Abstract
In this essay I will introduce and examine recent important works on the history of overseas Chinese and through them I will reassess several major conclusions of scholarship on the regional relationship between Southeast Asia and East Asia. An overview of the field yields three salient characteristics. First, whether the unit of analysis was Southeast Asia or East Asia, groups of countries or nation-states, the scholarship subsumed the migration of overseas Chinese between regions under the country-to-country connection. Second, scholars tried to examine and to define overseas Chinese as those exhibiting so-called core values of Chinese traditional culture, but they did not include social voluntarily activities, inter-regional and global networks, and other vital aspects, especially multilateral local-local, region-region, and local-global networks. Third, the overseas Chinese were treated mainly as a political issue between governments and the migrant Chinese communities, notably as a factor in nation-state building.
Through a reexamination of these conclusions, I shall treat inter-regional relations between Southeast Asia and East Asia as regional networks of overseas Chinese surrounding the South and East China Sea, and I will raise several issues for further investigation in overseas Chinese history studies in Japan, particularly patterns of migration and networks between Southeast Asia and East Asia.
