The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas

3. Groundlessness And Utopia: The Chinese Diaspora and Territory

3 Groundlessness and Utopia: The Chinese Diaspora and Territory Emmanuel Ma Mung There is an ancient Chinese poem which says, 'Wherever the ocean waves rouch, there are overseas Chinese',! Overseas migrations have thus long been a fact of Chinese Iife.2 They spread out from the southern and eastern peripheries (Nanyang and Taiwan), and then were extended to cover the island constellations of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. At last, they reached the far-eastern shores of the Pacific; that is, the far-western rim of the Americas. And this toponymic inversion, East/West, related to the roundness of the Earth, this paradoxical designation of a single place by two words with opposite meanings, this impossibility of localizing a place in a sort of topological 'in-itself', is a characteristic of a utopia in the sense of a semantic atopia, since a definite place is, in the natural language, simultaneously here and elsewhere, but a symmetrical elsewhere. Elsewhere and yet here. We could take this fulguration of geographic places as the starting point for our reflection on the relationship between the diaspora and territory. One of the questions to be asked about the diaspora could be this: How does a society remain cohesive in spite of distance? Because the question of distance is a primordial element in the organization of this society. On the basis of this geographical issue and its fundamental impact on every other issue, such as economic organization, historical evolution, and so on, one is led to wonder about the relationship the diaspora maintains with the land in this particular situation of dissemination on a worldwide scale. It is this aspect of the Chinese diaspora that we would 36 Emmalluel Ma Mung like to examine, on the basis of certain interpretative hypotheses formulated in the context of the study of international migrations. There is, of course, a considerable risk involved in seeking to generalize, so great is the diversity of situations encountered hy the Chinese of the diaspora. Nevertheless, a cerrain number of common characteristics can be pointed out, the most evident being an overrepresentation of the population in business-owning activities, and, likewise, a tendency to form an independent social entity by developing an ethnic entrepreneurship.3 While remaining aware of this risk, we would nevertheless like to suggest that a particular way of representing oneself in space, characterized by extraterritoriality, may be an outgrowth of the objective facts of the diaspora: the multi polarity of the migration and interpolarity of its relationships.4 It is this paradoxical relationship to the land which we shall attempt to describe, while examining some of its effects.s CONSTRUCTION OF EXTRATERRITORIALITY To our understanding, twO obiective morphological characteristics define a diaspora: the muhipolarity of the migration - which corresponds 10 the basic definition of a diaspora (dispersion) - and the interpolarity of the relations, an interpolarity which includes not only ties maintained by the conventional contemporary migrations with the country of origin, but also those existing between the various poles of the migration. The imerpolarity is expressed as migrations from one pole to another, in addition to visits and business relations between the various poles. A case in point is that of one Teochew (Chiu-chow) Chinese from Cambodia. After seeking political asylum in France and settling there in the 1970s, he emigrated 10 Canada for several years, first CO Montreal and later to Vancouver. He returned to France in the late 1980s and opened a restaurant and import shop in Rouen using capital acquired in Canada and loans from countrymen from Teochew (his own group) as well as Wenzhou (whose roots are in Zhejiang province). The reason he cited for his return to France was that the business outlook had become much more promising in France than in Canada. This case shows that the Chinese diaspora is charactcrized not only by migration between the various nodes where Chinese have settled, but also by a broadening of relations to include groups of Chinese of different geographic origin and therefore different dialects. Many othcr examples can be found from different geographic areas, showing the international travel and successive settlement of migrants in Grollndleswess and Utopia: The Chillese Diaspora alld Territor), 37 the area covered by the diaspora; for example, from Latin America to North America6 or to the Caribbean.7 h should be noted that these multiple migrations always occur within the area covered by the diaspora and that the...