What comes into your mind at the mention of the term overseas Chinese? Foreign students at university in America? Loud-mouthed, nimble waiters in a bustling Chinatown restaurant? Famous names such as An Wang, Lin Shao-liang and Yuan T. Lee? The overseas Chinese delegates who come back to Taiwan every year to attend the Double Tenth celebrations, wave ROC flags and ride round the island sightseeing in tourist coaches? Or perhaps it's the emigree investors who go abroad with wads of cash to buy land and set up factories.
All of these are right, and yet none of them are right either.
The story of Chinese settling down to live overseas is a very complex one. Chronologically it begins back in the 1820's in the middle Ch'ing dynasty, and extends over one and a half centuries down to the present. Spatially, their footsteps are found the world over, having endured similar hardships and shed different tears. Among their reasons for residing overseas there is the old one of poverty at home driving people away to seek a new life elsewhere and then being forced to remain abroad despite a longing to return home one day, while today people usually go abroad because they have "something up their sleeve" and have every intention of putting down roots in their chosen homeland. Culturally, there are those who have been baptized in their mother culture, the first generation emigrants still umbilically linked to their Chinese motherland, and there are the third and fourth generation ethnic Chinese who no longer speak the language. . . The global overseas Chinese community is not one whose outline can be sketched in just a few words or pictures.
But by tracing the periods and routes of the main overseas emigrations, we may at least pick up a few leads. . .
The overseas Chinese often say: "Wherever there is seawater, you will find Chinese people." Apart from indicating the massive population of the worldwide overseas Chinese community, this saying also points to the main method of transport used in the early days--travelling onboard a ship to wherever the tides and winds might carry it. So it is no wonder the majority of overseas Chinese hail from the maritime provinces of China; though why do Kwangtung and Fukien predominate? And why is it that Hokkien-speaking overseas Chinese are generally found in Southeast Asia, while the Cantonese and Hakkanese- speaking communities have spread further afield to the Americas, Europe, Africa and Oceania?
The fact that most overseas Chinese are Fukienese or Cantonese by origin may have been due to early development of the ports in Fukien and Kwangtung provinces, where people enjoyed more frequent contact with the outside world. Another factor was that from the late Ch'ing dynasty until the outbreak of the War of Resistance against Japan, there were many more poverty-stricken people in southern China than in the north. According to ROC central government figures for 1934, most farmers in northern China were landowning peasants, with the semi-landowning and tenant peasantry accounting for only 11%. But in central and southern China the proportion of tenant peasants was as high as 42%, especially in the provinces of Fukien and Kwangtung, with the former having a farming population consisting of over 90% tenant peasants.
Being too poor to own land was the main reason why the early overseas Chinese risked the long sea journey to America. According to Ch'en Ta, author of the book Nanyang Overseas Chinese and Fukienese & Cantonese Society, a 1939 survey of 905 overseas Chinese households from the Swatow area of Kwangtung province found that 70% gave simply making ends meet as their reason for going abroad, while 20% mentioned family ties and only 30% gave reasons such as setting up a new business.
Frequent warfare in the late Ch'ing period forced the people of Fukien and Kwangtung to seek alternative means of survival. Southeast Asia lies just across the sea from southern China and enjoys a similar climate; those lands were plentiful but thinly populated, and ample land was available for farming. More and more overseas Chinese chose to settle there, and today ROC government statistics kept by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission show a total ethnic Chinese population in Southeast Asia of some 27 million people, over nine-tenths of the entire overseas Chinese community worldwide.
Besides Fukien and Kwangtung, other provinces of China also saw smaller numbers of their inhabitants spread to other countries. For example, 90% of the overseas Chinese in Korea hail from Shantung, and most of Burma's overseas Chinese community has its roots in Yunnan.
Another major wave of emigration from the middle nineteenth century until the early years of the twentieth century was associated with contracted Chinese labor.
The negro slave trade once flourished as a means of developing the resources of Europe's colonial territories; with the worldwide abolition of slave trading in the middle nineteenth century, an alternative source of labor was identified in the Chinese.
Despite the presence of its own ban on exploiting Chinese labor, the Manchu government of the Ch'ing dynasty was powerless to enforce it. In 1859 the Anglo-French Expeditionary Force attacked Peking, sacked the Yuan-ming-yuan and forced the Ch'ing government to sign the Treaty of Peking. One of its clauses stated: ". . . Any Chinese subject desirous of taking up employment anywhere under British jurisdiction or elsewhere abroad may contract with a British subject to do so. . ." This legalized the trade in Chinese labor.
Thereafter, enticed by financial inducements or simply duped into going, millions of coolies accepted a modest payment and contracted to work for a limited period in tin mines or in the rubber, tea and sugar plantations of Southeast Asia. Others set off further afield to dig for guano in Peru, build railways in America, work in the gold mines of Australia and South Africa, or work behind the lines on the Great War battlefields of Europe.
