The Chinese Diaspora in the Pacific

Anthony Reid, Anthony Reid

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351892995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The essays reprinted here trace the history of Chinese emigration into the Pacific region, first as individuals, traders or exiles, moving into the 'Nanyang' (Southeast Asia), then as a mass migration across the ocean after the mid-19th century. The papers include discussions of what it meant to be Chinese, the position of the migrants vis-à-vis China itself, and their relations with indigenous peoples as well as the European powers that came to dominate the region. Together with the introduction, they constitute an important aid to understanding one of the most widespread diasporas of the modern world.

1
Conceptualizing Chinese Diasporas, 1842 to 1949

Adam McKeown

Adam Mckeown is an Assistant Professor of History at Northeastern University.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Swarthmore College, Northeastern University, and at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, March 26–29, 1998. I am grateful for comments offered at all of these events.

By and large, the social organization and customs of overseas Chinese … were all carried over from rural life in China. In the long term, the transmission and preservation of Chinese culture built the mutual development of overseas Chinese society and the Chinese homeland into an unbreakable relationship. Much evidence shows the difficulty of severing off the Chinese soul within those living abroad. Precisely because of this, the great majority of overseas Chinese had a great concern for the security of their country. This sentiment did not depend on the existence of the Qing or Republican governments, but mostly emerged from the natural disposition to cherish one’s home.

(Huang 1993, xi–xii)

Contemporary observers charged the Chinese with a refusal to assimilate to American ways, and many scholars have stressed how the Chinese have adamantly preserved their culture in the United States. Many Chinese values, practices, and patterns of social organization were indeed transferred to American soil, but the fact remains that Chinese communities that developed in America were by no means replicas of those in China.

(Chan 1986, 369)

Each of these epigrams is from an exemplary work of primary research. While not entirely exclusive—potential for overlap appears in the ideas of “mutual development” and “transfer” of culture—they each exemplify different research agendas that result in competing narratives of Chinese migration. Sucheng Chan’s work is part of a larger project of contemporary Asian American studies to incorporate Chinese as important actors in American history. It emphasizes the adaptations of Chinese social organization in the United States, and explains them as necessary and unprecedented responses to unfamiliar challenges. Although Chan pays more attention than many Asian American historians to Chinese nationalism, transnational families, and continued links to China, she does not follow the implications of these descriptions so far as to reformulate her narrative of migration as a monodirectional relocation followed by locally conditioned transformation (see also S. Chan 1991, 63–66, 96–97; 1990). In their most extremely America-centered versions, Asian American histories have treated these extra-American phenomena as little more than byproducts of exclusion and racism, and denounced the idea of the temporary Chinese sojourner as an orientalist construction (A. Chan 1981).

Huang Jianchun, on the other hand, is firmly embedded in a tradition of Chinese language scholarship that goes back over ninety years, and emphasizes the enduring love, patriotism, connections, and contributions of Chinese to their homeland (G. Wang 1991, 22–40). In its most extreme version, this scholarship may even talk of the patriotic resistance of Chinese emigrants against assimilation. The dichotomy between these two perspectives could be multiplied and complicated by examples from other places and disciplines. When taken together, these works do not produce a coherent panorama of the networks and processes of Chinese migration, but fragment and obscure them within the cracks between competing nation-based claims over the histories of Chinese migrants.¹

Over the past decade, a revival of the idea of diaspora and the formulation of newer concepts such as transnationalism, globalization, and the deterritorialized nation state have suggested alternative perspectives from which to approach issues of migration, transnational social organization, and identities that cross national and cultural boundaries. These approaches attempt to center mobility and dispersion as a basis from which to begin analysis, rather than as streams of people merely feeding into or flowing along the margins of national and civilizational histories. Thus, a phrase like “the Chinese diaspora in Canada” (or any other locale) should not be merely a substitute for phrases like “Chinese immigrants in Canada” or “overseas Chinese in Canada,” which are rooted in the narratives of the Canadian and Chinese nation-states, respectively. Rather, a diasporic perspective would complement and expand upon nation-based perspectives by drawing attention to global connections, networks, activities, and consciousnesses that bridge these more localized anchors of reference.²

This essay is an attempt to outline the shape and significance of narratives of Chinese migration that start from a transnational or global perspective. It begins with a survey of recent debates over the idea of diaspora, not because diaspora offers the most appropriate vocabulary and approach, but because the contentiousness surrounding its use can highlight many of the issues at stake. Taken as a whole, these debates have expanded the idea of diaspora from a relatively narrow and particular experience into a field for the conceptualization of many intertwining processes (Clifford 1994). I will take the position that understanding diaspora as a category that can be used to define and describe social groups is not so desirable as the development of a diasporic perspective that can direct the analysis of geographically dispersed institutions, identities, links, and flows.

The bulk of this paper will investigate different ways in which a diasporic perspective can shape the understanding of Chinese migration from 1842 to 1949—what might be loosely called “modern” Chinese migration. The purpose of this analysis is to highlight global processes that are usually left out of nation-based histories, and suggest the ways that they can engage and articulate with local perspectives. The analysis is divided into categories of diasporic labor, diasporic networks, diasporic nationalism, ethnic Chinese, and diasporic culture to highlight the way that practices and ideologies of migration are embedded in larger global trends and transnational activities, with different aspects developing and coming to the forefront at different times. This division also highlights how migration and diasporic identities are not characteristic qualities that define a group, but are strongly linked to particular social perspectives at particular times, such as global trade networks, the views from within particular nation states, the modern international system as a whole, and different socioeconomic classes.

