The Qiaopi Trade and Its Business Model

The business culture that supported the qiaopi trade rested on common subethnicity rather than generalized Chinese ethnicity.Footnote ² It conformed to local ethnic attachments corresponding to deep intra-ethnic cleavages imported from China along migration chains. It only rarely assumed a pan-Chinese form, except during wars and political crises. Even the trade associations founded to repel state interference supplemented rather than supplanted “dialect”-based associations or acted as fronts for them. In our opinion, Harris overstates the extent of their restructuring on non-“traditional” lines, although he does concede that their internal organization “continued to show some signs of fragmentation along native-place lines” (143).

Harris recognizes the uniqueness of the qiaopi trade and, commendably, repudiates its essentialist reduction. He rejects its description as “traditional Chinese,” which he sees as an error belonging to a larger Orientalist discourse, arguing that although the overseas Chinese remittance firms (qiaopiju 侨批局) were initially based on mutual trust and “geo-consanguineous ties,” by the 1870s they had changed as a result of new means of communications and transportation and new banking facilities and had turned into a modern business model (which he calls “colonial modern” [Harris Reference Harris2012, 32–33]). This model, according to Harris, represents the melding of culturalist business practices with capitalist profit-making strategies, and is one able to thrive in the interstitial gaps between nation-states, colonies, and empires.

Harris's definition of the qiaopi trade as a sui generis type of modern capitalism is, in our opinion, questionable on several grounds. We particularly question his identification of a rupture that came about in the trade in the 1870s as a result of new means of communications and transportation and new banking facilities, from which a qualitatively new business model emerged.

From a methodological point of view, this assertion would seem to imply that modern technology is incompatible with “traditional” structures and values, an argument that gives absolute primacy to technological development, which supposedly drives and determines change in social and economic structures. But technological determinism is no less a form of essentialism than the cultural determinism Harris rejects.

To support his theory of a rupture, Harris draws a line between the “circumambulating overseas agents” (shuike 水客, also translatable as “couriers”) that handled remittances in the early years and the later, better organized and more sophisticated qiaopiju. However, the distinction between these two forms of the trade was not categorical or qualitative, as Harris implies. The passage from one to the other was gradual, cumulative, and bidirectional. Problems of trust and distrust played a big part in the transition from shuike to qiaopiju, but shuike were aware of their customers’ apprehensions and did their best to allay them. In Batavia, shuike were held to account under the local hantar system,Footnote ³ by Chinese associations in the colony that policed the trade on behalf of its customers. Many shuike issued receipts even before the appearance of the qiaopiju, and Huang Ting's (Reference Ting and Weizhong2008) study of the documents of Batavia's Chinese association shows that the qiaopi trade was already quite mature in the years between 1787 and 1846, when it was still based mainly on shuike. In fact, all the methods used by qiaopiju—collecting qiaopi; networking; making use of agents, substations, and even post offices; issuing receipts; simultaneously engaging in the delivery of qiaopi and in other forms of trade and finance; and manipulating foreign-exchange levels—were old practices, inherited from the shuike.

Moreover, the transition from shuike to qiaopiju was never completed, temporally or geographically. Instead, there was a marked continuity across the decades. In more remote places, shuike remained central to the qiaopi trade from its start to its finish, and during the war years they made a striking comeback in regions where they had lost ground in the 1930s, when Chinese and Southeast Asian authorities managed to assert a greater degree of authority than previously and subsequently (Liao and Wu Reference Yun, Erchi and Weizhong2010, 268; Yang Reference Qunxi2003, 102–3). The shuike and their clients relied on traditional (in personam) means of trust rather than applying a system-based (in rem) approach, at a time when systemic trust and the legal protection of private property had not yet been properly established among Chinese immigrant communities in Southeast Asia and elsewhere in the diaspora. The pijiao 批 脚 or deliverers, hired by qiaopiju to take the letters and remittances to the villages, played a similar role to the shuike, and were an even more enduring and integral part of the trade. When the qiaopiju did emerge, they copied and perpetuated practices devised earlier by the shuike. The procedures Harris calls “culturalist customer services” were no “tinge” or embellishment on an enterprise otherwise modern in essence, but instead lay at its heart. Qiaopiju owners and managers ran their shops and offices on “traditional” lines, by exclusively employing their own kin and others linked to them by native-place or dialect ties. Their relations with their customers also continued to be based, even after the technological modernization of their enterprises, on consanguinity and provenance. So did their relations with other qiaopiju and with their agents and employees in China or overseas, except in rare cases where they were based on trade ties. However, even trade ties usually assumed a particularistic form. This is why we doubt that the line between tradition and modernity was as clear cut as Harris seems to assume, and hold that the two modes could, instead, be said to coexist and intersect.

In fact, the qiaopiju never actually killed off the shuike. Qiaopiju and shuike lasted equally long, until the Communists put a final end to both after 1949 (Taiwan's Jinmen remittance shop being the sole exception). Shuike continued to ply their trade, though mainly in regions lacking modern roads and institutions (Huang Jiaxiang Reference Jiaxiang and Weizhong2010, 503–4). Their advantages over the qiaopiju were that they were more personal and intimate; they were experts in local geography, culture, and community (both overseas and in China); and they performed a wider range of functions. Moreover, their coexistence with the qiaopiju afforded customers flexibility and choice in a market that had to cater to widely differing and constantly changing needs and pockets (Yang Reference Qunxi2003, 57).