European colonial records show that in 1845 a French ship transported Chinese laborers from Canton to the African island of Reunion; this marked the beginning of Chinese contracted labor. The first shipment of Chinese contract workers to the Americas took place in 1847 when some 800 hired laborers from Amoy were transported to Cuba.
Huge numbers of people were involved. Between 1881 and 1915 a total of 770,000 Chinese workers were sent to Singapore and Penang in Malaya; between 1904 and 1910 over 50,000 Chinese workers went to South Africa; and in 1916 & 1917 as many as 230,000 Chinese workers were sent to assist the Allied war effort in Europe. This latter group was mainly involved in loading and unloading food supplies, transportation, road-mending a nd working in ammunition factories; they weren't sent to the front. Al together some 5 million Chinese were involved in contract labor, untilthis "export trade in Chinese" came to a halt around 1930.
The majority of the contract laborers were Cantonese, including those recruited at Swatow through Spanish, Portuguese and Peruvian-managed coolie agencies and sent to work in places such as Cuba and Peru.
Another British-operated contract labor company distributed pamphlets in the countryside around Canton to hire workers to go to America. This proved successful because a travel allowance was paid, the workers would be brought home again once they were paid off, the contract was for a limited term, and the living and working conditions were excellent. Figures issued by the American Immigration Bureau show that most Chinese immigrants had set off from Kwangtung and Hong Kong, which is why the majority of overseas Chinese in the United States to this day are of Cantonese origin.
Some Chinese laborers were sent packing once their contracts were up. Chinese workers in the then British colony of South Africa, for example, struck in protest at their low pay and were all sent back to China after a government inspector found them "inefficient." But most Chinese workers stayed on after their contracts expired and became part of the ethnic Chinese community in their new home. This is why the populations of Singapore and Malaysia are one-quarter and one-third Chinese, respectively. The Chinese dialects of Cantonese, Hokkien and Hakkanese also spread round the world and were spoken wherever contract laborers settled.
The vast majority of the early Chinese emigrants intended to return home to China one day. Their hearts always stayed in their motherland, and far as possible they remitted all their earnings home.
Statistics show that between 1902 and 11930 all remittances by overseas Chinese totalled an average of US$150 million to US$200 million per year. Overseas Chinese returned to China to set up schools, build hospitals and invest in domestic industries. In two celebrated cases new railway lines were backed by individual overseas Chinese financiers, namely Malaya-based Chang Hung-nan's Chao-chow-Swatow line and American-based Ch'en Hsuan-hsi's Hsin-ning line.
Chinese based abroad were particularly concerned about China's poverty at the turn of the century and gave generously in support of Sun Yatsen's nationalist revolution. Overseas Chinese newspaper proprietors encouraged revolutionary sentiment; Singapore Chinese Chang Yung-fu lent his home as a meeting place for the Tung Meng Hui, and Sun Yatsen stayed there when he visited Singapore; Vietnam-based overseas Chinese bought ammunition to assist nationalist forces at the Battle of Huanghuakang in the year 1911, and in that battle some dozen of them gave their lives for the revolutionary cause.
With their diligence and thrift, the overseas Chinese gradually established themselves in their chosen land. To this day the economic pulse of many Southeast Asian nations is controlled by the overseas Chinese community; for example, the world's richest ethnic Chinese, Lin Shao-liang, is the wealthiest man in Indonesia. Even in the tiny Pacific island territory of Tahiti, overseas Chinese only account for 10% of the population, but control 70% of the economy.
While the early Chinese emigrants have now put down roots overseas going back several generations, a fresh wave of emigration has appeared with the new economic upswing on the Pacific Rim. Since these people's personal background, reasons for wishing to emigrate and choice of destination are quite different from those of their predecessors, they are called the "new overseas Chinese" as distinct from the "old overseas Chinese."
These "new overseas Chinese" are largely those who have emigrated since the Second World War, and the circumstances of their emigration could hardly have been more different.
In the case of America, the earlier Chinese immigrants either went there freely as gold prospectors or were sent there as contract labor to work on building railways. Normally their descendants continued to speak Cantonese and clustered together in Chinatowns, where they usually worked.
The new Chinese immigrants fall into two separate categories. One consists of the 4,000 Chinese students and about 1,000 technicians who were in America when mainland China fell to the Communists. Their presence brought about an upswing in average income and educational level for the American Chinese community.
The second category consists of new immigrants from Taiwan, including students and, in recent years, overseas investors. In the past decade, thanks to Taiwan's "economic miracle" and the subsequent upward revaluation of the NT dollar against the US dollar, many Taiwanese have paid cash on the nail for homes in the United States and have formed new Chinese communities and new Chinatowns where their native Hokkien dialect enjoys greater currency. Examples are Flushing in New York and California's Monterrey Park, where Hokkien is freely spoken.
Other popular countries with Chinese emigrants, apart from the United States and Canada, include New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. Mainland China's tightly closed "bamboo curtain" has meant that most new emigration since the 1960's has been from Taiwan. According to the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission, Taiwan is the homeland of the third largest group within the worldwide overseas Chinese community, after the Fukienese and Cantonese.
