Qiaopiju 僑批局, or overseas letter office, is a general name for a type of business firm that appeared during one of the great waves of Chinese migration in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 1 They specialized in transporting labor overseas, shipping goods throughout the diasporic network, handling private and business correspondence, and providing remittance and other banking services to overseas Chinese. The Qiaopiju and their antecedents, the circumambulating overseas or South Seas agents (shuike 水客/Nanyang ke 南洋客), created the earliest form of an institutionalized spatial network linking overseas Chinese to the homeland through the movement of people, remittances, goods, and information.
For over one hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the Qiaopiju dominated the remittance business among overseas Chinese. To maintain their market dominance, the Qiaopiju had to be economically adaptable and politically savvy within a variety of settings, both within and without China—during the disintegration of the Qing dynasty, in the fragmented polity of the Republic, among the Southeast Asian indigenous states, within the colonial regimes of mainland and archipelagic Southeast Asia, and in the midst of racist and discriminatory policies across the Pacific.
Many scholars looking for the source of the Qiaopiju's ability to thrive in such diverse political and economic settings have described them as a “traditional Chinese” type of business firm. What makes the Qiaopiju traditional, these scholars argue, was their reliance on cultural or familial affinities, sometimes called guanxi 關係 bases, such as native-place, dialect, or real and fictive kinship in interfirm and firm-customer relations (Chen Reference Chen2000; Huang Yanhua Reference Yanhua2006). Dai Yifeng and Jiao Jianhua emphasize Qiaopiju business behavior as “embedded” in traditional cultural and social practices—rather than an idealized free market—such as interpersonal trust based on geo-consanguineous ties (Dai Reference Dai2004; Jiao Reference Jiao2005a, Reference Jiao2005b). Traditional practices and cultural affinities, Dai Yifeng argues, manifested themselves in culturally sensitive customer services with the “human touch,” which gave the Qiaopiju a competitive edge over “modern” remitting enterprises like banks and post offices that relied on trust in their system of impersonal rules (Dai Reference Dai2003; Redding Reference Redding and Hamilton1991; S. Wong Reference Wong and Gary1991).
In their desire to find the indispensable “Chinese” elements of Qiaopiju success, scholars since the late 1980s have been influenced by the larger Orientalist discourse about the distinctive features behind the “spirit” of overseas Chinese capitalism (Redding Reference Redding1990). Characterizations of diasporic Chinese businesses in the late twentieth century as forming a “bamboo network” (Weidenbaum and Hughes Reference Weidenbaum and Hughes1996), “dragon network” (Susanto and Susanto Reference Susanto and Susanto2013), or unique type of “guanxi capitalism” (Hamilton Reference Hamilton1989) contribute to the essentialist idea that all ethnic Chinese share similar Confucian worldviews bounded by traditional social and cultural values. In their grossest forms, such triumphalist narratives celebrate the creation of a “greater China co-prosperity sphere” (Huntington Reference Huntington1996, 168–69). By overemphasizing the cultural characteristics of overseas Chinese capitalist behavior, these Orientalizing and self-Orientalizing scholars erase the instrumental economic practices overseas Chinese firms used to transnationalize their businesses (Greenhalgh Reference Greenhalgh1994).
A more nuanced understanding of the Qiaopiju requires us to analyze the historically contingent nature of their business practices and flexible organizational structure; how their interactions with empires, nations, and colonies throughout East and Southeast Asia shaped the form of their network; and their use of modern communications and transportation technologies to generate profits. The Qiaopiju business firm and network are thus particularly useful ways to examine early transnational forms of capitalist behavior among overseas Chinese, their interaction with new nation-states and colonies policing transnational economic activity, and their use of new communications and transportation technologies, all of which helps contextualize scholarly work on the contribution of overseas remittances to balancing China's trade deficit in the early twentieth century (Remer Reference Remer1933; Wu Reference Wu1967; Zheng Linkuan Reference Linkuan[1940] 1988).Footnote 2
Qiaopiju firms and their networks represented a new form of transnational economic organization. They initially utilized geo-consanguineous ties as part of the organizational process of transnationalization that allowed them to make firm “connections” across land, border, and ocean. By the 1870s, the economic limitations inherent in relying exclusively on such cultural affinities, coupled with the advent of new communications, transportation, and financial institutions, allowed Qiaopiju owners to change their business model. Rather than profit on remittance fees, Qiaopiju owners took advantage of the accelerated time and economic incentives offered by telegraphs and steamships to use the remittances as short-term loans to engage in other economic activities—currency speculation, transshipping, securities trading, or arbitrage—in the time lag between accepting a remittance and the customer's expectation of its delivery.
Qiaopiju businessmen pioneered this type of small business firm and flexible, decentralized network to operate in the interstitial gaps between nation-states, empires, and colonies at the precise moment that Southeast Asia became colonized; the Western nation-state system made inroads into East Asia; and global communications and transportation systems like telegraph lines, steamer routes, and modern postal services increasingly linked the world. The Qiaopiju emerged as a distinctive type of transnational business firm almost exactly when these “institutions”—colonies, nation-states, communication systems—established regulatory regimes to police and control the flow of capital, information, and people across space. This was no mere coincidence. The organization of Qiaopiju firms, their business practices, their profit-making strategies, and the structure of their network were not “traditional,” but created to exploit the incomplete, negotiable, and porous boundaries of the global nation-state and colonial systems. Later, when confronted by aggressive competition from state and colonial regimes bent on shutting down their businesses, Qiaopiju owners did lean on their long transnational experience and specialized knowledge of overseas Chinese needs to develop a host of culturalist customer services.
The resilience of Qiaopiju firms in the face of determined and multifaceted state and colonial regulatory efforts raises some fundamental questions about our understanding of state sovereignty and the role of the post office in the colonial/national state. In his revised edition of Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that three “institutions of power”—the census, the map, and the museum—shaped how the colonial state imagined itself and its subjects (Anderson Reference Anderson1991, chap. 10). Although often overlooked, the post office—the modern post office open to the general public—was one of the most important government institutions used in the creation of the modern colonial and national state in the nineteenth century. It was virtually impossible to imagine a community without the post office delivering letters, newspapers, and magazines; likewise, there could be little public sphere without the post office circulating information. Before any census could be undertaken, the colonial state had to determine its territory; what simpler way than counting everyone inside the state's postal radius? The British completed their first census in India in 1872, decades after the Indian colonial post office claimed its monopoly; the Chinese government, too, conducted three censuses through the post office in the early twentieth century, as the United States government does today. Before maps helped transform conceptions of the Thai polity around the turn of the twentieth century (Thongchai Reference Thongchai1994), the Thai government had run a modern post office for more than twenty years.
