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We wish to respond to Lane J. Harris's (2015) article "Overseas Chinese Remittance Firms, the Limits of State Sovereignty, and Transnational Capitalism in East and Southeast Asia, 1850s-1930s." We take particular issue with his conclusion that the trade in remittance letters (qiaopi[...]) is a modern form of "transnational capitalism" that depended on trust in a system of impersonal rules, rather than "a distinctive form of 'Chinese capitalism'" dependent on cultural or familial affinities, and that qiaopi traders used instrumental economic practices to transnationalize their businesses (Harris 2015, 146). We do so as part of a broader approach, shared by scholars both in China and elsewhere interested in identifying alternatives to modern capitalism that are, at the same time, robustly cosmopolitan, and for which modernity is multiple rather than modular. We believe that ethnicity and identity matter greatly in diasporic Chinese business culture, as a source of entrepreneurial resilience and creativity, especially in the early stages of diaspora formation, before the rise to power of locally born descendant generations without strong personal and cultural ties to China.1Far from forming an obstacle to economic growth and technological innovation, business familism, social networks, and their associated cultural values can be shown, at least in some periods and contexts, to have assisted economic development in Chinese societies at home and abroad, by enabling social mobility, furthering family interests, building partnerships, facilitating contracts, and promoting other practices proper to a modern market economy.
The Qiaopi Trade and Its Business Model
The business culture that supported the qiaopi trade rested on common subethnicity rather than generalized Chinese ethnicity.2It conformed to local ethnic attachments corresponding to deep intra-ethnic cleavages imported from China along migration chains. It only rarely assumed a pan-Chinese form, except during wars and political crises. Even the trade associations founded to repel state interference supplemented rather than supplanted "dialect"-based associations or acted as fronts for them. In our opinion, Harris overstates the extent of their restructuring on non-"traditional" lines, although he does concede that their internal organization "continued to show some signs of fragmentation along native-place lines" (143).
Harris recognizes the uniqueness of the qiaopi trade and, commendably, repudiates its essentialist reduction....