Chinese emigration

Waves of Chinese emigration have happened throughout history. They include the emigration to Southeast Asia beginning from the 10th century during the Tang dynasty, to the Americas during the 19th century, particularly during the California gold rush in the mid-1800s; general emigration initially around the early to mid 20th century which was mainly caused by corruption, starvation, and war due to the Warlord Era, the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War; and finally elective emigration to various countries. Most emigrants were peasants and manual labourers, although there were also educated individuals who brought their various expertises to their new destinations. As of 2023, illegal Chinese immigration to New York City has accelerated, and its Flushing (法拉盛), Queens neighborhood has become the present-day global epicenter receiving Chinese immigration as well as the international control center directing such migration.^[7]

Chronology of historical periods

11th Century BCE to 3rd Century BCE

• The Zhou Dynasty overthrew the Shang Dynasty in 1046 BCE. This conquest marked the beginning of the Zhou rule and the expansion of their territorial control.^[8]
• Western Zhou: The Zhou people engaged in military campaigns to expand their territory. As they conquered new regions, there was likely a movement of people to settle and administer these newly acquired lands.^[9]
• Eastern Zhou Period: The Eastern Zhou period is characterized by the Spring and Autumn Period (770–476 BCE) and the Warring States Period (475–221 BCE). During this time, the exchange of ideas and cultures between different states led to migration of scholars, artisans, and officials.^[8]
• 210 BCE: Qin Shi Huang (Chinese: 秦始皇) dispatched Xu Fu (Chinese: 徐福) to sail overseas in search of elixirs of immortality, accompanied by 3,000 virgin boys and girls. Records suggest Xu Fu's expedition settled in Honshu, Japan.
• From the Han dynasty onwards, Chinese military and agricultural colonies (Chinese: 屯田) were established at various times in the Western Regions, which in the early periods were lands largely occupied by an Indo-European people called the Tocharians.
• 661 CE: under the Tang dynasty, Zheng Guo Xi of Nan An, Fujian was buried at a Philippine island.^[10]

10–15th century

• Many Chinese merchants chose to settle down in the Southeast Asian ports such as Champa, Cambodia, Java, and Sumatra, and married the native women. Their children carried on trade.^[11][12]
• Borneo: Many Chinese lived in Borneo as recorded by Zheng He.
• Cambodia: Envoy of Yuan dynasty, Zhou Daguan (Chinese: 周达观) recorded in his The Customs of Chenla (Chinese: 真腊风土记), that there were many Chinese, especially sailors, who lived there. Many intermarried with the local women.
• Cham women, to whom they regularly returned to after trading voyages.^[13] A Chinese merchant from Quanzhou, Wang Yuanmao, traded extensively with Champa, and married a Cham princess.^[14]
• Nyonya
  (women).
• Majapahit Empire on Java, especially in Surabaya (Chinese: 泗水). The place where the Chinese lived was called New Village (新村), with many originally from Canton, Zhangzhou and Quanzhou
  .
• Ryūkyū Kingdom: Many Chinese moved to Ryukyu to serve the government or engage in business during this period. The Ming dynasty sent from Fujian 36 Chinese families at the request of the Ryukyuan King to manage oceanic dealings in the kingdom in 1392 during the Hongwu Emperor's reign. Many Ryukyuan officials were descended from these Chinese immigrants, being born in China or having Chinese grandfathers.^[17] They assisted in the Ryukyuans in advancing their technology and diplomatic relations.^[18][19][20]
• Siam: According to the clan chart of family name Lim, Gan, Ng, Khaw, Cheah, many Chinese traders lived there. They were amongst some of the Siamese envoys sent to China.
• In 1405, under the
  Liang Dao Ming (Chinese: 梁道明) and others to negotiate pacification. He took his family and fled to live in this place, where he remained for many years. Thousands of military personnel and civilians from Guangdong and Fujian
  followed him there and chose Dao Ming as their leader.
• Early Chinese mariners had a variety of contacts with
  his 15th century ocean voyages.^[21] On Lamu Island off the Kenyan coast, local oral tradition maintains that 20 shipwrecked Chinese sailors, possibly part of Zheng's fleet, washed up on shore there hundreds of years ago. Given permission to settle by local tribes after having killed a dangerous python, they converted to Islam and married local women. Now^[when?], they are believed to have just six descendants left there; in 2002, DNA tests conducted on one of the women confirmed that she was of Chinese descent. Her daughter, Mwamaka Sharifu, later received a PRC government scholarship to study traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in China.^[22][23] On Pate Island, Frank Viviano described in a July 2005 National Geographic article how ceramic fragments had been found around Lamu which the administrative officer of the local Swahili history museum claimed were of Chinese origin, specifically from Zheng He's voyage to East Africa. The eyes of the Pate people resembled Chinese and Famao and Wei were some of the names among them which were speculated to be of Chinese origin. Their ancestors were said to be from indigenous women who intermarried with Chinese Ming sailors when they were shipwrecked. Two places on Pate were called "Old Shanga", and "New Shanga", which the Chinese sailors had named. A local guide who claimed descent from the Chinese showed Frank a graveyard made out of coral on the island, indicating that they were the graves of the Chinese sailors, which the author described as "virtually identical", to Chinese Ming dynasty tombs, complete with "half-moon domes" and "terraced entries".^[24]
• According to Melanie Yap and Daniel Leong Man in their book Colour, Confusions and Concessions: the History of Chinese in South Africa, Chu Ssu-pen, a Chinese mapmaker, had southern Africa drawn on one of his maps in 1320. Ceramics found in Zimbabwe and South Africa dated back to the era of the Song dynasty in China. Some tribes to Cape Town's north claimed descent from Chinese sailors during the 13th century, their physical appearance is similar to Chinese with paler skin and a Mandarin-sounding tonal language; they call themselves Awatwa ("abandoned people").^[25]

15th–19th century

• When the Ming dynasty in China fell, Chinese refugees fled south and extensively settled in the Cham lands and Cambodia.^[26] Most of these Chinese were young males, and they took Cham women as wives. Their children identified more with Chinese culture. This migration occurred in the 17th and 18th centuries.^[27]
• Early European colonial powers in Asia encountered Chinese communities already well-established in various locations. The Kapitan Cina in various places was the representative of such communities towards the colonial authorities.
• The
  Amoy and Quanzhou resettled on the southern part of the peninsula. This group forms the majority of the Straits Chinese who were English-educated. Others moved to Taiwan
  at this time as well.

