Panel 16: Chinese Mobilities and Canada
Organizer: Lloyd Wong
The Cantonese Pacific and Canada: Migration Networks and Mobility Across Space and Time
Henry Yu
The University of British Columbia
Chinese migrations across the Pacific before the 1930s might be best understood as a singular historical process—the “Cantonese Pacific.” Regardless of the various local dialects spoken, and the local and regional networks created out of village and family patterns of migration, hundreds of thousands of trans-Pacific migrants in the 19th and early 20th century created a single migration system with nodes centered upon Hong Kong, San Francisco, Victoria, Vancouver, Melbourne and Sydney. Over multiple generations, a unique, recurring, and persistent geographic imaginary developed around a mythic “Gold Mountain” (金山) that was extraordinarily powerful in directing these migrants aspirations for spatial and social mobility.
The single most important factor for the creation and endurance of this coherent process of trans-Pacific migration was the dominance of Hong Kong as the main through port fortrans-Pacific migrants from southern China during that period. As Elizabeth Sinn has shown, Hong Kong was the nodal port through which trans-Pacific Chinese migration processes connected (Sinn 2010, 2013). San Francisco, Victoria, Vancouver, Sydney, Honolulu, Seattle, and smaller ports in the British Caribbean and Latin America were the secondary nodes by which a vast geographic pattern of migrations extended all across North America, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, and the Caribbean. All of these nodes connected local rural sites in the hinterlands of British and U.S. territories and colonies all around the Pacific into a circulatory migration network that linked them with small villages in eight specific counties in Guangdong province.
From the mid-19th century onwards, this group of coastal counties near the British port of Hong Kong became the nexus of trans-Pacific migrations to North America. Numbering several hundred rural villages all together, these counties dominated the flows of migrants from China to the west coast of North America for over a century. Not until the 1970s did the trans-Pacific migration of ethnic Chinese significantly expand beyond the networks created by these early migrants and their descendents. Speaking various rural village and county dialects that were in practice mutually unintelligible, these migrants organized around family, village, and local dialect networks, creating long distance routes that extended around the Pacific region. These routes were marked by multiple journeys in multiple directions, with young men leaving villages to pursue opportunities identified by earlier migrants, often paying for their initial journeys through loans and credit supplied by family and extended networks of relatives among earlier generations of successful migrants. Between the 1850s and the 1930s, a relatively stable system of life cycle migration endured, with men migrating long distances and creating families both in their villages of origin and in various sites around The Pacific.
Imagining an ideal migrant life as a series of stages, each with an affective economy of reciprocity and exchange between old and young, the use of loans and credit relations fixed desire into a rhythm of managed time, shaping it into a life cycle that measured success over time and husbanded hope for the future. The movement of capital across space and time, in other words, was less about the counting of dollars in calendar time–calculating interest rates owed day by day or month by month–and more about how desire and aspirations shaped the mobility of bodies in both space and time. Where an individual was located in the world was connected to their place in time within a life story–a narrative involving hope and self-denial across thestages in the idealized life of a migrant. The long-termsustenance of family economies built around personal loans and credit (meeting the challenges of sustaining a migrant network over long periods of time) and of family networks dispersed across space (meeting the challenges of trust and reciprocity for a migrant network spread across vast distances) cannot be analyzed without understanding these powerful stories that narrated an individual’s present moment in the context of their aspirations, and those of their fathers and sons, past and future.
Chinese Techno-immigrants’ Mobility in Western Canada
Karl Froschquer, Simon Fraser University
Lloyd Wong, University of Calgary
In Canada, recent Chinese immigrants perform important roles as employees and entrepreneurs in providing high tech services in the urban economies of Calgary and Vancouver. Some scholars focus on the importance high tech innovations and forms of capital accumulation (social, human, and cultural) in Silicon Valley and in similar high tech clusters in Canada’s metropolitan areas. Overlooking, thereby, that Canada’s regional postindustrial opportunity structures are of particularly importance to Chinese techno-immigrants. This paper examines the motility and mobility of highly skilled Chinese immigrants who participate in the high-technology sector in Western Canada. We use the term motility to refer to the capacity of actors, goods, and information, to be geographically and socially mobile. Using face-to-face interview data and key informant data this paper examines issues of access, immigration, competence, human & social& cultural capital, knowledge exchange, positions in companies, and appropriation with respect to these techno-immigrants’ motility and mobility.
