Diasporic chinenessens after the rise of china

Chinese have been making a special contribution within the realm of culture to reimaginings of the nation, national consciousness, and national identity in the last quarter of a century.

Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China

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Contemporary Chinese Studies

This series provides new scholarship and perspectives on modern and contemporary China, including China’s contested borderlands and minority peoples; ongoing social, cultural, and political changes; and the varied histories that animate China today

A list of titles in this series appears at the end of this book

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the Rise of China

Communities and Cultural Production

Edited by Julia Kuehn, Kam Louie,

and David M Pomfret

permission of the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Diasporic Chineseness after the rise of China : communities and cultural production / edited by Julia Kuehn, Kam Louie, David Pomfret.

(Contemporary Chinese studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-7748-2591-7 (bound); ISBN 978-0-7748-2593-1 (pdf);

ISBN 978-0-7748-2594-8 (epub)

1 Chinese diaspora 2 Chinese – Foreign countries – Ethnic identity 3 Chinese – Foreign countries – Intellectual life – 21st century 4 Popular culture I Kuehn, Julia, author, editor of compilation II Louie, Kam author, editor of compilation III Pomfret, David M., author, editor of compilation IV Series: Contemporary Chinese studies

List of Figures / vii

Acknowledgments / ix

1 China Rising: A View and Review of China’s Diasporas since the 1980s / 1

Julia Kuehn, Kam Louie, and David M Pomfret

2 No Longer Chinese? Residual Chineseness after the Rise of China / 17

5 Textual and Other Oxymorons: Sino-Anglophone Writing of War and

Peace in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fifth Book of Peace / 67

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

6 The Autoethnographic Impulse: Two New Zealand Chinese

Playwrights / 80

Hilary Chung

7 The Provocation of Dim Sum; or, Making Diaspora Visible on Film / 100

Rey Chow

8 Performing Bodies, Translated Histories: Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution,

Transnational Cinema, and Chinese Diasporas / x111x

Cristina Demaria

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9 Dancing in the Diaspora: “Cultural Long-Distance Nationalism” and the Staging of Chineseness by San Francisco’s Chinese Folk Dance Association / 126

9.1 Early members of the CFDA, including three founders (first, second, and fourth from left in back row) / 129

9.2 Program cover, 1983 International Folk Dance Festival The CFDA took part in a multicultural arts event / 131

9.3 Program inside front cover, 1983 International Folk Dance Festival / 131 9.4 Program list, 1974 performance / 134

9.5 Program list, 1979 performance / 135

9.6 Program photographs, 1979 performance / 135

9.7 Program photographs, 2006 performance / 136

9.8 Program, 2004 tour of cities in Guangdong / 144

9.9 Local performers of Latin dance on the CFDA’s 2004 Chinese tour / 144 9.10 A float showing representatives of China’s ethnic minorities in costume, at the 2009 National Day Parade in Tiananmen Square / 147

10.1 Wang Zhiyuan, Object of Desire, fibreglass, baking paint, lights and sound,

363 x 355 x 70 cm, 2009, White Rabbit Collection, Sydney / 155

10.2 Ah Xian, Dr John Yu, Glazed Ceramic, 42 x 42 x 31 cm, 2004, National

Portrait Gallery of Australia, Canberra/ 157

10.3 Guan Wei, Unfamiliar Land, acrylic on canvas, 267 x 677 cm, 24 panels,

2006 / 161

10.4 Zhou Xiaoping and Johnny Bulunbulun, Brothers Work, ink and acrylic on

canvas, 200 x 165 cm, 2007, artists’ collection / 163

10.5 Shen Shaomin, Bonsai, plant, iron tools, 2007, Uli Sigg Collection / 166

Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China was made possible with

generous support from Hong Kong University’s China-West Studies Strategic Research Theme Initiative and the Faculty of Arts in the form of a grant from the Louis Cha Fund The book evolved from a symposium held in December 2008 at Hong Kong University This conference was co-convened with Professor Nick Hewitt from the University of Nottingham, with a generous subvention from the university’s U21 funds We would like to thank Professor Hewitt, his colleagues, and the fifty-odd participants at the conference for their valuable contributions For this volume, we chose seven

of the most suitable articles from the thirty excellent presentations and commissioned a few more

We thank all the contributors for their co-operation and good humour throughout this project We would also like to thank colleagues at Hong Kong University: Paul Tam, Marie-Paule Ha, Elaine Ho, Yeewan Koon, QS Tong, Esther Cheung, Douglas Kerr, and Gina Marchetti, all of whom contributed

to and supported the project, and particularly Fiona Chung and Sarah Downes, who offered invaluable assistance at various stages of the project

We are especially grateful to Anne Platt for all her help in the preparation of the manuscript and to Alan Walker for compiling the index This book has benefited greatly from the input of two anonymous reviewers for the UBC Press We would like to take this opportunity to thank them for their com-ments on the original manuscript and to thank Emily Andrew for her help and advice throughout the editorial process

Earlier versions of Chapters 7 and 9 were published as “The Provocation of

Dim Dum; or, Making Diaspora Visible on Film,” Journal of Modern Literature

in Chinese 9,2 (July 2009): 208-17; and “Dancing in the Diaspora: ‘Cultural

Long-Distance Nationalism’ and the Staging of Chineseness by San Francisco’s

Chinese Folk Dance Association,” Journal of Transatlantic American Studies

2 (2009), www tandfonline.com, ISSN 1479-4012 We thank the authors and journal editors for allowing us to reprint these here

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the Rise of China

China’s Diasporas since the 1980s

Julia Kuehn, Kam Louie, and David M Pomfret

China-on-the-Rise

In recent times, the concept of the Chinese diaspora has begun to be ceived in relation to the global phenomenon referred to as “the rise of China.” This phrase has been widely used to describe the situation whereby a previ-ously American-dominated and Western-oriented world order has been (or presumably soon will be) succeeded by a new bipolarity ushered in by the ascendancy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC; hereafter China) This ascendancy has proceeded from the rapid economic growth delivered by the Chinese government after 1978 through market reforms and political liberalization China’s growth has been so rapid that in January 2009, its National Bureau of Statistics could boast that China had overtaken Germany

recon-to become the world’s third largest economy in terms of GDP By 2011, it had risen further, overtaking Japan to become second only to the United States

of America

While the “rise of China” to the status of a global superpower in the last quarter-century has created much angst and anticipation, it has also raised fundamental questions about affiliation and identity for diasporic Chinese groups in the West In effect, this global shift has presented overseas Chi-nese communities with the challenge of accommodating new cohorts of economic migrants Moreover, the transnational flows of people, goods, and ideas that have accompanied and constituted this shift have radically altered conventional (if overly simplistic) perceptions of the Chinese diaspora as a one-way process Migrants making the return journey have re-engaged with the notion of diasporic origin as they have reconnected, through new per-sonal and professional links, with China While the significance of the eco-nomic and financial strategies of diasporic Chinese to this process has been widely acknowledged, much less has been said of the ways in which the in-dividuals and communities that constitute this group have begun to negotiate China’s ascendancy, reconfiguring and re-evaluating its meanings, both practical and symbolic This is a significant oversight, given that diasporic

Chinese have been making a special contribution within the realm of culture

to reimaginings of the nation, national consciousness, and national identity

in the last quarter of a century.1 This volume, therefore, sets out to make an original and distinctive contribution to the broader debate on diasporic Chineseness precisely by considering the representational and symbolic di-mensions of these developments through engaging with specific examples of Chinese cultural production and representation

From the late twentieth century into the early twenty-first century, a period marked by the advent of “New China” or “China-on-the-rise,” Chinese artists, writers, filmmakers, and other cultural producers have reinterpreted and represented China and Chineseness to global audiences A new-found cultural vitality and self-assurance has pervaded cultural and intellectual production and has been given expression in a variety of cultural domains For example, while those involved in China studies have for decades debated the social, historical, and political changes in, and implications of, this new economic superpower, the discipline of Chinese Cultural Studies has also recently gained momentum within the academe.2

The transnational and global reach of an economically and culturally booming China has been given a further boost by numerous co-productions between China and Hong Kong, notably in the film industry, before, and especially since, 1997.3 Mention of Hong Kong calls to mind the fascinating and complex spaces of the Chinese diaspora and the issues of nation, identity, politics, economics, belonging, alienation, and mobility that those spaces raise.4 In the context of the Chinese diaspora – be it in Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, North America, the United Kingdom, or elsewhere in the world – socio-cultural concerns about community, culture, and communication are always closely intertwined with living “abroad.”

