Liu Hong. Southeast Asian Studies in China. Editor: Saw Swee-Hock & John Wong. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007.
Nearly thirty-five million ethnic Chinese now live outside mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Known collectively as “Chinese overseas”, they are a crucial force in the socio-economic transformations of modern China and the countries they reside and in the processes of cross-national interaction. Viewed from the perspective of international migration, they are one of the most dynamic immigrant and ethnic minorities. Despite a steady growth of interest in diasporic Chinese societies, relevant writings are scattered across scholarly journals, while some pioneering studies are out of print and hard to find. By re-examining the central themes of some representative works published in the last seven decades and reflecting upon the changing genealogies of the field, I hope readers can gain a deeper understanding of Chinese communities overseas in different historical periods and geo-cultural settings.
While by no means a comprehensive survey of relevant scholarship, this essay sketches the main trajectories and themes in Chinese international migration, meaning “the departure from Chinese soil for the purpose of living and working abroad with the likelihood of settlement”, whether or not the settlement was intended. It also reviews the changing approaches to these themes in spatial and temporal perspectives. The chapter goes on to provide an overview of these main approaches and connects them thematically and in other ways, and suggests additional references. Although this article is not specifically concerned with the status of overseas Chinese studies in the PRC per se, many issues discussed here have also been closely scrutinized by scholars in China, whose important efforts have collectively contributed to the field’s emergence and maturation. This essay, therefore, can be read comparatively with other chapters in this volume dealing with Overseas Chinese studies in the PRC.
Trajectories and Themes
The Chinese have had a long history of living and working outside China—a concept that is in itself a historical construct. The first account of Chinese emigration dates back to the Qin and Han dynasties (221 B.C.-220 A.D.), but not until the mid-nineteenth century did Chinese start to leave on a massive scale. This exodus had two principal causes: The socio-economic dislocations brought about by Western intrusion and the deteriorating imperial order in late Qing China; and the growth in demand for cheap labour and for merchants to serve as middlemen between the Westerners and Southeast Asian indigenes.
Later migration can be divided into three main phases. In the first period (the 1850s-1950), large numbers of Chinese, mainly from Guangdong and Fujian in South China, left for Southeast Asia. Up to the end of World War II, most considered themselves Huaqiao (Chinese sojourners or overseas Chinese), whose political loyalty and cultural orientation were towards China (in the form of a civilization, an ancestral hometown or qiaoxiang, or a nation-state). They were the generation of luoye guigen (“fallen leaves return to their roots”), a reference to Chinese who stayed loyal to their native places and wished (usually in vain) to return to them.
In the second period (1950-80), new ethnic Chinese identities emerged and people began to emigrate for different reasons and in different ways from in the past. An increasing number of Chinese living overseas were born locally, and the inflow of migrants virtually ceased after the founding of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. The Huaqiao gradually became Huaren (ethnic Chinese or Chinese overseas), who owed their political allegiance to their countries of residence. They were the generation of luodi shenggen (“falling to the ground and striking root”), a reference to the new pattern of permanent settlement abroad and renunciation of Chinese citizenship, while privately preserving a Chinese lifestyle and Chinese cultural values. Chinese now emigrated in large numbers from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. Unlike in the previous century, most went to North America, Australia, Western Europe, and Japan.
In the third and most recent period (1980—the present), new migrants originating in the PRC began to make up a greater proportion of overall Chinese emigration. The diasporic Chinese communities themselves have also undergone tremendous changes, due to continuing localization processes, accelerating globalization, and the emergence of China as a regional and potentially a world power.
This summary of Chinese emigration highlights central themes in an understanding of Chinese overseas, including the importance of different historical phases, differing patterns of adaptation in a range of political and geographical settings, linkages—political, economic, and symbolic—with the hometown or homeland, and the networks that connect Chinese overseas and their communities. A multi-dimensional perspective is essential for exploring these themes and processes.
First, by viewing Chinese overseas in the context of developments both in China and in their places of settlement, their complexities and characteristics are more easily captured. Second, it is essential to approach Chinese communities overseas from an inter-disciplinary angle. Social science theories and methods help to understand the Chinese diaspora, whose study is at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences. Approached creatively, its marginality is its strength. Studies of the Chinese diaspora can also be enriched by the broader study of international migration and associated theories, including issues such as identity, multi-culturalism, cosmopolitanism, networks, and ethnicity. Third, it is necessary not only to examine the impact on diasporic Chinese societies of China as a political entity and symbolic representation but also to analyse the diaspora’s role in political and economic change in China since the end of the nineteenth century. The Chinese overseas also play a role in interactions between China and their countries of residence. Finally, although Chinese overseas are a product of the eras of empire and the nation-state, at the same time they constantly cross national borders and defy the imposition of an identity based purely on territoriality, so they must be conceptualized in a transnational framework. Their mentality is one of both “here” and “there”, a characteristic that is often overlooked in state-centric histories.
The changing configurations and multi-dimensionality of Chinese overseas make scholarly inquiry daunting as well as exciting. It is exciting because the field affords numerous opportunities to reconstruct the tortuous journeys undertaken by Chinese in search of a better life. Chinese communities overseas are a magnet for inter-disciplinary projects. Studying them, however, is at the same time daunting, for the diversity of their social, cultural and political settings is impossible to grasp without a broad mastery of languages, histories and power relations. Collective work by scholars from different disciplinary and cultural backgrounds is the most effective means of tackling this diversity and fathoming its underlying unity.
This anthology aims to comprehend this multi-dimensionality by bringing together in one place some of the more representative writings published in English over the last seventy years. Apart from the usual criteria of academic merit and analytical rigour, special consideration is given to disciplinary and geographical factors, comparative analysis, transnational awareness, the blending of empiricism with larger theoretical discourses, and inter-disciplinarity. The anthology includes sections on the historical evolution of Chinese communities overseas with a focus on the second half of the twentieth century, when such communities underwent fundamental change, including hybridization. In terms of geography, besides articles on common institutional and cultural patterns among global Chinese communities, the volumes focus chiefly on communities in Southeast Asia, North America, Europe, and Australia. A salient feature of the collection is Chinese transnationalism, viewed from different disciplinary and geo-cultural perspectives. The contributors include both Chinese and non-Chinese. The essays are mostly from leading journals of the humanities and social sciences published in North America, Europe, Japan, Singapore, and China. Some are from edited volumes, and a small number are extracted from monographs, especially in the case of early publications vital for shaping our view of the Chinese overseas. Readers may find the statistics (and interpretations) of some selections dated, for they reflect the knowledge, political concerns, and dominant paradigms of their time, as such, they can also be seen as historical documents in their own right and chapters in the evolving genealogy of the field.
