Chinese Transnational Networks

Chee-Beng Tan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134156900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Chinese overseas have long been relevant to China, especially to qiaoxiang, and vice-versa. Qiaoxiang refers to regions from where emigrants migrated overseas, where there are therefore ties with Chinese communities overseas. Unlike most other works, which cover either China or the Chinese overseas, this book examines both China and the Chinese overseas in relation to qioaxiang.

With clearly presented chapters that examine the ancestral homeland, Chinese overseas, China and transnational networks, and the diversity of settlements and homelands, the expert team of international contributors of Chinese Transnational Networks have created a volume which will be essential reading for students and scholars of migrations studies, Chinese diaspora and Chinese culture and society.

Part I
Transformation in the ancestral homeland

1 Comings and goings
Pearl River Delta identities in an era of change and transformation¹

Graham E. Johnson

The Pearl River Delta has had a dramatic role to play in the modern history of China. In the past 25 years, it has experienced a notable transformation as a consequence of policy reforms in China and the influx of capital and entrepreneurial skills from, especially, Hong Kong, but also Taiwan and other parts of the Chinese diaspora. There are cultural commonalities within the Pearl River Delta region as a whole but also significant variation as a consequence of history, location, political leadership, and local social values. This chapter raises these issues. It draws attention to the differing roles in the process of change between two broad categories of actors of Chinese origin but external to the Chinese homeland, part of what may be called the “the Greater China complex.” Within the People’s Republic of China, a distinction is drawn between the “compatriots” (tongbao) of Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan; and the “Overseas Chinese”
(huaqiao) within the Chinese diaspora. The former category dates from 1949. It was assumed that their separated administrative status would be ultimately resolved, as Chinese sovereignty was extended to these territories in which they resided, separated by historical accident, as it has been in Hong Kong and Macao. The Taiwan issue is more complex.

The latter term is much older and is part of the political terminology of the Republic of China on Taiwan. In the contemporary period, some people of Chinese origin, living well beyond the bounds of China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Macao, may be uncomfortable with the term “Overseas Chinese.” Such individuals may be relatively recent migrants or descendants of migrants who left the Chinese homeland before 1949. They see the term as either dated or replete with political implications. The term implies a continued political link with mainland China (or Taiwan) where Chinese governmental bodies can bid for continued loyalty to the homeland, as Sun Yat-sen bid for support from people of Chinese origin throughout the world for his cause of overthrowing the Qing Dynasty and replacing it by a republican form of government. Such individuals may view their commitments to their places of birth or migration, rather than China itself, as major, and may prefer to use politically neutral terms such as “Chinese” (huaren, huayi) or ones that do not even suggest ethnicity (Singaporean, Canadian). Within both the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan, governmental organizations at all levels organize the activities of people of Chinese origin, whether “compatriots” or “Overseas Chinese,” and they are accorded distinct privileges.

There are ties to the Pearl River Delta by both people of the Chinese diaspora and the compatriots of Hong Kong and Macao (and to a lesser degree the compatriots of Taiwan, whose ancestral points of origin are likely to be elsewhere in China, although the majority do trace their ancestry to either Fujian or Guang-dong). For both categories, those ties have intensified since 1979. There are qualitative differences between the two types, however, which have had consequences for development within the Pearl River Delta over the past two decades since reform. These consequences may help explain in part the developmental experiences within the Pearl River Delta and account for differences with the broad region.

These distinctions are primarily political, historical artifacts with cultural consequences and implications for identities. They have contributed to the drama of the contemporary transformation, but they are rooted in a history that extends long before the reforms that began in 1979, indeed long before the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. The imperialist assault on China in the nineteenth century contributed to the demise of the imperial system of governance. It led to fundamental restructuring of China’s economy and had major effects on the delta economy. It led to the colonial presence of the British in south China for a century and a half after 1842. That presence, and its changing links to the emerging global economy, facilitated a series of migrations from the delta region. Hong Kong’s continued existence after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and its distinctive capitalist industrial development in the shadow of a socialist China and its primarily agricultural Guangdong interior, not merely gave rise to an intense migration flow but ultimately provided a distinctive economic and cultural milieu and a dramatic contrast to the long-established Cantonese cultural heartland centered on Guangzhou and the delta. Hong Kong became a major player in the affairs of Guangdong after 1979, in which the province in general, but the delta in particular, underwent an industrial transformation, as Hong Kong itself became de-industrialized. This, in its turn, occasioned a massive migration from China’s interior provinces and the poorer parts of Guangdong. At the same time, out-migration from Hong Kong and certain parts of the delta, to North America, Aus-tralasia, and even Europe, had further consequences.

