For kinship, not gifts: China’s rise redefines ties with relatives abroad

FUJIAN – That uncertainty is common among Singaporeans who have ventured to China in search of their roots, or xun gen, as the process is known in Chinese.

But as China rose from being one of the world’s poorest nations to the second-largest economy, the lives of its people were transformed – along with their relationships with descendants of overseas Chinese, including those in South-east Asia.

Once reliant on financial support from abroad, relatives in ancestral home towns are now largely self-sufficient. Family ties with those overseas are shaped less by obligation and more by personal choice and kinship.

Since China opened up in 1978, more than 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty, reducing global poverty by 75 per cent, according to World Bank standards.

The per capita disposable income for rural residents surged to more than 21,000 yuan (S$4,000) in 2023, from 134 yuan in 1978. Growth rates outpaced those in urban areas, though absolute income levels still lagged behind.

In 2021, President Xi Jinping announced during the 100th anniversary of the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC) that the country had built a “moderately prosperous society in all respects”.

Its gross domestic product exceeded 100 trillion yuan in 2020, with national per capita disposable income reaching 32,189 yuan – double the level in 2010.

These changes are felt most keenly not in statistics, but when overseas Chinese return to meet relatives they barely know.

For Mr Aw, his relatives in China did not ask for financial commitments, such as reconstruction of ancestral halls or red packets, during his two visits.

“There were all these stories when I was younger about how the relatives in China would ask for a lot when there were overseas returnees,” he said. “But the interactions so far with my distant cousins have been comfortable.”

The distant cousins were warm and generous. One invited them to his restaurant every night for meals and drinks and gave them tea leaves and bee hoon, which are Fujian’s specialities.

At the end of the trip, Mr Aw and his siblings handed out red packets – not because their Chinese hosts needed them, but as a gesture of appreciation.

“The money is also for them to help us clean the tombs and prepare offerings for our great-grandfather during festivals,” he said.

Taking a cue from the first trip in 1989, the Aw family also gave their Chinese relatives other gifts including alcohol and cigarettes on the second trip. This was the first visit for Mr Aw’s siblings and his nephew – this reporter.

Mr Aw said he would be open to future visits to see the village again, visit relatives and enjoy China’s tourist spots.

Yet renewed contact does not always translate into closeness – at least for now. While Chinese relatives told The Straits Times that they were glad to have met Singaporeans on xun gen tours, they remain somewhat unsure how to sustain or deepen that closeness.

Mr Aw’s distant cousin Hu Xinmin is an example. Now in his 60s, Mr Hu first met Mr Aw and his father in 1989 and said he was delighted to see his Singaporean relatives again 36 years later.

However, he felt that they had grown up in different environments and led lives that were “too different to find commonalities”, resulting in a sense of distance during their interactions. “There is a stronger sense of boundaries compared with the relatives I grew up with,” he noted.

Even so, when the Aw family visited Mr Hu and other relatives in 2025, warm greetings and pleasantries were exchanged in the Hokkien dialect.

Mr Hu, who now lives in Hutou town, Anxi county, received Mr Aw and his family in Zhiyang village, where their forefathers came from.

During dinner that day, Mr Hu held the hand of this reporter – a distant nephew – throughout the meal and invited him to his home in Hutou, about a 40-minute drive from the ancestral village, where his wife prepared local snacks like yam buns.

In Dabu county – a centre of Hakka culture in Guangdong province – a local resident, Mr Li, was deeply touched when his Singaporean cousin Lee Hong Ping returned to the ancestral village in 2018.

“It showed that he has strong family values,” said Mr Li, who is in his 50s and declined to give his full name for privacy reasons.

His cousin, Mr Lee, 56, heads the heritage committee at the Char Yong (Dabu) Association in Singapore, a clan association for Hakkas. He maintains casual contact with his distant relatives, sending occasional greetings on the Chinese messaging platform WeChat during festive periods.

“Beyond that, I might contact them for a meal when I am in the same city as them,” said Mr Lee.

Earlier generations of overseas Chinese in Singapore typically sent money, daily necessities and letters to their relatives in China – a tradition often passed down for at least one generation.

They also organised fund-raising activities to build basic infrastructure, such as schools, roads and temples, for their ancestral villages or helped new immigrants from their home towns settle in Singapore.

