Qiaopi and European Migrants’ Letters Compared

This chapter compares qiaopi letters and institutions with their European equivalent. It first discusses the migrant settings and the emergence of a postal culture. European and Chinese migrants shared many characteristics, but their sending places and the communities they formed abroad differed greatly. These differences were reflected in their letters. The chapter compares the letters of European migrants and qiaopi in regard both to the institutions that kept the correspondence going and letter contents and conventions. It concludes that qiaopi letters shared some features with European migrants’ letters as a result of the convergence of cultures, the spread of markets, the commonalities of the migrant condition, and the universality of epistolary conventions, but that their remittance role gave a special shape to their style and content.

Conclusions

This concluding chapter argues that the qiaopi trade was the basis for one of China’s earliest excursions into the modern world economy. The trade quickly progressed from the one-man operations of the early years to the piju formed by qiaopi entrepreneurs to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the swift growth of Chinese emigration and remittance. It eventually matured into a stable industry with its own perfected mechanisms, patched onto China’s other modern institutions like banks and the post office and linked to modern forms of communication and transport. The trade gave an impetus to other forms of transnational and domestic industry and to urban growth in coastal cities adjacent to the qiaoxiang. Initially based on networks of blood, place, and tongue, it later joined or created national, transnational, and international networks based on trade, finance, and general migration, mainly in territories around the South China Sea but also in the gold-rush Pacific—the Americas, Australia, and the South Pacific. These networks, maritime and terrestrial, were not just economic but also had deep cultural and social dimensions. Along them ran not just cash, capital, and goods but also people, ideas, and information. The flow of capital, ideas, and population between Chinese in diaspora and their families and communities in China was a key driver in the remaking of China along modern and transnational lines.

Qiaopi Geography

This chapter explores differences in the qiaopi trade from place to place, as well as their causes and consequences. The qiaopi trade was shaped by local circumstances and experiences, but even though its broad contours did not alter, it was more likely to assume special forms in the furthest-flung qiaoxiang than in other migrant-sending areas, which diverged less from the economic and cultural mainstream. Geography affected it at both ends of the migration chain, in China and abroad. This chapter examines the structures and characteristics of the qiaopi trade in the Hakka counties and in Hainan, Wuyi, and Guanfu, together with its connections in Southeast Asia, North America, and Australia. Differences of geography, politics, economy, and society were reflected not just in the form that the qiaopi system took in different places but also, to some extent, in the contents of migrant correspondence.

The Qiaopi Trade as a Distinctive Form of Chinese Capitalism

This chapter proposes a definition of the qiaopi trade in light of its distinctive features. Was it a modern form of “transnational capitalism” that depended on trust in a system of impersonal rules, as some argue? Or a distinctive early form of a specifically Chinese capitalism dependent on cultural or familial affinities? The chapter takes the latter view. It makes its argument by identifying alternatives to modern capitalism. These alternatives are robustly cosmopolitan and expressions of a modernity that is multiple rather than modular. The roots and strength of the qiaopi trade lay in its capacity to mobilize cultural capital and ethnic Chinese cultural and familial affinities in the ancestral homeland. For all its apparent traditionalism, the qiaopi phenomenon enabled Chinese entrepreneurs to compete successfully for more than a century with modern state-run banks and postal services both in China and overseas.

The Structure of the Qiaopi Trade and Transnational Networks

This chapter provides a detailed account of the evolution, structure, and personnel of the qiaopi trade, which enabled financial transactions (remittances) and the exchange of family letters across national boundaries. It looks at the institutionalization of the qiaopi trade and the role played by the piju (remittance shops) in sustaining transnational Chinese social and business networks on the basis of primordial ties of locality, dialect, and kinship. Transnational qiaopi networks played a key role not only in supporting the social and economic development of South China but also in sustaining the ties of families separated physically by oceans. These networks predated and coexisted with emerging nation-states based on institutions such as a modern post office and other regulatory regimes in both host lands and homeland. Competition between qiaopi institutions and modern organizations such as the post office, modern banks, and, ultimately, the increasingly powerful nation-state eventually led to the demise of the qiaopi trade in the late 1970s.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides a detailed account of the origins of qiaopi and their significance for Chinese international migration and modern Chinese history. Emigrants’ letters and remittances home were an important link between China and Chinese overseas, who were tied—emotionally, socially, and economically—with a China in transition to a modern society and state. During the period of the qiaopi trade, from the late Qing and the Republic through to the People’s Republic, modern mechanisms and institutions of finance and communication such as banks and post offices became a cornerstone of the modern Chinese state, and the qiaopi trade in South China played a part in that process. This chapter also introduces key concepts, terminologies, and usages concerning qiaopi and qiaopi trade.

Qiaopi, Qiaoxiang, and Charity

This chapter examines a dimension of the qiaopi trade often overlooked in existing studies (and, more broadly, in diasporic Chinese studies), its role in charity and in developing the qiaoxiang. It looks at the operational mechanisms, impact, and theoretical implications of qiaopi charity. It argues that qiaopi and the associated remittance networks were a main underpinning of diasporic Chinese philanthropy, which further cemented the relationship between Chinese overseas and China. The chapter examines education (which was the main focus of qiaopi giving after everyday family survival) and charity directed at improving transport and communications and aiding national causes (especially during wars and crises). It concludes that the qiaopi trade and early Chinese diasporic philanthropy foreshadowed contemporary forms of diasporic charity undertaken by migrants from other countries.

Qiaopi and Modern Chinese Economy and Politics

This chapter examines the contributions remittances made to Chinese economic development in general and to the qiaoxiang in particular. It considers the role played by the Chinese state and state-associated organizations in setting policies and guidelines for the qiaopi trade. The Chinese state sought to destroy or assimilate premodern postal services like the qiaopi system and to assert the authority of the post office over them. The state’s striving for a monopoly of postal services and its commitment to universal-service obligations brought it into conflict with existing postal services, including the qiaopi trade. The chapter reaches three main conclusions. First, the qiaopi trade played a key role in China’s economic modernization in Guangdong and Fujian and even to China’s survival as an independent nation-state. Second, in the course of interacting with and participating in China’s domestic economy and body politic, the agents and institutions that underlay the qiaopi trade underwent tremendous changes. Third, the nation-states’ growing power and influence over the qiaopi trade (and its agents) finally led to the trade’s demise in the late 1970s.

The Genealogy of Qiaopi Studies

This chapter is mainly concerned with scholarship over the past eighty years or so in both China and overseas on the qiaopi phenomenon. It first discusses the reasons for the large quantities of letters Chinese emigrants wrote home and the replies (known as huipi) they received from their families. It then analyzes scholarship on qiaopi up to 2013, when qiaopi were included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. During this period, studies on qiaopi were mainly undertaken in the context of local histories of South China (Fujian and Guangdong). In the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries, qiaopi studies gradually emerged as a special branch of research. This chapter pays special attention to qiaopi studies after 2013, when interest in qiaopi, both as an object of collection and a subject of research, reached new heights. While the focus of Chinese-language studies has been primarily on the role remittances play in the Chinese economy and in the economic and social development of the migrant-sending areas (the qiaoxiang), this book looks at qiaopi not only as an economic and financial phenomenon but also as a means of sustaining emotional and spiritual ties in families, clans, and local communities.