The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 10 | Issue 26 | Number 2 | Jun 17, 2012

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Becoming “Chinese”—But What “Chinese”?—in Southeast Asia　東南アジアでの「中国性」びいき−−その「中国性」の意味合い

Caroline S. Hau

Becoming “Chinese”—But What“Chinese”?—in Southeast Asia

Caroline S. Hau

Over the past three decades, it has become“chic”1 to be “Chinese” or to showcase one’s“Chinese” connections in Southeast Asia.Leaders ranging from President CorazonCojuangco Aquino of the Philippines to KingBhumibol Adulyadej, Prime Minister KukritPramoj , and Prime Minister ThaksinShinawatra of Thai land to PresidentAbdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia and PrimeMinister Abdullah Badawi of Malaysia haveproclaimed their Chinese ancestry. Since 2000,Chinese New Year (Imlek) has been officiallycelebrated in Indonesia, after decades of legalrestrictions governing access to economicopportunities and Chinese-language education,use of Chinese names, and public observance ofChinese customs and ceremonies.

Beyond elite and official pronouncements,popular culture has been instrumental indisseminating positive images of “Chinese” and“Chineseness.” In Thailand, for example, thehighly rated TV drama Lod Lai Mangkorn(Through the Dragon Design, 1992), adaptedfrom the novelistic saga of a penurious Chineseimmigrant turned multimillionaire and aired onthe state-run channel, has claimed theentrepreneurial virtues of “diligence, patience,self-reliance, discipline, determination,parsimony, self-denial, business acumen,friendship, family ties, honesty, shrewdness,[and] modesty” as “Chinese” and worthy ofemulat ion. 2 The crit ical acclaim andcommercial success of another rags-to-riches

epic from the Philippines, Mano Po (I Kiss YourHand, 2002), spawned five eponymous“sequels.”3 In Indonesia, the biopic Gie (2005)sets out to challenge the stereotype of the“Chinese” as “material man,” communist, anddictator’s crony by focusing on legendaryactivist Soe Hok Gie. In Malaysia, the award-winning Sepet (Slit-eyes, 2005) reflects on thevicissitudes of official multiracialism throughthe story of a well-to-do Malay girl whosepassion for East Asian pop culture leads her tobefriend, and fall in love with, a working-classChinese boy who sells pirated Video CompactDiscs.

The term “re-Sinicization” (or “resinification”)has been applied to the revival of hithertod e v a l u e d , o c c l u d e d , o r r e p r e s s e d“Chineseness,” and more generally to thephenomenon of increasing visibi l i ty,acceptability, and self-assertiveness of ethnicChinese in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.4 Thephenomenon of “re-Sinicization” marks asignificant departure from an era in which“China” served as a model for the localizationof socialism and propagation of socialistrevolution in parts of Southeast Asia in the1950s and 1960s, and Southeast Asian“Chinese” were viewed and treated aseconomically dominant, culturally different,and politically disloyal Others to be “de-Sinicized” through nation-building discoursesand policies.

For want of a better word, the term “re-Sinicization” has served as an expedientsignpost for the variegated manifestations andrevaluations of such Chineseness. Its use doesnot s imply a f f i rm the convent iona l

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understanding of Sinicization as a unilinear,unidirectional, and foreordained process of“becoming Chinese” that radiates (or isexpected to increasingly radiate) outward frommainland China.5 Since the “Sinosphere”6 wasinhabited by different “Chinas” at differenttimes in history, the process of modern“Sinicization” cannot be analyzed in terms of aself-contained, autochthonous “China” or“Chinese” world, let alone “Chinese” identity.These “Chinas” were themselves products ofhybridization7 and acculturation born of theirintimate and sometimes contentious cultural,economic, and military contacts withpopulations across their western continentalfrontiers, most notably Mongols and Manchus,and with Southern Asia (India and SoutheastAsia) across their southern frontiers.8 ThisSinosphere began to break down in the mid-nineteenth century. In their modernarticulations, “China,” “Chinese,” and“Chineseness” are relational terms that, overthe past century and a half, point to a history ofconceptual disjunctions and distinctive patternsof hybridization arising from the hegemonicchallenges that the maritime powers of the“West” posed to the Sinocentric world. And inthat world, social, economic, cultural, andintellectual interactions among many differentsites were intense and largely enabled by theregional and global flows and movements ofcapital, people, goods, technologies, and ideaswithin and beyond the contexts of British and,later, American hegemony in East andSoutheast Asia.

Without discounting China’s contribution tomodern world-making9 over the past centuryand a half, this article complicates the idea of“Sinicization” as a mainland state-centered and-driven process of remaking the world (and theethnic Chinese outside its borders) in its ownimage. Instead, it proposes to understand“Sinicization” as a complex, historicallycontingent process entailing not just multipleactors and practices, but equally important,multiple sites from which they, over time, have

created, reinvented, and transformed receivedmeanings associated with “China,” “Chinese,”“Chineseness.” Sinicization cannot be studiedapart from the related concepts of re-Sinicization and de-Sinicization; takentogether, they can best be understood as acongeries of pressures and possibilities,constraints and opportunities for “becoming-Chinese” that are subject to centripetal andcentrifugal forces – as Wang Gungwu10 hasn o t e d f o r t h e c u l t u r a l c o n t e x t o fterritorialization and de/reterritorialization.11

One crucial implication is that in this process ofrecalibration no single institution or agent, noteven the putative superpower People’sRepublic of China, has so far been able todefinitively claim authority as the final culturalarbiter of what constitutes “Chinese” and“Chineseness” or even, for that matter,“China.”

Conceptual Disjunctions

From the mid-nineteenth century onwards,Qing China confronted a hegemonic challenge,not from across its continental borders to thewest, but from the maritime world to its east. Afar-reaching consequence of this period is thatthe genesis of the modern term Zhongguo =China and related signifiers such as Zhonghua= “Chinese” and “Chineseness” (a term forwhich there is no exact Chinese-languagee q u i v a l e n t ) i s c h a r a c t e r i z e d b yreterritorializing as well as deterritorializingimpulses that ar ise from conceptualdisjunctions in the Zhongguo = China equation.Ris ing nat ional is t sent iments made“Chinese/ness” an issue of paramountimportance for “China” in its multipled iscurs ive , terr i tor ia l , and reg imemanifestations, and for the so-called “Chinese”in Southeast Asia (the principal region ofimmigration from the mainland) and their hoststates and societies. This created multipledisjunctions between territory, nation, state,culture, and civilization – key concepts in thestudy of modern politics – in the signifiers

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“China” and “Chinese/ness.”

This is not to argue that the concepts ofterritory, nation, state, culture and civilizationlack any referent; on the contrary, modernChinese history is an account of the prodigioustime and energy expended, not to mention theblood-sweat-tears spilled, on determining,fixing, or challenging and changing the propercultural, political, territorial, and civilizationalreferents of “China”.12 The fact that “China”was and continues to be a floating signifier13 –that is, its referents are variable, sometimesindeterminate and unspecifiable – does not inany way suggest that “China” is purely adiscursive construction; it only means thatthere is an irreducibly discursive dimension tothe relationship of ethnic-“Chinese” with“China.” Taxonomic studies of ethnic “Chinese”political loyalty and orientations, and multiplemanifestations of “Chineseness,” can best beunderstood as attempts at making sense of themultiplicity of assertions, commitments,persuasions, declarations, and expressionsgenerated by the floating signifier “China.”They highlight the productive potential of thesignifier “China” to be made to mean and dosomething, conditioning practices and claimsmade in the name of “China” and “Chinese.”

