Editor’s Note

This issue begins with Wasana Wongsurawat’s discussion of the conflict between the Chinese KMT government and the Siamese government over the development and control of Chinese education in Thailand during the first half of the 20th century. Her article describes how the KMT’s promotion of Chinese civilization via its policy on overseas Chinese education challenged the Thai government’s effort to promote civilization through a modern education system for all citizens including its Chinese minority, and was regarded as having infringed upon Thai sovereignty. The second article by Song Ping traces the formation of a transnational lineage in Malaysia comprising the Zheng members who originally migrated from Yongchun in southern Fujian. The leaders in Yongchun and Malaysia cooperate to manage the lineage property including a school which plays a crucial role in the local community. Using the Zheng lineage as an example, she suggests that the transnational practices of the Chinese overseas have stimulated lineage revival in China. She also argues that the transnational involvement in lineage organizations and activities is instrumental in fostering the interest of the overseas Chinese in their ancestral homeland and encouraging them to express their cultural identity.

The third article by Chin Yee Whah surveys the evolution of Malaysian Chinese business from the colonial era to the present, describing how Chinese entrepreneurship evolved and took new forms as Chinese businesses adapted to the changing government policies and the advent of global capitalism. Finally the article by Duan Ying describes how a group of Kuomintang soldiers from Yunnan and their descendants have adapted to life in northern Thailand and become a category of Chinese in that country. Unlike their parents the local-born Yunnanese are neither sentimental about a homeland in Yunnan, nor interested in the KMT government in Taiwan. They are local-born ethnic Chinese “looking for economic opportunities in Thailand and in the transnational space of Thailand, Taiwan and mainland China.”

There are two articles under the Report section. Katrina Gulliver looks at the influences of Western education on Sophia Chen Zen, one of the few Chinese women to have received an education overseas during the interwar period. Seeing herself as an intermediary between China and the West, Sophia Chen Zen pushed for the “improvement in the status of China’s women without discarding the positive elements of Chinese culture”; she maintained an ambivalent attitude toward the influence of Western modernity on the traditional Chinese women. The second report by Lisa Falvey discusses the attitudes of American adoptive parents toward children adopted from China. Instead of using the immersion model in which white adoptive parents try to provide an unattainable “authentic” Chinese cultural environment at home, the author suggests that the parents work toward an “integration” model which agitates against stereotyping Asians as inherently foreign and reject the societal pressure to use their children as the sites for such cultural negotiations.

There are also five book reviews and a section on book news.

Since 2005, this journal has been published by NUS Press of the National University of Singapore for the Chinese Heritage Centre under the auspices of the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas (ISSCO). From 2009 the JCO will be published by Brill for the Chinese Heritage Centre under the auspices of ISSCO. We look forward to cooperating with Brill. At the same time we thank NUS Press, in particular Dr. Paul H. Kratoska, Managing Director, and Lena Qua, Production Editor, for their cooperation and support.

For information about the Journal of Chinese Overseas, please visit < http://www.chineseheritagecentre.org >