Just as there was no impenetrable barrier between shuike and qiaopiju, so too the different sorts of qiaopiju, representing different levels of complexity and technological sophistication, ranged along a continuum. The relatively rare vertically organized and seemingly more modern qiaopiju that controlled all three stages of qiaopi dispatch (receipt overseas, transfer to China, and receipt in China—the so-called sanpan 三盘 system) grew out of the simpler sort based on horizontal ties, but again the development was not irreversible. Big qiaopiju could fragment or shrink back into small ones after fizzing brilliantly for a while, and back again into big ones, depending on circumstances. The smaller and more “traditional” qiaopiju formed a dense network of shops linked by ties of kinship, native place, and dialect.

The protean character of the qiaopiju as an institution is well illustrated by Tianyi (天一), which in time developed into the biggest and most important qiaopiju. Tianyi was founded on blood and native-place relations, of the sort associated with chain migration before the emergence of trust-producing systems, but it passed in the course of its existence through different sorts of trust—personal, relational (i.e., guanxi 关系–based), and, in the early years of the twentieth century, system-based. However, as a historian of the company noted, the transition between these various stages was never unilinear or unidirectional (Jia Reference Junying2014, 140). By avoiding modern methods of management, scrutiny, and accountability and sticking to the family-firm model, under which all its ties and operations were strictly controlled by the Guos, the founding family members, Tianyi cut transaction costs, ran simple and effective administrations, and swiftly accumulated a huge sum of capital. In time, however, corrupt practices crept in, and the model of “harmonious and tacit understanding” that characterized the company was not up to dealing with the resulting problems, thus becoming a bane rather than a boon. Internal supervision was inadequately exercised, and Tianyi (like several other such firms) became a breeding ground for embezzlement, reckless speculation, and competition between different branches of the company. In 1929, speculation led to a run on Tianyi's funds and to its closure, owing half a million yuan.

Did the transnationalization of the remittance trade lead to the overriding of “cultural characteristics” by “instrumental economic practices,” as Harris (Reference Harris2015, 130) argues? This line of reasoning implies that transnational organization cannot be based on “mutual affinities.” However, China's early premodern domestic hang 行 and huiguan 会馆 (guilds) were capable of horizontal and even transnational organization, not least in response to actions by the Chinese state and (later) foreigners—in this respect, the trade associations set up by the qiaopiju starting in the early twentieth century trod a well-worn path.Footnote ⁴ Although “traditional” in nearly all regards, these horizontally and transnationally organized guilds were at the same time complex and multifunctional, and could be based on trade rather than on native place (Zhang Mingshan Reference Mingshan, Lin and Daogang2006, 100). These early examples of horizontal and transnational organization undermine the thesis that the organization of the qiaopiju in formal trade associations necessarily disqualified them as “traditional.”

The qiaopi trade was extremely adaptable and resilient, so why did it eventually collapse? Harris has no convincing answer to this question, implying instead that the trade's “flexible, decentralized, rhizomatically organized network” and its “frontier attitude and celebration of transnational laissez-faire capitalism” (Harris Reference Harris2015, 146) enabled it to face down state and colonial attempts to bring it under regulation and engineer its downfall. He goes on to ascribe its shrinking and eventual disappearance after 1949 to political causes—the measures by Southeast Asian colonial and independent regimes to isolate China and the chaos of China's Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and the early 1970s.

However, the trade was highly vulnerable to attempts by the Chinese and various colonial and other states in the region to assume its functions by way of the Post Office and the banks, especially in the 1930s. The main reason was that it was unable to compete with organizations and corporations, capitalist or state capitalist, chartered, supported, or controlled by the Chinese state and other states. The Sino-Japanese War, and the postwar inflation, saved the trade for a while, for shuike and qiaopiju both made a comeback in the late 1930s and early 1940s, in association with modern (chiefly foreign) banks. The inflation was particularly important, for it made going through official channels in China hugely disadvantageous to the recipient and remitter. But despite this surge, the trade eventually fizzled out after 1949, not just on the mainland, where it succumbed to a strong state and changes in the qiaoxiang and the general overseas-Chinese economy, but also on Jinmen (Quemoy) Island in Taiwan, where it was defeated by modern banks and postal services. The root cause of the inevitable clash between qiaopiju and the Bank of China and the Post Office lay in the traditionalist and fundamentally transnational orientation of the former and the fact that the latter were modern institutions operating within a capitalist framework and within the confines of a nation-state.

The Qiaopi Trade and the Qiaokan Phenomenon

The relationship between the qiaopi trade and modern capitalism is clarified by an analysis of the qiaokan 侨刊 (overseas Chinese magazines) phenomenon, a concomitant and, in some respects, a product of qiaopi culture that peaked between 1910 and the early 1930s. Here two concepts, postal culture and print culture, bear centrally on the discussion.

“Postal culture” is a term coined by Gabriella Romani (2013), in her book on letters in post-unification Italy, to describe the communicative practices supported by the nineteenth-century letter, which reshaped the lives and broadened the horizons of the masses and brought literacy to the villages. It created “a new geography of national identity, based on … an enhanced sense of belonging to a group, [and] … an idealistic extension of the individual experience” (Romani Reference Romani2013, 4).

