The Qiaopi Trade and Transnational Networks in the Chinese Diaspora (Chinese Worlds)

Originating in the 1820s and used for 150 years thereafter, qiaopiis the name given in Chinese to letters written home by Chinese emigrants to accompany remittances. Their key function was to preserve family ties. Although such correspondence focused principally on the provision of economic support, the qiaopialso touched on cultural, political, educational, and gender themes. This book therefore seeks to examine the qiaopifrom two interconnected perspectives. One views qiaopifrom a political and institutional angle, the other from a financial and social angle. Bringing together the extensive research of a group of international scholars, this multi-authored volume sheds light on the larger significance of the qiaopifor modern China. Taking an empirical, evidence-driven approach, the contributors employ a wide range of primary sources in both Chinese and English and relate their findings to scholarship in both the Chinese-speaking world and in non-Chinese interdisciplinary fields. In so doing, this book helps to bridge the gap between Chinese- and English-speaking researchers in the field of qiaopistudies. As one of the first books in English on the qiaopitrade and its significance, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history and Chinese migration, as well in Migration Studies and Diaspora Studies more generally.

Benton, Gregor

刘洪

Zhang, Huimei

Reference

Routledge

Chinese Migrants and Internationalism (Chinese Worlds)

The transnational and diasporic dimensions of early Chinese migrant politics opened in the late nineteenth century when Chinese radical groups bent on overthrowing the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) vied with one another to win Chinese overseas to their modernizing projects, and immigrants who had suffered discrimination welcomed their proposals. The radicals’ concentration on Chinese communities abroad as outposts of Chinese politics and culture strengthened the stereotype of Chinese as clannish, unassimilable, xenophobic, and deeply introverted. This book argues that such a view has its roots less in historical truth than in political and ideological prejudice and obscures a rich vein of internationalist practice in Chinese migrant or diasporic history, which the study aims to restore to visibility. In some cases, internationalist alliances sprang from the spontaneous perception by Chinese and other non-Chinese migrants or local workers of shared problems and common solutions in everyday life and work. At other times, they emerged from under the umbrella of transnationalism, when Chinese nationalist and anti-imperialist activists overseas received support for their campaigns from local internationalists; or the alliances were the product of nurturing by Chinese or non-Chinese political organizers, including anarchists, communists, and members of internationalist cultural movements like Esperantism. Based on sources in a dozen languages, and telling hitherto largely unknown or forgotten stories of Chinese migrant experiences in Russia, Germany, Cuba, Spain and Australia, this study will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history, labour studies and ethnic/migration studies alike.

Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917–1945 (Chinese Worlds)

Was Mao Really a Monster?: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday's "Mao: The Unknown Story"

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday was published in 2005 to a great fanfare. The book portrays Mao as a monster – equal to or worse than Hitler and Stalin – and a fool who won power by native cunning and ruled by terror. It received a rapturous welcome from reviewers in the popular press and rocketed to the top of the worldwide bestseller list. Few works on China by writers in the West have achieved its impact. Reviews by serious China scholars, however, tended to take a different view. Most were sharply critical, questioning its authority and the authors’ methods , arguing that Chang and Halliday’s book is not a work of balanced scholarship, as it purports to be, but a highly selective and even polemical study that sets out to demonise Mao. This book brings together sixteen reviews of Mao: The Unknown Story – all by internationally well-regarded specialists in modern Chinese history, and published in relatively specialised scholarly journals. Taken together they demonstrate that Chang and Halliday’s portrayal of Mao is in many places woefully inaccurate. While agreeing that Mao had many faults and was responsible for some disastrous policies, they conclude that a more balanced picture is needed.

Was Mao Really a Monster?: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday’s "Mao: The Unknown Story"

Chun, Lin

In October 1934, the badly beaten Red Army set out on the Long March from southern and central China, leaving behind a rearguard to fight the overwhelming Nationalist government forces. Three bloody years followed, in which many guerrillas were killed, some abandoned the Revolution, and others deserted to the enemy. When survivors of the lost legions came down from their mountain hideouts in 1937, they regrouped as the New Fourth Army, whose renowned force helped drive the Nationalists from the mainland. The dramatic story of the Chinese Communists in southern and central China has been hidden in the shadow of the Long March. Now Gregor Benton reconstructs their history, using oral interviews, legends, letters, documents, and local archives to show how they survived terrible isolation and repressive counterrevolution. Shattering myth and propaganda, he exposes both the misery and triumph of the Chinese Communist victory. Benton's definitive work makes an essential contribution to debunking the Mao-centered historiography of the Revolution.