Between the late nineteenth and the mid-twentieth century, there was a politicaldisjunction as various entities and movementsat various times – from late Qing provincial andcentral authorities, to reformers such as KangYouwei and Liang Qichao, to revolutionariessuch as Sun Yat-sen, and on to warlords, theKuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party– reached out to the “Chinese” in “China” aswell as Nanyang (Southeast Asia) andelsewhere.14 Motivated by imperatives ofmobilizing human, financial, and affectiveresources, each of these appeals to the“Chinese” accomplished two tasks. It drew onor tapped different wellsprings of attachmentto and identification with native place(s),ancestry, and origins; and it articulated

competing political visions of community,people, nation, and state. Political disjunctionmeant that there was no easy or necessary fitbetween nation and state.15 Different politicalmovements, whose activities and mobilizationsometimes took place outside of the territory of“China,” targeted specific “Chinese” localitiesand communities and competed to capture thestate and remake society in the image of theirvisions of the nation. “China”-drivenSinicization thus represents various attemptson the part of different “Chinese” regimes andactors to propound their notions of Chinesenessand mobilize “Chinese” capital, resources,labor, and specific talents/skills for economic,political, and cultural objectives inside andoutside the territorial boundaries of “China.”

Such attempts to reterritorialize the “Chinese”in Southeast Asia were in some wayssuccessful. They helped to create a newpolitical, and more importantly, mobilizableentity called the huaqiao, a term that came intogeneral use at the end of the nineteenthcentury but acquired its territorializingconnotations only at the beginning of thetwentieth.16 But these efforts often came upshort against competing deterritorializationsand reterritorializations of “Chinese” and“Chineseness” that had taken place for at leastthree centuries in the colonial states ofSoutheast Asia – especially the SpanishPhilippines, Dutch East Indies, British Malaya,and French Indochina. Their regimespromoted, cemented, and reinvented specificforms of “Chinese” identification and identitieswhile curtailing or repressing others.17

The “Chinese” had an important role in theWestern colonies established in Southeast Asia.They were crucial agents and mediators inSpanish, British, Dutch and French attempts toinsert themselves into, to regulate andrechannel, the flows and networks of theregional maritime trade between China and itsneighbors. Moreover, colonial states adopteddifferent policies toward the “Chinese” as part

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of the divide-and-conquer logic of governingtheir resident populations. These policies haddifferent consequences.

In the early years of colonial rule, for example,the Spanish in the Philippines relied on thecategory of mestizo (mixed blood) toadministratively distinguish the Philippine-bornoffspring of sangley (“Chinese”)-native unionsfrom their (China-born and Christianconverted) sangley fathers. Their access totheir fathers’ capital and their socialization intheir mothers’ native cultures made themestizos among the most socially mobile andhybrid strata of the colonial population.Acquiring economic clout by taking over thehitherto sangley-dominated trade during theprohibition of sangley immigration between1766 to 1850 , these mest i zos wereinstrumental in appropriating the term“Filipino” (a term originally denoting Spanishcreoles) and giving i t a national( ist)signification. But while this resignificationpromoted hybridity as a nationalist ideal, iteffectively occluded these mestizos’ “Chinese”ancestry and connections and codified the“Chinese” as Filipino nationalism’s Other. Thisdouble move helped to promote identificationwith “white” Europe and America.

Thailand exemplifies a different historicaltrajectory: at the turn of the twentieth century,cultural notions of Chineseness had been farless important in the eyes of the Chakri kingsthan the political fealty and economic utility ofthese “subjects” to the monarchical state. Thatpreeminent symbol of Chineseness, the pigtail,as Kasian Tejapira18 has argued, at firstsignified identification with the Qing empire.Later transformed into a marker of culturalnativism among the jeks, it was mainly viewedby the Thai state as a signifier for a specificadministrative category, a specific tax value,and opium addiction. Only later, when Chineserepublicanism came to be seen as a politicalthreat to the state, did the Thai monarchVajiravudh (Rama VI) actively propound a

racial conception of Thai-ness that was opposedto Chineseness.19 New urban middle classesemerged out of “state-centralized andsupervised national education system, togetherwith the rapid, state-planned, capitalisteconomic development”20 under Sarit Thanaratin 1961, and included a sizeable number oflookjin who were born and raised in Thailand,worked in the most advanced sectors of botheconomy and culture, possessed economic andconsumer clout, but remained outside the state.These lookjin became politicized and wereactive in both militant and peaceful socialmovements, including the October 14, 1973uprising, the communist armed struggle, andthe uprising of the May Democratic Movementof 1992. The end of the Thai Communistinsurgency (which, like its counterparts in thePhilippines and Malaya, had strong links withCommunist China), coupled with marketreforms in China, and Deng Xiaoping’s visit toThailand served to delink “Chineseness” fromits associations with political radicalism andnationalist Other.

Deng Xiaoping in audience with the Thaiking

In Indonesia and Malaysia, intermarriagesbetween Chinese and natives had produced astable “third culture” of peranakan and baba,

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whom Dutch and British colonial policiesclassified as “Chinese” and whom the colonialsystems of social hierarchy, privileges andincentives discouraged from assimilating intonative society. Fresh waves of migration fromChina in the late nineteenth century createdpressures to Sinicize on the part of the baba. Astheir political awakening preceded that of thesuccessful anti-Manchu revolution in China, theperanakan worked through their modernidentification as “Chinese” by means of activeparticipation in Indies politics.21 In the 1950sup to the mid-1960s (particularly 1963-1965),China and Indonesia under Soekarno’s GuidedDemocracy enjoyed close relations which led tothe coining of the term “Pyongyang-Beijing-Jakarta Axis”22. Suharto, however, viewedCommunist China as the major foreign threat tohis regime, and enacted a series of regulationsto place ethnic Chinese of both Chinese andIndonesian citizenship under surveillance andto forcibly integrate the “Chinese.”

The most salient feature of the colonialSoutheast Asian state’s treatment of the“Chinese” is the association of “Chinese” withcommerce and capital, an identification thatoriginated in the context of maritime trade andcolonial economic enterprise but glosses overthe existence of sizeable communities ofChinese laborers, especially in Malaysia. (TheQing and Nationalist states may have alsoreinforced this historical conflation of ethnicityand commerce/capital by treating the huaqiaoprimarily as sources of financial “contributions”to underwrite state- led projects andundertakings and as sources of remittances tohelp shore up the economy in China.) Suchidentification effectively conditioned thesocialization of “Chinese” migrants as “materialmen” who played an indispensable role in thecolonial and later post-colonial economies.Reproduced and perpetuated through socialrelations of production that were characteristicof “Chinese” enterprise in the region,23 thissocialization enabled the “Chinese” to takeadvantage of the opportunities that were

available in the colonial states and economies.But it also rendered them vulnerable tonationalist opprobrium that stigmatized “alienChinese” as economically dominant andpolitically unreliable. “Chinese” participation inthe national economies of Southeast Asia issignificant and visible enough to lend anecdotalcredence to the myth of “Chinese” economicdominance. This myth, however, is based onpopularly disseminated statistics which, asRupert Hodder shows, are often problematic intheir calculations, if not their assumptionsabout who counts as “Chinese” and whetherethnicity is an issue: Chinese constitute 10percent of the population of Thailand butallegedly command an 80 percent share of thecountry's market capital; in Indonesia, theshare of market capital of a mere 3.5 percent ofthe population is supposed to be 75 percent; inVietnam, 3 percent of the population isresponsible for 50 percent of Ho Chi Minh'smarket activity; and in Malaysia, theyconstitute about one third of the population,but have a 60- to 70 percent share of thecountry's market capital.24 The visibility andeconomic prominence of the “Chinese” madethem ready targets of nationalist policies aimedat disentangling the link between ethnicity andclass through domestication of “cultural”differences (via assimilation and integration)and redistribution of wealth.

