ABSTRACT
All over Southeast Asia, the term hua-ch'iao has been dropped except for those Chinese who are citizens of either the People's Republic of China or the Republic of China in Taiwan. The Peking government has been carefully distinguishing between its citizens abroad who are hua-ch'iao and others who are merely 'foreign nationals of Chinese origin'. The use of ch'iao to describe Chinese away from home, therefore, retained the sense of temporariness but brought out a touch of approval, a sense that the society and the government understood that the absence might lead to settlement. This suggests that when ch'iao came to be applied to the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, North America and Australasia and elsewhere in the 20th century. The shift in government policy can be briefly traced for the Chinese in Southeast Asia. The first official use of ch'iao in the treaties signed with the Western powers appeared in the Sino-French Treaty of Tientsin in 1858.
