Emotional Transnationalism:
Chinese Migrants in Southeast Asia

The flow of Chinese from Mainland China to Thailand¹, Singapore², and the United States³ constitutes a part of historical processes of cross-border migration. Transnational migrants develop and maintain multiple relations across familial, economic, social, organizational, religious, and political boundaries.⁴ In other words, transnationalism primarily entails the multiplicity of transnational migrants’ involvement in both origin and host societies.

Chinese began to venture abroad in increasing numbers from 1500 to 1740.⁵ In the mid-nineteenth century, the demand for cheap labourers in North America, Australia and Southeast Asia accelerated the outbound flow of Chinese; the advanced transportation technologies facilitated the long-distance movement of people and goods.⁶ In Chaozhou (Teochew) along the South China coast, a large number of Chinese went to Southeast Asia after the opening of Shantou (Swatow) as a treaty port in 1860. This development fostered the formation and growth of emigrant communities across Chaozhou. Between the emigrant communities and overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, there were business dealings among rice merchants, bankers, shipping firms, and thousands of hard-working labourers. The mobility of Chaozhou Chinese across the ocean not only connected the emigrant communities with Southeast Asia but also made them an integrated part of overseas Chinese migration. Thus, studying these Chaozhou migrants should add a rich dimension to the diverse history of global migration.

This article focuses on the pull and push factors of Chaozhou Chinese migration across Southeast Asia in the first half of the twentieth century. It uses the term “Chinese diaspora” in a generic sense in order to avoid portraying Chinese as “perpetually foreign to local societies and potentially loyal to a rising China.”⁷ The analytical focus is on the first generation of migrants who were born in Chaozhou and left for Thailand in their youth, or who were born abroad. But these migrants maintained deep ties with the ancestral villages through economic, social and emotional ties. Over time, they developed a certain long- distance imagination and concern about the Chaozhou homeland. They mailed pictures of their children and themselves to Chinese relatives, and they thought that they would return to Tangshan (China’s old name) for retirement.

Conceptually, the article applies the notion of “emotional transnationalism”⁸ to discuss the act of mailing personal and family photos in the familial sphere. This emotional affinity among the first generation of Chaozhou migrants appeared to be different from that of the second generation of the Filipinos in California.⁹ The identity of the Chaozhou migrants is shaped by the process of sending overseas remittances and photos, inheriting and practicing traditional religious festivals, worshipping and missing the ancestors, continuing to teach and learn the dialect among their children.¹⁰ The article argues that the ethnic identity of transnational migrants is often strengthened through the circulation of photos, an understudied topic in the literature. The impacts of the circulating photos are prevalent amongst the lower socioeconomic-level families. As vital material objects, such photos are easier to pass down through generations and preserve rich memories within the familial domain. Composed of four sections, the first part defines how photos were used in transnational migration, and the second part historicizes the extensive transnational migration networks between South China and Southeast Asia. The next section addresses how photos flowed among overseas Chinese and became part of their public and private life. The conclusion evaluates the significance of circulating photos in Chinese transnational families. With respect to source materials, the oral interviews were conducted by Hui Wang in Chaozhou, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Singapore from 2012 to 2018. For the sake of privacy, the real names of the interviewees were not revealed. In addition to the interviews, the consulted print materials include newspapers, archival documents and the batches of qiaopi, and personal letters written by migrants when they sent remittances to their hometowns.¹¹ The migrants who wrote home frequently were more inclined to return to their hometowns.¹² These private documents and photos are well preserved by the emigrant communities, and Hui Wang, the co-author, collected some of them during fieldwork in Chaozhou.

As early as the middle of the eighteenth century, Chaozhou Chinese sailed from Zhanglin Port located in eastern Guangdong on the red- headed boats for Siam (today’s Thailand).¹³ After the nineteenth century, the legalization of rice trade from Siam to China stimulated the commercial and migratory links. The opening of Shantou as a treaty port provided a new context for overseas Chinese migration, and such maritime networks contributed to the extraordinary success of Chaozhou rice merchants in regional commerce.¹⁴ Seen in this perspective, Chaozhou Chinese created a vital socio-economic link that connected Shantou, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia until the 1960s.