Diasporic Chineseness after the Rise of China: Communities and Cultural Production addresses the nexus between the political and economic rise of

China and the cultural productions that this period has produced in the sites

of the Chinese diaspora It asks how this “New China” has influenced not only diasporic communities, culture, and communication but also more general critical and theoretical notions of “diaspora.” For the rise of China has inspired those in the vanguard of the cultural production of Chinese-ness to write and rewrite the ways in which the communities of which they are part articulate their “exile.” Through its focus on representation, the book takes up the question of how this momentous and ongoing shift in cultural

and economic power has impacted the cultural strategies adopted by members

of Chinese diasporic groups It examines how they have rethought and interpreted identity, community, and other paradigms through culture It

re-explores the creative response to this shift and how this shift has been materialized in literature, the visual and performing arts, and other cultural practices within diasporic groups The “culture” in the title of our collection refers to the works through which cultural producers have developed and given expression to diasporic Chineseness in relation to the Chinese nation-state through various media in recent years Our book analyzes examples of these creative engagements and how they relate to representations of diasporic affiliation, which is referred to by the term “communities” in the title.

Diasporic Chineseness, Cultural Nationalism, and the State

While the world was still reeling from images of the massacre of Chinese protestors during the Tiananmen demonstrations in June 1989 and the col-lapse of the Berlin Wall in November of the same year, followed closely by the demise of Communism altogether in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, diaspora was emerging as an important concept in literary and cultural stud-ies Those at the forefront of this developing field focused their attention on diasporic groups that they understood, as a result of their dispersal, to inhabit spaces across or between national spaces In the very movement of these individuals and groups through transnational networks, scholars identified possibilities for liberation from the nation-state, which was often perceived

as oppressive, coercive, or monolithic.5 Diaspora functioned within the deme as an analytical category that could be used to challenge assumptions about the indispensability of the nation to individual and collective identity.The Chinese government’s 1989 crackdown and the impending handover

aca-of Hong Kong to China in 1997 triggered waves aca-of diasporic movement from Hong Kong The liberatory potential of diaspora quickly gained momentum

in literary and cultural deliberations over what it meant to be Chinese For the elite of Chinese cultural producers and intellectuals, a group accustomed

to the privilege of moving through diasporic networks, suggestions that a challenge to the interconnectedness of state and nation might be constructed

on the heterogeneity and hybridity of “displaced” subjects held a special fascination Investigations of “Chineseness abroad” emerged at the forefront

of new contributions to diaspora and “East-West” studies

Wang Gungwu’s seminal works on the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia gave rise to the growth of studies of Chinese people overseas, from those who were sojourners to those who were settlers in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century Many stayed and became naturalized in their new homelands Many also returned to China and played an active role in the momentous changes there Most were happy to lead ordinary lives wherever they found themselves, and very few indulged in debates on national or ethnic

identity politics It was not until late in the twentieth century that scholars such as Ien Ang, Shirley Lim, Rey Chow, and Sau-ling Wong began to give more theoretical depth to the area of investigation that crystallized into Chinese diaspora studies Their creative and critical contributions to the area of Asian American writing gave momentum to this field as it emerged

on the intellectual agenda – in the wake of postcolonial studies and in parallel with transnational, cosmopolitan, and (later) global studies – to become an established critical category.6

Although the tendency in the academe had hitherto been to discuss the Chinese diaspora in rather reductive terms related to flows of capital and commerce, Asian political discourse in this period – and in particular, specu-lation over the remarkable economic growth of Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan – focused greater attention on the role of culture in this economic, political, and national-transnational ferment In this context, the ideas of the influential scholar of Confucianism Tu Weiming, who argued that a re-newed sense of “Chineseness” located within the diaspora might serve as an example for a centre supposedly in moral and cultural decline, gained ground

Tu advanced the concept of a “cultural China” as an area of cultural geneity spanning diasporic nodes However, to some, especially those who felt themselves to have been assimilated into the cultures and contexts in which they lived or to be pursuing autonomous projects, claims for such an imagined community of exiled Chinese intellectuals sounded like an appeal

homo-to an (elitist) ethnic fundamentalism.7 While diasporic Chinese – whether

“nationalist,” “cosmopolitan,” “assimilated,” “transnational,” or “multicultural” – had often been defined in terms of such supposedly coherent cultural norms, these norms themselves were and are, as intellectuals have pointed out, undergoing constant adaptation

Moreover, as increasing economic and political influence began to augment the authority of the Chinese state in the years that followed, predictions of a dominant periphery ran up against evidence signalling the enduring import-ance of “the nation” in debates over identity within diasporic communities

In the last two decades, the Chinese Communist Party itself has been an important galvanizing force behind the reassertion of the nation As it pursued

a shift away from the economic tenets of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought toward party-state nationalism, the government developed a “Patriotic Education Campaign,” which was launched in 1991 and proceeded along-side systematic ideological and institutional efforts to cultivate Chinese nationalism among diasporic communities This shift in policy saw younger members of these communities, in particular, re-envisioned as “new migrants:”

a generation supposedly marked out by its sentimental attachment to, and affinity with, the rising Chinese nation-state and its modernizing projects.8

The subsequent surges in nationalist sentiment observed among members

of diasporic Chinese communities attracted much scholarly attention and were illustrated with reference to some quite spectacular (and by now well-known) incidents.9 For example, the website www.huaren.org, set up to speak for diasporic Chinese who felt themselves to be victims of racial prejudice, manipulated ethnic essentialism in the case of the rape of Chinese women

in Indonesia The anger expressed within diasporic communities connected across new media networks with a state-level response from China Second, after the Olympic torch relay ceremony in Europe during the summer of 2008 was accompanied by violent criticism of the human rights violations perpe-trated by representatives of the Chinese state, young diasporic Chinese themselves organized large-scale counter-protests supporting the Olympic Games in Beijing.10

Both incidents are suggestive of how essentialist, cultural nationalist conceptions of Chineseness continued to flow through diasporic networks,

in some cases serving the interests of the Chinese state As the People’s Republic of China redefined its cultural space within and beyond the so-called Great Fire Wall, in accordance with its augmented global role, the frameworks for a place-based imagination from which the idea of community proceeds also shifted Although new media technologies facilitated virtual networks, they did not necessarily diminish nationalist or statist interven-tions in the cultural politics of diasporic communities New technologies sustained nationalist efforts within some communities and contexts to re-engage with diasporic Chineseness and even to integrate diasporic audiences into official nationalism.11

These examples are illustrative of the profound implications that the rise

of China has had for diasporic groups living in the West China’s ascendancy has presented them with a series of new dilemmas, as well as opportunities and challenges Long-established hierarchies of cultural and economic op-portunity encouraged earlier generations of transnational Chinese to interpret Western cities as “frontiers” of economic and political “freedom.” These older generations were mostly labourers whose stays in countries outside China were prompted by economic necessity The majority had received little formal education in China before they left However, since the late 1990s, the num-ber of young Chinese going abroad to attend colleges and universities has increased dramatically, and the number who have chosen to return to China has also increased at a rapid rate The rise of China, accompanied by a shift

away from state policies envisioning overseas Chinese as an economic source toward the valorization of this group and its contribution to “mod-ernization,” has brought into question deeply ingrained assumptions about moving to and living in the West, as well as about departing from and re-turning to China.

re-Reterritorialization, Representation, and Diasporic Generations

The “return” has become a more and more prominent socio-economic phenomenon in recent years According to Chinese Ministry of Education statistics, the percentage of Chinese who departed as students or research-ers and have returned to China has increased dramatically in the last ten years This apparent reversal of what authorities had referred to as a “brain

drain” in the 1990s has brought increasing numbers of the so-called haigui,

or “sea turtles,” back to China.12 The impact has been to further stimulate re-evaluation of “the West.” Both diasporic communities and returnees have revisited definitions of nation, identity, community, and culture Cultural producers, who have often been at the forefront of engagement with these questions, have (re)interpreted and represented them in their work Within the domains of the academe and cultural production, the concept of dias-pora and how it might be relevant to Chinese living both inside and outside the national borders of China has acquired new importance and complexity The time is ripe for critical reflection on how, exactly, Chineseness has been refashioned in the wake of the rise of China

In the last decade, a number of anthologies have been published that have begun to investigate the role of culture producers and cultural products in this network of nation, diaspora, identity, community, and communication

The editors and contributors of Asian Diasporas: Cultures, Identities,

Representations (2004); Culture, Identity, Commodity: Diasporic Chinese Literatures in English (2005); Reading Chinese Transnationalisms: Society, Literature, Film (2006); Diasporic Histories: Cultural Archives of Chinese Transnationalism (2009); and China Abroad: Travels, Subjects, Spaces

(2009) have done good work in this field, to name just a few.13 However,

en-gagement with several key themes distinguishes Diasporic Chineseness after

the Rise of China from these other anthologies First and foremost, this

col-lection reviews the changes that diaspora in general and diaspora studies more specifically have experienced since the 1980s In this study, pioneers of this critical field of scholarship and established scholars examine how the rise of China has had an effect on their (previous) understanding, theoriza-tion, and representation of “the Chinese diaspora.”