The complexity of diasporic Chinese history and the richness of its scholarship cannot be fully captured in an anthology of this sort. Many representative works and authoritative accounts are excluded for lack of space. To remedy this shortcoming, I have provided additional bibliographical references for some key themes. Readers may also wish to consult recent bibliographical works4 as well as the invaluable Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas edited by Lynn Pan of the Chinese Heritage Centre in Singapore and the massive twelve-volume Encyclopedia of Chinese Overseas under the general editorship of Zhou Nanjing of Peking University.
Structure and Variations
Conceptualizing and Historicizing Chinese International Migration
This volume deals with the conceptualization, history, demography, and spatial distribution of Chinese migration, including the changing paradigms of its study. The section on “Conceptualization” begins with a chapter on the historical patterns of Chinese migration by Wang Gungwu, doyen of the field over the last half-a-century. His essay describes the characteristics and inter-relations of four major players in Chinese migration and overseas settlement since 1800: The Huashang (Chinese trader), the Huagong (Chinese labourer or “coolie”, a term generally considered to be derogatory), the Huaqiao (Chinese sojourner), and the Huayi (descendant of migrants). Arguing that the “powerful and indestructible” Huashang pattern has been basic to Chinese migration since ancient times, Wang draws our attention to the profound spatial differences between Chinese migration to Southeast Asia and to the countries of European settlement in the Americas and Australasia.
While Wang Gungwu is a historian by training and mainly researches Southeast Asia, Paul C.P. Siu is a sociologist working on the first-generation Chinese in North America. Using the frameworks of George Simmel’s “stranger” and Robert Park’s “marginal man”, Siu conceptualizes “the Chinese sojourner” up to the 1950s as someone who “clings to the culture of his own ethnic group as in contrast to the bicultural complex of the marginal man. Psychologically he is unwilling to organize himself as a permanent resident in the country of his sojourn. When he does, he becomes a marginal man.” He identifies the dilemmas a sojourner faced in deciding whether to stay abroad or return home, a problem centrally related to “the success or failure of the job [of making money in the new land]—he would not like to return home without a sense of accomplishment and some sort of security. But this state is psychologically never achieved”. This movement back and forth forms an integral part of the sojourner’s life. “The sojourner stays on abroad, but he also never loses his homeland tie.”
The chapter by Philip Kuhn begins with the origins of Chinese migrant institutions within China itself since the sixteenth century and examines the foreign environments into which Chinese migrated and the community structures they developed, giving special attention to the flexible adaptation and recombination of cultural templates. He argues that the Chinese migrant ecosystem has functioned as “a spatially extended system that overspreads geophysical and administrative boundaries”. This ecosystem, furthermore, acted through a network of corridors, which made possible the continued recruitment of new migrants through exchanges of information and patronage. In an attempt to formulate a comparative framework in understanding Chinese migration, Kuhn proposes “an historical ecology”, a narrative deals with migrants’ adaptation to changing environments over historic time on a worldwide scale. Writing at the threshold of the twenty-first century and drawing on a wide range of data about global Chinese communities, Adam McKeown aims to reconceptualize Chinese diasporas and identifies two traditions in scholarly writings, one that emphasizes the adaptive nature of Chinese social and cultural organizations and their contributions to the national histories, another that stresses “the enduring love, patriotism, connections, and contributions of Chinese their homeland”. He criticizes the fragmentation created by “nation-based perspectives” and advocates a “diasporic perspective” that highlights the “global connections, networks, activities, and consciousnesses that bridge these more localized anchors of reference”.
The section on “Historical Evolution and Changing Demography” deals with the definition of “Chinese overseas”, a much contested subject. It is generally agreed that “Chinese overseas” refers to ethnic Chinese who live outside mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau “but acknowledge their Chinese origins, or are so regarded by demographers.” Some earlier writings include the populations of Hong Kong and Macau in their statistics, partly because of their unique place in the mental and geographical maps of Chinese diasporans. Confining his definition of “overseas Chinese” to two kinds of people, international migrants (whether they change their nationality or not) and their descendants, Zhu Guohong provides a detailed historical survey of the origins and processes of Chinese international migration using Chinese-language sources. He divides the history of Chinese migration into five stages and examines the processes in light of changes in the motivation for emigration, typologies of migration, and the distribution of the emigrating population. This perspective provides a contrast to earlier Western scholarship that tended to pay greater attention to colonial policies.
Labour migration was a main factor in Chinese international migration between 1850 and 1950. “A Survey of Chinese Emigration” prepared by the International Labour Organization deals with the characteristics and statistics of Chinese emigration in the first half of the twentieth century. Apart from discussing push-and-pull factors, it also describes the measures taken by receiving governments to restrict Chinese immigration and the Chinese Government’s attempts to protect its subjects abroad, thus highlighting the importance of power relations in emigration. The next two chapters describe the changing demography of Chinese overseas since the end of World War II. Using statistics and surveys provided by the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission in Taipei in the mid-1960s, the geographer Sen-Dou Chang examines the overall distribution of Chinese overseas and their occupational changes. According to him, the Chinese overseas were more numerous in the tropical than in the mesothermal regions, on islands or along coasts than in the interior of continents, and in urban than in rural areas. They worked primarily in restaurant, retail trade, agriculture, handicrafts and small industry, and mining in the mid-twentieth century. The data for the chapter on “The Global Distribution of the Overseas Chinese around 1990” derive from the Overseas Chinese Economic Year Book published in Taiwan, as well as from the national censuses of concerned countries. The chapter reports thirty-seven million Chinese overseas in 1990. (However, these figures include Hong Kong and Macau [approximately 6.1 million] and should be used carefully.) Apart from listing the demographic statistics of countries with a large number of Chinese, this survey provides useful data on population growth in the developed and developing regions and changes in the distribution of Chinese population between 1948 and 1990. The proportion of Chinese living in Southeast Asia has steadily declined, while that of industrialized nations has grown, a trend that has continued over the last fifteen years. (The latest demographic survey of Chinese overseas put their number at nearly thirty-three million in 1997, excluding Hong Kong and Macau.)
