The Chinese Overseas: From Earthbound China to the Quest for Autonomy. By Wang Gungwu. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp.148. Chinese Big Business and the Wealth of Asian Nations. By Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown. New York: Palgrave, 2000. Pp. xii, 328. $79.95.
王赓武的讲座集追溯了海外华人过去千年的经历，从早期商人到19世纪劳工、20世纪中产阶级流亡者，分析其身份保持与变迁。
Wang Gungwu's 1997 Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures, now published as The Chinese Overseas , traces the experience of the overseas Chinese in the last millennium. By the sixteenth century migration overseas had become a steady current, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, promoted by economic opportunities abroad and politics at home, it became a flood. Whereas the earlier migrants consisted primarily of traders settling abroad, the migrants of the nineteenth century included many manual laborers, and by the twentieth century many were middle-class political and economic exiles. Despite the change in composition, these emigrants retained their Chinese identity.