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  • Diaspora's Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration by Shelly Chan
  • Michelle T. King
Shelly Chan, Diaspora's Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. xiv, 264 pp. $99.95 US (cloth), $25.95 US (paper).

How does one write a history of Chinese migration, which has spanned several different eras and included some tens of millions of people, scattered across the globe? Scholars have traditionally tended to study overseas [End Page 598] Chinese as discrete groups in spatial terms, from the bounded perspective of each country or region where Chinese landed and adapted to life, whether in Southeast Asia, the Americas, or elsewhere around the world. More recent works have attempted to bridge these spatial divides by stressing the transnational connections binding overseas Chinese to their home communities in China, or by highlighting the similarities among different migrant groups.

Shelly Chan proposes an inspired, new approach to the study of migration and diasporas in her recent book. Rather than asking what impact migrants had on their overseas communities, she sets out to examine how mass emigration changed China. Yet instead of framing her research in terms of geographies, bounded communities, or common themes of migration, Chan introduces two novel concepts: diaspora time and diaspora moments. Diaspora time is defined as the "diverse, ongoing ways in which migration affects the lifeworlds of individuals, families and communities" (12) — in other words, the everyday social lives of migrants, which other scholars have helped to document. Diaspora moments, on the other hand, where Chan focuses the bulk of her analytical energy, are defined as junctures when diaspora time rises above everyday strategies and intersects with "other temporalities" to become an issue "demanding a coherent response from leaders and institutions and causing long-term consequences" (13).

Though perhaps in need of a more vigorous name to suggest the dynamic power of the concept, framing her study in terms of diaspora moments allows Chan to pry open the topic along new fault lines. The focus turns to sporadic moments of tension, rupture, and reconfiguration, illuminating the fractious space between the Chinese state and its overseas migrants, whether in the late Qing dynasty (1644–1911), the Republican period (1912–1949), or the People's Republic of China (PRC) era (1949-present). Chan argues that dealing with overseas Chinese migrants as a group essentially bound the empire/republic/party-state ever more firmly into a network of modern, global connections, as discussions of diaspora intersected variously with the challenges of imperialism and colonialism, industrial capitalism, and Cold War Asian nationalism. In the process, China itself was reimagined as a permanent homeland for diaspora.

This clever and capacious framing allows Chan to range widely in terms of time periods, geography, and perspective. Some of the chapters focus on well-known events or figures, re-examining them to highlight their global connections. This includes chapter one, on the lifting of the Qing ban on overseas migration in 1893, and chapter three, on the neo-Confucian ideology of Lim Boon Keng (1868–1957), a Straits Chinese descendant born in British Malaya and educated at the University of Edinburgh, who served as [End Page 599] president of Xiamen University in Fujian Province for sixteen years. Chapter two examines a group of Republican intellectuals at Jinan University in Shanghai, led by Liu Shimu (1889–1952), who pioneered the field of Nanyang (South Seas) studies in the 1920s and 30s, well-aware of both European forms of colonialism and growing Japanese ambitions to control the area.

The most exciting chapters of the book, however, focus not on political or intellectual elites, but rather on the uneven attempts of the nascent PRC state to scrutinize and control ordinary overseas Chinese families and returned migrants from Southeast Asia resettling in Guangdong Province in the 1950s and 60s. These two final chapters offer the most vibrant examples of diaspora time rupturing into diaspora moments, as the everyday patterns of migrant life suddenly posed vexing ideological issues for Communist leaders. Here, Chan's use of archival documents from the Guangdong Provincial Archives provides readers with fine-grained accounts of local challenges to the Party line...

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