Second, and related to the first point, this book highlights the significance

of the “personal voices” of and within diasporic Chineseness While it remains committed to the analysis of the “representation” of the Chinese diaspora through its various cultural products – as do the above-mentioned collec-tions – our collection adds lived experience to these analyses The personal voices of diaspora vary a great deal They range from those of the pioneering critics of Chinese diaspora studies to those of diasporic writers and artists and anonymous returnees But what these voices have in common is their reflection of the changes in the scholarly and personal understanding of (life and identity in) diaspora and the related issues of nationality and national-ism The essays in this collection thereby serve to illustrate how diasporic intellectuals are engaged with the geopolitical shifts that influence Chinese people in different social settings They add to our understanding of diaspora

by examining the relevance of these imagined communities to other groups beyond the “ivory tower.” Together, they provide a sense both of the detach-ment and separateness intrinsic to diaspora and of the multiple incongruities

of the diasporic Chinese experience They reveal the diverse strategies adopted

by a range of intellectuals, artists, and “everyday people” confronting diasporic Chineseness in the age of the rise of China, and they provide new insight into how nation, identity, and diaspora are mutually produced

Third, in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as the Open Door Policy stimulated movements within China as well as an outflow of those referred to as “new immigrants” and encouraged tens of thousands of overseas Chinese to make the return journey, new importance was attached both to the “minorities” who moved across its internal and external borders

and to the nature of diasporic engagements with, and within, the nation

Indeed, as Tseen Khoo and Jacqueline Lo point out, “the term diaspora now includes ethno-cultural groupings (e.g., Gypsies and Kurds), racialised group-ings (e.g., Black, Indigenous), country-defined communities (e.g., Iranian, Somalian), transethnic and transborder linguistic groupings (e.g., Francophone and Anglophone), and global religious communities (e.g., Catholic),” leading them to conclude that “there has been a ‘diasporisation’ of diaspora studies.”14

In response, Shu-mei Shih, for example, has proposed a new direction in the study of Chineseness based on people who use the Sinitic script.15

What it means to be Chinese is being negotiated across cultures, and Chinese diasporic subjects have been shaped by and have confronted very different forces on the ground in the nations of settlement in relation to wider global shifts Chineseness has therefore become differently re-embedded

in the process of diasporic relocation As Allen Chun suggests, “The very

nature of identity as a selective process in the mind of individual actors grounded in local contexts of power and meaning makes the possibility

subject-of ‘Chinese’ identifying with a common discourse a hopelessly impossible

task.”16 In other words, location is critical to representations of Chineseness Hence, while a “deterritorialization” of nationalism and the nation-state has occurred, and is integral to diaspora, this book also investigates the “re-territorialization” of literary and cultural studies

It is precisely the embedding of “culture” in local contexts of power that produces diverse expressions of Chineseness Although the very mobility of diasporic Chinese renders them constituents of a “deterritorialized” nation (or a diffuse nationalism), diasporic groups, wherever they are, continue to

engage with notions of the homeland They remain key participants in and

contributors to imaginings of the nation and of national consciousness and national identities Because of their participation, the profound shift in the meanings ascribed to the bounded space of the Chinese nation-state has, over the last three decades, had a corresponding impact on the various ways

in which cultural producers currently “read,” and have read, diaspora The rise of China has inspired new reflections on how a national identity may be embedded in, or even at odds with, specific socio-political grounds

This collection shows how experiences and performances of ization” through literary and cultural media are also important From the

“reterritorial-haigui struggling to develop strategies that will allow them to remigrate to

mainland China, to “hyphenated” Chinese intellectuals and writers making the return to the “homeland,” reterritorialization challenges us to rethink our understanding of links between the diasporic community and the main-land It brings into sharp relief the modes and means through which the individuals who form part of these diasporic groups have engaged with changed, and changing, notions of “nation” and “homeland” and have devised and participated in imaginings of the nation and of national consciousness and national identities It also illustrates how the state’s appropriation of certain ethnic minorities within the mainland as a tool of “soft power” in the service of efforts to promote cultural nationalism has left these communities facing a sense of “exile,” of being “strangers in their own homes.” This sense,

in some respects, is similar to that experienced by Chinese living beyond the geographical borders of the Chinese nation-state

Context is closely interrelated with ethnicity and culture in the tion of identity Through its case studies of cultural production, this collection examines the variety of ways in which the adoption of multiple identities may allow individuals to engage with communities on a social level These

construc-www.Ebook777.com

engagements may decentre the authority of cultural hegemony, without necessarily destroying the boundedness of identity, through the articulation, rearticulation, and communication of these challenges in a variety of media The individual essays in this volume examine the ways in which diasporic Chinese have developed and mediated their personal, ethnic, and national identities in an ongoing engagement with the contexts in which they have settled They also examine how culture producers have negotiated recent transformations in local contexts The chapters in the volume focus on rather specific cultural struggles, experiences, and representations of specific loca-tions – Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan, North America, and Tibet – bringing these to bear on theoretical insights about changing notions of nation and diaspora which, as will emerge, vary widely and are therefore far from essentialist.

Fourth, this study engages with the rearticulation of diasporic Chinese ness

at a moment when new technologies are liberalizing speech within diasporic communities Recent developments in social media, political and personal blogging, networked activism, and coalition building may have seen youth

at the forefront of attacks on conventional paradigms, standard models, and established hierarchies A key consequence of this has been that “older” forms of understanding of what it means to be Chinese have been reworked

or have fallen into abeyance Ways of understanding what it meant to be Chinese may even have undergone something of a generational shift, as evidenced by the different strategies adopted by those who consider them-selves to be “naturalized” or assimilated and by those young people whose migration has been more recent This shift needs, we suggest, to be under-stood in relation to a rising China The essays that follow have therefore been grouped precisely in order to highlight the complex development of dia-chronic and generational differences within the diaspora For example, the grouping that deals with the film genre juxtaposes representations of dias-

poric Chineseness in films such as Dim Sum in the 1980s with those of Lust,

Caution in the first decade of the twenty-first century Together, the essays

make more easily discernible the tensions that have emerged in the wake of diasporic strategies as culture producers have explored intergenerational relationalities through the authoring and reauthoring of narratives that posit alternative histories and identities

In what follows, our contributors reflect on the significance of various different media to the highly complex processes of cultural production: in effect, the “framing” of these processes through a variety of genres, texts, and lenses The collection begins with an analysis of intellectuals’ personal voices

beyond and outside academia Because the border crossings of large numbers

of people back into (as well as out of) China in the last three decades, have created new kinds of diasporic Chineseness and understandings of Chinese nationalism and culture, the first three essays place particular emphasis on the theme of the “return.” They nuance claims for the diasporic Chinese as

a post-national, cosmopolitan community of “transnational yuppies” and high light the conundrum posed for those who would seek to understand links between the diasporic community and the mainland by emphasizing the importance of flexible identity and multiple territorialities negotiated by transmigrant individuals.17

