The End of China’s Emigration Ban in 1893: A Non-event?

Seemingly fixed and insular, the idea of the Chinese diaspora had not always been there, but grew out of a global dialogue across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As the Chinese diaspora seemed to represent over and over the possibility of crossing purported divides between native and other, nation and world, albeit in different forms, the recurrence in time suggests that diaspora is less a set of communities spread across space, as often defined, but more a series of moments revealing tensions over global connections in the aftermath of mass migrations. In Chinese history, these moments could be seen as fragments of multiple temporalities impinging on the present—the reappearances of emigrant pasts that were ordinarily suppressed in national History.

This paper explores this overlooked temporal dimension of diaspora by revisiting China’s lifting of a defunct emigration ban, which most historians have thought inconsequential. A closer look suggests that the 1893 event was not simply to endorse the free exits that were already underway, but to invite free returns. This reconstitution of China as a homeland helped its transition from empire to nation and reframed emigrants as “huaqiao.” Often rendered as “Chinese sojourners,” the term’s literal meaning, “the temporarily-located Chinese,” has a temporal dimension—the diaspora elsewhere was to be “temporary” in contrast to the “permanent” nation. The call for returns thus served to reunify a national time and space that was concurrently fragmented by mass emigration. It also revealed the rippling effects of an earlier coolie migration (1845-75), from the post-emancipation Western construction of “the Chinese emigrant,” to demands for protection, and to China’s entry to diplomacy at a time of imperial restoration. The 1893 moment showed how emigrant histories converged to redefine the emigration ban as backward and returns as critical to China’s future as a modern nation.