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Part II MIGRATIONSample essay: "Patterns of migration" The peopling of the Americas and Australasia, the Vietnamese push into Cham and Khmer territory, transfers of people to colonize the Chinese empire's frontier territories -- these are all migration stories. Clearly migration comes in many kinds, from the mass movement of whole tribes in ancient times to the seasonal sojourning of traders and labourers. We begin by briefly considering internal movements within China, then turn to cross-border migration overseas. Emigration is a concomitant of economic, social and political changes; and we look at the concatenation of these in China and the world at large in order to arrive at an understanding of the contexts in which the history of Chinese migration has been enacted. This calls for a study of the different types of migrant, from the sojourning trader and the indentured labourer to the cosmopolitan entrepreneur and student-turned-settler... Sample essay: "Patterns of migration" Chinese migration has not been all of a piece; on the contrary, it has been immensely varied. At one extreme were emigrants who left home out of despair; at the other were those driven by calculated ambition. Emigration has been both necessity and advantage, both exile and opportunity. To do justice to the variety, writers have used terms like chain migration, forced migration, labour migration, free migration, student migration, seasonal migration, illegal migration, return migration, secondary migration (or re-migration) and so on. Nor are the categories mutually exclusive; to complicate mattesr, an individual can undergo several kinds of migration within a lifetime. Indeed the movements of Chinese across the world bear witness to a general observation in the way we conceive of migration by any people: that it is a multi-directional and continuing movement incorporation both onward relocation and repatriation. Lynn Pan, Editor, Founding Director, Chinese Heritage Centre, Singapore
Excerpt copyright © 1998, 1999 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.
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Copyright © 2008 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.