In this migratory context, the economy, culture, education, language, and lifestyle of Chaozhou society also became more closely embedded into overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. Chen Ta reckoned that the emigrant communities depended for their living in part on remittances from overseas relatives.¹⁵ Overseas remittances provided the main source of income for the emigrant communities, and the indispensable funds for economic development in Chaozhou. From 1889 to 1949, there were a total of 4,062 overseas Chinese investment firms across Chaozhou, with an estimated amount of about 80 million yuan, accounting for 11.39% of the total funds invested in domestic enterprises in modern times.¹⁶

In the first half of the twentieth century, overseas remittances balanced the trade deficit of various regimes in China, and overseas Chinese supported the revolutionary movement of Sun Yat-sen and promoted the modernization of the emigrant communities by repairing bridges and roads, building markets and schools, and supporting charity works.¹⁷ Being exposed to cosmopolitan culture in Southeast Asia, these migrants brought overseas lifestyles, dietary habits, and new educational ideas back to their hometowns. Yet, in the private domain, they adhered to the traditional Chinese religious beliefs and cultural festivals.¹⁸ When the returnees introduced Western educational and welfare concepts to their hometowns, they advanced the modernization of Xiamen and Shantou and left behind an enduring legacy.¹⁹ A similar trend can be seen in the Cantonese-speaking Ssu-Yi area along the Pearl River.²⁰ Although the Chaozhou and Cantonese emigrants introduced new consumption practices, modern healthcare knowledge and fashionable clothing style, the anthropologist James Watson finds the traditional Man lineage to still dominate the life of the emigrant communities in Hong Kong’s Shatin.²¹ By studying the circulating photos among Chaozhou migrants, this article shows that the photos served as a significant material object that linked the overseas and ancestral homes of Chaozhou migrants, and such intimate connections became a crucial feature of traditional linage society in South China.

The establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 transformed the longstanding relationship between overseas Chinese and their ancestral homelands. The emigrant communities witnessed a change from a highly mobile society into a state-centric agrarian society with limited spatial mobility, partly because of China’s new nationality law and partly because of a wave of anti-Chinese campaigns in newly independent Southeast Asian nations.²² In the 1950s and 1960s, antagonism and suspicion towards overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia prompted more Chinese migrants to begin integrating themselves into the local nation-states. When the Southeast Asian states enforced travel restrictions from China, this posed a serious problem for the migrants to bring their Chinese relatives abroad. For about thirty years thereafter, the migrants requested photos from their Chinese relatives as part of the efforts to provide identification. The letter writers spent a lot of time discussing how to apply for an exit permit to leave Mainland China and how to obtain an entry permit to enter the Southeast Asian states for family reunion. For example, on May 16, 1956, when Yang applied for a permit for his wife in Chaozhou to go to Singapore, he asked for six photos of his wife to be used for the entry certificate of Singapore.²³

The opening of treaty ports after the Opium War allowed modern photography to flourish in coastal China, and a group of foreign photographers such as Felice Beato, Milton Miller, and John Thomson established themselves in major cities.²⁴ In the 1920s, social critics often satirized that there were numerous photo studios in Beijing and the façades of these photo studios were very ostentatious.²⁵ The widespread advertisements in newspapers suggest that photos had entered the Chinese daily life during the 1920s, and that photos were commonly used in the production of Chinese government documents. An advertisement in the Nanyang Siang Pau in Singapore in 1929 showed that citizens could get cash at the photo studio for photos taken in the past.²⁶ Evidently, taking personal photos was a popular practice in coastal China and among Chinese diaspora.

