Global Migration and China. Leuven (Belgium): Leuven University Press; HangZhou (China): Zhejiang University Press; Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press [distributor], 2013. xiii, 317 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$79.50, cloth. ISBN 978-90-5867-901-7.
This book consists of a collection of papers that were all previously published in English during the author’s more than twenty years of studying transnational migration from China since1986. Not all the original publications, particularly those consisting of conference papers or research reports, are easily accessible and a pulling together of a lifetime’s work on the theme is perhaps warranted. Several of the papers have been lightly edited since their original publication or updated through return visits to the field. The book is divided into three main parts, together with a short introduction and concluding remarks.
Part 1, with six chapters, covers empirical studies in places of origin of migration. These focus on the author’s main areas of fieldwork in Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, and in several parts of Fujian Province. However, in two chapters, the author also examines the evolution of the relatively recent migration to Israel and the process of labour recruiting in southern China. This section concludes with a discussion of an agricultural village established in Fujian Province to settle Chinese migrants from Southeast Asia from the 1950s. Part 2, also comprised of six chapters, deals with destinations of migration, and focuses primarily on Europe, concentrating heavily on the Netherlands. Migrant associations, the evolution of migration to Europe, and students and scholars are the specific themes examined. Somewhat out-of-place is a short chapter on refugee determination in British Columbia, Canada. The third part consists of three chapters, two of which are based upon cemetery archives from nineteenth-century Batavia, which are today held in the Netherlands and which generate much useful information on the Chinese in Indonesia. The first chapter in this third part consists of reflections on the Dutch language, landscape painting and the nature of Dutch culture to argue the case that the Dutch are the Chinese of Europe based upon a common entrepreneurial capability.
Such a wide range of topics certainly provides insight into the great diversity of Chinese transnational migration. However, it also leads to two weaknesses. First, there are no common themes running through the chapters of the book that might hold the book together, and one might have wished for a greater degree of editorial attention and updating to try to bring about a greater consistency. For example, chapter 8, a short entry that reviews Chinese migration to Europe, could very easily have been incorporated into chapter 12, where the same issues are introduced using more recent data (183–185). At the very least, cross-referencing between the two chapters to try to reconcile the different estimates given for the numbers of Chinese in Europe would have helped the reader. The author gives an estimate of some 2.5 million Chinese in Europe around 2008 (183), whereas recent United Nations estimates place the number of migrants from China in Europe at just over one million in 2013, although many of the one million other migrants from Southeast Asia would also have been ethnic Chinese. Readers would have benefited from a much fuller discussion of the differences between numbers of migrants from China and numbers of people of Chinese ethnicity. One might also have expected the revisions to the papers to have incorporated information from an important source such as Lynn Pann’s The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Singapore, Archipelago Press, 1998, second edition, 2006). Unfortunately, the author could not have had access to Elizabeth Sinn’s recent meticulous work on labour recruitment and migration from southern China, in Pacific Crossing (Hong Kong, Hong Kong University Press, 2013).
The second weakness inherent in the breadth and range of topics in the chapters is that it has led to a lack of depth of analysis on particular topics. For example, one wondered whether there was any relationship between the emigrant villages (qiaoxiang) in Wenzhou and the some two million immigrants from other rural parts of China who appeared to have moved into Wenzhou (9). The village of Lishan seemed to be depopulating but was this typical of qiaoxiang areas, of which there were many? What was happening to vacant housing and unused land? Was there evidence of land consolidation? Or of houses being rented out to immigrants, elsewhere if not in Lishan? We are never told. Again, in the case of Songping, the village created for migrants from Southeast Asia is presented as typical. However, how do we know that it is representative? Much more information needed to be presented to justify the case. A third example is that it is never made clear upon which basis asylum seekers were awarded refugee status in Canada. That is, what would seem to be interesting follow-up questions are never examined in the various chapters.
The strength of this book is also its weakness: the great range of topics covered. Some of these topics have received relatively little attention in the literature, such as the Chinese migration to Israel or the villages established for ethnic migrants from Indonesia. However, once introduced, the reader is often left frustrated that the research was never pushed to a greater depth. Li Minghuan has done great service over almost a quarter of a century in pioneering different approaches to the topic of Chinese transnational migration. It is a pity that a greater effort was not made in the editing and updating of the papers presented in this book to take into account both more recent research and a fuller interpretation of her own empirical data.
Ronald Skeldon
University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
pp. 907-909