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移民,华侨, 侨民:Immigrants, Overseas, Expats and


davesgonechina

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I recently gave an assignment in my university English class in China where I asked the students to discuss what it means when people call the US or Canada an "immigrant society". A student asked me what immigrant means after class, and when I said it refers to a person who moves from one country to another, she said "no, it also means a person who moves within the same country". I checked my Chinese dictionary, and sure enough, 移民 refers to migration without distinguishing whether it crosses borders. It makes no distinction about changing citizenship or permanent residence either. I can't find any Chinese words, in fact, that make these distinctions. Similarly, 华侨, or overseas Chinese, 华 means China in this case and 侨 is "to live abroad" - but makes no note of their citizenship. Looking at words for nationality 民族,ethnicity 种族 and race 种族 (again), I'm struck how there is little distinction between these concepts and they bleed into each other. Anybody else find this absolutely fascinating (and a little discomforting)?

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Immigrate implies movement inward the same way emmigrate implies movement outwards. These are just directional prefixes. If you think about it, nothing grafts these English concepts onto the nation-state other than contemporary custom.

That being said, it's a pretty damn strong custom. And since I've never heard anyone tell me they 移民了到北京 if they didn't mean at least permanent residence, I suspect the same custom holds in Chinese.

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I'm struck how there is little distinction between these concepts and they bleed into each other. Anybody else find this absolutely fascinating

Sure, this is what makes learning a foreign language so fascinating and useful. Fascinating because it teaches us that "concepts" are only the products of a particular society or culture, and not entities that exist in space. Useful because it tells us there are more ways than one of doing the same thing or expressing the same concept, and not just just one way (which is undoubtedly "our way" :D )

I'm sorry that my knowledge of Chinese is not sufficient to help you but I'm sure someone else (or you yourself one day) will be able to express in Chinese what you want to say here, provided that s/he is not trying to shape the expression to a foreign norm. I'm here just because your comment reminds me of another poster 's comment that due to the lack of grammatical inflections in Chinese, he finds it difficult to express his more subtle shades of thought !!!

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Trevelyan, you're right insofar as the latin root immigrare doesn't include nation states in it's definition - it simply means "to move house". But the Oxford English Dictionary defines immigration and emigration (coming and going, as you point out) as being "to a foreign country" specifically in comtemporary usage. "Migration", without either prefix, specifies moving house without any reference to borders. But 移民 blurs migrate and immigrate together unlike English. So the student who asked me (after finishing the assignment) may have accidentally written about migration within China, a very different thing.

The other thing about the words for overseas Chinese is that when you take this millennia long history of referring in the language to Chinese people abroad as not changing their citizenship or political affiliation and combine that with many of the feelings I've gotten from Chinese here and abroad that anyone overseas who doesn't support the motherland and the "race" is essentially betraying their people, it makes for an argument that alot of nationalist and chauvinist feelings are, if not reinforced, certainly made easier by the nature of the language. True, an American who goes and joins, say, the Taliban, gets alot of the same reaction - but English, I think, conceptualizes it in a very different way.

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Surely this is just one of many examples where Chinese has one expression for things expressed with a number of expressions in English (and vice versa).

Anyone heard of inmigration?

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Italian, like Latin, does not distinguish between 'migration' and 'immigration' (the word 'migrare' typically refers to 候鸟, migratory birds). So it's not just the Chinese.

民族 etc. are all recent terms, many of them borrowed from Meiji Japanese. The 'chauvinist' colouring has very little to do with the words themselves, and a lot with the way writers have been using them in the last century or so. The same, of course, is true of all languages.

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Hi All...I'm brand new here and I find this site very interesting and informative.

Here's my 2 cents......I believe the term 移民 is a faily new concept (last 30-40 years?) and it usually means emigrating to another country when used (I'm talking about the term and not the act itself). The word 移 means "move" only so whether 移民 means "immigrate" or "emigrate" can only be determined in the context it is used....such as 新移民 (new immigrant) or 移民到美國 (emigrating to the U.S.)

When our ancestors moved all over the world to become 華僑, I do not think they used the term 移民 but rather 移居. In modern day usage, however, 移居 would generally be used for moving within one's country's boundaries like 移居到北京 while 移民 would be used for moving outside the country.

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