Despite its myriad contributions to the creation of the colonial and national state, the post office always confronted existing “indigenous” communications and remittance networks, and the two clashed over the state's claim to a sovereign monopoly of the mails. When colonial and national post offices in East and Southeast Asia confronted the Qiaopiju network, they tried to make it “legible,” to borrow a term from James C. Scott (Reference Scott1998), by simplifying this uniquely dynamic, decentralized, and deterritorialized network of independent shops into a system of innocuous-sounding “letter hongs.” Similarly, contemporary governments have raised an alarm over the “informal” hundi/hawala remittance networks purportedly used to distribute funds among terrorist cells (Martin Reference Martin2009). In both cases, state officials tried to regulate these remittance networks, but were confounded by diffuse transnational economic networks operating in numerous legal jurisdictions. Unlike a multinational firm, however, the Qiaopiju network had no single headquarters or legally responsible board of directors—it functioned rhizomatically—which boggled the colonial mind and stymied the efforts of the state to enforce its sovereignty.
The supranational and decentralized nature of the Qiaopiju network eventually forced colonial and state officials to recognize their inability to deal adequately with the Qiaopiju in isolation. Since the territorially bound state was incapable of grappling with the complexity of the deterritorialized Qiaopiju network, colonial and national states were forced outside their borders to try to undermine the Qiaopiju by applying international law through the Universal Postal Union, established in 1874, which theoretically made the entire world a single borderless “postal territory”—a global postal state. What the union found when it attempted to regulate the Qiaopiju was the rapid emergence of a vibrant transnational civil society partly occupied by Qiaopiju trade associations, allied chambers of commerce, and domestic lobbying groups scattered across the region agitating against it. In the face of such intransigence, international cooperation broke down, forcing the relevant states to accept a “sovereignty bargain.” They acknowledged a limit on their sovereignty to ensure the continued circulation of Qiaopiju capital; in exchange, Qiaopiju firms accepted some state regulation of their industry.
The ability of the Qiaopiju to first frustrate claims of state sovereignty, and then defy the Universal Postal Union, shows that our notion of a state-civil society dichotomy fails to adequately explain political clashes between transnational entities like the Qiaopiju network and international organizations such as the Universal Postal Union. Although lack of space prohibits a lengthier discussion here, this research does suggest the need for a better understanding of the early relationship between transnational civil society, state-sponsored international bodies, and their encounters in unbounded space.
Overseas Agents and the Early Remittance Network, 1760–1870
In the early eighteenth century, most overseas Chinese communities consisted almost exclusively of itinerant traders. In 1717, the Kangxi Emperor reinstated the maritime ban and ordered all overseas merchants to return to Qing territory or face corporal punishment. Over the next four decades, Qing emperors gradually relaxed these restrictions until Qianlong lifted them completely in 1754, allowing merchants to return at any time (Zhuang Reference Zhuang1989, 106–20). Although aimed at traders, the Qianlong Emperor's edict effectively granted all Chinese subjects the privilege of living and working abroad indefinitely. Shortly thereafter, the nature of overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia was transformed by the arrival of increasing numbers of laborers settling not only in urban emporia like Batavia, but also moving inland to the new gambier plantations in the Riau archipelago, the tin mines of Bangka, and the gold fields of West Kalimantan; these laborers wanted to remit their earnings home.
From the 1760s to the 1840s, Europeans in Southeast Asia frequently commented on Chinese remitting monies back home, but seem little concerned with how this was accomplished, except for the occasional reference to circumambulating voyagers carrying remittances on junks (Blussé Reference Blussé, Tagliacozzo and Wen-Chin2011, 245–46; Gützlaff Reference Gützlaff1833, 135; Newbold Reference Newbold1839, 11; Raffles Reference Raffles1817, 1:236–37). Only when a new surge of Chinese emigration began in the 1840s as tens of thousands of coastal Chinese began looking for new economic opportunities in the gold mines of California, Canada, and Australia; the pepper and gambier fields of British Malaya; the guano beds of Peru; the sugar plantations in the Caribbean; and the railroads of the American and Canadian West do we find the first attempts to describe the emerging remittance network among overseas Chinese (Siah Reference Siah1847).
In Southeast Asia prior to 1870, Chinese immigrants entered local indigenous states whose rule was weak, diffuse, and decentralized and an economic system increasingly dominated by the early colonial powers—the Dutch in Batavia, the British in Singapore, and the Spanish in Manila. The relations between the colonial regimes and local states rested for the most part on commercial treaties and agreements. The inconsistencies of direct and indirect local and colonial rule, the lack of demarcated territorial boundaries, and the gradual transition to capitalist-oriented production left open enough space for overseas Chinese to thrive as middlemen within this hybrid economic system from their bases in the polyglot cities scattered throughout mainland and archipelagic Southeast Asia.
Overseas Chinese served as middlemen not only in the emergent capitalist economies of Southeast Asia between indigenous peoples and colonizers, but also in the mobilization and transportation of laborers from southern China to the tin mines of the Dutch East Indies, the rubber plantations of the Malay peninsula, and the other commercial crop fields throughout the region. These labor recruiters collected outward-bound Chinese from along the southeast coast or Hong Kong and escorted them through an emerging transoceanic network linking seaward China and maritime Southeast Asia. They booked passage, arranged accommodations on credit, and did a number of other odd jobs necessary for transporting the laborers from China to their new place of work (Bank of Taiwan Reference George[1914] 1993, 8–10, 31–34; Hsu Reference Hsu2000, 32–34). The men who organized these trips and escorted the emigrants went by a number of different names—water bosses (shuitou 水頭), overseas agents (shuike 水客), South Seas agents (Nanyang ke 南洋客), and voyagers (zoushui 走水)—though for simplicity I will refer to them as “overseas agents.”
