Search Results

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 book explores the ways that Chinese American and white adoptive parents, and their children as they become teens, approach issues of Chinese identity, and how they imagine the Chineseness of their children in relation to blacks, whites, Asians, and other groups. Drawing on ethnographic interviews and extensive participant observation and focus group discussions with more than seventy-five individuals conducted intermittently between 2001 and 2009, the book considers the processes by which adoptive parents negotiate Chineseness and Chinese culture within the politics of race, class, and culture of the Midwest and in the San Francisco Bay Area. It discusses the ways that new family identities—incorporating forms of whiteness and Chineseness as well as ideas about multiculturalism and race—are being created out of the practices surrounding Chinese adoption. It also examines how productions of Chinese culture become salient for Chinese adoptees who are living them.

This introductory chapter explains the coverage of this book, which is about the history of Chinese modernity during the period from 1900 to 1980. It examines the role of modernity in the transformation of Chinese identity and highlights the city and the nation as the twin loci for the construction of Chinese modernity. It discusses the politics of the Westernized educated professional, the transnational orientation of an emerging bourgeois class and the transformative capacity of the modernizing state.

This book follows the paths of Chinese Mexican families, tracing the transpacific journeys and the emergence of a Chinese Mexican identity. It also explores complex intersections of identity, citizenship, racialization, gender ideology, and class in Mexico, the United States, and China in a single narrative frame.

This chapter focuses on Chinese identity and Chinese nationalists' view of the West. It discusses Westerners' observation that the Chinese threat to both America and Japan is real and that it is the same as that from all dictatorships. The chapter comments on China's anti-American 1997 diatribe The Plot to Demonize China and highlights the repeated efforts of nationalists to construct a positive Chinese national identity at America's expense.

This concluding chapter reviews how the book has explored how Chinese American and white adoptive parents learn about issues of culture and racism and gain insight into how their children are being racialized. It has shown how meanings surrounding Chineseness are negotiated within the daily lives of adoptive families as well as the ways that Chinese adoptees, including teens, use and reinterpret Chineseness. It has also highlighted the dynamic and ongoing process of Chinese identity construction among Chinese American adoptive parents that often involves the interpretation of practices and values as “Chinese,” along with white adoptive parents' conceptions of the relationship between Chinese and Chinese American culture. As a conclusion, the book considers the importance of looking at Chinese culture being produced in relation to shifting and multilayered discourses on race, culture, and adoption that circulate around adoptees.

Chapter 3 examines the historically-based thesis on empire that argues that the democratic process evolving from ‘empire’ to nation-state presents a challenge for China’s territorial integrity. It analyzes the impact of China’s national identity question on Chinese democratization, and explores why China has difficulty establishing democracy. Through demonstrating the conflictive logic between democracy and state nationalism in the context of China’s national identity issue, it provides an explanation or an understanding of, not a justification for, the Party/State’s resistance to democracy. The chapter also argues against a strong historical determinism and emphasizes the importance of agency. It explores the possible democratic solutions through which China could avoid the logic of “the empire thesis”.

Other than China, no empire of such cultural and ethnic diversity has survived modern statehood and the twentieth century in one piece. While the concept of ethnicity is certainly modern, it is clear that, empire-wide, Chinese cultural and local identities have undergone repeated shifts and transformations in recent centuries. This book does not see immutable cultural differences behind ethnic conflict and coexistence. Imperial policies could simultaneously promote cultural diversity and assimilation, and the different strands in imperial discourse, or the spaces beyond the imperial gaze, allowed many individuals and groups the flexibility to redefine and relocate themselves. There is much evidence, while China's leaders continue the search for a unity that is as inclusive as empire yet as integrated as the nation-state, and while its diverse population responds to the opportunities and pressures of post-socialism and globalization, that all these uncertainties and spaces persist.

This chapter focuses on the journey of Jiang Wenye, a Taiwanese composer and poet based in Japan, in search of his Chinese identity. More specifically, it examines the artistic choice Jiang made during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the political consequences he had to cope with. In the summer of 1936, Jiang made his first trips to Beijing and Shanghai. Through select musical pieces, poetry, and theoretical treatises, the chapter considers Jiang's modernist sensibility as a reflection of his colonial and cosmopolitan bearings. It also looks at the way Jiang's engagement with Confucian musicology brings about an unlikely dialogue between Chinese cultural essentialism and Japanese pan-Asianism. Finally, it analyzes how Jiang's lyrical vision was occasioned by, and confined to, historical contingencies. It suggests that, because of the contested forces his works and life brought into play, Jiang dramatizes the composition of Chinese modernity at its most treacherous.

