ABSTRACT

The post-war development of China’s international migrations, oscillating wildly as it does in numbers, and shifting in the origins of its immigrants and destinations of its emigrants, almost beggars belief. Following the tumultuous years of the civil war ending in 1949 with the mass migration of about 2 million Kuomintang (KMT) troops, families and supporters to Taiwan, the communist People’s Republic of China (henceforth the PRC, or just China) ‘locked down’ as it were. That meant very few people came in (just a handful of foreigners who were trusted by the new regime), and almost nobody went out (just a few workers on China-sponsored infrastructure projects in developing countries). Over the next 30 years, the PRC became what it had been through earlier periods of its history – a country without international migration flows. The very minor exceptions to this rule were some students in Eastern Europe and the courageous people who managed to escape to Hong Kong, sometimes by swimming along the shore. However, once the Deng Xiaoping reforms began to take effect after 1978,

the situation changed dramatically. The PRC became the source of two very important but very different kinds of international migration: (i) the mostly illegal migration of relatively poor people from Fujian, Zhejiang and other southeastern provinces to North America, Western Europe and elsewhere (now much reduced); and (ii) the legal but circumscribed migration of Chinese students and researchers toWestern (mostly North American) universities (still increasing). As the opening-up process continued, coastal southeast regions of the PRC

became the destination for foreign migrant businessmen and technicians (typically not accompanied by their families), associated with foreign direct investment (FDI) in the Pearl River Delta area by successful capitalist corporations, many of them based in Hong Kong or Taiwan. The reversion of Hong Kong to China in 1997, however, had much less effect on migration flows than had been expected. Finally, in the recent period, after the PRC has enjoyed over 30 years of

rapid economic growth, three signs of maturity in China’s international migration flows can be identified. First, there is the completion of the global Chinese diaspora by the arrival of significant numbers of migrant workers, plus

a small number of settlers, in the one part of the world – tropical sub-Saharan Africa – that had previously figured very little in Chinese emigration. Second is the emergence of truly multicultural cities in China – Beijing, of course, because of its administrative, diplomatic and cultural importance, but above all, Shanghai. Because of Shanghai’s commercial, industrial and financial predominance in the whole China ‘plus’ region, a large population of foreign permanent and semi-permanent residents now live there, contributing enormously to the city’s dynamism and diversity. The third sign is the recent emergence of China as a country of new immigration flows – an example being the small, but until recently rapidly growing,West African community in Guangzhou.

North America (especially the USA) had figured prominently in the 19th-century exodus from late Qing China, and this meant that a significant population of Chinese descent persisted through the period of the policy of Asian exclusion, which built up in the late 19th century, became total in 1924, and lasted until well after World War II. Subsequently, the doors began to open again. Partly this was ideological. In the context of the Cold War between the forces of ‘freedom’ (that is, the capitalist democratic West) and those of ‘tyranny’ (i.e. the communist authoritarian East), it was judged essential to demonstrate how welcoming the West was to those who rejected the ideology of the communist bloc. So dissidents from the Soviet Union and ‘Red China’ were treated as guests in the USA. A similar, albeit guarded, welcome was also extended to students and researchers from the PRC who wanted to study in North America. However, the vast majority of migrants from China to the USA and Canada,

in flows that built up rapidly in the 1980s and 1990s, were neither political dissidents nor researchers; they were very ordinary people mostly from southeastern China (Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang) who wanted to make good money doing low-level jobs in the high-wage West. Having paid for the passage, many thousands of such migrants disappeared into the ‘Chinatowns’ of North American cities, both those located on the west coast and those in the east, especially New York. Close networks of mutual obligation based on family connection and hometown loyalty provided the ‘social capital’ needed to survive, and then possibly prosper, in such a different economic and cultural environment. The 2010 Census shows that there are approximately 3.8 million people of

Chinese descent in the USA (with, of course, an increasing proportion of these being of mixed descent). They are concentrated in urban areas and have some of the characteristics of a ‘model minority’ in that they do not for the most part represent a threat to law and order, they are predominantly employed in secure, well-paid jobs, and they demonstrate, especially through educational success, the ‘get-up-and-go’ spirit of American individualism – in short, they tend to live, and thereby lend legitimacy to, the ‘American dream’. Those who are less educationally successful and have not joined the ranks of professionals

or managers, usually work in the small business sector, especially in the personal services, catering and convenience stores, and clothing industries. A similar picture emerges for Canada, where the Chinese ‘community’, added to by large numbers of students who have stayed on after completing their studies, have, broadly speaking, been financially and socially successful, albeit with many challenges to overcome, including discrimination. The Canadian policy environment has been particularly favourable to Chinese immigrants due to the ‘path to citizenship’ that it offers. So, integration within a society that is, or at least has been up until fairly recently, multicultural both in spirit and practice, has been relatively straightforward.