Naturally, this new culture was also the result of the migrant's passage from being a villager—usually a peasant, with narrowly bounded horizons—to inhabiting a wider world and, in nearly all cases, to assuming a new social role as a petty trader or a worker in urban industry or commerce, in a mine, or on a plantation. Overseas, he—less often, she—was exposed to new social practices and political viewpoints. In the Chinese case, for example, the systemic racism of colonial society in Southeast Asia, of the white settler societies of North America and Australasia, and of Europe predisposed migrants to be even more sympathetic to the new nationalist and republican politics that found their readiest audiences in Chinatown.

Postal culture had a strong political edge: its primary role was to keep friends and relatives in touch, but it also created an information network that eroded distance, enhanced the sense of interconnectedness, and exposed people “to new ideas and customs [and] a world much larger than the one they inhabited” (Romani Reference Romani2013, 4). The term “postal culture” was later extended to the United States by David Henkin, who argued that Americans became ever more aware of their participation in a network of communication that embraced the nation (Henkin Reference Henkin2006, 6, 93). However, it has been less widely used in other national contexts. Harris briefly mentions the term in his study on the Post Office and state formation in modern China between 1896 and 1949, but he does not analyze it in any detail, probably because his main focus is on the Post Office's contribution to forming the modern Chinese state, as opposed to its political role in broader society (Harris Reference Harris2012, 181).

“Print culture,” an idea first developed by Benedict Anderson, is a better-known term and has been more widely explored and applied. We know from Anderson's work and from research inspired by it that the rise of nationalism and national identity is intimately connected with the rise of print and print-capitalism, triggered by the industrial revolution (Anderson Reference Anderson1991).

The two cultures, postal and print, are clearly connected, and both are illuminated by Tocqueville's definition of modern postal services as that “great link between minds” (John Reference John2009, 3), a mainstay of the modern communications revolution and at the heart of modern institutional, ideological, economic, social, cultural, and political change in probably every country (Maclachen Reference Maclachen2011). Modern postal systems reach places and classes of people previously barely touched by the central state and the mainstream economy, penetrating more deeply into society than any other branch of government except the military. As a result, they, together with newspapers, have played a greater role than most institutions “in shaping the pattern of everyday life,” bringing “a steady flow of information on public affairs” to the towns and villages, and enabling ordinary people to “participate in national politics” (John Reference John2009, 4–13).

Both a postal culture and a print culture thrived in the qiaoxiang in the context of migration and the qiaopi system. However, they differed in nature from those theorized by Romani and Anderson, and they fall far short of the models of social practice the two authors put forward.

Regarding postal culture, the qiaopi trade's role in safeguarding affective family links led to greater literacy among the lower classes and to greater participation in the affairs of local society and the state by migrants and their dependents, including the women that stayed behind when the men migrated. In that sense, it fulfilled the conditions for a postal culture as set out by Romani and others. However, the qiaopi trade lacked essential features of a modern mail system, which in most countries forms a state monopoly and is internationally regulated and coordinated and run according to uniform principles. In fact, it was quite the opposite of such a system—it was private, unregulated, and variform. The Post Office did try to muscle into the qiaopi trade, but it usually failed, and efforts at domestic regulation of postal services were intermittent and restricted. The qiaopi trade was, all along, demarcated by “dialect” and region, and was further differentiated at subregional and subdialect levels. Qiaopi traders not only failed to develop a national dimension, they actively (and, for the most part, successfully) resisted nationalization, that is, the transformation of the remittance business into a monopolistic arm of the bureaucratic state, Chinese or (in diaspora) both Chinese and non-Chinese. That does not mean that the qiaopi trade was without national relevance, politically and—even more so—economically, or that it was not swept up in the great political mobilizations of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but it did not spawn a postal culture in the usual sense of the term. Nor, despite their commonality of political and economic interest, did the qiaopi traders ever fully overcome their deep segmentation along subethnic lines and achieve lasting unity as a profession.

Regarding print culture, the qiaoxiang experience throws up interesting questions for Anderson's theory. Partha Chatterjee (Reference Chatterjee1993, 5) has faulted the theory for implying that Europe and the Americas are history's only true subjects and that even the imaginings of colonial peoples “must remain forever colonized.” Radhika Desai (Reference Desai2009, 14) added to the criticism: colonial and semi-colonial (hereafter, Third World) countries need no sociology of nationalism because they were merely imitating, or “pirating,” prefabricated Western models of nationhood, or (in a later version of the thesis) for arguing that “the immediate genealogy [of these models] should be traced to the imaginings of the colonial state.” Either way, Anderson's theory is said to have rendered the study of Third World nationalism Eurocentric, and a Western construct (Desai Reference Desai2009).

It is important to note, in light of this debate, that an indigenous print culture thrived in the qiaoxiang in the context of migration and the qiaopi system. Migrant and community leaders in the villages and counties of the qiaoxiang produced a great quantity of qiaokan and mailed them to expatriates all over the world, to inform them of events at home and to encourage them to donate to local causes (Williams Reference Williams2003, 104). Wuyi in Guangdong was the main center of qiaokan publishing, though qiaokan also appeared in other qiaoxiang (Liu Jin Reference Jin2007, 33). Before 1949, more than 200 different qiaokan were published in Wuyi alone. Many were monthly, and some were fortnightly and even weekly. Nearly all were migrant-funded (Liu Jin Reference Jin2009, 75, 85; Mei and Mei Reference Weiqiang and Xue2007, 6).