Clan associations – based on home towns, surnames or dialect groups – were formed to act as a bridge between the two countries.

Some associations organised trips from Singapore to China, a tradition that continues to this day. The Aw family’s 2025 trip was organised by the Nanyang Hwu Clan General Association in Singapore.

Mr Francis Phua, deputy secretary-general at the Singapore Federation of Chinese Clan Associations (SFCCA), which has some 230 member associations, told ST: “Overseas Chinese in Singapore (in the past) would think about returning home to China one day, or what is known as luo ye gui gen.”

The proverb describes fallen leaves returning to their roots.

As the migrants amassed wealth, bought property and built their lives in Singapore, the idea of putting down roots, or luo di sheng gen, gradually took hold, said Mr Phua, 66, who is also president of the Hainan Hwee Kuan in Singapore.

In addition, changes in China prompted overseas Chinese to take up citizenship in their destination countries. One major change came in the 1950s when China stated that overseas Chinese who had taken citizenship elsewhere would no longer be considered Chinese nationals.

The Overseas Chinese Museum in Xiamen, a port city in Fujian, noted that “most overseas Chinese chose to acquire citizenship in their countries of residence”.

South-east Asia’s Chinese diaspora through the decades

Internal strife within China could also have influenced some Chinese to remain abroad.

In 1945, after World War II, China resumed its civil war that started in 1927 and was interrupted in 1937 by the Japanese invasion.

The war ended in 1949, leading to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, run by the CPC. The Kuomintang government then retreated to Taiwan, which China claims as its own.

The Overseas Chinese Museum, founded by Singapore businessman and pioneer Tan Kah Kee, noted that “the world situation changed dramatically after World War II (and) multiple factors prompted the majority of overseas Chinese to obtain local citizenship”.

“With their identity shifting from expatriates to citizens, their sense of national belonging underwent a fundamental change,” it said.

At that time, Chinese citizens from coastal provinces such as Fujian and neighbouring Guangdong streamed into Singapore to take up jobs as traders, journalists and teachers. Some also started their own businesses.

Their descendants identified more strongly with Singapore, where they were born. Over time, many early migrants lost touch with their relatives in China.

“The earliest migrants would share with their descendants stories of their childhood and the lives of their relatives back in China, which were then passed on to their children,” said Mr Phua.

Living with extended families was also common, which helped foster a greater sense of shared identity – including awareness of their ancestral home towns in China and their relatives there.

In the past, common gifts to bring back to China included money, lard and rice, said Mr Or Teck Seng, chairman of the Nanyang Hwu Clan General Association in Singapore.

“Given how poor China was then, daily necessities were important gifts,” he said. Visiting Singaporeans would also buy gifts such as sewing machines and bicycles from speciality stores, catering only to foreigners.

Mr Or himself dug into his savings and sold one of his condominium units in Singapore to finance the rebuilding of his ancestral home in Anxi county in Fujian. The 68-year-old vice-president of an engineering company has taken on five such rebuilding projects, comprising four ancestral houses and a temple.

He first visited his ancestral home in 1997 and has since made more than 30 trips there.

“It was my duty to make sure my ancestors could ‘live comfortably’ so that they could continue blessing my family and me,” he said.

In the past, travelling to China was arduous. Travellers were required to fly to Hong Kong first, before making their way to ancestral villages in rural China. SFCCA’s Mr Phua said that Chinese Singaporeans would visit their home towns in groups to save on transport costs and for company.

He recalled that when he first went to Hainan province in the 1980s with his parents and his wife, his face was covered in dust after a four-hour bus-and-trishaw ride from the airport in Haikou to his home town, due to the sandy roads.

Improvements to China’s roads over the years have shortened the trip to no more than an hour or two these days, he said. Car rides are now smooth and efficient, a marked change from the bumpy journey he used to take.

Mr Phua said early generations of Chinese braved the gruelling journeys not only to see their childhood friends and relatives, but also to show their children what village life had been like before they left for Singapore.

Spotting the trend, travel agencies started offering xun gen tours in collaboration with clan associations, he noted.

While older trips often involved rebuilding temples, ancestral halls, or providing financial aid, modern tours are more focused on understanding family history.

