Some Thoughts on the State of Chinese Diaspora Studies

It took me a while to understand why I found The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas a little disturbing on first reading. There is certainly a lot for general editor Lynn Pan and her contributors to feel very proud of. The scope of this book is quite exceptional; it looks at Chinese diaspora communities all over the globe, from Southeast Asia to Latin America to the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. In addition, there are a large number of thematic essays that introduce a range of very important issues—such as the nature of diasporas, the history of migrations from China, the institutions of Overseas Chinese communities, and some of the relationships between Overseas Chinese and China—that are crucial in beginning to understand the huge range of diverse experiences and historical circumstances that make up the Chinese diaspora.

As someone who is familiar primarily with the Anglophone Chinese diasporas, I was personally very interested to read the chapters on the ethnic Chinese communities of Southeast Asia, about which I know relatively little, and there were also interesting facts to be gained from the sections on Europe and Africa. However, some of the materials on the South Pacific were annoyingly brief and, in a few cases, inaccurate. One important error, for example, concerns the supposed lack of prejudice against Chinese in Western Samoa. It is a very well-known piece of family lore in most Chinese Samoan households that there was at least one forced deportation of Chinese citizens from Samoa during the early twentieth century that resulted in the separation of a number of Chinese Samoan men from their families. This kind of error is annoying and detracts from the otherwise undeniably complete coverage that one finds in this book.

Overall, the book is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in learning about the Chinese diaspora. Nevertheless, there are a number of very important issues that it does not address that play an important role in the way in which discussions of the diaspora are framed.

The problem with The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas rests on its repeated emphasis on a fairly essentialist argument of who and what is "truly" Chinese. Although a small number of the contributions (e.g., Kwok Kian Woon's "Being Chinese in the Modern World") point out the historically situated nature of diaspora identity, there are numerous cases where this subject is brought up only to be tossed aside (e.g., in John Cayley's essay on diaspora literature, Christine Inglis' discussion of "the Chinese" in Australia, or Edgar Wickberg's discussion of the Chinese diaspora in the Philippines). Many of the contributors seem to be aware of the complexity of the various different cultural formations found in the diaspora, but this awareness does not come through effectively in the way in which these communities are presented.

Chinese traditions and "traditional" culture (as understood in the 1950s outside mainland China) are thus identified as the dominant factor within Pan's definition of Chineseness. The fact that the mainland itself has undergone profound cultural changes over the past fifty years—at least in the cities and Special Economic Zones—and is no longer the actual physical locus of many of these traditions or practices is an irony that appears to have slipped by the editors and contributors to this volume. Indeed, the dominant tone in a number of the entries is an uneasy triumphalism, expressed mostly in terms of the continued survival and ultimate financial success of ethnic Chinese communities around the world. Small wonder that one reviewer characterized some of the entries as reading like "a folder from the local tourist bureau" (Blussé van Oud Alblass 1999).

It...