Reimagining Chinese diasporas in a transnational world: toward a new research agenda

ABSTRACT

This introduction article examines the changing nature of the Chinese diasporas in a transnational world and its concomitant implications for Chinese diasporas studies internationally. With a shifting paradigm of transnationalism and transnational migration, new patterns of Chinese diasporas can be characterised by unprecedented hypermobility, hyperdiversity, and hyperconnectivity. Such characterisations depict the global dispersal of overseas Chinese as one of the most hyperdiverse groups with substantial sub-group differences that distinguish it from most other diasporas. As an important hallmark of contemporary Chinese diasporas, the hyperconnectivity manifests itself in the transnational social networks, talent mobility and brain circulation between China and the globalised world. Unlike earlier movements and mobilities, the latest ones are more dynamic and fluid suggesting that the Chinese sojourn is seen as multiple and circular rather than unidirectional or final. This special issue illustrates how the analytical constructs of hypermobility, hyperdiversity, and hyperconnectivity aid in the reimagining of contemporary Chinese transnational diasporas. It also offers research findings and theorisation to further stimulate new scholarship on the Chinese diasporas in a transnational world.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnationalism
• mobilities
• Chinese diasporas
• transnational diaspora
• transnational migration

A brief history of the Chinese diasporas¹ and conceptualisations

Prior to the first millennium A.D., the movement of Chinese outside of China was rare with only a few venturing out to the surrounding areas in the South China Sea. A cliché, with a strong measure of truth, about China at that time was one of ‘earthbound China’ (Wang 2000, 3). This inward-looking China was very different from many regions of Europe during this same B.C. time period where the operation of imperialism relied on maritime activities for wars and the building of empires. Examples of these activities include the Greco-Persian Wars and the building of the Roman Empire from a republic and a kingdom where naval battles were fought and where there was a significant movement of people and goods throughout the Mediterranean.

It was only in the first millennium A.D. that trade and co-requisite diplomacy began on a small scale for China which included the present day regions of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Indonesia which were small polities or port cities, and, as Wang (2000) points out, these were places that the central empire of China did not take very seriously. Nevertheless, these were the beginnings of early Chinese settlements overseas. However, early in the second millennium, from the tenth to twelfth centuries, China had an increasing economic interest in the Southeast Asia. Thus, a significant Chinese overseas population began to emerge in the region as a result of major maritime and commercial developments. In the early 1400s, during the Ming Dynasty, China’s Yongle emperor built ships capable of visiting not only countries in Southeast Asia and East Asia but also across the Indian Ocean to Ceylon, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa (Pan 2006). By the mid-1500s, there was a small but significant Chinese community in Manila and between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries migration from China headed primarily to Southeast Asia. Lai (2006) points out that China’s emerging interest in Southeast Asia at this time was collaterally related to the back-drop of a large and progressive expansion of European interest in overseas trade, colonisation, and settlement where, for example, the first Chinese overseas community in Manila was connected to the trade nexus of China-Manila-Acapulco that was established by the Spanish.

In the time period from the beginning of nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, there was much more Chinese international migration and significant Chinese overseas settlements were created that went beyond Asia and which were also concomitant with European colonialism and political imperialism not only in Asia but many other parts of the world (Lai 2006). By the early nineteenth century, the industrial revolution in Britain was complete and British colonialism was hegemonic. The social and market forces of British hegemony began to swing eastward as the industrial revolution continued to create a demand for raw materials including food. With the ending of the transatlantic slave trade in the 1800s, there was a labour shortage in the Americas while British India and imperial China were declining due to Western aggressiveness (Lai 2006). These events set the stage for a mass migration of flexible labour of Asians, primarily Chinese and Indians, and the creation of new Chinese diasporas beyond Southeast Asia to the Americas, Australia, and Oceania, Europe, East Asia, India, and Africa. In terms of European colonialism, Chinese were labourers in the colonies of Britain, France and the Netherlands and as well as in the respective colonial societies (Christiansen 2013). This Chinese flexible labour force included those who were unfree and free. They were primarily Chinese males who toiled as laundry workers, miners, railway workers, loggers, fishers, farm workers, gardeners, and domestic servants, among other manual labour jobs. Tens of thousands of Chinese males were recruited to build the transcontinental railways of both the United States and Canada in the mid to late 1800s as part of these two countries nation-building projects. Overall, Chinese labourers experienced not only highly exploitative working conditions, often in split-labour market situations, but also general and widespread societal racism in their respective destination countries, including head taxes and periods of legislated exclusion in countries such as the United States from 1882 to 1943, Canada from 1923 to 1947, and Australia from 1901 to 1949. Yu (2022) points out that while Chinese transnational networks at this time were shaped by the politics of white supremacy in settler nations, there were many forms of resistance that the targeted Chinese used to undermine, circumvent and subvert racist legislation. These troubled relationships of the early Chinese in ‘host’ societies are characteristic and a common feature of diasporas (Cohen 2008, 17).

In many European countries, like Britain and France, the native populations viewed the Chinese as a national threat whenever there was a large influx to meet labour force shortages (Sluka, Korobkov, and Ivanov 2018). While the Chinese migrations of this time period were mainly characterised as labour diasporas, it should be noted that these migrations also involved some Chinese merchants and entrepreneurs as trade diasporas (Cohen 2008). These included tens of thousands of Chinese gold miners working for themselves in the mid-1800s in the gold rushes of California USA, New South Wales Australia, and British Columbia Canada. However, toward the end of the twentieth century (circa 1970s), the nature of this flexible labour began to shift and increasingly involved highly skilled knowledge workers for emerging new economies in the United States, Australia, and Canada as well as many countries in Europe (see Gao 2022; Zhou and Yang 2022) and to a lesser extent in Africa where the proportion of skilled temporary migrants has been growing since the early 2000s but with low skilled migrants still dominant (Park 2022).

This brief history and periodisation of Chinese diasporas over-simplifies the deeper scholarly literature on this topic which is not within the scope of this introduction to this special issue. Li and Li (2013) point out that the scholarly work on the periodisation of the history of Chinese overseas is quite varied with numerous scholarly interpretations and conceptualisations whereby, in this literature, there is a major dichotomy where the Chinese overseas were seen as either a part of a greater China or as separate entities and settlements contextualised in local conditions and exigencies of life. They further point out that what is central to this debate is the comprehension of sojourning and how much China should be considered as the homeland and reference point for the conceptualisation of Chinese overseas populations.

In terms of this conceptualisation, Wang (1981; as cited in Huang 2010, 6–7) argues that the term huaqiao should technically and more narrowly refer to ‘Chinese sojourners’ rather than the broader concept of ‘overseas Chinese’. As such, he considers huaqiao as a sub-category of ‘overseas Chinese’ with its direct linkage to the concept of sojourning. In contrast, other scholars, such as Li and Li (2013), have pointed out that the term huaqiao (or Chinese sojourners) suggests that they are subjects of China given, by definition, their desire or intention to return to China. They argue that some scholars prefer the term ‘Chinese overseas’ as it is more neutral and recognises that many Chinese immigrants and their children may very well have acquired citizenship (haiwai huaren) and identity in their destination countries. Further, many English writing scholars in Southeast Asia prefer using ‘Chinese overseas’ rather than ‘Chinese diaspora’ because of the latter term’s sensitivity that implies ‘not rooted’ or that the term may be perceived as China-centric (Tan 2012, 3). These are complex scholarly issues that are not only semantic but also have legal and political implications in terms of official discourse and Chinese state policies. For the analysis here the distinction between huaqiao, Chinese overseas, and haiwai huaren, ethnic Chinese or Chinese descent, is becoming moot over time in light of the recent ‘transnational turn’ in China studies (Chan 2018). These include Chinese movements described as hyper-mobility, return migration, circular migration, transmigration, and double diasporas (Guo 2016) and emphasis on transnational Chinese including student migration, skilled migrants, investors, and entrepreneurs many of whom are in ‘new’ Chinatowns and ethnoburbs (Li 1998; Miles 2020).