For a century and a half, therefore, the delta region as a whole—the definition includes Hong Kong and Macao—has experienced an array of “comings” and “goings,” adding to cultural complexity and implications for change and identity. Different historical moments have produced different textures in a south China region that, from the Qing Dynasty on if not before, has been notable for the extent of movements both “in” and “out.”

The Pearl River Delta region

Thirty years after its incorporation into the People’s Republic of China, the Pearl River Delta region was a well-defined, and, in the context of the times, a gener- ally prosperous rural area dominated by double-cropping rice and an array of cash crops, such as pond fish, silk cocoons, and sugar cane (Johnson and Johnson 1976). Its development through the late 1970s was deeply conditioned by a national economic strategy, which gave the province an agricultural focus in the 30 years after its incorporation into the People’s Republic of China. Its potential for light industrial development was compromised during the 1950s (Vogel 1969: 154–6), and there was hostility to the long-established commercial skills within the rural economy (Siu 1989: esp. 153–5). Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta region were largely insulated from the global economy from the early part of the 1950s, as a consequence of inwardly looking national development policies. International trade was compromised and foreign investment was seen to be ideologically incompatible with a policy of national self-reliance. In the three decades after 1949, Guangdong and the Pearl River Delta region were marginal to the Chinese economy.

To some degree, Guangdong has always been somewhat marginal, complicated, and troublesome, from the perspective of the central state. During the early Qing, the Manchu role was contested, resulting in a coastal evacuation and a resettlement by Hakka (Kejia) migrants in the central region. This injected a tension, in part about ethnic differences with the Han, that was to last until the end of the dynasty. It was also from mid-Qing that challenges to imperial rule came from an unlikely source, as European traders began a process that was to fundamentally compromise the Chinese imperial system. Early Qing policy was to confine the foreign presence to Guangdong’s distant shores, allowing the Pearl River Delta to enjoy enormous prosperity. It was to end in the first Opium War, which brought an end to the Guangdong monopoly and plunged China into a century of tribulation.

The delta was variously affected by the forcible incorporation of China into the new world order imposed by European capitalist interests. Loss of territory and loss of control coincided with a dramatic shift in demographic conditions. The south China frontier had been reached in the early Qing, and population pressure on available land became increasingly troublesome, as the delta economy suffered from the loss of its trading monopoly as a major shift to the Changjiang delta occurred and as domestic political control slipped from the grasp of the Qing government. Ethnic and anti-dynastic conflict began in the delta region and spread throughout China, as foreign demands grew only more insistent.

There were two linked developments in the delta. The British became established in their Hong Kong colony, and through it, the delta was firmly linked to the world beyond, great swathes of which were greatly in need of unskilled labor with an enormous capacity for work. The delta region became a major source of such labor, which was to flow through Hong Kong until the 1920s. The “Overseas Chinese” were born, resulting in major economic and political repercussions. From the mid-nineteenth century, large numbers of émigrés from south and southeast China, but disproportionately from the Pearl River Delta, were a major source of unskilled labor in the Americas, Southeast Asia, Australasia, and southern Africa. Remittances from these out-migrants had a major effect in the Chinese homeland before 1949 (Chen 1940; Woon 1984). Under different political and economic circumstances, many delta residents left for Hong Kong in the late 1940s and the early 1950s, and contributed to its economic transformation in the 1950s and 1960s.

There therefore developed two distinctive segments of the delta on its peripheries. The Overseas Chinese homeland of the west delta furthered its cultural distinctiveness in the period before 1949 but was sadly marginalized in the 30 years after. The Hong Kong extremity was always anachronistic. It functioned like an “Overseas Chinese” settlement, at least until 1941, although its links to the homeland were always very intense. After 1949, the economic links with China were much diminished and the cultural links compromised, as Hong Kong was cut adrift from the homeland. If the west delta languished, the Hong Kong extremity created a new economic and cultural formation and ultimately a vibrant cultural identity that was as much a product of global forces as it was of Chinese ones.