Studies on Chinese overseas have undergone paradigm shifts since the 1950s, when the field first began to take shape and grow in a climate of nationalism and Cold War. The chapters in the section on “Research Frameworks and Approaches” are concerned with changing perspectives on the Chinese diaspora. The main approach of scholars like G. William Skinner in the 1950s and 1960s was in terms of assimilation theory. Refuting popular myths about the “unchanging Chinese”, Skinner conceptualized Chinese assimilation in Thailand as a process when “the immigrant’s descendant identifies himself in almost all social situations as a Thai, speaks the Thai language habitually and with native fluency, and interacts by choice with Thai more often than with Chinese”. In a similar vein, Bernard Wong defined assimilation as a process whereby “immigrants discard the cultural traits of their land of origin and acquire those of their host country through intermarriage, participation in the institutions of the host society on primary group levels, internalization of the values of the larger society, and adoption of their behaviors and attitudes.” His work in Peru and the United States led him to conclude that the Chinese in Lima were more assimilated than in New York. While Skinner emphasized the role of politics in explaining the successful assimilation of the Chinese in Thailand, Wong also identified structural and environmental factors as the key variables in accounting for the differences.
By the 1980s, the assimilationist thesis had come under increasing criticism for its one-sidedness and uni-directionalism. In one of the first essays on diasporic Chinese identities, Wang Gungwu had argued that modern Southeast Asian Chinese tend to assume multiple identities. He elaborated four types of identity that have a central bearing on the minds and hearts of Chinese in the region: National, class, ethnic, and cultural. Some of his views have been subsequently refined and revised, but this essay generated much interest and debate. L. Ling-Chi Wang takes the critiques of the assimilationist and loyalty paradigms a step further. Arguing that the sole focus of these paradigms is “on the racial difference and conflict between the dominant Euro-Americans and the Chinese minority” and that it is “simplistic, unidimensional, biased and incomplete”, he proposes an alternative paradigm under which “racial exclusion or oppression and extraterritorial domination converge and interact in the Chinese American community, establishing a permanent structure of dual domination and creating its own internal dynamics and unique institutions”.
Cultural studies and scholarly discourses on the relationship between knowledge and power have given a new impetus over the past decade to the debate on Chinese identity. A fundamental issue at the heart of Chinese diaspora, Chineseness, has been treated with greater theoretical rigour than in the past. Instead of focusing on Chinese communities in specific locales, these studies are more concerned with conceptual and theoretical issues. Rey Chow makes a critique of the field of China study—particularly the study of Chinese languages, literatures and cultures, but she also argues that “the habitual obsession” with Chineseness has given rise to a cultural essentialism that draws an imaginary boundary between China and the world. It is one of several attempts to tear down the barriers between the study of China and of the diaspora. According to her, “in the controversies over cultural identity, the signs of the times are that the diasporic is fast becoming the norm.” In a similar effort to elucidate Chineseness, Ien Ang explores the limiting conceptual and political implications of diaspora discourse and argues that just like nations, “diaspora are not natural, always-already existing entities but ‘imagined communities’.” The transnationalism of the Chinese diaspora, she points out, is “actually nationalist in its outlook, because no matter how global in its reach, its imaginary orbit is demarcated ultimately by the closure effected by the category of Chineseness itself”. Questioning the rigid division between Chinese and non-Chinese, she proposes a return to the hybridizing context of the global cities as “points of destination for large numbers of migrants from many different parts of the world” and argues for bringing out the intrinsic contradiction of the concept of diaspora, thus constituting “the space of diaspora’s undoing”.
Ien Ang has problematicized not only Chineseness but the approaches to it, including transnationalism. Since the mid-1990s, transnationalism has made big inroads into migration studies, especially in studies on the Latino communities of the United States. Transnationalism is usually defined as “the processes by which immigrants form and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement…. An essential element is the multiplicity of involvements that transmigrants sustain in both home and host societies.” More specifically, transnational studies are concerned with “a growing number of persons who live dual lives: Speaking two languages, having homes in two countries, and making a living through continuous regular contact across national borders.” Recent theoretical reformulation has, on the other hand, claimed that the connections linking “here” and “there” are contingent outcomes subject to multiple political constraints. The chapter by Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini—and the collection they co-edited—has been highly influential in shaping our understanding of modern Chinese transnationalism, which is grounded in the “culturally distinctive domain within the strategies of accumulation of the new capitalism—both Chinese and non-Chinese—emerging over the last two decades in the Asia-Pacific region.” Conceptualizing modern Chinese transnationalism as a “third culture” that “arise[s] when groups face problems of inter-cultural communication at first hand and confront the necessity of continually moving back and forth between different cultures, each to some extent spatially defined,” they demonstrate the centrality of the Chinese diaspora’s transnational mobility and its flexible strategies in negotiating with “modern regimes of colonial empires, postcolonial nation-states, and international capitalism”. This path-breaking work has inspired a number of recent studies and points toward new and exciting directions in future research. Transnational studies have gained much ground over the past decade, as evidenced by recent studies on the Chinese press, religion, and migration.
Modern Chinese transnationalism must be understood in the context of linkages between China as a nation-state and the diaspora. Prasenjit Duara explores “the ways in which nationalist ideologies sought to contain and domesticate a variety of transnational phenomena in East Asia that potentially ran counter to the sovereign interests of the nation-state in the first half of the twentieth century”. He examines the different strategies employed by the Qing imperial state, revolutionary republicans, and the reformists, including Pan-Asianism, Han radicalism, and Confucian culturalism, in their engagement with the Chinese overseas (particularly in Southeast Asia and North America). This contact led to the politicization of the Chinese overseas, who came to play an increasingly important role in China.
