ABSTRACT
The study of Chinese in diaspora is now a well developed field of study with diverse topics across different disciplines and involving scholars from different parts of the world, many of whom are increasingly themselves migrants or descendants of migrants. This Handbook brings together a significant number of specialists of different disciplines and specialties to provide a comprehensive analysis of the Chinese worldwide, showing the range of subjects that have been researched and the contribution of the study of Chinese migration, settlement and remigration to the study of migration processes, politics and ethnic relations, localization and cultural formation, ethnicity and identity as well as globalization and transnationalism. The study of the Chinese in diaspora in broader spatial and disciplinary perspectives has been advanced over the years with the publication of a significant number of edited books that result from academic conferences, such as Gosling and Lim (1983); Lim and Gosling (1983); Cushman and Wang (1988); Wang and Wang (1998); and Ong and Nonini (1997), etc. There are also four volumes of selected published works edited by Liu (2006), while Benton and Pieke (1998) contributes to the consolidation of the study of the Chinese in Europe. All of these and many others show the development and scope of the study of the Chinese diasporas. There are a few encyclopedias, a significant one is that edited by Lynn Pan (1999). Published in both English and Chinese, this comprehensive work is well known. As to the Chinese encyclopedia, the 12 volumes compiled by Zhou Nanjing and his team are most comprehensive and useful for those who read Chinese (Zhou 1999-2002). Various encyclopedias on minorities have significant entries on the Chinese diasporas. For example, Asian American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia has a big section on the Chinese Americans (Ling and Austin 2010).