Economic reform in China: the “open door” policy and Pearl River Delta consequences

In the late 1970s, new policy initiatives had dramatic effects in the Pearl River Delta region. The reform measures involved significant decentralization of economic decision-making away from the central state. Provincial levels became more autonomous and in their turn gave lower administrative levels augmented decision-making powers. In Guangdong, as in other parts of the southern coastal region, there began a process of diversification of the rural economy and a shift away from an agricultural focus. Industrialization that accelerated after 1987 produced rapid economic growth rates and an increase in real standards of living in some rural areas. It also occasioned a massive labor migration from less advantaged parts of Guangdong and interior China. Such migrants were culturally distinct from the dominant delta population.

At the beginning of the reform period, the Guangdong provincial economy ranked fifth or sixth nationally in overall value of production. By the early 1990s, Guangdong ranked first. Its agriculture and industry had forged ahead, and the tertiary sector (construction, transportation, and commerce) became second to none.² The province’s trade performance has been significant and accounts for almost 40 percent of China’s domestic exports.

Guangdong’s record of economic growth has been a consequence of an array of special policies that gave the province considerable latitude to seek innovative solutions to new production possibilities (Fewsmith 1994: 148–203). In 1985, the Pearl River Delta region, along with the lower Changjiang region and southern Fujian, was designated an “Open Economic Region,” in which many of the distinctive policies of the Special Economic Zones (SEZs) were extended to the counties and municipalities within the Pearl River Delta, narrowly drawn.³ Since the reform period, the Pearl River Delta region has regained much of its historic “outwardly oriented” character and has increased its share of economic activity in the province as a whole. By 1997, the Pearl River Delta, with 31 percent of the legally resident provincial population, had 44 percent of the labor force. It accounted for 75 percent of the gross value of agricultural and industrial production. Its share of industrial value was 78 percent, and its share of agricultural value at 39 percent was no longer the dominant force that it had been before the reform period, reflecting a greatly diminished arable acreage. It accounted for over 80 percent of Guangdong’s exports. Its per capita GDP was more than twice the provincial average, and almost nine times the national average (GSSB 1999). The Pearl River Delta was historically economically dominant in the Guangdong economy. Since reform, and especially in the 1990s, that dominance has only been furthered.

As China’s “southern gate,” Guangdong has consistently attracted the bulk of China’s foreign investment since the reform period began. In the initial phases of reform, the entrepreneurial skills and capital of people of Chinese origin, especially in Hong Kong, but also in Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere, were actively sought. Kinship connections and loyalties to ancestral localities became a central part of development initiatives. The Overseas Chinese areas of the west delta were released from the long period of suspicion and reactivated the links with compatriots worldwide.

The Pearl River Delta region: transformation and variation

Observations in various locations across the Pearl River Delta region suggest economic transformation in the wake of reform (Johnson 1992: 185–220; Johnson 1995; Johnson and Woon 1997a, 1997b). It was, in part at least, a consequence of mobilizing support for the reform initiatives from an array of Chinese settings outside the bounds of the People’s Republic of China.⁴ There is, however, considerable diversity within the delta region with respect to both economic processes and their cultural consequences and identities. The western delta, the historical area of Overseas Chinese migration to North America and the Hong Kong extremity stood as contrasting examples to the balance of the delta, whose characteristic distinctiveness was only furthered during the 30 years after 1949. The central delta region, the old commercial core of the delta that historically included Nanhai, Shunde, Panyu, and parts of Zhongshan, was affected by the national policies that prevailed until 1979 but remained prosperous and retained its cultural identity. It has sketched out distinctive responses in the period after reform. The eastern delta, roughly the Guangzhou-Hong Kong corridor, including Dongguan, the Shenzhen SEZ, and extending eastwards to the Huizhou area, was much affected during the initial period of the People’s Republic of China. It was poor, marginal, and, unlike the central region, linguistically complex, with a Hakka-speaking majority. It is most firmly linked and most deeply influenced by Hong Kong and the globalization process. In-migrants, although present throughout the entire de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyrigt Page
• Chinese Worlds
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Chinese overseas, transnational networks, and China
• Part I: Transformation in the ancestral homeland
• Part II: Ethnic Chinese, China, and transnational networks
• Part III: Diversity of settlements and homelands