Page 89 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

This was followed in a more scholarly vein by the two volumes of essays edited by
Wang Gungwu and Wang Ling-chi, The Chinese Diaspora: Selected Essays (1998).
Pan was also the general editor of a massive encyclopedia of the Chinese diaspora,
published under the aegis of the Chinese Heritage Centre in Singapore, which
was established in 1995 ‘to study overseas Chinese globally’. Interestingly, this
impressive publication expressly avoids the word ‘diaspora’ in its title (even though
it is used liberally in the text), and is called The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas
instead (Pan 1998). This suggests that there is something problematic about the
politics of naming and use of the label ‘Chinese diaspora’ – an issue I will return
to shortly.
Of course, the transnationalization of the imagination afforded by the notion of
diaspora can be experienced as rather liberating indeed. By imagining oneself as part
of a globally significant, transnational Chinese diasporic community, a minority
Chinese subject can rise, at least in the imagination, above the national environment
in which (s)he lives but from which (s)he may always have felt symbolically
excluded. I would contend that much of the current popularity of ‘Chinese
diaspora’ among ethnic Chinese around the world is fuelled precisely by this
emotive desire not just to belong, but to belong to a respectable imagined
community, one that instils pride in one’s identity precisely because it is so much
larger and more encompassing, in geographical terms at least, than any territorially
bounded nation. Global diaspora, in this context, signifies deliverance and release
from territorialized national identity, triumph over the shackles of the nation–state.
In the economic realm, the rising power of what Ong and Nonini (1997) call
‘modern Chinese transnationalism’, whose subjects are jetsetting business men
criss-crossing the Asia-Pacific to enhance their commercial empires, has received
much attention. This transnational Chinese capitalist class, mythically held together
by supposedly unique Chinese cultural characteristics such as guanxi, grew
substantially since the opening up of mainland China in the mid-1980s (e.g. Chan
2000). It is a well-known fact that the Chinese economy owes much of its
astonishingly rapid growth in recent years to the multi-million dollar investments
of overseas Chinese capitalists from across the Asia-Pacific region, in no small part
encouraged and enticed to do so by the communist authorities in Beijing who
are determined to establish a ‘capitalism with Chinese characteristics’ with the
help of China’s diasporic sons, all in the name of ‘cultural solidarity, filial piety
and everlasting loyalty to the motherland’ (Ong 1999: 45). The creation of new
overseas Chinese business networks operating on a global scale has accelerated in
the 1990s as traditional overseas Chinese voluntary associations, in the past
organized mainly under principles of native place, kinship and dialect and dedicated
to traditional obligations such as ancestor worship, were transformed into modern,
globally operating organizations specifically committed to expanding economic
opportunities and strengthening diasporic cultural ties across national boundaries
(Liu 1998). The World Chinese Entrepreneurs Convention, established in 1991,
is only one of the most prestigious new organizations embodying the new, self-
confident and capitalist elite face of the Chinese diaspora in the era of globalization. 2

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