Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses how Muslim Chinese overseas interconnect their meaning of migratory lives through the process of adaptation to their surrounding politic-cultural environments.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on multiple facet of adaptation of Chinese overseas to the surrounding environment. Especially I would like to focus on several dimension of political adaptation of those Muslim Chinese overseas who scattered in a transnational social space among China, Myanmar and Taiwan. Muslim Chinese overseas in this paper indicates a population who migrated from Yunnan province of China to upper Myanmar (and in some case to Northern Thailand) from the end of 19th to the mid-20th century at their first stage of migration. After migrated to Myanmar, they again re-migrated to Taiwan in the 1980s for economic and political reason.

The process of their migration and re-migration caused and has been causing their adaption to surrounding political environments. Surrounding political environments in this paper include political entities such as British Colonial government, Chinese Qing official, Burmese military junta, and Overseas Chinese policy of ROC government (Taiwan). On the macro level, Muslim Chinese overseas negotiate their socio-cultural aspects with those political entities and transform their politico-cultural systems into the one that could be suitably located in the system. On the micro level, various aspects of everyday lives in terms of the relationship with indigenous ethnic groups in the area should be paid more attention. Muslim Chinese overseas interconnects their meaning of migratory lives through the process of adaptation to their surrounding politic-cultural environments.