‘Playing’ at the ethnic boundary: strategic boundary making/unmaking among ethnic Chinese groups in Australia

ABSTRACT

The sociological literature has constructed a systematic typology of ‘modes’ and ‘means’ of strategic ethnic boundary making/unmaking. Through exploring different strategies, scholars illustrate the processes and contexts of boundary expansion or contraction. Other scholars also distinguish ethnic elements and ‘moral' values attached to certain ethnicities but not to others. This paper acknowledges dynamic boundary making/unmaking and moral aspects of ethnicity, while exploring the different degrees to which national and pan-national identity nest within each other among ethnic Chinese groups, as well as how ethnic boundary becomes a field where people ‘play' in their everyday interactions. Based on participant observations and in-depth interviews from two pan-Chinese worksites in Australia, the paper argues that different interpretations of ethnic identity as well as how different identities (national and pan-national) are nested give people room to ‘play' at the ethnic boundary and result in different outcomes. This paper also shows that people can cross the ethnic boundary (between Taiwanese/Hong Kongese and PRC-Chinese) without expanding/contracting the existing categories or ‘repositioning/transvaluing' their ethnic statuses.

KEYWORDS:

• Australia
• (PRC-)Chinese
• ethnic boundary
• ethnic identity
• Hong Kongese
• Taiwanese

Acknowledgements

I thank Professor David FitzGerald, Jeff Haydu, Christena Turner, Hilary Yerbury, Pei-te Lien and Katherine Whitworth for multiple readings of this paper. I also thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I will use ‘PRC-Chinese’ in the rest of paper to clarify the distinction between ‘people from mainland China’ and ‘ethnic Chinese’. I acknowledge the reviewer who suggested this term.

2. As one of my colleagues said: ‘We are all casual workers here!’

3. There are currently two systems for Chinese characters. One is traditional Chinese (Fantizi), which is used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau and takes its form from standardized characters dating back to the late Han dynasty. The other is simplified Chinese (Jiantizi), which was developed by the People's Republic of China in 1954 to promote mass literacy. Parts of this cultural aspect may have been ‘manufactured’ (Chen 1996; Hsiau 1997). The maintenance of traditional characters as the national written language may have had its origin in a politically motivated decision to set Taiwan apart from China. Over time, however, language and lexical shifts have evolved, thus producing organic differences between how language is used in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.

4. For example, in the 2014 survey, 42% saw themselves as ‘Hong Kongese’ and 24% as ‘Hong Kongese in China’, while a mere 18% considered themselves as ‘Chinese’ and 15% as ‘Chinese in Hong Kong’.

5. Even most PRC-Chinese, Hong Kongese and Taiwanese people in Australia agree that if possible, ‘never look for jobs offered by Chinese people! They only give you shitty pay!’. Nevertheless, these pan-Chinese networks are still widely used because ‘it's hard to find a proper job unless your spoken English is like a native speaker's’ (interview, James, Taiwanese, 4 December 2014).

6. The shared cultural background between PRC-Chinese, Taiwanese and Hong Kongese is a good example here.

7. So far, the Chinese government does not allow dual citizenship.

8. In September (2014) citizens occupied central Hong Kong for several months to protest against the Chinese government's control of Hong Kong's electoral nomination process for the city's top position, demanding an open nomination process for candidates in the next election.