Mr Or said the Singaporeans were “mostly curious about their ancestors’ home towns”, and some took part in traditional rituals to pay respect to their ancestors.

Some visitors went on unplanned xun gen trips when in China for other purposes. For instance, Mr Lee from Char Yong (Dabu) Association went in search of his ancestral home town in 2018, when he was in Guangdong for a conference.

His grandfather left Dabu county for Singapore around the 1930s shortly after getting married to work as a tailor. His job supported a household of 11 people.

“Though money was tight, my grandfather would still squeeze out money to send home to China whenever requests came,” he said.

His aunt showed him the room where his grandfather lived before moving to Singapore.

“The ancestral home has largely been abandoned after the roof caved in and became unsafe, but I’m very touched to have seen that part of my grandfather’s life,” said Mr Lee.

As for Mr Phua, his mother had urged him to visit their ancestral home in Hainan after he got married. His parents used to show him letters from their relatives, and he even helped them write back.

“So I actually wanted to go back and see what they were like,” he said.

That first trip turned out to be memorable.

“There was no language barrier, as we grew up speaking the Hainan dialect,” said Mr Phua. “Neighbours would visit us every night to talk to my mother until the wee hours, while my wife and I would hang out with my cousins, whom we were meeting for the first time.”

Today, China has one of the largest populations living abroad. There were about 10 million Chinese citizens living overseas in 2020, according to the International Organization for Migration. This placed China behind India (18 million), Mexico (11 million) and Russia (10.8 million) that year.

China has long regarded its overseas citizens as a key part of its growth story. Media reports show that their investments accounted for about two-thirds of the country’s foreign investment in its early development years.

Media reports also note that overseas Chinese, particularly those living in Hong Kong, Taiwan and South-east Asia, were among the first to invest in China in the 1980s. For decades, the diaspora – even after acquiring foreign citizenship – reportedly accounted for as much as 70 per cent of foreign direct investment.

The history of Chinese migration stretches back centuries. Records at the Overseas Chinese Museum show that a wave of Chinese emigrated abroad to seek refuge between the 1890s and 1920s amid China’s worsening political situation, frequent wars and severe natural disasters in the southern coast.

The two Opium Wars between 1839 and 1860 were a key driver that “brought drastic changes to Chinese society”, the records state.

After the Opium Wars ended, the Qing government was forced to accept a series of unequal treaties, allowing Western powers to recruit Chinese labourers in the south-eastern coast, according to the records.

The south-eastern coast includes Guangdong, Fujian and Hainan provinces, which are the ancestral homes of most Chinese Singaporeans. While some moved directly to Singapore, others travelled to a third South-east Asian country first, such as Malaysia and Vietnam.

History professor Zhuang Guotu at Xiamen University said that the majority of Chinese Singaporeans today are likely to have descended from migrants who left China after the Opium Wars, although there are also signs of earlier settlements of overseas Chinese in Singapore.

By the early 1940s, there were about 8.5 million Chinese worldwide – with more than 90 per cent in South-east Asia, said Prof Zhuang, director of the university’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies. This was a sharp increase from the 1.5 million overseas Chinese living in South-east Asia in the mid-19th century.

Emigration was banned in 1949 after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in the same year. It resumed after China’s opening-up reforms, with a third wave of migration in the 1980s that was “an integral part of the surge of global migration”, Prof Zhuang said.

While older Singaporeans look back and reflect on their roots in China, new immigrants are planting theirs in Singapore as part of a global migration surge.

Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in a speech at the SFCCA Spring Reception in January 2025 that “the needs of new immigrants are now very different from those in the past”, noting that “they no longer require support for basic needs”.

SFCCA’s Mr Phua said that unlike earlier groups of overseas Chinese who became Singaporeans, new immigrants from China are “much wealthier, with a number having moved to Singapore due to investment migration”.

Prof Zhuang said that migrants who arrived in Singapore after China opened up differed from earlier groups in their political views. Having seen or experienced the economic transformation first-hand, they formed their “own views of China’s political system”, he noted.

This group continues to maintain strong ties with their Chinese relatives back home, with some migrants holding substantial business interest in China as well.

“They view transnational mobility – and even returning to China – as a normal way of life and career development, representing a departure from the traditional immigrant mindset of (returning to roots),” he added.