Mountain Fires: The Red Army's Three-Year War in South China, 1934-1938

History

Asia

University of California Press

In his prizewinning Mountain Fires: The Red Army's Three-Year War in South China, 1934-1938, Gregor Benton traced the fate of the Communist rear guard that stayed behind when the Red Army set off on the Long March. After three bloody years, the survivors regrouped as the New Fourth Army, which later helped to drive the Nationalists from the mainland. In this sequel to Mountain Fires, Benton describes the first three years of this army, and its triangular war with the Nationalists and the Japanese.Like the Three-Year War from which it stemmed, the New Fourth Army was for many years neglected by historians, mainly because of the absence from it of Mao Zedong, around whom the story of the Chinese Revolution was largely written until his death in 1976. With the downgrading of the Mao cult and the return of some power to the regions (where New Fourth Army veterans held power) in the 1980s, new sources on the New Fourth Army became available. This study, which combines a thematic and a narrative approach, makes exhaustive use of these and other sources to explain the original features of this youthful army, which was no outgrowth or faithful copy of Mao's senior and better-known Eighth Route Army but a body with its own origins and history, and which fought its war in a quite different political, military, and social setting.

New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance Along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1938-1941

Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820–1980

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.

Business & Money

Finance

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.

WANG, GUNGWU

Eight Outcasts: Social and Political Marginalization in China under Mao

The 1949 Communist Revolution marked a period of earthshaking change in China. Political, economic, ideological, and cultural movements galvanized the country, culminating in dramatic social transformations at all levels, including the persecution of hundreds of thousands of the country’s citizens. Based on normally inaccessible records of confessions, interrogations, trial transcripts, and depositions, Eight Outcasts tells the stories of eight victims of the Maoist dictatorship. It introduces readers to individuals accused of infractions such as corruption, political wrong thinking, homosexuality, illicit sexual activity, foreign ties, or “historical problems” (connections to the former Kuomintang regime) in the period between the revolution and Mao’s death in 1976. Each chapter brings stories of China’s voiceless citizens to light, broadening our knowledge of this important transitional period.

Kuisong, Yang

Zhen, Ye

New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance Along the Yangtse and the Huai, 1938-1941 (Chinese Worlds)

This study looks at the first three years of the Chinese Communists' New Fourth Army, between the late spring of 1938 and January 1941. The New Fourth Army was no outgrowth or faithful copy of the senior and better-known Eighth Route Army but a body with its own origins and history, and with original features that make it highly interesting for historians. This distinctiveness derived mainly from the background in the Three-Year War (1934-1937) of the Communist guerrillas left behind in the south who set up the army, but it also owed much to the unique political, military, and social environment that the army encountered in the lower Yangtze region, where it first joined battle with the Japanese.  After the Wannan Incident of January 1941, in which its headquarters were destroyed, the New Fourth Army began to look increasingly like the Eighth Route Army, its more typically Maoist elder brother in the north. The Wannan Incident led to a radical reorganisation of its detachments and the definitive realignment of its politics. Thus transformed, the older New Fourth Army engages less for its own intrinsic and distinctive nature than as a division (subject only to circumstantial variation) of the general movement of Chinese communism at war. The Wannan Incident represented a turning-point and, in some respects, a decisive break in the army's development, and therefore forms a natural climax and finale to this study.

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Books by Benton, Gregor

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Benton, Gregor. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Qiaopi Trade and Transnational Networks in the Chinese Diaspora (Chinese Worlds)

Chinese Migrants and Internationalism: Forgotten Histories, 1917–1945 (Chinese Worlds)

Was Mao Really a Monster?: The Academic Response to Chang and Halliday’s "Mao: The Unknown Story"

Chinese Migrants and Internationalism (Chinese Worlds)

Mountain Fires: The Red Army's Three-Year War in South China, 1934-1938

New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance Along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1938-1941

Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820–1980

Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820–1980

Eight Outcasts: Social and Political Marginalization in China under Mao

New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance Along the Yangtse and the Huai, 1938-1941 (Chinese Worlds)