As Chinese flexible labour increasingly involves highly skilled knowledge workers, a further conceptual issue arises and it revolves around the question of ‘how much China should be considered as the reference point and homeland for Chinese overseas populations?’ This matter revolves around how the term ‘diaspora’ is defined when referring to Chinese overseas populations as Chinese diasporas. Historically the diaspora referred specifically to Jews and their exile from their historic homeland, but by the end of the last century, the notion of diaspora was broadened and redefined to include many other groups. Four popular definitions of diaspora that were developed in the 1980s and 1990s, when the term started enjoying wider usage in scholarly literature, include the work of Connor, Safran, Cohen, and Van Hear. In the mid-1980s Connor (1986, 16) simply defined diaspora as ‘that segment of a people living outside the homeland’. Safran (1991) further developed Safran’s definition of diaspora to include notions of collective memory, alienation, and commitment to an ancestral homeland. Soon after, Cohen (1996, 1997, 2008) drew upon the classical tradition and Safran’s insights to further expand the definition to include nine traits of a diaspora, which he called strands of a diasporic rope. These traits included: (1) not just dispersal from a homeland but also expansion, which includes the search for work and trade; (2) a collective memory and myth about the homeland, including its location, history, and achievements; and (3) ethnic solidarity. While Cohen posits nine common features of a diaspora, he argues that no one diaspora will manifest all features. Following Cohen’s definition, Van Hear (1998) conceptualises diasporas very broadly as populations which satisfy three minimal criteria; (1) the population is dispersed from a homeland to two or more other territories; (2) the presence abroad is enduring, although exile is not necessarily permanent, but may include movement between homeland and new host; and (3) there is some kind of exchange – social, economic, political or cultural – between or among the spatially separated populations comprising the diaspora. These four definitions while being somewhat disparate also had some common themes. What is problematic is that there is no one single definition of diaspora that is widely accepted in the literature as contemporary definitions of diasporas are quite varied and illustrate that it is an essentially contested concept (Grossman 2019). The work presented here reflects a broader definition of diaspora, akin to Van Hear’s definition, using the term to refer to any internationally dispersed ethnic group or community with the notion of homeland being significant but not paramount. Grossman’s (2019) recent qualitative data analysis of a database of seventy-four articles that used the keyword diaspora led him to conclude that there are six core and decontested attributes of a diaspora of which includes ‘transnationalism’ and ‘homeland orientation’ among others. From his work, I would argue that not only are the Chinese overseas considered as diasporas but they are also engaged in transnational communities and practices hence they should be referred to as transnational diasporas.²

In recent decades there has been a growing literature that examines Chinese diasporas utilising a transnationalism perspective (Guo 2016; Hsu 2000; Ling 2012; Ma and Cartier 2003; Pieke et al. 2004; Wong and Ho 2006; Yang 2013). Moreover, with respect to Chinese immigrants to the United States, Yang (2013) argues that over time there has been a shift and transformation in Chinese migratory practices from sojourning (1848-1943) to settlement (since 1943) and to contemporary transnationalism (since the 1970s), with the latter two still occurring and overlapping to some degree. Song (2019) has recently made the case that the two most important issues that define Chinese diasporas are ‘Chineseness’ and transnationalism and arguably the Chinese overseas are transnational diasporas.

The onset of the transnationalism paradigm and its relationship to the diasporas and the new mobilities paradigms

Over fifty years ago, Canadian sociologist Anthony Richmond (1969) coined the term transilience which, at that time, referred to the exchanges of skilled and highly qualified migrants between advanced societies, and as such these migrants were referred to as transilients. He argued that transilients: maintain close ties with family and friends; are aware of changing economic, political, and social conditions in their former country and elsewhere; have high rates of re-migration and return. Richmond’s concept of transilience was one of the forerunners to the notion of and phenomena of transnationalism developed by social and cultural anthropologists in the 1990s. Transnationalism, as a paradigm, emerged in the 1990s as a critique of the assimilationist paradigm and, for those in diasporas, their transnational practices often challenged assimilationist forces (Özkul 2019).

Cultural anthropologists Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton (1992) originally defined transnationalism in terms of the social processes of migrants and their establishment of transnational social fields that cut across geographic, cultural, and political borders. Their writings discussed ‘transnational projects’ which described the nature of these migrants’ cross-border relationships that involved multiple and constant interconnections and relationships (Basch, Glick Schiller, and Blanc-Zanton 1994, 7) which sociologists later described as transnational social spaces (Faist 2000). Increasingly as immigrants have multiple interconnections that cut across international borders, their identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state and transnationalism can be conceptualised at the individual or institutional or structural levels. In terms of human agency, these ‘migrants’ are engaged in taking actions, making decisions, and developing identities through social networks which simultaneously connect them to two or more societies and these practices are multistranded; thus these migrants are referred to as ‘transmigrants’ (Blanc-Zanton, Basch, and Glick Schiller 1995, 684). At the behavioural and structural levels, transmigrants’ actions and identities are embedded in transnational social networks. Transnationalism can be contrasted to the older notion of sojourning where people, or sojourners, settle and become incorporated in the economy and political institutions, localities, and patterns of daily life of the country they reside in. Transmigrants, however, are engaged ‘elsewhere’ in the sense that they maintain connections, build institutions, conduct transactions, and influence local and national events in the countries from which they emigrated (Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1995, 48). During the 1990s, scholars in other disciplines also started to use the transnationalism paradigm. For example, in sociology Lie (1995) argued that the immigration experience could also be differentiated on the basis of transnational practices whereby the experience of international migration increasingly includes being part of transnational diasporas.

Evidence of increasing interdisciplinary scholarship utilising the transnationalism paradigm included the launching of the academic journal Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies in the early 1990s. As well, by the late 1990s and early 2000s, there was a flourish of themed special issues on the topic of transnationalism in mainstream academic journals. These included International Migration Review in 2003; Ethnic and Racial Studies in 1999 and 2003; Global Networks in 2001; and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies in 2001. While in 2001 Portes (2001) cautioned that these early proponents of transnationalism may have exaggerated its scope, there was, nevertheless, the recognition amongst most scholars of the importance of transnationalism as a refinement or reformulation of existing theories of international migration and of immigrant and ethnic incorporation and adaptation. In the transnationalism paradigm, the terminology, concepts, and theoretical perspectives used in traditional theories of migration have been reformulated and redefined. The immigration experience is no longer ensconced in macroscopic generalisations with emerging social differentiation based on class, ethnicity, and gender (Lie 1995). The transnational paradigm entails a shift away from traditional terms such as ‘international migration’, ‘home society’, ‘settler society’, ‘sending country’, ‘receiving country’, ‘push/pull’, ‘immigrant’, ‘migrant’, and ‘temporary worker’. This fundamental shift from inter-national to trans-national marks this paradigm. While transnationalism, as a perspective in the study of migration, is seemingly similar to globalisation studies and diaspora studies, it is also dissimilar. Globalisation studies tend to be primarily economic with the binary of ‘the global’ and ‘the local’; diaspora studies are often historical and concerned with culture and identity; and transnationalism studies concentrate more on the flows and counter-flows themselves which are described as the links, social fields and social networks which emerge across nation-states (Özkul 2012). These flows and counter-flows involve not just the migration or movement of people but also other material and non-material mobilities such as capital, goods, culture, ideology, and religion.

