Every country has its share of immigration, and the China is no exception. Due to multiple reasons people abandon their country, seeking their fortune abroad. Everyone might have one’s own ideas of what to search behind the borders of their own country, but despite the historically proved eagerness of Chinese people to live China, the real cause is still to be viewed.
An emigrational aspect of the Chinese was being overlooked so many times not without a reason. One of the first Chinese experiences of resettling people was forcible moving of prominent families throughout the empire to distant cities. It was done for making sacrifices and maintaining the imperial tombs. Due to such factors as shipping routes, trade patterns and other people of China was either pulled to some places abroad or pushed out of their country in large quantities. Only in a period of the second half of nineteenth-century records show an approximate amount of 300,000 immigrants from China entering the United States (Batalova, Hooper, 2015). As for the present reasons, just to compare, they are infrastructure improvements, political reforms, education (Carlson, 2012).
Europe made its own impact on the migration. When Chinese people were confident enough with foreigners, new paths of colonization were opened. Especially willing were people, to whom agriculture, the common way of Chinese living, was not an option. But here we see ambivalence towards the migrating people. Europeans needed this free labor force, but they had fear also. So the Chinese, being out of their country, were often courted, punished and executed. The times when Europe literally controlled China exacerbated the attitude. A bright example is the Philippines, where “carrot policy” was mixed with “stick policy”.
The mentioned here are not all the examples of how the Chines migration was carried out. Yet, it is enough to see that it had a compulsory feature as a significant part of it. Later we read that, considering the past experience of travelers, every Asian family sends abroad only those who are strong enough to survive the challenge, which was a migration for them. And here we meet the word “diaspora”, as a system of living, which was created with the Chinese in those lands where they settled. The word “with Chinese” here fits better than “by Chinese”. Historical examples show us that migration processes of China were controlled by many parties but the Chinese emigrants themselves. So it is possible to derive that the Chinese diaspora creation had a large portion of forcibility within. Familiar events were included in the works of Sima Qian, a prominent historian of China.
Life wasn’t fair to Sima Qian. For the attempt of defending Li Ling, a captured general, he was given a choice: either to select a death penalty or castration. In the times of ancient China, these two were almost equal. The shame of being a eunuch drove men to suicide, and it was common sense back then. Nevertheless, Sima Qian’s vision differed. He chose to live with a humiliation, from which he never recovered (Gracie, 2012). The reason for this decision lies in the Chinese people’s obsession with their own history. The historian sacrificed his own honor for the sake of his work.
What we see here is a forced part of Chinese history. Through ages, China suffered much from Europe-controlled migration processes. Eventually, they even brought some benefits for Chinese folk, but the way of making history is sometimes not something we can look at calmly.
Reference
Carlson, B. (2012). B 2009, Why Chinese immigrants chose America. Web.
Gracie, C. (2012). Sima Qian: China’s “grand historian”. Web.
Hooper, K. (2015). Chinese immigrants in the United States. Web.