Page 88 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

UNDOING DIASPORA

coherent transnational community is unsettled when placed within the relentlessly
hybridizing framework of the global city.
Continuing on from the argument I have developed in the previous chapters, I
will in this chapter question all too uncritical celebrations of diaspora in light of the
processes of globalization the world is undergoing today. I will explore the limiting
conceptual and political implications of diaspora discourse, suggesting that a narrow
focus on diaspora will hinder a more truly transnational, if you like, cosmopolitan
imagination of what it means to live in the world ‘as a single place’ (Robertson
1992). I will return to the Chinese diaspora, not only because it is one of the oldest
and largest diasporic formations in the world, but also because it has – and,
considering its strength in numbers, can afford to have – global aspirations. I
will do some conceptual ground-clearing, and reflect on the concept of ‘Chinese
diaspora’ itself: how it is currently used, how this relates to older conceptions of
diasporic Chinese, and its intellectual and political implications. In doing this, my
theoretical starting point will be that just like nations, diasporas are not natural,
always-already existing entities but ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991). As
such, I will conclude that the transnationalism of the Chinese diaspora is actually
nationalist in its outlook, because no matter how global in its reach, its imaginary
orbit is demarcated ultimately by the closure effected by the category of Chineseness
itself.

The global production of Chinese diaspora

The modern nation–state has classically, in its nineteenth-century European
conception, operated as a territorially bounded sovereign polity, imagining itself
as an internally homogeneous community, unified by a common language, culture
and people. To be sure, this very ideal of the nation as (having to be) racially and
culturally homogeneous was one of the main ideological justifications for the
various policies of Chinese exclusion introduced in new-world nation–states such
as the USA, Canada and Australia in the late nineteenth century (Markus 1979;
Stratton and Ang 1998). In South-East Asia, where most of so-called ‘overseas
Chinese’ live, they have long been an integral part of colonial society and economy.
After World War Two, they were subjected to rule of the newly independent
postcolonial nation–states with strong nationalist aspirations of their own. In
many cases, as in Malaysia and Indonesia, the Chinese found themselves relegated
to being second-class citizens, economically well-off but socially and politically
discriminated against. ‘Being Chinese’, under all these circumstances, has meant
being locked into an unenviable, paralysingly disempowered position vis-à-vis the
dominant national culture and the state undergirding it.
While ‘overseas Chinese’ used to be the common English term to describe
the dispersed migrant Chinese communities around the world, in the past decade
or so they are increasingly frequently described collectively as ‘Chinese diaspora’.
A key marker of this shift was the publication of Lynn Pan’s hugely popular book
Sons of the Yellow Emperor, a sprawling history of the Chinese diaspora (Pan 1990).

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