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13 Internate and New Chinese Migrants
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225 13 The Internet and New Chinese Migrants brenda chan the chinese diaspora—old migrants, new migrants The Chinese diaspora is one of the major global diasporas, and Chinese communities exist in many corners of the earth, from Oceania and Africa to Europe and America (Cohen 1997,85–94;Pan 1998).Emigration from China was most significant from the 1850sto 1920s,when massive numbers of Chinese, usually men of peasant origin, left China for Southeast Asia and other parts of the world as indentured labor, working in tin mines and on plantations (Wang 1991, 6). Between the 1950sto the late 1970sthere was little movement in and out of the People’s Republic of China (pr c) because of restrictive policies under the Communist government. Migration resumed only after 1979with the implementation of economic reforms and the opening up of China (Skeldon and Hugo 1999,335–36). Departures began to increase after 1984,when new laws permitted Chinese nationals to study abroad if they paid their own fees (Guerassimoff 1998,145),but only a minority of these self-financed students returned to China (ibid., 150).A significant number of Chinese students also remained in foreign countries after the Tiananmen incident 226 d i a s p o r a s i n t h e n e w m e d i a a g e in 1989(Nyíri 1999,29). The revival in Chinese emigration from the pr c accelerated in the 1990s,as population pressure intensified competition for jobs, educational opportunities, marital partners, and social status in the emerging consumer society among urban communities (ibid., 28).Students in China are also caught up in the fervor to pursue foreign education, with some twenty-five thousand students going overseas for education annually (H. Liu 2005, 294–96). Scholars have used the term xin yimin, or “new migrants,” to designate pr c citizens who emigrated after 1979, when the economic reforms began in China (Nyíri 2001, 145; H. Liu 2005, 293). Hong Liu (2005, 293) has identified four main categories of new migrants from mainland China: students-turnedmigrants (those who study abroad and may subsequently take up residence in their host countries), emigrating professionals, chain migrants (who join family members or relatives who are living abroad), and illegal immigrants. However, these new migrants or xin yimin are different from Chinese migrants from Hong Kong and Taiwan and from the overseas Chinese who settled over several generations in Southeast Asia as well as other parts of the world. Unlike the earlier waves of Chinese migration that consisted mainly of unskilled labor hailing from South China, there is a sizable segment of highly educated professionals among the xin yimin, alongside a proletarian diaspora (ibid., 304). The native-place origins of xin yimin are more diverse and can be traced to many different cities and provinces all over China (ibid., 299). Moreover, most of the xin yimin were raised in Communist China and carry with them “a collective memory of mainland China prior to their migration” (Sun 2002, 143–44)—withthe nationwide famine in the early 1960sand the Cultural Revolution as two significant events etched permanently in their collective memories. Sun (ibid., 9) prefers to designate these xin yimin as “paradiasporic” in their transnational condition, because of the continual engagements and attachments that they retain with the “motherland.” Their identities, which are so deeply conditioned by the experiences of Communist China, will be further complicated as they confront the foreign cultures that they have entered for work and study. from immigrant organizations to cyber-communities Ethnic Chinese communities outside of China have relied on three important institutions in maintaining a collective sense of Chinese identity: voluntary organizations (such as chambers of commerce and clan associations), Chinese-language education, and Chinese-language media (Sun 2005, 68). [3.230.128.106] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:56 GMT) t h e i n t e r n e t a n d n e w c h i n e s e m i g r a n t s 227 Increasingly, the Internet—in the form of Web sites, online magazines, bulletin board systems (bbs), newsgroups, and so on—complements ethnic newspapers , radio stations, and satellite television as a component of diasporic Chinese media, providing new Chinese migrants with the latest news of social and political affairs in China and keeping them entertained with popular cultural products in the Chinese language: “Media images, in the form of dvd, vcd, mt v, such...