Central to the process of emigration was China in its successive avatars: dynastic empire, embattled republic, socialist-revolutionary nation-state, and capitalist autocracy. In all these contexts, Chinese emigration was a subset of a vaster scene of human movement of which the major part was internal migration. Internal and external migration are joined by the life strategies and social institutions that underlie both. Migration to escape persecution (or prosecution) is a long-term historical theme, and coerced migration of various sorts is another.