Chinese overseas are now officially valued not only as investors of capital but also as conduits of information and as cultural brokers with the rest of the world—roles they have been filling unofficially for centuries.

The important difference today is that these most recent frontier enclaves were created by a Chinese government and that their special privileges and exemptions for Chinese and foreign business firms are designed to fit Chinese priorities: same historic functions but under new management.

What all these frontier enclaves had in common were rules under which Chinese merchants could deal with foreigners under conditions that were not subject to Chinese government restrictions.

By the late Qing, however, the rhetoric of the “foreign-affairs faction” (yangwu pai) proclaimed the benefits of foreign trade and technology for building “a wealthy state and powerful military.” This formula was not far from Deng Xiaoping’s, lacking only the “Socialist” component. It assured establishment elites of the late empire that foreign technology would be overlaid with Chinese characteristics because the political system would remain solidly based on Confucianism.

Now that China has reentered the world economically and culturally, its leaders recognize that only international trade and technology can lift the nation out of poverty.

Emigrants continue to make their way out of China into the world market while keeping in touch with personal networks of potential partners back in China.

Wherever wealth is not considered in itself a sign of virtue or status, the rich must show that they value something more than money.

One cadre was careful to observe that the government was supporting Anxi ancestor rituals as “a cultural practice and not a superstition.” However the heritage corridor may be rationalized, government cadres intent on funding modernization projects with overseas Chinese donations may find that they are admitting traditional ritual practices (and even long- moribund lineage structures) through the back door.

Such an independent-minded, culturally sophisticated entrepreneur seems unlikely to become a political tool of any Chinese government. Yet his sense of duty on a personal level keeps him from cutting his ties to his native place. Historically, this is the golden thread that runs through Chinese overseas social practice: care for family and qiaoxiang does not necessarily involve political adhesion to any particular governing regime.

Besides preferential treatment for present-day relatives of prosperous emigrants, PRC endorsement of an overseas Chinese elite could provide insurance for kinsmen back home against any future reversion to the anti-emigrant line of the late 1950s and 1960s. It would be surprising if the insecurity and stigmatization suffered during the bad years were not on the minds of emigrants and their home folk.

In the background of the New Migration has been a turnabout in Chinese government policy toward travel abroad: from fear to caution to encouragement, from treating foreign travel as a political issue to classing it as a normal, legitimate human activity. Travel abroad may include, of course, travel with intent to emigrate. In China’s drive toward “modernization” and economic growth, this will surely be one of the most consequential events.

Poor rural new immigrants have continued to form small particularistic groups for mutual support, built on compatriotism, kinship, and corituality. In contrast, immigrant urbanites, already more cosmopolitan, are inclined to make common cause with ethnic Chinese from different geographic and dialect origins.

Non-Chinese political elites had trouble distinguishing one variety of “Chinese” from another (dialect or regional distinctions were insignificant from the majority’s point of view), so they found it more convenient to treat—or mistreat—all of them equally.

Historically, we have seen aggregated “umbrella” organizations of pan-Chinese scale amid majority populations that were hostile and culturally impervious to Chinese immigrants.

This array of voluntary associations is completely without a hierarchy or directorate but is organized around functional life needs in an urban setting, not in the old manner of affinity groups. This suggests that urbanized Chinese had long since moved beyond affinity groups based on the traditional quartet of linkages (compatriotism, kinship, corituality, and brotherhood), instead finding support and sociability in despatialized, nonparticularistic groupings.

Satellite Chinese communities have emerged not through involuntary segregation but through ethnic real-estate networking (Chinese-speaking brokers for Chinese-speaking clients) and ethnic business clustering. The process has worked largely through language segregation: for Chinese immigrants, language has proved to be a compelling centripetal force.

The lint-laden air left her with a hacking cough and a painful throat. Despite the hazards and discomforts of the sweatshop for its all-female, entirely Sinophone workforce, Lii concluded that this was not a matter of “evil” owners and “victimized” workers, but that “there is something more complex at work—a miserable complicity born of necessity in an insular, immigrant world.”

Yet underlying the “grim conspiracy” was an inescapable fact: every worker interviewed was thankful to have her job.

Such enterprises operate on the principle that ethnic capital and coethnic labor embody shared cultural values—notably the old guild-style norms of patron-client relationships in which the interests of employer and employees are represented as complementary, not conflictual. The employer provides jobs along with a degree of care for the workers (including shielding them from government authorities); the workers accept substandard wages, which are at least better than they would be making back home.

To stanch the influx from Hong Kong, Britain erected legislative barriers such as the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962), which limited the flow of labor immigrants from Commonwealth countries and severely constrained the Chinese restaurant business (the predictable Chinese adaptation was to summon wives and other dependents from the home villages to fill the restaurants’ labor needs).

For Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia, the fall of colonialism brought much suffering and anxiety: indigenous peoples with painful colonial pasts viewed Chinese as remnants of the colonial order and scapegoated them for their own continuing poverty.

Instead of being invested in agriculture or local enterprise, the remittances went directly toward financing new emigrants. Relations between the families were described as “very good,” and the interest charged was slightly less than the bank rate. Chain migration was being perpetuated by chain financing.63 There was evidently a sense of obligation to help successive emigrants go abroad. Field investigators found that, after the first cohort of migrants had established an economic foothold in the venue country, loans to the next constituted 40 percent of the funds borrowed (the rest still came from family and friends in China). It was an impressive bootstrap operation.

There is also a perennial regional quarrel between the maritime provinces and the central government, as we observed earlier: the “Maritime Interest” has its own unique priorities that affect relations between the local state and the central.

Forbidden migration to Taiwan during the early eighteenth century enabled coastal patrolmen in the Taiwan strait to extort large bribes from Fujianese who had decided to cross anyway. Navy ships, for a price, carried illegal migrants. Authorities even tried to outbid the migrants by offering sentinels substantial bounties for arrests of surreptitious strait crossers.