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One of the most curious aspects of anti-Chinese policies was officials’ practice of hiring immigrant Chinese interpreters, thus foiling exclusionary laws. The clash of two titans, Yip On and David Lew, shows how political alliances across racial lines compromised enforcement of anti-Chinese immigration policies. The study of interpreters and the politics through which they won, held, and lost their posts reveals a new understanding of how immigration policy was made. As an ethnic collaborator, the interpreter engaged in policy-making from a distinctive position. He had a duty to carry out the mandates of Parliament, but he gained political leadership from supporters who viewed anti-Chinese laws as illegitimate.

This chapter considers the way that multidirectional migration flows are transforming national citizenship and its territorial premises. Eschewing the tendency to study emigration and immigration as discrete fields, it proposes an approach that brings together seemingly distinct emigration, immigration, and re-migration trends under an analytical framework known as contemporaneous migration. This approach illuminates how citizenship formations in different national contexts are increasingly drawn into a constellation of relations, situating the migration and citizenship politics of national societies in a trans-territorial context. The chapter contextualizes developments in Chinese emigration and immigration to China in wider theoretical debates on emigration and diaspora, citizenship and territory, immigrant integration and re-migration, and ethnicity and co-ethnicity. It signals the multifaceted aspects of migration that interconnect China with migration sites globally, changing citizenship norms and practices.

Despite racial bars to the legal profession, Chinese immigrants often made the law their instrument through interpreters who acted as informal legal brokers. They were paralegals who served Chinese clients and sometimes other non-white groups. The brokerage relations of these “Chinese lawyers” also illuminate another less visible aspect of legal history, the profoundly integrated nature of Canadian justice. Ethnic dispute resolution processes continually interacted with the formal justice system. David Lew’s murder mystery shows how these legal negotiations helped make the Canadian state a central institution in British Columbia’s early twentieth-century Chinese Diaspora.

In 1924, Robert Park, a sociologist from the University of Chicago, directed a study that asked: Were Asians more like blacks or whites? To find the answer, Anglo American researchers interviewed Chinese from British Columbia to California, starting with Vancouver, Canada. West Coast Chinese felt that Park’s answer could not be left to chance, so they mobilized the Chinese community to steer the researchers in a specific direction. Brokers hoped to win white scholars’ sympathy as well as to turn the power of social science against anti-Chinese policies. Chinese regarded the study as a battle of wits, a battle that the researchers did not know they were fighting. This meeting would help shape a pivotal set of ideas about immigration and race that would become known as the Chicago School of Sociology.

This chapter provides a brief history of the field of Chinese diaspora archaeology in North America, from its beginning in the 1960s to its present state, and it places this work within the context of 19th-century Chinese migration throughout the Pacific world. Although the body of work produced by archaeologists of the Chinese diaspora has provided tremendous insights into the daily lives of 19th-century Chinese migrants, it has been hampered by a continued reliance on models of continuity and change that frequently ignore the transnational lives of Chinese migrants. This has made Chinese diaspora archaeology slow to impact broader archaeological and anthropological discussions, and this chapter argues that embracing transnational and diasporic models will allow archaeologists of the Chinese diaspora to make important contributions outside of the field.

Following the First World War, global movements for anti-colonial nationalism inspired great numbers of ordinary Chinese to political action in new social movements that challenged traditional brokers. These movements began to alter both Canadian race relations and Chinese community politics. For one year, from September 1922 to September 1923, at least three to four thousand Chinese in British Columbia joined an anti-segregation movement, defying both white authorities and powerful Chinese leaders to demand equal education in the public schools. Through civil disobedience, protesters clashed with pro-segregationists determined to separate Asian and white children. Thus, a protest that started with a school boycott grew into a greater struggle over defining the limits of popular democracy.

This chapter examines Falun Gong in the post‐1995 period, as it became a transnational movement following founder Li Hongzhi's relocation from China to the United States. It focuses on the many Falun Gong practitioners who are members of the Chinese diaspora in North America, among whom the author did fieldwork between 1999 and 2002. The results of this fieldwork suggest that some 90 per cent of Falun Gong practitioners in North America are recent Chinese immigrants, who are better educated and wealthier than the average American or Canadian. Some have joined Falun Gong for health reasons, others because they find in Falun Gong answers to their questions about the meaning of life. As revealed in their witness statements to one another at experience‐sharing conferences, practitioners believe that their lives are a series of “tests” which enable them to burn off karma and advance in their cultivation.

This chapter explains that although the search for identity is a personal task, in both the reasons prompting such a search and its results are entwined larger questions involving the nature of a society. It notes that scholars of Chinese diaspora have discussed that most of the large numbers of emigrants from China in the late nineteenth and through the first half of the twentieth centuries initially regarded themselves as sojourners and not as permanent settlers in the countries to which they had journeyed in search of better opportunities. The chapter explains that without necessarily diluting earlier local Chinese identities, different developments led to the creation of a new Chinese national identity among ethnic Chinese communities abroad. It discusses three developments in overseas Chinese identities observed during the post-World War II era that have led to an emerging debate about the meaning of “being Chinese.”