Generally, the way photos were interchanged can be divided into two types: photos for public publication in newspapers and magazines, and photos for private consumption among family members. In the migration process, the publicly published photos can be circulated in the origin and host societies of the migrants. The former introduces the living and working conditions of overseas migrants to people in their hometowns. The latter informs overseas migrants about the situation at home. When immigrants worked and lived overseas, they obtained information about their hometowns from multiple channels, such as communicating with their fellows, reading newspapers and magazines, and participating in the activities of the hometown association. For example, Qiaokan, magazines written and published locally in the emigrant communities in China and distributed to the overseas Chinese abroad, set out to nurture a sense of attachment to the hometowns among overseas Chinese and their descendants.²⁷ The photos in the newspapers and magazines made it possible to convey hometown news to emigrants. In this way, the hometowns of overseas Chinese could attract more donations and maintain transnational patriotic sentiment.

In a similar fashion, the Republican Chinese state launched The Industrial Quarterly to revitalize national industries and promote domestic products through the channels of the Chinese national chambers of commerce in Shanghai. In 1935, the Chinese national chambers of commerce organized representatives from domestic factories to visit overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia and interacted with the Chinese Clothing Merchants Association in Vietnam, and the Sanjiang (Three Rivers) Association in Singapore. In 1936, the delegation visited the provinces Phitsanulok and Nakhon Pathom in Thailand, met with the Bangkok Hakka Association, Bangkok Hainan Association, and prominent Thai-Chinese leaders like Jia Gi Si (Thai name: Khun Niphatchinnkhon) and Chen Shouming.²⁸ The Industrial Quarterly recorded the grand welcome that these delegations received, and photographed the overseas Chinese activities in Thailand.²⁹ Some other newspapers and periodicals published in China introduced the life and work of overseas Chinese by publishing photos, such as The Chinese Commercial News Sunday Pictorial in 1932³⁰ and The Graphic Pictorial in 1946.³¹

Besides, many Chinese-language publications among diaspora introduced the ancestral hometowns’ history, culture, and economy. At a time when there was no formal diplomatic relationship, such periodicals filled the information void about China. In a special issue of Singapore Teochew Poit Ip Huay Kuan in 1969,³² four photos were used to record the famous bridges and temples in Chaozhou. In addition, in 1999 on the 70th anniversary of the Singapore Teochew Poit Ip Huay Kuan, twelve photos of the famous Chaozhou scenery were published to impress the readers.³³ This particular periodical was distributed among Chaozhou Chinese in Singapore. The more articles, photos, and contents on Chaozhou were published, the closer Chinese diaspora in Singapore felt about their ancestral hometowns. When there was little content on Chaozhou in the publication, Chaozhou Chinese in Singapore had become localized and felt committed to their newly adopted country.³⁴

The photos in the letters are mainly included in the following three ways: firstly, photos circulated among the two generations between the origin and host societies. Usually, the photos were sent by migrants in the hosting society to the Chinese relatives to illustrate the life and work abroad. Secondly, the photos were circulating among three generations between China and their overseas residences. The migrants would mail their children’s photos to the grandparents in China. Thirdly, the circulation of photos took place within the same generation, between siblings, especially after parents passed away. These three aspects of photo circulation were primarily based on blood ties. This generational difference reflected in the circulation of photos was due to the family strategy of migration that was needed to send family members abroad to earn a living.

The circulation of photos chiefly reflected the important events in the transnational family. The first type was that there were new members in the family, newborns or marriage. The second type was the important experience of family members other than marriage, such as graduation or a new job. The third was relatively ordinary events. In daily life or in connection with annual festivals, the migrants would respond to the needs of relatives in the hometown for photos, send photos to relatives in the hometown as part of the process of actively keeping their relatives updated on their situation as well as to express feelings of longing.³⁵ The circulation of photos, accompanied by correspondence and remittances, underpinned a family history that spanned several generations.

When the photos were framed and hung at home, the circulating photos gained an afterlife, and the photographic memory would likely be passed across generations. Behind these photos and letters are colourful stories about the human experience and memory of overseas relatives and their imagined hometown connections. From overseas Chinese to the emigrant communities, the circulation of the photos, along with that of letters, information, and resources, helped reinforce the transnational ties. The Chaozhou Chinese transcended the actual geographic distance, showed a strong sense of loyalty to their family, and shaped the notion of identity and belonging in cross-cultural contexts. How did the migrant merchants and labourers practice emotional transnationalism?

