The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas [Hardcover]

Lynn Pan (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0674252101 | ISBN-13: 978-0674252103 | Edition: 1st Ed.

The first of its kind, this book offers a panoramic view of past and present overseas Chinese communities worldwide. From their arrival as laborers in the British colonies to their emergence as a force in Indonesia, Chinese emigrants have carried the experiences of China to other continents and civilizations, in the process modifying and enriching them. The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas reflects the diverse histories and traditions that produced this diaspora, as well as the rich and various transmutations it has produced in turn.

Arranged geographically and thematically, with country-by-country profiles of individual Chinese communities, the book includes sections on the regional and cultural origins of emigrant communities; the history and patterns of migration; social, familial, and business institutions; and interethnic relations. An invaluable reference, it is as accessible as it is authoritative, highly readable from beginning to end. The engaging design employs boxed features, maps, graphs, tables, and a vast array of pictures to make complex material remarkably clear and vivid. A glossary identifies Chinese proper names and terms with their characters, while the bibliography gives full references to Chinese, English, French, and Spanish works.

Comprising signed articles by 50 noted scholars in Asia, North America, Europe (including Russia), Australia, and Africa, with a large advisory panel of eminent experts, the Encyclopedia is an unparalleled resource, providing an unprecedented view of one of the world's largest, oldest, and most varied cultures abroad.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

For many centuries, Chinese people have been emigrating and creating distinctively Chinese communities outside mainland China, even as they adjust to the foreign cultures in which they put down roots. A third-generation huaqiao, overseas Chinese, in Los Angeles is a very different person from one in, say, Manila, yet they share a heritage that may have molded their diverse experiences in similar ways. This book provides everything one could want to know about the Chinese diaspora in a very user-friendly way. Though encyclopedic in its wide-ranging detail, the information is not presented in encyclopedic form. First, essays analyze the origins of the overseas Chinese, their migrations, institutions, and relations with the motherland and with non-Chinese peoples. The rest of the book, more than half, is devoted to outlines of Chinese societies around the world: in Southeast Asia, the Americas, Australasia, Europe, East Asia, the Indian Ocean, and Africa. Maps, charts, drawings, and imaginatively chosen vintage and contemporary photographs describe the Chinese communities established in these disparate places. Questions of racial discrimination and identity in the modern world are approached rationally and dispassionately. A vast amount of history and social analysis is presented, yet editor Lynn Pan has maintained unusual clarity and accessibility in a book that could have been overwhelming in its thoroughness. --John Stevenson

From the Back Cover

A valuable and-particularly for an encyclopedia-very readable work. Its unique strength is that half of it is made up of very substantial narrative, descriptive, and analytical chapters of different facets of the lives of Chinese overseas. The editor has succeeded remarkably in combining high standards of scholarship with an extremely readable style of exposition.-Prasenjit Duara, University of Chicago

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press; 1st Ed. edition (April 30, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674252101
• ISBN-13: 978-0674252103
• Product Dimensions: 11.4 x 9.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,786,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good book, but poor coverage of Asian business, April 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Hardcover)

This meticulously researched book is a must read for understanding the Overseas Chinese community in Asia. But despite their economic dominance of the region, the role of the Overseas Chinese in business is very poorly covered in this encyclopedia and almost leaves you feeling that this role has never been analyzed. I recommend that readers supplement this book with a balanced book on the Overseas Chinese in business: Having just finished "New Asian Emperors: The Overseas Chinese, their Strategies and Competitive Advantages" by George T. Haley et al., I see both books as essential to understanding the role of the Overseas Chinese community as both cover the same area from different, though extremely well-researched perspectives.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Celebration of Heritage or Ethnic Triumphalism?, September 25, 2002

By 

Christopher Fung (honolulu) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Hardcover)

This is a good first reference book for those who wish for a single-volume overview of the Chinese Diaspora. However, there are a number of disturbing issues about this book which need to be brought up if the spirit of enquiry is to be preserved.

First the good points: This is the only volume which summarizes the huge diversity of experience of the Chinese diaspora, and while the volume refuses to use the term (something I will come to later), most of us outside the rabid cultural nationalist camp see very little wrong with using it (it's certainly more convenient then "The Chinese Overseas" - overseas from where? one might ask, are Taiwan and Hongkong somehow magically connected to the mainland by invisible strips of earth that only Pan and her collaborators can see?).

The introductory material presents a solid treatment of "traditional" Chinese culture at the turn of the 20th century and gives a useful overview of some of the important ideas in thinking about or studying the diaspora. There are also some good individual chapters on the various "Overseas Chinese" communities. As a non-specialist in Southeast Asia, I was most impressed with the coverage there, but there were useful contributions on Europe, Australasia and North America too. The treatment of Chinese in the Pacific Islands was a little brief, as were the sections on the Caribbean and Latin America. Had Evelyn Hu-DeHart been given a little more space, she would have been able to do her subject matter much more justice.

Now to the problems: Pan's volume begins with the premise that each of these Diasporan Chinese communities shares something called a Chinese Identity. This is in turn related to a model of Chineseness that is dominated by historical (and genetic) factors. No serious attention (with a small number of individual exceptions) is really paid to the ways in which Chinese communities and in particular, the post-World War 2 generations in these places have changed except to invoke "assimilation" in a thoroughly simplistic fashion.

No mention is made of the roles played by Asian Americans (and Chinese Americans in particular) as gate keepers in maintaining North American systems of racial privilege. Nor are the difficult relationships between Chinese and Malays or Chinese-Jamaicans and Afro-Jamaicans given much attention.

The definitional boundaries utilized by dominant interests within ethnic Chinese communities are often unproblematized so that (for example) the Chinese men who married Maori women in New Zealand and the descendants of those marriages disappear from the "Chinese" community as do many of those who married white people.

Rather than examining these points of fragmentation and conflict, the volume instead focusses on the increasing prosperity of certain segments of Diasporan communities. This coupled with the absence of much in the way of critical analysis tends to produce an overall effect of triumphalism and simple-minded praising of the self-made man ideology which is so dear to the hearts of capitalists and model minorities everywhere.

Such an emphasis is to be expected perhaps in a volume commissioned by the Chinese Heritage Center in Singapore, a body set up to promote Lee Kwan Yew's idolization of Confucian family values as the corner-stone of Singaporean Chinese identity and prosperity. This is one reason perhaps why the editors shied away from using the word "Diaspora" with its intimations of permanent rupture, preferring instead a title which asserts the centrality of "China" as a location and as an idea despite the increasingly disputed and diverse nature of the communities it claims to represent.

In summary, I would say "Buy this book but be aware of its limitations." It's not a book I would rely on for anything more than an introduction to a very complex and dynamic situation.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What an overview of the impact of Chinese immigration, March 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas (Hardcover)

Congratulations to the Chinese Heritage Centre for their courage, perserverance and satisfaction in publishing the first comprehensive view of Chinese migrants over the last 200 years or so. This book assembles the many of the puzzling pieces of the Chinese mosaic. Each country's contributor/researcher/academic presented their views on the Chinese communities. Overall accurate but some contributors negative views influenced their contributions. As a 3rd generation Overseas Chinese I would have appreciated if the local communities or societies had been invited to present their views.