Even though a combination of generationalchange and global/regional economicdevelopment has in recent decades producedsizeable urban professional middle classes thatinclude not only “Chinese” but also non-Chinese Southeast Asians, economicregionalization has further cemented thisidentification of “Chinese” with capital. Thecrucial difference is that in the throes ofeconomic and social transformation, post-colonial states and societies have generally re-valued the identification of Chinese with capitalin positive terms. This continuing identificationof Chinese with capital is the source of“Chinese” assertive self-empowerment but also

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of continuing vulnerability to popular-nationalist ressentiment in contemporarySoutheast Asia. Oscillating between these twopoles, popular media portray Chinese as“heroes” of regional economic developmentand “villains” in times of economic crisis (andeasy targets of violence, as in the case ofChinese Indonesians during the Asian crisis of1997-8).

What constitutes “Chinese” culture in themodernist sense of the term is continuallyenriched by the development of hybrid“Chinese” cultures that owe a great deal to thelocal histories of settlement and culturalcontacts in social spaces both within andoutside the purview of the mainland state. Thepoliticized huaqiao nationalism among“Chinese” immigrants and their descendants inSoutheast As ia and e lsewhere was a“peripheral” sort that was dependent andconditional on developments and contestationson the mainland. Physical and psychologicaldistance from China gave it leeway to define itsvarious “Chinese” cultures according to thepressures operating and opportunities open inthe countries of residence.25 At the same time,huaqiao activities had an impact on themainland. Overseas Chinese support for thenationalist movement led Sun Yat-sen to callthe huaqiao the “mother of revolution” (gemingzhi mu).

Southeast Asian Chinese provided substantialfinancial support for “national salvation”activities against the Japanese in the 1930s and1940s. Moreover, in the decades since the re-opening of China, in deeply interactiveprocesses, investment by ethnic Chinese fromHong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Americaand elsewhere has been crucial to theeconomic modernization of the mainland.26 Inthe past decade, mainland China has emergedas the dominant trading partner of countries inSoutheast Asia and East Asia more generally. Itis Malaysia’s biggest trading partner,Thailand’s second largest trading partner, andthe Philippines’ third largest trading partner,with ASEAN being projected to become China’slargest trading partner by 2015.27 China’sdeepening economic integration through tradeand investment in the region we now call EastAsia and its Pacific partners (notably Americaand Canada) is also crucially mediated byethnic Chinese living and working in and acrossthe region.

To complicate the issue, during the first half ofthe twentieth century the mainland “Chinese”state was not unitary, weakened as it had beenduring the late Qing and the Republican years.In the twentieth century, the threat ofdismemberment and secession loomed large asChina was subject to decentralized rule bycompeting warlords, occupation by imperialJapan, and a civil war between the KMT andCCP. The enduring myth of historical continuitythat rests on the ideal of a unitary state28 beliesthe reality of fragmentation of power andauthority, with the state(s) serving as object(s)of intense competition among different forces.Another disjunction arises from the modernstate’s fraught and contested inheritance of theterritorial boundaries established by the Qing(with precedents in boundaries set by theMongols and claimed by the Ming). “China”’sinternal division was not the only significantdisjunction. Equally important was the physicalfragmentation around the edges of the Qingempire, particularly the loss of Hong Kong to

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the British and Taiwan to the Japanese. Thesegeopolitical “splits” were to have crucialconsequences during the Cold War era, whenthe mainland was “closed” to the American-dominated “Free Asia,” and Taiwan and HongKong emerged as interlinked (but notnecessari ly overlapping) purveyors,respectively, of state-authorized and market-driven “Chinese” culture and “Chineseness”through the circulation of media and popularculture. In the post-Cold War era, the status ofTaiwan remains a flashpoint as mainlandChina’s integration into (and increasingimportance in) the “East Asian” trade systemhas proceeded alongside its continuingexclusion from the hub-and-spokes securityframework.

On the international front, Taiwan andMainland China competed, with varyingdegrees of success, for the attention andsupport (if not loyalty) of overseas Chineseduring the Cold War era.29 (This does not mean,however, that these geopolitical sites ofChinese representations and contestationswere totally discrete and mutually exclusive.)The opening of China after 1978 has seenfurther deterritorialization through large-scalemigration from China as well as re-migration ofethnic Chinese from Northeast and SoutheastAsia to mainly English-speaking countries ofAmerica and the Commonwealth of Nations.Simultaneously, reterritorializations haveoccurred as the crisis of faith engendered bythe retreat of socialism and socialist thoughtcreated a vacuum filled by versions ofnationalist and Confucianist discoursespropounded by diverse states, markets,communities, and individuals inside and outsideChina.30 Various actors sought to fill the voidthrough literature, mass media such asnewspapers, films, and television shows, andcybermedia, as well as regime sponsorships ofConfucianism, Taiwanese cultural nationalism,and other undertakings.

“Sino-Japanese-English” Hybridization in

the Age of Collective Imperialism

Conceptual disjunction is not the onlycharacteristic feature of the modern term“China” and its attendant signifiers. A specificpattern of hybridization has also been crucial tothe emergence of modern “China” and itsculture and politics. It has long been acceptedthat cultural inflows traditionally enteredimperial China mainly through continental(particularly Inner) Asia and through theoverland routes that brought Buddhism fromIndia. Several times in its history, “China” wasruled by non-Han: the Mongols , whoincorporated China into the first world-empirein history; and the Manchus, who presided overa multi-ethnic empire and cemented theirlegitimacy among the Han Chinese byselectively Sinicizing themselves (without,however, completely erasing their ethnicidentification as Manchus) and acting asprincipal sponsors of state-propagatedConfucianism.31

Rather than its lack of interest in exporting itsinstitutions, social practices, and values,32

limits to the reach and might of the mainlandstate were instrumental in delineating itsrelations with neighbors to the east.33 Itsrelations with Korea and Vietnam, with whom itshared borders, were historically organized interms of a China-centered tributary system,periodically backed by military power, allowingfor a flexible range of appropriations of – andacculturat ion to – things Chinese byneighboring states.34 Even as Vietnam closelymodeled its institutions and practices afterChina, it actively engaged in a form ofappropriation that drew on “civilizational”notions shared among different polities in theEast Asian region while abstracting the termfor China from its geographical reference tothe mainland.35 This abstraction enabled theVietnamese court and scholar-officials toenthusiastically adopt Confucian institutionsand norms while simultaneously resistingpolitical domination by the mainland state.36

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Farther removed from China’s reach, somepolities in the region, such as Malaka andButuan, sent tributary missions to China tosecure economic benefits and accrue socialprestige, without adopting wholesale Chineseinstitutions and social practices.

