Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants

Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of China. While many of these faces of China’s globalization headed for the popular Western destinations of the United States, Australia and Canada, others have been lured by the booming Asian economies. Compared with pre-1949 Chinese migrants, most are wealthier, motivated by a variety of concerns beyond economic survival and loyal to the communist regime. The reception of new Chinese migrants, however, has been less than warm in some places. In Singapore, tensions between Singaporean-Chinese and new Chinese arrivals present a puzzle: why are there tensions between ethnic Chinese settlers and new Chinese arrivals despite similarities in phenotype, ancestry and customs? Drawing on rich empirical data from ethnography and digital ethnography, Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants investigates this puzzle and details how ethnic Chinese subjects negotiate their identities in an age of contemporary Chinese migration and China’s ascent.Contesting Chineseness fills a gap in existing scholarship in its combination of its principal subject matter (ethnic Chinese subjects’ imaginaries of ethnicity and the resulting tensions that reconfigure the host society), with innovations in approach (linking participants’ narratives with imaginaries), methods (traditional and digital ethnography) and transdisciplinarity (sociology, migration studies, cultural anthropology, human geography, race and ethnic studies, gender studies, Asian and Chinese studies).

Sylvia Ang is Alfred Deakin Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation (ADI), Deakin University. She was Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore from 2018 to 2020. Her research draws on her engagement with the superdiverse cities she has lived in (Singapore and Melbourne, Australia) to analyse migration and ethnic relations, class, gender and racism.