Overseas agents began carrying remittances in the mid-eighteenth century, when emigrants asked fellow townsmen returning to the homeland to carry small amounts of cash to their families. Gradually, these men became circumambulating overseas agents, making three or four trips per year on junks, depending on the monsoon winds. Eventually, some agents opened or contracted with small general stores to provide easily accessible locations for collecting the remittances. In other cases, preexisting general stores made agreements with itinerant overseas agents to transport remittances for the shops (Dai Reference Dai2003, 70; Peng Reference Peng1992, 68, 70–71). Sometimes, local inns concentrated in the main emigrant depots of southeast coastal China—Xiamen, Chaozhou, Shantou, Guangzhou—maintained informal arrangements with shops scattered throughout the Chinese diaspora to collect and transmit remittances (Bank of Taiwan Reference George[1914] 1993, 28–31).
Overseas agents undoubtedly came from a number of different professions, but they had an intimate connection to private couriers (xinke 信客), who provided similar services in mainland China starting in the late eighteenth century (Harris Reference Harris2012, 129–58). In addition to carrying letters, remittances, and small parcels, private couriers also frequently escorted travelers, took care of accommodations, and handled luggage (SHAC 1911, 1919). Private couriers and Minxinju 民信局 (private post offices) along the southeast coast also began transnationalizing their operations by carrying remittances on river steamers from the nearby colonies to Guangzhou; estimates suggest there were two hundred of these so-called Hong Kong-Macao letter shops (Gang-Ao xin guan 港澳信館) by 1867 (An 1867; Inspectorate General 1892, 3:573–74).
By the late 1850s, inns, general stores, overseas agents, and Hong Kong-Macao letter shops had created a transoceanic network linking seaward China, the entrepôt of Hong Kong, and colonial cities and towns throughout Southeast Asia. The linchpins holding together this junk-traversed transoceanic network—or, more precisely, multiple networks—were various types of relationships based on mutual affinities such as local dialect, native-place, and real or fictive kinship. Since most of the laborers and overseas agents were townsmen who spoke the same dialect, and such agents circulated between familiar migrant depots and work centers, overseas Chinese gradually gave their personal trust to agents with geo-consanguineous ties. Affinity-based relations between agents and remitters not only provided a system of mutual trust, but were absolutely indispensable prior to the creation of regional financial and communications institutions that could transmit remittances.
Interpersonal trust and mutual affinities as the basis of agent-remitter relations in the early years afforded a viable transactional model, but ultimately limited the opportunities for business growth and profit-making and introduced an element of uncertainty in remittance transactions. By using these so-called guanxi bases, both overseas agents and remitters narrowed the available options for conducting their economic exchanges. Agents had access to overseas Chinese with whom they shared such affinities, but their business was restricted to that relatively small group. Remitters were locked into the expensive 10 percent remittance fees charged by their hometown agents and were still exposed to possible losses when agents absconded (Dai Reference Dai2003, 77n6). Pre-1870 agent-remitter business transactions relied on geo-consanguineous and other affinities as a basis for business trust, but they also exposed both sides to economic limitations, risk, and uncertainty. The situation underwent a momentous change around 1870 when new communications, transportation, and banking facilities fostered the rapid institutional development of Qiaopiju firms and their movement beyond geo-consanguineous ties as a primary business model.
The Qiaopiju: Origins and Profit-Making Strategies, 1870–1900
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, improvements in steamship technology, the extension of the submarine telegraph network, and the inauguration of modern postal services helped usher in the era of high imperialism in Southeast Asia. Within the region, the construction of roads, bridges, new port facilities, and railways increasingly linked domestic political and economic centers and integrated hinterland and metropole. In effect, the region became networked to the world and the colonies and nations became networked to each other (Frost Reference Frost2004; Headrick and Griset Reference Headrick and Griset2001). When colonists, emigrants, and indigenous peoples began using these new transportation and communications technologies, they transformed the geo-political and economic landscape of Southeast Asia by intensifying the marketization of local economies.
The globalization of the capitalist economic model, the introduction of international law, and the technological revolution in transportation and communication helped colonial administrators impose a more complex bureaucracy onto the loose, indigenous forms of political association in Southeast Asia, but they also presented an opportunity for overseas agents who quickly grasped that steamships, submarine telegraph cables, and foreign exchange banks could help them increase their business. Their existing business model of independent owner-operators relying on trust-based geo-consanguineous ties, however, would need to be fundamentally transformed.
People in a number of occupations serving the early transnational network established Qiaopiju firms. In addition to overseas agents and hostel keepers, owners of overseas trading companies also began offering small remittance services in the 1880s (Inspectorate General 1892, 3:519). Other firms that handled petty remittances included transshipping companies, local retailers, wholesalers, and other kinds of small businesses based either in a Chinese or Southeast Asian coastal port town with branches scattered throughout the local hinterland and abroad (Bank of Taiwan Reference George[1914] 1993, 68). Quite frequently, preexisting money dealers, traders, and foreign currency exchangers throughout Fujian and Guangdong, such as native banks (yin hao 銀號), money shops (qianzhuang 錢莊), and Gold Mountain firms (jinshanzhuang 金山莊), also provided remittance services. Even “piglet purchasers,” who sold emigrants into indentured servitude in Southeast Asia, founded Qiaopiju. In a great Horatio Alger story, a lowly Filipino-Chinese boatman named Guo Youpin, starting with one office in Zhangzhou, Fujian, in the 1880s, gradually built an empire of more than thirty Qiaopiju with 550 employees.
While some overseas agents continued to carry currency, those who opened Qiaopiju firms created a remittance procedure that reveals a comprehensive understanding of the newest capitalist methods—a system that at least one Westerner recognized as working “with great precision” (Singapore Times Overland Journal 1871). Rather than physically carry currency to China, Qiaopiju firms would collect a remittance, issue a receipt, and allow the remitter to send a short letter (pixin 批信) to the recipient. After collecting a reasonable number of letters, they placed them inside a single package, referred to as a “clubbed package” or “clubbed packet” (zongbao 總包), and entrusted it to the Chinese supercargo of a homebound steamship on the Holt Brothers or Butterfield & Swire lines, who then handed it over to Qiaopiju agents at a port of call or destination. Just prior to the supercargo reaching his destination, a trip from Singapore to Xiamen taking a week to ten days, the Qiaopiju owner telegraphically transferred the funds through an office of the China Submarine Telegraph Company to an agent in Hong Kong or Xiamen, who converted the transfer into local funds and delivered them to the Qiaopiju firm in China. Once the remittance was reunited with the pixin, the firm dispatched a courier to effect delivery.
