Available From UC Press

Qiaopi is 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.

Dear China is the first book-length study in English of qiaopi and of the origins, structure, and operations of the qiaopi trade. The authors explore the characteristics and transformations of qiaopi, showing how such institutionalized and cross-national mechanisms helped sustain families separated by distance and state frontiers and contributed to the sending regions’ socioeconomic development. Dear China contributes substantially to our understanding of modern Chinese history and to the comparative study of global migration.

Gregor Benton is Emeritus Professor at Cardiff University. His books include Mountain Fires: The Red Army’s Three-Year War in South China and The Qiaopi Trade and Transnational Networks in the Chinese Diaspora (coedited with Hong Liu and Huimei Zhang).
 
Hong Liu is Tan Kah Kee Endowed Professor of Asian Studies and Chair of School of Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. His publications include China and the Shaping of Indonesia, 1949–1965 and Singapore Chinese Society in Transition.

"Dear China is the first and only book of its kind in the English language, and its excellent evidence-based and source-driven scholarship will form the benchmark for all future English-language studies on the qiaopi trade."—Glen Peterson, author of Overseas Chinese in the People's Republic of China
"In Gregor Benton and Hong Liu’s new volume, the materials and references alone will open up new venues for us to rethink and trace the routes, legal and illegal, of Chinese migration worldwide. Dear China is one of the most significant contributions in the field in twenty years."—Jing Tsu, author of Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora