Chinatown, Europe

An Exploration of Overseas Chinese Identity in the 1990s

Flemming Christiansen, Flemming Christiansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135797317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi sull'etnia

Is Chinatown a ghetto, an area of exotic sensations or a business venture? What makes a European Chinese, Chinese?
The histories of Chinese communities in Europe are diverse, spanning (amongst others) Teochiu speaking migrants from French Indochina to France, and Hakka and Cantonese speaking migrants from Hong Kong to Britain. This book explores how such a wide range of people tends to be - indiscriminately - regarded as 'Chinese'.
Christiansen explains Chinese communities in Europe in terms of the interaction between the migrants, the European 'host' society and the Chinese 'home' where the migrants claim their origin. He sees these interactions as addressing several issues: citizenship, political culture, labour market exclusion, generational shifts and the influences of colonialism and communism, all of which create opportunities for fashioning a new ethnic identity. Chinatown, Europe examines how many sub-groups among the Chinese in Europe have developed in recent years and discusses many institutions that shape and contribute ethnic meaning to Chinese communities in Europe.
Chinese identity is not a mere practical utility or a shallow business emblem. For many, China remains a unifying force and yet local and national bonds in each European state are of equal importance in giving shape to Chinese communities. Based on in-depth interviews with overseas Chinese in many European cities, Chinatown, Europe provides a complex yet enthralling investigation into many Chinese communities in Europe.

1 European Chinese identity in the 1990s

Blood descent, nationality and nationalism

Almost any Chinese discussion of overseas Chinese claims that genetic heritage defines who is Chinese. Blood descent (xuetong), the idea that people born of Chinese parents are ethnic Chinese, seems powerful because it is intuitively right and because it is simple. It is also part of what has been termed Chinese ‘racial nationalism’.¹

When we look at the Chinese in Europe, however, blood descent is not a useful way of defining the overseas Chinese, for it is hard to use for anything. The interviews made for this research revealed that while they cited blood descent as a criterion for defining who is Chinese, our interviewees found the idea inadequate, and they also used other criteria. The more one looks at ‘blood descent’ as a criterion for Chinese ethnicity, the more it seems meaningless in its own right: it is a criterion the Chinese themselves use, and it is their interpretation of it that counts. That interpretation is different from person to person and from situation to situation.

Blood descent is used as the basis for China's nationality law and for China's policy-making on overseas Chinese. The concepts of huaqiao (i.e. Chinese citizens residing abroad) and huaren (i.e. Chinese who have assumed foreign nationality), both based on genetic descent, accordingly define specific administrative and legal statuses of overseas Chinese vis-à-vis China.

Chinese nationalism and blood descent are closely linked. Overseas Chinese, who emphasise their genetic heritage, accordingly, imply that they are members of the Chinese nation. The imagined community of the Chinese has a strong affective appeal and is politically important.² ‘Overseas Chinese’ are linked to Chinese nationhood, so that is where our analysis begins.

The Chinese nation and the overseas Chinese

The origin of the Chinese revolution in 1911, and of earlier uprisings and attempts, lay in popular opposition to Qing rule and resentment towards the presence of foreign powers in China. The ‘fan Qing fu Ming’ ethos (to overthrow the Manchu Dynasty and restore the Ming Dynasty) was alive and strong in the popular movements and organisations that the revolutionaries around Sun Yat-sen and Huang Xing mobilised for their revolutionary cause during the last decade of Qing rule. The anti-foreign sentiments, and the attacks on foreign churches and missionaries, as well as on their Chinese proselytes, had formed a core in the Yihetuan uprising in 1900–1. Nationalism arose from the assertion of a popular common cause against the Qing dynastic rule and foreign presence.

Sun Yat-sen mobilised the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia and the Americas in support of the revolutionary enterprise; his networks of allies abroad, apart from a handful of intellectuals, were the leaders of the Hongmen secret societies, which existed as Zhigongtang (Che Kung Tong) all over Asia and in America. Their aim was to overturn the Qing dynastic rule and to restore the Ming dynastic rule, and they provided Sun with money and organisation for the revolutionary endeavours.

Intellectual circles in China and in exile in the late 1890s began to formulate the idea of a Han nation, a unity of the descendants of the Yellow Emperor. This idea incorporated the opposition to the Qing and the foreigners, but went much further in proclaiming a new unity of all Chinese, who had until then been divided and linked by particularistic bonds. The history of the Han was reinterpreted and reformulated. Frank Dikötter (1996; 1992, 97–125) has in detail described the evolution of radical reformist ideas, which emerged as ‘racial nationalism’ around the turn of the century. These ideas were explicit reflections of Western racism, inspired by Darwin's theory of natural selection, and by Spencer and Huxley. The Chinese idea of ‘bloodline ethnicity’, which still exists today, sprang from these racial nationalist ideas as formulated by people like Liang Qichao and Zhang Binglin, and later rephrased by Sun Yat-sen. Racial nationalism, rather than restoration of the Ming dynasty formed the basis for early Chinese revolutionary ideology.

