Reimagining Chinese Diasporas In A Transnational World

Reimagining Chinese Diasporas in a Transnational World examines the changing nature of the Chinese diasporas in a transnational world and its concomitant implications for Chinese diaspora studies internationally. With a shifting paradigm of transnationalism and transnational migration, new patterns of Chinese mobilities have emerged that can be characterised as multiple and circular rather than unidirectional or final. This book illustrates how the analytical constructs of hypermobility, hyperdiversity and hyperconnectivity aid in the understanding of contemporary Chinese transnational diasporas. The book offers new research findings and theorisation and contributes to the existing Chinese diasporas literature and the interdisciplinary fields of ethnic, migration and mobility studies. It stimulates further research and scholarly work on the Chinese diasporas in the age of transnational migration. This book will be a great resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of sociology, ethnic studies, international politics, and migration studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

The rise of China has brought about a dramatic increase in the rate of migration from mainland China. At the same time, the Chinese government has embarked on a full-scale push for the internationalisation of Chinese media and culture. Media and communication have therefore become crucial factors in shaping the increasingly fraught politics of transnational Chinese communities. This book explores the changing nature of these communities, and reveals their dynamic and complex relationship to the media in a range of countries worldwide. Overall, the book highlights a number of ways in which China’s "going global" policy interacts with other factors in significantly reshaping the content and contours of the diasporic Chinese media landscape. In doing so, this book constitutes a major rethinking of Chinese transnationalism in the twenty-first century.

This book explores the history, the reality, and the complex fantasy of American and European Chinatowns and traces the patterns of transnational travel and traffic between China, South East Asia, Europe, and the United States which informed the development of these urban sites. Despite obvious structural or architectural similarities and overlaps, Chinatowns differ markedly depending on their location. European versions of Chinatowns can certainly not be considered mere replications of the American model. Paying close attention to regional specificities and overarching similarities, Chinatowns thus discloses the important European backdrop to a phenomenon commonly associated with North America. It starts from the assumption that the historical and modern Chinatown needs to be seen as complicatedly involved in a web of cultural memory, public and private narratives, ideologies, and political imperatives. Most of the contributors to this volume have multidisciplinary and multilingual backgrounds and are familiar with several different instances of the Chinese diasporic experience. With its triangular approach to the developments between China and the urban Chinese diasporas of North America and Europe, Chinatowns reveals connections and interlinkages which have not been addressed before.

Originating in the 1820s and used for 150 years thereafter, qiaopi is the name given in Chinese to letters written home by Chinese emigrants to accompany remittances. Their key function was to preserve family ties. Although such correspondence focused principally on the provision of economic support, the qiaopi also touched on cultural, political, educational, and gender themes. This book therefore seeks to examine the qiaopi from two interconnected perspectives. One views qiaopi from a political and institutional angle, the other from a financial and social angle. Bringing together the extensive research of a group of international scholars, this multi-authored volume sheds light on the larger significance of the qiaopi for modern China. Taking an empirical, evidence-driven approach, the contributors employ a wide range of primary sources in both Chinese and English and relate their findings to scholarship in both the Chinese-speaking world and in non-Chinese interdisciplinary fields. In so doing, this book helps to bridge the gap between Chinese- and English-speaking researchers in the field of qiaopi studies. As one of the first books in English on the qiaopi trade and its significance, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese history and Chinese migration, as well in Migration Studies and Diaspora Studies more generally.

Leading scholars in the field consider the profound importance of meanings of place and the spatial processes of mobility and settlement for the Chinese overseas. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Chinese migrant communities have reinvented their histories in many contexts, but the process of globalization has accelerated and diversified this phenomenon. Their fluid identities, innovative modernities, and generative talents in overcoming prejudice and multiple dislocations offer powerful examples of creative resistance to placebound traditions and nationalist histories. As the velocity of exchange in global media and commerce steadily increases, emergent and dynamic diasporas are increasingly influential in transnational discourses. This volume engages cultural representations of the subjectivities and loyalties of Chinese migrant communities, including analyses of aesthetic texts, as well as theoretical approaches in cultural studies. The book situates diasporic agency as an historical phenomenon with far-reaching political and social implications for both home and host societies and as a major site of contemporary cultural developments. By assembling a variety of regional, temporal, and disciplinary perspectives, it interrogates current notions of the diasporic subject, raising questions about respective ideological roots and cultural repositories as well as extensions and transgressions of new aesthetic vocabularies. Contributors include Roland Altenburger, Pheng Cheah, Prasenjit Duara, Kathrin Ensinger, Ping-kwan Leung, Helen F. Siu, Tamara S. Wagner, Mary Shuk-han Wong, Sau-ling C. Wong and Nicolas Zufferey.

This title provides a much needed theoretical account of socio-cultural and identity issues surrounding middle-class Chinese migration in the changing context of migration policies and issues in Australia and other places. It also offers insights to students studying the current changing face of Chinese migration and provides relevant data to policy-makers, managers and practitioners in the field of immigration and multicultural affairs. This is a cutting edge volume that advances theories, methodologies and policy issues relating to contemporary middle-class Chinese migrants. It reports and discusses multidisciplinary research undertaken in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The book will not only serve as an introductory textbook for students of migration studies, social sciences and China studies, but also as a reference source for those who are interested in learning about recent Chinese migration in Asia and the Pacific.

A concise and compelling survey of Chinese migration in global history centered on Chinese migrants and their families.