If the rise of China has prompted intellectuals to revisit the extent to which they “identify” with the national regimes in which they – or earlier generations – pursued assimilation, it has also inspired, among some, a pronounced disinclination to view themselves as part of a single universe of discourse Yet, as this volume also shows, simultaneously and paradoxically,

an imaginary transnational fundamentalism – extending to Chinese where – has endured through this period It may even have intensified Ien Ang’s “No Longer Chinese? Residual Chineseness after the Rise of China” addresses this issue Ang examines the ways in which notions of hybridity and transnationalism, which have been central to thinking about diasporas, have changed profoundly with China’s emergence as a new global superpower The essay considers the implications of the rise of China for the construction and experience of diasporic Chinese identities and asks whether space will remain for vernacular, localized, hybrid Chinese diasporic identities or whether they will instead be increasingly overpowered by the homogen-izing, essentializing, and nationalizing force of a global China Ang explores this conundrum by reflecting on modes of diasporic cultural transfer in the broader context of international relations and global historical change in the twenty-first century Her reconsideration of global Chineseness not only sets the tone for the volume by bringing under critical reconsideration the con-ventions of the “East-West” dynamic but also sits in complementary relation

every-to the final essay, Kwai-Cheung Lo’s re-evaluation of Chinese within the

borders of a rising China

For some, physical distance from the mainland presents useful ities for transcending divisions within Chinese nationhood It allows the pursuit of alternative ways of cultural self-identification However, as a result

opportun-of China’s triumphant embrace opportun-of capitalism, others have felt compelled to re-evaluate the state-led “project” of Chinese modernity Within the over-arching frame defined by the contributions of Ang and Lo, Chapters 3 and

4, by Ouyang Yu and Kam Louie respectively, examine this re-evaluation from the perspective of the migrant intellectual and entrepreneur

In “Twenty Years in Migration, 1989-2008: A Writer’s View and Review,”

Ouyang Yu provides a powerful, provocative, and deeply subjective insight into the case of the Chinese intellectual migrant The essay picks up on the issues of identity, identification, and globalism introduced by Ien Ang and, employing a strikingly different vernacular and an approach that is symp-tomatic rather than analytical, opens up important questions about reflexiv-ity and representation The essay – disgruntled, forthright, and combative

in tone – nuances earlier studies of Chinese cultural identity focusing on assimilationist tendencies within migratory movements to the West and tracks a sharpening sense of individual difference vis-à-vis specific host cul-tures: in particular, those of Australia and Britain It examines the revised expectations and orientations that result from the bitter experience of the costs of migration and highlights the constraints and conventions encountered

in the intellectual “marketplace” of the West In his essay, Yu critically assesses the meaning of diasporic “freedoms” in the light of this reinter-pretation and explores the motives for a “reterritorialization” as an important stratagem of the intellectual migrant

re-By contrast, Kam Louie’s “Globe-Trotting Chinese Masculinity: Wealthy,

Worldly, and Worthy” reveals strategies adopted by business migrants for successful deal making as they travel back to China Unlike portrayals of the merchants and compradors of traditional and modern times, in which wealth creation was seen as the result of immoral and exploitative practices, the materialistic and hedonistic pursuits of these entrepreneurs are shown to

be part of their business acumen in the international marketplace While China’s rise could indicate a cultural renaissance, the phrase refers primarily

to an economic phenomenon The political and moral soul searching so mon only a decade or so ago has given way to monetary concerns For both the individual and the collective, success is measured almost entirely in fi-nancial terms, and a worthy gentleman is seen as one who is both wealthy and worldly

com-In order to provide new insights into the contextually and temporally specific development of diasporic Chineseness since the rise of China, this collection looks to two overlapping and mutually constitutive levels: the individual and the community To simultaneously counterpose and comple-ment the personal experiences with contemporary scholarly and theoretical debates on diasporic Chineseness experienced by various subjects and in various cultural representations and manifestations, the volume develops

discussion of how theories of the mutual constitution of “the nation and diaspora within a Chinese frame” have been rearticulated from the late twentieth century by those giving expression to it through the literary genre.18

In Chapters 5 and 6, the contributors discuss the textuality of cultural productions from the new perspectives opened up by the theorizing

literary-of a rising China as nation and in diaspora They track the ongoing struggle over historical, social, and personal representations of Chineseness and the three-way negotiation between group, host, and home country in various media Although some Chinese seek to divest themselves of their ethnicity, they may at times choose to invoke Chinese culture to advance their own interests, whether economic, ideological, or nostalgic Focusing on Maxine Hong Kingston’s historicizing of the diaspora of Chinese civilization, Shirley Geok-lin Lim provides a key vantage point on this problem from the North American perspective in “Textual and Other Oxymorons: Sino-Anglophone

Writing of War and Peace in Maxine Hong Kingston’s Fifth Book of Peace.”

She highlights Kingston’s appeal to the possibility of the Chinese diaspora as

a planetary pacifist movement – that is, of a diasporic supercultural ness embodied in the “figure of peace.” Lim’s reading of Maxine Hong Kingston’s writing brings into focus the complex tensions between the abso-lutism of the state and the collusive relationship that diasporic Chinese may maintain with it in Chinese and foreign contexts

Chinese-In “The Autoethnographic Impulse: Two New Zealand Chinese wrights,” Hilary Chung examines the recent explosion in creative explorations

Play-of Chinese New Zealand identity by a new generation Play-of artists and writers

of Chinese descent amid a new wave of Chinese migration in the wake of the rise of China The juxtaposition of Chung’s essay with Lim’s again allows the divergent responses of generations of cultural producers to be drawn out Focusing on the work of young Chinese New Zealand playwrights, Chung identifies a common impulse whereby the classic autobiographical claim to authenticity of identity has been combined with an ethnographic focus that seeks to authenticate the location of the historical Chinese community within contemporary New Zealand Such an impulse is suggestive of how space can

be carved out for diasporic Chineseness in such a community, given the particularistic commitment to a paradigm of multiculturalism within bi-culturalism This, she argues, in turn provides conditions in which a product-ive engagement with notions of China-on-the-rise can develop

Film has provided an especially vital medium for the expression of diasporic identity, but the historical poetics of visuality, deeply entrenched within transnational capital, are also closely connected to the politics of the modern

nation-state Visuality – what becomes or is made visible – is in itself trinsically an economic, political, and cultural phenomenon that can reveal much about the politics of culture within Chinese diasporas Chapters 7 and

in-8 discuss this further Rey Chow’s “The Provocation of Dim Sum; or, Making

Diaspora Visible on Film” focuses discussion on an earlier generation of diasporic Chinese and the important transitional moment of the 1980s During this period, as the rise of China as an economic superpower com-menced, Chinese Americans were taking advantage of their increasing visi-bility within US media to articulate a new vision of China Illustrating her

argument with the example of Wayne Wang’s Dim Sum (1985), Chow shows

how, in this period of transition, film mediated between two distinct visions

of China: one represented by older diasporic Chinese populations in North America and the other by a new generation of Chinese Americans who were carving out a more prominent presence in various US media domains The essay shows how diaspora (in this case, a particular Chinese diaspora) has been dealt with through the medium of film It discusses both the specificities

of filmmaking and pertinent links between the works of contemporary Asian directors and the earlier moments of film in the first part of the twentieth century “Slowness” and the image of the mother both emerge as aspects of these specificities in Wayne Wang’s handling of his subject

The theme of tradition is revisited in this discussion of diasporic film with

Cristina Demaria’s analysis of Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution (2007) In her essay

“Performing Bodies, Translated Histories: Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution,

Trans-national Cinema, and Chinese Diasporas,” Demaria analyzes this recent film adaptation of the homonymous novella by Eileen Chang Shot in China by a Chinese crew, made partly with Chinese funding, and directed by Ang Lee,

a filmmaker identified with transnational cinema, the film represents the dynamic contemporary culture of Chinese cinema Demaria’s chapter con-nects with Chow’s essay, which discusses the other end of the period under study, one marked by “the contemporary global problematic of becoming visible.” While Chow examines Wang’s exploration of diaspora through aesthetics, Demaria shows how Lee uses the lenses of politics, history, and gender While the mother is a key figure for Wang, Lee is fascinated by the image of the spy, who performs the effacement of personal (national?) identity and in whom the challenges of navigating across boundaries and borders and negotiating dual loyalties (including the betrayal of the nation) can be read

as a metaphor for cosmopolitan citizenship and transnational cinema Demaria argues that in the context of ongoing efforts within the Chinese

diaspora to reconfigure the relation between centre and margin, Lust, Caution

emerges as a film that expresses and embodies the complications involved in the crossing of boundaries and the generational challenge of addressing the repressed conflicts of China’s tumultuous past.