The continuity of Chinese history, through the unfolding of the ‘dynastic cycle’ of its successive imperial regimes, has been taken as one of the great truisms of discourse on China. Yet assertions of cultural continuity in China have emerged in recent research much more as tendentious fictions, cultural artefacts themselves designed to stitch together disparate elements over time—the daotong or ‘Transmission of the Way’ proposed by Neo-Confucians, is one good example. And looking at Chinese history as a sequence of political powers, the transmission of what was seen as a form of imperium, zhengtong, or ‘Correct Succession’, has also long been considered as technically problematic. The modern scholar Rao Zongyi has a well-researched monograph on these debates that deserves to be better known, especially as history as an element in Chinese identity is now coming to assume an increased contemporary importance.

The experiences of Chinese diasporic communities in the American South has been little studied compared to those in the West, despite the importance of Chinese immigration in discussions of post-Emancipation plantation labor. This chapter explores the making of a Chinese American identity in Jim Crow–era New Orleans through the archaeology of a Chinese-operated hand laundry, in business at the same location for three decades. Chinese immigrants in the South entered a two-tiered racial hierarchy in which they were officially relegated to a lower status, but the ambiguities of color in an urban setting like New Orleans provided opportunities to use the material markers of ethnicity instrumentally to negotiate a status that was neither white nor black.

This chapter focuses on the migration history of contemporary Yunnanese Muslims in Burma and their Islamic transnationalism. The narrators relate their marginality in Burma, owing to both their ethnicity and their religion, and talk about how they deal with social and religious discrimination through Islamic networking beyond Burma. The narrators, who are located in both Burma and Taiwan, employ various motifs and strategies to overcome obstacles and adversities in order to reach their goals. Moreover, they thread together two common themes referred to by James Clifford—“roots” and “routes”—to portray how they understand their life trajectories in relation to time, localities, peoples, and their multiple roles or positions. The chapter examines the elements that connect diasporic Yunnanese Muslims across a wide range of places and distinguish them from Yunnanese Han and other Muslim groups. It shows that their connection to Islam and their Chinese identity help strengthen Yunnanese Muslims' communal and transnational Hui networks and also underscore their ethnic boundary vis-à-vis other Muslim groups.

The Introduction contextualizes Tsui Hark’s Peking Opera Blues both in the light of the many struggles for democracy in modern China since Republican times, and in the light of his own filmmaking career. It suggests that politically committed youth, and so-called revolutionaries, seeking social transformations in the post-imperial China depicted in this film, may well have parallels in contemporary Hong Kong especially post 1997. In addition to highlighting Tsui’s specific, and well-received, contributions in cinema, some social, political and cultural contexts, particularly related to questions of Chinese identity, culturation, citizenship and colonialism, together with some of the issues specific to contemporary Hong Kong and Sinophonic filmmaking, are raised in order to prepare the ground for situating five different acts of reading film (through multiple theoretical and analytical lenses) in the chapters to follow.

Wang Tao, a prominent member of the Chinese literati, arrived in Hong Kong in 1862 and found it a baffling place, inhabited not only by foreigners but also by southern Chinese, who were (in his view) uncivilized, unable to speak his dialect and possessing weird tastes in food. Merchants, who belonged to an inferior class in China, played a prominent role in society, flaunting their wealth and status with little restraint, funding charitable works, claiming political influence over the colonial government and earning respect from officials in China and Chinese overseas. During his 20 or more years in Hong Kong Wang Tao came to terms with the colony. He made history by founding the first Chinese-language newspaper, the Xunhuan ribao. He came to appreciate the different versions of Chineseness that had at first bewildered him, and molded new versions of Chineseness out of this jumbled assortment of Chinese identity.

The conclusion provides a summary of the book chapters, including the genealogy, transmission, translation, and yi and li of Chinese American familism. The conclusion discusses the theoretical implications of employing a liyi framework to understand Chinese Americans and Asian Americans in relation to religious, ethnic, gendered, and sexual identities, as well as mental health and political organizing. The authors explore the implications for employing the theory of liyi in current debates about the category of religion as well as the study of religious “nones,” especially among American millennials. Future directions are discussed.