Multicultural Challenges and Redefining Identity in East Asia

Nam-Kook Kim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781409455288
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317093664
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Essays in Politics & International Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Globalization and increased migration have brought both new opportunities and new tensions to traditional East Asian societies. Multicultural Challenges and Redefining Identity in East Asia draws together a wide range of distinguished local scholars to discuss multiculturalism and the changing nature of social identity in East Asia. Regional specialists review specific events and situations in China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines to provide a focus on life as it is lived at the local level whilst also tracing macro discourses on the national issues affected by multiculturalism and identity. The contributors look at the uneven multicultural development across these different countries and how to bridge the gap between locality and universality. They examine how ethnic majorities and minorities can achieve individual rights, exert civic responsibility, and explain how to construct a deliberative framework to make sustainable democracy possible. This book considers the emergence of a new cross-national network designed to address multicultural challenges and imagines an East Asian community with shared values of individual dignity and multicultural diversity. With strong empirical support it puts forward a regulative ideal by which a new paradigm for multicultural coexistence and regional cooperation can be realized.

Chapter 1
Foreigner Street: Urban Citizenship in Multicultural Shanghai

James Farrer

“Foreigner Street:” A Place in the City for Others

In the spring of 2010, officials in charge of Hongmei Pedestrian Street in suburban Shanghai decided to rename the prominent restaurant and shopping street “Foreigner Street,” or Laowaijie in Chinese, displayed in large, neon, red letters above the West entrance (Global Times 2010). The street already was the home to a wide variety of bars and restaurants, ranging from a popular Canadian sports bar, to a Dutch bakery, and a Persian restaurant, many owned by migrants from various countries. Whether the Chinese term “laowai,” usually used to describe white foreigners (similar to gringo in Spanish, or farang in Thai), is derogatory, overly casual, or merely neutral, is a matter of some dispute,¹ but the existence of such a street points to an emerging Chinese concept of a multicultural city, one in which international migrants are framed as a welcome but simultaneously alien presence.

The existence of a suburban “Foreigner Street” in Shanghai also points to multiple sources of Chinese multicultural imaginaries. One reason for the birth of this shopping district was the socialist government practice of placing foreigners in designated enclaves, such as the neighborhood of Hongqiao, the original special economic zone in 1990s Shanghai, within which the Hongmei Entertainment Street developed. Historically, the concentration of foreigners in this suburban district was an outcome of state planning in a period in which foreigners were restricted to stipulated housing developments. A second, and very different, source for this particular multicultural imaginary was the model of “Chinatowns” (tangrenjie) around the world, which probably inspired the term “Foreigner Street” (laowaijie) in Shanghai. Seeing the name, Chinese visitors would immediately make the connection to their own touristic experiences of China abroad. A related inspiration might have been the ethnological theme parks, often featuring China’s own minority cultures, which were popular in the early 1990s. If the theme parks celebrating China’s minority cultures were a kind of “internal orientalism” (Dirlik 1996, Schein 1997), then this kind of “Foreigner Street” could be described as an analogous “occidentalization” of the larger world beyond China. Finally, Shanghai itself has a very long history of foreign settlement and cosmopolitan culture, which probably also inspired the celebration of foreign culture within the city (though the clumsy “foreigner street” label might not be typical of the diverse representations of Western cultures in Shanghai). In a larger sense, what this awkwardly renamed “Foreigner Street” points out is that even Shanghai, China’s most cosmopolitan city, has a somewhat uneasy relationship to the large and growing foreign population in its midst, a group that it largely embraces—indeed courts through city branding and urban planning—but still considers exotic, alien and transient, though also a key element of the city’s cosmopolitan image.

Multiculturalism and Immigration in the Chinese Context

In a collection of essays such as this, highlighting issues of migration and multiculturalism, the People’s Republic of China presents a dilemma. China has been known primarily as a country of emigration, not immigration. Furthermore, multiculturalism in China has been conceptualized primarily in terms of relations between the majority Han population and the ethnic minorities within the boundaries of the PRC. This chapter refocuses this discussion by considering urban China as a new immigrant destination, albeit primarily for “elite” or “skilled” migrants.² This chapter also develops an idea of multicultural urban citizenship centered in the “global city” rather than the nation state as a whole. At the same time, we must locate this new phenomenon of multicultural urban citizenship in the context of two larger contrasting PRC experiences of multiculturalism: Communist practices of dealing with internal minorities and the long and growing experience of Chinese elites with transnational migration and travel outside the borders of China.