Chapters 9, 10, and 11 deal with art, performed and exhibited, from the 1960s to the present day Sau-ling Wong’s “Dancing in the Diaspora: ‘Cultural Long-Distance Nationalism’ and the Staging of Chineseness by San Francisco’s Chinese Folk Dance Association” examines the medium of dance in order to explore the tensions that have developed between different generations of diasporic Chinese over articulations of Chineseness She considers the sig-nificance of dance in the construction and defence of a sense of community within this particular Chinese diaspora and shows how this medium has been used to construct and defend an essential Chinese identity predicated

on a centrifugal cultural ideology Accounting for the considerable tive power that these essentializing tendencies possessed for a generation of diasporic Chinese grappling with a profound sense of estrangement, she then tracks the diminishing appeal of such performances after the rise of China.Yiyan Wang’s “Tyranny of Taste: Chinese Aesthetics in Australia and on the World Stage” presents us with both case studies and a larger theoretical debate about changing/changed notions of the Chinese diaspora Introducing the art practices and products of Chinese Australian artists such as Wang Zhiyuan, Guan Wei, Guo Jian, Hu Ming, Zhou Xiaoping, and Shen Shaomin, Wang also enters the debate that is at the heart of this volume: with an Australian art market “mad about” Chinese art and with a number of Chinese artists settling in Australia and receiving Australian citizenship but then, often after decades, returning to China, how do we need to rewrite the critical understanding of this Chinese Australian diaspora? Clearly, in an age of global and transnational art distribution and production, the concept of diaspora has become much more fluid, flexible, and open than pioneers in the field initially suggested

incorpora-The importance of this question of how Chineseness has been rearticulated

is signalled here by the fact that this book commences with an examination

of Chineseness – indeed, its re-evaluation beyond the borders of a rising China – along a by-now-familiar East-to-West etiology and concludes with

a study that considers how “minorities” within the national borders of China

are provoking a reappraisal of diasporic engagements with the nation.Kwai-Cheung Lo, in “Reconfiguring the Chinese Diaspora through the Ethnic Minorities,” studies the ways in which those on the periphery of

“China” have been selectively, though spectacularly, appropriated into onstrations of “Chineseness” by those working through official channels to represent the “new” China to the world In doing so, Lo’s contribution sheds

dem-new light on the importance of communities drawn along lines of ethnicity

to the ongoing reconfiguration of the notion of Chineseness in the Chinese diaspora The chapter highlights the importance of ethnic traditions as a source of legitimacy – that is, the role of ethnicity in the construction of a cultural taxonomy of the nation – and the importance of ethnic minorities

to diasporic community formation In the wake of China’s rising global status, members of diasporic Chinese communities have also re-embraced their ethnic identities and built closer bonds with their ethnic homeland

Lo shows how history has served as an axis along which allegiance to the homeland has been redefined In this way, diasporic Chinese have engaged with tradition both by reinventing it and by seeking to dispense with, or elude, its grasp Lo reminds us of how, through the performance of “ethnic dance,” neo-nationalism draws on similar kinds of images to the cosmopolitan dias-pora In this regard, diasporic Chinese may (wittingly or not) serve as a cultural and financial resource for Chinese nationalist projects oriented toward transnational reunification strategies Standing in complementary relation

to Ien Ang’s chapter, Lo’s essay rounds out this volume by showing how the rise of China and the accompanying intensification in antagonistic relations with internal “minorities” have sparked heated debate and considerable controversy over what it means to be Chinese in the twenty-first century

A Rising Discourse

Together, the contributions in this volume explore the ways in which nation and diaspora have been mutually constituted after the rise of China They show that as the meaning of links between host societies and China have changed in response to this shift, so too has the concept of the Chinese diaspora in cultures and communities (including academic communities) As the contributors show, diasporic Chinese have used a variety of media to give expression to their sense of the ambiguity and fluidity of multicultural experience and, in particular, essentialist discourses of Chineseness China-

on-the-rise thus provides a mechanism for the re-exploration of ethnie and

new theoretical discussions of diaspora as an alternative focus to the nation.The essays in this collection provide new evidence of the many ways in which individuals have fashioned and refashioned imagined communities in terms of both deterritorialization and reterritorialization During a period marked by their acquisition of greater visibility, diasporic Chinese subjects have participated in a discursive politics that reconfigures the relation be-tween centre and margin The return “home” has been communicated in various media in such a way as to reinforce the sense of being part of a “third culture.” The essays also show that diaspora, as a kind of “third culture,” needs

to be understood in relation to global networks of culture rather than merely national communities That is, a diasporic ethnic identity is not something that is defined by either the point of origin or the nodes in the transnational network across which migrants move.19 The essays in this volume draw atten-tion to the role of communication through culture in the construction of individual and community identity, following a major shift in perceptions of

a Chinese “heritage” subsequent to China’s rise

Together, the chapters gathered here explore China and Chineseness in specific temporal-spatial contexts and elucidate the many varieties and di-mensions of Chineseness abroad They shed light on ways in which new memories, new allegiances, and new self-identities have emerged and been formulated in the last three decades The contributors show how Chineseness has been mediated and materialized, related to and asserted, against the nation-state They reveal how the ethos of a transnational and diasporic way

of life runs up against other social values – values related to social class, gender, sexuality, and generation – in productive relation, and against the nation-state itself As such, the essays demonstrate the significance of locality and locatedness to diasporic Chinese cultural politics Finally, it is hoped that the international case studies presented here will serve both as a provocation

to and a timely signal of the promise of further comparative and contextual analysis of the efforts undertaken in recent times, at a variety of levels, to adapt, accommodate, and fundamentally reconfigure the symbolic meanings

of diasporic Chineseness after the “rise of China.”

Chineseness after the Rise of China

Ien Ang

In 2008, I was invited to Beijing to present a keynote address at the Eleventh International Conference on Australian Studies in China I was pleased, as this would be my first visit to China in more than a decade The first decade

of the twenty-first century was a time in which China rose to prominence as

a major power in the global capitalist world order In this period, China’s international reputation was transformed from one of the backwaters of his-tory to the country that many onlookers consider the premier rising global superpower So massive has been China’s increased clout in such a short period of time that it has compelled the emergence of a discourse of the “rise

of China” in the West, a discourse characterized by a mixture of awe and anxiety An invitation to visit Beijing – just after the spectacular 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the event that bolstered China’s new-found notoriety on the world stage – was therefore a golden opportunity for me to get a glimpse

of this newly powerful China But accepting the invitation wasn’t an easy decision for me

The problem was more personal than professional China, after all, is the disavowed homeland of my ancestors and thus the troubled signifier of my family’s enduring physical and cultural displacement When I was growing

up in 1950s and 1960s Indonesia, my parents always insisted that we were Chinese but that it was better not to flaunt this identity because, so I was told, we lived in a country that was hostile toward us Chinese Thus, for me,

“being Chinese “was always linked to a history and experience of tion and marginalization, of being “Other.” We were a self-identified Peranakan Chinese family living far removed from China, the country of our family origins Hence, “China” has always been present in my imagination as

minoritiza-a metminoritiza-aphor for the impossibility of “home,” the remote locus delicti of my

forced and despised inauthenticity, succinctly typified as “being Chinese but not speaking Chinese.”1 This paradoxical identity was not a matter of choice but a social imposition: a lived paradox that was most painfully accentuated whenever I visited a Chinese-speaking country, say Taiwan or Hong Kong,

where not speaking the language (no matter whether it was Mandarin, Hokkien, or Cantonese) signified a cultural deprivation that made it clear that

my claim to Chineseness was a problem I was either too Chinese (because

I looked like one) or not Chinese enough (because I didn’t speak the language)