First, the circulating photos expressed their homesickness and feeling toward the loved ones left behind. Aging parents in the emigrant communities hoped to see their children returning from abroad, and overseas Chinese cared about their hometowns, even though these letters were written in a formal tone. Moreover, this emotional connection not only carried the solicitude for the living relatives and dependents but also expressed respect for the ancestors. In traditional China, people sought blessings from their ancestors by sweeping tombs and offering sacrifices.³⁶ But overseas Chinese could not perform these rituals in person. Therefore, they adhered to ceremonial rituals such as the Tomb-Sweeping Day and Hungry Ghost Festival.³⁷ Meanwhile, they showed their emotional attachment by mailing photos to their parents, relatives, and dependents. In doing so, the emotional transnationalism was experienced most intensely.

Second, the circulation of photos conveyed one being a member of the family regardless of the distance.³⁸ As with remittances, the photos served to articulate a vision of the estate households to which the overseas family belonged. Additionally, when the migrants had newborns, especially boys, they sent the baby photos home, indicating that the newborn was a member of the spatially extended family, and urging the recipients to pray to their ancestors and village deities for the wellbeing of an additional male descendant.³⁹ Lima believes that the transnational family is the most important social institution in transnational space.⁴⁰ The photos circulating between the overseas Chinese and their hometowns institutionalized transnational families. The status quo of overseas and domestic relatives was shown to family members by mailing photos, and the new members were also announced to the family via photos.

Third, photos’ circulation went beyond the extended family to impress the wider emigrant communities. Newly received photos were often circulated socially, making the person in the photos and those who received the photos become significant others. In this case, the photo was closely linked with the family and the community. The photos also provided a mechanism for these families to differentiate themselves from those who could not maintain close ties with their relatives and dependents in the hometowns. In other words, a series of transnational interactions surrounding the photos strengthened the identity of transnational migrants.

In the end, the circulation of photos enhanced the national identity of transnational migrants by containing the substantive connection and the homeland imagination between different generations of overseas Chinese. When transnational migrants mailed photos to relatives and dependents in their hometowns, they articulated their conception of home and belonging by expressing concern for the senior family members and ancestors, participating in public events related to property management in their hometowns through letters and remittances, and abiding by the traditional customary practices. The photos were framed, hung on the wall, formed the imagination of the overseas world, and became part of the shared family memory. In the first half of the twentieth century, the nationalistic trends gradually influenced the national identity of overseas Chinese. In Thailand, Chinese integrated into Thai society for a better life. But the Thai Chinese continued to send overseas remittances, letters, and photos back home. In the 1950s and the 1960s, antagonisms and suspicion towards the Chinese accelerated the Thailandization of Chinese in Bangkok. Around 1967, the Thai government began to allow universities and high schools to teach Chinese courses.⁴¹ Thais had set off a craze for learning Chinese for practical and emotional reasons.⁴²

Later, in many examples of correspondence, overseas Chinese in Thailand expressed their homesickness by mailing photos and contemplated the possibility of returning to China in person. In other words, overseas Chinese in the chained migration demonstrated emotional transnational connections with their hometowns in which the nation and ethnic groups manipulated identity on the basis of their understanding and analysis of the local, hometown, and international in different eras.⁴³ In the cross-cultural interaction between overseas Chinese and their hometowns, the flow of photos embodied rich emotions, and shaped their understanding of an imagined home and nation.

