Nearly thirty-five million ethnic Chinese now live outside mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Known collectively as “Chinese overseas”, they are a crucial force in the socio-economic transformations of modern China and the countries they reside and in the processes of cross-national interaction. Viewed from the perspective of international migration, they are one of the most dynamic immigrant and ethnic minorities. Despite a steady growth of interest in diasporic Chinese societies, relevant writings are scattered across scholarly journals, while some pioneering studies are out of print and hard to find. By re-examining the central themes of some representative works published in the last seven decades and reflecting upon the changing genealogies of the field, I hope readers can gain a deeper understanding of Chinese communities overseas in different historical periods and geo-cultural settings.

While by no means a comprehensive survey of relevant scholarship, this essay sketches the main trajectories and themes in Chinese international migration, meaning “the departure from Chinese soil for the purpose of living and working abroad with the likelihood of settlement”, whether or not the settlement was intended. It also reviews the changing approaches to these themes in spatial and temporal perspectives. The chapter goes on to provide an overview of these main approaches and connects them thematically and in other ways, and suggests additional references. Although this article is not specifically concerned with the status of overseas Chinese studies in the PRC per se, many issues discussed here have also been closely scrutinized by scholars in China, whose important efforts have collectively contributed to the field's emergence and maturation. This essay, therefore, can be read comparatively with other chapters in this volume dealing with Overseas Chinese studies in the PRC.

TRAJECTORIES AND THEMES

The Chinese have had a long history of living and working outside China — a concept that is in itself a historical construct. The first account of Chinese emigration dates back to the Qin and Han dynasties (221 B.C.–220 A.D.), but not until the mid-nineteenth century did Chinese start to leave on a massive scale. This exodus had two principal causes: The socio-economic dislocations brought about by Western intrusion and the deteriorating imperial order in late Qing China; and the growth in demand for cheap labour and for merchants to serve as middlemen between the Westerners and Southeast Asian indigenes.