As a consequence, my relationship with China – the country and the culture – has always been torn by ambivalence On the one hand, its emotive pull has always been irresistible, like the life-long involuntary bond one has with one’s family no matter how strained relations are; on the other hand, I have always refused to submit to the idea that I was “a lost child of China.” In pursuing cultural and intellectual autonomy, I felt the need to push China away from me and to keep identification with “being Chinese” at bay, living

my life instead as a hybrid, cosmopolitan, and transnational subject, a multiply situated subject without a homeland This has made sense to me as someone who spent my youth in postwar Indonesia and received my formative educa-tion in the Netherlands, where I spent twenty-five years as a semi-assimilated Chinese-Indonesian subject in a white European context, and who has lived and worked in the officially multicultural society of Australia since the 1990s However, one can never be completely free of one’s ethnic origins: a residual Chineseness is always part of me – for example, in the form of family memory

or inherited cultural knowledge, however truncated

I have described and theorized this precarious, unstable, and problematic identity formation, its social complexities, and its wider cultural repercus-

sions, in the essays in On Not Speaking Chinese In my book, not only do I

emphasize the flexible indeterminacy and contestability of Chineseness as

a signifier for identity, its capacity to be remade and reshaped in different conditions of diaspora; I also stress the very prospect for the salience of Chineseness – as a category of identity – to be undone, negated, and cancelled out, whenever the boundaries between “Chinese” and “non-Chinese” become blurred or non-sensical: for example, in contexts of pervasive hybridization through complex co-mingling and intermixing with many other groups and ethnicities As I put it there, “Not only does the moment of pure Chineseness never strike, there are also moments – occurring regularly in the lives of those

‘truly on the periphery,’ in Leo Ou-fan Lee’s words – in which the attribution

of Chineseness does not make sense in the first place.”2 This hybrid standpoint – inspired as it is by postmodern, post-structuralist, and postcolonial critiques

of determinist thinking – amounts to a largely deconstructive cultural politics, focused more on unsettling modes of ethnic absolutism and nationalist cer-tainties than on asserting alternative positive identities From my own per-sonal point of view, this embrace of cosmopolitan hybridity provided important breathing space, opening up discursive wriggle room for modes

of engagement, intellectual and cultural, that are not straitjacketed by the fraught legacy of past migration and diasporic heritage It was a way for me

to play down the significance of my Chinese “roots” and their continuing influence on my tense relationship to China, real and imagined, by keeping

my identity ambiguous, indefinite, undecided

But the recent rise of China has made maintaining this discursive ambiguity more complicated China’s increasingly prominent presence on the world stage has made the country virtually impossible to ignore, surrounded as we now are by incessant stories about its problematic progress Ubiquitous “Made

in China” labels are a constant reminder of the country’s role as the engine

of the world economy, the media are obsessed with the political impact of China’s ascent on international relations, and encounters with self-confident and knowing mainland Chinese – whether students, tourists, professionals, diplomats, business people, or migrants – are now a regular experience in most corners of the world All of this has created a larger-than-life phantom China in the global imagination, a China that is at once mighty and scary, far too large and powerful for its own good A “monstrous” China that, in its unstoppable march to superpower status, threatens to swallow up the world The more I was confronted with this monstrous China, the more urgent it became to come to terms with my deeply ambivalent relationship not just with China but with “being Chinese.” The invitation to the conference in Beijing was a small opportunity to do just that

When I arrived at the Chinese Consulate in Sydney, I found myself in a long queue of people, the majority of whom were visibly Chinese, waiting impatiently for their turn at the visa application counter The all-too-familiar feeling of anxious disconnect resurfaced immediately when someone asked

me something in Chinese I hid my embarrassment by shrugging my ders, remaining silent Here again was a moment of being (mis)taken for Chinese simply because I looked Chinese, just like most people in the queue They thought I was one of them Luckily, the woman behind the counter did not seem surprised or bothered when I addressed her in English The form

shoul-I had filled in was itself quite interesting shoul-It asked for “country of birth,” in

my case Indonesia, and “current nationality,” in my case Dutch (Although I migrated to Australia almost twenty years ago, I have never become an Australian citizen, opting instead to keep my European Union passport.) For reasons mysterious to me, the form also asked for “former nationality,” which

I had left blank The sharp-eyed woman behind the counter noticed this omission and said that I should put “Indonesian.” The form also gave the option of providing your Chinese name, in Chinese characters, “if applicable.”

I decided not to fill this in, even though I do have a Chinese name (for which

I cannot draw the characters), carefully chosen for me by my Peranakan Chinese grandfather So I imposed a verdict on myself: by not providing my

Chinese name, it would appear that I was de facto no longer Chinese, at least not to the Chinese authorities Instead of tracing my ancestral roots, the form traced my biographical route from Indonesia to the Netherlands to Australia

This was a poignant moment that made me wonder: does this official, cratic disidentification with Chineseness mean that I am no longer part of the Chinese diaspora, and if so, what am I?

bureau-I tell this personal story to reflect on the changing meaning of the

prob-lematic term “diaspora,” especially Chinese diaspora, in the new global

condi-tion of the twenty-first century Of course, I cannot claim that my experience

is in any sense representative – on the contrary It is from the singularity of

my story – enunciated from a place “truly on the periphery,” in the murky borderlands where it is impossible to unscramble “Chinese” from “non-Chinese” – that I wish to make some observations about the politics of Chineseness in the era of the “rise of China.” My interest here is in making that murky, peripheral, ambiguous place productive for global intercultural dialogue that can be freed from the absolutist sign of “Chineseness,” which,

as I will argue, is being reinforced, not diminished, by the reductive logic of diaspora in this age of China’s rise

Diaspora, Transnationalism, and the Nation-State

Just over two decades ago, Khachig Tölölyan, editor of the journal Diaspora,

wrote, “Diasporas are the exemplary communities of the transnational ment.”3 The transnational moment at that time was a manifestation of the intensifying processes of globalization – economic, technological, cultural – since the 1980s This transnational moment was also, at that time, widely experienced as a moment of cultural possibility, a moment of the emergence

mo-of previously submerged, multiple perspectives, a moment mo-of emancipatory and democratic potential In particular, this transnational moment was as-sociated with the promise of unsettling the homogenizing, assimilating power

of the nation-state

“Diaspora” was one of the key terms that signified this promise As Tölölyan

notes, diasporas force nation-states to “confront the extent to which their boundaries are porous and their ostensible homogeneity a multicultural heterogeneity.”4 More importantly, the transnationalism of diasporas was

hailed by some as an effective conduit for overcoming the constrictions of

national boundaries, for challenging the power of the nation-state to include and exclude In this way, as Tölölyan put it, diaspora operated as the “para-digmatic Other of the nation-state:” it deconstructed dominant notions of

identity, belonging, and citizenship Diaspora was seen as an alternative site

of belonging for those who felt excluded from the national imagined munity invoked by the nation-state It promised a virtual home for those who – marginalized by the divisive fallout of racial, ethnic, or cultural difference – wished to declare that they were, as James Clifford puts it, “not-here to stay;” it imparted a “sense of being a ‘people’ with historical roots and des-tinies outside the time/space of the host nation.”5

com-In this transnational imaginary, diaspora is posited not as a competing structure to the territorial nation-state but as an unbounded, dynamic net-work of places and flows that comprise movements and interactions across space without fixed boundaries Diasporic emancipation from the shackles

of the nation-state, in this regard, is not a matter of organized oppositional politics but involves a cultural deterritorialization of identity and belonging that transcends the nation-state from the inside, what Michel de Certeau once called “escaping without leaving” – a politics of evasion that erodes the cultural cohesion of the nation but leaves the legal borders of the nation-state intact.6 Implied here is a postmodern notion of diaspora, one that emphasizes mobility and hybridity and that decentres both the host country and the original homeland as determinants of identity The ancestral home here is less an actual place to return to than a mythical site of memory and (be)longing for diasporic subjects trying to come to terms with their existential condition of displacement, producing what Vijay Mishra calls “transcultured subjects.”7 Exemplifying this postmodern notion of diaspora is the African diaspora, especially in Paul Gilroy’s characterization of it as the Black Atlantic,

or – although this is an historical anomaly – the Jewish diasporic experience before the establishment of the nation-state of Israel, as expressed in the

