Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820-1980

Kelvin E.Y. Low of the National University of Singapore reviews Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820-1980 by Benton Gregor & Liu Hong. In this book, the authors explore the characteristics and transformations of qiaopi, one of several names given to the “silver letters” Chinese emigrants sent home in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These letters-cum-remittances document the changing history of the Chinese diaspora in different parts of the world and in different times. They show how such institutionalized and cross-national mechanisms helped sustain families separated by distance and state frontiers and contributed to the sending regions’ socio-economic development. Dear China contributes substantially to our understanding of modern Chinese history and to the comparative study of global migration.

Read the book review at https://doi.org/10.1177/0197918319855063.