Page 79 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

which was an urgent call to action to all global Huaren who received the message.
Thus it was with the help of the rapid and expansive communication channels
of the Internet that anti-Indonesian demonstrations were held in many North
American, European and Asian cities including San Francisco, New York, Toronto,
Washington, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Sydney and Beijing. This was an unprece-
dented instance of global activism in the Chinese diaspora, and it had the immediate
effect of gaining the attention of world leaders all over. In this sense, the Indonesian
crisis was a defining moment in the coming into visibility of the Chinese diaspora
on the global political stage, with the Internet as a unifying force. So successful
was the creation of this, what Arjun Appadurai (1996a) calls ‘diasporic public
sphere’ that Huaren became, as one newspaper report put it, ‘a one-stop meeting
place for Chinese worldwide’ (The Straits Times, 20 August 1998).
With much confidence one editorial put it this way:

Huaren knows the power of the internet, Huaren knows that there is a
need out there to create a Third Space for ethnic Chinese overseas. We
know the potential and potency of projecting a global Third Force against
racism, fascism, and ethnic stigmatization and oppression.
(Huaren, 31 July 1998)

Indeed, in the months after the May riots of 1998 the number of visits to the
site and the number of people wanting to help the movement snowballed so
exponentially that the initiators had every reason to be euphoric about their
achievement and their new-found political power. The Straits Times even called the
phenomenon a ‘revolution of sorts’ and described it in superlative terms: ‘It changed
dramatically the way governments, societies and communities conducted themselves
by tearing down national boundaries and making their deeds transparent to the
entire world’ (20 August 1998). We should not forget, however, that similar
revolutionary rhetoric was used about ten years ago to describe the role of
fax machines and satellite television – in the form of CNN – in disseminating
information and galvanizing global solidarity for protesting students at Tiananmen
Square in Beijing. The impact of any new communication technology, from the
invention of the telegraph in the nineteenth century onwards, has always been
subject to exaggerated predictions and announcements and the Internet is no
exception (see e.g. Ebo 1998). But Huaren’s momentum as a self-appointed ‘Third
Force’ for the global Chinese diaspora was short-lived. It was only a matter of
months before the editorial board noticed ‘the onset of compassion fatigue among
many of us’ (Huaren, 4 September 1998) and by 2000, the Huaren website still had
a sizable discussion group dedicated to the Chinese Indonesian case – now relegated
to a specialist section in the Bulletin Board called ‘Indo-huaren crisis’, but it no
longer seemed to attract worldwide attention and most participants were clearly
engrossed in discussing the intricate details of the stormy developments in Indonesia.
There are, then, clear limits to the electronic politics of global diasporic
mobilization. For one thing, there is an intrinsic contradiction, in Huaren’s global

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