• Chinese immigrants, mainly from the controlled ports of Fujian and Guangdong provinces, were attracted by the prospect of work in the tin mines, rubber plantations or the possibility of opening up new farmlands at the beginning of the 19th century until the 1930s in British Malaya
• Between the period of 1927–1949, some
  Sarawak, North Borneo and Malaya after the Nationalists lost the civil war to avoid persecution or execution by the Chinese Communist Party.^[32]
  • The
    Kuomintang retreat to Taiwan
    in 1949 saw an emigration of approximately 2 million mainland Chinese to Taiwan.
• After Singapore became the capital of the Straits Settlements in 1832, the free trade policy attracted many Chinese merchants from Mainland China to trade, and many settled down in Singapore. Because of booming commerce which required a large labor force, the indentured Chinese coolie trade also appeared in Singapore. Coolies were contracted by traders and brought to Singapore to work. The large influx of coolies into Singapore only stopped after William Pickering became the Protector of Chinese. In 1914, the coolie trade was abolished and banned in Singapore. These populations form the basis of the Chinese Singaporeans.
• Peranakans, or those descendants of Chinese in Southeast Asia for many generations who were generally English-educated were typically known in Singapore as "Laokuh" (老客 – Old Guest) or "Straits Chinese". Most of them paid loyalty to the British Empire and did not regard themselves as "Huaqiao". From the 19th till the mid-20th century, migrants from China were known as "Sinkuh" (新客 – New Guest). A majority of them were coolies, workers on steamboats, etc. Some of them came to Singapore for work, in search of better living conditions or to escape poverty in China. Many of them also escaped to Singapore due to chaos and wars in China during the first half of the 20th century. They came mostly from the Fujian, Guangdong and Hainan provinces and, unlike Peranakans, paid loyalty to China and regarded themselves as "Huaqiao".
• At the end of the 19th century, the Chinese government realized that overseas Chinese could be an asset, a source of foreign investment, and a bridge to overseas knowledge; thus, it encouraged the use of the term "Overseas Chinese" (华侨).^[33]
• Among the provinces,
  Chinatowns in Canada and the United States
  .
• In addition to being a region of major emigration abroad, Siyi (Sze Yup) was a melting pot of ideas and trends brought back by overseas Chinese, (華僑; Huáqiáo). For example, many
  Sze Yup built in the early 20th century featured Qiaoxiang (僑鄉) architecture, i.e., incorporating architectural features from both the Chinese homeland and overseas.^[36]
• The first major immigration to America was during the
  de jure in 1947 but de facto in the 1960s with the opening up of immigration to Canada
  .

In the early 1960s, about 100,000 people were allowed to enter Hong Kong. In the late 1970s, vigilance against illegal migration to Hong Kong (香港) was again relaxed. Perhaps as many as 200,000 reached Hong Kong in 1979, but in 1980 authorities on both sides resumed concerted efforts to reduce the flow.

More liberalized emigration policies enacted in the 1980s as part of the

In 1983, emigration restrictions were eased as a result in part of the economic

References

Citations

Sources

• Amrith, Sunil S. Migration and diaspora in modern Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
• Benton, Gregor, and Hong Liu. Dear China: emigrant letters and remittances, 1820–1980. (U of California Press, 2018).
• Chan, Shelly. "The case for diaspora: A temporal approach to the Chinese experience." Journal of Asian Studies (2015): 107–128. online
• Cooke, Nola; Li, Tana; Anderson, James, eds. (2011). The Tongking Gulf Through History (illustrated ed.). University of Pennsylvania Press.
  ISBN 978-0812243369
  . Retrieved 4 January 2013.
• Ho, Elaine Lynn-Ee. Citizens in Motion: Emigration, Immigration, and Re-migration Across China's Borders (Stanford UP, 2018).
• Lary, Diana (2007). Lary, Diana (ed.). The Chinese State at the Borders (illustrated ed.). UBC Press.
  ISBN 978-0774813334
  . Retrieved 4 January 2013.
• McKeown, Adam. "Chinese emigration in global context, 1850–1940." Journal of Global History 5.1 (2010): 95–124.
• Pan, Lynn (1994). Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora. New York, NY: Kodansha America.
  ISBN 1-56836-032-0
  .
• Pan, Lynn, ed. (1999). The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  ISBN 0674252101
  .
• Tsai, Shih-Shan Henry (1996). The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (Ming Tai Huan Kuan) (illustrated ed.). SUNY Press.
  ISBN 0791426874
  . Retrieved 5 January 2013.
• Wade, Geoff (2005), Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu: an open access resource, Asia Research Institute and the Singapore E-Press, National University of Singapore, retrieved 6 November 2012
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain. Country Studies. Federal Research Division. [1]

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chinese diaspora.

• The Rocky Road to Liberty: A Documented History of Chinese American Immigration and Exclusion
• [2]
• Chinese Canadians – A visual history from the UBC Library Digital Collections documenting Chinese settlement in British Columbia