Globalizing Chinese Migration

Pál Nyíri, Senior Fellow, Humanities Centre, Central European University, Hungary. Igor R. Saveliev Associate Professor, Niigata University, Japan.

• Contents: Globality and diversity: Introduction, Igor R. Saveliev. Global Chinese Migration: New Spaces and New Flows: Evading the divine wind through the side door: the transformation of Chinese migration to Japan, H. Richard Friman; Chinese migration to Russia in space and time, Igor R. Saveliev; Chinese in the labour market of the Russian Far East: past, present, future, Anatolii M. Shkurkin; Contemporary Chinese migration to Russia, Vilya G. Gelbras; Illegal aliens smuggling to and through Southeast Asia’s golden triangle, Bertil Lintner; The Dongbei: the new Chinese immigration in Paris, Marc Paul. The Global Chinese: Constructing the Discourse: Chinese migrant workers in Japan: policies, institutions, and civil society, Daojiong Zha ; Non-remaining and non-returning: the mainland Chinese students in Japan and Europe since the 1970s, Cheng Xi; A group in transition: Chinese students and scholars in the Netherlands, Li Minghuan; Changing Chinese identities and migration in the borderlands of China, Burma and Thailand, Mika Toyota; From class enemies to patriots: overseas Chinese and emigration policy and discourse in the People’s Republic of China, Pál Nyíri; Gold from the lands afar: new Fujianese emigration revisited, James K. Chin; Time travels: locating xinyimin in Sino-Cambodian histories, Penny Edwards; Mobility, entrepreneurship, and sex: how narratives of modernity help Chinese women in Hungary evade gender constraints, Pál Nyíri; Appendix, Go Bon Juan; Afterword, Pál Nyíri; Index.

’The Chinese have created a global migrant network and we know much about Chinese communities in North America and Australasia and the history of their migrations into Southeast Asia. We know less, however, about the Chinese in other parts of the world, and particularly about their contemporary migrations. This book provides valuable information about the most recent and often irregular movements to Southeast Asia and gives insight into Chinese migrants in Russia, Japan and western European destinations. The book provides an essential comparative perspective for students of the Chinese Overseas and significant insight into Chinese migration in less well-known destinations.’ Ronald Skeldon, Professorial Fellow, University of Sussex, UK and Honorary Professor, City University, Hong Kong ’This book of essays describes the new wave of migration from China in the last quarter of the twentieth century. One of the editors, Pál Nyíri, is an established expert on Chinese migration. The book shows how local migrant flows within China spilled over in the 1990s onto the global scene, bringing legal and illegal Chinese settlers - described in the essays as new migrants - to countries of Europe and Asia not previously, or long not, the target of Chinese immigration on such a scale. In analysing the Chinese state’s role in this migration, the authors dismiss as fiction the theory (sometimes advanced by hostile and racist foreign observers) that Chinese authorities are intent on using mass emigration as an expansionist tool. They go on to explain that migrants who might, in earlier times, have been reviled as traitors and absconders are today more likely to be viewed by sections of the Chinese state bureaucracy as patriots who remain part of China’s polity and economy and contribute to its standing overseas. Some senior officials, however, particularly diplomats, stress the harm done by new migrants, both to China’s economy (which loses assets as a resu