Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (review)

Aihwa Ong's Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality intensifies the decade-long "rebirth" of diaspora and transnational studies with provocative and far-reaching insights. Grappling with the meanings of citizenship in late capitalism, Ong coins the term "flexible citizenship" to refer to the

cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacements that induce subjects to respond fluidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions (p. 6).

Far from being constructed only out of the identity politics or agency enacted by Chinese subjects, these cultural logics and interrelated economic rationalities are shaped by the nation-state, the market, and the family. Drawing on the Foucaultian notion of governmentality, Ong argues that Chinese subjects' "flexible citizenship" is constituted by these interrelated regimes in the contemporary world. The three regimes, however, do not weigh equally. Global capitalism, above all, is emphasized as the force majeur in processes of subject formation. Such attentiveness to the global market's own peculiar subjectifying processes not only serves as a creative (albeit not unproblematic) combination of Marx and Foucault. It is also the battering-ram of Ong's larger political-intellectual aim to "reorient" discussions of Chinese subjects vis à vis the new discourses and representations of belonging that are emerging in tandem with transnational Asian capitalism the world over.

Ethnographically, these abstract aims and ideas are grounded in detailed and hard-nosed observations of states, peoples, images, and capital in motion. Conventionally viewed in terms of essential differences on both sides of the Pacific-East vs. West, Collectivism vs. Individualism, Tradition vs. Modernity-Ong suggests throughout her book that Chinese and American nation-states govern subjects amidst the same neoliberal forces of the world economy. In opening its economic borders, the Chinese state seeks to attract overseas Chinese subjects through refashioning Confucian ideals and guanxi particularist relations as "naturalized" mechanisms to incorporate and regulate these capital-wielding diasporans within the notion of a modern Chinese essence. Having been scorned by the mainland in the past, overseas Chinese businessmen are now being heralded as potential harbingers of modernity, "adding wings to the tiger" (p. 44). Equally eager to tap into the power of Pacific Rim capital, Western business analysts and state powers also join the chorus of Confucian eulogizing. Not only have U.S. immigration laws made it easier for wealthy Asians to move to the United States, but American-based scholars proclaim that "'Confucian humanism' will create 'an Oriental alternative' to the destructive instrumental rationality and individualism of the West" (p. 131).

These vignettes, among many others, show how "citizenship" is being made into an instrument of flexible accumulation for the nation-state "to subvert its own regulatory mechanisms in order to compete more effectively in the global economy" (p. 130). But national and state entities are not the only ones permeated by and channeling this discourse on Confucianism. Indeed, the latter is willfully appropriated by sojourning Chinese, not necessarily to "collaborate in the biopolitical agenda of any nation-state," as Ong reminds us, but to "convert political constraints in one field into economic opportunities in another, to turn displacement into advantageous placement in different sites . . . " (p. 134). These are flexible citizens par excellence whose very own discourse on the advantages of essential Confucian ethics and guanxi relations in the global economy legitimizes their transnational capitalist formations.

One of the most intriguing parts in the book regards the fate of the nation-state in a transnational world. Ong holds that an analysis of the latter's relationship with transnationalism need not be a "win or lose" endeavor "whereby . . . the nation-state loses to [or even wins over] global trade . . . " (pp. 2-3, 15-16). She introduces the notion of "graduated sovereignty zones" to capture how the nation-state is being refashioned in a transnational world (pp. 214-239). In order "to meet the challenges of global markets and supranational organizations," state governments must confer certain privileges or mete out harsh treatment to certain ethnically marked peoples or certain zones within the "nation-state...