These qiaokan included “newsletters, newspapers and magazines published by individuals, clans, schools, villages and government offices” in the qiaoxiang. According to an early report, four out of five were sent abroad (Liu Jin Reference Jin2007, 33). The first such, Xinning zazhi 新宁杂志 (Xinning magazine), appeared in Taishan in Guangdong in 1908. It was designed to meet the needs of migrants and their families and communities, by sustaining or reestablishing contact and exchanging information, particularly information about Taishan—its problems, developments, general news, and history (specified as “customs and traditions”). The qiaokan phenomenon peaked between 1910 and the early 1930s. In the late 1930s, new, more expressly political qiaokan arose to support the anti-Japanese movement and solicit donations to support national defense. Starting in 1945, most qiaokan resumed publication after a wartime gap. Only a minority survived the transition to Communist government in 1949. Those that survived played a role in attracting donations of food and materials and foreign currency remittances in the 1950s and early 1960s, before disappearing during the Cultural Revolution. They started reviving in 1978, when millions of copies were printed annually, but the government's hand was clear in the revival and the emphasis was on attracting capital investment (Huang and Godley Reference Huang, Godley, Douw, Huang and Godley1999, 313–19; Yao and Mei Reference Ting and Weiqiang2009).

The qiaokan were evidence of a vibrant local print culture in the qiaoxiang that strongly complemented the regional postal culture set going by the qiaopi trade. Qiaokan were a public counterpart to qiaopi, not private but communal, and have been called “collective family letters” by Chinese overseas (Huang and Godley Reference Huang, Godley, Douw, Huang and Godley1999, 317; Liu Jin Reference Jin2009, 75, 85). Indeed, qiaopi and other correspondence made up much of the contents of the qiaokan and village newsletters (Huang Annian Reference Annian2014). The qiaokan had a local or regional focus. Most served townships or lineages, although a few (like Xinning zazhi) appeared at the county level. However, during political crises they transcended particularism and made propaganda for the nation. So there is no clear dividing line between qiaokan and qiaopi culture on the one hand and a national orientation on the other.

Qiaopi traders backed the qiaokan financially, through donations and advertisements. Some 70 percent of advertisements in Xinning zazhi were placed by qiaopiju and other remittance firms (Hsu Reference Hsu2000). Yinhao 银号, qiaopiju, shanghao 商号, and other businesses active in the qiaopi trade handled the overseas dispatch of qiaokan and acted as agents for the publishers (Liu Jin Reference Jin2007, 33–34; Yao Reference Ting2011, 24).

Were these qiaokan evidence of Chinese copying in the qiaoxiang of Western print-culture, like the modern-style newspapers that started to proliferate in China and Chinatown in the nineteenth century? Almost certainly they were not. Unlike the newspapers, which were distributed publicly and regularly, most qiaokan were distributed privately and occasionally. A much likelier model for them was the centuries-old Chinese habit of producing local and genealogical records, the so-called jiapu 家谱 (family records), zupu 族谱 (lineage records), and zongpu 宗谱 (clan records),Footnote ⁵ as well as the fangzhi or difang zhi 地方志 (local gazetteers) that provided information at county level and above about local history, geography, society, and economy, and were designed to aid local government and promote local identity.Footnote ⁶ The qiaokan replicated the same divisions as these compilations among kinship organizations and between them and the county. Traditionally, most genealogies were produced by the wealthiest sector of society, one able to defray the costs of printing. They displayed and symbolized membership of a powerful family or kinship group, and their appearance often signaled the revival of formal kinship organization after a period of decrease. In some cases, the production of a genealogy “created the organized kinship group, rather than vice versa.” Genealogies were exclusively private: their role was to transmit family or lineage history, household or lineage instructions, and standards of moral propriety to future generations and to record glorious episodes in family or clan affairs. Urbanization and internal migration, far from weakening genealogy making, strengthened it (Meskill Reference Meskill, Chin and Freedman1970, 141–43).

The analogy between qiaokan on the one hand and jiapu, zupu, and fangzhi on the other has obvious limits. Jiapu and zupu were controlled, by definition, by single clans or branches of them, while many fangzhi were published by groups associated with local government or the broader community. These publications were not, in all cases, financed and produced in the same way as qiaokan, nor did they necessarily perform the same functions. However, the qiaokan phenomenon was multiform. Qiaokan operated at several levels in the qiaoxiang, from the county down to the village and the lineage, and some of their divisions corresponded to those of the older, kinship-based forms of local publication.

The link and commonality and the partial equivalence is reflected in the terminology used to describe some of the older migrant-linked publications. Names that reveal their role and provenance include xiangkan 乡刊 (village publication), zukan 族刊 (lineage publication), and xiangxun 乡讯 (village bulletin), as well as names that combined two variants, one “modern” and the other “traditional” (e.g., xiangkan xiangxun and qiaokan xiangxun) (Yao and Mei Reference Ting and Weiqiang2009, 1–5).