Canadian Immigration Policy and Chinese Student Mobility: Transitioning from International Students to Permanent Residents in Canada
Yixi Lu
Li Zong
University of Saskatchewan
In a globalization context the two interrelated trends of competition for skilled workers and the internationalization of education have become critical to a successful knowledge economy. As a result, many developed industrial countries including Canada have experienced a dramatic inflow of scholastically-skilled immigrants. A good portion of these immigrants received their advanced education in the host country and often, decided to become permanent resident in that country. In Canada, it is clear that international students have been viewed as a main source of qualified skilled immigrants by policy makers. This paper aims to examine the impact of new trends and changes in Canadian immigration policy on immigration intention of Chinese students in Canadian universities, and also to explore how their Canadian experience would affect their propensity to stay and ability to adapt. Three reasons make Chinese students the focus of this study: firstly, their number has increased dramatically for more than a decade; secondly, the People’s Republic of China has topped the list of immigrant sending countries since 1998; thirdly, Chinese students’ migration choices can be less predictable and more divergent along with the rising economic power of China where skilled workforce is in high demand. Questionnaire survey is used to collect information on Chinese students’ immigration intention and action, experiences in university and Canada in general. Gender difference will be given attention in this study. Policy implications will also be addressed from Canada’s perspectives.
New Immigrants from China to Canada, 1980-2009: Migration Patterns and Economic Performance
Eva Xiaoling Li
Peter Li
University of Saskatchewan
In the 19 year period between 1980 and 2009, there has been a conspicuous shift in the region of origin of Chinese immigration to Canada from Hong Kong to Mainland China. As well, Chinese immigrants were made up of mainly skilled immigrants. The shift of origin and composition has to do with changes in the supply and demand of potential immigrants with university education. Since the 1990s, China has increased its university capacity. University graduates in China rose from less than 1 million a year in the 1990s to over 6 million a year in 2010s. During the same period, the number of students going abroad from China exceeded those who returned annually, creating an expanding pool of highly educated Chinese students or graduates outside of China. At the same time, Canada has placed an increasing emphasis on human capital as a central criterion of immigrant selection. The combined changes in the supply and demand of human capital facilitated the immigration of those with high educational credentials from China to Canada. However, despite the educational advantages of recent Chinese immigrants, they tend to underperform in earnings in Canada compared to other groups of Canadians.
Panel 17: Carving Out a Niche as an Overseas Chinese Student
Shaping Chinese Citizens in the United States: A Case Study of Chinese Students’ International Education Experience From a Political Perspective
Gang Li
The University of British Columbia
The Central Research Questions
This paper is based on my doctoral research that explores and critically understands the political dimension of Chinese international students’ experience in the United States in general, and how they are produced politically through their experience with democracy while pursuing degrees at U.S. universities in particular. Specifically, this inquiry examines the following two questions: 1) How do these students engage with democratic discourses and practices in the United States? 2) How do the students become and/or how are they made into political – and possibly democratic – subjects through this engagement?
Methodology
A qualitative case study design was adopted to address the research questions. The research was conducted at a U.S. East Coast city, a city with a large population of Chinese international students. The six selected participants included both current graduate students and recent graduates with bachelor’s degrees. Priority was given to those whose disciplinary studies were closely related to democracy and those who were active in student associations. Two one-hour semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant, the second as a follow-up of the first. The interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese, audio recorded, transcribed and translated.
Analytical Schemes
Thematic analysis with some components of critical discourse analysis (CDA) was adopted to analyze the collected data. Thematic analysis was conducted to search for themes and patterns of research participants’ engagement with democratic discourses and practices in the United States. CDA was used to analyze participants’ taken-for-granted assumptions about what is typical, normal, or appropriate in their understanding of the key concepts of this inquiry (e.g. democracy, and democratic practices) by means of making visible how their conceptions position themselves and link with each other in the discourses generated from interviews.
