Beijing’s Policies for Managing Han and Ethnic-Minority Chinese Communities Abroad

The overseas Chinese (OC) form a vast network of powerful interest groups and important political actors capable of shaping the future of China from abroad by transmitting values back to their ancestral homeland (Tu 1991). While the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) welcomes and actively seeks to foster relations with the OC in order to advance China’s national interests, some cohorts may be hostile to the regime. In accordance with their distinct demographic and ethnic pro-files, the CCP’s qiaowu (侨务, OC affairs) infrastructure serves to entice, co-opt, or isolate various OC groupings. This article summarises the policies for managing different subsets of OC over the past three dec-ades, and argues that through qiaowu, the CCP has successfully unified cooperative groups for China’s benefit, while preventing discordant ones from eroding its grip on power.