China, to be sure, has more than one face. “China is not just another nation-state in the family of nations,” observed Lucian Pye; instead, it is “a civilization pretending to be a state”. This reconstructed China has ramifications for the Chinese overseas. Tu Weiming’s conceptualization of “Cultural China” is another attempt to go beyond the geographical and cultural boundaries that have shaped the study both of China and of Chinese overseas. Accordingly to Tu, Cultural China can be examined in terms of a continuous interaction of three symbolic universes: Societies populated predominantly by cultural and ethnic Chinese, which include mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore; Chinese communities throughout the world; and individuals “who try to understand China intellectually and bring their conceptions of China to their own linguistic communities”. While this conception is controversial, it points to the dynamic flows of Chinese cultures on a global scale and the formation of new identities as a result of their interactions. The increasing economic integration of ethnic Chinese societies has reinforced symbolic interactions in the cultural arena. Together with its political ramifications, it is at the heart of the equally controversial “Greater China” concept. Wang Gungwu’s chapter reminds us that this concept must be employed cautiously and that history provides a useful angle from which to understand contemporary evolutions. After a judicious examination of the changing political attitudes of different types of Chinese overseas toward the Chinese state, he concludes that while there are those who are narrowly concerned with China’s resurgence and those who are narrowly concerned with the survival of ethnic Chinese communities overseas, the rise of Greater China has had a profound impact on Chinese lives and the regions they inhabit. Again, China’s inseparability from the Chinese diaspora and the cultural linkages that bind them leads to an exploration of institutions that have had a long-standing and lasting impact upon diasporic Chinese and their homeland connections, themes central to Volumes Two and Four.
Culture, Institutions and Networks
A number of institutions have played a key role in shaping diasporic Chinese societies. Chinese culture is a main element in these institutions and the transnational networks that bind them. The second volume of The Overseas Chinese starts with a section on “Chinese Family and Clanship”, seen as the foundation of Chinese society, and their transformations in foreign settings. Ta Chen (1892-1975), who obtained his Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University and taught at Tsinghua University in the 1920s/1930s, was a pioneer in the study of overseas Chinese and their hometown linkages. His chapter deals with the family system in emigration and how the joint management of its resources and rigid control of individual family members was influenced by legal and social codes. He illustrates his arguments with concrete examples of the “dual family system”, meaning the establishment and maintenance of two families, one in South China’s emigrant communities and another in the diasporic settlements of the Nanyang (Southeast Asia). The dual family system differed from class to class—in upper, middle and lower class families—but its chief function remained the perpetuation of the family tree and economic inter-dependence. The husband enjoyed much authority, just as in the traditional family, but women played a larger role in the emigrant community and often had to manage family affairs in the absence of the household head. Tien Ju-kang, who obtained his Ph.D. in anthropology from the London School of Economics in 1948 and did field work in Sarawak, describes the clans, a surname group comprising a large number of dispersed localized sub-clans whose members may or may not be able to trace their origins to a single founding ancestor. He finds that “the intricate network of surname relationship” played an important social and economic role and highlights the changes that took place in clans overseas, including a greater sense of mutual solidarity and a larger economic role. Unlike in China, where seniority counted most, the leadership among Chinese clans in Sarawak was based on personal qualities and high economic status.
For the overseas Chinese community, the family is not only cultural and social but profoundly economic. “The essence of Chinese economic organization is familism,” according to Siu-lun Wong’s seminal essay. He argues that Chinese family firms are not necessarily small, impermanent, and conservative and identifies four phases of their development: Emergent, centralized, segmented, and disintegrative. Subsequent studies have pointed out that Chinese familism must be understood in different socio-political structures and that prevailing political discourses have also played a part in shaping it. While the concept of the family as a cohesive unit is normally linked with the notion of family members living under one roof, family dispersal is as old as human migration, a phenomenon well documented by Ta Chen and others. The wave of globalization at the end of the twentieth century further transformed the diasporic Chinese family. In his chapter on Hong Kong’s “astronaut families”, Chan Kwok Bun makes two main arguments: The dispersing of the patrilineal Chinese family is often a rational family decision to preserve the family and “families split in order to be together translocally”; and these spatially dispersed families constitute strategic nodes of an ever-expanding transnational field that produces the emerging Chinese cosmopolitan.
Voluntary associations are a central pillar of diasporic Chinese societies. Voluntary association is usually defined as “any public, formally constituted, and non-commercial organization of which membership is optional, within a particular society”, but Chinese voluntary associations are somewhat different. As Gary Hamilton argues, “[v]oluntary associations are clubs with members, with precise organizational boundaries, with some kind of governing body and specific purpose, and with written duties and responsibilities for the members. Chinese associations, however, are not so clear-cut as these, and are not so well defined and neatly bounded. Rather, these Chinese groups focus on the relationships that bind members into a common identity and that form a moral community out of which a sense of duty and obligation arises.” The section on “Voluntary Associations” begins with Edgar Wickberg’s chapter. On the basis of a comparative study of Chinese in Southeast Asia and North America, he provides a useful overview of overseas Chinese adaptive organizations that help new immigrants (and older ex-migrants) meet their initial basic needs—housing, jobs, and social support. Over the past 150 years, Chinese migrants’ needs have changed from housing and employment to new opportunities and hometown connections; and from new opportunities and hometown connections to concerns about their children’s need for Chinese education, in language or culture or both. He also examines the changing role of the huiguan (an association based on place of origin in China or common surname).
