Overseas Chinese in the People's Republic of China

"Peterson delves into an under-studied and fascinating area: the roles and experiences of Chinese with emigrant pasts or connections, whom he calls “domestic overseas Chinese,” in the PRC during the early decades of the Communist regime...His is an important contribution to a thinly populated field—the few other scholarly works that are on this topic are from the 1980s, and the number has only slowly increased during the 2000s." - Karen M. Teoh, Journal of International and Global Studies Volume 4, Number 1, (November 2012).

Overseas Chinese in the People’s Republic of China examines the experiences of a group of persons known officially and collectively in the PRC as "domestic Overseas Chinese". They include family members of overseas migrants who remained in China, refugees fleeing persecution, and former migrants and their descendants who "returned" to the People’s Republic in order to pursue higher education and to serve their motherland. In this book, Glen Peterson describes the nature of the official state project by which domestic Overseas Chinese were incorporated into the economic, political and social structures of the People’s Republic of China in the 1950s, examines the multiple and contradictory meanings associated with being "domestic Overseas Chinese", and explores how "domestic Overseas Chineseness" as political category shaped social experiences and identities.

This book fills an important gap in the literature on Chinese migration and Chinese transnationalism and will be an invaluable resource to students and scholars of these subjects, as well as Chinese history and Asian Studies more generally.