The genius of the Qiaopiju procedure was in exploiting the implications of steamship transportation and the telegraphic transfer, the latter having been introduced in Asia in the 1870s. The telegraphic transfer allowed the transmission of funds to take place in minutes rather than weeks or months, but Qiaopiju owners also realized that by sending clubbed packages on scheduled or tramp steamers they were buying a certain amount of time—the week to ten days it took the pixin to arrive in China. Those ten days gave the Qiaopiju the opportunity to pool the remittances and use them as no-cost short-term loans to engage in other economic activities like currency exchange speculation or price arbitrage—buying cheap and selling high—between commodity markets across the region. By almost all accounts, Qiaopiju firms made the bulk of their profits by exploiting the chaotic currency systems prevalent throughout Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and coastal China. If rates were favorable, for example, Qiaopiju firms could route their remittances into the International Settlement and convert the funds into Shanghai taels, retransmit the funds to Hong Kong and exchange them for trade dollars, and then end up converting the trade dollars at a local money shop in Chaozhou for chopped Mexican silver. Not a few firms went bankrupt when exchange rates moved against them, but most thrived. They thrived despite the telegraph eliminating the need for mutual trust and face-to-face relations between firms. As one Qiaopiju owner put it, “I worked in the qiaopi industry for forty years, but never went to Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaya, or Indonesia” (Rui Reference Rui1987).
Starting in the 1870s, most Qiaopiju began working in close cooperation with Western-owned Eastern exchange banks, which handled many of their telegraphic transfers. By the 1870s and 1880s, the Chartered Bank of India, Australasia, and China (1858); the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (1865); Banque de l'Indochine (1875); Yokohama Specie Bank (1880); and Deutsch-Asiatische Bank (1889) had set up a network of exchange and bullion operations linking London and the rest of Europe with Asia. The banks held together the emerging Pacific and South Seas economies by issuing free-floating notes against silver and funded interregional trade by engaging in the exchange business. To handle the exchange business, the banks almost universally employed compradors who acted as intermediaries with local “native” banks in Hong Kong, who were themselves linked to Chinese firms that handled trade north along the China coast known as Nanbeihang 南北行; Gold Mountain firms linking Hong Kong with the United States, Canada, and South America; and Qiaopiju remittance agencies throughout Southeast Asia. Relying on fluctuating rates between the gold-backed London market and the silver-based Asian economies injected a serious speculative element into money markets in the South Seas region, something Qiaopiju owners capitalized on to their benefit. The Eastern exchange banks, Nanbeihang, Gold Mountain firms, and Qiaopiju thus created a financial system epitomized by currency exchange speculation, discounting trade bills, emerging futures markets, and telegraphic transfers lubricated by the wages of overseas Chinese laborers.
The success of their new business model allowed Qiaopiju firms to expand rapidly. In the 1870s, significant numbers of Qiaopiju appeared in Shantou, Chaozhou, Xiamen, Guangzhou, Qiongzhou, Taibei, and many other places (Inspectorate General 1892, 3:488–89; Zheng Hui Reference Hui2003). According to one estimate, between 1887 and 1891 there were more than fifty new Qiaopiju established along China's southeast littoral zone (Liu Reference Liu1986, 383). In Southeast Asia, there were already fifty firms in Singapore and twenty-five in Penang by 1892 (Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser 1893) as well as companies in Saigon, Bangkok, Rangoon, Java, Manila, Makassar, Jesselton, and a host of other locations.
The rapid development of the Qiaopiju industry—one of the earliest truly transnational economic networks in Asia—brought the firms and their business practices to the attention of state and colonial authorities, whose attempts to control the flow of immigrants and regulate “informal” Chinese businesses provided the first test to their resilience. Although not directed at Qiaopiju activities specifically, restrictive immigration regimes began to shrink the growth of their customer base. Colonial and indigenous administrations in Southeast Asia had long imposed heavy poll taxes on Chinese residents, but the rise of the “coolie trade” in the mid-nineteenth century angered local populations, who demanded new immigration controls. A wave of immigration restrictions spread across the Pacific—in Australia in the 1860s, in the United States and Canada in the 1880s, and in New Zealand and the American-controlled Philippines in the 1890s. Though Singapore remained a “free port,” and Thailand generally welcomed Chinese immigrants, the Dutch East Indies and other colonies continued to tax them heavily. These governments were trying not only to protect the jobs and wages of their local populations, but also to slow the outflow of immigrant remittances from “unproductively” draining their economies (Royal Commission 1885, 168, 362). Although restrictive immigration policies endangered the long-term health of the Qiaopiju industry, a more pressing concern was a threat to their very survival.
In the late nineteenth century, many national and colonial governments in East and Southeast Asia began claiming sovereignty over communications networks by defining a state monopoly on the transmission of letters. The postal monopoly was a relatively new phenomenon in international law—only in the late eighteenth century did most Western states begin adopting the idea. Although as late as 1867 private postal services continued to exist in Europe—the famous Thurn and Taxis—they were soon shuttered by aggressive state regimes that based their claims to sovereignty on impartial (and often international) law. In Asia, the British first introduced the idea of a state postal monopoly with the passage of the India Post Office Act of 1866, which not only granted an exclusive postal monopoly to the state, but specifically targeted indigenous remittance and letter networks by outlawing the private carriage of “clubbed packets” (Legislative Department 1876, 960). In Singapore, the British claim to a postal monopoly, and a failed attempt to make Qiaopiju firms “legible” to the state, precipitated a deadly clash.
In mid-1872, Singapore Postmaster General Henry Trotter broached the subject of closing down the Qiaopiju firms for violating the state postal monopoly. Leaving remittances in the hands of private Qiaopiju firms, British settlers argued, was “unfair to the State” because they interfered with its prerogatives and siphoned off its revenue (Straits Times Overland Journal 1876). Two Penang-based Qiaopiju owners responded to this discussion by proposing to pay the government to act as its monopoly agent in collecting remittances. Andrew Clarke, then governor of Singapore, accepted their offer in the fall of 1874 and rationalized his position by claiming the Qiaopiju were inherently corrupt and inefficient. Remaining uncertainty about the position in international postal law, however, left the agreement in abeyance (Straits Times Overland Journal 1877). In mid-1876, the recently appointed governor of the Straits Settlements, William Jervois, circumvented questions about international postal law by creating a Chinese Sub-Post Office and making the two Penang babas salaried colonial subpostmasters who did not have a monopoly on the collection of remittances, but had one on their transmission (L. Wong Reference Wong1980, 178). As the Qiaopiju owners understood very well, this new system “injure[d] us Chinese for the benefit of barbarians” by removing their opportunity to profit off the remittances as short-term loans (Straits Observer 1876).
