Paper short abstract:

This paper will provide an introductory discussion for a comparative study on how newly introduced crops had enabled Chinese to grow and emigrate their population, and how the mobility of Chinese population has formatted ecological and social environments around them in East and Southeast Asia.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I will provide an introductory discussion for a comparative study on how the mobility of Chinese population has formatted ecological and social environments around them in East and Southeast Asia.

Alfred W. Crosby has discussed "Columbian Exchange" as a process after Columbus, in which newly introduced crops had enabled European to grow and emigrate their population, then they had transformed much of Americas, Asia, and Africa into ecological version of Europe. As our panel will discuss, we can find a similar process in the long history of the mobility of Chinese population since 16th Century up to the present.

This paper, as well as this panel, will call this process as "Chinese Exchange," and will examine how crops introduced from Americas had supported and encourage the population growth and emigration, and how Chinese population has formatted ecological and social environments along historical periods; 16-17th, 18th, 19th-20th Centuries and the present, in order to give a tentative definition to, and raise issues on "Chinese Exchange".

In the 16-17th, as Prof. Deng Xiaohua pointed out, sweet potatoes from America via the Philippines islands, had triggered drastically population growth and emigration in Southern China, and brought the staple food, the recipe, or a sort of dining arts to places to emigrate. Thereafter, they had organized and developed familism, filial piety, ancestral worship, marriage and reproducation, and social relationship for formatting ecological and social environments around them.