The hybridization that arose during themaritime period from the collision betweenChina and the “West” entailed a differentcultural politics. The flows of people and modesof transmission of new political and culturalideas – as well as the new conceptions ofcommunity that entered and circulated inChina from the West – ran through pathwaysa n d n e t w o r k s c r e a t e d i n t h e E a s t .Consequently, the making of “China” in themodern period is crucially mediated by twonon-Chinese communicative spheres, Japaneseand English (both British and American), whichwere created by the regional system in the Eastin which Britain, Japan, and the US competedfor dominance. Between the late nineteenthcentury and the 1930s, the formation of anEast-based system of collective imperialismlinked the territories and economies of China,Japan, and Southeast Asia, providing thebridges and avenues through which peoples,commodities, languages, and ideas moved intoChina.

This pattern of flows to, through, and fromChina is nested in a specific regional structureof power and wealth. Although western powersdominated the international order thatprovided the institutional framework for“forced free trade” in the region, the economicimpact of the West on China was confinedmainly to the littoral regions.37 It was intra-Asian trade, mediated by western collectiveimperialism, that penetrated China’shinterlands and connected China to the worldmarket. In this sense, the impact of the Westwas principally mediated through intra-Asianregional links and connections among China,Japan, and the various colonies in SoutheastAsia. Chinese merchants and the development

of colonial economies, underpinned in part byChinese labor, played a crucial role in thisconnecting process.38 This regional system,rather than the “West” per se, played a centralpart in China- and world-making. In its culturalmatrix, Japanese was an important linguisticmode of transmission of western concepts,while English served as the de facto regionaland commercial lingua franca.

The relationship between China and the so-called “West” was crucially mediated by thereconfigured relationship between China andJapan. Japan’s victory over Qing China in theSino-Japanese War of 1894-5 was a spectacularreversal of traditional China-to-Japanunidirectional cultural flows.

Nakamura Shuko depicts Japanese navalvictory off Haiyang Island, October 1894.

From the final years of the nineteenth centuryto the first half of the twentieth, the number ofChinese students who received their educationin Japan surpassed the combined numbers oftheir compatriots in Europe and America.39

These Chinese ryugakusei/liuxuesheng werekey agents in the “translingual practices” (touse Lydia Liu’s term) that decisively shaped thevery terms by which, for intellectual andpolitical purposes, the “West” was discursivelyconstructed and deployed in a China-Westbinary.40 Through these practices, basicvocabulary such as politics (zhengzhi),economics (jingji), and culture (wenhua)entered the Chinese lexicon and circulated inChina through “Sino-Japanese-English”

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translations in which not only Japan-educatedChinese and Japanese, but also westernmissionaries, played important roles.41 Morethan half of the loan words in the Chineselanguage are from Japanese;42 one Chinesescholar has gone so far as to argue that 70 percent of the modern terms regularly used in thesocial sciences and humanities are importedfrom Japanese.43 Some of these Japanese termswere neologisms first coined by westernmissionaries and subsequently re-imported toChina via Japanese texts. Others were eitherneologisms rendered in kanji (Chinesecharacter) form by the Japanese, or oldclassical kanji/Chinese terms that wereassigned new and modern meanings by theJapanese, and then re-imported into China.

An early political form taken by thesetranslingual practices was Asianism, for whichTokyo/Yokohama served as the main hub, withsmaller hubs in San Francisco, Singapore,Siam, and Hong Kong. Here, a kind of Sino-Japanese kanji/hanyu communicative spherehelped create a network that linked, atdifferent times, personalities such as KimOkgyun of Korea, Inukai Tsuyoshi and MiyazakiToten of Japan, Sun-Yat-sen of China, and PhanBoi Chau of Vietnam.44 But it is also instructiveto note that English became the second linguafranca of this Asianist network, connectingSuehiro Tetcho to Jose Rizal, and Sun Yat-senand An Kyong-su to Mariano Ponce. Sun Yat-sen communicated with his Japanese friendsand allies through Chinese (often in brushconversations or bitan/hitsudan) as well asEnglish. He switched completely to Englishwhen communicating with Filipino nationalistMariano Ponce, as did Japanese activists likeSuehiro Tetcho and Miyazaki Toten.

In fact, along with his connections with Japanand Korea through the medium of writtenChinese, Sun also exemplifies a specific kind of“modern Chinese” that first emerged in portcities such as Shanghai, Tientsin, Canton, andAmoy, as well as sites of Chinese immigration

in Southeast Asia and America. The “Anglo-Chinese” (to use a term by Takashi Shiraishi45)were part of the British formal and commercialempire in the region in the nineteenthcentury.46 In Hong Kong and Southeast Asia,Anglo-Chinese – who, along with a smallernumber of their Japanese counterparts, wereoften educated by Christian missionaries –staffed the bureaucracy and constituted thenascent middle classes of professionals (suchas doctors) and scions of Chinese merchants.Educated in both Chinese and English andsometimes only in English, and interpellated as“Chinese” by the colonial policies of theirrespective domiciles, these Anglo-Chinese wereproficient in local and colonial languages suchas Cantonese, Hokkien, Malay, Javanese,Tagalog, Dutch, Portuguese, and French. Theirmulti l ingualism (and especially theirproficiency in English, the commercial regionallingua franca) gave them the cultural resourcesto move across social and linguistic hierarchiesin their polyglot colonial societies and beyond.47

These multicultural/hybrid Chinese include thePenang (Malaysia)-born Lim Boon Keng (LinWenqing, 1869-1957), a doctor by professionwho was educated in Edinburgh. He was anassociate of Sun Yat-sen and later president ofXiamen (Amoy) University, and a key figure inthe propagation of Confucianism in Singapore,Malaya, and the Dutch East Indies.

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Lim Boon Keng

Spurred by his exposure to English texts onChina and Chinese classics, and the colonialdispensation that labeled him “Chinese,” hisattempt at creating a “modern Chineseidentity” entailed the elevation of Confucianismto a national as well as a universal philosophyand religion comparable to, and on a par with,Christianity.4 8 His idea of an emergentChineseness was not rooted in outward orphysical signs of Chineseness (for example,costume or hairstyle), but rather in a personalcode or morality that prepared the Chinese forprogress. At the same time, as Wang Gungwuhas pointed out, Lim’s advocacy of Confucianeducation was complemented by his support fora modern curriculum that included theteaching of science. Famously delivered inEnglish at his presidential address at XiamenUniversity49 on 3 October 1926, his vision ofrevivified Confucian teachings for the present

time offered a distinctive platform formodernization in China. Despite differingsharply from the anti-tradition Chinesemodernity envisioned by the Sino-Japanesehybrid Lu Xun, it was in all respects as modernas Lu’s.50

Two other exemplary Anglo-Chinese fromopposite ends of the political spectrum areconservative Ku Hung-ming (Gu Hongming,1857-1928) and May 4th activist Lee Teng Hwee(Li Denghui, 1872-1947).

