Urban Chinese at the Sinitic Frontier: Social Organizations in United States’ Chinatowns, 1849–1898

To call Chinese nationals who have emigrated abroad ‘overseas Chinese’ seems very natural, especially since most joined together to form communities of fellow nationals outside of China. (It is not always appropriate to include the children and grandchildren of these emigrants, however.) The term implies a uniformity to the communities that Crissman made explicit in a model which proposed to tie them together and link them to cities in China.