The chapter by Maurice Freedman, a pioneer in the anthropological study of Chinese overseas, is a classic work on immigrant associations in nineteenth century Singapore and elsewhere. Freedman examines connections built on the principles of locality, dialect, surname, and occupation and finds that there were both continuities and changes in the overseas settings. Secret societies in late Qing China were a main precedent for these associations. Anti-Manchuism was their raison d’être in China, but it became less so in Singapore, where secret societies served as “a means both of insulating the Chinese from outside interference, and of balancing the relations between the segments of a relatively closed Chinese community”. Lawrence Crissman’s theory of the segmentary structure of urban overseas Chinese communities, based on data from Southeast Asia and North America, offers a generalized model for understanding diasporic Chinese social organization. While emphasizing the multiplicity and situationality of Chinese ethnicity, Crissman points out that the Chinese community is not homogenous and is divided into a number of sub-communities, or segments, in terms of dialect and geographical origin. These segments are interlocking, overlapping and fluid. The leadership of Chinese segmentary communities is based on wealth and prestige. “Overseas Chinese communities”, concludes Crissman, “are plutocracies in which wealth breeds prestige and power”. This leadership pattern represented a major departure from that in China. As Wang Gungwu has demonstrated, in traditional China shi (scholar-officials) were at the top of the social and political hierarchy and shang (merchants) were either at the bottom (in the ideal type) or below the shi (in reality). Among Chinese in colonial Southeast Asia, on the other hand, “commerce and shop-keeping were the only sources of wealth open to them…. Thus, there were broadly speaking only two divisions in overseas Chinese society—merchants and those who aspired to be merchants.”
Chinese voluntary associations are primarily designed to meet immigrants’ needs in specific geographical locales, but their transnational activities should not be overlooked. Hong Liu’s chapter is concerned with an unprecedented surge in globalizing activity by overseas Chinese voluntary associations starting in the early 1980s, embodied in their frequent and large-scale gatherings; the formation of permanent international associations; and, most importantly, the extensive and creative use of such meetings and institutions to facilitate business and socio-cultural networks (both within the diaspora and between the diaspora and the homeland). It argues that the globalization of overseas Chinese associations represents a re-working of structural and cultural relationships in a multi-dimensioned global space. As a strategy of historical regeneration, social survival, economic expansion, and cultural revitalization, it deeply influences patterns of modern Chinese transnationalism and socio-economic developments in China and has created a new synergy between the global and the local.
Overseas Chinese business networks and entrepreneurship has been the subject of scholarly and popular discourse over the last two decades. Two different approaches have emerged, one culturalist and the other structuralist, to explain diasporic economic activities. More recently, what I called a “revisionist turn” has emerged, characterized by an attempt to go beyond the established dichotomy. The section on “Networks and Entrepreneurship” opens with Jamie Mackie’s chapter, which is an early examination of overseas Chinese business success and entrepreneurial capacity. Most of the writings he surveyed are on Southeast Asia, but he places his findings in the larger context of immigrant entrepreneurship, including its links with values, motivations and socio-political structures. All these issues have been at the center of the debate on entrepreneurship ever since the heyday of Weberian and Schumpeterian scholarship in the early twentieth century.
I mentioned earlier that studies on the Chinese diaspora have been international in scope and researchers from different disciplines and national backgrounds have contributed to the field. Well-known for his innovative work on the Chinese tributary system in East Asia, Takeshi Hamashita has brought Japan’s sinological tradition and rich source materials to the attention of scholars outside Japan. Instead of relying on the conventional unit of analysis that focuses on the country or national economy, his chapter looks at overseas Chinese financial networks at the intersection of region and ethnicity, with a special emphasis on the extensive trade triangle of Inchon-Shanghai-Osaka/Kobe. After its opening by the West in the 1850s, Japan created economic ties with other parts of East Asia by using the long-established commercial networks set up by Chinese merchants and overseas Chinese. Gary Hamilton questions the conventional wisdom that attributes the so-called economic miracle of East and Southeast Asia in the 1980s/1990s to the role of state, market, and culture. He argues that Chinese capitalism is not confined to precisely defined geographic boundaries and calls for a more historically grounded analysis. Chinese capitalism rests on a form of social organization that is “legitimated through kinship principles and is not dependent on a system of political economy”. These principles nurture business networks that “are extremely flexible and that give Chinese entrepreneurs a comparative advantage in demand-responsive settings”.
The fourth section, “A Question of Culture”, collects writings on factors that have helped shape the worldviews and mentality of Chinese overseas. It begins with a chapter on the role played by newspapers in Hong Kong in the making of diasporic Chinese consciousness. Historically, Hong Kong has served as a major port of emigration and a nexus of Chinese diaspora. Elizabeth Sinn shows that the Chinese press in Hong Kong in the late nineteenth century was a prime source of information on the Chinese abroad. By describing the suffering of compatriots overseas, highlighting the commonality of their experience, and underlining their ties with the homeland, it created in readers’ minds “a transnational entity that we now call the Chinese diaspora”. This reformulation of the Chinese diaspora coincided with the making of the Huaqiao and the emergence of a “New Asia” in socio-political discourse, pointing up the relationship between ethnicity and region.
Religion has played an important part in the imagining by Chinese emigrants, especially those of earlier generations, of the outside world and served as “cultural capital” linking them with the ancestral homeland. In an anthropological study on the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Tan Chee Beng examines forms and structures of Chinese religions, including Buddhism. He argues that these religions, characterized by polytheism and syncretism and in the realm of folk religions, were fundamental in creating Chinese identities. Education is another agency. Tan Liok Ee looks at Chinese schools in Malaysia, the most comprehensive Chinese-language educational system outside mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. She finds that the schools survived both by joining the national school system and by providing an alternative to it. As a result of demographic, socio-cultural, economic and political factors in the transition from immigrant society to membership of an independent nation-state, the Chinese culture of education remains resilient.
The gender issue in Chinese emigration has received increasing attention in recent years. Quite a few studies have appeared on Chinese immigrant women, particularly in North America. An obstacle to such research has been the paucity of accounts by Chinese women themselves, yet another “people without history” (to quote Eric Wolf). Judy Yung argues that oral history “allows ordinary folks like my subjects to speak for themselves, fill in historiographical gaps, and challenge stereo-types, as well as validate their lives”. She concludes on a hopeful note: “Chinese women have always had to be inventive in order to survive, adapt, and contribute to the well-being of their families, community, and country.”