The owners of the Singapore-based Qiaopiju firms orchestrated a violent riot. In early December 1876, the firms offered a 100-tael reward for the decapitation of the “wolf-hearted” Penang-based monopolists. Tension mounted until the morning of December 15, 1876, when a mob ransacked the Chinese Sub-Post Office. Having demolished the premises, the rioters attacked the Ellenborough and New Market Police Stations, where the police fired into the crowd, killing three protestors and wounding several others. After a brief general strike against the “red haired barbarians,” the situation returned to normal and most Qiaopiju firms passively resisted by ignoring the Sub-Post Office (Straits Times 1877).
Other states and colonies in Southeast Asia followed the British by claiming a postal monopoly, but accepted limits on their sovereignty by compromising with the Qiaopiju industry. In the early 1880s, Thailand established its postal monopoly even as it legally permitted Qiaopiju firms to collect and transmit their remittances and letters; eventually, the Thai administration opened the so-called “Eighth Post Office” to serve Qiaopiju firms (“Postal Act of Siam” 1906, 22–23; Tantasuroek Reference Tantasuroek1992, 6). After the creation of the Federated Malay States in 1895, Selangor, joined by Perak and Pahang, licensed Qiaopiju firms and allowed them control over the remittance trade in exchange for sending their clubbed packages through the state post office (Maxwell Reference Maxwell1905, 166, 173; State of Pahang 1900, 7, 15). The French in Indochina, too, created a similar licensing system (SHAC, n.d.). Despite state and colonial efforts to compromise with the Qiaopiju firms, many of the companies refused to recognize the legality of a state postal monopoly and engaged in “illicit letter traffic” (“The Siamese Postal Service” 1896, 137–39).
On the cusp of the twentieth century, Qiaopiju firms had created a new remittance procedure, developed capitalist profit-making strategies, and weathered a direct attack by state and colonial administrations over the postal monopoly. Between 1870 and 1900, the Qiaopiju crafted an overall economic model that melded a frontier attitude, represented by their celebration of laissez-faire transnational capitalism, with the most contemporary technological advancements to facilitate the free flow of money, goods, and people throughout their diasporic network. Ironically, at almost the precise moment Qiaopiju firms developed this new model and jettisoned their reliance on trust-based firm-customer relations, they introduced a number of culturalist customer services to stave off competition from state-run remitting agencies.
Marketizing Culture: The Qiaopiju, Customer Relations, and Interfirm Networks
By the early twentieth century, there were some 280 Qiaopiju in Singapore and Penang in British Malaya; between thirty and forty scattered between Batavia, Bandong, and Semarang in the Dutch East Indies; about ten in Manila; around thirty in Saigon in French Cochinchina; twenty in British Hong Kong; and fifty in Thailand. Sites of emigration like Xiamen and Guangzhou continued to dominate the Qiaopiju network on the mainland, but firms also began moving inland along navigable waterways to places like Wuzhou, Guangxi (Inspectorate General 1904, 2:325).
The rapid growth of the Qiaopiju industry in the early twentieth century was the result of a host of new culturally sensitive customer services, a concerted effort to develop interfirm relations to surmount the challenges of restrictive immigration regimes, and the completion of a highly bureaucratic remittance procedure designed to replace interpersonal trust and increase customer confidence. Although Qiaopiju firms still controlled a transnational network—something that could not legally be created by state postal services—the companies developed these culturally sensitive customer services and remittance procedure to keep post offices from capturing either end of the remittance system.
Some culturally sensitive customer services were probably offered in the late nineteenth century. It is only when external observers like Japanese economic reporters from the Bank of Taiwan, the American economist C. F. Remer, Academia Sinica representative Wu Chengxi, or Chinese Postal Inspector Zhang Jixi were trying to understand the source of Qiaopiju dominance, however, that we find detailed descriptions of their practices. Not only did Qiaopiju firms want to keep the source of their competitive edge secret, but they would only discuss those services that banks or post offices could not copy because of their own internal rules, the absence of adequately trained staff, or prohibitions in international law.
One of the more popular customer services offered by Qiaopiju firms was writing and reading letters for illiterate remitters. Qiaopiju office staff would often write a message on the pixin when a customer sent a remittance. When the remittance and letter reached their destination, the courier would read the letter aloud to the recipient. The courier then invited the recipient to send his or her own letter back, called a huipi 回批 (return letter), which would be delivered and read out to the recipient in Southeast Asia.
Most of the couriers hired by Qiaopiju firms to read pixin or huipi were not full-time employees, but literate local villagers earning some additional money—usually five to ten silver dollars a month in the 1930s—for their services (SHAC 1936). This allowed Qiaopiju firms not only to limit their business expenses, but also to deliver remittances without requiring customers to provide full addresses—a source of great convenience for overseas Chinese unfamiliar with the new system of residential addresses required by the post office. Employees dispatched by the Chinese Post Office to study Qiaopiju practices constantly remarked on their amazing ability to effect delivery without an address (e.g., SHAC 1928c, 1929).
Qiaopiju firms also sent out collecting agents to remote locations like illegal gold mines in Java or gambier fields in Malaya. Most early descriptions of Qiaopiju activities have them collecting remittances in cities or towns (Siah Reference Siah1847). In the early twentieth century, however, Qiaopiju firms began laying out collection circuits throughout rural Southeast Asia. Most firms had scheduled stops to collect remittances immediately after payday. In areas heavily populated by Chinese immigrants, Qiaopiju firms bid against each other to collect money from the workers who had pooled their funds in an attempt to secure a lower remittance rate (SHAC 1936).
Qiaopiju firms also accepted remittances on credit. If a remitter needed to send money for an emergency, or did not have enough funds at hand, Qiaopiju firms would offer “advance money” (diankuan 墊款) and accept the remitter's word that the money would be repaid (Dai Reference Dai2003, 75). Once the remittance was delivered and the huipi returned, the Qiaopiju collected the promised funds. The “advance money” system proved to be one of the most popular Qiaopiju culturalist services (SHAC 1938). By the mid-1930s, between 60 and 70 percent of all remittances sent to Shantou were done on credit terms (SHAC 1936).
