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.
