Author: Mette Thunø

Publisher: NIAS Press

Publishing Year: 2007

Call Number: DS732.B573

Description: Chinese migration has changed fundamentally in recent years. It no longer has the exceptional and ambivalent nature of earlier times when virtual slaves dreamed of returning home to China as rich men but instead settled in Chinatowns across the globe. An important factor is that China has changed, transformed by decades of economic liberalization and rapid economic growth. As such, most migrants – both women and men – now leave China for a more promising future and often find ways to bring their families with them. Chinese migration may be distinct but it is no longer exceptional.

Author: Elizabeth Sinn

Publisher: Hong Kong University Press

Publishing year: 1998

Call number: DS732.L349

Description:

This book is an anthology of select papers presented at ‘The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas: Comparative Perspectives’ Conference held from 19 to 21 December 1994.

The Hong Kong conference, however,  was more focused in terms of time, being the first international meeting of its kind to concentrate on the post-war period which had witnessed fundamental changes among Chinese outside China.

The majority were related to one of the five themes chosen for the conference: changing economic activities of Chinese overseas, national, international and transnational; migration patterns; political participation in host countries; popular culture and ethnicity; family structure and gender issues.

Author: Ien Ang

Publisher:Routledge

Publishing Year: 2001

Call Number: DS732.A581

Description: In this major new book, leading cultural thinker Ien Ang engages with urgent questions of identity in an age of globalization and diaspora. The starting-point for Ang’s discussion is the experience of visiting Taiwan. Ang, a person of Chinese descent, born in Indonesia and raised in the Netherlands, found herself “faced with an almost insurmountable difficulty”-surrounded by people who expected her to speak to them in Chinese. She wrties:’It was the beginning of an almost decade-long engagement with the predicaments of “Chineseness”in diaspora. In Taiwan I was different because I couldn’t speak Chinese; in the West I wa different because I looked Chinese.’

From this autobiographical beginning, And goes on to reflect upon tensions between ‘Asia’ and ‘the West’ at a national and global level, and to consider the disparate meanings of ‘Chineseness’ in the contemporary world. She offers a critique of the increasingly aggressive construction of a global Chineseness, and challenges Western tendencies to equate ‘Chinese’ with ‘Asian’ identity.