In the early twentieth century, when bandit gangs began infesting the mountains of south China, Qiaopiju firms offered additional security to customers through the sale of “mountain tickets” (shanpiao 山票). Qiaopiju customers could purchase mountain tickets, modeled on stamp remittances at modern post offices, as a form of insurance on delivery. The Qiaopiju had an assortment of preprinted stamps with various denominations they would sell to a remitter. Once purchased, the tickets could be sent to China in the safest way possible, the recipient received the stamp, and then had to call at the Qiaopiju shop to cash it (Dai Reference Dai2003, 75; Jiao Reference Jiao2005b, 66).
Underlying these culturalist customer services was the Qiaopiju's mature remittance procedure, which proved the bane of state-based remitting agencies that could not match its guarantees nor its cheapness. Qiaopiju remittance procedures in their mature form began when an agent arrived at a work site. After accepting the amount to be remitted, the Qiaopiju employee handed over a numbered receipt and inquired if any message was to accompany the remittance. In addition to the personalized message, the pixin also had a serial number on it, ensuring the remittance and pixin could be reunited after their separate journeys to China. The employee then recorded the transaction in his account book, gathered the letter and funds, and notified the office manager. Once the money and letter reached their destination, the courier handed over the money and the numbered receipt stating the original amount remitted, and provided the recipient with the option of sending a huipi, which also had the same serial number on it. If a message was to be returned, it was written on the huipi and dispatched abroad. Once the huipi was returned to its point of origin, it was taken to the original remitter and handed over or read aloud—the family news included in the letter, often specifically mentioning the amount received, served as a secondary receipt. At every step, Qiaopiju employees and remitters could check and double check that all serial numbers matched. The numerous receipts and matching serial numbers also allowed the Qiaopiju firms to literally trace every single remittance that passed through their hands—a service no modern postal service or bank could offer without significant cost.
Qiaopiju firms offered a more sophisticated, regularized procedure for handling remittances than modern post offices, but one that also catered culturally to the unique needs of overseas Chinese and their families. Although personal trust may have played some small part when overseas Chinese chose their Qiaopiju, every step in their remittance procedure shows that overseas Chinese most emphatically did not implicitly trust the firms. Serial numbers, huipi, and personal letters were a triple check on the honesty of the firm's employees. Heavy emphasis on the traditional aspects of Qiaopiju firms does a disservice to their strengths as flexible, adaptable companies carefully developing an ironclad remittance procedure to convince remitters of their honesty.
If firm-customer relations placed emphasis on culturalist practices in the early twentieth century, interfirm relations and network organization were trending towards purely economic considerations based on the desire to extend the geographic reach of individual companies. Research by bank employees studying the Qiaopiju industry describes three primary types of interfirm relations: (1) yearly profits were divided equally amongst all the offices in a network; (2) all business expenses were paid by the head office, which also received all the profits, but it paid commissions of between 1 and 2 percent to the collecting offices; and (3) head offices received all the profits, but paid a commission of 0.002 to 0.004 percent on the amount of remittances collected by independent contract agents (Bank of Taiwan Reference George[1914] 1993, 69). In Fujian, there was a special terminology to describe interfirm relations. Qiaopiju that acted independently were known as toupan 頭盤, firms that acted as agents for a number of different overseas head offices and delivered in urban or suburban areas were called erpan 二盤, and agent firms that delivered inland were called sanpan 三盤 (Yang Reference Yang2004, 463). Naming conventions should not keep us from understanding that any given Qiaopiju probably acted as a head office, a branch office, an affiliate, and a contract agent at all times (Huang Qinghai Reference Qinghai1996, 51–66). It is not unusual to find in Chinese Post Office records Qiaopiju firms maintaining relations with ten, twenty, or thirty firms (e.g., SHAC 1931).
The flexibility in interfirm relations, and the overall rhizomatic structure of their network, was one of the hallmarks of Qiaopiju success. Such flexibility allowed them not only to deepen their relations with firms from all over the diaspora, but also to greatly expand the geographic reach of their networks. If a Qiaopiju in Bangkok received a remittance from a small shop owner from Guangxi, or a worker from Quanzhou harvesting gutta percha outside of Negeri Sembilan gave his monthly salary to a Qiaopiju agent, the receiving companies could make a series of contractual relationships with a chain of Qiaopiju firms to effect delivery (SHAC 1936).
Transaction Costs: Relations between the Chinese Post Office and Qiaopiju, 1920s–1930s
By the 1920s, overseas remittances almost balanced China's trade deficit. The Chinese Post Office, seeking to capture the international remittance market and attracted by possible lucrative remittance fees, attempted to shut down the Qiaopiju network for violating the state postal monopoly. Qiaopiju firms, as in Singapore fifty years before, immediately recognized that the Chinese government's “alleged protection” of overseas Chinese was “merely empty words” (SHAC 1926a). Establishing modern trade associations along the southeastern coast, and in the colonial capitals of Southeast Asia, Qiaopiju firms rapidly developed a form of transnational civil society that fought and ultimately defeated the efforts of the Chinese Post Office.
The Chinese Post Office's attack on the Qiaopiju was predicated on the possession of a postal monopoly. Its efforts to secure that monopoly began when the Guangxu Emperor authorized Sir Robert Hart, inspector general of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service, to establish the Imperial Post Office in 1896. Fearful of the consequences of eliminating the jobs of tens of thousands employed in existing postal systems, the emperor decided to force Hart to compete for control over the mails. Hart and his French successors spent the next twenty-five years transforming their new institution into an internally sovereign and internationally recognized postal monopolist by challenging the government-run relay (yizhan 驛站) and post station systems (jidipu 急遞鋪), the Wenbaoju 文報局 for overseas Chinese officials, the Minxinju for private Chinese businesses, the municipal council local post offices (gongshang shuxinguan 工商書信館) handling mail for the foreign settler communities, the foreign post offices (ke you 客郵) connecting foreigners in China with their home countries, and the Qiaopiju.
