Suchergebnisse

[F]or the first time in modern history, a rising China is shaping the relationship, transforming the diaspora's identity …

The Chinese diaspora, consisting of both Chinese living overseas who are citizens of China (huaqiao), and people of Chinese descent who are citizens of foreign countries (huaren), have significantly shaped the making of modern China. China's policy towards its diaspora is primarily governed by its national interests and foreign policy imperatives. However, the Chinese government has been careful to ensure that the huaqiao and the huaren fall into different policy domains: Chinese citizens living overseas are subject to China's domestic policies, while Chinese descendants who are citizens of other countries come under China's foreign affairs. Nevertheless, from the beginning, the latter continue to be regarded as kinsfolk distinct from other foreign nationals. The huaqiao-huaren distinction is often blurred in ordinary discourse and this has been a source of much misunderstanding. However, it has not been the policy of the Chinese government to blur this distinction, and it is acutely aware of the complexity of the issue and is therefore very cautious about implying any change. As such, when terms such as huaqiao-huaren are introduced in the official lexicon, they are meant to acknowledge certain historical and contemporary realities, and not to deliberately obfuscate the two categories. The use of the combined term is in fact a recognition of the clear-cut distinction between the two groups, and is meant to convey a semantic balance in which neither category is emphasized at the expense of the other. In general, since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949, the Chinese government has treated the diaspora as an asset, rather than a liability. The sole exception was during the Cultural Revolution when returnees, or the guiqiao, were condemned as reactionary and bourgeois elements. There is therefore a fundamental continuity in China's diaspora policy: namely, that China embraces both groups as part of a global Chinese community. Some policy shifts can be expected in future as China becomes more proactive in reaching out to its diaspora while balancing the needs and interests of Chinese abroad with the needs and interests of the Mainland.

Until quite recently most commentators assumed that the international relations and political economy of the Pacific region would be dominated by the US-Japan relationship for the forseeable future. Two new factors have emerged in recent years to upset that judgement. The first is undoubtedly the rapid rise to economic prominence of China as a result of the post 1985 'economic miracle'; the second is the arrival of Chinese diaspora business as major players in the Asia-Pacific. This is evidenced by their ablity to outinvest Japan in the region by a consistently large margin since 1992 but particularly by their important role in the re-industrialisation of China and the latter's emergence as a major exporter. The Chinese diaspora presents a particular problem for International Political Economy (IPE): a series of highly integrated manufacturing, trading and investing networks operating throughout the region and beyond but lacking the backing of a powerful state. This purpose of this article is to begin the task of trying to conceptualise this phenomenon within IPE.

This book explores how memories are used to re-establish a sense of belonging, analyzing the relationships between migrants' adjustment, assimilation and re-membering home. It considers memories as social expressions as well as the tensions and conflicts in representing and renegotiating memories in literature and cinema

Parker 's review essay begins as an account of two important
recent books dealing primarily with Chinese migration to, and
diaspora formation in, Australia and Britain, while incorporating
other analyses of Chinese diasporas in Latin America and South
Asia. In addition, Parker provides an inclusive and carefully interrogative
overview of contemporary theories of Chinese diasporic
transnationalism and of the need for measured skepticism about the
transnational turn in recent migration scholarship. He sketches the
"new Chinese migration order" that stems from the interaction of
several factors: globalization, China's opening to trade and migration,
the economics of Western higher education, new communications
technology, and the regular recalibration of immigration
policies in Europe, Australia, and North America. He analyzes the
roles played by culture and the intergenerational aspects of collective
memory in shaping the identity of Chinese diasporic social formations
and touches on issues of spatiality, temporality, and the
changing role of China in diasporic identity in the age of the Internet.
Parker concludes with an exploration of the shift from an attitude
that assumes one "possesses" an identity to a more positional and
performative view of identity, while arguing that a certain "banal
transnationalism" can miss the implications of Chinese diasporic
heterogeneity in social class, social practices, and embodied gender
and racial identities.

Anyone writing about Chinese migration in Britain does so under the shadow of death. The murder of two Chinese students in Newcastle in August 2008 was the latest in a line of misfortunes to propel Britain's Chinese population to the front pages of national newspapers. In 2000 fifty-eight Chinese people were discovered suffocated to death in the back of a van opened at Dover customs port. Four years later the drowning of twenty-three Chinese cockle pickers off the northwest English coast at Morecambe Bay further highlighted the dangers endured by vulnerable Chinese migrants.