Chinese の国際移動と国際秩序

歴史、現在、未来

抄録

Although globalization seems to be the most appropriate word to explain and understand the background and history of international Chinese migration, at the same time we need to pay attention to the various active tendencies of local and regional migration networks of overseas Chinese with inter-regional and internal home-remittance networks. In other words, we can say that the period of the nation-state and nationalism has greatly changed in recent decades and the traditional world order and world view based mainly on the nation-state has begun to be replaced by a multilayered and multilateral view of a changing world formed of global, regional, national and local levels.
In the nineteenth century, Chinese international migration mainly consisted of the “coolie trade” due to the lack of laborers in Western countries and Western-owned colonies.
Following the “coolie migration” period, the imperial regime started at around the turn of the century. During this period, overseas Chinese international migration was organized and controlled by regionally divided world powers, and overseas Chinese migration in particular was organized and influenced mostly by the British Empire. In addition to movement of laborers, overseas Chinese merchants joined in the wider economic activities such as shipping, insurance, trade and finance.
In Asia, interregional relations between East Asia and Southeast Asia played an important role as a wider regional financial system with Hong Kong and Singapore as intermediary centers.
Hence, international migration of overseas Chinese was influenced, organized and controlled mostly by “outside” factors such as economic and political changes. However, at the same time, private home-remittance networks by overseas Chinese also developed from within. These were private networks between Southeast Asia and South China and created a different basis for encouraging and managing the international migration of overseas Chinese. Home-remittance networks are a basic element of international migration networks and it is likely that more attention will be paid in the future to these private interregional and internal relations as a basis of the communal realm in the extended networks of local societies in Asia.