China’s current politics of multiculturalism developed in a twentieth-century context of colonialism, invasion, and national resistance. Upon seizing power in 1949, the Communist Party rapidly moved to assert control of minority border regions that had in some cases gained de facto independence or were occupied by foreign powers. In contrast to the previous regime of the Republic of China that downplayed the very existence of ethnic minorities in China, the CCP employed the rhetoric of a multi-ethnic nation and political self-determination to stave off independence movements and counter the involvement of foreign powers in border regions. Partly inspired by the Soviet model, the People’s Republic of China was explicitly founded as a multiethnic or “multi-national” state with various protections and privileges extended to 55 minority ethnic groups (minzu) that were deemed large or distinctive enough to warrant official recognition (Mullaney 2011). Despite the rhetoric of cultural diversity and political autonomy, the Party’s desire to assert control over these resource rich and strategically important border regions meant that China’s multicultural policies have always involved an unstated goal of assimilating “backward” minority populations into a Han-dominated political culture (Gladney 1994, He 2005). Beyond this specific Communist history, we could also see these policies as a larger Confucian pattern of patronage and tutelage of minorities by a more powerful and “advanced” Han Chinese majority (He 2005). Yet despite efforts to appease minorities through policies such as affirmative action in university admissions and exemptions to the one-child policy, challenges to this Chinese version of “multiculturalism” continue, as inter-ethnic violence, separatist movements, and economic disparities plague minority regions of the country.

Related to these developments, PRC attitudes towards “foreigners” were also cast during this same period of state formation that emerged out of a long struggle against colonialism and foreign invasion. During the first half of the twentieth century many Chinese cities had gained substantial foreign populations, mostly located in semi-colonial “treaty ports” such as Shanghai and Tianjin, or colonial possessions wrested from China, such as Hong Kong and Dalian. The new Communist leadership was determined to eliminate foreign political influences, expelling resident foreigners from the country in the early 1950s, or encouraging them to emigrate, including almost all long-term resident Westerners (and the last remaining Japanese) as well as Russians, stateless Jews, and other refugees still living in Chinese cities after the Communist takeover. Soviet advisers were an important exception to this cleansing of China’s cities, but with the cooling of ties between the Soviet Union and China after 1956, they too were expelled, and previously multicultural (and colonial) cities such as Shanghai and Dalian became nearly devoid of foreign residents for most of the 1960s and 1970s. Beijing had a small population of diplomats and a few resident foreign communists, but even the capital city was scarcely a multicultural metropolis. Only Hong Kong and Macau remained as cosmopolitan cities, but were outside of the national territory.

We can thus say that ideas and practices of Chinese “multiculturalism” in the past half century developed with almost no reference to the possibility of immigration into China, or permanent foreign populations in Chinese cities, and were concerned primarily with binding restive minority populations to the nation state and limiting foreign involvements in Chinese affairs. In as much as Chinese did come into contact with foreigners inside China, the state worked to limit contacts to a polite façade of politically correct “friendship” (Brady 2003). These policies of restricting foreigners’ entry to China, formed in a period of perceived national crisis, reinforced a psychological and social barrier between Chinese and foreigners that still impacts on intercultural relations today.

The other formative Chinese experience of multiculturalism is actually located beyond the borders of China, in the long and complex history of Chinese emigration, which includes the formation of “Chinatowns” in cities around the world. Indeed, throughout its modern history, China has been primarily an emigrant (as opposed to immigrant) society, with waves of out-migration from the Ming Dynasty onward creating a population of “overseas Chinese” estimated to be about 50 million, with the largest groups in Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe. In addition to labor migrants, hundreds of thousands of Chinese have studied abroad, forming a Chinese intellectual and business elite, not only in China, but dispersed in cities throughout the world. More recently, many of these transnational migrants have returned to Chinese urban centers, including Shanghai, where they also form an important part of the multicultural urban population. Although difficult to summarize, these Chinese experiences of migration abroad are an important source of ideas about a cosmopolitan or multicultural city. Indeed, Chinese inspirations for how to deal with “foreigners” and “foreign culture” may owe as much to Chinese experiences abroad as they do to indigenous Confucian traditions or the socialist experiences of managing foreigners in China.

