Throughout history, overseas Chinese have represented a classic diasporic community whose historical migration has often involved a deliberate political break from their ethnic motherland. However, due to their cultural and economic ties with China as well as a long-lasting overseas Chinese nationalist discourse, overseas Chinese have always remained a unique force, directly and indirectly influencing the political, economic and social development in their ethnic motherland. The scope and scale of their influence have constantly ebbed, flowed and morphed since the second half of the 19th century, when Chinese mass emigration started. To a great extent, the history of Chinese mass emigration has been inseparable from China's political, economic and social development during the last 200 years. Compared to the study of Jewish or European diasporas, for example, there is insufficient research into the impacts of the Chinese diaspora on China. Shelly Chan's Diaspora's Homeland makes a good contribution to our knowledge of, and future discussion on, this important subject. In her innovative quest for a historical analysis of how the mass migration of more than 20 million Chinese during the 19th and 20th centuries influenced their ethnic motherland's politics, economy and culture, Chan provides us with myriad historical and conceptual narratives to understand the role of overseas Chinese.
Chan develops and applies the concept of “diaspora moments” to analyse interactions between the Chinese diaspora and their motherland in the era of modern China. According to her, “diaspora time” represents the diverse, ongoing ways in which migration affects the lifeworlds of individuals, families and communities, and a “diaspora moment” can erupt and recur when diaspora time interacts with other temporalities and produces unexpectedly wide reverberations. Among numerous “diaspora moments” in China's modern history, Chan selects five as case studies to reveal the connective tension between overseas Chinese migration histories and their ethnic motherland's national history. First, Chan analyses the influence of the “coolie trade” on the expansion of the Qing court's diplomacy and its growing political attention toward the emerging Chinese diaspora. Second, Chan investigates how the research output of a special group of Chinese scholars transformed modern China's worldviews and brought about a new area in the study of Chinese history. Third, Chan utilizes Lim Boon Keng's personal reckoning of Confucian revivalism to explore the reflections of early 20th-century Chinese intellectuals on China's traditional culture. Fourth, Chan discusses how the negative impacts of the Communist government's land and marriage reforms on transnational families in south China led to a rare self-reckoning from Beijing in the 1950s regarding its flawed policy. Focusing on her last chosen “diaspora moment,” Chan explores how the Communist government failed to understand the complicated identities of returned Chinese and to formulate successful reintegration policies for the resettlement of returned Chinese in the Mao era.
Besides her diverse case studies, which provide a broad historical overview of the Chinese diaspora from a new perspective, Chan's reconceptualization of diaspora can be particularly useful to understand the diaspora's participation in their ethnic motherland's politics in the contemporary era. The accelerated steps of international migration, the global spread of information and communication technologies, and continuous democratization around the world have propelled a globalization of the domestic politics of many states which is similar to the globalization of national economies. In the case of the Chinese diaspora, the rapid, unceasing flow of “new immigrants” in recent decades and the evolving sensibilities of foreign-born, second- and third-generation Chinese are transforming the internal structure of the Chinese diaspora and redefining its political, economic and cultural identities. Unlike earlier generations of Chinese emigrants, the contemporary Chinese diaspora have carved out new transnational identities thanks to their better education and technological know-how, flourishing overseas investment and employment, and enthusiastic embrace of multiculturalism and political pluralism. Therefore, it is always challenging to comprehend the relationship between the contemporary Chinese diaspora and their ethnic motherland. Chan's concept of “diaspora moments” and her argument that China as a homeland and its emigrants as a diaspora are mutually constitutive have provided new conceptual and analytical approaches to explore how members of the contemporary Chinese diaspora have interacted with their ethnic motherland in the age of accelerated global migration.
It remains to be seen if Chan's new concept of “diaspora moments” – a series of recurring disjunctions in which migrant temporalities come into tension with local, national and global ones – will be widely adopted in future research on Chinese and global diasporas. However, Chan's book definitely broadens and deepens our comprehension and shows that the history of the Chinese diaspora is an integral part of global history and that international migration has had impact on China as a nation-state within the international system. With its innovative conceptualization, meticulous research and insightful narratives, Diaspora's Homeland is a must-read for those who are interested in the study of both Chinese and global diasporas. It is also an excellent textbook for China-related graduate courses in the disciplines of history, political science and international studies.
