Page 93 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

BEYOND ASIA: DECONSTRUCTING DIASPORA

major source of the suspicion that the Chinese minorities could never feel
loyalty towards their host nations.
(Wang 1999: 2)

In other words, the term huaqiao, with its reference to temporariness of residence
outside China and its wholesale application to all Chinese abroad, evoked a scenario
of ‘militant commitment to remaining Chinese or restoring one’s “Chineseness”’
(Wang 1992: 7). This ideological China-centredness and obsession with
Chineseness helped fuel anti-Chinese suspicion and discrimination in foreign lands,
whether in South-East Asia or in European immigrant societies such as Australia
and the United States. The question lingering in Wang Gungwu’s mind is: ‘Will
the word diaspora be used to revive the idea of a single body of Chinese, reminiscent
of the old term, the huaqiao?’ (1999: 2).
The power of these words – huaqiao then, diaspora today (not to mention
huaren) – is not solely associated with their capacity to consolidate the collective
imagination. They also spur people into action: they buttress and legitimize
organizing practices aimed at mobilizing dispersed communities around a singular
point of cultural and political identification: real and imagined ‘China’, the
centre of authentic ‘Chineseness’. Thus, the hegemony of huaqiao discourse in
the first half of the twentieth century was closely connected to the activist practices
of mainland Chinese nationalists, who sought to resinicize overseas Chinese
communities in South-East Asia who, in their eyes, had ‘lost’ their Chineseness.
Through ideological apparatuses such as Chinese language education and the
unifying narratives of race and fictive kinship, the self-identification and identi-
fication by others of these communities as Chinese were reinforced and affirmed.
The controversial history of overseas Chinese nationalism – a diasporic nationalism
designed to support and strengthen the nation–state of China – does not have to
be recounted here; suffice it to say that its overall ideological effect was a general
reification of the very idea of Chinese identity as something fixed and indisputable.
As Prasenjit Duara has argued, before the intervention of the Chinese nationalist
activists, the majority of Chinese outside China lived with a flexible and ambiguous
sense of Chineseness which had relatively open and soft, permeable boundaries.
The activists, in Duara’s words, ‘sought to transform these multiple, mobile
identifications into a Chineseness that eliminated or reduced internal boundaries,
on the one hand, and hardened the boundaries between Chinese and non-Chinese,
on the other’ (1997: 41).
It is this ideological effect, associated with the term huaqiao, which Wang
Gungwu finds intellectually and politically debilitating, and which he sees as in
danger of being repeated in the current valorization of the Chinese diaspora.
Indeed, there is little doubt that the global discourse of diaspora, pace Huaren, is
a powerful instrument in stimulating the (desire for) transnational integration and
essentialist homogenization of overseas Chinese communities and individuals
around the world as ultimately Chinese, and by implication, as ultimately distinct
from non-Chinese. In this sense, the language of diaspora is fundamentally

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