Some scholars have argued that the concepts of transnationalism and transnational communities are broader and more inclusive ones than the concepts of diaspora and diasporic communities. More generally transnationalism is a broader concept than diaspora, which is an older and a more political term, and more narrowly applied to ethnic, racialised, religious, and national groups. Thus, transnational communities are broader and encompass diasporas, but not all transnational communities are diasporas (Van Hear 1998; Wong and Ho 2006; Faist 2010). Diasporas, as indicated above, have very specific criterion such as the paramount importance of homeland. In this sense, diasporas may be appropriately conceptualised as a concomitant of transnationalism (Braziel and Mannur 2003).

For this special issue the premise is that there is analytical synergy by bringing together studies of ethnicity, migration, immigration, transnational and diasporic communities, and mobilities and that this approach is effective for the analysis of Chinese transnational diasporas. Back in the late 1990s, the state of ethnic scholarship in various countries such as Australia, Canada, Britain, and the United States was one of a ‘landlocked’ framework that privileged bounded and essentialised notions of ethnicity while not allowing conceptual space for transnationalism (see Winland 1998). With the introduction and growth of transnationalism and diasporic studies over the past two decades, a conceptual space has been engendered in ethnic and immigrant scholarship. Hannam, Sheller, and Urry (2006, 10) point out that diasporas and transnational citizenship studies have ‘ … offered trenchant critiques of the bounded and static categories of nation, ethnicity, community, place and state within much social science’. In addition, they note the crucial role migration studies has for the field of mobilities research. Other scholars, such as Faist (2013), have noted the important relationship of the new mobilities paradigm with migration studies and sociology while noting both spatial and social mobilities and the emergence of transnational social space. The term mobility encompasses geographical and social phenomenon and in the early and mid-2000s the new mobilities paradigm emerged in the writings of social geographers and sociologists (Büscher and Urry 2009; Cresswell 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006; Urry 2000, 2007).

There is a dialectical relationship amongst migration studies, transnationalism and diaspora studies, and mobility studies. While migration studies examine the movement of people, most often across borders, transnationalism and transnational studies focus on the fact that it is not only people who move across borders but that human sociality also entails other mobilities such as goods, economic capital, networks, knowledge, and other symbolic mobilities. While there appears to be dialectical relationships amongst transnational, diasporic, and mobility studies, these are only at the points where they converge. To illustrate this, many of the six conceptualisations of transnationalism that Vertovec (1999) expounds on (social morphology, consciousness, cultural reproduction, avenue of capital, political engagement, and reconstruction of place) can simultaneously be thought of as forms of mobility. That is, transnationalism as social morphology (such as social networks, social remittances) are social mobilities; transnationalism as an avenue of capital (such as remittances and foreign direct investment) are economic mobilities; transnationalism as cultural reproduction are cultural mobilities; transnationalism as sites of political engagement are political mobilities; and transnationalism as reconstruction of place are architectural, cultural, and social mobilities. These conceptualisations and forms of transnationalism are movements or mobilities that go in both directions between countries. However, when there is no convergence then the reach of the paradigms goes beyond each other. Blunt (2007) suggests that mobilities research extends far beyond migration studies. Although research on mobilities and migrations cannot be collapsed onto each other, there are many productive connections between them, particularly in terms of materiality, politics, and methodology.

These various forms of mobilities thus include not only the geographic (migration) but also the social (relations and networks), the economic (capital and trade), and the symbolic (ideas, information, and images). These multiple paradigms and their interconnections augur well for an analysis of Chinese diasporas and they provide a general theoretical framework for this special issue on Chinese diasporas both in historical and contemporary contexts. Departing from the traditional ethnic-studies perspective of Chinese migrants in a nationally bounded context, the theme of this special issue explicitly connects them to transnational diasporas. This allows for the reflection of the dynamic historical and current transformations of Chinese diasporas and the connection of their transnational communities. Constant population movements within, but also across national borders, alongside a much more extensive and complex communicational, informational, and exchange network, are permanent features of a globalised world. Both Chinese population movements and intricate exchange networks signal the multiple economic, cultural, social, ideological, and symbolic mobilities within and across states in transnational social spaces.

Reimagining Chinese diasporas in the age of transnational migration: changing practices and analytical constructs

Well over a decade ago Steven Vertovec (2007) coined and introduced the concept of ‘super-diversity’ and since then it has garnered much attention and has been adopted among a wide range of social science disciplines including sociology and those related to migration studies (Meissner and Vertovec 2015). This section utilises the concept of super-diversity as the spring-board to the following sections on hypermobility, hyperdiversity, and hyperconnectivity as analytical constructs to describe the changing nature of Chinese diasporas in the age of transnational migration. The notion of super-diversity extends well beyond the popular and adopted notion of having ‘more’ ethnicities, languages, and homelands as a result of human migration. Rather, Vertovec’s fuller original intention was that super-diversity recognises multi-dimensional shifts in migration patterns and the proliferation of significant forces that affect ‘where, how and with whom people live’ (Meissner and Vertovec 2015; Vertovec 2013). In considering these forces that affect the ‘where’, ‘how’ and ‘with whom’, the concept of super-diversity underlies the following discussion of the hypermobility, hyperdiversity, and hyperconnectivity as analytical constructs of Chinese transnational diasporas. The objective here is not one of problematising but rather reimagining Chinese diasporas using more contemporary analytical constructs to account for transnationalism in terms of practices and identities.

Hypermobility: the global trend of overseas Chinese distribution

As transnational migration intensifies, the contemporary overseas Chinese are becoming increasingly hypermobile and subsequently the population is more globally distributed. Despite the difficulties in assessing its size and scale, what emerges clearly from a pertinent body of literature is the changing pattern of the overseas Chinese distribution over the past centuries (Li and Li 2011; Poston, Mao, and Yu 1994; Poston and Wong 2016; Zhuang 2011). As alluded to earlier, although Chinese migration started as early as the twelfth century, the size remained small with movement confined mainly to Southeast Asia until the mid-nineteenth century when mass migration to the Americas, Australia and Oceania, Europe, and Africa took place. Still with a heavy concentration in Asia, the contemporary overseas Chinese population have spread virtually to every corner of the world. Poston and Wong’s (2016) authoritative work on the overseas Chinese population report that as of 2011 there were 40.3 million Chinese residing in 148 countries of the world outside the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, excluding tourists, visitors, and short-term residents. This figure represents an increase of almost 5 million in the 10-year period between 2001 and 2011 at an annual growth rate of around 1.2 percent. If this annual growth rate remained unchanged until the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, the overseas Chinese worldwide from 2012 to 2019 should have added another 4.6 million people. Using this trajectory the current overseas Chinese population should be well over 45 million, more than five times its 1948 count. Siu’s (2020) recent work estimates approximately 50 million ethnic Chinese overseas in the diasporas.