Significant Findings
1. Participants’ engagement with democratic discourses and practices
This engagement occurs at different places, particularly at local academic communities of their education, and local neighborhoods of their residence. Noteworthy is that Chinese student associations play a key role in participants’ engagement not only with U.S. politics but also with social and political developments in China. Also noteworthy is that the relationship between the United States and China tends to exert a strong influence on participants’ experience with U.S. democracy and their attitude toward China’s democratization.
2. Consequences of this engagement
Participants tend to undertake an ongoing conceptualization of democracy with a constant checking of their knowledge about limits of U.S. democracy. Their understanding of democracy becomes highly nuanced, which is closely related to other concepts such as equality and liberty in a web of competing discourses such as nationalism, socialism, and liberalism.
3. Political subject formation process of the participants
Participants emerge repeatedly as political subjects through their engagement with democratic discourses and practices in the United States, a process in which they question their pre-given identities in their unequal relations within existing social orders, and leverage their international education experience to bring greater equality and liberty in China.
Social Experiences, Mobility and Identity: Chinese International Students as Potential Migrants
Ran Xiang
The University of British Columbia
This paper outlines a study designed to analyze and interpret how Chinese graduate students at a Canadian university reconstruct their identities through social experiences. My specific focus is on Chinese graduate students as potential immigrants, which entails examining their identity within a hybrid transnationalism and cosmopolitanism theoretical and conceptual framework. Transnationalism is characterized by simultaneity—one possesses feelings attached both to destination and origin and one can be at more than one place—and the development of transnational ties (Chan, 2002). Cosmopolitanism suggests something that “(a) transcends the seemingly exhausted nation-state model; (b) is able to mediate actions and ideals oriented both to the universal and the particular, the local and the global; (c) is culturally anti-essentialist; and (d) is capable of representing variously complex repertoires of allegiance, identity and interest” (Vertocec & Cohen, 2002 p. 4). Methodologically, the study employs qualitative case study involving individual interviews triangulated with analysis of immigration policy documents pertaining to international students. Participants are five Chinese students (each one a “case”) from diverse backgrounds (age, gender, marital status, prior experience before coming to Canada, etc.) studying in Canada with a visa and study permit. The five cases constitute a collective case study in which “each case contributes to the understanding of the phenomenon” (Stake, 1995). I anticipate that people’s prior education and/or work experience and their different social interaction patterns, among other factors, will result in difference in terms of their sense of identity and potential belonging in Canada. The increasing number of Chinese graduate students in Canada and the fact that they are also one of the major sources of new immigrants to Canada make my research important in unveiling their experiences and their identity construction since it will provide not only empirical data, but also theoretical insights on the formation of transnational Chinese identity and more importantly potential Chinese-Canadian identity.
Balancing Demands: Issues Facing Chinese Students and U.S. Universities Today
Ying Zeng 曾纓
Western Michigan University
The life of Chinese exchange students and their impact on US higher education has been in the news as of late. The series of articles on Foreign Policy and The Chronicle of Higher Education are examples of this increased media attention. The new breed of affluent Chinese exchange student in so many ways appears to be the polar opposite of students that studied in the US on the 80s and 90s. The dramatic increase in the number of Chinese seeking to pursue higher education degrees in the United States over the last two decades has implications not only for the observing changes in Chinese society or economy but also for policy decisions at universities across the US. Between 1999 and 2013 the number of students from mainland China alone increased from 46,949 to 225,474. This dramatic rise has been fueled by a number of factors including prestige associated with some universities in the US, increased employability and higher incomes associated with a US degree, the growing Chinese middle class and its ability to fund an overseas education, and the need of US universities for increased foreign student enrollments to make up for budget shortfalls and decreases in enrollments of US nationals. The focus of this paper will be on the problems for the students and the institutions they attend in the US that recent increase in the number of Chinese students has created. Universities must be strategic in their enrollment policies if they are to assure the best educational experience for their Chinese students as well as their US nationals. Using Western Michigan University as an example, this paper examines increasing Chinese student enrollments and the impact those increases are having on the students themselves as well as the university.
