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This chapter talks about how the ethnic Chinese throughout the United States greeted the news of the People's Republic of China's entry into the Korean War with immense trepidation. Almost overnight, the prevailing images of Chinese in the American public eye had metamorphosed from friendly Pacific allies to formidable, threatening foes. Chinatown's Korean War Red Scare dramatized the ways in which the Cold War structured the reconfiguration of Chinese American citizenship in the post-Exclusion era. The ascendance of anti-Communism as the defining paradigm of US foreign policy after World War II introduced new imperatives to clarify Chinese America's social and political standing. To address these issues, both parties looked to the identification of Chinese in the United States as Overseas Chinese—that is, members of a global Chinese diaspora with ties to each other and China.

This chapter analyses the multifaceted identities of returned emigrants in Xiamen during its treaty port era through the lens of different power regimes — the Qing, Great Britain, Japan, and the Republic of China. It examines how they manipulated their identities for their own benefits. For those emigrants who had acquired foreign nationality, they had literally returned home to China as a “foreign” country. But for returned overseas Chinese in general, Xiamen was “foreign” also, because it was not entirely Chinese. In a sense, the chapter explains how Xiamen was situated “in-between” China and the world beyond after various contending political powers created a fluid environment in Xiamen. While the various states tried to identify, win over, and discipline the emigrants, the chapter reveals the chameleonic nature of the overseas Chinese and their conspicuous lack of deep ideological commitment to any one particular state.

This chapter highlights the stories of Chinese migrants who came to the People's Republic of China from Indonesia during the two-decade span of this book. By the late 1960s, at least 164,000 ethnic Chinese had “returned” to their ancestral homeland even though most of them were born and raised in Indonesia. The majority started their lives all over again on the overseas Chinese farms, primarily located in the mountainous regions in the Southern Chinese provinces of Fujian, Guangdong, and Hainan. However, these repatriated overseas Chinese carried the daily practices of capitalism and transnational investment ties with them. Ironically, their resistance against the socialist state's attempts to incorporate them helped prepare the PRC for its transition to market principles and its opening to international trade. Their tales of hope and disappointment, compromise and perseverance, conclude this story of migration in the time of revolution.

In the interwar years a number of prominent Chinese Australian families moved to Hong Kong and Shanghai where they built famous department store chains. While much has been written about the ‘Four Great Department Stores’, little is known of the family dynamics which underpinned these businesses. This chapter uses the private archives of Chinese Australian woman Daisy Kwok, whose life would forever be affected by her father’s decision to move the family to Shanghai to work for Wing On & Co. in the 1920s. It argues that we need to pay greater attention to the issue of return migration in overseas Chinese history, especially its impact on women’s lives.

This paper argues in favor of renaming Overseas Chinese archaeology “Chinese diaspora archaeology” and adopting an explicitly diasporic theoretical and interpretive framework. It introduces and defines diaspora as a general phenomenon, outlines key features of early Chinese migration beginning in the sixteenth century, and explores debates over characterizing this migration process and overseas Chinese communities as diasporic. Finally, it introduces examples of how archaeologists have incorporated a diasporic framework into their research and offers a vision of what an archaeology of the Chinese diaspora might look like and what benefits in can offer the discipline.

This chapter reviews the state of the field of Chinese Australian women’s history and provides an introduction to the historical presence of women of Chinese heritage in Australia. For too many years Chinese Australian women’s history has been doubly erased in a gendered and racialized historiography. This has been compounded by the perceived absence of the primary sources needed to undertake a recovery project. As feminist historians we now recognize that aided by the digital revolution and a creative use of newspapers, family histories, official statistics, and government records, it is possible to uncover and illuminate Chinese Australians women’s lives in the past. In doing so we question the framing of Chinese women as static or immobile while their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons took part in large-scale migration from Guangdong in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Placing the movements of migrant and Australian-born Chinese women in an international context, we propose a spectrum of mobility along which women’s individual, and changing, situations can be situated. This introduction also surveys existing historical scholarship on Chinese women’s migration and settlement in New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, recognizing that international themes offer inspiration for Australian research.

