從種植香蕉到僑捐學校: 澳洲匯款與僑鄉發展

“Whenever there are overseas Chinese, there are remittances!” This expression is widely heard in southern Chinese emigrant communities. Even today elders who have not even travelled beyond their villages rattle off the exchange rates for migrant destination countries from memory. In remote villages of Ko Yiu in Guangdong, one can also make purchases with Australian currency. While remittances are conventionally associated with a monetary and material value, they perform more than economic functions. The social, emotional and ideological dimensions attached to the flow of remittances help us to understand the motivations which facilitated Chinese migration to Australia. One powerful force was migrants’ desire to contribute to social and economic reform in their native districts. My doctoral research shows how the early Cantonese migrants in Australia fuelled the modernisation of education in rural South China.