State-building after the 1911 Revolution, however, forced a third perspective onto nationalism. The 1911 Revolution was weak; the Provisional Government in Nanjing, headed by Sun Yat-sen, could not hold out against the force of Yuan Shikai. Yuan not only represented the Imperial Court and the infant emperor Pu Yi, but was also a strong bureaucrat with immense patronage networks, commanding respect among the Han bureaucracy that was freeing itself from the imperial yoke. In addition, he commanded huge, modern armies that easily matched the armies that had joined the revolution. The revolutionaries had no option but to yield power to Yuan Shikai in early 1912. The nationalist foundation of the new republic was not the Han racial nationalism of the intellectuals and the revolutionaries, but the unity of the five great nations, the Han, the Manchus, the Mongols, the Moslems, and the Tibetans. The Republican authorities issued two declarations, assuring equal treatment of the five nations within the new state.

The Han bureaucracy under Yuan Shikai understood that Han nationalism as a state-founding principle, from the point of view of Realpolitik, was divisive. It was likely to lead to independence efforts by Moslems in the whole of the North West (religious and ethnic insurrections during the nineteenth century were still fresh in their memory), and at the very least Russian attempts to sow the seeds of discord. Although the Mongols mainly had been docile and accommodating, they had attempted several insurrections. But more importantly, Mongol nobles were so in debt to Chinese merchants and to the Qing state, that they hoped to forfeit those debts by a declaration of independence. The Mongol nobility was also open to inducements from Russian agents. The North East was old Manchu land, which until the 1870s had been excluded from Han immigration by the segregation policies of the Qing empire. These vast under-populated regions had attracted the attention of Russia and Japan. Even with a rising Han population (migrants from Shandong and Zhili), it was essential to formulate a claim on the region, which went beyond actual Han settlement. State-building in 1911 based on Han nationalism would have been foolhardy, giving the expansionist Russian empire and Japan a carte blanche to divide the fringe territories of the Qing Empire between them. The state-building coalition of the revolutionaries and the powerhouse around Yuan Shikai chose to declare that China included the combined territory of the five great nations.

The fact that the revolutionaries around Sun Yat-sen, the core of the Tong-menghui and later the Guomindang, had to a large extent been exiles, living in Japan and other foreign countries, and that Sun Yat-sen's revolutionary cause had received huge amounts of money, logistic support and organisational aid from innumerable overseas Chinese, meant that the overseas Chinese from the very beginning were included as a part of the post-revolutionary state-building ideology. This, of course, was easily accommodated within the notion of racial nationalism or bloodline nationalism. This ‘modern’ nationalism could not accommodate the ideology of restoring the Ming Dynasty and the obscurantist ways of secret societies, so Sun Yat-sen sought to force overseas Chinese into a new, politically oriented relationship with the new state, urging them to establish a revolutionary party on the foundations of their old-style tangs. An overseas Chinese leader in San Francisco, Huang Sande (1936), in his Revolutionary History of the Hongmen, gives a vivid account of how he was pushed around by Sun Yat-sen and the republican bureaucracy when he sought post-revolutionary recognition of the American Zhigongtang.³ But the state-founding nationalist ideology of China included overseas Chinese.

Constitutionally, overseas Chinese have been regarded as a part of China ever since. This follows the logic of ‘bloodline nationalism’. However, this must be examined from several perspectives. The claim to integrate overseas Chinese is important to gauge the nature of their relationship with China, and the policies to cement this relationship are important for the examination of the community they imagine.

Citizenship through the blood-line

The Chinese state, unlike many other states, includes its compatriots who live abroad as part of the nation. This extends much further than the jus sanguinis underpinning some countries' nationality laws. The overseas Chinese have since the founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911 habitually been seen as a factor in Chinese political life and as an element to be included in the constitutional context and in decisions relating to the fate of the nation.

Overseas Chinese had or could claim citizenship of the Chinese Republic, and could have the right to vote and be elected to the two-chamber parliament of the Early Republic, according to the Organic Law of Parliament of 10 August 1912 (Tung 1968, 33). This situation basically continued through the tumultuous constitutional history of the Chinese Republic. Overseas Chinese, for example, elected some of the members of the People's Political Conference in 1938–48, which was under Nationalist domination, but included Communist members until 1945 (Tung 1968, 188–91). Overseas Chinese political participation also exists in Taiwan today, even after the revision of the Constitution of the Chinese Republic in the early 1990s.

The founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 was based on the inclusion of overseas Chinese in the process. The state-founding coalition of parties, organisations and individuals under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party included a number of overseas Chinese. They formed part of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). They gave credence and legitimacy to the new state by taking part in setting it up: they were constitutionally involved in its formation. The CPPCC is the prime layer in China's political constitution, being the body which founded the state, gave it its first constitutional framework (in the form of the Constitution which was passed in 1953), and passed the most fundamental special laws of New China, namely the Marriage Law and the Land Reform Law.