One of the most striking features of overseas Chinese hypermobility is found in the sheer size and volume of the population as it is the third-largest diaspora in the world after the German and Irish diasporas (Poston and Wong 2016). However, more than half of the Irish diaspora and over four-fifths of the German diaspora reside in one single country – the United States. In comparison, Chinese diasporas are more globally distributed to virtually every country of the world and with a much longer history. A second striking feature of this hypermobility is the shift in the population distribution from Asia to the Americas and to a lesser extent to Europe and Oceania. Up until the early 1980s, 90 percent of the world population of overseas Chinese lived in Asia; in 2011, only 29.6 million, or 73.3 percent, lived in 35 Asian countries. In comparison, 18.6 percent of the overseas Chinese lived in 40 countries of the Americas in 2011, as compared to 17.1 percent in 2001 and only nine percent in 1990. These figures indicate that Chinese diasporas are now very much global diasporas. Thirdly, the transnationalism framework considers the diasporic sojourn as neither unidirectional nor final, but rather as multiple and circular. Zhou and Yang's (2022) survey data findings on Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles in this issue illustrate these diasporic mobility choices. They found that while some immigrants would like to remain, in the long run, in the United States, others do not preclude the possibility of returning to China. In the meantime, a significant number were transmigrants as over one-third of Chinese immigrants made frequent trips back to China. As such, hypermobility also means that the migration and remigration journeys of some overseas Chinese represent certain stopping points in a lifelong trajectory of moves across borders. In this view, overseas Chinese will likely continue to move over time at distinctive passages in the life cycle. Park’s (2022) analysis supports this hypermobility where for many Chinese migrants Africa is a transnational place, or a sojourn, rather than a permanent place of settlement amongst.

It is difficult to predict the future trends of overseas Chinese mobility and hypermobility as they will inevitably be influenced by the international migration policies of the sending and receiving countries. However, Poston and Wong (2016) predict that while Chinese migration to major immigrant-receiving countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States will continue to grow, the number of Chinese in Africa will likely experience the greatest relative increase because of China’s strengthened economic and political ties with African countries (see Park 2022). Moreover, African countries make up almost one-half of all the countries involved in China’s global infrastructure development strategy referred to as the Belt and Road Initiative (see also Ren and Liu 2022). Overall, the recent hypermobility of Chinese has, in part, contributed to the superdiversity, in terms or ‘race’ and ethnicity, of global cities such as London, Paris, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Vancouver, to name a few.

Hyperdiversity: demystifying Chinese diasporas

Overseas Chinese are often treated in the media and in the public domain as a homogenous and monolithic group coming from ancient China, speaking the same language, and sharing the same culture. Such essentialised characterisations are often based on troubling arguments, uninformed stereotypes, and an undifferentiated notion of ‘the Chinese’ (Sullivan and Cheng 2018). The uniform depiction of the Chinese as possessed of a single identity conceals the substantial diversity of Chinese diasporas across the world and invoke negative stereotypes. Contrary to the popular myth that the Chinese are homogeneous coming from a singular origin and cultural background, research shows that overseas Chinese are heterogeneous to the extent that they can be classified as a hyper-diverse group with substantial sub-group differences. The characteristics of overseas Chinese hyperdiversity can be disaggregated by their origin, destination, citizenship, language, immigrant category, occupation, education background, and socio-economic status.

With respect to the origins, up to the end of World War II the majority of Chinese migrants originated from China’s coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian because of their long history of maritime trade, proximity to Southeast Asia and other destination countries, overseas connections, and a rich linguistic diversity (Wang 1991; Zhuang 2011). These provinces sent the largest number of Chinese migrants to Southeast Asia, the Americas (see Yu 2022), and Oceania. Zhejiang Province, particularly its Wenzhou and Qingtian, is another coastal province that sent a substantial number of migrants overseas particularly to Europe. For example, the first Zhejiangnese merchants to arrive in Europe were peddlers of Qingtian soapstone carvings in 1865 (Thunø 2003). Europe and Africa’s Chinese population is still primarily comprised of people from Zhejiang and Fujian provinces (Li 2013; Thunø and Li 2020; also see Park 2022 and Wu 2022). Wu’s study in this issue provides another example of recent Chinese immigrants from Qingtian, Zhenjiang Province who account for an overwhelming majority of the Chinese population in Luxembourg. Her findings reveal a degree of hyperdiversity even among this seemingly homogeneous group who have different nationalities, occupations, and migration histories. By the 1980s, the major source of Chinese migrants shifted to Hong Kong because of the pending handover to China in 1997. In the late 1990s, a rising China with its economic boom created a new middle-income class that established the economic conditions for the mobility of Chinese people from mainland China, and subsequently China entered a new emigration phase (Xiang 2016). In Canada, for example, mainland Chinese immigrants outnumbered those from Hong Kong and Taiwan in 1998 and became the top immigrant source for Canada (Guo and DeVoretz 2006). To the present time, Chinese migrants world wide come from all provinces of China, no longer just from the traditional sources. With a shifting paradigm of transnationalism and transnational migration, we have witnessed high rates of re-migration from less developed regions such as Asia, Africa, and Latin America to highly industrialised immigration countries such as Australia, Canada, and the United States.

To illustrate, over a period of 20 years from 1980 to 2001 Canada accepted a total of 755,698 Chinese immigrants who moved to Canada from 132 different countries with the majority from mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan (Guo and DeVoretz 2006). For the city of Vancouver, the overseas Chinese community would include the following groups: (i) descendants of pre-1980s immigrants, who call themselves Lao Hua Qiao (Old Overseas Chinese); (ii) Hong Kong and Taiwan immigrants since 1980; (iii) recent mainland Chinese immigrants from all provinces of China; and (iv) Chinese transmigrants from Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Peru, Jamaica, South Africa and other places (Wickberg 2007). Some of the Chinese transmigrants may have lived in more than one overseas location, but may have never lived in China. Their origins alone have created substantial varieties of Chineseness with sub-group differences and complexities of experience and self-interpretation of their cultural and social status. These variations in the construction of Chineseness outside of China contributes to hyperdiversity (Song 2019) In terms of their destinations, as discussed above, overseas Chinese are now virtually living in every country of the world outside the Chinese mainland, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, although unevenly distributed (Poston and Wong 2016). This special issue covers countries specifically in Southeast Asia (Ren and Liu 2022), Oceania (Gao 2022), Africa (Park 2022), Europe (Wu 2022), and North America (Zhou and Yang 2022; Yu 2022). Because China does not recognise dual citizenship, many overseas Chinese have acquired citizenship in their destination countries and subsequently have become Huaren. Hence, the perception of overseas Chinese as possessed of a single identity is a myth.

Associated with the hyperdiverse origins is the linguistic diversity of Chinese diasporas, particularly among Chinese transmigrants who speak a minimum of three different languages, including the official language(s) of the re-migration country (e.g. Australia, Canada), language of previous host country (e.g. Malaysia, Indonesia), and possibly one Chinese native language (e.g. Mandarin, Cantonese). Even among the Chinese from China alone, their native tongue includes a wide variety of Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkiens, Taiwanese, Shanghainese, etc. To illustrate with the Canadian case, among a total of 755,698 Chinese immigrants who landed in Canada between 1980 and 2001, 58% spoke Cantonese, 30% Mandarin, 9% Chinese (e.g. Hokkiens, Taiwanese, and other dialects), and the rest 3% spoke 98 different languages and dialects from Afrikaans to Yiddish (Guo and DeVoretz 2006).