Although postal administrators long claimed as their “birthright” an “inviolable” postal monopoly, President Xu Shichang 徐世昌 only granted the privilege in 1921.Footnote 3 Co-Director General of Posts Henri Picard-Destelan, the French administrative head of the Post Office, immediately used the new monopoly to threaten and cajole the Qiaopiju (SHAC 1922). In 1922, with the assistance of the Beijing Ministry of Communications, Picard-Destelan formed the Committee on the Unification of Postal Rights (tongyi you quan weiyuanhui 統一郵權委員會), partially tasked with figuring out how to eliminate the Qiaopiju.Footnote 4
Sensing a tightening legal grip, the Qiaopiju quickly petitioned the Ministry of Communications through the Jiangsu and Shanghai Chambers of Commerce, the Ningbo and Shaoxing Native Place Associations in Shanghai, and their own National Letter Trade Association, asking the Ministry to grant them a “grace period” of fifteen years. The Ministry recognized the Post Office's right to a national monopoly, but also believed that “due consideration” should also be given to the livelihood of the Qiaopiju and their employees. The Ministry reversed itself and ordered the Directorate to “adopt a lenient attitude” for the time being (SHAC 1926b).
Thwarted by an emerging transnational civil society pressuring the Ministry of Communications, Picard-Destelan shifted strategies by trying to use international postal law to eliminate the clubbed package system. In 1914, the Chinese Post Office joined the Universal Postal Union, the governing body of international postal relations, but did not become an active member until after World War I. One of the earliest and most accepted tenets of international postal law was the prohibition against sending more than one letter under a single cover; all letters had to be sent a decouvert (san ji 散寄), meaning the Qiaopiju's clubbed package system was technically illegal (Universal Postal Union 1925, art. 34, para. 3). Although most Southeast Asian postal administrations had been members of the Union since 1877, China's conspicuous absence meant they made little effort to enforce this prohibition.
In the summer of 1924, the Universal Postal Union convened its congress at Stockholm. When representatives from the Dutch East Indies introduced a proposal to eliminate the clubbed package system, China's delegation immediately seconded it. The relevant administrations decided to temporarily postpone a decision to give them time to work out the details. In December 1925, the Chinese Post Office submitted a series of proposals to the Ministry of Communications on the abolition of clubbed packages. The Ministry approved them, and the date for abolition was set for January 1, 1927 (SHAC 1927g). On October 8, 1926, however, the Singapore Post Office publicly announced the impending end to the clubbed package system (Peng Reference Peng1992, 217–18; Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser 1926).
Shocked by the news, Qiaopiju owners throughout coastal China and Southeast Asia mobilized support among the transnational Chinese community, founded modern trade associations, and sent delegations to meet with postal officials across the region. Members of the Singapore Chinese Chamber of Commerce, many of whom were Qiaopiju owners, “assailed” the Post Office, various government ministries, and postal administrations throughout Southeast Asia with petitions requesting a delay (e.g., SHAC 1926a). In Bangkok, the Chinese General Chamber of Commerce telegraphed a “highly indignant” letter to the Beijing Ministry of Communications (SHAC 1927a). The All-Provincial Union of Chambers of Commerce and the Xiamen General Labor Union, speaking on behalf of Qiaopiju trade associations in Shantou and Xiamen, also lobbied the Ministry of Communications to rescind the abolition (SHAC 1927b, 1927c, 1927d, 1927e). In the end, the Qiaopiju industry mobilized several hundred Qiaopiju firms to protest the government's decision (SHAC 1927h).
On February 13, 1927, the Chinese Ministry of Communications buckled and informed the Southeast Asian postal administrations of the extension of the clubbed package system (Straits Times 1927). While Chinese postal administrators had been confident of their position in international law, they had not foreseen the rapidity with which the Qiaopiju firms could organize themselves into modern trade associations, mobilize support among chambers of commerce, and apply effective pressure on the Beijing government. The “exceptionally strong” Qiaopiju trade associations, Fujian Postal Commissioner Stapleton-Cotton declared, were turning what had seemed a simple matter of applying international postal law into a “long and bitter” struggle (SHAC 1927f).
The ability of the Qiaopiju firms to rapidly and effectively organize themselves into modern trade associations (tongye gonghui 同業公會) and pressure the relevant governments as a form of transnational civil society was key to their ability to survive the 1926–27 effort to eliminate the clubbed package system and represents an even further step away from “traditional” Chinese economic organization. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Chinese merchant organizations in many fields underwent associational restructuring as they began to change from the old-fashioned guild (huiguan 會館, 公所 gongsuo), designed to regulate trade in the interests of business owners, to the modern trade association devoted to promoting trade, lobbying government, and standardizing business practices (Goodman Reference Goodman1995, 29–46).
Qiaopiju trade associations represented this modern trend away from economic specialization by native place in their relations with colonial or state administrations, but whose internal organization continued to show some signs of fragmentation along native-place lines. The internal fragmentation was fostered by the overall structure of the trade associations as voluntary organizations based on contractual agreements restricted to certain geographical areas rather than compulsory, monopolistic associations controlling the entire trade and encompassing Qiaopiju across the region. Modern trade associations founded in the late 1920s and early 1930s, in Shantou, Xiamen (two), Chaozhou, Jieyang, Jinjiang, Fujian, Hainan, Singapore, and Thailand, all organized themselves geographically. Conceptually, however, much of the native-place influence within the Qiaopiju trade associations was less a function of traditional identity politics than determined by the concentration of firms serving customers from specific places within China who congregated in certain cities in Southeast Asia. The transnationalization of economic enterprises required a reliance on some organizing principle in lieu of corporate ownership of the entire network; the simplest principle turned out to be native place or geographic area.
Qiaopiju trade association charters usually defined their purposes in broad terms such as “maintaining the interests of the trade.” The organizers of the Chaozhou Overseas Chinese Remittance Trade Association, for example, declared the association's duties to be protection of the trade, strengthening services to overseas Chinese remitters, and arbitrating disputes between member firms. Likewise, the Shantou Municipal Overseas Letter Trade Association's charter defined its functions as harmonizing its members' viewpoints, promoting the interests of the collective, and redressing harm done to their industry by state interference (SHAC 1936). In practice, Qiaopiju trade associations primarily lobbied local, national, and colonial governments on economic and regulatory polices related to international remittances; standardized remittance procedures; and often set industry rates on currency exchange (Rui Reference Rui1987). Pooled association dues were used to “protect the interests” of the industry by maintaining “good connections with bankers and local business leaders” throughout the growing transnational civil society (SHAC 1928e).