Yiddish term “galut.”8 This, then, was the transnational promise of “diaspora:” the promise of a sense of identity and belonging that is constrained neither

by the place of residence nor by the originary homeland but that emerges from redeeming the very fact of displacement, substituting the lack of a secure national home for a border-crossing transnational “home” of sorts This post-modern notion of diaspora emphasized the significance of routes over roots;

it advanced an anti-essentialist politics of diaspora

In relation to the Chinese diaspora, a peculiar version of this post modern cultural transnationalism can be found in Tu Weiming’s famous neo- Confucian idea of “Cultural China” in the early 1990s.9 For Tu, “Cultural China” was a political discourse that served to challenge the authority of the Chinese motherland and to assert the diasporic periphery (by which he referred primarily to overseas Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Southeast Asia, and, to a lesser extent, to those in Western

settler societies such as the United States) as the new centre of ness, explicitly rendering the nation-state of the People’s Republic of China

Chinese-as marginal to the modern meaning of “being Chinese.” As Tu notes, “While the periphery of the Sinic world was proudly marching towards the Asian-Pacific century, the homeland seemed mired in perpetual underdevelop-ment.”10 Needless to say, Tu’s pessimism about the state of affairs in the Chinese ancestral homeland was deeply influenced by the despair spawned

by the violent crackdown on the student protests in Tiananmen Square in June 1989, then only a few years past At the same time, the late twentieth century was a period of massive economic growth in the so-called Asian Tigers, much of which was associated with the successful business activities

of overseas Chinese entrepreneurs Aihwa Ong and Donald Nonini’s tion of these businesses as “ungrounded empires” underscored the perceived transnational power and vitality of diasporic Chinese capitalist networks, which they saw as a form of “modern Chinese transnationalism,” unshackled

descrip-by the constraints of the nation-states of both ancestral homeland and host country.11 Interestingly, then, diasporic transnationalism was most promin-ently evoked in the Chinese case not by ideas of escape from oppression (as would be the case with the African diaspora) but by the prospect of expansive accumulation of wealth!

In retrospect, we know that this projection of transnational promise and liberation, as represented by the late twentieth-century postmodern (re-)emergence of diaspora, was wildly exaggerated It was the expression of a selective optimism, which coincided with the short-lived “new world order” ruled by the global victory of capitalism, as proclaimed triumphantly by former US president George Bush Sr after the fall of the Berlin Wall, also in

1989 This was a time when the narrative of globalization, with ments of a forthcoming “borderless world” and “the end of history,” reached hyperbolic proportions, as if we had entered a world in which national borders were soon going to be irrelevant, not so much extinct as ineffectual, without much consequence.12 By the turn of the century, however, especially after the terrorist attacks on New York in 2001, it became clear that the world

pronounce-in the twenty-first century will see a reassertion of borders both withpronounce-in and between nation-states Far from being pushed into decline by the forces of globalization, the nation-state has struck back with a vengeance; indeed, the contradictory trend seems to be that while national markets and national economies are becoming less and less significant, entangled as they are within the all-embracing frame of global capitalist economic relations, the idea of nationhood as such has gained strength as the cultural anchor for popular

and policy understandings of security and well-being.13 Nationalism and tions of national culture have now become more prominent sites of active identification and public governance everywhere, as well as the legitimizing force for disciplinary politics of inclusion and exclusion This has problematic consequences for diasporic people, heightening the tensions in their sense

no-of identity and belonging

Indeed, globalization has paradoxically only accentuated the assertiveness

of nation-states in the management and governance of their populations, even as global migrations have meant that internal diversity and ethnic plur-alism have become a hallmark of virtually all contemporary societies In this process, it is the locatedness of diasporic communities within the nation-state, not their transcendence of it, which carries the most weight This is in rela-tion to both the nation-state of residence and the nation-state of the original homeland In their country of residence, diasporic groups tend to be cast as

“ethnic minorities” that, notwithstanding the reigning rhetoric of culturalism and ethnic pluralism, are faced with the challenge of accommo-dating the dominant national culture of their host country in response to calls for assimilation and integration in the name of national unity This is the case both in Western countries of immigration, such as Australia, and in post-colonial nation-states with a legacy of large colonial migrations, such

multi-as those in Southemulti-ast Asia (where very large dimulti-asporic Chinese communities reside) In this sense, diasporic migrants are inevitably embroiled in contesta-tions over the imagined community of their country of residence as they struggle for inclusion, recognition, and social justice They cannot abandon this politics of national location, even if the possibility of transnational tran-scendence through diasporic connections is facilitated as never before by globalizing forces such as the Internet

At the same time, homeland nation-states have stepped up their efforts to secure the continued loyalty and support of their diasporized subjects This

is certainly the case for the People’s Republic of China Since the end of the Maoist era, the Chinese government has, in the words of Pál Nyíri, “made strenuous efforts to gain the trust of previously alienated overseas Chinese, including a sharp discursive shift from treating them as traitors to emphasiz-ing their achievements and contributions to both China and their countries

of residence.”14 As Nyíri observes, China’s foreign policy actively posits the diaspora as a potential source or conduit of investment, technological in-novation, and behind-the-scenes diplomacy Here, the diaspora is subjected

to a meaning of Chineseness that is irrevocably tied to the interests of the Chinese nation-state, at the expense of the identifications of diasporic Chinese

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with the countries where they actually live In this sense, diasporic subjects find themselves being pulled in opposite directions, under pressure to display their allegiance to competing national regimes.

This resurgence of competing nationalisms on a global scale exposes some problematic contradictions in the valorization of diasporic transnationalism

as it occurred in the 1990s and in the idea of diaspora itself As I argue in my essay “Undoing Diaspora,” the problem is not that the concept of diaspora

is too transnational but, on the contrary, that it is not transnational enough.15

Far from reaching beyond the national, the discourse of diaspora itself is ultimately nationalist: the diasporic imagination is based on a transnational nationalism, or nationalist transnationalism, which imposes closure not in territorial terms but in proto-ethnic or racial terms In other words, however transnational and spatially expansive the Chinese diaspora may be, ultimately

it is posited as a closed, if dispersed, community to which only notionally

“Chinese” people can belong In this light, I concur with Benedict Anderson’s critique of diaspora for its lack of universal grounding, representing “a cer-tain contemporary vision of cosmopolitanism based on a quasi-planetary dispersion of bounded identities.”16 In short, a transnational diasporic network does not need to be geo-anchored in a territorial nation-state to be circum-scribed by a particularistic “essence,” which can be used to impose strict

“eth nic” boundaries The cultivation of diasporic Chineseness does not have

to be fastened to the Chinese motherland to operate as a category of identity and belonging that can be divisive as well as unifying, exclusionary as well as inclusionary To put it differently, Chineseness, no matter how flexible and indeterminate its meaning in diasporic contexts, is by definition a concept with closure: it only makes sense to talk about “Chinese” if there are “non-Chinese.” Relatedly, as Yao Souchou points out, “Chinese culture” or “Chinese identity,” while infinitely changeable through time and space, cannot be just anything; it must always, through whatever detour and no matter how tenu-ously, refer back to some historical source and cultural continuity to be socially recognizable as “Chinese.”17 In other words, the contradictions of diasporic Chinese transnationalism are twofold: they are not just the contradictions of transnationalism but, more pertinently, those of (the category of) Chineseness itself

Indonesian-Chinese Dilemmas

We have seen the impact of these contradictions at work in Indonesia over the past decade There is a well-known and long-standing history of trouble-some inter-ethnic relations in Indonesia, a post-colonial nation-state that, since independence, has relegated people of Chinese descent who live within

its borders – many of whom have family histories in the country that go back for generations, have Indonesian citizenship, and speak the local language – to the margins of national identity Chinese Indonesians have had to struggle hard for their place within the Indonesian imagined community, sometimes through assimilation, both forced and voluntary; sometimes through col-laboration with the governing elite; sometimes by quietly seeking refuge in their own neighbourhoods and schools; and sometimes by moving to another country altogether, as my parents did Overall, theirs has been a struggle to

be accepted as Indonesians When riots flared up across the country in

re-sponse to the economic crisis in May 1998, however, and many Indonesians

of Chinese descent were violated by mobs of urban poor, it was their ascribed and visible Chineseness that was the target of their victimization What fol-lowed was the transnational mobilization of ethnic Chinese from all corners

of the world – North America, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, and Asia – who expressed outrage and protest, mostly through the Internet, and fiercely declared solidarity with their co-ethnics in Indonesia The plight of Indonesian Chinese quickly became the cause célèbre of a self-declared online “global Chinese fraternity,” which sanctimoniously sought to present the Chinese

diaspora (or huaren) as a powerful global force for the advancement of Chinese

people everywhere.18

The discourse of this militant expression of diasporic Chinese alism operated by constructing an impassable divide between “Chineseness” and “Indonesianness,” hence accentuating the fatal confrontation of two competing nationalisms This is a discourse through which the transnational Chinese self symbolically gains the moral high ground against a totally demon-ized Indonesian nation It is ironic, however, that it is Chinese Indonesians themselves who pay the price for this uncompromising display of diasporic antagonism By emphasizing the Chineseness of those victimized and stress-ing the absolute incompatibility of Chineseness and Indonesianness, the discourse simply reinforced the positioning of Chinese Indonesians as Other, with the forever “outsider” status that post-colonial Indonesian nationalism had imposed on them Here, the deterritorialized voice of diasporic Chinese transnationalism threatened to jeopardize the very localized struggles for national belonging and citizenship that Indonesian Chinese had to work

transnation-through within the complex situation on the ground, within the nation-state

