Contenu du sommaire : Engendering Transnational Space: China as a High-capacity Diaspora State and Chinese Diasporic Populations

The article examines recent transformations in diaspora governance at the local level, particularly the new, more integrated approach towards emigrated Chinese developed in places with longstanding and strong emigration movements. These places, known as “hometowns of Overseas Chinese” or qiaoxiang, have been actively reaching out to their expatriates for decades, but the initiatives and strategies for reaching out have changed recently due to central government policies, increased return migration, and the widespread use of information and communications technologies. Based on the case study of Qingtian County in the eastern province of Zhejiang, the paper examines different ways in which local government is reaching out to its members abroad, focusing on activities in the area of legal affairs and public administration, investments, digital transformation, public diplomacy, local urban restructuring, and response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings reveal innovation and experimentation at the local level rather than the passive implementation of central policies, and point to the need for further unpacking of the role of the state in diaspora engagement.

In the last two decades, local Chinese governments have become involved in the foundation of “new migrant” voluntary organisations abroad, which have increasingly served economic and diplomatic goals. Using the case study of the establishment of the federation-style New Overseas Chinese and Ethnic Chinese Association in Japan (NOCECAJ) in 2003, this article argues that the main new organisations in Japan have specifically supported regional talent recruitment in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and public diplomacy goals and, more recently, the agenda of the “serving” and “caring” Chinese state. Because of the troubled history of Sino-Japanese relations, these organisations have furthermore worked for the betterment of bilateral relations. This article makes the case that, despite unification and co-optation efforts, the expansion of the immersion of local governments and diaspora engagement offices at provincial and city levels urges us to disaggregate the “diaspora state” in favour of an intricate and shifting set of interactions between a wide range of diasporic actors at multiple levels. Moving beyond both “state-led transnationalism” and “networked governance,” it hence posits that “assemblage” as an approach can better help us grasp the convolutions of Chinese diaspora engagement in the twenty-first century.

This paper examines the notions, politics, and practice of care that have characterised the transnational Chinese state during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on policy and media analyses, participant observation, and qualitative interviews with 21 Chinese people in the Netherlands, the paper maps out three care circuits: from the diaspora to China, from China to the diaspora, and from China to the world. The findings show how the pandemic has offered a stage for emotional ties, patriotism, and moral responsibility to be played out, cultivated, and contested. These in turn have an impact on the economic and political agendas of the transnational Chinese state.

This paper explores how the Art-Tune Records Company (Yisheng changpian gongsi 藝聲唱片公司), a Hong Kong-based private corporation and a shadow agent of the People's Republic of China (PRC)'s China Records Factory, fostered the circulation of Chinese music to Hong Kong and Overseas Chinese audiences in the 1950s and 1960s. Against the colonial government's political censorship and US-imposed sanctions on the PRC, Art-Tune sought to remaster and reproduce the recordings of China Records Factory by deploying tactics of depoliticisation and underscoring Chineseness. It also delivered gramophone music with multiregional and multilingual versions to foster listeners' emotional sympathy with cultural China and the new PRC regime. The successful migration of PRC music abroad contributed to dynamic intermedia practice with the reformulation of socialist Chinese music into Hong Kong martial arts movies. The paper discusses how socialist music was transformed from a propaganda medium to Chinese symbols that appealed to diasporic Chinese across Cold War geopolitical divides.

In 2017, the Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission (MTAC) was disbanded after 68 years of operation on Taiwan, raising the question of how an anachronistic institution evolved as the Republic of China (ROC) underwent democratisation. Documentary analysis finds that until the end of military rule (1987), the MTAC retained a Han-chauvinist mission to civilise its “frontier” through development policy and reform. By the twenty-first century, rhetoric emphasising bilateral and international exchange emerged. However, MTAC literature continued to highlight the relatively higher status of Taiwanese development to that of Mongolia, even as espousal of political “Chineseness” had faded. As ROC statehood in the early twenty-first century has increasingly embraced Taiwanese “multiculturalism,” the history of the MTAC sheds light on a neglected but significant aspect of the evolution there of discourse on national identity.

Based on fieldwork at Xinjiang restaurants in Shanghai, this paper focuses on the social mechanism of the negotiation of food authenticity. Centring on how factors such as capital, ethnicity, and locality play out in defining and contesting the authenticity of “ethnic cuisine,” this research locates the rising Xinjiang food market in a broader context of migration, globalisation, and consumerism, and analyses an array of competing definitions about authenticity among the restaurant management, employees, and customers at the sites of production, presentation, and consumption. The trajectory of Xinjiang restaurants manifests the reproduction and transformation of cultural representations into potential economic value and unveils how conceptualisations of locality and ethnicity take on particular market‐driven forms. The contested claims over authentic Xinjiang food and the creation of authenticity in restaurants echo local people's imagination about Xinjiang, ethnic identity politics in China and the development of the market economy in relation to migration.