Dear China

Book excerpt: 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.