Chapter Four explores the rapidly diverging politics of Chinese American New York and San Francisco in the early and mid-1950s. In New York, KMT activists and officials infiltrated almost every Chinese American organization, but their factionalism and disregard for community welfare frustrated many residents. In San Francisco during the same period, Chinese Americans increasingly focused on American domestic politics, which not only proved safer than Chinese politics but also touched their lives more directly. Growing numbers registered to vote, and a group of younger men and women participated in the liberal Democratic club movement, forging valuable ties to regional politicians.

Chapter 5 argues that Chinese overseas is a privileged narrative focus providing a vantage point from which to explore the importance of Southeast Asia or Nanyang as ethos and imaginary in 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong films. As a border-crossing process and imaginary, Nanyang not only contributed to the survival of Hong Kong’s film industry between the 1950s and 1960s, but it also fuelled the transformation and construction of the colony as a nodal site amid 1960s industrialization. In order to explore Nanyang’s role in Hong Kong’s narrative path toward industrial modernity, this chapter first examines the shifting colonial, statist and cinematic conceptions of Cold War citizenship, allegiance, nationality, and gendered labor. Second, this chapter discusses two politically-driven filmic projections of the Nanyang ethos, arguing that both films continue to conceal contentious ideological and bipolarized conceptions of Chinese national subjectivity. The chapter ends with an analysis on The Story between Hong Kong and Macau (Yishui ge tianya, dir. Cho Kei, 1966), which moves beyond a paternalistic studio-centered approach to reveal how narratives about the travelling Chinese woman and the Nanyang continue to negotiate with narratives of gendered work and gendered economy in the process of screening Hong Kong’s modern industrial community.

This chapter analyses the evolution of Xiamen and the undertakings of overseas Chinese in the treaty port after they returned. It unravels the reason why Xiamen did not develop into an industrial and trading center a la Shanghai after its opening as a treaty port, then explores how it facilitated the mass movement of people in and out of the country. By examining the development of Xiamen, the mobility and identity of the emigrants, and the intricate relationships between the two — the chapter narrates the reason for the emigrants' return to Xiamen, and how the foreign experience affected their views of and relationships with the city. The chapter also pushes the boundary of Chinese history beyond China to incorporate a transnational perspective — that is, paying attention to how processes and relationships that have transcended the borders of China shaped the history of Xiamen — and complicates the familiar narrative of Chinese history by demonstrating the subjectivity of the emigrants and including the contributions of these traditionally marginalized people to China. In a way, Xiamen forces us to examine Chinese history and modernity beyond the boundaries of geopolitical China.

This chapter glances at the decisions and purposes of two overseas Chinese to return to Xiamen — a first-generation emigrant to the Philippines, Li Qingquan (1888–1940), and a third-generation overseas Chinese emigrant from Singapore, Lim Boon Keng (Lin Wenqing, 1869–1957). It illustrates their experiences and shows that the overseas Chinese relationship with the homeland was not natural nor guaranteed, and they were not always successful in settling back in China. Chinese emigrants were in a constant struggle to make sense of their socioeconomic and political environments and to settle, and foreign circumstances were as important if not more so than native-place connections in informing their decisions to return to China. More importantly, they did not assume a natural affinity with the place they returned to; rather, their choice to make home in Xiamen was a deliberate one. The chapter further discusses how emigrants are no longer bound to a given place once they began their journeys. Hence, home is not about returning to from where they originated but where they go that is most comfortable and familiar, and where they could create a sense of belonging, that is, a place that feels most like home.

