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Reviewed by:
  • Leaving China: Media, Migration and Transnational Imagination
  • Brenda Chan Kin Ying
Leaving China: Media, Migration and Transnational Imagination. By Sun Wanning . Lantham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002. 242 pp.

Appadurai has asserted that it is mass mediation which distinguishes present-day migration from diasporas of the past:

Those who wish to move, those who have moved, those who wish to return, and those who choose to stay rarely formulate their plans outside the sphere of radio and television, cassettes and videos, newsprint and telephone. For migrants, both the politics of adaptation to new environments and the stimulus to move or return are deeply affected by a mass-mediated imaginary that frequently transcends national space.

(Appadurai 1996: 6)

Sun Wanning's book teases out the complex relationship between media and migration in its treatment of the construction of transnational subjectivities amongst the Chinese people, as a process facilitated by the "mobility of media images" and the "media images of mobility" (p. 216). The author attempts to trace the trajectory of the mobile Chinese subject from internal rural-urban migration to relocation and settlement in a foreign country.

Unlike most works on the same subject matter which focus on the identities of migrants who have been displaced from their homeland, Sun's book offers a refreshing perspective by giving substantial treatment to those who have yet to move or are unable to move physically beyond the national border, but are nonetheless active participants in a transnational imaginary that is worked and reworked by the dialectical forces of East and West; tradition and modernity; private and public; past and future; national and diasporic; space and time. Although parts of the book have been adapted from journal articles that were earlier published by the author, the eight chapters in Leaving China have been coherently structured as a continuous back-and-forth movement of traversing between the homeland and the host society. Sun also writes with a strong personal and reflexive touch because of her own experience of migration from the People's Republic of China (PRC) to Australia.

Leaving China presents a rich corpus of data garnered from textual analyses of films, television dramas and Internet websites, ethnographic television viewing with Chinese audiences in the mainland and with Chinese migrants in Australia, as well as in-depth interviews with viewers in these two countries. Chapters 1 and 2 provide textual analyses of various Chinese films — about peasant women who [End Page 130] leave their villages for the city (with television playing a pivotal role in their decisions to move) and about Chinese city-dwellers who dream of going to America but chicken out when the real opportunity presents itself. In Chapters 3 and 4, Sun discusses the responses of Chinese migrants toward the enactment of their experiences in television dramas produced in mainland China. Chapter 5 highlights the role of the Internet as a "cultural location," where PRC migrants can refresh their shared memories of specific historical events of the nation, through visits to websites or virtual archives documenting the Nanjing Massacre. From the migrants' vicarious travels in cyberspace to the motherland, the focus shifts in Chapter 6 to the embodied and actual experiences of Chinese migrants in their consumption of ethnic foods in the host society. Chapters 7 and 8 juxtapose the reception of media events (such as the Sydney Olympics) by "domestic" Chinese audiences with that by former Chinese nationals who are now resident in Australia. Sun concludes by outlining the vision of a virtual or electronic Chinese nation that unites the diasporic Chinese communities all over the world with those who remain in the homeland.

Contrary to the view that migrants have formed transnational communities which "escape the power of the nation-state to inform their sense of collective identity" (Kearney 1991:59), Sun's thesis is that Chinese transnationalism is premised upon the power of the Chinese state and the strength of a collective memory of the Chinese nation. She argues that new media technologies such as satellite television, combined with the staging of media events, enable the PRC government to extend its propaganda offshore, to reach out to Chinese migrants in various parts of the world. Former...

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