Panel 18: Migration, Stereotypes, and Chinese Identity
Canada Head Tax Record, 1885-1923: Demographic Profile of Chinese Pioneers From Sun Woy (Xinhui) District
Rudy Chiang 蔣汶德
This study presents a demographic profile of Chinese pioneers from Sun Woy District based on the Canadian Head Tax Record from 1885 to 1923. Most pioneers landed at age 20 to 24. The most prevalent age was 20 when they first arrived. Serving as labourers, they contributed immediately to the productivity of an emerging Canada. The imposed Head Tax on Chinese Pioneers extracted the fruit of their labour, at the cost of family support at home. Pioneers came from regional pockets of Sun Woy district, suggesting that family tie and clan connection played a significant role in bonding pioneers in an isolated foreign land. Clan support manifested the family value of “The Village Clan 鄉黨” in the Confucian School. This study tracks family names in Chinese by village, providing potential leads to descendants of the pioneers in search of their ancestral home village.
Challenging the Long Shadow of the ‘Coolie’ Label in Nineteenth Century Australian History
Pauline Rule
VCAA (Formerly, retired)
Little research has been undertaken into the ways in which Chinese immigrants financed their trips to nineteenth century Australia. Originating at the same time as the mass movement of Chinese Coolie labourers to South American and elsewhere the common assumption made in the 1850s and afterwards was that the Chinese arriving to seek wealth on the goldfields of eastern Australia were also Coolies but somewhat ambiguously were also ‘free’ men. This assumption led to an associated idea that the Chinese gold-seekers and other subsequent Chinese immigrants had arrived under a form of indentured labour whereby they were bound to work for other Chinese in order to pay off the cost of their passage. Early commentators therefore regarded Chinese immigrants to Australia as akin to bonded labourers.
Contemporary Australian historians of immigration frequently turn to the few extant remarks of these commentators as evidence of how Chinese immigrants financed their trips and how they were organised in eastern Australia. Upon a very slight body of evidence conclusions are made about the Chinese presence in nineteenth century Australia: conclusions that set Chinese immigrants apart from other colonial immigrant groups. Reputable historians of Australian history make ill-informed judgements because of the lack of reliable research and writing on this issue. For instance, Clare Wright, in her detailed study of the Eureka uprising at Ballarat in 1854 states that the Chinese ‘formed triads … to send family and community members to Victoria’. Popular accounts of nineteenth century Chinese immigration, written for the tourist and the school student, also tend to focus on dramatic and colourful but inaccurate explanations of Chinese immigration.
Through an examination of passenger lists from nineteenth century ships travelling especially to south-eastern Australia and other more fragmentary evidence from sources such as inquest, court, insolvency and naturalisation records this paper will investigate the ‘Credit Ticket System’ and attempt to provide a more layered and complex interpretation of how Chinese immigrants managed the process of journeying to the ‘New Gold Mountain’. The paper will argue that the use of debt and the movement of people in groups along the various stages of their journey was not a sign of people trafficking but a pragmatic provision of a service by some Chinese for other Chinese unfamiliar with a new language and new surroundings.
The Migration Effects of Chinese Returnees on Emigration in the Late 19th Century as Compared to European Migration
Korekiyo Fujimura 藤 村是清
Kanagawa University
By analyzing the passenger traffic statistics of four exit ports – Amoy, Swatow, Kiungchow, and Hong Kong – from 1855 to 1940, this report presents a new perspective on Chinese migration along China’s coast in the late 19th century. Mencarini’s statistical study of three Chinese treaty ports from 1876-1898 has not been carefully examined for over a century. By including statistical data from Hong Kong, which Mencarini did not use, this study presents detailed flow diagrams to highlight the movement of migrants between China and nearly all regions in Southeast Asia and part of North America.
Up until 1928, statistical figures on migration between Chinese coastal cities and Southeast Asian countries or San Francisco in the United States all showed long-term upward trends, except for during World War I when these figures temporarily dropped. The annual return rate to China remained, and the rate was approximately 80 percent, except for between 1931 and 1933. The percentage of women and children leaving China rose to over 50 percent around 1937. The monthly distribution of the number of Chinese entries and departures to and from San Francisco in the three months before and after the Lunar New Year was four and eight times higher than the other months.
