Taking a long and broad historical view, Steven B. Miles examines what he describes as a continuous history of Han Chinese migration within and beyond China since the sixteenth century. He finds that up until the nineteenth century, Chinese migration was concurrent with Chinese territorial state migration. By taking issue with the way historians of Chinese migration have, in his view, excluded “internal migration,” Miles argues that the field has overlooked parallels and connections between “internal” and “external” migration.
This seems to be a call for a China-centered approach to the history of Chinese migration and diaspora. Given that Chinese state borders changed over time, it was not clear how migration to Manchuria or Taiwan should be counted. Miles is right in pointing out this problem. In the introduction to Chinese Diasporas, Miles tries to summarize the debates over “diaspora” as a term or label used for Chinese overseas and follows what I understand to be my mapping of the debates, as well as a broader discussion in the field about migration history as global history, but he also departs from it.Footnote 1 He calls for a more cautious, limited use of “diaspora” because collective trauma and separation from the homeland “[doe] not apply to Chinese migrants” (p. 11). Rather than focusing on how diaspora can be a method to study and critique the writing of national history, Miles thinks that “diasporas,” the plural form, can be used instead to avoid notions of a monolithic, bounded entity. This leaves me wondering whether this inadvertently contributes to an infinite expansion of “diaspora,” which does not help the cause of limiting its use.
The book offers great insights into premodern Chinese history but also articulates dynamics that are well known to historians of Chinese migration. For instance, Wang Gungwu has pointed out how Han migration began with the expansion of early Chinese empires. Migration as a family-level decision and the ways in which native-place networks played an important role are well recognized in both earlier and current scholarship, such as that by Bryna Goodman, Emily Honig, Philip Kuhn, and Adam McKeown. There are some missed opportunities, it seems, for excluding state-organized migration and non-Han migration. What remains important and interesting, however, is Miles's attention to the different merchant diasporas in the Ming and Qing periods, such as the Huizhou merchants who engaged in the salt trade, itself a movement interconnected with the influx of silver. This shows how local Chinese history was also part of global history. What was internal or external not only changed over time but was highly fluid at certain times.
Organizationally, Chinese Diasporas devotes its first two chapters to the periods 1500–1700 and 1740–1840, outlining the patterns of Han Chinese migration, state expansion, and merchant diasporas. The remaining five chapters explore modern migration, but, by Miles's definition, they largely focus on “external” movements. One of the chapters returns attention to the domestic situation, particularly the floating population and new migration since the 1980s. The last main chapter is a richly detailed discussion about the current variety of Chinese movements, from international students to elite investors to “study mothers.” Miles makes the important point that China should not be reduced to a “push factor” but is capable of generating many types of actors.
The book brings much-needed attention to the gaps in the scholarly understanding of Chinese migration in all of its forms. However, “external” migration still dominates most of the book's contents, suggesting how much more still needs to be done. In final consideration, I also wonder about the usefulness of a stark internal-external divide. Perhaps Miles's criticism that scholars of Chinese overseas and Chinese migration do not study “internal” migration enough could be extended to historians of China in general. As the question of networks, circulations, and family and native-place ties, all of which are common to many scholars of migration, enters “mainstream” conversations, how may we see “China” and “diaspora” in new ways?