Gu Hongming

Like Lim Boon Keng, Ku Hung-ming was bornin Penang and educated in Edinburgh, but healso studied in Leipzig and Paris. Fluent inEnglish, Chinese, French, and German, amongother languages, he translated Confucian andother classic texts into English, worked for the

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Qing government, and advocated a form oforthodox Confucianism that, counterposed toEuropean civilization, proved to be unpopulareven among Chinese.51 Lee was born nearBatavia (now Jakarta, Indonesia) and educatedat the Anglo-Chinese School in Singapore andYale University in the US. He founded the YaleInstitute, taught at the Tiong Hwa Hwee Koanin Batavia, and later became the first presidentof Fudan University in Shanghai.52

The impact of political Asianism was limitedand eventually curtailed by Japaneseimperialism. It spurred the development ofChinese nationalism by providing Chinesenationalists with an identifiable enemy againstwhich the Chinese people could be mobilized.Sino-Japanese-English translingual practicesarguably had a far wider influence especiallyon Chinese culture, politics, and militaryorganization.53 Such translingual practicestransformed Chinese institutions and practices,bearing out the discursive and dispositionalaspects of Sinicization. Their political impact isreadily apparent in the crucial role they playedin the introduction of socialist thought intoChina, via translation from Japanese. IshikawaYoshihiko’s54 study reveals that, between 1919and 1921, 13 out of 18 Chinese translations oftexts by Marx and Engels, as well as otherMarxist figures – including The CommunistManifesto – were based on Japanesetranslations. Writings by Japanese anarchistsand Marxists such as Kotoku Shusui, OsugiSakae, and Kawakami Hajime also were read inChina, Korea, and Vietnam, and influenced thedevelopment of socialism in these countries.55

Where political surveillance of and crackdownsagainst Bolshevism restricted its transmissionfrom Japan to China, Bolshevist thought,including its visual imagery, entered China viatranslations from English (many of thempublished in America) through the treaty portof Shanghai. Shanghai itself is a spatialrepresentation of this Sino-Japanese-Englishhybridization: the British provided the policingand administration; the Japanese constituted

the largest foreign contingent; and the grayzones created by the administrativelysegmented International Settlements enablednationalists and communists from Asia andbeyond to flourish, allowing figures such as TanMalaka, Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh), HilaireNou lens , and Agnes Smed ley (whocommunicated with each other in English, alingua franca of the Comintern) to meet,mingle, and organize their respective politicalprojects in the name of the nation andinternational solidarity.

Beyond mainland China, the Sino-Japanese-English cultural nexus was an enabling groundnot only for the revolutionary movement in thePhilippines, but also for the political awakeningof the Indies Chinese, whose activities wouldprovide models and inspiration for Indonesiannationalist activism. Tiong Hwa Hwee Koan,the first social and educational associationestablished in 1900, recruited staff fromChinese ryugakusei in Japan to teach not onlyChinese but also English.56 Its textbooks, whichwere published in Japan and later in Shanghai,had originally been designed for use by Chinesestudents in a Yokohama school run by aYokohama Chinese; that school’s opening hadbeen graced by Sun Yat-sen and InukaiTsuyoshi.57 The Indonesian writer PramoedyaAnanta Toer would memorialize the Chineseinfluence on Indonesian nationalism throughthe revolutionary Khouw Ah Soe – a graduate ofan English-language high school in Shanghai.Although Soe does not publicly acknowledgethis, he had in fact lived for some years inJapan before being sent to do politicalorganizing among the Indies Chinese. In AnakSemua Bangsa (Child of All Nations, 1980),58

the protagonist Minke learns from Soe aboutanticolonial struggles in the Philippines andChina. In a little over one generation, thispolitical awakening and educational trendwould produce Anglo-Chinese Indonesians suchas Njoo Cheong Seng (1902-62), whose popularGagaklodra series of martial-arts fictionfeatures an eponymous half-Chinese, half-

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Javanese protagonist. Njoo typified a newgeneration of Indonesian Chinese who werecomfortable not only with Indonesian (andDutch), but learned some English as well. Inimagining an Indonesian nationalism that wasnot incompatible with Chinese patriotism, hedrew inspiration from both British andAmerican literary traditions and popularcultures (especially American comics andHollywood films).59

Thailand offers another interesting case study,of a different path of transmission of radicalnationalism through the regional circulation ofpeople and transmission of ideas. Communismcame to Thailand not from the West, but via theEast through Chinese and Vietnameseimmigrants. Considered part of the CommunistParty of Malaya, Thailand’s communist partywould in turn make Siam a strategic base and

hub for the establishment of communist cells inLaos and Cambodia by Ho Chi Minh.60 Althoughgifted Sino-Thais were able to obtain theireducation in England and, less frequently, inFrance, English education at the time waslimited to Thai aristocrats, bureaucrats, and thenascent middle class. Sino-Thais received theireducation in China or in nearby Straits Chineseschools. The bilingual Thai-born lookjin, whowere instrumental in translating socialist textsinto Thai, bonded with their Thai counterpartsin prison. During the American-led Cold Warperiod, they achieved proficiency in English,enabling them to work on translation alongwith Thai radicals. This pattern of increasingproficiency in the language of British and laterAmerican regional domination would be ofgreat consequence in the post-Cold War period.

The Rise of the Anglo-Chinese underAmerican Hegemony

Japan’s primacy as a translingual hub wasundermined by Japanese imperialism and itsfailed attempt to establish hegemony in theregion. After its defeat, Japan was incorporatedinto the American-led “Free Asia” through ahub-and-spokes regional security system(anchored in the US-Japan alliance andbilateral treaties between the US and itsSoutheast Asian allies) and a triangular tradesystem involving the US, Japan, and the rest of“Free Asia” that officially excluded CommunistChina.61

Of equal import was the fact that for the firstquarter century of this new regionalarrangement, ethnic Chinese migrants faced agreat deal of pressure from postcolonial nation-states in Southeast Asia to de-Sinicize. Thispressure reached its apotheosis in the anti-Chinese discrimination practiced in Indonesia,which actively sought to erase all visible (andauditory) signs of Chineseness. Along with thepostcolonial states in Malaysia and thePhilippines, Indonesia aimed to regulate if notrestrict the economic activities of ethnic

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Chinese through economic nationalism andaffirmative-action programs favoringbumiputera (“sons of the soil”). While these de-Sinicizing policies and the absence of directcontact with mainland China succeeded innationalizing the Chinese minority, erasingChineseness by granting the ChineseIndonesian a form of second-class citizenshipironically reinforced and perpetuated thetreatment of the ethnic Chinese as “alien”nationals.62 The situation of the Chinese in thePhilippines, however, shows how changingdiplomatic and economic imperatives led toshifts in state policies, as the re-establishmentof diplomatic relations between the Philippinesand China in 1975 paved the way for the massgranting of Filipino citizenship to largenumbers of Chinese. The hitherto alienChinese, through college education, weredrawn into closer and more frequent socialcontact with Filipinos and came to identifythemselves as “Filipino,” thus facilitating theirincorporation into both the national imaginaryand the body politic.