Contributors to qiaokan also recognized the affinity between qiaokan on the one hand and qiaopi and zupu on the other. We have already noted that qiaokan were sometimes pictured as “collective family letters.” A poem published in the inaugural issue of Yingchuan yuekan 颖川月刊 (Yingchuan monthly) in 1926 explicitly likened the qiaokan to a jiashu (family letter) or a zupu, in a metaphor (Mei and Guan Reference Weiqiang and Zefeng2010, 289). The two publishing traditions were therefore not only related but were experienced as such by practitioners, and continue to be seen to be related by Chinese historians and experts on the qiaopi phenomenon.

To understand this relationship, it is helpful to recall that premodern Chinese society richly documented its laws and institutions, and that this tradition sank deep into the villages (Chen Chunsheng Reference Chunsheng2004). Local communities recorded their activities and organizational statutes in genealogies and gazetteers. Local society along China's southeastern coast has, for centuries, been marked by its history of maritime trade and overseas migration. Local dependence on remittances shaped the local migrant culture. Although qiaokan differed in some respects from genealogies and fangzhi, they nevertheless remained part of local culture and society. The genealogies recorded the origins, ranking, branching, and famous people of a family or a lineage, and the history of its spread and development. Local gazetteers chronicled and recorded the history and circumstances of local communities, including local politics, the local economy, and local society and culture. The qiaopi that emigrants sent home created and nurtured an integrated transnational field that encompassed both emigrants and their kin in China, and helped preserve traditional ways in the daily lives of both groups.

Compiling genealogies and local histories, was, by tradition, the work of members of the local gentry, who had the requisite skills and financial and social resources to do this work. In the qiaoxiang, transnational migrant entrepreneurs often played the same role, in many respects, as the traditional gentry in previous periods in conducting local affairs and public administration (Chen Chunsheng Reference Chunsheng2005, 334–48), either by remote control from overseas or after remigrating. They also contributed to compiling and publishing qiaokan, to give textual expression to the social affairs of the diaspora and its home communities.

Some qiaokan (like Xinning zazhi) were published in China, while others were published overseas (Wu Hongli Reference Yixiang1949; Xinjiapo Shunde Tongxiang Hui Reference Hui1948). Principally, they reported on Chinese social, political, and cultural affairs at either end of the migration chain, conceived as a single field. Qiaopi reflected family and lineage affairs, including house-buying or house-building, weddings and marriages, and lineage financial and other interests: qiaokan reflected local and national affairs, including changes in the political situation and state decrees. Like genealogies and gazetteers, qiaokan reflected the relationship in traditional Chinese local society between the state, the locality, the lineage, and the family. Because of emigration, local society in the southeastern coastal region was transnational: it straddled the qiaoxiang and regions of Chinese settlement overseas, so its cultural traditions were reflected both in qiaopi and qiaokan and in genealogies and gazetteers. For example, the Chaozhou zhi, a gazetteer compiled by Jao Tsung-i, contained a special section on the qiaopi trade (Rao [Jao] Reference Zongyi1965, 870–71). Most genealogies in the qiaoxiang listed the names of family or lineage members overseas. For example, the second son of Singapore's famous Chaoshan trader Lim Nee Soon 林义顺 was born in Singapore but is described in detail in the lineage genealogy of his ancestral home in Chenghai, Guangdong Province (Ke Reference Mulin1991).

In the qiaoxiang, ordinary people's everyday affairs extended overseas but remained rooted in native places. The overseas segment and the non-migrant segment existed, for the migrant generation and its dependents, as two parts of an indivisible whole. Together, they continued (at least for a while) to maintain the original social order and tradition, a dynamic in which qiaopi and qiaokan played a key role. Qiaopi cemented the tie between family and lineage, and ensured the preservation of kinship institutions and local community.Footnote ⁷ Qiaokan, on the other hand, helped preserve state institutions and local authority, and their contents reflected national or local political, economic, and social matters. By means of qiaokan, emigrants stayed in close touch with the situation in China, both local and national, and were able to participate in the construction and maintenance of the social order in China and in their native places.

Chinese researchers wanting to explore the transnational society that straddled the qiaoxiang and the emigrant community therefore resort to a variety of sources and publications. Many, in studying migrant families and lineages, use zupu and qiaokan as complementary sources, to obtain a rounded picture of the kinship system (Yuan Reference Xingyan2010). Family genealogies, lineage genealogies, local gazetteers, qiaopi, and qiaokan were all products of a similar set of social and historical circumstances. When exploring the tie between diaspora and native place and its attendant publications, it is impossible to draw a clear line between “traditional” and “modern.”

So the emergence of qiaokan in the early twentieth century is consonant and congruent with existing traditions of local publishing. To produce a qiaokan signaled a family, lineage, or community's achievement of wealth and power, under the special circumstances of emigration, or the elevation of a qiaoxiang county to higher status as a result of emigration and remittance. Like the old-style genealogies, qiaokan could signal or speed the further incorporation of an agnatic group newly enriched by qiaopi. They were distributed free, by mail in the case of overseas subscribers (Yao and Mei Reference Ting and Weiqiang2009, 6), to anyone qualified to receive them. They were a response to emigration, and a mechanism to prevent the severing of the link between migrants and the local society they had left behind. Just like the qiaopi trade, the emergence of qiaokan in the early twentieth century represented a creative adaptation to new circumstances overseas of an indigenous tradition.