This report also discusses why most trends simply show an increase in the number of emigrants in direct proportion to that of immigrants for almost every year. The analytical approaches of previous studies failed to point out the link between the departures and entries of Chinese migrants. This drawback is attributed to the method used, which involves determining the factors affecting migration rates based solely on yearly statistics. The key to explaining the simultaneous annual rise in the number of exiting and entering Chinese migrants is the micro migration cycle, which is most clearly recognized in the monthly movements of Chinese to and from San Francisco.
Each year, former emigrants tended to return to China before February, and new emigrants left for the same destinations after the Chinese Spring Festival. The money and knowledge that these returnees brought back to their local communities in South China attracted others to join the collective emigration to San Francisco. The returnees and settlers from the United States and Southeast Asia were instrumental in bringing Chinese newcomers from their own groups, and upward trends were generally observed. This cycle was the fundamental base of Chinese mass migration.
Lastly, this study statistically compares the migration effects of Chinese returnees on emigration with European returnees’ influence on their respective outflow to the United States. Italian migration cycles between Italy and New York will provide an interesting example from the viewpoint of the Chinese return migration cycle.
Panel 19: Migration and Identities
A Transnational Chinese Identity: Technoculture & Mass Mediated Music in the Chinese Panamanian Diaspora
Corey Blake
University of California, Riverside
Present in Panama since the 19th century, the Chinese diaspora in Panama City, Panama represents an empowered community of hybrid individuals who identify as both Chinese and Panamanian. These hybrid Chinese Panamanian identities emerge through an engagement with transnational media and digital technologies. Specifically, music surfaces as especially important as a sonic marker of this Chinese Panamanian hybridity. Within the Panamanian Chinatown of El Dorado, an interesting mixture of both Chinese and Latin American popular music genres sound throughout the various stores. This mixture of music genres demonstrates Chinese Panamanian agency in asserting and reaffirming the diasporic community’s status as both Chinese and Panamanian. Emerging from fieldwork conducted in Panama during the summer of 2014, I argue that the Chinese diaspora within Panama City, Panama shapes and asserts to the rest of Panamanian society its hybrid identity through its technocultural use of global, mass- mediated musical genres.
In order to make sense of Chinese Panamanian engagement with music technologies, this project utilizes ethnomusicological scholarship pertaining to music and technology. For example, I situate Chinese Panamanian musical agency as similar to various analyses of Asian American expressions of identity. Also, research detailing the musical atmosphere within various malls directly relates to the shopping center aesthetic that is present in El Dorado Mall. Further, the Chinese Panamanian community are consumers of globally available music genres, a phenomenon explored in detail by Timothy Taylor (Strange sounds: Music, technology, & culture, 2001). Arguing that “technology is never simply an artifact, but always caught up in social, historical, and institutional webs” (p. 31), Taylor’s research demonstrates the social impact that technology has on communities. Likewise, as a community that has historically been marginalized, my research demonstrates the social implications for Chinese Panamanian engagement with digital musical technologies.
Through a careful examination of the transnational relationships between music technologies and the communities that use them, this study offers a better understanding of how people in transnational and diasporic groups use and experience music to form hybrid identities. Additionally, the data from this project opens the door for further research in Chinese and East Asian studies within a Latin American context, with specific regard for music and technology.
Uncovering the Chinese Vietnamese in the Recent Diplomatic Records of Mass Migration
Daniel Tsang
UC Irvine
While immigration scholars have long observed that the majority of “boat people” from Vietnam have been ethnic Chinese, public discourse in the United States, as evidenced by contemporary media coverage, has more likely conflated Hoa identity with Vietnamese identity. This paper focuses on the period leading up to and after the Fall of/Liberation of Saigon and traces how various foreign governments jockeyed into position to deal with ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, even before the influx of boat people. Beyond some early studies of refugee adaptability into American society, there is little if no attention paid to Chinese Vietnamese in the current scholarly literature several decades after the mass migration. Declassified U.S. State Department files present this researcher with a way to tease out Chinese ethnicity, and present a picture that potentially is more nuanced than usually presented. The officially declassified documents, comprising 1.7 million diplomatic cables from 1973 to 1976, issued when Henry Kissinger was Secretary of State, have been made easier to search and retrieve online. This archive offers access to the inside thinking of policy makers and diplomats on the scene as the refugee crisis loomed and became reality near the end of April 1975 and beyond. One is able to uncover how Chinese ethnicity is recognized and addressed as governments began processing the influx of refugees with the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime, and the steps taken to take into account the arrival of refugees who spoke Cantonese for example. Right below the radar of reporters who covered the thousands of new immigrants who ended up at Camp Pendleton, California, however, the authorities sought ways internally to cope with refugees speaking Cantonese (and often not Vietnamese or English), even during the earliest days of the Vietnamese refugee crisis, before the larger waves of boat people years later. These official conversations, now declassified, provide a revealing view that may help today as the world again encounters mass migrations.