State-driven attempts at de-Sinicizing theChinese and more recent market-driven re-Sinicization of the Chinese occurred with novelforms of hybridization. Anglophone educationin the region and abroad and the acquisition oflinguistic proficiency in English (or moreaccurately, englishes) became a widespreadphenomenon that reached beyond the elitesand professionals and scions of rich merchantsof the earlier period to encompass the growingmiddle classes and urban populations. Thishybridization also involves nationalization thatincorporates elements and languages ofSoutheast Asia’s indigenous cultures. Theproduct and agent of this process is the “Anglo-Chinese” (and, in the case of the SoutheastAsian Chinese, “Anglo-Chinese-Indonesian,”and so on). The term “Anglo-Chinese” wasoriginally applied to schools (sometimeswestern missionary-run) where sons (and laterdaughters) of ethnic-Chinese businessmenreceived the kind of education that prepared

them for business and/or professional careers.A version of the Confucian classics was taughtin Chinese (Guoyu), alongside English andpractical subjects such as accounting. Such“hybrid” schools were established in theNanyang territories (mainly in the Britishcolonies of Singapore and Malaya, but also inIndonesia and the Philippines), and in the portcities of Hong Kong, Tientsin, Canton, Amoy,and Shanghai; some of their graduates went onto pursue higher education either in China or,more commonly, in England and America.

A term that originated in the maritime-Asianworld under British hegemony can thus befruitfully applied to the contemporary regionalcontext of the East Asian hybridization ofChinese under American hegemony. Thecrucial linguistic continuity from British toAmerican English marked the transition fromBritish to American hegemony and promotedthe use of English as a regional and commerciall ingua franca. What fol lowed was thewidespread dissemination of Hollywood filmsand, eventually, the Americanization ofbureaucratic elites and professional middle-classes and their worldviews. Like theirforefathers in this region, the Anglo-Chinesetend to have the following characteristics: theyare at least bilingual (with English as one oftheir major languages); they received awestern-style education (which normallyincludes secondary, tertiary or graduateeducation in America or Britain);63 they havesome grounding in the school systems in theirrespective countries and intend to educatetheir children in the same way; they are well-versed in “international” (mainly Anglo-American) business norms and values; and theyhave relied on their hybrid skills (whetherlinguistic or cultural) and connections to enterbusiness and work as entrepreneurs andprofessionals . One can also speak ofcomparable processes of Anglo-Japanization ofJapanese, Anglo-Koreanization of Koreans,Anglo-Sinicization of Taiwanese, andcomparable phenomena among segments of

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Southeast Asian middle and upper classes.

Far removed from the context of anti-imperialist nationalism that was the engine of“China”-driven Sinicization in the first half ofthe twentieth century, “re-Sinicization” is todaymore a component of , rather than analternative to, ethnic Chinese Anglo-Sinicization. Now primarily market-driven, it ispropelled as much by economic incentives forlearning Mandarin Chinese and seeking jobs ina rapidly growing China and East Asian regionas by the desire to learn about “Chinese”culture in a more hospitable politicalenvironment. Wang Gungwu64 calls this the newhuaqiao syndrome, in which the mainlandChinese nation state is an increasinglyimportant, but by no means the only, source ofeconomic opportunit ies and culturalidentification and validation. This process mayentail a form of Sinicization that involves theM a n d a r i n i z a t i o n o f e r s t w h i l eprovincialized/localized huaqiao identities, asthe pressures and incentives among Anglo-Chinese to learn putonghua (as well as thesimplified Chinese script) increase with China’seconomic rise. But it is not likely to happen atthe expense of ongoing Anglo-hybridization,and may very well complement it. Moreover,the process of selective Anglo-hybridizationinvolves not only ethnic Chinese, but also non-Chinese Southeast Asian elites and middleclasses. It prepares the ground for the creationof an encompassing and inclusive culturalframe of reference and communicative meetingground for interaction among the SoutheastAsian middle and upper classes, and betweenthese classes and their counterparts in otherareas of the world. Along with fellow Anglo-hybrid elites in their respective countries,Anglo-Chinese parlay their proficiency in theglobal lingua franca and their familiarity withAnglo-American norms and codes into cultural,social, and material capital.

Ethnic Chinese were erstwhile subject topressures to declare loyalty to their respective

country of residence. During the Cold War,their lack of direct access to mainland Chinameant that the elder generation, whoconsidered themselves sojourners, could nolonger dream of returning to China. Theyounger generation grew up with the firmnotion that their home was in the Philippines,Thailand, or other parts of Southeast Asia.“China” remained for them a geographical andsymbolic marker whose image was nowmediated by Taiwan and Hong Kong in the formof f i lms, music, television programs,newspapers, and news reports. In the age ofcollective imperialism, and especially inconjunction with anti-Japanese nationalism, thiscondition of extended absence from themainland had already created the phenomenonof “abstract” or “taught” nationalism amongthe so-called huaqiao.65 In the 1930s to 1940s,this type of nationalism inspired some of themto return to China during the Sino-Japanesewar. In postcolonial Southeast Asia across theTaiwan straits, a bitter rivalry between twogovernments claiming to speak in the name of alegitimate “China” played out in Chinatownsacross Southeast Asia, America, and elsewhere.This, despite the fact that younger generations,increasingly rooted in their countries of birth,looked to Southeast Asia for their identities.Some chose assimilation. Others, stillidentifying themselves as Chinese, practiced aform of abstract nationalism that enabledidentification with (an often imaginary) “China”without necessarily supporting either themainland or the Taiwanese state.66

Moreover, Taiwan and especially Hong Kongemerged as hubs for the popular culturaldissemination of images of and knowledgeabout China, in the form of newspapers, books,movies, television shows, and pop music. Thisdevelopment was conditioned in large part bythe potentials and restrictions inherent in theregional system created in America’s “FreeAsia.” The example of Hong Kong cinema in thepostwar period is instructive of how conceptualdisjunction and historical hybridization

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influenced the development of the filmindustry. In the early postwar era, theproduction of Hong Kong films relied heavily onfinancing by overseas Chinese and pre-sellingto distributors in Southeast Asia. Replacingprewar Shanghai as the “Hollywood of theEast,” Hong Kong had a preeminently regionalcinema. Starting in the 1950s, during the ColdWar, Taiwan emerged as the Hong Kong filmindustry’s main market and a leading source ofnon-Hong Kong financing. Hong Kong’s abilityto capture the regional market of American-led“Free Asia” was made possible in part byTaiwan’s ruling Kuomintang Party. Byclassifying Hong Kong films as part of its“national cinema,” it promoted exchangesbetween Hong Kong and Taiwan (as well as“Free Asia” overseas Chinese communities).This made Hong Kong films eligible forconsideration by Taiwan’s film-awardingorganizations, and offered incentives for importand production of Mandarin-language filmsthrough subsidies and preferential taxation.67

The intensification of indigenous nationalism inSoutheast Asia in the late 1960s and 1970s hadan adverse impact by restricting the circulationof Hong Kong films as well as Southeast AsianChinese investment in the Hong Kong filmindustry. This led to a shift in focus fromserving émigré-community markets todeveloping domestic along with nationalmarkets in the region and beyond. Hong Kong’sregional émigré and overseas market in turndefined Hong Kong’s film tradition, genres, andconventions. Mandarin and other Sinophonefilms of the 1950s drew from the folk operatradition and prewar Shanghai film conventionsof featuring songs, historical themes andsettings, and love and martial arts genres68 –conventions on which even mainland Chinesefilmmakers had to draw during the past decadewhen, in collaboration with their Hong Kongand Taiwanese counterparts, they beganproducing films for the international market.

