780520970540
Print ISBN:
9780520298415
Publisher:
University of California Press

Abstract

Qiaopi is the name given to the “silver letters” Chinese emigrants sent home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These letters-cum-remittances, which were entered into UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register in 2013, document the changing history of the Chinese diaspora in different parts of the world and in different periods, as well as its linkages to China. The qiaopi trade played a big part in making China transnational. This book, the first in English on qiaopi and on the origins, structure, and operations of the qiaopi trade, makes an important contribution to our understanding of modern Chinese history and to the comparative study of global migration. It examines the culture, business, geography, and politics of the qiaopi phenomenon, both in China and abroad, as well as the special features of the qiaopi trade in each of its Chinese regions. It traces the history of the trade, including the shift from individual couriering to large-scale enterprise, and its role in China’s difficult transition from an agrarian bureaucracy under the Qing to capitalism and the start of modern statehood under the Kuomintang and then to collectivism and full statehood under the communists. The study argues that the qiaopi trade was indispensable to modern China’s economic and social modernization and the basis for one of China’s earliest excursions into the modern world. The changes that it wrought were built initially on primordial ties of locality, kinship, and dialect, and it later joined or created national, transnational, and international networks based on trade, finance, and general migration.

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