Abstract
This chapter traces the histories of long-standing Chinese migrations to the United States to examine the link between immigrant entrepreneurship and diasporic development. Based on data collected from two parallel research projects and multisite fieldwork in the United States and China, Zhou and Liu show that immigrant entrepreneurship has continued to serve as a key pattern of adaptation among new Chinese migrants and that this long-standing pattern is shaped by different migration histories, structural circumstances in both sending and receiving societies, and locations in the transnational social fields. The authors also show that rapid globalization, changing geopolitics in the Asia Pacific region, and the rise of China have opened up new avenues for transnational entrepreneurship. They conclude that immigrant entrepreneurship is conducive to integration, as it enhances not only an individual’s economic opportunities but also his or her sociocultural opportunities, by way of diasporic development.
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- 1.
Both projects relied on mixed methods that combined an in-depth survey of online listing of Chinese immigrant organizations, interviews with organizational leaders in diasporic communities and with government officials in China, participatory observations, and content analysis of major local and community newspapers. This chapter draws from two of my published journal articles on the theme (for more detail, see Zhou and Liu 2015, 2016).
- 2.
Portes and Zhou (1996) addressed the contradictory findings by examining how the choice of functional forms—loglinear (relative returns) versus linear (absolute dollar values)—of the earnings equations produced contradictory outcomes concerning the superior or inferior earnings of the self-employed relative to wage/salaried workers. When the loglinear form was used there was a negative, but statistically insignificant, earnings effect on self-employment. However, when the linear form was used, the effect became significantly positive. They also found that the preponderance of the self-employed was among positive outliers and thus argued that the use of the loglinear form, which was favored by most economists, sacrificed substantive knowledge about the ethnic entrepreneurship because it excluded all the outliers and evened out the earnings of the most successful entrepreneurs.
- 3.
The “paper son” phenomenon is known as a phenomemon of illegal Chinese migration during the era of Chinese exclusion, in which young Chinese migrants entered the USA in a false identity of someone else’s US-born child.
- 4.
US Census Bureau, 2015 American Community Survey 1-Year Estimates, http://factfinder.census.gov/faces/tableservices/jsf/pages/productview.xhtml?src=bkmk, accessed on December 1, 2016.
- 5.
Referred to middle-class suburbs with high concentrations of immigrant groups of racial or ethnic minority status.
- 6.
See “Overseas Chinese Guanxi and Open-Door Reform in Guangdong” (in Chinese) http://qwgzyj.gqb.gov.cn/qwhg/146/1346.shtml, accessed on December 1, 2016.
- 7.
Interview with Mr. Wang in Los Angeles, January 2010, in Chinese, translated by Zhou.
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Zhou, M., Liu, H. (2017). Immigrant Entrepreneurship and Diasporic Development: The Case of New Chinese Migrants in the USA. In: Zhou, M. (eds) Contemporary Chinese Diasporas. Palgrave, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5595-9_18
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