Qiaopiju trade associations and the boisterous civil society they fostered clashed with state authorities again in 1928. Following the Northern Expedition (1926–28), the Nationalist government took over both the Post Office and Ministry of Communications. In August 1928, the government announced the convention of a National Communications Conference to reevaluate all communications and transportation policies (SHAC 1928a). In the run-up to the conference, various Qiaopiju trade associations, representing “millions of impoverished overseas Chinese,” worked to preempt a decision to eliminate the Qiaopiju (SHAC 1928b; see also Zheng Ketang Reference Ketang1930, 37). Despite their efforts, the conference delegates accepted the Post Office's proposal to close the firms for infringing on the state postal monopoly. The delegates officially delayed the closure until the end of 1930 to give the Qiaopiju owners and employees enough time to transition to new professions (Guomin zhengfu jiaotong bu 1928, 68–69, 382–84).
Immediately following the National Communications Conference, the Chaozhou-Meixian General Chamber of Commerce, the Shantou Overseas Chinese Pixin Industry Trade Association, the Singapore-based Chaozhou Qiaopiju Trade Association, and the All-Provincial Union of Chambers of Commerce began an intense lobbying effort to nullify the conference's decision (SHAC 1928c, 1928d; Wang Reference Wang1929). The Qiaopiju lobbyists made remarkably similar arguments in their impassioned pleas. In letter after letter, Qiaopiju owners defended their companies by attacking the Post Office for its bureaucratic complexity and inefficiency—the Post Office charged exorbitant fees, levied heavy postage costs to deliver to rural areas, and frequently lost remittances (SHAC 1928c, 1929).
Pressure from chambers of commerce and Qiaopiju trade associations ultimately swayed the national government, which feared the loss of the valuable remittances. In effect, the national government was making a “sovereignty bargain” with the Qiaopiju—the state would recognize a limit on its sovereignty in exchange for the continued circulation of Qiaopiju remittances and some regulation of the companies. By the opening of the London Congress of the Universal Postal Union in May 1929, the Ministry ordered the new Director General of Posts Liu Shufan 劉書蕃 to work out a temporary compromise allowing the Qiaopiju to continue operations, but under new licensing provisions (Zheng Ketang Reference Ketang1930).
In September 1930, the Post Office issued the “Provisional Regulations for Minju Registered Licenses” (SHAC 1930). The license application required Qiaopiju owners to submit full particulars on their ownership, relationships with other Qiaopiju, and the overseas areas they served.Footnote 5 From the license applications, the Post Office gained detailed information about the number of Qiaopiju, demographic information about the owners, and the size and extent of the various inland and international networks, allowing it to regulate and track remittance flows. To control the growth of the industry, only firms in existence in 1930 would be allowed to apply for a license. Despite the application deadline of December 31, 1930, however, enough Qiaopiju protested that the Ministry ordered the Post Office to grant an extension for applications (SHAC 1933). By December 1933, the national government and the Chinese Post Office recognized their inability to replace the transnational remittance network of the Qiaopiju firms. That month, the Chinese government abandoned its efforts to close the Qiaopiju and granted them permission to continue operations for the foreseeable future (SHAC 1933).
Over the next forty years, Qiaopiju firms continued to dominate the overseas Chinese remittance industry, though they faced a number of new challenges. Wartime exigencies and the Japanese occupation of Qiaopiju remittance hubs like Fuzhou, Singapore, and Hong Kong forced the companies to shift to black-market operations and develop overland “smuggling” routes into Nationalist-held areas through Indochina. Sensing an opening in the market, the Chinese Post Office developed its own transnational collection system by signing contracts with international banks like the Banque de l'Indochine, the Philippines Bank of Communications, and Chase National in New York, and then had the remittances delivered through its own newly formed domestic Distribution Centers (fenfaju 分發局) (Harris Reference Harris2012, 430–36). Despite some success with its own network, the Post Office still found 217 Qiaopiju head offices in China maintaining relations with 2,682 branches abroad at the end of the war (SHAC 1946a, 1946b).
Qiaopiju firms continued using the black market in the immediate postwar years, as colonial regimes throughout Southeast Asia restricted outward remittances as they struggled to rebuild their domestic economies. In China, the national government's disastrous economic policies, and the attendant hyperinflation, ruined the Post Office's own remittance network and allowed the Qiaopiju to thrive. When the Communists came to power, Fujian alone had 185 Qiaopiju head offices with 2,700 branches abroad. The firms feared the worst, but found Communist leaders just as willing as the Nationalists to recognize the value of their remittances as desperately needed foreign exchange (Wu Reference Wu1967; Yang Reference Yang2004, 131–47). Over the succeeding decades, the Qiaopiju network slowly shrank as foreign governments forbade sending remittances into Communist China. The Qiaopiju network finally disappeared during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, though similar “informal” companies probably helped funnel an estimated sixty billion dollars into China from overseas Chinese in 2012.
Conclusion
The emergence of the East Asian economic miracle of the four mini-dragons—Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea—in the 1960s, just as the overseas Chinese remittance network was disintegrating, has led scholars to overlook the contributions of firms like the Qiaopiju in pioneering an early form of transnational capitalism in East Asia. Qiaopiju firms and their networks do not represent a distinctive form of “Chinese capitalism,” but the development of a particular kind of business designed to operate in the spaces between an imperial empire and semi-colony in China, emerging nation-states and colonies in Southeast Asia, and colonial entrepôts like Hong Kong. Within this transoceanic space, Qiaopiju firms occupied a powerful sector in an emerging transnational civil society that defied state and colonial attempts to regulate their industry. To operate successfully in such disparate geographic, political, and regulatory environments, Qiaopiju owners created a flexible, decentralized, rhizomatically organized network densely connected through interfirm relations that allowed them to expand the scope of their operations. Their frontier attitude and celebration of transnational laissez-faire capitalism also allowed them to utilize the most cutting-edge technologies—steamships, telegraphic transfers, Eastern exchange banks, international postal services—to engage in capitalist profit-making strategies, but they also pioneered a host of new cultural customer services to protect their industry from outside interference. The Qiaopiju business model was so unique, state-run post offices and international exchange banks found it virtually impossible to replicate their success, which allowed the Qiaopiju to dominate the international remittance industry among overseas Chinese for more than a century.
Acknowledgments
The research for this article was carried out at the Second Historical Archives of China (SHAC) in Nanjing. I would like to thank the archivists for their kind and helpful assistance. Funding for the research was generously provided by the Social Science Research Council and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center. A version of this paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in 2013. I would like to thank Poshek Fu, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, for encouraging me to explore the transnational significance of the Qiaopiju; Mei Chun for her constant support; James A. Cook, at the University of Pittsburgh, for his insight into overseas Chinese history; and the several anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful feedback.