However, the integration of overseas Chinese in the political system of the People's Republic of China is ambiguous. First, Chinese nationality law was not strongly and explicitly regulated for a long time, even though it always rested on the principle of jus sanguinis. After concern expressed by the Indonesian government around the time of the Bandung Conference in the mid-1950s that the large overseas Chinese population in Indonesia, due to the dual nationality, might have split loyalties, the Chinese and Indonesian governments in April 1955 issued a joint declaration terminating dual nationality of the overseas Chinese. This established the policy of not allowing dual nationality, which now forms Article 3 of the Nationality Law of the People's Republic of China of 1980. As a consequence, the People's Republic recognises two types of overseas Chinese; namely, citizens of the People's Republic of China who reside abroad, so-called huaqiao, and Chinese by bloodline who have acquired citizenship in a foreign state, huaren.

Representation of overseas Chinese within the Chinese political system is indirect, through the so-called ‘returned overseas Chinese compatriots’, guiguo qiaobao. The CPPCC includes representatives of this group among its members; in addition overseas Chinese, living anywhere, may be ‘specially invited persons’ (tebie yaoqing renshi). The political system of the People's Republic has to a radical extent based itself on a division of the population in ideal-type segments, to whom different rights accrue. This is particularly evident in the 56 officially recognised minority nationalities, in the division of holders of agricultural household registration, and urban household registration, and so on. Legally and practically, returned overseas Chinese compatriots, are such a group apart: they are subject to special rules and treatment, and there are even differences between the treatment of those who are Chinese citizens residing abroad and those who are bloodline Chinese. The status of citizens in China is, thus, mediated by individual attributes other than citizenship which determine the scope of people's rights: are they Han, or Tibetan, or Zhuang? Do have agricultural or urban resident household registration? Are they returned overseas Chinese compatriots? Viewed from within the Chinese political system this division into ideal-type segments is rational. For overseas Chinese, however, this fine-meshed categorisation indicates the constraints they are under. If they return to China to settle, their political participation will be guided and determined, or at least influenced, by their status as returned overseas Chinese compatriots. Their social status is defined largely by their ideal-type role.

What is the political concern of the CPPCC with the overseas Chinese? The CPPCC has as one of its declared functions to

utilise its members' historical links and social relations to, on a broad scale, deploy the links with Taiwanese compatriots, Hong Kong compatriots and overseas Chinese compatriots [so that they] make contributions to support the modern construction of the motherland and to realise the great cause of the unification of the motherland.

(Huang Daqiang et al. 1993, 26)

This is the closest one comes in terms of political inclusion.

The notion of imagined communities indicates the construction of common cultural and political interests in an environment where these are not yet realised, a transient situation where visionary activists create generalising nationalist norms based on shared rudimentary social institutions. Benedict Anderson (1983) in his book Imagined Communities describes the unifying forces that created nationalist bonds where none had been before the beginning of nationalism. He emphasises the career patterns, the ‘apex of the pilgrimage’ of the young and educated. To put it crudely, if the highest attainable social position and official post is within a narrow region, then that narrow region will emerge as a ‘nation’. Anderson (1983, 119–23) discusses why Sumatrans ‘have come to understand Ambonese as fellow-Indonesians, the Malays as foreigners’. The career patterns of young educated people in the Dutch Indies were universal in all parts of the colony, and they came to feel Indonesia as the wider area for their ambition, thus shaping their nationalist bonds across language barriers and cultural difference. The opposite was true, says Anderson (1983, 125–31), in French Indochina, which limited the ‘apex of the career pilgrimage’ of young Cambodians to Cambodia, even though many were educated in Vietnam or even in France. As a consequence, French Indochina developed divided nationalisms and later formed different nation states.

The overseas Chinese do not have educational and career patterns that integrate them at a national level in China, but the continuous promotion of first a revolutionary nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century and later the official integration of overseas Chinese as part of the Chinese political system (albeit more symbolic than real in some periods) has contributed to the emergence of an imagined community based on the idea of a Chinese nation that integrates people of different origin in one national teleology.

Inclusion at the symbolic level gives overseas Chinese official recognition. This recognition gives them status and power in the overseas Chinese communities. Their membership of the national and provincial CPPCC, and their appointment as consultants, board members, or honorary citizens, or in Taiwan as Overseas Chinese Affairs Commissioners or any of the many official and semi-official posts specifically directed towards them, sets them apart and outside real influence on the ‘home’ polity, but allows their political cooptation, and provides a channel for influencing the nature of overseas Chinese identity.

The rise in Chinese nationalism at the turn of the century that changed overseas Chinese around the world into carriers of a synthetic and general Chinese national identity still sets the norm. Duara (1997, 1998) examines how late Qing reformers, revolutionaries and imperial representatives competed to create national allegiance among overseas Chinese. Lynn Pan (1990, 168–9) in Sons of the Yellow Emperor describes how, in the 1910s, the majority of locally assimilated Chinese in Southeast Asia, the babas and peranakans, suddenly regained their Chineseness under influence of Chinese nationalism, learning Mandarin (while some few acquired education, skills, lifestyles and tastes inseparable from the British and Dutch colonial masters). An event of great influence in overseas Chinese communities (including those in Europe) was the sustained campaign for supporting China in the pe...