Ungrounded Empires

The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism

Aihwa Ong, Donald Nonini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780415915434
• eBook ISBN: 9781135964191
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the last two decades, Chinese transnationalism has become a distinctive domain within the new "flexible" capitalism emerging in the Asia-Pacific region. Ungrounded Empires maps this domain as the intersection of cultural politics and global capitalism, drawing on recent ethnographic research to critique the impact of late capitalism's institutions--flexibility, travel, subcontracting, multiculturalism, and mass media--upon transnational Chinese subjectives. Interweaving anthropology and cultural studies with interpretive political economy, these essays offer a wide range of perspectives on "overseas Chinese" and their unique location in the global arena.

Part 1

Transiting to Modernity: The Wildness and Power of Early Chinese Transnationalism

Preface

By the modern colonial period, Chinese outside of China, like other Asian peoples, resisted the localizations imposed on them by Euro-American and Japanese colonial empires in Asia by employing their border-crossing practices to undermine laterally the association between authoritative mobility and imperial power.

Both essays in part 1 substantiate this, though in different ways. The essay by Duara points to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a period when new, alternative political logics and rhetorics from China itself confronted Euro-American colonial empires in the Asia Pacific during a time prior to their own consolidation. The representatives of three factions of modern nationalists from China moved across permeable colonial boundaries and spaces to engage in an extraterritorial rivalry with one another for the loyalties of diasporic Chinese positioned in these spaces: the emissaries of the Chinese emperor, nationalist reformers such as Liang Qichao and Kang Youwei, and revolutionary nationalists such as Hu Hanmin and Sun Yat-sen. These three factions made conflicting rhetorical claims vis-à-vis one another on diasporic Chinese as huaqiao, citizens of a larger modern Chinese nation, but in so doing were all subversive in challenging Euro-American colonial sovereignty by calling for the movement of diasporic Chinese bodies and economic capital out of the Euro-American colonies through campaigns of patriotic return, investment, and so on.

The merchants discussed by Trocki in his essay were organized into kongsis or “companies,” and plied their trade in men (indentured laborers) between China and Southeast Asia and in commodities (gambier and pepper; later, rubber; and throughout, opium) across the boundaries of British, Dutch, and French empires in Southeast Asia. Chinese merchants, called taukehs in Hokkien, sought to take advantage of two problems of European rule—the need to recruit “Oriental” labor to open up colonial frontiers for European profit-taking, and the need to raise revenues in Asia rather than the metropole to subsidize the colonial administration. The latter problem was solved by letting out “opium farms”—an early modern form of subcontracting dealing in opium for addicted laborers—to Chinese merchants. However, by the early years of the twentieth century, Chinese flows in men, opium, and capital came to be seen as unauthorized movements across and beyond administered colonial spaces, posing a danger to colonial order and to the burgeoning racial “color line” that by then had come to buttress it, and the colonial authorities took steps to curb their border-crossing activities. Nonetheless, similar transgressions by Chinese have continued under the conditions of middle and late modernity.

As discussed in the introduction, we contend that the wildness and unpredictability of Chinese transnationalism has since the mid-1970s been harnessed and put to use by the forces of global capitalism and late modernity. The social, cultural, and spatial features of contemporary Chinese transnationalism, its connections to nation-state regimes of truth and power, and the implications of its workings for the (self-) making of new Chinese subjects are the topics investigated in the essays in parts part 2, part 3, and part 4.

Chapter One
Nationalists Among Transnationals:
Overseas Chinese and the Idea of China, 1900–1911 ¹

Prasenjit Duara

The problem with modern territorial nationalism is that while it is the only acceptable form of sovereignty in the modern world, it is an inadequate basis of affective identification within the nation-state. Thus, the modern nation-state seeks to deploy the frequently older, extraterritorial narratives of racial and cultural community to serve its own needs. This essay will explore how, and with what difficulties, a territorially limited sovereignty, the early twentieth-century Chinese nation, sought to turn the energies and loyalties of deracinated transnational communities, the overseas Chinese, toward its interests. I will consider the efforts of three nationalist groups between 1900 and 1911: the late Qing imperial state, the constitutional monarchists and reformers led by Kang Youwei, and the republican revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-sen and others. Given that there are several important works on the history of Chinese nationalism among the overseas Chinese themselves, especially as it developed in Singapore, Malaya, and the United States (including Hawaii) (see especially Ma 1990; Yen 1976; and Huang 1993), I will not dwell on that topic. My goal is to probe the discursive and cultural means that the mainland nationalist groups utilized to mobilize the emigrants to the national cause.

