ABSTRACT
The social network approach has been employed in qiaopi and yinxin studies to explain how economic behaviour was constructed and reconstructed locally and internationally in the case of social associations. This chapter also looks at Chinese remittance networks, asking how the world economy functionally influenced the Chinese approach to organizing the remittance business. The Chinese Australian remittance trade permits a case study of the impact of the gold rush on Chinese overseas remittances. Few remittance documents sent by Chinese Australians seem to have survived, so this chapter instead analyses newspapers, personal letters, company records, and national archives from the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. It revives the term jinxin (gold and letter), used by Chinese Australians to describe their remittances. Jinxin referred to profiting from gold, exchanging currency, and recycling remittances into innovative enterprises. The case of Wing Sang Co. shows that the remittance trade played an important role in the history of Chinese Australian entrepreneurship between 1894 and 1916 by strengthening commercial and social capital, thus helping Chinese Australian merchants meet their business needs. The history of jinxin further illustrates the history of the transformation of Chinese immigrants from the gold diggers to trans-local capitalists at a time when the world economy was undergoing fundamental changes.