Chinese representation and self-representation is another strand of scholarship in this field of study. Such representations happen principally in films, music, literary works, and socio-political commentaries. Caroline Hau looks at representations of Chinese in Filipino nationalist thought and notes a constant tension between efforts to identify Chinese as part of the Philippine nation-state and to hold them at arm’s length from it. She not only “calls attention to the marginalization of the Chinese, and the way it is principally expressed in terms of the suppression or subornation of a minority to the majority” but examines the mechanisms by which “the selective inclusion and exclusion of the Chinese helped enable precisely a political community to be imagined as Filipino”. This relationship between power, knowledge and the representation of Chinese as “aliens” is not confined to the Philippines. The Chinese in Indonesia, a commentary on ethnic Chinese in Indonesia by the country’s leading intellectual, Pramoedya Ananta Toer (1926-2006), is similarly intertwined with the politics of the Sukarno regime and the changing perceptions of the Indonesian state and the PRC.
Chinatown is inevitably shaped by the culture, ethnicity, and political authority of the host society. In North America, it is typically characterized as “a concentration of Chinese people and economic activities in one or more city blocks which forms a unique component of the urban fabric [and] is basically an idiosyncratic oriental community amidst an occidental urban environment”. Kay Anderson, however, goes beyond this conventional approach and presents Chinatown instead as “a social construction with a cultural history and a tradition of imagery and institutional practice that has given it a cognitive and material reality in and for the West”. It is, she argues, “an idea that belongs to the ‘white’ European cultural tradition”. Her analysis of municipal policies and landscape planning in Vancouver and of intellectual discourses on Chinatown shows how it is embedded in white Europeans’ sense of difference between immigrants from China and themselves. Chinatown’s internal politics and transnational linkages with China in the twentieth century were further ingredients in the making of Chinese urban communities in the West.
Chinatown is not only an idea and image but a place of residence and work, stretching in some cases even to an industrial sector. By means of extensive surveys and statistical analyses, Min Zhou and John Logan examine New York City’s Chinatown, one of the oldest in North America. Defining it as an ethnic enclave that creates opportunities for its members unavailable to them in the larger society, Zhou and Logan find that education, labour-market experience, English-language ability, and other forms of human capital enable male workers in the ethnic enclave to increase their earning power. However, gender discrimination in the enclave labour market means that human-capital returns are minimal for female enclave workers.
Communities Across the Globe
While the first two volumes look mainly at the Chinese diaspora as a whole, the third volume presents specific studies of ethnic and immigrant Chinese communities in different regional and national environments and the strategies they have adopted to cope with them. Themes such as identity, Chineseness, and gender discussed in the earlier volumes also feature here. It is not possible to cover ethnic and diasporic Chinese communities everywhere, so I have chosen to focus on Southeast Asia and North America. This choice is made also in recognition of changing demographic and scholarly trends. Southeast Asia was the main destination of Chinese emigration until the 1950s, when it was replaced by North America and other industrialized nations. However, some 80 per cent of Chinese overseas still live in Southeast Asia. The rise of cultural studies and ethnic studies in the United States and other Western countries has gradually led to the integration of ethnic Chinese into these new fields of enquiry.
The section on Southeast Asia starts with the work of G. William Skinner, whose analysis of diasporic Chinese societies combined a social science approach with sinological knowledge. He argues that Chinese and indigenous cultures achieved a new and stable socio-cultural synthesis in the “intermediate creolized societies” of Southeast Asia. Skinner’s comparative approach is complemented by the regional perspective developed by Carl Trocki in his study of Chinese enterprise in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Trocki shows that Chinese enterprise predated the colonial presence, that there was much transnational mobility, and that kongsis or shareholding partnerships were the main organizational structure of Chinese business. Claudine Salmon reappraises the Chinese contribution in Southeast Asia. Instead of focusing on Chinese as exploitative “middlemen”, she calls attention to various neglected aspects of Chinese enterprise, including technological assistance, financial support, and other forms of know-how in the period before and after the coming of the Westerners. The previous three chapters deal with the pre-colonial and colonial eras, when Chinese openly identified with China, as a civilization and nation-state. Fundamental changes took place in the post-colonial and postwar era after 1945, when indigenous nation-states emerged in Southeast Asia. Leo Suryadinata captures these changes and creates conceptual tools with which to study the new realities. Refuting terms such as “overseas Chinese” and “Chinese overseas”, he prefers to call Chinese in the region Southeast Asians and examines both their self-perceptions and indigenous perceptions of them. Government policies have also played a role in shaping Chinese national identities, which remain fluid.
Unlike most Southeast Asian regimes, which tend to homogenize ethnicity and portray it as a potential threat to national unity, North America, Australia, and New Zealand are migrant states committed to a policy of multi-culturalism and a general tolerance for ethnic diversity. These new regimes emerged late in the twentieth century and were predated by systems that discriminated on grounds of “race”, particularly against Chinese migrants. This institutional racism was a major determinant in the evolution of the identity, occupational patterns, and changing relationships of ethnic and immigrant Chinese with local state authorities and the ancestral homeland. L. Ling-Chi Wang argues that Chinese identity in the United States was shaped not only by dominant ideas of assimilation (in the United States) and loyalty (to China) but also by ideas that evolved from actual encounters between Chinese and Euro-Americans. Their interplay led to the formation of five types of identity, based on sojourning, assimilation, accommodation, ethnic pride, and alienation. Sucheng Chan’s case study contrasts strikingly with Skinner’s conceptualization of the creolized Chinese society in colonial Southeast Asia. According to Chan, second-generation Chinese Americans served as “one of the most important socializing agents in Chinese American communities” and strove to become Americans and to be treated as such. Unlike their Sino-Southeast Asian counterparts, Chinese Americans sensed irreconcilable differences between “American” and “Chinese” cultures and agonized over how to choose between them.