The vast majority of this 31 million-strong community have taken citizenship in the country where they reside, and some second and third generation ethnic Chinese have never lived on Chinese soil. Mixed marriages and cultural assimilation have meant that they can no longer read Chinese or speak a Chinese dialect; in fact they are indistinguishable from the local people both in speech and behavior. Nevertheless certain specifically Chinese characteristics can still be identified among them.
A high regard for education is one example. With the traditional Chinese accent on academic study as everyone's highest goal, Chinese students cram hard to squeeze into universities here in Taiwan while abroad ethnic Chinese are routinely much in evidence in the field of higher education. To cite one example, in America the national average educational attainment is 12.6 years for males and 12.4 years for females; locally born ethnic Chinese attain rates of 14.9 years and 14.3 years respectively. And in Tahiti, over half the members of the French student alumni association are ethnic Chinese.
Wherever ethnic Chinese live together in a community you can nearly always see the red rooftiles and upswept eaves of a Chinese temple. Three 100 year-old Chinese temples survive in California alone, keeping alive the cults of Matsu, Kuan-yin and the Jade Emperor. In Chinese-run stores, restaurants and businesses of all kinds you can often find a shrine where incense is burned before an image of Kuan-kung. Practices such as the veneration of ancestral tablets and visiting parental graves on Tombsweeping Festival are even more widespread.
Culinary habits are often regarded as forming a noble tradition; and let's not forget the quintessentially Chinese game of mahjong. It is said that wherever Chinese people live, there you will find mahjong.
Whether at home or abroad, Chinese people are always linked together in certain ways as if by an umbilical cord.
Overseas Chinese Population and Distribution [Picture]
[Picture Caption]
In contrast to the immigrant laborers of earlier times, modern overseas Chinese are successful and self-possessed, enjoying a far better life.(left photo courtesy of the compilers of A History of the Chinese Community in South Africa, right photos by Vincent Chang)
Pao Shu left Chungshan county, Kwangtung, at 21 work on a pear farm in California, where he now lives at Locke, north of San Francisco.
An early western view of a southern Chinese harbor shows that coastal residents were au fait with handling boats.
San Franciscan Li Shih-nan betrays a hint of pride at displaying an old photo of his father, who took part in the 1911 Nationalist Revolution. (photo by Vincent Chang)
Overseas Chinese societies have the clout to look after their members "from the cradle to the grave." Shown here is a Chinese public cemetery in Honolulu.
(Below) A stroll through Chinatown lets you witness many traditional Chinese activities. Shown here is San Francisco's Chinatown. (photo by Vincent Chang)
Overseas Chinese stress education as the best route to a better future. Here a class is in progress at a Chinese middle school in Malaysia. (photo by Huang Lili)
Many Chinese immigrants in Europe and America have changed their religion. Shown here is a Honolulu church with Chinese members in the congregation.
Cheng Ho's image is still venerated by the Chinese community in Indonesia.
Chinese-owned shops in Southeast Asia often display signs in different languages, meeting the need for cultural assimilation.
Modern immigrants enjoy an incomparably better life than before. These are the owners of a shrimp-raising business in Dominica. (photo by Vincent Chang)
(Left) New-generation immigrant businessmen mostly belong to the white-collar class. Shown here is the owner of a construction company in Australia. (photo by Vincent Chang)
In contrast to the immigrant laborers of earlier times, modern overseas Chinese are successful and self-possessed, enjoying a far better life.（left photo courtesy of the compilers of A History of the Chinese Community in South Africa, right photos by Vincent Chang）
Pao Shu left Chungshan county, Kwangtung, at 21 work on a pear farm in California, where he now lives at Locke, north of San Francisco.
An early western view of a southern Chinese harbor shows that coastal residents were au fait with handling boats.
San Franciscan Li Shih-nan betrays a hint of pride at displaying an old photo of his father, who took part in the 1911 Nationalist Revolution. （photo by Vincent Chang）
Overseas Chinese societies have the clout to look after their members "from the cradle to the grave." Shown here is a Chinese public cemetery in Honolulu.
Overseas Chinese stress education as the best route to a better future. Here a class is in progress at a Chinese middle school in Malaysia. （photo by Huang Lili）
（Below） A stroll through Chinatown lets you witness many traditional Chinese activities. Shown here is San Francisco's Chinatown. （photo by Vincent Chang）
Cheng Ho's image is still venerated by the Chinese community in Indonesia.
Many Chinese immigrants in Europe and America have changed their religion. Shown here is a Honolulu church with Chinese members in the congregation.
Chinese-owned shops in Southeast Asia often display signs in different languages, meeting the need for cultural assimilation.
（Left） New-generation immigrant businessmen mostly belong to the white-collar class. Shown here is the owner of a construction company in Australia. （photo by Vincent Chang）
Modern immigrants enjoy an incomparably better life than before. These are the owners of a shrimp-raising business in Dominica. （photo by Vincent Chang）
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