Immigration into China, in contrast to emigration, is a relatively recent and numerically smaller phenomenon, and one which has received little scholarly attention. In the 2010 census, the Chinese government for the first time included foreign residents. A total of 593,832 “persons with foreign nationality” (waijirenyuan) were counted, a figure which demographers considered to be low, since collecting data on foreigners was found to be very difficult (Stats.gov 2010).³ Although forming only a tiny fraction of China’s roughly 1.3 billion people, this foreign population was concentrated in a few major cities where they arguably had an impact on social and cultural life greatly disproportionate to their small population. Shanghai had the largest foreign population outside of Hong Kong with 173,000 resident foreign passport holders in 2012 (Kuka and Shi 2013). In this study I investigate what kinds of experiences integrate this growing population of migrants into life in a Chinese city, how this integration is limited, and how these processes of cultural and social incorporation relate to the larger Chinese conceptions of multiculturalism outlined above.

Asian Global Cities and the Prospects of Urban Citizenship

One key context for the emergence of new ideas of urban multiculturalism in China is the nexus of competing global cities emerging in Asia, the most important of which are Hong Kong and Singapore, themselves cities with a majority ethnic Chinese population. As they have become centers of global finance and trade, Asian global cities have experienced an explosion in the number and variety of migrants. These newcomer populations typically show a bifurcated class distribution typical of global cities (Sassen 2002), involving, on the one hand, a relatively small but economically important group of highly skilled transnational managers, professionals, and technical experts, often from developed countries, and on the other, a much larger contingent of migrant service workers, often from poorer countries in the region. In addition, an increasing number of migrants are students and recent graduates from universities in developed countries, often still searching for stable employment and willing to work at considerably lower wages than experienced professionals. One issue these cities must face is how and to what extent to incorporate these migrants into the social, political, and cultural life of the city. As we can see below, many of these processes of incorporation are largely in the hands of immigrants themselves, as they interact with the local society to produce social, cultural, and affective ties. Many migrants move on, but others develop long-term ties to their new cities, opening up the question of what types of “multicultural citizenship” are made possible through their activities and interactions with the local society.

Whether we call them “skilled migrants,” “lifestyle migrants,” “middling transnationals,” or “expats,” new immigrants are an increasingly visible and important component of the multicultural populations of Asian global cities (Yeoh and Chang 2001, Yeoh and Willis 2005, Conradson and Latham 2005). Indeed, it might be argued, that attracting such “elite” migrants, or “foreign talents,” has been a major push behind neoliberal immigration policies in the Asia-Pacific region. Urban governments from Tokyo to Singapore seek to make their cities attractive places for skilled migrants, while managing and controlling the increase in so-called “unskilled migrants” (industrial laborers, nannies, etc.) (Yeoh and Chang 2001, Oishi 2012). Still, as traditional “exporters” of migrants, Asian countries may present complex and sometimes hostile environments for migrants. Even educated Asian migrants may face discrimination (Liu-Farrer 2011). And for Westerners, postcolonial legacies of Western colonization create both opportunities and obstacles to their integration in many Asian cities (Knowles and Harper 2009, Fechter and Walsh 2010, Farrer 2010a).

Global cities represent particularly attractive locations of settlement for educated migrants with a cultural orientation towards cosmopolitan living. As Yeoh and Willis have noted (2005), previous research on expatriates has typically emphasized the mobility of elite professionals through transnational networks of cities, ignoring the “stickiness” of global cities as places of settlement. This is not to say that expatriate identities focus only on ties to one place. In their stories about their travels, transnational professionals express multiple ties to home societies, professional communities, and also to the cities they reside in (Colic-Peisker 2010). Many expatriates express a particular attraction to global cities such as Shanghai, which offer the possibilities of a cosmopolitan lifestyle and the prospect of some type of multicultural urban citizenship. Sassen describes the global city as a partially denationalized space that enables migrants to lay claim to partial and aspirational forms of cosmopolitan urban citizenship (Sassen 2006: 314).