Through the “Free Asia” regional system, Japanalso became connected to Hong Kong and

Taiwan. In line with the Sino-Japanese-Englishhybridization of modern China, Shanghai’s filmstudios in the 1920s and 30s were modeled notonly after Hollywood, but also after Japan.69

The postwar period witnessed an increase inpopular culture flows from Japan (through film,music, manga, and anime) into Taiwan andHong Kong. Jidai-geki (pre-Meiji historicaldrama) films from Japan, for example, inspiredHong Kong filmmakers to create their ownswordplay movies. Taiwanese popular musichas historical roots in Japanese enka, withsuperstars such as Teresa Teng (Teng Li-chün,who has a huge fan base in China) cementingtheir domestic and international reputations bymaking it big in Japan, and going on to recordsongs not just in Mandarin, Cantonese,Japanese, and English, but also in Korean,Vietnamese, and Indonesian.

Teresa Teng’s fan base extended fromTaiwan to China, Hong Kong, Japan, Koreaand across Southeast Asia

Film technicians were trained in Japan, and

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Japanese talent was hired in Hong Kong. In theearly 1950s, Japanese filmmakers initiated theestablishment of the Southeast Asian MotionPicture Producers’ Association and theSoutheast Asian Film Festival. This move wouldeventually lead the expansion of a regionalfilm network under the designations of “Asia”and “Asia-Pacific.”70 Hong Kong films were shoton location in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia,South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines; co-productions and talent inflows were initiatedwith Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, andThailand;71 and from the 1970s onward, HongKong’s domestic as well as other nationalmarkets (rather than just émigré-communitymarkets) in Asia, America, and other areasbecame an important source of Hong Kong filmrevenues.

The reopening of China in the late 1970smarked the beginning of China’s economicreintegration with the regional system. HongK o n g , T a i w a n a n d e t h n i c C h i n e s eentrepreneurs, professionals, and companies inSoutheast Asia, America, and other regionsplayed an important role in this process. Insharp contrast, on questions of security, Chinaremains outside the US-led hub-and-spokessystem. A look at the cooperative andcollaborative connections and networks in andaround Hong Kong cinema reveals how thepatterns and densities of regional exchangeshave changed over time.72 Although China hadopened and embarked on reform, in the late1970s and early 1980s it was still in theprocess of being integrated into the regionalsystem. The integration of “Free Asia” wasalready very much in place, as illustrated bythe prominent presence of Taiwanese and theimportance of Southeast Asian financing anddistribution networks in Hong Kong films.Japanese inflows of money and talent peaked atthe height of Japan’s bubble years in the 1980s,when the country led the flying-geese patternof regional development. As China becamemore integrated into the regional system andemerged as the locomotive of regional

development after the Asian financial crisis of1997-8, mainland Chinese financing and talentinflows gained importance in Hong Kong films.Taiwanese actors/actresses have always formedan important contingent in Hong Kong films; inthe 1990s, mainland actors came to constitutean equally important group and overtook theirTaiwanese counterparts by the early 2000s.

Large-scale flows and exchanges between HongKong and China have resulted in a form of re-Sinicization, defined by Eric Ma as “therecollection, reinvention and rediscovery ofhistorical and cultural ties between Hong Kongand China.”73 Despite the rise of culturalnationalism that has sought to articulate auniquely Taiwanese national identity (entailinga reassessment of Japan’s role in Taiwan’smodernization), post-Cold War contacts anddeepening economic ties with the mainlandengendered a “Mainland Fever” in Taiwan thatwas fed by books, films, and music from andabout mainland China.74 In the meantime, the“porous” nature of the regional system hase n a b l e d p e o p l e a n d c a p i t a l t o g otransnational.75 This trend has become clearerin recent years through an increase in the“unclassifiability” of East Asians such as theactor Takeshi Kaneshiro. He holds a Japanesepassport, and his father is Japanese and motherTaiwanese. Conversant in Mandarin, Hokkien,Japanese, English, and Cantonese, he debutedas a singer under the Japanese name “Aniki”and gained fame first in Taiwan beforeappearing in Hong Kong and Japanese films.

The cultural impact of ongoing regionalizationis far less understood and remarked upon.Japanization, which reached its peak in the1980s and 90s as Japan-led economic growthplanted the seeds for regional economicintegration, has now been subsumed under abroader process of East Asian regionalism andregionalization that has created variegatedsources of cultural flows going well beyondJapan and Greater China. It is subject to novelrecombinations, as when increasing numbers of

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mainland Chinese students opt to study inJapan rather than in America, Taiwanesemanga artists begin publishing their works inJapan, mainland Chinese produce films usingEast Asian pop culture formats, Singaporeansfollow Hong Kong and Taiwanese fashiontrends, Filipinos fall in love with Taiwan’s pop-idol band F4 and Japanese with Koreanteledramas, and Koreans learn English in thePhilippines rather than in America or Britain.“Re-Sinicization” and Japanization are but twostreams of this multi-sited, uneven process ofhybridization.76

Some Implications of Multi-Sited“Chineseness”

The conceptual disjunctions and historicalhybridizations that make “China” a floatingsignifier create multiple meanings of andidentifications with “China,” “Chineseness,”and “Chinese culture/civilization.” In practice,no single political entity/regime embodies orexercises ultimate authority on “China,”“Chinese,” and “Chineseness.” Although itsimportance has greatly increased in economicand geopolitical terms, the mainland has so farnot emerged as the preeminent cultural arbiterof Chineseness. Indeed, China is distinguishedby a relative lack of soft power compared toAmerica.77 Nor have the economic rise of Chinaand the market-driven Mandarinization of“Chineseness” substantively reduced orsimplified the multi-sited claims and belongingsexercised by the ethnic “Chinese” in SoutheastAsia.

What we see, instead, are multiple instances ofcultural entrepreneurship that do notnecessarily affirm the primacy of mainlandChina as the cultural center and arbiter of(Mandarin) Chineseness. An example is theDragon Descendants Museum, locatednorthwest of Bangkok in Suphan Buri Province.

Dragon Descendants Museum

A brainchild of former Thai prime minister (andhimself Sino-Thai) Banharn Silpa-archa, themuseum was conceived to commemorate thetwentieth anniversary of the establishment ofdiplomatic relations between Thailand andChina. Launched in late 2008, its celebration of“5,000 years” of Chinese history illustrates justhow much ideas of China and Chineseness oweto the incorporation of a standardized versionof Chinese history, taught in Thai Chineseschools, into the narrative of “Chinese”contribution to the development of Thailand.More telling is its subscription to a version ofChinese history that is mediated by Taiwan’sand Hong Kong’s culture industries. Onestriking example of this Hong Kong/Taiwanpop-cultural mediation of Chineseness is theprominence accorded to the historical figure ofJudge Pao (Bao Zheng), whom Thais came toknow through the Taiwanese TV mini-seriesthat was a huge hit not only in Taiwan, but alsoin Hong Kong and mainland China.78 It was infact the enormous popularity of the Judge Paoseries among Thai viewers that madeChineseness “chic” in the 1990s. 7 9

Cultural entrepreneurs like Malaysia’s LillianToo (born in Penang) and Thailand’s ChitraKonuntakiet (born in Bangkok) have turnedChineseness into a profitable business venture.Lillian Too has built her career on a curriculum

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vitae that emphasizes her MBA from theHarvard Business School; her position as thefirst woman CEO from Malaysia to head apublicly listed company, the Hong Kong DaoHeng Bank; and her self-reinvention as founderof the World of Feng Shui. Her Web site sellsher English-language geomancy (fengshui)books, which target the “30 million English-speaking non-Chinese Asians” worldwide.80

Educated in an elite school in Thailand beforeobtaining her master’s degree in the UnitedStates, Thailand’s Chitra Konuntakiet overcameher experience of anti-Chinese racism in schoolby becoming a successful columnist, radiopersonality, and novelist.