This chapter traces the roots of the Chinese Nationalists' faith in their diaspora as a major component of any political or military victory, with particular emphasis on how Chinese officials sought to help Chinese migrants and Chinese Americans mobilize men and money to fight the war in Asia. Nationalist China had strong incentives to maintain productive ties with the diaspora during World War II. The support of the Chinese diaspora in their overseas struggles, for example, could win their backing and remind the Allies to treat China as an equal. This chapter discusses overseas Chinese policy during World War II as it affected Chinese Americans and U.S.-China relations on three fronts: the central goals and the philosophy behind the policy, the mobilization of Chinese in the United States and elsewhere in Allied war efforts, and the solicitation of donations and remittances to aid China. It suggests that Nationalist “citizen services” in the name of the war effort form a clear example of the use of migration policy to negotiate equality for the Chinese state.

This chapter first outlines and critically examines previous scholarship in historical archaeology on the Chinese and Japanese diasporas and industrial labor. This outline is followed by discussion of overseas Asian migration to North America drawn from the fields of history and Asian American studies. In addition to providing background context, this chapter offers important interpretive insights and themes developed in later chapters into a model of transnational consumer habits and diasporic identification. Among the themes incorporated into this approach are the inter- and intra-ethnic diversity of Asian migrants, multi-scalar approaches to analysis, issues of structure and agency, the multiplicity of identity, and essentialist versus constructivist conceptions of ethnicity and culture.

This chapter discusses in detail that much of the histories of the Chinese overseas have been based on what can be called “border-guard views”. That is to say, they are founded on assumptions of one-way entry, migration, settlement, and assimilation. Such views neglect, it is argued here, not only those who returned to their qiaoxiang, but those who never left, and those who had the capacity to make choices between the two. A review of the many histories of the overseas Chinese is provided and their theoretical foundations discussed. This is followed by a look at the development of an alternative to such perspectives usually centered on the nation-state, an alternative labeled here a “qiaoxiang perspective”.

This chapter compares the Chinese and Japanese sites on Don and Lion Islands in terms of everyday consumer habits, sources and access to local and imported consumer goods, and in terms of the impact of racism, economics, and consumer desire. It brings together archaeological, archival, and contextual information to create a picture of how diasporan movements and transnational connections between home and host countries shaped everyday lives, identities, and consumer habits of Asian migrants. This discussion is followed by broader conclusions about the value of transnational and diasporic approaches to the archaeology of displaced populations and the role of material consumption in the process of collective ethnic identification among diasporic communities. Finally, it offers suggestions for future research and argues that by adopting transnational and diasporic approaches, archaeologists can make significant contributions to broader theoretical debates in the social sciences.

The conclusion uses the case of Falun Gong to probe deeper issues in the history and historiography of modern China, arguing that the metanarratives of politics and revolution have obscured the important roles that religion in general and redemptive societies in particular have played in China's modern experience. The popularity of Falun Gong and qigong in the Chinese diaspora suggests that redemptive societies are not simply a product of the post‐Mao era and that they are likely to reappear in one form or another as China becomes a more open, less controlled society.

Chapter 5 argues that Chinese overseas is a privileged narrative focus providing a vantage point from which to explore the importance of Southeast Asia or Nanyang as ethos and imaginary in 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong films. As a border-crossing process and imaginary, Nanyang not only contributed to the survival of Hong Kong’s film industry between the 1950s and 1960s, but it also fuelled the transformation and construction of the colony as a nodal site amid 1960s industrialization. In order to explore Nanyang’s role in Hong Kong’s narrative path toward industrial modernity, this chapter first examines the shifting colonial, statist and cinematic conceptions of Cold War citizenship, allegiance, nationality, and gendered labor. Second, this chapter discusses two politically-driven filmic projections of the Nanyang ethos, arguing that both films continue to conceal contentious ideological and bipolarized conceptions of Chinese national subjectivity. The chapter ends with an analysis on The Story between Hong Kong and Macau (Yishui ge tianya, dir. Cho Kei, 1966), which moves beyond a paternalistic studio-centered approach to reveal how narratives about the travelling Chinese woman and the Nanyang continue to negotiate with narratives of gendered work and gendered economy in the process of screening Hong Kong’s modern industrial community.

Plant remains from Market Street Chinatown, San Jose, California, and historical accounts show that Chinese migrants relied on a variety of strategies to obtain plant foods in western North America in the second half of the nineteenth century. They farmed Chinese and European American crops, purchased local and imported foods, and collected wild resources. They faced a diversity of local environmental, social, and economic conditions that required a flexible cuisine and making choices beyond the dichotomy of maintaining a traditional Chinese diet or adopting European American foods.

Since most Chinese emigrants in the 19th century wished to return home to grow old and die, and be buried among ancestors and descendants, mechanisms were set up to gather the bones of those who had died in America for repatriation and final reburial in China. These exercises required money, organizational skills, good will and transpacific connections. Many individuals and associations in Hong Kong were involved in facilitating bone repatriation, and, behind activities so imbued with emotional and spiritual meaning were hardnosed arrangements for the management of money and properties and delicate political manipulation. The chapter reveals the complex relationships between Chinese communities in Hong Kong and California and underlines the pivotal role Hong Kong played in the Chinese diaspora.