Confucianism in Exile: Intersection Between Home Rule Movement in Japanese Taiwan and Nanyang Pan-Chinese Identity in the Long 1920s
Huei-ying Kuo 郭慧英
John Hopkins University
This paper examines the oft-neglected issue on the intersection of the homerule movement in Japanese Taiwan and pan-Chinese movements in Nanyang (present-day Southeast Asia). Existing studies have pointed out that the spread of Confucian identity by Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao in the region around the 1900s. It has also been concluded that Chinese in Nanyang responded to the surging Chinese nationalist sentiment in the May Fourth movement with greater vernacularization. In Taiwan, the first decade after the May Fourth movement witnessed the surging anti-imperialist ideology that mobilized the peasants and workers in the anti-Japanese struggle, but isolated the bourgeoisie in the Confucian cultural reforms at the same time. Given that the May Fourth movement was part and parcel of the global reaction to Woodrow Wilson’s illusionary Fourth Points, one may well query how the radicalization of anticolonial movements and the tightening colonial racial policies affected the development of Confucian movements in Chinese overseas communities.
Focusing on the promotion of Confucian learning by Lin Hsien-t’ang from Taiwan, Lim Boon Keng from British Malaya, as well as Kwik Djeon Eng who was an active merchant in both the Dutch East Indies and Hong Kong, I investigate the social networks that tied the bourgeois Confucian campaigns across different colonies together. I also examine how each campaign evolved into different political dispositions in the long 1920s. Japanese regime in Taiwan ranked Han Chinese as the most civilized but denied them equal rights in education and political participation. When championing the home-rule movement, Lin hoped to use the Confucian identity to defend the ethnic dignity of Han Chinese. British regime in Malaya grouped the creolized Baba Chinese into the same racial category as the China-born Chinese after 1921. This reflected the growing influence among the China-born Chinese in Malaya, who identified the Baba’s tacit approval of the British colonial status quo as a target of Chinese nationalist ire. To accomplish his goal of reserving Confucian identity in Chinesness, Lim Boon Keng had to take side in the turbulent politics in China. In Dutch East Indies, the colonial government differentiated the creolized peranakans from those new migrants from China. The differentiation however saved the peranakans from being involved in the China-oriented politics. In 1932, the third front that identified the future of the peranakans in the establishment of a local East Indies Nation came into being.
The comparative study points to the dual discursive forces–Chinese nationalism and colonial racial codifications–that shaped the contours of Chineseness in Taiwan, Malaya and Java differently. While Confucian identity provided an overarching framework for Chinese overseas communities to associate among themselves, the divergent racial policies in each colony constituted another parameters in which Chinese overseas had to react to. The boundary of Chineseness thus changed, in accordance with not only the Chinese overseas connection with China, but also with the colonizers, the natives and other non-native Orientals. Confucian learning would not lead to a preordained identity.
