Most places that lose their people to emigration never build institutions to bring them back. Jiangmen did — and what it built is not a slogan but a paper chain with dates.
A clause in Chapter 8 of the 2019 Greater Bay Area development plan supports building an overseas-Chinese cultural-exchange-and-cooperation important platform (华侨华人文化交流合作重要平台, Huáqiáo Huárén…
qiaoxiang
A village with no land, and one export
On the western shore of the Pearl River estuary, roughly thirty kilometres north of Macau, sits a village that never had enough ground to feed itself. Cuiheng Village (翠亨村, Cuìhēng Cūn) held about sixty households and around ten surnames in the 1860s. The soil was thin and…
Duanfen, Taishan: The Emigrant Town That Built a School
In the first decade of the twentieth century, when most of the able-bodied men of inland Taishan were already leaving for the Americas, one township put the money they sent home into classrooms before it put it into anything else. The town was Duanfen (端芬镇, Duānfēn…
Chonglou, Taishan: A Village and Its Diaspora
Two Chonglous on the Same Map
Chonglou, in Taishan (台山), was never one town — by its own count it has long been two: a town of the staying and a town of the leaving, so evenly split that local people describe the place as 两个冲蒌 (liǎng gè…
Between 1840 and 1940, the Siyi (四邑) region of Guangdong sent over two million people overseas — one of the largest sustained migrations in modern history. Taishan alone contributed an estimated 1.3 million emigrants, hollowing out villages and transforming local society into a qiaoxiang (侨乡) — an emigrant homeland dependent on remittances and defined by…
In 1931, at the peak of overseas Chinese remittances to Taishan, ten surname groups pooled their Gold Mountain earnings to build something unprecedented — a 108-building arcaded market town on the banks of the Datong River. The Mei clan held the largest stake, but the Qiu, Cao, Jiang, Liu (刘), Huang (黄), Chen, Li, Tan,…
A tower stands alone in a rice paddy near a river called Baisha. Its reinforced concrete walls face west — toward America. It was built with money sent from a laundry in San Francisco by a man — call him Zhang — who left his village in 1902. He never saw the tower finished. He…