This chapter details how, with the People's Republic of China winning Mainland China and the diplomatic recognition of Indonesia, the positions of the Nationalists and Communists reversed. Having switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing, Jakarta nevertheless allowed the Chinese Nationalist Party apparatus to continue its activities until 1958. Jakarta's ambiguous attitude induced a battle for influence between the two rival Chinese governments. As a regime in exile, the Chinese Nationalist government adjusted its past policies to fit the new circumstances resulting from its retreat to Taiwan. Having lost formal diplomatic representation, the Nationalists forged clandestine alliances with the Indonesian right-wing forces through the personal networks of the remaining Chinese Nationalist loyalists. In contrast with Taipei, Beijing prioritized state-to-state diplomacy over its connections to the overseas Chinese. By suspending the activities of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) among the overseas Chinese and signing the Sino-Indonesian Dual Nationality Treaty, Beijing attempted to ease Jakarta's concern that the ethnic Chinese could be used as a Communist fifth column.

This chapter explores how returned overseas Chinese investors used their money, knowledge, and vision to influence the urban reconstruction and cityscape of Xiamen in the early twentieth century. The chapter then proceeds to describe the transformation and modernization of the city brought about by the returned Chinese emigrants. Overseas financiers worked in tandem with city administrators to champion developmental projects, and they also speculated in real estate for personal profits, pushing land prices up three to four times. The chapter also reveals how the infusion of money from abroad allowed Xiamen's municipal government to push forth the construction of new roads and the reclamation of marshlands, ponds, and even graveyards. The chapter highlights the public utility companies set up by the overseas Chinese investors and the introduction of modern life, including telephone, electricity, and running water.

This concluding chapter explores the possible future directions for Chinese overseas communities and the process of the maintenance and change of their identities. In their quest for cultural identity, the Singapore Chinese have looked to their ancestral roots for a sense of historical and cultural continuity. This has given them a renewed sense of “Chineseness”. Singapore Chinese also use their four sets of identities in different social contexts to represent themselves to different groups of people, including those of other nationalities, ethnicities, dialect groups, and lineages.

This chapter examines the memoirs, diaries, poems, and theater scripts written by Ba Ren, an undercover member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and a writer, and those who used to work with him in the 1940s. It contends that the CCP was better able than its Nationalist rival to capture the hearts and minds of young overseas Chinese by expanding its political networks and promoting cross-ethnic alliances among the working class. In the 1940s, the CCP built its support base among the overseas Chinese through the education and publishing efforts of left-wing intellectuals like Ba Ren who traveled from Mainland China to Southeast Asia and worked as teachers and journalists in overseas Chinese communities. The subsequent rise of literacy and increasing availability of left-wing publications created a generation of revolutionary-minded ethnic Chinese youth. Through supplies, information, and refuge provided by these young people during the Japanese occupation, the CCP established underground offices in Sumatra, which were hidden behind the counters of pastry shops, Chinese medicine companies, soap factories, and wineries. It was the enthusiasm of these left-leaning youth that allowed openly active pro-CCP civic associations and political organizations to blossom during the Indonesian National Revolution.

This chapter addresses the Indonesian government's anti-Chinese acts, which had their origin in long-standing ethnic tensions but were directly triggered by Taipei's aid to regional rebellions against the central government in Jakarta. Although the Chinese Nationalists were the main targets, all the ethnic Chinese were subject to discriminatory policies. Beijing's response to the 1959–60 crisis in Indonesia was restrained. Indonesia under Sukarno's leadership was crucial to the People's Republic of China's “intermediate zone” strategy, which focused on cultivating solidarity with Asian and African countries. In a series of meetings with Indonesian diplomats in late 1959 and early 1960, Chinese foreign minister Chen Yi emphasized that the Chinese Communist leadership did not prioritize the interests of the overseas Chinese over its diplomatic ties with Jakarta. Instead, the PRC's primary goal was to advance friendly relations between Beijing and Jakarta while assisting Indonesia with its economic development. Underneath its reconciliatory attitude, however, Beijing was profoundly dissatisfied that the Indonesian government had singled out the ethnic Chinese while condoning Western exploitation.