All three mainland groups appealed to the overseas Chinese principally for financial contributions for their projects and investments in China and elsewhere, which they believed would strengthen the Chinese nation. I am concerned with the different political and rhetorical mechanisms whereby the nationalist groups exchanged symbolic values in order to secure material support from the overseas Chinese. All three groups sought to create a strong nation-state in China, and the overseas Chinese were expected to contribute to this project because they were Chinese. Yet the meaning of Chineseness itself was by no means clear, not only because emigrants themselves had multiple and ambiguous identities but especially because it was a time when such meaning was itself changing rapidly in China. The task of each of the three nationalist groups was to secure and fix a sense of Chineseness, but each had to fix this identity in the face of a preexisting multiplicity and ambiguity of identities as well as in relation to conflicting interpretations of Chinese-ness espoused by the others.

The Nationalist Cultural Project

In a recent work on nationalism (Duara 1995, 65–69), I have discussed the problem of how small activist groups seek to transform the identities of communities by changing the perception of social boundaries of this community from being soft to hard. A survey of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia and the United States in the period under review suggests that the model of soft and hard boundaries is particularly useful in understanding the relationships between the nationalist groups mentioned above and these communities. The various cultural practices of a community—such as language, eating habits, and marriage taboos—also constitute the boundaries that mark that community.

From a historical perspective, these boundaries are never fixed but are mobile, in the sense both that their valence changes over time and that at any given point in time they signify a variable degree of openness to different Others. Thus these boundaries may be perceived as permeable or soft in certain respects and rigid with respect to other people and times. Activist groups with a totalizing vision of community seek to eliminate these permeable boundaries or transform them into the hardened boundaries of a closed community. They do so in accordance with a narrative that privileges one organizing institution or practice—such as race or fictive kinship—over all others.

Diasporic Chinese often organized themselves as several simultaneously different communities: as linguistic groups, such as Cantonese bendi, Hakka, Chaozhou, and Hokkien, with dialects and languages that were mostly mutually incomprehensible; as surname groups; as territorial or native-place communities; as secretive versus public sodalities; and as class-differentiated groups, among others (Ma 1990, 7–29; Yen 1976, 4–15, 286–89; Freedman 1979). An individual might have belonged to several of these communities, thus crossing some permeable boundaries while encountering other, harder boundaries. At the same time, diasporic communities were also differentiated by how they perceived their boundaries with the surrounding communities and cultures—depending often on the nature of the indigenous or colonial polity and racial division of labor (see Alatas 1977, 75–76, 85–89). Thus Chinese in Thailand tended to assimilate with local Thais (or exhibit bi-culturalism), Peranakans in Indonesia to remain aloof from the local culture, and Chinese in the Philippines to emerge as a mestizo group halfway between the above two (Purcell 1965, 30–36; Lee 1978, 4–5). Chinese Christians in North America (Ma 1990, 21–22, 36) or Malaccan Babas and other Straitsborn Chinese who intermarried with local Malays and later became anglicized had different and changing attitudes from those more recently arrived (xinke) from China (Freeman 1979, 63–64). If we imagine a baseline scenario of the diaspora before the arrival of mainland nationalist forces, it would be this image of multistrandedness and shifting boundaries. The activists 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.

Wang Gungwu (1991a) has characterized the dominant pattern of Chinese immigration to Southeast Asia from at least the nineteenth century (though he finds it to be much older) as the huashang, or Chinese trader, mode. There is also the huagong or Chinese labor, mode, which emerged between the 1850s and the 1920s, but the huashang mode is more basic and continues to this day. It is one in which kinsmen of successful traders follow the pioneers or are brought in to establish or extend business networks. There is a sense in which this group remains Chinese because of the functional significance of family and nativeplace ties; at the same time, they demonstrate a certain flexibility, especially toward the political authorities of the host countries, whether colonial or indigenous. Wang’s strong emphasis on the huashang mode as the dominant mode or even model of Chinese society overseas reinforces my basic point that the sense of Chineseness with which the majority of Chinese abroad lived was one with relatively open boundaries. In this context, Freedman’s revelation that the culturally adaptive Baba Chinese were also highly influential among the later immigrants and absorbed the more successful among them as Baba because they were wealthy, influential, and had marriageable daughters underscores the correlation between adaptability and success (Freedman 1979, 63–64).

Wang contrasts the huashang mode with what he defines as the huaqiao pattern, which became most visible between 1900 and the 1950s but which has had rather less staying power than the huashang mode (Wang 1991a, 6–8). Clarifying his very specific terminological choice of huaqiao for this phenomenon rather than its more common usage as a general term for the diaspora as a whole, Wang traces its origins to the influx of nationalist activists and ideology at the end of the nineteenth century. Huaqiao, which may be literally rendered as “Chinese sojourner,” was introduced to unify the various terms that the diaspora used to refer to themselves, such as Min Guangren, Min Yueren, and Tangren—ways of identifying the people of Guangdong and Fujian. The new national signifier, huaqiao, implied first that the hauqiao owed their allegiance to China and the Qing state (and after 1911, to the Republic) and entailed certain legal rights and responsibilities toward the Chinese state. More important than the legal dimension was the political and ideological one, whereby the primary loyalty of all Chinese was owed to China. Huaqiao were mobilized, especially through education campaigns—often directed against local authorities opposed to education in Chinese—to instill this sense of loyalty and re-sinicize those who had been acculturated to local or Western ways (Wang 1991a, 8–9). It is precisely this process of fixing the meaning and hardening the boundaries of Chineseness that I shall explore in this essay.