Peter Li traces the experiences of the Chinese in Canada between 1858 and 1930 and contends that their occupational choices were constrained by market conditions (including the demand for cheap labor) and institutional racism. Ethnic business emerged as a means of coping with a hostile environment. Li’s historical approach to ethnic stratification differs from traditional studies which tend to emphasize on psychological and cultural difference. Katharyne Mitchell takes the story of Chinese immigration to North America up to the end of the twentieth century, when the transnational mobility of people and capital reached new heights. Citing the example of an influential voluntary organization formed by immigrant entrepreneurs from Hong Kong, she explores the intricate relationship between transnationalism, neo-liberalism in Canada, and Chinese networks. She highlights the need to ground Chinese transnationalism in the national political economy, in itself a product of global transformation.
Although most European countries are not migrant states in the same way as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, they nevertheless became a prime destination of Chinese immigration in the late twentieth century. Frank Pieke argues that Chinese immigration to Europe is a largely neglected topic, even though it dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. By the late 1990s, there were more than half a million Chinese in Europe. Pieke calls for comparative studies and theory-building, and proposes a Europe-wide instead of a nation-bound approach. In the meantime, nation-based studies of ethnic and immigrant Chinese communities will help lay a solid foundation for pan-European comparisons. Gregor Benton’s meticulously documented study questions currents in transnational studies that stress contemporaneity, economics, and elites and argues that transnational practices and institutions are “as old as Chinese immigration to Britain”. In addition to building diasporic links with compatriots elsewhere, the transnational world of the Chinese in Britain has “several intersecting layers, corresponding to sub-ethnic, political, and class divisions”.
The experience of Chinese in Australia and New Zealand is strikingly similar to that of those in North America, in that racist immigration policies played a big role in shaping their communities. C.Y. Choi’s chapter on the 1901 Commonwealth Immigration Restriction Act analyses the moment of birth of the White Australia Policy, which survived for decades. The act required immigrants to undergo a dictation test in a European language. Australia’s Chinese population decreased by more than two-thirds mainly as a result, from more than 30,000 in 1901 to about 9,000 in 1947. The policy also precipitated the urbanization of the Chinese population and a concomitant switch from mining and farming to commercial and industrial pursuits. The inflow of large numbers of new migrants did not resume until the 1970s, when Chinese from Southeast Asia, China, and Hong Kong started to arrive. In the new wave, women outnumbered men. Dissatisfied with the migration paradigms that “are conceptually represented as economically and male driven”, Jan Ryan examines the new patterns of Chinese immigration to Australia from the angle of gender and class. Manying Ip surveys the evolution of Chinese in New Zealand in the light of changing immigration policies. She provides a demographic and employment profile of the community and analyses its coping strategies, intra-diasporic linkages, identity changes, and cultural revival since the 1990s.
The final section of the third volume presents writings about Chinese communities in other regions. These communities are smaller, both proportionately and absolutely, than those we have considered up to now. Even so, studies on them add to our understanding of the diaspora. Talking about the Chinese in Mexico and Peru, Evelyn Hu-Dehart shows that “as field hands and laborers, truck farmers, merchants, shopkeepers, artisans and manufacturers, pioneers and frontiersmen, the Chinese have made significant contributions to the economic and infrastructural development of Latin America and the Caribbean”. As for the Chinese in Japan, although there has been a big increase of studies on them, most writings are in Japanese or Chinese. Richard Friman focuses on the transformation of Chinese migration to Japan by highlighting the instrumental role of immigration policies and enforcement patterns. Some Chinese went in through the front door, legally, while others entered through the side door on student and trainee visas or through the back door as illegal immigration, to help meet the Japanese demand for unskilled labour.
In her chapter on Hakka ethnic identity in Calcutta, Ellen Oxfeld explains that ethnic identity is a matter not simply of how a group chooses to define itself but of how others define it. Ethnic identity is dialogical or reflexive, “created, maintained, and reaffirmed through a continuous set of oppositions between one’s own group and others”. She focuses on three elements in the establishment and maintenance of Hakka identity in Calcutta: “State and national politics, an ethnically differentiated and stratified economy, and a host society with a religious system based on the symbolic opposition of purity and impurity”. The final chapter, by Karen Harris, is about the Chinese in South Africa, a community that has a long history of struggle and transnational interactions ignored both by South African historians and writers on the Chinese diaspora. Harris describes the history of the Chinese in South Africa as “a legacy of inequality, inconsistency and interstitial existence”. They suffered more or less the same racial discrimination as other coloured populations, but their small numbers and distinctive culture allowed them to escape the worst rigours of apartheid and “to lead a sometimes precarious existence in the interstitial spaces between a ruling while elite and a large, mainly laboring class, black majority”.
Homeland Ties and Agency of Interactions
The history of the Chinese overseas is intertwined with their changing ties with the ancestral hometown/land. While China’s own transformations shaped Chinese emigration, the diaspora has in its turn influenced the development of modern China. Chinese overseas have also played a role in political and economic relations between China and their countries of residence. The writings in this fourth volume deal with two related issues: The long-standing linkages between Chinese overseas and their homeland and the contribution by Chinese overseas to China’s economic growth; and the diaspora’s role in interactions between China and other places.
The first section on “Qiaoxiang and Beyond” deals with the role of Chinese overseas in the qiaoxiang (ancestral hometowns) and beyond. The qiaoxiang are primarily in South China, especially Guangdong and Fujian. Ta Chen compares an emigrant community with a non-emigrant one. In an ethnographical study, he examines how the emigrant community’s livelihood was influenced by its sojourners overseas, including by way of remittances. Madeline Hsu describes the sojourners’ role in transforming the homeland, and their own transformation in the process. She focuses on the role of qiaokan, “magazines written and published locally and distributed to Taishanese [a sub-ethnic group originated from Taishan in Guangdong] internationally with the goal of nurturing a sense of connection to Taishan among émigrés and their descendants.” She concludes that through these qiaokan, “Taishanese at home articulated a vision of community in which Taishanese abroad continued to play vital roles in their guxiang [hometown] by employing their superior access to capital and technology overseas to invest in the economy and well-being of Taishan.”