Abroad, the qiaopi trade had close connections with the new-style, modern press that grew up alongside it, as one of the “three pillars” of overseas-Chinese society, alongside associations and schools. Between 1815, when a Chinese newspaper is said to have appeared for the first time outside China (in Malacca), and 1996, at least 4,000 Chinese periodicals were published Chinese and Chinese and other languages in fifty-two countries and territories, alongside at least another 200 published by Chinese in languages other than Chinese (Benton and Gomez Reference Benton and Gomez2008, 192–93). In Thailand, the first Chinese-language daily was founded in 1903, and in later years sixty-five others followed. This press developed more or less hand-in-hand with the qiaopiju system in its heyday, and each played a huge role in promoting the other, largely through advertisements placed by qiaopiju owners out to recruit customers and reports on the trade by journalists. The owners used the press to announce their removal to new premises (which happened frequently, as a result of expansion and shop fires), special offers, new regulations imposed either by the Chinese or the Thai authorities, new currency arrangements, closures, and openings. During the early years of the Sino-Japanese War, they used the newspapers to warn Chinese about Japanese attempts to gain control of the lucrative remittance trade (Cai and Xu Reference Jinhe and Guanghua2014).

Some qiaokan, like Xinning zazhi, started out in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a response to China's humiliating military defeat by Japan in 1895 and the failure of the reform movement of 1898. They subscribed, at first, to a common national discourse, and in that sense confirmed the thesis of “print capitalism,” at least in certain phases. During political crises, the qiaokan transcended particularism and made propaganda for the nation. So there was no clear and permanent dividing line between qiaokan and qiaopi culture on the one hand and a national orientation on the other. However, the journals’ main purpose was to meet the needs of migrants and their families and communities by sustaining contact and exchanging local information. They enabled migrants, returned migrants, and the homebound to swap news “as they had when they attended the same marketplaces” back in China (Hsu Reference Hsu2000, 313).

In her study on qiaokan, Madeline Hsu mentions Anderson's idea of “print capitalism” and notes, in a footnote, that his comments about “the role of ‘print capitalism’ in making it ‘possible to “think” the nation’ shed light on the role of qiaokan in the dispersed community of Taishan” (Hsu Reference Hsu2000, 312n11). However, there are clear limits to the analogy, which her study illustrates. Whereas Anderson sees nations in the Third World as prefabricated copies of Western models, Hsu concludes that the “imagined community” supposedly constructed by the printing press is harder to nurture than one founded on existing allegiances, “as in the case of communities defined by native-place” (Hsu Reference Hsu2000, 326). Most qiaokan were parochial publications with a local or regional focus. The main concern of Xinning zazhi, for example, was to build a “better Taishan.” Although this aim did not conflict with the wish for a better China, national politics were not the raison d’être of the genre or even its abiding focus.

Xinning zazhi, which started out more committed than most qiaokan to the idea of building a stronger China, lost its overt political orientation after the fall of the Qing and was absorbed into county politics. It continued for a while as a sort of “village newspaper,” until its later cooption into state politics by the Guomindang, which forced qiaokan to publicize its policies and plans. This political bullying alienated American Taishanese, who (according to Hsu Reference Hsu2000, 325) chose “loyalty to their county over the Guomindang's calls for nationalism.” Only the looming threat of a Japanese invasion of China revived their attention to national politics. In the late 1930s, new, more expressly political qiaokan arose to support the anti-Japanese movement and solicit donations to support national defense. However, migrants’ attention to China's national affairs eventually waned yet again as their and their descendants’ focus switched to overseas. With the further passage of time, and the changes wrought by war, even the native-place ties frayed (Hsu Reference Hsu2000, 328).

Starting in 1945, most qiaokan resumed publication after a wartime gap. Only a minority survived the transition to the Communist government in 1949. Those that survived played a role in attracting donations of food and materials and foreign currency remittances in the 1950s and early 1960s, before disappearing during the Cultural Revolution. They started reviving in 1978, when millions of copies were printed annually, but the government's hand was clear in the revival and the emphasis was on attracting capital investment (Huang and Godley Reference Huang, Godley, Douw, Huang and Godley1999, 313–19; Yao and Mei Reference Ting and Weiqiang2009).

Capitalism and the Qiaopi Trade

Harris (Reference Harris2015, 146) views the qiaopi trade not as “a distinctive form of Chinese capitalism” but as a “transnational laissez-faire capitalism” that engaged in capitalist profit-making strategies while pioneering “a host of new cultural customer services” that its state-run rivals found impossible to replicate. In Fujian and Guangdong, on the other hand, most scholars see the trade as deeply and inextricably embedded in tradition and its associated forms of trust, which defined relations between the qiaopiju and the remitter and recipient, between the qiaopiju and the hostels or shanghao that it used as part of the process of remitting, and among the qiaopiju. When a modern banking system and modern postal services emerged in China and in Chinese migrants’ overseas destinations, qiaopi traders took advantage of the strong points of these institutions and, where it was profitable to do, entered into or initiated legally defined trust relations with them, while taking care to adapt their new-style practices to local social conditions in the qiaoxiang and the diaspora. From these interactions there emerged a new synthetic system that hybridized ancient and modern forms of trust, the one in personam, the other in rem, the one rooted in social relations, the other in the market. However, the former remained primary throughout.