To further disaggregate overseas Chinese by education background, occupation, immigrant category, and socio-economic status, there are distinctions to be made between early Chinese migrants and their recent counterparts in different country contexts. It is widely known by now that early Chinese migrants were primarily ‘coolie’ workers or chain migrants working in mining, railway construction, agriculture, domestic service, etc. They were primarily male peasants from rural areas with little or no education who left China in search of new opportunities and to escape population pressure. The ‘coolie’ workers were classified by Wang (1991) as the Huagong pattern that occurred from the 1840s through the 1920s between China and Southeast Asia, North America, Australia, Cuba, Peru, South Africa, etc. Besides Huagong, another prominent category is the Huashang migrants, consisting of traders and merchants, who are considered to be the most resilient pattern by Wang. After World War II, particularly since the 1960s, the new immigration policies world wide favoured educated and wealthy immigrants. Following that, the composition of overseas Chinese has shifted dramatically to more well-educated professionals and entrepreneurs with higher degrees and linguistic assets. Different from their earlier counterparts, contemporary overseas Chinese are engaged in a broad range of occupations, including management, professionals, investors, entrepreneurs, manufacturers, business owners, and politicians, performing a variety of Chineseness in their local contexts. As such, the educational background, socio-economic status, and occupations of Chinese migrants are much more diversified than earlier periods because of specific immigration policies that seek out those with high human capital in terms of education and skills. As an illustration of how this type of hyperdiversity occurs, Zhou and Yang’s (2022) study of immigrants in Los Angeles points to the concept of positive selectivity with respect to immigrants having a college education. Their survey data found that in Los Angeles while approximately 40% of Chinese immigrants had only high school education, another 41% had a bachelor’s degree or higher. In terms of occupations, 49% were in managerial and professional occupations and 13% were self-employed. A further disaggregation of Chinese migrants in terms of immigrant category is revealed by Park (2022) with respect to the Chinese state in Africa. While the largest proportion of Chinese in Africa are independent of the Chinese government, a smaller but significant proportion are representative of the state and are connected to embassies, consulates, development programmes, peace-keeping, and Confucius Institutes. This distinction adds a further state-related dimension to hyperdiversity and is a result of the recent rise of China economically and its transitioning position in terms of the Global South–North dichotomy. Further analysis by Park (2022) shows that there is greater hyperdiversity of Chinese diasporas in Africa with respect to wide ranges of skill level, education, and occupation as compared to those in Europe and other OECD countries where the emphasis has been mostly on highly educated and highly skilled migrants in recent decades.

The preceding discussion has clearly demonstrated that hyperdiversity is an important hallmark of contemporary Chinese diasporas that distinguishes it from most other diasporas. Hyperdiversity manifests itself in their diverse origins, destination countries, citizenship, language, educational background, occupation, and socio-economic status. The terms ‘overseas Chinese’ and the Chinese diasporas represent a collectivity of individuals coming from different parts of the world (e.g. People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, the Philippines, Jamaica, South Africa, etc.), speaking different languages (e.g. Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, Hokkiens, Taiwanese, Vietnamese, Afrikaans, English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Yiddish), representing different citizenship (e.g. Chinese, Malaysian, Singaporean, Vietnamese, Laos, British), believing in different world religions (e.g. Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Christianity, Islam), and living in different social and political systems (Communism, Capitalism, and a combination of the two). Overseas Chinese bring with them a variety of Chineseness based on the contexts in which they have been a part of. The hyperdiversity of overseas Chinese attenuates the primordial notion of diaspora which relies on homeland and origin as its criteria in defining diaspora.

Hyperconnectivity: Chinese transnational networks and unending sojourn

One important feature of a diaspora is maintaining connections with the homeland as well as others in the diaspora who are in different foreign regions or countries (Cohen 2008). For example, Yu (2022) describes the earlier Cantonese Pacific networks which provided the connections for labour migration, small business accumulation, trade, and flow of capital from China to other Pacific rim countries. From the very beginning of Chinese migration, overseas Chinese maintained connections with their homeland through intermittent visits and remittances. Ties with ancestral hometowns and villages in China are mostly socio-cultural and ritual, which may bring back sentimental memories (Tan 2007). As Tan notes, kinship has been crucial in maintaining the links between migrants and their original homeland. More recently, their connectivity with the homeland is maintained through qiaoxiang – the ancestral homeland, which have been successful in attracting diasporic donations, business investment, and contributions to infrastructure development in building roads, bridges, schools, hospitals, and temples (Tan 2007; Yow 2013). Because transnational migration creates multiple homes and transnational relations, overseas Chinese may have multiple homelands (Tan 2007). The first-generation Chinese are more likely to see China as their homeland, but their descendants may see China as the homeland of their forebears or as the ancestral homeland. After re-migration to another country, some may find more attachment to the immediate country which they emigrated from depending upon how long they had lived there.

A globalised economy permits greater connectivity and creates a new type of hyperconnectivity between migrants and their countries of origin (Dade 2004; cited in Hugo 2008) and others in different destination countries. Contemporary diasporas are in a digital age and are fundamentally different from the past ones as they are connected to their communities of origin ‘instantaneously, continuously, dynamically and intimately’ (286). In the early 2000s, Vertovec (2004) pointed out that inexpensive international telephone calls were the social glue of migrant transnationalism and the dominant medium of hyperconnectivity. Today, in the early 2020s it is the plethora of free social media including WeChat, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok to name just a few which have contributed to the formation of ‘virtual transnational diasporas’ as a new space for transmigrants to maintain diasporic engagement (Lei and Guo 2020). With barriers of distance and time removed, overseas Chinese can now act and interact with their communities of origin, and others in global diasporas, on a practically real-time basis to speak daily with family, read the same newspapers, stream the same TV show, and return on daily scheduled flights. Park’s (2022) work explores the impact of information and communications technology (ICT) on the Chinese in Africa in terms of identity, sense of belonging, and the construction of transnational and diasporic virtual communities arguing that ICT allows for simultaneous engagements that are no longer bound by the national borders.

Mobility and frequent movement between origin and destination is an important part of the hyperconnectivity established by overseas Chinese as evident in ‘flexible citizenship’ and ‘astronaut’ and transnational families that are practices of transnationalism (Bryceson 2019; Chiang 2008; Ho 2002; Ong 1999; Waters 2002). With the development of modern transportation and advanced ICT, transnationalism makes it possible for imagined diasporic communities to subvert the unidirectionality of migrant passage and to replace it instead with an unending sojourn across different lands (Lie 1995). As such, the sojourn itself is neither unidirectional nor final. Instead, ‘multiple, circular and return migrations, rather than a singular great journey from one sedentary space to another, occur across transnational spaces’ (304).

To elaborate on the hyperconnectivity of Chinese transnational diasporas, one example is the transnational business networks through which Chinese entrepreneurs engage in hypermobility under the framework of transnational social space. Originally the term ‘bamboo network’ was used to refer to the transnational Chinese family oriented business networks with flows of people and goods throughout Southeast Asia (Weidenbaum and Hughes 1996). These networks are an important component of transnationalism, where transnational entrepreneurs are interested in mobilising their contacts across national borders in search of suppliers, capital, and markets and in promoting economic growth in both the sending or receiving countries (Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999). In his study of Taiwanese entrepreneurial migration to Canada, Wong (2004) highlights the importance of transnational familial networks and transnational business circuits. While transnational familial networks constitute a form of ‘capital’ as the dispersal is a ‘resource’, the transnational business circuits are spatially distributed with their multiple national sites, including Asian production-North American distribution, retail chains, and import-export. Another aspect of hyperconnectivity pertains to talent mobility and brain circulation that many scholars have discussed (Guo 2016; Saxenian 1999, 2002, 2005; Wang, Zweig, and Lin 2011). Earlier work by Saxenian (1999, 2002, 2005) found that transnational immigrant professional and technical communities out performed multinational corporations in their quick and flexible transfer of skills, technology, human resources, and organisational know-how between California and high-tech parks in Taiwan, Beijing, and Shanghai and thus verifying brain circulation between Asian and US high tech sectors. Unlike earlier movements and mobilities, the latest ones are more dynamic and fluid suggesting Chinese transnational diasporas are seen as multiple and circular rather than unidirectional or final. This recent shift also demonstrates that the boundaries between diaspora, territory, and transnational migration are blurred.