Indeed, many Indonesian Chinese shunned the virtual redemption promised

by the rhetoric of global Chinese diaspora, considering it less a support than

a threat to their struggle for survival and a sustainable life in Indonesia.19

Interestingly, the situation in Indonesia has changed radically in the ten years since the May 1998 riots, which saw the downfall of Suharto’s New

Order regime In the process of democratization that followed, Indonesia saw both the rejection of Suharto’s ideology of assimilation and the endorse-ment of multiculturalism as a preferred policy for rebuilding the nation Discriminatory policies and laws against the Chinese were overturned, prompting a resurgence of Chinese cultural expression and articulations of Chinese identity among many Indonesian Chinese.20 Indonesian human rights activist Liem Soei Liong described the breathtakingly rapid improvement in the emancipation of Chinese in Indonesian civil society, marked by the aboli-tion of dozens of anti-Chinese laws, in this way:

All the post-Suharto administrations contributed to the eradication of the racist policies towards the Chinese BJ Habibie scrapped more than a dozen racist regulations and this trend continued in the following administrations Gus Dur went even further and started to revive Chinese festivities like Imlek, Chinese New Year, Cap Go Meh, Ceng Beng etc In 2006 two laws were adopted

in parliament, the Law on Citizenship and the Law on Citizens’ Administration Both laws passed parliament by acclaim, adopting the fact that Chinese Indonesians are now legally seen as Indonesia asli, or Indonesian natives, hence abolishing the inherited Dutch colonial notion that the Chinese were “foreign orientals” (vreemde oosterlingen) 21

This stunningly quick political turnaround, as Anthony Reid suggests, was a response to the shock of the violence, including horrific rapes of Chinese women, which brought many Indonesians “into a realisation for the first time of the racist danger in their own society.”22 In other words, the lifting of official discrimination against Chinese in Indonesia was not the effect of transnational diasporic Chinese pressure but the result of progressive forces within the Indonesian nation As a consequence, as Reid observes, “the worst

of times for Chinese Indonesians appears to have been followed by the best

of times.”23 Whatever the case, however, Ariel Heryanto cautions against interpreting this dramatic transformation simply in terms of liberation, rec-ognition, and revival.24 In his view, one of the problematic consequences of the new situation has been a consolidation of the long-standing assumption that ethnic identity – in this case, Chinese identity – is a given, a natural essence that resides within the bodies of Chinese Indonesians But as Heryanto remarks, “Questions of who is or is not ‘Chinese’ Indonesians, where, when, how and why remain daunting while being largely avoided If the group’s boundary and identity are not clear, it is hard to speak of ‘liberation.’”25

Indeed, what can “being Chinese” still mean in this new configuration of

a more affirmatively multicultural, multi-ethnic Indonesia, after such a long

history of suppression and assimilation, if not Peranakanization? There has

been a resurgence of ethnic Chinese organizations that play an important role not only in reviving but also in imposing what Chineseness means in Indonesia Often driven by diasporic agendas that stress ethnic solidarity and advocate a return to “roots” and resinicization, these organizations powerfully promote an essentialized version of Chinese cultural identity – a version, for example, that is characterized by speaking Mandarin and knowing about

“authentic” Chinese heritage This, however, has little resonance with the hybrid lived realities of most Indonesians of Chinese descent today For them, cross-cultural mixing, borrowing, and accommodation with local cultures has been a fact of life for decades, and for some – such as the Peranakan – even for centuries.26 Chineseness is, at best, a residual part of their Indones-ianized, pluralized, and hybridized identities Its salience is more ascribed than deeply felt It is therefore not surprising, as Reid observes, that many of these hybrid subjects have sought to quietly escape the burdens of Chinese-ness and to dissociate themselves from the highly problematic label “Cina,”

a label with deep-seated negative cultural stereotypes in Indonesia and one that remains a central signifier for the non-Indonesian Other.27 For such people, who possibly constitute the majority of Indonesians of Chinese des-cent, the new emphasis on the significance of their Chinese ethnicity and the compulsion to submit to the self-essentializing forces of Chineseness would be not only an artificial imposition but also socially and culturally disempowering For these people, whose livelihoods depend on their accept-ance and security within the Indonesian nation-state and on their sense

of belonging within Indonesia, identifying with a transnational diasporic Chineseness could easily be a regressive turn of events

This is not to deny that for some Chinese Indonesians, a (re)identification with Chineseness is of massive benefit – this includes the entrepreneurial class and anyone who stands to gain from the “rise of China.” As Reid remarks,

“In the euphoric context of China’s rise, the 2008 Olympics, and the growing

usefulness of Chinese language in commerce, some of the Peranakan who

forgot their Chineseness a decade ago may now be remembering it for certain purposes.”28 Indeed, a key consideration in the Indonesian government’s deci-sion to roll back its anti-Chinese policies related precisely to strategic inter-national relations considerations: at a time when China is set to become the premier power in the Asia Pacific region, it makes sense to befriend it to maximize the geopolitical opportunities and economic benefits to be gained

As a consequence, Chineseness is now imbued with connotations of tunity rather than threat for the Indonesian nation-state Brian Harding re-ports that an estimated more than 90 percent of business between China and

oppor-Indonesia today involves Chinese oppor-Indonesians.29 Indonesian investment in China is being driven by Chinese Indonesian-controlled corporations and finance houses, and Chinese Indonesians often act as “guides” for Chinese companies looking to invest in Indonesia in order to help break down cultural and linguistic barriers to doing business in Indonesia In short, the rise of China has transformed Chinese diasporic connections from a liability into

an asset for highly circumscribed, instrumental purposes In this global capitalist context, the transnational nationalism of diasporic Chineseness is not subversive of but has a certain complicity with the national interests of both Indonesia and China It has little to do with the more utopian, emanci-patory promise etched in the postmodern moment of diaspora discourse

No Longer Chinese?

One of the consequences of diaspora talk, Chinese or otherwise, is an reflective emphasis on the internal homogeneity of the diaspora, an instinctive notion that “we are all Chinese.” This reification of a common “Chineseness”

un-as a racial category obscures real and significant differences within and tween the many groups of people scattered around the world who may still

be-be labe-belled “Chinese” in some residual way, such as the Peranakan “Chinese”

in Indonesia, but whose social and cultural circumstances diverge radically according to different local conditions Many observers have remarked on the heterogeneous nature of the Chinese diaspora, to the point where Wang

Gungwu questions the very usefulness of the word “Chinese” as an umbrella

term for all ethnic Chinese communities around the world.30 He predicts that

“the single word, ‘Chinese,’ will be less and less able to convey a reality that continues to become more pluralistic.” He suggests that we need more words

“with the necessary adjectives to qualify and identify who exactly we are describing.”31 But we can go even further than this Should we perhaps stop calling certain groups “Chinese” at all? Can’t the very dedication to Chinese-ness as such, and the insistence on holding onto the label “Chinese,” operate

as a source of continued oppression for some subjects, especially those who are “truly on the periphery”?

For all its transnational postmodernism, diasporic Chineseness is ultimately contained by the symbolic pulling power of a real and imagined China; it is attached to an umbilical cord whose material and affective strength is being severely tested now that the actual nation-state of China has entered the world stage Even Tu Weiming’s “Cultural China,” which claimed the superi-ority of the diasporic periphery over the mainland centre in the shaping of Chinese cultural modernity, is now challenged by the idea of “Grand China,”

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