Historical analyses of the relationship between the locale and the Chinese nation have often attempted to place the development of a Chinese national identity into some sort of linear framework that leads to nationalism and nation-building. Beginning in the 1990s, however, some analysts argued that local and provincial identities have much to do with how the nation was imagined and that the local was often intimately connected with the national. Indeed, viewing local identity as historically dynamic has forced us to realize that questions of history, national values, and Chinese identity are not drawn from a single narrative. As one searches through the past of modern China, it quickly becomes apparent that the form and substance of what the nation meant to the Chinese people differed from place to place. One of the most crucial questions that many local communities faced in the first half of the twentieth century was how to maintain a meaningful local identity while being committed to building a strong nation.

In turning our attention to Xiamen, one is immediately struck by how the complexity of the relationship between the city and its overseas émigrés influenced this relationship. Like many other Chinese cities, important political and economic forces such as warlordism, imperialism, and nationalism certainly affected the relationship between Xiamen and the nation. In Xiamen, however, ties to the nation, both economic and political, were in large part managed and overseen by a group of people that had spent long periods of time overseas — the city's Overseas Chinese (Huaqiao). Drawn from both the city and the villages scattered across southern Fujian (Minnan), the southern Fujianese or Hokkien had dominated seaborne commerce with Southeast Asia (Nanyang) for centuries. This tradition of maritime trade also meant that the ways in which questions of national identity were negotiated by city residents was, in turn, affected by their international experiences. Much of what can be termed a “Xiamen identity” grew out of a mixture of a dynamic entrepreneurial culture and a cosmopolitanism that had been born in southern Fujian but raised in Southeast Asia.