There are several reasons why networks are important in the context of diaspora studies. Marked by connectivity and transnationality, transnational social networks are important because they can connect with both state and society sectors through formal and informal means (Castells 2010). Apart from informal networks, China has stepped up its efforts in strengthening ties with the overseas Chinese. In this regard, it has established sophisticated and integrated institutional mechanism with a transnational logic to engage with overseas Chinese in tandem with China’s changing priorities in national development (Liu and van Dongen 2016). China has also adopted new strategies to leverage the unique role of diasporic Chinese organisations. Ren and Liu (2022) in this issue provide an example of the importance of transnational business networks, such as ethnic Chinese business associations in Southeast Asia, with respect to how they interact with the Chinese state and the role of the state in the transnational engagement of the diasporas. Almost impossible to assess its exact size, it is estimated that there are tens of thousands of diasporic Chinese organisations worldwide. They are usually organised into five groups: (i) clan association, (ii) district and locality association, (iii) fraternal-political association, (iv) community-wide association, and (v) professional and alumni associations. They are often seen as an important asset to the country of origin because diasporic connections and networks can lead to profound changes at points of origin in many areas and as such, diasporas perform a vital social role in bridging the gap between the individual and society, the local and the global, and the cosmopolitan and the particular (Cohen 2008).

Chinese diasporas studies in a transnational world: ongoing and emerging research questions

The rise of China and the changing demographic and social characteristics of Chinese diasporas over the past century, particularly in terms of socio-economic status, reveal the need to develop new theoretical frameworks to better understand Chinese diasporas. As Thunø and Li (2020, 6) have recently argued, with respect to contemporary Chinese migration to Europe, ‘ … there are novel Chinese modalities in terms of numbers, types, destinations, circulation, economic undertakings and social and political activities’ and these modalities conceptually challenge existing theories and models of Chinese migration that are becoming out-dated. Thus, there are ongoing and emerging research questions going forward that will contribute to a new theorising of Chinese diasporas and this section explores some of the areas of concern. These include transnational identity and citizenship, second-generation youth, civic participation and integration, and social exclusion and anti-Chinese racism.

Back in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the globalisation literature burst onto the scene, the then dominant forms of cultural identity and citizenship were being questioned. The rapid rate of economic and cultural globalisation at that time suggested that the relationship between territorially defined nation-states and national and social identities was a tenuous one. It was argued at that time that as people increasingly participated in international migration, and in transnational and diasporic communities, they would develop and solidify multiple identities which would be grounded in different countries and societies. As such, it was argued that what would emerge would be separate multiple identities or perhaps a singular hybridised type of transnational identity linking people to several nations, which some scholars argued, constituted a deterritorialisation of social identity and also of citizenship. For example, in 1997 Cohen (1997) noted that the deterritorialisation of social identity challenges the nation-state’s claim of making exclusive citizenship a defining focus of allegiance and fidelity, in contrast to the reality of overlapping, permeable, and multiple forms of identity.

Two decades later this prediction is only partially true as multiple and transnational identities have emerged but the deterritorialisation of those identities has not occurred for most Chinese in transnational and diasporic communities. With respect to Chinese diasporas, the limited but emerging research on multiple and transnational identities has verified the phenomenon. For example, recent work by Ip and Yin (2016), Zhang and Guo (2017), and Fang and Fine (2020), have verified transnational identities. These multiple and transnational identities however are still very much linked to dual or multiple nations or countries and are embedded in transnational social networks. Thus, they are not deterritorialised nor approaching the level of cosmopolitan identities. However, further empirical research is much needed on the Chinese diasporas in the United States, Canada, Australia, and European countries regarding multiple and transnational identities.

Emergent multiple and transnational identities have implications for the forms and practices of citizenship in transnational and diasporic communities. In the case of legal citizenship for those in Chinese diasporas, this status has no value in ascertaining and measuring transnationalism because China, as mentioned earlier, does not legally recognise dual citizenship nor nationality³ despite the fact that approximately ninety countries, which is approximately one-half of the world’s states, tolerate some form of dual citizenship (Faist and Gerdes 2008; Renshon 2001). Moreover, of the top ten countries in terms of the size of Chinese diasporas, most of them have highly restrictive dual citizenship policies (Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Myanmar, and Vietnam) while only a few are tolerant and open to dual citizenship (United States, Canada, and Peru). In terms of OECD countries, only twenty of the thirty-seven member countries allow non-restrictive dual citizenship and these include, besides the United States and Canada, Australia, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom to name a few (Faist and Gerdes 2008) but, as mentioned above, dual citizenship with China is not possible. Thus, legal citizenship for Chinese with transnational identities does not reflect loyalty or commitment. However, citizenship is not only a legal construction but it is also a social and ideological construction. Citizenship in terms of social membership goes beyond the formal obligations of legal citizenship. Delanty (1997) conceptualises four models of citizenship that are defined by rights, duties, participation, and identity, where the latter two give citizenship a substantive (non-legal) dimension. There is scant research on the substantive social dimensions of transnational citizenship of the Chinese in various diasporas. The traditional conception of citizenship as a singular loyalty is likely diminishing with increasing dual and multiple identities. As such, an emerging research area concerns ascertaining the existence and extent of dual loyalties of those in Chinese diasporas.

There is a dire need for research on multiple and transnational identities among second-generation Chinese youth both within and across generations. This includes research on engagements with education as part of their aspirational project of future making (see Wu 2022). Transnationalism and identity construction among second-generation Chinese youth is an often-ignored and inadequately addressed research area in transnational studies (Cui 2017). In particular, what has not been adequately researched is how second-generation Chinese youth engage in transnational practices and negotiate their identity formation within the transnational social fields. In light of this, Cui’s Canadian study explores the transnational practices or orientation of second-generation Chinese youth in relation to the influence of transnational family connections and activities on their identity construction. Her findings reveal that second-generation Chinese youth may not engage in transnational practices with the same scope and intensity as their parents. However, the transnational practices within immigrant families have nurtured transnational orientation and identification among Chinese descendants. She underscores how the ideological and hegemonic socialisation that immigrant youth received in host society may affect how they observe, think and construct meanings of second-generation transnationalism, identity, and belonging. In contrast, Torruella (2019) reveals in a Spanish study that there are some similarities in the transnational practices between second-generation youth and their parents. Her work shows that some of the second-generation have established relationships and new mobilities with China in order to secure upward mobility just as their parents did when they migrated to Europe. As such, there are social and geographic mobilities that criss-cross over time and across generations. This is an important and emerging research area as the literature tends to focus on these mobilities within a generation rather than across generations.

