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The purpose of this paper is to explore how the Chaozhou-speaking communities in northeast Guangdong Province dealt with new barriers of border control during the 1950s, and how they circumvented these institutional obstacles to leave China for Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. The emigration process was reshaped by new social and political forces in Maoist China. How did the Chaoshan people apply for the travel permit to leave China? How did they enter the hosting countries? How did the emigration experience influence the identity formation of Chaoshan Chinese in the 1950s?

This paper draws on archival sources, memoirs and interviews to demonstrate the ways in which Chaoshan people pursued new strategies of emigration during the 1950s.

In Maoist China, the application for an entry-exit permit was a rather complicated bureaucratic process for ordinary people. One needs to consider the class status, geographical origins and overseas connections of the applicants as well as the changing official policies toward overseas Chinese.

This paper emphasizes on the impacts of emigration experience on the identity formation of Chaoshan people and the incremental transformation of these emigrant communities in Guangdong Province.

This scholarly finding throws light on the transformation of Chaoshan from a fluid, mobile maritime environment to an increasingly state-centric agrarian society during the 1950s.

This paper is an original scholarly study of the history of Chaoshan communities in South China and their emigration to Southeast Asia.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the survival capability of Chaoshan people in the maritime world of the South China Sea amidst the changing monetary systems of the rival empires and political regimes from 1939 to 1945. It particularly focuses on overseas Chinese remittance business in Shantou under the Japanese rule. Local societies in coastal China and overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia experienced severe hardships due to the Sino-Japanese War, the Pacific War and the Chinese Civil War. As fighting among the rival empires and regimes intensified, Chinese migrant communities straddling between Southeast Asia and South China had to negotiate and adapt to survive these crises, regardless of whether they were government-affiliated or local autonomous subjects.

This research draws on archival materials to investigate the reactions of Chinese migrant communities in Chaoshan region in times of war and regime change. How did local maritime societies and overseas Chinese adapt to the harsh realities of the wartime? How did the Japanese Empire use Wang Jingwei’s puppet government in Nanjing to control the Chaoshan remittance network? How did the remittance network shift its operational structure in face of a wartime crisis?

Faced with the wartime crisis and the Japanese occupation, Chaoshan communities used a variety of survival strategies to protect and maintain the overseas Chinese remittance business. In dealing with remittances from Singapore, British Malay and Indonesia, they cooperated with the Japanese military authority and its puppet government to maximize the autonomy of their business operation in the Japanese-controlled East Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. On the other hand, to secure the flow of remittances from French Indochina and Thailand, the indirectly controlled territories in the Japanese Empire, Chaoshan merchants sought an alternative path of delivering remittances, known as the Dongxing route, to bypass the Japanese ban on private remittances from these two regions.

It would be a better research if more resources, including remittance receipts and documents during the Japanese occupation, could be found and used to show more detailed features of Chaoshan local society.

This research is the first one to investigate the contradictory features of local Chaoshan society during the Japanese occupation, an under-explored subject in the Chinese historiography.