This chapter looks at self-narratives of educated Chinese women who migrated to China during the 1940s and 1950s, and the complex effects of twentieth-century Chinese nationalism as it acquired a transnational reach among a female constituency. These re-migrant women, also known as guiqiao (Chinese for “returning sojourner”) were sufficiently politicized by their school experiences in Malaya and Singapore to detach themselves from their natal homes and seek out an ancestral homeland. In China, they hoped to obtain something that diasporic identity seemed to deny them—a sense of authentic belonging—but found that the nation-state could be as exclusionary as their lands of settlement. Their stories reveal an unanticipated dimension of overseas Chinese female education: by attending girls’ schools, many women learned to see themselves as non-gendered individuals, whose claim to national citizenship was in some ways rebellious but also complied with restrictive norms of Chinese ethno-nationalism and sociopolitical revolution.

Chinese-language girls’ schools in British Malaya and Singapore grew out of the national modernization movement in late Qing and early Republican China, and therefore also contained the contradictions of the “woman question” of that period. These schools were sites of modernization and politicization for overseas Chinese women, introducing non-gender-specific curricula, notions of gender equality, and ideals of national citizenship. Arguably, they may have done more to usher in modernity for girls and women than contemporaneous English schools in Malaya and Singapore, challenging the received wisdom that modernizing change was a Western-driven movement. At the same time, these schools sometimes perpetuated traditional gender role expectations even more energetically than occurred in China, because those beliefs were associated with the cultural heritage that they were supposed to uphold, especially in a Western imperial milieu. Chinese political and social modernization hence became associated with cultural conservatism.

This chapter revisits a well-known immigration case from the early White Australia period. In 1913, Ham Hop, the wife of fruit merchant Poon Gooey, was made to leave Australia with the couple’s two young Australian-born daughters. She had come to Australia on a temporary permit in 1910, but Poon Gooey had then mounted a determined campaign to gain permission for her to remain more permanently. The campaign, while ultimately unsuccessful, found widespread community support and was an ongoing embarrassment to the federal Labor government. This chapter focuses on the experiences of Ham Hop – first as a gum saam po, then as a migrant wife – to explore the possibilities for uncovering the lives of Chinese wives who were largely excluded from permanent migration to Australia in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Disparate yet interlinked forces shaped the rise of girls’ schools serving ethnic Chinese in British Malaya and Singapore: Western imperialism in Southeast Asia; European and Chinese notions of race and gender; Chinese migration; and twentieth-century ideas about the modern nation. Female education in these colonies was a battleground of ideologies during an era of political reinvention. European missionaries, British colonials, and Chinese community leaders founded English-language and Chinese-language girls’ schools. These institutions reproduced social and cultural norms, but they were also disruptive, giving overseas Chinese women options to be colonial subjects, transnational actors, patriotic national citizens, or some combination of these roles. These women confronted tensions between tradition and modernity, and between the competing pulls of ethnic, cultural, and political loyalties. Their history is a microcosm of overseas Chinese migration and diaspora, whereby the purported flexibility of transnational existence can also limit identity expression and national belonging.

This chapter traces the parallel development of charitable practices and forms of civic association in the Cantonese Pacific over the century to 1949 with a view to exploring ways in which Chinese overseas employed charity to build trust within their own communities and with their host societies in Australia and North America. Business activities and social transactions among Chinese diaspora communities are said to be embedded in personal trust, and to extend to larger trust networks. The chapter argues that the evolution of charitable practices and associational forms among Cantonese diaspora communities of the Pacific largely conform to this pattern. By drawing attention to some of the connections linking civic associations and their charitable activities to a range of trust-building strategies over time, the chapter highlights points of continuity in the work of Chinese community organizations overseas during a period of rapid institutional change from the late Qing Dynasty to the founding of the People’s Republic – specifically the relationship between engaging in private charity and working for the public benefit to build community trust.