The qiaopi trade was further defined by its strictly and exclusively regional nature, its “richness in human feeling,” and its professional diffuseness and multiformity. Its regionalism was broadly drawn in the case of the bigger qiaopiju but sometimes exercised on the narrowest of scales, for transgressing its regional limits reduced the intensity of the trust necessary for the transaction. “Richness in human feeling” at first infused the entire qiaopi and huipi process, and even after the resort to banks and the Post Office to supplement the middle stage of transmission, from abroad to China and vice versa, receipt and delivery retained that element of intimacy and fellow-feeling. Its multiformity—its engagement in many interlinked forms of business and social action—underlay its extensive embeddedness in Chinese and ethnic-Chinese society and its intersecting, interlocking, and overlapping social and business networks, both regional and transnational.

Chinese economic culture is often reduced in the literature to a single national stereotype rooted in Confucian ideas about Chinese society, which supposedly could be jolted into the modern world only by exogenous shocks. However, studies on the qiaopi trade have started to rewrite the history and geography of the Chinese passage into modernism. This rewriting, which resurrects old ideas about the special nature of China's southeastern littoral, is closely connected with new trends in regional politics, now tolerated by a political system formerly more interested in homogeny than distinctions.

This rewriting would have been impossible but for changes in China's national politics. China's political culture and economic system are no longer as rigidly centralized as they once were, and they were never as centralized as in the Soviet Union. Regional differences and political cultures were never entirely wiped out by the revolution that brought the Communists to power in 1949, and some new ones formed as a result of it, particularly in the southeastern provinces, which had their own revolutionary factions and traditions. Since the post-Mao reforms, regional differentiation has deepened, as power in the national economy and political system is increasingly transferred downwards. Local and regional fortes are now pridefully declared rather than discreetly hidden. Different regions excel in different ways, and a strong suit of the southeast is its history of emigration. This is a particularly useful distinction in an age when China is expanding into ever more overseas markets, one that regional leaders can use to strengthen their hand in the country's national and provincial councils. The emergence of qiaopi studies since the early 1990s must be understood in the context of this regionalization of historiography as well as politics and economics. Moreover, the recent revival of the case for Fujianese and Cantonese exceptionalism posits an explanation for the rise of the qiaopi trade other than that of capture into the orbit of modern capitalism.Footnote ⁸ As economic, administrative, and political decision-making in China becomes increasingly devolved and as old regional politics starts to regain traction and new political identities begin to emerge, the history of the qiaopi trade is woven into China's budding polycentric politics.

Historians of the qiaoxiang of Guangdong and Fujian vaunt the special character they claim centuries of overseas navigation and emigration have stamped on the two provinces. Like other regions and nations worldwide from which large numbers of people have left to go overseas, the tradition of venturing abroad to make a living has, according to their analysis, made sectors of the Cantonese and Fujianese population and culture outward-looking rather than narrowly focused on the landside. Qiaopi historians have resurrected from Hegel (a philosopher with whom they are probably familiar through Marx) the separation of the world into the potamic (rivers), the thalassic (inland seas), and the oceanic (categories he borrowed from the philosophical geography of Carl Schmitt), corresponding to Asia, Europe, and England and America (or to ancient, middle, and modern). According to Hegel ([1821] Reference Hegel and Wood1991, 268–69), nations (like China) that shun navigation do not know freedom and sink into stagnation and superstition, whereas sea peoples are creative and industrious and without limits, like the ocean, a “free element.” They are wise, brave, and transcendent rather than closed and conservative (Zheng Reference Youguo2013).

Qiaopi historians extend this division into coastal and noncoastal cultures to China. Pace Hegel, who saw China as “the realm of theocratic despotism” (Hegel [1837] Reference Hegel and Alvarado2011, 102), they argue that China had its oceanic culture in the past and must now reclaim it, and they imply that sea-facing regions never lost it. One study describes China's southern peoples as “an ethnic group with oceanic characteristics,” imbued with “oceanic civilisation” (Su and Huang Reference Wenjing and Qinghai2013, 40). In applying these labels, historians implicitly assert the superiority over other parts of the country of the seaward southeast, especially Fujian, locked off until recently from the Chinese hinterland by high mountains with few passes, and also of Guangdong, furthest away from the stagnant and corrupting culture of China's landlocked heartland.

According to the newly revived regional lore, the southern Fujianese are courageous and heroic, a disposition that led Fujian's Han pioneers hundreds of years ago to climb into the region across perilous peaks. Their spirit is “daring and adventurous … and thick with sea culture” (Wu Hongli Reference Hongli and Weizhong2008, 367). The Chinese of southern Fujian are sometimes called the “Jews of China” or of Asia, a moniker scholars of the region accept with pride.Footnote ⁹ As for the qiaopi managers, they were “Robinson Crusoe-style ocean heroes” (Su and Huang Reference Wenjing and Qinghai2013, 40). This focus on enterprise and expansion chimes with China's current national initiative to establish a “new silk road” to the West, but whereas Beijing's main official emphasis is on reviving the northern route across Central Asia, strategists in the southeast talk about reviving the “maritime silk road” or “silk road on water,” of which the qiaopi trade was an essential part (Rana and Chia Reference Rana and Chia2014).

