Dear China Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 18201980 [Hardcover]

Qiaopiis 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 Chinais the first book-length study in English ofqiaopiand of the origins, structure, and operations of theqiaopitrade. The authors explore the characteristics and transformations ofqiaopi, 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 Chinacontributes substantially to our understanding of modern Chinese history and to the comparative study of global migration.

Gregor Benton is Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University. His books include Mountain Fires: The Red Army’s Three-Year War in South ChinaandThe Qiaopi Trade and Transnational Networks in the Chinese Diaspora(coedited with Hong Liu and Huimei Zhang).
 
Hong Liuis 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.

"Dear China is the first and only book of its kind in the English language, and its excellent evidence-based and source-driven scholarship will form the benchmark for all future English-language studies on the qiaopi trade."—Glen Peterson, author ofOverseas Chinese in the People's Republic of China