HUAQIAO

'Hua' is a name the Chinese have long used of their country, the character appearing in such compounds as Huaren ('Hua people' or 'Chinese'), Huayi ('Hua descendants' or 'people of Chinese descent') and Huayu ('Chinese speech' or 'Mandarin').

The word with which it is combined, qiao, means chiefly 'to stay away from home somewhere temporarily.' So far as the word's usage is concerned, that somewhere can be within China or outside it. Nevertheless, the name Huaqiao, 'Chinese sojourner,' is always understood as implying a stay outside China. This goes also for two other compounds of note: qiaoxiang, 'sojourner's home village,' or, more broadly, the homeland of the absentee emigrant; and qiaohui, the sojourner's remittances home.

Qiao is also to be found combined with the words gui ('return') and juan ('dependants') to mean 'former overseas Chinese' (Guaqiao) and 'dependants of overseas Chinese' (Qiaojuan). Guiqiao and Qiaojuan are official labels for people who live in China but whose identification as a category for purposes of policy-making is bound up with residence abroad.

'Huaqiao,' a term dating from the late 19th century, can be considered with or without its heavy emotional semantic freight. With it, the term is nuanced in ways not completely captured by its English rendering of 'Chinese sojourner.' For one who has left China for good and become a foreign subject, the term 'Chinese sojourner,' with its suggestion of transience, is clearly not the happiest. But it is the one which, until its usage was formally narrowed in 1957, China was using for all Chinese abroad from the 1910s onwards...

Without its semantic freight, it means, according to the definitions China proclaimed in 1957 and 1984, a citizen of the People's Republic of China resident abroad -- one of those to be found in the segment designated 'aspiring migrants,' in other words.

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