Increasingly, migrants belong in different ways and to different degrees to more than one society, producing calls for a more open and flexible concept of multicultural citizenship in which many factors such as family bonds, economic involvement, residency, and cultural participation may confer citizenship rights (Castles and Davidson 2000: viii). Urban citizenship is one such form of multicultural citizenship. Membership in an urban community, though not necessarily to the larger nation state in which the city is situated, represents a devolution of citizenship claim-making from national to urban spaces (Purcell 2003, Smith and Guarnizo 2009). Citizenship, in this sense, is not merely an outcome of state policies, but also of “bottom up” cultural practices that involve making claims on social space. Migrants’ urban citizenship claims are expressed in shared narratives about places and other practices of urban place-making (Taylor 2010, Friedmann 2007). This can include leisure and consumption practices, volunteer work, as well as economic activities that create a space for migrants in the city. Place making activities also may involve childrearing, marriage, and sexual activities that create affective bonds to a place and to local people.

Especially within Asia, multicultural citizenship has largely been understood as an issue addressed at the national level, and largely concerned with the state’s treatment of long-term ethnic minority populations. Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and China all have multicultural policies for managing large groups of indigenous minorities or long-established immigrant populations (Kymlicka and He 2005). As described above, in the case of China, these national policies have been aimed largely at preserving Chinese sovereignty over border regions, tamping down internal dissent, and assimilating minority populations into a larger Han-dominated social and political order (He 2005). With the exception of the “special administrative region” of Hong Kong, relatively little attention has been paid to newer flows of transnational migrants concentrated in Chinese cities rather than border regions, and involving relative newcomers and sojourners rather than traditional settler populations or indigenous groups. From the point of view of Shanghai’s political and economic elites, however, these foreign migrant populations, largely educated professionals, are far more significant economically, socially, and culturally, than national minorities such as Tibetans, Zhuang, Uighurs, and Hui who also have migrated to the city. Indeed indigenous ethnic minorities are among the most economically and socially marginalized groups of migrants in Chinese cities (see, for example, Liu 2010).

At a theoretical level, this study addresses the possibilities of multicultural citizenship for “skilled” or “privileged” migrants in global cities, while pointing out the limitations of multicultural citizenship for marginal “internal” migrants. In doing so, I emphasize the relationship of urban citizenship, a sense of social and cultural membership at a level below that of the nation state, to belonging, the subjective and intersubjective sense of cultural and social acceptance and attachment to a place. Although the concept would apply to migrants in any city of the world, a focus on urban citizenship seems especially relevant to understanding the lives of transnational migrants in Asian cities. The reasons for this are two-fold. First, international migrant populations in many East Asian countries are still small and concentrated in a few cities. In large countries such as China, international migrant populations rarely influence national events or even become a topic of national policy debates. Secondly, international migrants are rarely able to achieve full political, cultural, and social citizenship at the national level in most East Asian countrie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Locality and Universality of Identity under Globalization in East Asia
• 1 Foreigner Street: Urban Citizenship in Multicultural Shanghai
• 2 Multicultural Challenges in Korea: Liberal Democracy Thesis vs. State Initiated Multiculturalism1
• 3 From Kokusaika to Tabunka Kyōsei: Global Norms, Discourses of Difference, and Multiculturalism in Japan
• 4 Taiwanese in China and Their Multiple Identities, 1895–1945
• 5 Successfully Misunderstood: The Untold Realities of the Thai-Chinese Assimilation “Success Story”
• 6 Ethnic Minorities and the State in Vietnam
• 7 Diverse and Divisive: Multiculturalism in Singapore
• 8 Beyond Multiculturalism: Redefining Indonesian Nationhood in a Globalized Age
• 9 The Plural Society and Multiculturalism in Malaysia and Singapore
• 10 Gendered Migration and Filipino Women in Korea
• Index