Chinese Migration in Latin America: Transnational Histories and Local Entanglements

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel examines the multifaceted experiences of Chinese migrants in Latin America, highlighting how they navigated, contested, and contributed to shifting configurations of modernity across different historical and national contexts. Spanning the early 20th century to the present, the three papers explore how Chinese diasporic actors engaged with issues of race, legitimacy, and economic survival—often under conditions of marginalization or systemic crisis.

One paper analyzes Chinese medical practitioners in 1930s Peru, showing how they resisted exclusionary discourses by mobilizing transnational networks and producing counter-narratives within both local and diasporic spheres. Another investigates Chinese merchants' role in shaping Peru’s plantation economy during the early 20th century, tracing how their transnational capital and labor strategies contributed to agricultural modernization and global commodity flows. The third paper explores the case of Chinese entrepreneurs in Venezuela, who operated restaurants and retail businesses during the oil boom and later adapted to economic collapse by maintaining informal supply chains—at times substituting for state functions.

Together, these papers foreground the agency of Chinese migrants as actors who did not simply adapt to host societies, but who actively shaped and were shaped by intersecting regimes of modernity, race, and crisis. The panel brings migration studies into dialogue with economic history, medical epistemology, and state–diaspora relations, offering new insights into Chinese Latin American histories as embedded, relational, and globally entangled processes.

Sub Track

• Migration, Diaspora, and Transnational Communities

Chair

• Qing Zhou, Shanghai University

Individual Presentations

• Chinese Migrant Entrepreneurs in Venezuela’s Crisis Economy - Xinyuan Pan, peking university; Jing Zhang, Peking University

• Chinese Transnational Economic Networks and Global Peru: Chinese Merchants in the Plantation Economy,1900-1930 - Qing Zhou, Shanghai University

Session Organizer

• Qing Zhou, Shanghai University