Imperial Nationalism: Mobilizing Culture

Consider the Qing state (1644–1911) first. Although republican historiography—which has dominated much professional historiography in China and elsewhere—has tended to demonize the Qing as a foreign (Manchu), barbarian power that sold out the nation to Western imperialist powers, it is also clear that in its last decade the Qing state launched a program of strengthening the nation-state vis-à-vis the imperialist powers. It did so by trying to maximize and define its territorial boundaries, by strengthening national defenses, and by undertaking a comprehensive reform program in education, commerce, law, and local self-government (Pomeranz 1993; Duara 1988). For these purposes, it needed to expand its revenue base, especially since much of its existing revenue was pledged to servicing the foreign debt incurred through military defeats. It was in this context of national and state strengthening that it turned to the overseas Chinese (among other sources) for revenue.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, the Qing state banned emigration and regarded emigrants as pariahs and pirates. It often executed repatriated emigrants in order to deter potential travelers from leaving the empire. In the early period of Qing rule, overseas Chinese were associated with Ming loyalists and with secret-society efforts to overthrow the Qing. After it succeeded in quelling the opposition to its rule in Taiwan led by Koxinga (Zheng Chenggong) in 1683, that source of the policy against emigrants evaporated, but the ban continued to be strict (Zhuang 1989, 101–4).

Overseas Chinese were regarded as people who had moved out of the ambit of civilization and, indeed, had betrayed this civilization. When complaints about the Dutch massacre of Chinese in Batavia in 1740 reached the Qing court, the Qianlong emperor displayed a lack of interest, saying that “they had deserted their ancestors’ graves to seek profits abroad” (quoted in Tsai 1979, 499). The conversion of overseas Chinese to foreign religions such as Christianity and Islam, their association with “barbarians” such as the Dutch, and their participation in rebellions on the Burmese and Vietnamese borders earned them the opprobrium of hanjian, or traitor to the Han (Zhuang 1989, 102–4).

With growing awareness of the world system of modern nation-states and the discursive seachange accompanying it, the imperial state reversed its policy toward emigrants by the 1880s. Not only did it remove the ban on emigration and seek to oversee the coolie trade (Tsai 1979, 502) but also, following the nation-state model, beginning in 1878 it established consulates in Southeast Asia and America to address the needs of its “nationals” abroad. The concern behind the imperial state’s setting up consulates was as much the need to care for its overseas nationals as it was to benefit from their presence and wealth. The writings of imperial officials—in particular, provincial governors and governor-generals—through the 1880s (Zhuang 1989, 140–41) and later were dominated by the interest in huaqiao as contributing to national strength. They sought both financial support for state-dominated ventures and technical skills in shipbuilding and armament production from the huaqiao (Zhuang 1989, 139–41). Their ideas were dominated by the “self-strengthening” school, which sought to build up the military strength of the imperial state while preserving essential Confucian values. The practical manifestation of this ideal was the establishment of enterprises run by merchants but supervised by officials (guandu shangban). Self-strengthening officials such as Li Hongzhang sought to enlist huaqiao help for the China Maritime Stem Navigation Company to compete with Western shipping interests and support the company’s overseas expansion (Yen 1982a, 217–18). Huaqiao were also expected to serve as spies. Wu Zengying wrote:

Nanyang is surrounded by islands on the east and the west, exactly like a Great Wall of the sea (haishang changcheng)…. We should send delegates to these places to sign treaties that would forbid mistreatment of our merchants. We should also grant the outstanding ones among them the consul’s posts and have them investigate the physical features of their host country, its population distribution and the depths of its waterways. In addition, they can keep an eye on the Westerners and inform us of any suspicious move. (Quoted in Zhuang 1989, 141)

With the New Policy reforms in 1902, Qing policies toward huaqiao began to focus increasingly on soliciting commercial involvement within China. Special opportunities to invest in mining and railroads were granted in order to prevent foreigners from monopolizing these areas. In 1903 Zhang Bishi, a scholar-official well-connected to overseas merchants, was appointed as imperial commissioner to inspect overseas commercial affairs. Six special missions of imperial envoys and many smaller delegations to drum up investment were organized in Southeast Asia, and millions of dollars were actually raised through these means (Yen 1982a, 224–28). The missions...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Chinese Transnationalism as an Alternative Modernity
• Part 1: Transiting to Modernity: The Wildness and Power of Early Chinese Transnationalism
• Part 2: Family, Guanxi, and Space: Discourses and Practices in the Age of Flexibility
• Part 3: Transnational Identities and Nation-State Regimes of Truth and Power
• Part 4: The Self-Making and Being-Made of Transnational Subjectivities
• Afterword
• Notes on Contributors