Opportunity in Crisis explores the history of late Qing Cantonese migration along the West River basin during war and reconstruction and the impact of those developments on the relationship between state and local elites on the Guangxi frontier. By situating Cantonese upriver and overseas migration within the same framework, Steven Miles reconceives the late Qing as an age of Cantonese diasporic expansion rather than one of state decline. The book opens with crisis: rising levels of violence targeting Cantonese riverine commerce, much of it fomented by a geographically mobile Cantonese underclass. Miles then narrates the ensuing history of a Cantonese rebel regime established in Guangxi in the wake of the Taiping uprising. Subsequent chapters discuss opportunities created by this crisis and its aftermath and demonstrate important continuities and changes across the mid-century divide. With the reassertion of Qing control, Cantonese commercial networks in Guangxi expanded dramatically and became an increasingly important source of state revenue. Through its reliance on Hunanese and Cantonese to reconquer Guangxi, the Qing state allowed these diasporic cohorts more flexibility in colonizing the provincial administration and examination apparatus, helping to recreate a single polity on the eve of China's transition from empire to nation-state.

Are you an engineer or manager working on the development and implementation of RFID technology? If so, this book is for you. Covering both passive and active RFID systems, the challenges to RFID implementation are addressed using specific industry research examples and common integration issues. Key topics include RF tag performance optimization, evaluation methodologies for RFID and Real-Time-Location Systems (RTLS) and sensors, EPC network simulation, RFID in the retail supply chain, and applications in product lifecycle management, anti-counterfeiting and cold chain management. The book brings together insights from the world's leading research laboratories in the field, including the Auto-ID Labs at MIT, successor to the Auto-ID Center which developed the Electronic Product Code scheme which is set to become the global standard for product identification.MIT Auto-ID Labs's suite of Open Source code and tools for RFID implementation is available at www.cambridge.org/9780521880930.

Are you an engineer or manager working on the development and implementation of RFID technology? If so, this book is for you. Covering both passive and active RFID systems, the challenges to RFID implementation are addressed using specific industry research examples and common integration issues. Key topics include RF tag performance optimization, evaluation methodologies for RFID and Real-Time-Location Systems (RTLS) and sensors, EPC network simulation, RFID in the retail supply chain, and applications in product lifecycle management, anti-counterfeiting and cold chain management. The book brings together insights from the world's leading research laboratories in the field, including the Auto-ID Labs at MIT, successor to the Auto-ID Center which developed the Electronic Product Code scheme which is set to become the global standard for product identification.MIT Auto-ID Labs's suite of Open Source code and tools for RFID implementation is available at www.cambridge.org/9780521880930.

Chinese Diasporas provides a concise and compelling new history of internal and external Chinese migration from the sixteenth century to the present day. Steven B. Miles places Chinese migrants and their families at the center of his narrative through a series of engaging case studies taking readers from the heart of Ming China to the global property markets of the twenty-first century. The focus on individual migrants and their descendants reveals the ways in which the 'Chinese diaspora' has consisted of distinct paths of migration from specific emigrant communities to targeted destinations both within China and abroad. This is essential reading for those interested in the history of the Chinese diaspora and the overseas Chinese, and for those interested in the role of migration in the making of the modern world.

Chinese Diasporas provides a concise and compelling new history of internal and external Chinese migration from the sixteenth century to the present day. Steven B. Miles places Chinese migrants and their families at the center of his narrative through a series of engaging case studies taking readers from the heart of Ming China to the global property markets of the twenty-first century. The focus on individual migrants and their descendants reveals the ways in which the 'Chinese diaspora' has consisted of distinct paths of migration from specific emigrant communities to targeted destinations both within China and abroad. This is essential reading for those interested in the history of the Chinese diaspora and the overseas Chinese, and for those interested in the role of migration in the making of the modern world.

Tracing journeys of Cantonese migrants along the West River and its tributaries, this book describes the circulation of people through one of the world's great river systems between the late sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Steven B. Miles examines the relationship between diaspora and empire in an upriver frontier, and the role of migration in sustaining families and lineages in the homeland of what would become a global diaspora. Based on archival research and multisite fieldwork, this innovative history of mobility explores a set of diasporic practices ranging from the manipulation of household registration requirements to the maintenance of split families. Many of the institutions and practices that facilitated overseas migration were not adaptations of tradition to transnational modernity; rather, they emerged in the early modern era within the context of riverine migration. Likewise, the extension and consolidation of empire required not only unidirectional frontier settlement and sedentarization of indigenous populations. It was also responsible for the regular circulation between homeland and frontier of people who drove imperial expansion-even while turning imperial aims toward their own purposes of socioeconomic advancement.

In 1817 a Cantonese scholar was mocked in Beijing as surprisingly learned for someone from the boondocks; in 1855 another Cantonese scholar boasted of the flourishing of literati culture in his home region. Not without reason, the second man pointed to the Xuehaitang (Sea of Learning Hall) as the main factor in the upsurge of learning in the Guangzhou area. Founded in the 1820s by the eminent scholar-official Ruan Yuan, the Xuehaitang was indeed one of the premier academies of the nineteenth century.

The celebratory discourse that portrayed the Xuehaitang as having radically altered literati culture in Guangzhou also legitimated the academy's place in Guangzhou and Guangzhou's place as a cultural center in the Qing empire. This study asks: Who constructed this discourse and why? And why did some Cantonese elites find this discourse compelling while others did not? To answer these questions, Steven Miles looks beyond intellectual history to local social and cultural history. Arguing that the academy did not exist in a scholarly vacuum, Miles contends that its location in the city of Guangzhou and the Pearl River Delta embedded it in social settings and networks that determined who utilized its resources and who celebrated its successes and values.