Chinese Marriage & Families: A Statistical Look at the Pattern of Settlement Across the Colony of Queensland, 1850-1920
Sandra Robb
James Cook University
The study of Chinese marriage patterns across the colony of Queensland, 1850 to 1920, provides an interesting platform to view broader Australasian and transnational Chinese family landscape trends. The spotlight on intimate relations associated with the Chinese Diaspora has only recently shifted to women married or living with Chinese men in overseas countries, yet there is still more to be learnt and discovered about Chinese marriage patterns in regards to community, family and cultural formation. On one hand, some scholars have focused on immigrant Chinese women and their experiences in new and foreign countries while others have focused on the range of exclusionary policies aimed at preventing family unification. Some have explored the delicate intricacies of crossing the racial divide associated with interracial marriages between White women and Chinese men, yet consistently and maybe tellingly, very few have explored the relationships formed between Indigenous women and Chinese men including just where and who was involved. Marriage partners of Chinese men were not one homogenous group but a diverse range of women with very different cultural traditions. This paper will reveal the diverse range of women across Queensland who formed intimate relations with Chinese men, including Chinese, White and Indigenous women. Underpinned by a statistical framework, this paper is based on years of research which has culminated in a clarification of the basis primary questions relating to the Chinese family landscape: where did couples live, how many were there, and who was involved?. By understanding Chinese marriage patterns across Queensland, a more integrated approach to the Chinese Diaspora can be achieved in regards to settlement trends and family formation. The Chinese family landscape is an important feature of the Chinese Diaspora and the time is ready to reinterpret and integrate this aspect into mainstream lines of enquiry.
Panel 20: Politics and Transformation
Gender and Elective Office-Seeking of Chinese Americans in Early 21st Century
Pei-te Lien
University of California Santa Barbara
Chinese Americans have been considered the “model minority” in American society because of their overall outstanding achievements in socioeconomic terms. The story of their political incorporation, especially elective office-holding, seems to paint a completely different picture of their “Americanization” or the process of becoming part of the U.S. mainstream. This research attempts to help demystify and improve understanding of the political incorporation of this immigrant-majority population by focusing on the women and men of Chinese descent who held popularly elected offices at national, state, and local levels offices in the Unites States in early 21st century. We are particularly interested in the issue of women’s under-representation, which has been a persistently troubling phenomenon in American politics. Are Chinese American women similar to or different from other American women in their experiences of seeking elective offices? If Chinse American women are also much less likely to hold elective offices than Chinese American men, what are possible reasons to explain the gender gaps?
Empirical research on American women and politics has largely focused on the experience of Whites, while U.S. research on racial and ethnic politics has largely focused on the experience of Blacks. Centering on the electoral experiences of individuals who are situated at the intersection of race and gender in identity politics, this research provides a first scientific look into the sources and contours of gender gaps among Chinese American elected officials as a whole and by level and type of office. We answer the research questions by systematically examining the landscape of elective office-holding of individuals of Chinese descent in the United States as well as the origins and contours of their pathways to popularly elected offices at various levels of government. The research subjects include Congress members, statewide elected officials, state legislators, county commissioners/ supervisors, city/town council members, and school board members. Our analysis compares women to men in their political socialization and trajectories to office and explores possible road blocks for women. Utilizing the one-of-a-kind database on Asian Pacific American Elected Officials (APAEO) created from the on-line roster of the Asian Pacific American Institute for Congressional Studies in early 2014, we discuss and compare key factors that influence the trajectories to the first and subsequent elective offices for women and men such as homeland origin, educational and family background, occupation, community and organizational involvement, and prior appointments, staff, and management experiences. Our results are expected to fill the knowledge gaps on how gender impacts political incorporation–findings that would of relevance to scholarship in Asian American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Women’s Studies, and Political Science.
Socialist Cuba and China’s Expanded Economic Relations in Latin America and the Caribbean
Mary-Alice Waters
Pathfinder Press
In 1960 the new revolutionary government in Cuba was the first in Latin America to break from US policy and establish diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. As large numbers of Chinese Cuban merchants and property owners abandoned the island country, Chinese Cuban workers and farmers mobilized to defend Cuba’s socialist revolution.
Over the next three decades, while diplomatic relations were never broken, Cuba and the PRC were on opposite sides in some of the most important class conflicts in the world, from Vietnam and Cambodia to Chile and Angola.
At the same time, Cuba became the only country in the world to eradicate discrimination against Cubans of Chinese descent, a product of the profound transformation of social relations made possible by Cuba’s socialist revolution.
Economic and political shifts of the last quarter century, especially in China, have today led to growing trade relations and investment in Latin America and the Caribbean by capitalist enterprises from the PRC. This paper will explore how these economic and political developments have affected Cuba and its unique Chinese heritage.
