Page 217 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NOTES

14 In the first four months of its existence (from February 1998), there were some
100,000 visits to the site. However, this number increased exponentially in the wake
of the crisis. The rapid rise in Huaren’s popularity in this respect can be compared with
that of CNN in 1989, when the 24-hour global news network provided non-stop
up-to-date news about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square student
protests and its violent suppression on 4 June. Major crises have launched these new
global communications media – satellite TV in the late 1980s, the Internet in the late
1990s – into the mainstream.
15 B.J. Habibie, President Suharto’s immediate successor, issued a decree that the distinc-
tion pribumi/non-pribumi must no longer be used. Under President Wahid, elected
in 1999, bans on the expression of Chinese cultural traditions (e.g. Chinese New Year
celebrations) were slowly removed.
16 As mentioned earlier, separatist movements are particularly strong in Aceh and in West
Papua. And of course, the East Timorese, whom Indonesia attempted to incorporate
in its national imagined community, voted overwhelmingly for their independence in
1999.

4 UNDOING DIASPORA
1 The journal was first published by Oxford University Press, later by Toronto
University Press.
2 The World Chinese Entrepreneurs Convention was an initiative of the Singaporean
Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry. It holds biannual international con-
ventions to facilitate global networking for Chinese entrepreneurs worldwide. Its
inaugural convention was held in Singapore, where Senior Minister Lee Kuan Yew
delivered the keynote address; since then there have been conventions in Hong
Kong (1993), Bangkok (1995), Vancouver (1997) and Melbourne (1999). The 2001
convention was held in Nanjing, China, in June 2001.
3 An exception is Singapore, the only nation–state outside Greater China with a
diasporic Chinese majority, where there has been a long history of government-
sanctioned resinicization policies such as the Speak Mandarin Campaign.
4 Lynn Pan has made the astute remark that the very quest for ethnic self-discovery and
identity is a mark of Americanness, not Chineseness: ‘To the villagers in Toishan, the
Chinese American who returns to rediscover his origins is doing a very American thing,
for the last thing they feel is the need for roots’ (1990: 295). Pan informs us that
Toishan village has taken advantage of this diasporic longing by tapping into the ‘roots
business’ in the USA, offering tours to ancestral villages and wooing investments
by returning local sons. Here, diaspora consciousness is expressly encouraged by the
homeland because it is economically profitable.
5 A comparative analysis with other diasporic formations would enable us to assess
to which extent the core/periphery divide is a general characteristic of all diasporic
formations, and in which ways they are variably imagined in particular diasporas.
6 This does not mean, of course, that there are no forces of exclusion at work in
the global city, on the contrary. Exclusionary and divisive processes based especially
on class and race (and to a lesser extent gender) tend to carve the space of the city up
into particular ‘enclaves’ or ‘ghettos’ where certain groups are more or less welcome.
Unlike in the case of diasporas, however, such exclusionary mechanisms are not
essentialized nor predetermined; for example, a previously white neighbourhood can
over time become multiracial or even predominantly black or Asian (as is the case
in some major cities in North America and Australia).
7 This ethnographic story comes from fieldwork among the East Timorese diaspora in
Sydney by my PhD student Amanda Wise.

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