Another important aspect of substantive citizenship involves the practice of citizenship in terms of civic and political participation or sometimes described as active citizenship. What forms and degrees of transnational citizenship exist amongst the Chinese in the diasporas? Potential research areas here include the assessment of the political and/or civic participation of Chinese transnationals in both their respective diasporic countries and in China. Related to this is the question of how much influence do transnational practices have on Chinese civic participation in the diasporas? The phenomena of civic and political participation can also be thought of as dimension of social integration. As well, the economic and labour market integration of the Chinese in the diasporas are also very critical and need further research. Some of the issues and questions raised here pertaining to integration and civic participation are also relevant for second-generation Chinese youth.

Since a significant number of the recent Chinese in the diasporas are highly skilled professionals and entrepreneurs, future research needs to examine their incorporation or labour market integration in their destination countries. This includes research on the embodiment of their mobilities in terms of their work and professional activities that emerge in their transnational networks and social space. More specifically, future research should try to determine whether their transnational professional and entrepreneurial activities inhibit or facilitate their labour market and economic integration. What are the ways in which integration and transnationalism are interrelated? Are there links between Chinese transnational mobility and the extent of their social, cultural, and labour market integration? In other words, is there an integration-transnationalism-diaspora nexus?

Coinciding with the above questions of integration is the issue of social exclusion and anti-Chinese racism faced by those in Chinese diasporas. The social exclusion of the Chinese and the existence of anti-Chinese racism, both historically and in contemporary times, have been well documented in many countries, including several in Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam) as well as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia among others (see Gao 2022; Yu 2022). This social exclusion and racism includes disenfranchisement, denial of citizenship, block-mobilities and glass ceilings in the labour market, working class racism, and segregated communities among others. Over the past several decades the level of overt anti-Chinese racism has decreased in many countries due to human rights, anti-discrimination, and employment equity legislation. As well formal apologies, as Yu (2022) points out, for past anti-Chinese racism have been made by several countries such as Canada, New Zealand, and the United States and at various levels of government, such as the city of Vancouver, and the province of British Columbia, and the Government of Canada. However, anti-Chinese racism still remains a social problem. For example, recent work by Liu (2019) in central-eastern Europe reveals generally negative attitudes toward the Chinese and where public discourse reinforces cultural stereotypes. In 2020, the beginning year of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a dramatic rise in anti-Chinese, and more generally anti-Asian racism and microagressions in many countries across the world (Guo and Guo 2021). For example, a 2020 survey of 516 Chinese in Canada during COVID-19 found that 64% reported being treated with less respect than other people, 50% reported being called names or insulted, and 43% reported being personally threatened (Angus Reid Institute 2020). In the United States, data from multiple sources reveal an increasing and pervasive spread of anti-Asian, and particularly anti-Chinese, sentiment and physical attacks in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (Chen, Trinh, and Yang 2020). In the United Kingdom, police data released in June 2020 revealed that the rate of hate crimes against Chinese, from January to March 2020, nearly tripled that of the previous two years which included assault, robbery, harassment, and criminal damage (Wei 2020). It remains to be seen whether in a post-COVID-19 era this anti-Chinese racism will decline or not.

In summary, radical changes in a transnational world necessitate that we recast traditional studies of the Chinese beyond national and essentialised communities to encompass their circulatory cross-border movements and mobilities. Even if it has been a myth that historians have debunked that previous Chinese migrants were merely sojourners or rarely moved again globally, contemporary migrants have complex and diverse forms of mobilities which have surpassed those of any previous imagination and have called into question not just borders, sovereignty, and national states, but also issues of citizenship, identity, and belonging. What are the forces behind the creation of transnational social spaces, the mechanisms, routes, and processes, as well as the consequences of these radical changes globally? How exactly is Chinese defined with respect to citizenship, identities, and belonging? What does the future hold with respect to such phenomena given a rising China as an emerging superpower? What are the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Chinese diaspora and their transnational practices? These are emerging research questions.

Overview and key advances of the contributions in this special issue

This special issue has six empirically based articles on Chinese diasporas studies, from a variety of disciplinary or interdisciplinary perspectives. This special issue originates, in part, from the 25th Biennial Conference of the Canadian Ethnic Studies Association which was held in Banff, Alberta, Canada. The theme of the conference was Immigration, Ethnic Mobilities, Diasporic Communities in a Transnational World. One of the plenary sessions focused on Chinese Diasporas in a Transnational World where speakers presented on a variety of topics related to the changing nature of Chinese diasporas in a transnational world. These presenters are also members of the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas (ISSCO) with a strong focus on diasporas. Their perspectives have contributed to the existing Chinese diasporas literature and the interdisciplinary fields of ethnic, migration, and mobility studies. For this special issue, we rounded out the conference presenters with other ISSCO contributors who enrich the existing interdisciplinary perspectives from their studies of Chinese diasporas.

The first article by Na Ren and Hong Liu examines some of the themes of transnationalism and diasporas in the context of Southeast Asia by focusing on the emergence of new structural characteristics of ethnic Chinese business associations in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines. Drawing on empirical case studies, the authors conducted multi-sited fieldwork with 29 Chinese business associations which had substantial engagement of transnational practices in Southeast Asia. Contextualising the study in the Belt and Road Initiative launched by China in 2013, the authors develop the concept of institutionalised transnationalism as an analytical tool highlighting the formation of state-centric transnational networks. Their analysis shows that these associations have formed institutionalised transnational interactions with China through multi-layered and diverse-patterned state-centric transnational networks which in turn facilitate cross-border flows of people, capital, goods and information. These transnational networks are illustrative of hyperconnectivity amongst ethnic Chinese business associations, which is the substance of transnational circuits. Their findings also illustrate the point that the Chinese state is not only involved as an essential dynamic element in the institutionalised transnationalism, but also enters into transnational networks as an active player. They also point out that the institutionalised transnationalism has operated within a ‘dual embeddedness’ structure in which the state is involved as a key network node in the transnational socio-economic field connecting China and Southeast Asia. Their findings have important theoretical implications for an understanding of the entanglement of transnationalism, the state, and ethnic and national interest in the reimagining of Chinese diasporas in a transnational world.

Next, Yoon Jung Park takes up some of the themes in the Ren and Liu article by turning our attention to recent Chinese migration to Arica, which historically has been limited both in size and scope until relatively recently over the past two to three decades. She argues that China’s current economic and cultural globalisation, partly in conjunction with the Chinese state (as noted by Ren and Lui discussed above), produces a hyperdiversity of Chinese migrants on the African continent while the migrants themselves are having impacts on their African host nations and this is changing the way we understand Chinese diasporas and their mobilities. Overall, her synthesis of the literature on the Chinese in Africa reveals the need to incorporate new discourses of transnationalism in order to reflect greater fluidity of mobilities between China and Africa. She argues that the Chinese in Africa live transnational in-between lives straddling their homes in China and their new homes in Africa thus constituting a very transnational diaspora where she coins the term ‘Chinese rolling stones’ to describe their transmigration. These transnational practices are enabled by their hypermobility and hyperconnectivity, via virtual connections and social media, which results in multiple identities that are fluid, contextual and situational. These intense transnational practices are also due in part to the fact that very few African countries have instituted clear pathways for legal and social citizenship for Chinese migrants. Thus, a further area explored in Park’s work is the reception and lack of potential integration of Chinese migrants in African countries and their societies where there is a spectre of anti-Chinese sentiment and racism. Park also examines specifically the case of South Africa in light of how the Chinese are able to respond to anti-Chinese sentiment through different strategies.

