Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820–1980

Gregor Benton · Hong Liu

July 2018 · Univ of California Press

About this eBook

Qiaopi is one of several names given to the “silver letters” Chinese emigrants sent home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These letters-cum-remittances document the changing history of the Chinese diaspora in different parts of the world and in different times.

Dear China is the first book-length study in English of qiaopi and of the origins, structure, and operations of the qiaopi trade. The authors explore the characteristics and transformations of qiaopi, showing how such institutionalized and cross-national mechanisms helped sustain families separated by distance and state frontiers and contributed to the sending regions’ socioeconomic development. Dear China contributes substantially to our understanding of modern Chinese history and to the comparative study of global migration.

About the author

Gregor Benton is Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University. His books include Mountain Fires: The Red Army’s Three-Year War in South China and The Qiaopi Trade and Transnational Networks in the Chinese Diaspora (coedited with Hong Liu and Huimei Zhang). Hong Liu is Tan Kah Kee Endowed Professor of Asian Studies and Chair of School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His publications include China and the Shaping of Indonesia, 1949–1965 and Singapore Chinese Society in Transition.