However, these historians also argue that the oceanic tradition of Fujian and Guangdong is no mere replica of foreign models but (like Deng Xiaoping's socialism) has Chinese characteristics. It is, in their imagining, a synthesis of China's Central Plains culture, which the pioneers brought south, Fujian's pre-Han indigenous culture, and oceanic culture. The impulse to sail the world and form communities abroad broke a major taboo of Chinese culture, that one must on no account “go roaming while one's parents are alive,” but it did not lead in China to a severing of the homeland tie. In that regard, China's heroes were quite unlike the “British ocean hero.” They fulfilled humanity's “eternal wish” to conquer nature, but at the same time they recognized their responsibility to their ancestors and kith and kin. Indeed, it was attachment to the family that led them to go overseas in the first place, as the family's representatives. Foreign exploration strengthened rather than weakened the tie, because of the lineage system, Chinese people's native-place orientation, and the control of emigration by senior kin, who kept the womenfolk at home. The qiaopi was a main link in this chain.

The oceanic attribution is based on the unusual history of the southeastern provinces, whose inhabitants are known to have been trading and settling overseas as early as the Tang (618–907) (Ma Reference Chujian and Weizhong2008, 20), even more so after the southward refocusing of the Chinese economy in the Southern Song (1127–1279) (Wang Weizhong Reference Weizhong2007, 4). In the Ming and Qing, ports in both southern Fujian and eastern Guangdong were at times officially thrown open to trade, private and public, with the Philippines and Thailand. Local merchants sailed around the whole of Southeast Asia and covered it with an ever growing and ever more diverse network of transnational operations (Chen Xunxian Reference Xunxian and Weizhong2010, 183–86). When “sea bans” were imposed by the court, to curb piracy and prevent the emergence of self-sufficient coastal economies, they flouted them, and “the four oceans became their home” (Luo Reference Zeyang and Weizhong2004, 208–10). The “ocean economy” thrived most, in the premodern period, in the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries, when Chinese merchants competed successfully with European traders in Southeast Asia, even in periods when the Chinese court “disowned” them. However, it continued to influence the thinking and outlook of merchants in southern China until modern times (Zhang Linyou Reference Linyou2014, 226–27).

Historians of the qiaopi trade claim that the extent of private trade in the region led to the creation of a culture that did not relegate merchants to the despised fourth class in the traditional division of society into scholars, farmers, artisans, and merchants usually observed in China but even admired them (Wu Hongli Reference Hongli and Weizhong2008, 362). Jao Tsung-i, the main exponent of the special nature of the region, has argued that Chaozhou's merchant culture “led the way” in the region's history of overseas exploration and was at the same time “a product of a seaborne yangwu 洋务 culture” (Chen Xunxian Reference Xunxian and Weizhong2008, 168).Footnote ¹⁰

So qiaopi scholarship suggests a different pedigree for the qiaopi trade than one of lateral assimilation into modern capitalism as a result of technological developments. Instead, its roots and strength lay in centuries of Chinese enterprise in Fujian and Guangdong, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific, where migrant traders and, in some cases, their locally born descendants mobilized cultural capital and their cultural and familial affinities in the ancestral homeland to run their businesses. Despite its apparent “traditionalism,” the qiaopi phenomenon enabled Chinese entrepreneurs to compete successfully for more than a century with modern state-run banks and postal services both in China and overseas. The mobilizations in support of qiaopi institutions in the face of government attacks on the trade in China, Singapore, Thailand, and elsewhere were part of a national and transnational (or diasporic) awakening of Chinese migrants. Although primarily economic, they also had great political potential, as well as the deeply emotional connotation of maintaining the tie to hearth and home.Footnote ¹¹ They not only reinforced the migrants’ national identity but created a new sense of diasporic unity by fixing on an issue Chinese migrants everywhere jointly faced. They were matched in vigor and extent only by the anti-Japanese mobilizations of Chinese in Southeast Asia in the 1930s. Moreover, the transnational ties and identity they created were a basis upon which and a template for these anti-Japanese transnational movements, which took off among Chinese across Southeast Asia in the 1930s and 1940s (Chen Liyuan Reference Liyuan and Weizhong2010). Chinese immigrants’ linkages with China through qiaopi and the qiaopi trade reaffirm, methodologically, the importance of approaching the Chinese diaspora as “a series of moments in which reconnections with a putative homeland take place” (Chan Reference Chan2015).

To conclude, these findings show, yet again, that there is not just “one modernity” or “vision of modernization,” and suggest that the path to modernity outside Europe is not a repetition of “modular” forms first generated by Europeans and Americans or a process of convergence with them (Eisenstadt Reference Eisenstadt2000; Eisenstadt and Schluchter Reference Eisenstadt and Schluchter1998). Although the qiaopi trade intersected and interacted with Western forms of economic organization and profit-making and qiaopi traders often copied new Western technologies to develop their businesses transnationally, they appropriated these technologies creatively, on the basis of structural, cultural, and institutional premises and in settings shaped by Chinese regional and national histories and traditions. This process of adaptation and selective appropriation generated a new national and transnational dynamic that has features in common with other modern societies but also draws strongly on China's internal cultural and institutional resources.