Politics of Diaspora and Ethics of the Other in Ha Jin’s A Free Life and A Map of Betrayal
Yang-chieh Lin 林揚傑
National Taiwan Normal University
Ha Jin has been reputed for his novels of diaspora which describe the diasporic experience of Chinese Americans. Ha Jin’s narrative contains typical diasporic experience, such as disorientation in the host country, nostalgia to their homeland, conflicts and negotiation with other ethnical groups. Moreover, in the global era, the rapid development of technology and transportation has accelerated transnational migration. Increasing mobility of immigrants has caused dissolving the conventional cultural, national and ethnical boundaries. Current researches about Ha Jin’s works and Asian American literature mostly focus on the politics of difference in race, gender, and social class. Politics of difference which emphasizes their difference from the dominant parts can be regarded as a resistant strategy. It claims the individuality for those who have been recognized as marginalized groups in the society. However, overemphasizing the difference may leave out some issues based on universalities between different individuals and groups. Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of the Other concerns more about the universalities rather than difference between self and the Other. Therefore, the research aims to adopt the philosophy of the Other proposed by Levinas to examine the relation between self and the Other. His philosophy focuses on the connection between self and the Other, and how the status of the Other shall succeed the self. This relation opens an Other-oriented ethics. The research expects to explore how these diaspora characters in Ha Jin’s A Free Life (2007) and A Map of Betrayal(2014)formulate ethical relation to the dominant groups by using the language of the Other. The protagonist of A Free life, Nan Wu, who is persecuted by PRC government after Tiananmen Incident, strives for a free life in the America. A Map of Betrayal is a return narrative of a Chinese American who intends to investigate the secret past of her father who had been accused of treachery.
The first part of my thesis explores how the subjectivity of diaspora is formed in the unsymmetrical relation of the Other. The irreducible exteriority, namely face of the Other not only evades the Other from assimilation, but also symbolizes their potentiality to alter the subjectivity of the self. Ha Jin’s characters of diaspora are not the Other containable to the self, but can change self’s understanding about the Others. The second part examines the language of the Other in Ha Jin’s novels. For Levinas, the language the Other is “saying,” expressing the alternative discourse oppressed (the unsaid)in the dominant discourse (the said). Ha Jin’s characters of diaspora are recognized as the Other both by China and the America. Their saying in this marginalized position constantly demands ethical relation and appropriate response from the majority. Moreover, Levinas concerns hospitality to the Other as the utmost value, and self’s response to the Other is the paramount issue in their ethical relation. However, when embracing the Other, the self also inevitably abandons part of its own subjectivity to consummate its ethical relation to the Other. Ha Jin’s characters of diaspora often demand reasonable treatments from the majority; however, when they become ethical subjects, they also face the demand of response by the Others. These characters have shifting roles of demanding and being demanded. Finally, loyalty and betrayal is a common ethical issue in Ha Jin’s novels. The research will explore the ethical dilemma about loyalty and betrayal for diaspora characters in A Free Life and A Map of Betrayal. Ha Jin’s characters often claim that “loyalty is a two-ways road” to explicate the relation to their country. My research argues that in Levinasian ethics of the Other, both loyalty and betrayal tend to reduce the infinity of the Other to assimilate the Other to the self. In the ethical relation, both loyalty and betrayal are unattainable, and it’s also impossible for the Other to be criminalized.
On Chinese Ethnicity Power and China’s Southeast Asian Region Strategy: An Anthropological Aspect
Shihlun Allen Chen 陳世倫
Sun Yatsen University
President Xi’s frequent international State visits have revealed the fact that China has successfully transformed from an economic powerhouse into another altitude. While One Road One Belt has become the core foreign strategy, Chinese overseas have emerged to bridge between resident countries and their China Home Counties. This paper thus explores such parallel force in understanding how this ethnicity power has functioned and communicated within this transnational structure. The author applies his long-term anthropological fieldwork in the Southeast Asian peninsula, and argues that Chinese overseas plus overseas Chinese have merged into a great ethnic network and force in bridging the neo-liberalism international order on mutual interests. A multi-dimensional framework is purposed in explaining how the Chinese ethnicity power has strung China’s regional strategy on the foreign territories. More importantly, the paper concludes how such new condition has integrated old and new Chinese Diaspora communities into a new Chinese identity beyond traditional classification and definition of Chineseness, while foreign authorities have heavily but carefully relied on