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Session Type: Panel

Theme: 4. Seeing from the Neighbourhood: States, Communities and Human Mobility
Panel

Family, Clans, Friends, and Co-Religionists: Chinese Community Networks from the 16th -20th centuries

Tuesday, July 30, 2024
14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
Location: Post Graduate School Building, P2.03

This panel explores some of the many different strategies used in creating communities and establishing relationships across social and geographical boundaries from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Through these local and regional networks, individual men and women developed satisfying societal roles which allowed them to create new identities for themselves, build their personal prestige, establish commercial connections, and make lasting friendships that cut across socio-economic barriers. Even for people with an important role on the national stage, their position within a local community could be the defining factor in their lives and a source of unequivocal pride. As economic and political forces brought about wave after wave of migration, family businesses focused on serving the ever-growing Chinese diaspora across Southeast Asia by providing goods and services to consumers far from home in a culturally sensitive and linguistically accessible manner. And in times of trouble, these wider social networks could be a source of much needed comfort and support. Arranged in chronological order, this panel begins with Lin Hsueh-yi’s paper describing the role that co-religionists could play in providing help in times of war, focusing on one specific Buddhist community at the time of the Ming-Qing transition. Within a monastic context, like-minded individuals could create a mutually supportive network that stretched beyond the confines of the nuclear family or clan. Next, Olivia Milburn’s paper analyzes the role that a shared interest, in this case writing poetry, could have in creating a community. Members of poetry clubs in China in the Ming and Qing dynasties came together to celebrate their local landscape and its history, leaving a rich legacy of writings about their shared experience of this locale. Daniel Burton-Rose’s paper considers the explosion of clan-based philanthropic endeavors in late Qing China, based on the activism originally proposed by Fan Zhongyan in the Song dynasty. Maintaining clan-owned property and properly disbursing assets required considerable collective effort, sustained over the course of generations, and significantly encouraged the creation of cohesive bonds across the wider patrilineal network. Finally, Koh Keng We’s paper takes the discussion into the twentieth century, and beyond the geographical confines of China, to describe the importance of family businesses in providing goods and services to the Chinese diaspora across Southeast Asia, including culturally sensitive commodities like traditional medicine (TCM). Collectively, these papers explore some of the many ways used by Chinese communities to build and maintain connections between members.

Presentations:

  • 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
    Landscape and History: Creating Communities in Late Imperial Chinese Poetry Groups

    Presenter: Olivia Milburn – The University of Hong Kong

  • 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
    Culture, Context and Concerns: Chinese family enterprises across regional global orders in the long twentieth century

    Presenter: Keng We Koh – Nanyang Technological University

  • 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
    Deploying the Past to Change the Future: Fan Zhongyan (989-1052) in the Philanthropic Innovations of Yu Zhi (1809-74)

    Presenter: Daniel Burton-Rose – Wenzhou-Kean University

  • 14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
    Jin Bao (1614-80) and His Borrowed Mountain in a Borrowed Time: The Displaced Buddhist Community in Early Qing Guangdong

    Presenter: Hsueh-yi Lin – The University of Hong Kong