During the 1950s and 1960s, China had not yet established formal diplomatic relations with Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore inhabited by a large number of overseas Chinese. It was common for the emigrant communities to mail personal and family photos as part of the identification process. After the 1970s, China and Thailand normalized bilateral links. Soon after, China implemented a policy of reform and opening up, and this advanced the social and economic interactions among Chinese Thais and the emigrant communities. In the fieldwork, it can be found that, on the one hand, there was a climax of overseas Chinese donating money to their hometowns. On the other hand, relatives and dependents of overseas Chinese could apply for visas to Thailand relatively easily, meet overseas relatives, and get together for three or four months because of convenient cross-border transportation.⁴⁴

This article pertained to the lower socioeconomic-level overseas Chinese who promoted and nurtured emotional relations with their distant hometowns through photographs. In an era without telephones and the Internet, photos effectively connected the new environment in the hosting society with the old environment in the ancestral hometown. The circulation of photos among different generations of overseas Chinese enabled these migrants to participate in globalization at multiple levels. Within transnational families, the circulation of photos was an expression of homesickness and feeling toward the loved ones left behind. Along with remittances, information, and resources, the circulation of photos shaped the conception of home, the sense of identity, and the notion of a nation of overseas Chinese by maintaining continued participation in their hometowns.

In contemporary era, the tradition of printing out photos and then mailing them home has gradually disappeared with the advent of social media. The ways transnational migrants express their feelings to their families and hometowns have been greatly transformed. This calls for new analytical lenses to explore the identity of transnational migrants in a new globalized context.

This research was funded by the National Social Science Fund of China (21CZS072) and the Humanities and Social Science Research Project of Higher Education Institutions in Hebei Province (SQ2021106). Authors thank Søren Friis Hansen for his helpful comments.

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1、G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1957). Wasana Wongsurawat, The Crown and the Capitalists: The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2019).

2、Ong Siang Song, One Hundred Years' History Of The Chinese in Singapore: The Annotated Edition (Singapore: World Scientific, 2020).

3、Madeline Y. Hsu, Dreaming of Gold, Dreaming of Home: Transnationalism and Migration Between the United States and South China, 1882-1943 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

4、Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1992), ix.

5、Steven B Miles, Chinese Diasporas: A Social History of Global Migration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

6、Tomoko Shiroyama, “Overseas Chinese Remittances in the Mid-Twentieth Century,” in Chinese and Indian Merchants in Modern Asia: Networking Businesses and Formation of Regional Economy, ed. Choi Chi-cheung, Takashi Oishi, and Tomoko Shiroyama (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 72-103.

7、Shelly Chan, “The Case for Diaspora: A Temporal Approach to the Chinese Experience,” Journal of Asian Studies 74, no.1 (2015): 108.

8、Emotional transnationalism is the process of sustaining transnational connections between transnational migrants and their relatives and dependents left behind in their hometowns at the level of emotions, ideologies, and cultural codes (Wolf, 2002). Diane L. Wolf, “There’s no place like ‘home’: Emotional transnationalism and the struggles of second-generation Filipinos,” in Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation, ed. Peggy Levitt and Mary C. Waters (London: Russell Sage, 2002).

9、Ibid., 255-94.

10、Hui Wang, “The ‘Ancestors’ of the Same Hometown and Different Places: The Spread and Shaping of the Chaozhou Hungry Ghost Festival,” Festival Studies 14 (2019): 55-63.

11、Gregor Benton and Hong Liu, Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820–1980 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 6.

12、Eric Richards, “Running Home from Australia: Intercontinental Mobility and Migrant Expectations in the Nineteenth Century,” in Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600-2000, ed. Marjory Harper (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 77–104.

13、Jennifer Wayne Cushman, Fields from the Sea: Chinese Junk Trade with Siam during the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program. Cornell University, 1993). Li Jiancheng, Chaozhou Port and Maritime Silk Road (Guangzhou: Guangdong Economic Publishing House, 2018).

14、Choi Chi-cheung, "Rice Treaty Ports and the Chaozhou Chinese Lianhao Associate Companies: Construction of A South China-Hongkong-Southeast Asia Commodity Network, 1850s-1930s", in Merchant Communities in Asia, 1600-1980, ed. Lin Yu-ju, and Madeleine Zelin (London: Routledge, 2015), 53- 78.

15、Chen Ta, Emigrant Communities in South China, A Study of Overseas Migration and Its Influence on Standards of Living and Social Change (New York: Institute of Pacific Relations, 1940), 9.

16、Zhao Chunchen and Chen Liming, A Century of Chaoshan Cultural and Social Changes Catalogue of Modern Chaoshan Culture and Social Changes (Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House, 2001.01), 96.