While most studies on the qiaoxiang focus on Guangdong and Fujian, where the overwhelming majority of emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America originate, many ethnic Chinese in Europe are migrants or the descendants of migrants from the more northerly province of Zhejiang. Li Minghuan writes about Wenzhou, which claims to have some 250,000 compatriots living outside of China, more than 65 per cent of them in Europe. Poverty is no long the main motive for emigration. The post-Mao economic reforms have raised the standard of living and of expectation. Like Ta Chen, Li identifies a distinct “culture of migration” in the Zhejiang qiaoxiang, whose people see “getting rich in Europe” as their common destiny. Chinese overseas have contributed crucially to China’s rapid economic development since the late 1970s. The benefits have spread beyond the traditional qiaoxiang. Paul Bolt describes the efforts of the Chinese state to attract diasporic investors and the investors’ enthusiastic response. He concludes that while the Chinese “tribe” is still overshadowed by the Chinese state, the state has gained greatly from its diasporic connections.
Interactions between state and diaspora began more than a century ago. The section on “The State, Local Politics, and Overseas Chinese Nationalism” begins with Michael Godley’s examination of the Qing campaign to modernize pre-1911 China using overseas Chinese capital and skills. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, policy switched from protecting Chinese labourers overseas to “the encouragement of renewed contracts with the motherland to the outright exploitation of overseas experience and wealth”. The switch had far-reaching implications. Using Singapore and Malaya as examples, Yen Ching-Hwang traces the emergence of overseas Chinese nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century. An extension of Chinese nationalism, overseas Chinese nationalism was brought into being by the efforts of Qing officials and of the reformists and revolutionaries who visited Southeast Asia. External threats to China’s sovereignty heightened this nationalist sentiment. A strong concern for China’s fate was a main characteristic of overseas Chinese nationalism.
Wang Gungwu debunks the portrayal of ethnic Chinese either as non-political or as a serious political threat to the peoples they live among. Chinese groups are not static communities with solid and indestructible features; instead, they are “agents of change”, heterogeneous, mobile, and dynamic. Wang identifies three major groups among overseas Chinese: Group A is predominantly concerned with Chinese national politics and its international ramifications; Group B with local community politics; Group C with the politics of non-Chinese hierarchies, whether indigenous, colonial, or nationalist. In a comparative study of Jews in Central Europe and Chinese in Southeast Asia in the modern period, Anthony Reid examines the “creative and vulnerable role” of both groups of outsiders in dynamic processes of change. Reid’s chapter, which distinguishes between “blood” and “civic” nationalism, compares the transitions through which both entrepreneurial minorities passed: Their rise as key brokers for the expanding state; their emancipation; and their espousal of nationalism. William Callahan’s chapter is another comparative study of the interactions between multiple identities and the production of domestic and international politics. Neo-nationalists in both China and Thailand use diasporic Chinese as a resource to reconstruct a nationalist self and a foreign Other. The diversity of “Chineseness” is articulated in different economic and cultural spaces, while diasporas are “a symbolic resource in the production of cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and localism”.
The Chinese overseas have played an important role in the economic and diplomatic interactions between China and their places of residence. The third section of this volume, “Ethnic Factor and the Political Economy of Diplomacy”, begins with the chapter by Man-houng Lin on Taiwanese merchants’ role in the modern economic transformation of East Asia, a largely neglected issue. Their economic activities in Japan and Asia were shaped by Chinese merchants’ cultural networks and Japanese political economy. “When the cultural network functions, we can see the autonomy of Taiwanese or overseas Chinese merchants,” she concludes. “And where the Japanese political-economic force exerts influence, we can see the subordination of the Taiwanese or the overseas Chinese merchants.”
Stephen Fitzgerald deals with PRC policies toward the Chinese overseas, especially in the Cold War era, when the “Chinese problem” was at first a diplomatic liability and then (after the end of the Cultural Revolution) became an asset. Fitzgerald argues that Chinese policies after 1956 were based on a “high degree of sensitivity to the attitudes and emotions of indigenous Southeast Asians, and a well-informed and realistic appraisal of the situation in Southeast Asia and the complexities of the Overseas Chinese problem”, which in turn demonstrated Beijing’s “capacity for rational foreign policy action”. With a growing ethnic Chinese population in the United States and increasing importance of Sino-American relations, the role of Chinese as “a bridge across the Pacific” has arisen as a topic of debate and scholarly inquiries. Lucie Cheng analyses the role played by Chinese Americans in forming linkages between the United States and the Asia-Pacific region and how they themselves have been affected by such linkages. The triangular relationship between the United States, China, and Chinese Americans is also discussed. In building bridges to China, Chinese Americans both contribute to globalization and challenge it. Their identities, local and transnational, are transformed by the start of the “Pacific Century”.
The final section of this anthology, “Chinese New Migrants at the Turn of the Centuries”, looks at the so-called new Chinese migrants, or xin yimin. These are the people who have emigrated since the late 1970s, either permanently or as sojourners. New migrants are of four main types: Students-turned-immigrants (who study abroad but stay on after graduating), chain migrants (who join kin already settled overseas), emigrating professionals (who emigrate to the West using their educational credentials and professional experiences), and illegal immigrants (who go overseas without papers or overstay after their visas run out). Mette Thunø traces two policies changes that have redefined the Chinese state’s relationship with the new migrants: The PRC’s recognition of Chinese citizens living abroad as a patriotic force in the late 1970s, and its decision to call upon the “cultural and national loyalties to China [of recent Chinese migrants and ethnic Chinese] regardless of citizenship”.
Whereas Thunø deals with macro-level policy changes and their ramifications, Xiang Biao examines issues in the Chinese authorities’ management of emigration flows, including exit control, diaspora policy, student migration, labor export, regulations on emigration agencies and human smuggling. The Chinese authorities use emigration to enhance China’s international integration.
The anthology closes with my own preliminary observations on the uncertain future of new Chinese migrants and their homeland ties. It is often said that overseas Chinese nationalism had died out by the 1950s, when China-centred allegiances gave way to local identities. This chapter analyses the revival of overseas Chinese nationalism and puts it in historical perspective. It argues that overseas Chinese nationalism is concerned with China’s economic prosperity, cultural regeneration, and national unification. This nationalism is reactive and has an embedded tension with transnationalism, which reduces its centrality and intensity. As a result, it is unlikely to become a unified ideology or a centrally led movement like in the 1930s.