In the next article, Min Zhou and Ashelee Yang explore the integration experiences of contemporary Chinese immigrants in Los Angeles. Utilising a mixed-method approach consisting of a large online survey, in-depth personal interviews and focus groups, their findings contribute to a re-imagining of contemporary Chinese diasporas in terms of their hyperdiversity rather than considering them as more monolithic. They reveal very divergent patterns of integration, identity formation, coethnic interaction, and sense of belonging which they attribute to the interactive processes of immigrant selectivity (resulting in brain drain from China) and social transformations in the context of reception at dual levels of the host society and ethnic community. For Zhou and Yang, the hyperdiversity of Chinese immigrants challenges the traditional and classical model of straight-line assimilation and suggests support for a segmented assimilation model as evidenced by data from their in-depth interviews which reveal fragmentation in their integration, belonging, and identity. Their in-depth interviews identify a divergence between ethnic identity and emotional attachment where a strong Chinese identity has bifurcated patterns of attachment with some advocating for association with coethnics and the home country on the one hand while others, on the other hand, intentionally dissociated themselves and felt ashamed of being close to other coethnics. Another example of divergence is related to class, residential assimilation, and coethnic proximity where the findings are counterintuitive. The Chinese who are residentially assimilated in predominantly white middle-class neighbourhoods, and who have good English and higher income, tend to be very ethnically attached to co-ethnics elsewhere living and working in Chinese ethnoburbs such as San Gabriel and Montery Park amongst many others. In contrast, those who are not residentially assimilated and who live in Chinese ethnoburbs, surrounded by many other coethnics, have weaker ethnic attachments which Zhou and Yang find highly unusual as they are the beneficiaries of the ethnic community in which they reside. These are a couple of examples of the effects of hyperdiversity and their findings touch on many other areas related to integration, belonging, and identity such as a citizenship-cultural membership divide and intragroup boundary making.

The fourth article by Jia Gao examines the dynamic nature of recent Chinese transnational talent mobility to Australia – another OECD country – at the intersection of China’s post-1978 reform and Australia’s shift towards Asia. With early Chinese immigrants primarily from Indochina and Southeast Asia, it is only since the late 1980s and early 1990s that a growing number of migrants directly from China mainland started to arrive in Australia. This is a similar pattern that has been discussed by other authors in this special issue. Starting from the late 1990s, Australia introduced merit-based migration system which selected new immigrants based on their qualifications, skills, business experiences, and financial capabilities. In this view, Chinese immigrants in Australia became a hyper-selected group that Zhou and Yang spoke about in their article about contemporary Chinese immigrants in the US. Gao argues that Australia’s new migration policy became a pivotal turning point in creating a hypermobile ethnic Chinese population in Australia with a significant increase from 200,000 in 1986 to 1.2 million in 2016. In particular, the recent arrival of PRC Chinese increased the hyperdiversity of the Chinese in Australia, among whom 41% were born in PRC, 25% born in Australia, and 8% born in Malaysia. Over 46% claimed to be Mandarin speakers. In this article, Gao juxtaposed the analysis of hypermobility, hyperdiversity, and hyperconnectivity of the Chinese in Australia with an ongoing Chinese-invasion narrative. In his assessment, the narrative has been caused by the absence of a transnational perspective which theoretically can be blamed for the resurgence of Sinophobia in Australia. Gao’s article brings to light the actual historical process and addresses misconceptions in Australia’s recent debate over Chinese influence and threat.

With the next article, Jinting Wu examines the experience of second-generation and 1.5-generation Chinese youth focusing on how they frame their futures through enacting differential aspirations within a field of educational possibilities in Luxembourg. Drawing on in-depth and ethnographic data and building on Appadurai’s notion of the ‘capacity to aspire’ and Bourdieu’s theorisation of capital and habitus, this empirical study examines the divergent ways immigrant youth and families negotiate an unequal terrain of educational possibilities and articulate future aspirations that are intertwined with class, race, transnational connections. Depending on the respondents’ class backgrounds and migration status, the author identified three diverse types of aspirations as they consider the possibilities of individual distinction, credentialed social mobility, or stable livelihoods, which illustrate another important aspect of hyperdiversity as a changing characteristic of contemporary Chinese diasporas in Europe. The findings also highlight a temporal dimension to the study of immigrant education viewing aspiration as a form of habitus which in turn influences immigrants’ future educational and occupations outcomes. Wu’s study contributes to the understanding of educational mobilities of Chinese immigrants and illustrates the multiple aspirations, negotiations, and educational futures within a rapidly stratifying Chinese diaspora.

The final article moves the discussion away from the previous ones that examine specific cases of Chinese diasporas to one that concerns reparation and reconciliation of historical anti-Chinese racism via contemporary formal state apologies. Henry Yu’s article examines recent Vancouver and the British Columbian apologies (in 2018 and 2014 respectively) for anti-Chinese legislation in the late 1800s and early 1900s. He conceptualises historical time as a forward-looking process of inclusion that applies to the histories of Chinese diasporas. Firstly, he contextualises contemporary governments’ apologies for being a racial state in the past with a retrospective on Cantonese Pacific transnational networks in diasporas in an era of white supremacy. Here, Yu cites the bonds of loyalty and resilience of the Chinese in diasporas as they struggled to survive under white supremacy. Secondly, after connecting present apologies to the past he then connects them to the future by discussing the prospects for, and aspirations of, democratic inclusion and equality. He argues that this approach simultaneously acknowledges the earlier histories of Chinese diasporas in terms of their global networks that endured over centuries and recognises and reframes anti-Chinese racism within national historical narratives. However, as noted above, in many countries today anti-Chinese racism still remains and/or is emerging. For example, Gao (2022) discusses the resurgence of Sinophobia in Australia and the reinvention of a Chinese-invasion narrative that has been sanctioned by political leaders and xenophobic critics.

Collectively these articles in the special issue begin to address some of the ongoing and emerging research questions mentioned earlier in this introduction. They also turn our gaze to much needed research that has yet to garner scholarly attention. These six articles illustrate the breadth of Chinese diasporas studies and some important empirical findings and theorisation. In some respects this special issue illustrates how the analytical constructs of hypermobility, hyperdiversity and hyperconnectivity aid in the understanding of contemporary Chinese transnational diasporas. However, this special issue is just the beginning of a re-imagining of Chinese diasporas and does not claim to provide a comprehensive overview nor does it fully address the research questions mentioned above. Rather, this special issue offers some new research findings and theorisation to further stimulate further research and scholarly work on the Chinese transnational diasporas.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Lloyd Wong for his tremendous contributions to this special issue before his retirement. I am also grateful to all reviewers for their time and feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 I use the plural and refer to ‘Chinese diasporas’ rather than the singular ‘Chinese diaspora’ to indicate that there is no monolithic bounded entity known as the Chinese diaspora (see Miles 2020, 11). Rather, as this Introduction argues in a later section, the Chinese overseas are hyperdiverse rather than monolithic.

2 The term transnational diaspora gained traction with the work of Lie (1995). I adopt this term rather than describing Chinese overseas as participating in ‘diasporic transnationalism’ which is used by Tölölyan (2010) to refer to a situation, for those in the diaspora, who have decentered the notion of homeland as the only source of national identity which then has implications for their greater subjectivity in terms of identity, belonging, and transnational practices.

3 A few Chinese have dual citizenship with Portugal and the United Kingdom due to the historical circumstances of colonial Macau and Hong Kong.