17、Woon Yuen-fong, “An Emigrant Community in the Ssu-Yi Area, Southeastern China, 1885-1949: A Study in Social Change,” Modern Asian Studies 18, no. 2 (1984): 273-306.

18、Tan Chee-Beng, “Shantang: Charitable Temples in China, Singapore, and Malaysia,” Asian Ethnology 71, no. 1 (2012): 75-107.

19、Chen, Emigrant Communities in South China, 116-208.

20、Woon, “An Emigrant Community in the Ssu-Yi Area.

21、James L. Watson, Emigration and the Chinese Lineage: The Mans in Hong Kong and London (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975).

22、David Mozingo, Chinese Policy toward Indonesia, 1949-1967 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 157-191.

23、Research Centre of Chaoshan History and Culture ed., The Second Series of Chaoshan Overseas Chinese Qiaopi (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2012), vol.67, 308.

24、Zhang Ming, Chinese Images Taken by Foreigners 1844-1949 (Beijing: China Photography Publishing House, 2018).

25、Yao Min’ai, “Funny Short Stories: Photo Studios in Beijing,” Tabloid, vol. 10, 1923, p.1-3.

26、“Photo,” Nanyang Siang Pau, May 14, 1929, 20.

27、Madeline Y. Hsu, “Migration and Native Place: Qiaokan and the Imagined Community of Taishan County, Guangdong, 1893-1993,” Journal of Asian Studies 59, no.2 (2000): 308.

28、Chen Shouming was once appointed by the national government as the Commercial Commissioner of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Thailand and was the Chairman of Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Thailand during the 1940s.

29、The Industrial Quarterly 2, no. 4 (1935. 3), and no. 1-4 (1936).

30、Chinese Commercial News Sunday Pictorial 10, no.16 (1932).

31、“Overseas Chinese Working in the Factory,” The Graphic Pictorial 1, no. 4 (1946).

32、 Bayi refers to the Chaozhou-speaking counties of Chaoan, Chenghai, Jieyang, Chaoyang, Huilai, Puning, Raoping and Nanao.

33、Choi Chi-Cheung, “Regional Studies and International Perspectives: Chaozhou, Hong Kong and Southeast Asia,” in Proceedings of the Symposium of Young Scholars in Comparative Studies of Regional Social History, ed. Shanxi Provincial Historical Society (Shanxi, 2004), 225-226.

34、Ibid., 228.

35、Research Centre of Chaoshan History and Culture ed., The First Series of Chaoshan Overseas Chinese Qiaopi (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2007), The Second Series of Chaoshan Overseas Chinese Qiaopi (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2012), and The Third Series of Chaoshan Overseas Chinese Qiaopi (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2015).

36、Jianhua Chang, Lineage Chronicles (Shanghai: Shanghai People's Publishing House, 1998), pp.108-38; Maurice Freedman, Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (London: Athlone Press, 1965), 108-12.

37、Hui Wang, “The ‘ancestors’ of the same hometown and different places: The Spread and Shaping of the Chaozhou Hungry Ghost Festival,” Festival Studies 14 (2019): 55-63.

38、Philip A. Kuhn, Chinese Among others: Emigration in Modern Times (Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 49.

39、Woon Yuen-fong, “Social change and continuity in South China: Overseas Chinese and the Guan Lineage of Kaiping County, 1949–87,” The China Quarterly 118 (1989): 329.

40、Fernando Herrera Lima, “Transnational families: Institutions of Transnational Social Space,” in New Transnational Social Spaces: International Migration and Transnational Companies in the Early Twenty-first Century, ed. Ludger Pries (London: Routledge, 2001), 77-93.

41、“Chinese Learning in Thailand,” Nanyang Siang Pau, June 26, 1967.

42、“Thailand's craze for learning Chinese,” Nanyang Siang Pau, February 5, 1973.

43、Choi, “Regional Studies and International Perspectives,” 225.

44、Fieldwork conducted by Hui Wang in Chenghai, Chaozhou from December 2016 to January 2017.