Debating Diasporas

The long history and powerful implications of the word diaspora make it one of the more problematic conceptual alternatives to nation-based historical narratives. Until recently, the idea of diaspora has been intimately linked to the history of the Jews.³ At the very least, this identification has meant that recent writers trying to develop a more generalizable understanding of diaspora have had to customize computer spell-check programs that still only recognize diaspora with a capital “D.” More substantively, the association of diaspora with Jewishness has strong moral overtones, associated with traditions of forced exile, communal suffering, tenacious identity, and longing for the homeland. This moral dimension has facilitated the relatively easy appropriation of diaspora to describe the Armenian dispersal, impelled by genocidal attacks on their homeland after the turn of the century. The more recent appropriation of diaspora to describe the dispersal of Africans is more clearly an attempt to retroactively create a coherent identity out of scattered and disjointed peoples, yet the moral flavor of diaspora as suffering and exile resonates so strongly with the experience of slavery that it lends this construction of pan-African identity an air of validity it might not otherwise have had (Gilroy 1993, 205–12). In contrast, Gypsies have long been known as a geographically dispersed and mobile group, yet almost never as a diaspora because of their lack of a politics or sentiment of exile and homeland. Similarly, the fact that European imperialist dispersals after the fifteenth century have not inherited or appropriated the label of diaspora underlines the importance of identification as victims of suffering and dispersal, rather than as the willing perpetrators.

Many more recent appropriations of the idea of diaspora have latched on to it in a very contrasting manner: rather than a way to describe and promote the preservation of identity despite scattering, persecution, and hardship, it has become part of a wider attack on bounded and static understandings of culture and society. This work focuses on the transformations and dislocations created by movement, and diaspora becomes a signifier of multiplicity, fluidity, wildness, hybridity, the dislocations of modernity, or the decentered textures of postmodernity and postcolonialism. Narratives and analyses of diaspora are erected as critiques of essentialized notions of race and culture, as subversions of hegemonic narratives of political and cultural nationalism, as fields for the interplay of identity politics, and as calls for wider recognition and inclusion of diversity (see the first incarnation of the journal Diaspora, vols. 1–4, 1991–95; Hall 1994; Ong and Nonini 1997). This diaspora-as-heterogeneity still entails a morality constructed in opposition to oppression, only now it focuses more on resistance against continuing oppression than on an originating act of oppression. Moreover, the oppressor is now likely to be precisely those narratives of essentialized, primordial identity that were so important in earlier definitions of diaspora.

One appealing aspect of this approach to diasporas is the way that any application of the word is also an interrogation of what and who we are talking about. Attaching an adjective such as “Chinese” in front of diaspora is to implicitly ask how so many different peoples can actually be grouped together, and what are the consequences of doing so? For example, a Chinese diaspora could potentially include people as diverse as participants in the California Gold Rush, Sino-Vietnamese boat people, cosmopolitan Chinese businessmen constantly moving around the world with multiple passports, Filipino patriot José Rizal; and peranakans who are the descendants of intermarriages between Chinese and Malay women that began centuries ago, speak Malay dialects, and yet are often known for their stubborn maintenance of Chinese traditions. A graduate student from North China may have more in common with another academic like me than with Cantonese immigrants working in restaurant kitchens. Exiles from the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 fit many of the moral requirements for a diaspora-as-exile, yet one of the most famous exiled leaders, Wuer Kaixi, is not an ethnic Han Chinese. All of these people could potentially be called Chinese, yet Chineseness certainly does not signify the same thing in every instance, and may even be rejected by people such as Rizal.

If diaspora is an excellent position from which to highlight diversity, it is also a fine perspective from which to focus on links and flows. Thus, the recent emphasis on diversity has been countered with arguments that if diaspora is to be a useful and coherent category, it should describe cultural bonds, ties to a homeland, transnational organizations, or networks linking people together across geographic boundaries and dispersion (see the more recent incarnation of Diaspora, vol. 5, 1996 onward, especially Tölölyan 1996; Cohen 1997; Tu 1991). These arguments have tended to accept, and even promote a deemphasis on moral implications in favor of conceptualizing diaspora as a generalizable category applicable to the understanding and comparison of a wide variety of mobilities and dispersals. Ideas of homeland and exile are often crucial in defining these diasporas, but can be replaced by other bonds and processes which help to shape scattered people together as a group.

This version of diaspora can be the basis for a history that starts from the connections between places, and the flows, interactions, and transformations that take place through these connections. In doing so, it can avoid some of the dichotomies and multiplicities that often plague discussions of migrant identity. For example, Frank Moy was born in Portland, Oregon in 1874 and received a primary and high school education in Chicago. He grew up to marry a Caucasian American, have children who would grow up to be lawyers, become involved on the local school board, drive a black Lincoln, wear tailored suits with gold chains, make friends with local politicians, and develop a reputation as an upstanding Chicago businessman—whom one reporter called “as hospitable as a Southern Colonel” (Drury 1932, 14). Chinese in Chicago also knew...