Page 51 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

it) for granted: just like Yang, I was regularly made to be painfully aware that being
Chinese in these countries was, to all intents and purposes, a curse. In short, the
status of Chineseness as a discursive construct, rather than something natural, is
a matter of subjective experience to me, not just a question of theory.
Conceiving Chineseness as a discursive construct entails a disruption of the
ontological stability and certainty of Chinese identity; it does not, however, negate
its operative power as a cultural principle in the social constitution of identities as
Chinese. In other words, the point is not to dispute the fact that Chineseness exists
(which, in any case, would be a futile assertion in a world where more than a billion
people would, to all intents and purposes, identify themselves as Chinese in one
way or another, either voluntarily or by force), but to investigate how this category
operates in practice, in different historical, geographical, political and cultural
contexts. As Stuart Hall (1996b) has remarked, the fact that ‘race’ is not a valid
scientific category does not undermine its symbolic and social effectuality. The
same could be said about Chineseness. What highlighting the constructed nature
of categories and classificatory systems does, however, is ‘shifting the focus of
theoretical attention from the categories “in themselves” as repositories of cultural
[meaning] to the process of cultural classification itself’ (ibid.: 302). In other words,
how and why is it that the category of ‘Chineseness’ acquires its persistence and
solidity? And with what political and cultural effects?
What I would like to illuminate in this chapter is that the diasporic paradigm
is necessarily unstable. After all, the very spirit of the idea of diaspora, motivated as
it is by notions of dispersal, mobility and disappearance, works against its consolida-
tion as a ‘paradigm’ proper. Contained in the diasporic perspective itself, therefore,
are the seeds of its own deconstruction, which provides us with an opportunity to
interrogate, not just the different meanings Chineseness takes on in different local
contexts – a limited anti-essentialism which still takes the category of Chinese itself
for granted – but, more radically, the very significance and validity of Chineseness
as such as a category of identification and analysis.

Cultural China?
The process of decentring the centre, which is so pivotal to diasporic theory, has
been forcefully articulated recently in the influential collection The Living Tree:
The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, edited by Tu Wei-ming (1994a),
2
Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy at Harvard University. In this
collection, Tu elaborates the contours of a symbolic universe he calls ‘cultural
China’, a newly constructed cultural space ‘that both encompasses and transcends
the ethnic, territorial, linguistic, and religious boundaries that normally define
Chineseness’ (Tu 1994b: v). For Tu, the project of cultural China is one designed
to decentre the cultural authority of geopolitical China (that is, the People’s
Republic), an intellectual effort to redefine ‘the periphery as the center’ in current
engagements with what it means to be Chinese (Tu 1994c). This project is critical
insofar as it aims to break with static and rigid, stereotypical and conventional

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