Age of Openness, The: China before Mao

3: Open Borders

Open Governance 31 Browsing through some of the secondary sources on modern China written during the Cold War one gets the impression that only a few privileged individuals, mainly students and merchants, travelled abroad in the republican era, generally to return as ‘alienated’ or ‘rootless cosmopolitans’.1 Recent scholarship, presented in the first half of this chapter, demonstrates instead how people from all walks of life, across the social divide, were keenly interested in the world beyond their community, and many travelled in and out of the country, acquiring a distinctly global outlook, from the emigrant returning to his village after decades of hard labour in Indonesia, the soldier repatriated from Europe at the end of World War I or the diplomat retiring in a foreign concession after years of service abroad. People moved in and out of republican China, and the traffic went both ways: the second part shows how deeply enmeshed foreign communities were in the social texture of republican life. Too often portrayed in a negative light, they were numerous, influential and often well established in China, contributing to a pluralistic environment from which the republican era benefited. ‘Chinese’ Travel outside the imperial realm was prohibited, although enforcement was lacklustre: while relatively few left the Qing in the two centuries after its foundation in 1644, millions of males — many constraints existed on the mobility of women and children — left in the mid-nineteenth century with the suppression of the slave trade, working as contract labourers in appalling conditions on the colonial Open Borders 3 32 The Age of Openness plantations in Latin America and Southeast Asia, the railways in the United States and the mines in South Africa. Only in 1893 were restrictions on immigration abolished and was the right of imperial subjects to emigrate recognised: working men could now bring their family members to join them. By the time the empire collapsed in 1911 at least ten million emigrants lived abroad.2 Not all migrants lived in desperate poverty, and some migrant communities had been established well before the rise of bonded labour in the nineteenth century. In Southeast Asia, for instance, many wealthy and successful merchants were recruited by the colonial authorities into a system of headmanships, assuming communal responsibility for local governance, public works and charitable enterprises while developing the indigenous economy as managers of large-scale colonial plantations or mining operations. These merchant families not only welcomed foreign modes of administration but also seized upon the educational facilities offered by colonial regimes, sending their children to Dutch, French or English schools, many becoming bilingual. Whether colonial authorities favoured assimilation, as in the Philippines where Spanish policy ensured that indigenous women who married foreign men remained Catholics and brought up mestizo families, or on the contrary preferred segregation, as in Java where Dutch rule separated migrant communities from native elites, adaptability was a key to the survival and flourishing of sojourners from China. Some migrant communities were exclusively male and centred on the use of popular religious practices to strengthen social bonds and obtain wider recognition, recruiting further reinforcements from their home villages: this form of chain migration ceased to be predominant with the lifting of the ban on immigration in 1893. Family communities, on the other hand, existed before 1893 in regions where migrant men married local wives, for instance the Peranakan in Java and Malacca, making sure that their male descendants retained sufficient mastery of the spoken dialect to sustain links with the China trade. In all cases adaptability led to cultural diversity, and this diversity did not square easily with the political demands of the modern nationstate , whether in the countries where migrant communities resided Open Borders 33 or in China. In China, the very term huaqiao, ‘overseas subjects’ or ‘overseas Chinese’, was introduced by the end of the nineteenth century as part of a call for help from a dynasty in search of wealth and power against foreign powers, enrolling hitherto scattered communities with varying degrees of identification with the empire into a fight for national revival. On the other hand, sojourner communities and migrant individuals became the target of nationalist movements of host countries, from the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States in 1882 to the Immigration Act in Australia in 1901. A rising tide of nationalism in Southeast Asia contributed to portraying ‘overseas Chinese’ as a fifth column stubbornly resisting integration with the broader community...