Chitra Konuntakiet

Her books on Chinese culture (as filteredthrough her Teo-chiu upbringing) – ChineseKnowledge from the Old Man , ChineseChildren, Nine Philosophy Stories, and mostrecently the novel A-Pa – have sold more than600,000 copies to date.81 Both Lillian Too andChitra Konuntakiet propound notions ofChineseness that fall beyond the purview ofstate-sanctioned and mainland-originatingdiscourses: in the case of Lillian Too, throughaccess to a belief system that is not accordedofficial recognition in mainland China but ispart of folk beliefs and practices in Taiwan,Hong Kong, Chinatowns elsewhere, and

Mainland China; and in the case of ChitraKonuntakiet, through access to familialmemories and ideas of Chinese customs andpractices that were rooted primarily in herfather’s immigrant experience in Thailandrather than in received notions of Chinesenesspromoted by the mainland and Taiwan’s Chinascholarship.82

Enforced for much of the twentieth century bythe political turmoil on the mainland, “Chinese”migrants and their descendants’ experiences ofextended physical absence from their putativeplaces of “origin” have meant that politicalcontestation over the meanings of “China”extended across the mainland and intoNanyang and Hong Kong. Yet there wereimportant limits to the deterritorialization ofthese struggles, as illustrated by “the Chinafactor” in the Hong Kong riots of 1967coinciding with the Great Proletarian CulturalRevolution.83 Even when political and culturalmovements succeeded in capturing the state,their ability to use the state to propound theirvision of the “Chinese” nation remainsconstrained by the limited reach of the“Chinese” state. Through competing strategiesof territorialization, deterritorialization, andreterritorialization, authorities and institutionsimpose constraints on ethnic Chinese, withinboth Chinese and non-Chinese territories. Thespatial, political, cultural, and economicdisjunctions that inform the different processesof Sinicization have lent an irreducibly“imaginative” dimension to “Chinese”identification without predetermining thepractical consequences and outcomes of theseidentifications and projects.

Moreover, mainland China has not remainedimmune to the appeal of these different sourcesand centers of “Chineseness.”84 An importantexample of spirited debate on China’s identityin the post-Mao era was sparked by thecontroversial six-part TV documentary seriesHeshang (River Elegy, 1988), which relied onthe spatial metaphors of land-versus-sea to

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contrast the isolationism of so-called“traditional” “Chinese” culture, symbolized bythe Great Wall, with the openness of themaritime-world “blue” ocean into which theYellow River flows.85 Some enterprisingcompanies have embarked on making films, setin China, that showcase China’s regionalconnections and participation in shared urbanregional lifestyles. One example is thesuccessful mainland Chinese production of theEast Asian romantic comedy genre Lian Ai QianGui Ze (My Airline Hostess Roommate, 2009)which deals with a Beijing-based flightattendant who falls in love with her roommate,a Taiwanese visual artist who creates a cute catcharacter modeled after Japanese anime.Another example is the persistence andcontinuing popularity of the traditional Chinesescript, despite government attempts to imposeand propagate a simplified system; traditionalscript continues to proliferate in China via theInternet, overseas news media, movies, books,and even shop signs (despite governmentprohibition). Thus it retains its usefulness as ameans by which mainland Chinese cancommunicate with Taiwan and overseasChinese communit ies. 8 6 The Chinesegovernment is even promoting the productionof cartoon animation, drawing in part on thevisual language and conventions of Japaneseanime that were popularized through Taiwanand Hong Kong. One example of a successfulventure is Xi Yang Yang yu Hui Tai Lang(Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf), a televisioncartoon series produced by the Guangdong-based Creative Power Entertaining, whose2009 movie version broke box office records fora Chinese animated film.87 The cartoon series isnow aired in 13 Asian countries and regions.88

Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf

By erasing their revolutionary past and in itsplace highlighting local and regional identitiesthat carry traces of “traditional” or “folk”elements, and with the rise of regional/localidentities, China’s provinces in the hinterlandshave sought to transform themselves intorevenue-generating tourist attractions, thuschallenging the “ultrastable spatial identity ofChineseness.”89 Nor have coastal provincesbeen remiss in self-promotion. Tourist-servicecompanies in Xiamen, for example, have turnedhybridity into a cultural asset as a way ofattracting tourists from Taiwan, Hong Kong,and Southeast Asia, with which Xiamen hasclose historical connections. For example, atourist brochure put out by the Xiamen Min’nanTourism and Culture Industry Co. invokesinternational as well as local contexts topackage Xiamen’s attractions. Published inChinese, English, and Japanese, the brochurefeatures a series of stage shows that celebrate,

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through song and dance, the heritage of “MagicMin’nan” (Southern Min).9 0 Min’nan ispresented as a hybrid culture, a product of thehistorical position of Fujian as the “startingpoint” of the Maritime Silk Road, a “hotbed ofreform” that played an important role in thereopening of post-Maoist China, and a “pioneerin the Western littoral of the Taiwan Straits.”Alongside its ancient South China (Guyue)heritage, this brochure plays up Xiamen’sshared cultural links with Taiwan and InnerAsia and its free-port access to the “West” andthe world, thus laying simultaneous claim towestern-oriented modernity and classicalChinese civilization.

Moreover, the highlighting of a hybrid SouthChina culture with multiple traditions andconnections rewrites the narrative of Chinesecivilization, stressing its heterogeneity and, inparticular, the openness and hybridity of the“south” as opposed to the “north”.91 It affirmsan idea first propounded by Fu Ssu-nien (FuSinian) and Ku Chieh-kang (Gu Jiegang) in the1920s and 30s92 and revitalized during the pastthree decades by new archeological findingsthat prove the existence of a number ofregional cultures (other than the one along theYellow River in the Central Plains). Theseregional contacts formed a “core” which, by3000 BC, linked a geographic area consisting ofShaanxi-Shanxi-Henan, Shandong, Hubei,lower Yangzi, the southern region from Poyangto the Pearl River delta, and the northernregion by the Great Wal l that wouldsubsequently be called “China.”93 This idea ofmultiple sources and origins of Chinesecivilization decenters the traditional claim ofthe Yellow River as the cradle of Chinesecivilization without relinquishing altogether theidea of a civilizational “core.”

The centripetal and centrifugal forces ofterritorializing and de/reterritorializing Chinaand Chineseness thus define ethnic-Chineseattitudes and responses toward claims tocultural authenticity by mainland Chinese. The

outcry in Hong Kong and Guangzhou against aproposal by the Chinese People’s PoliticalConsultat ive Conference GuangzhouCommittee to increase the ratio of Mandarin-language to Cantonese content in GuangzhouTelevision’s programming – an attempt toproscribe Cantonese-language coverage of the2010 Asian Games – indicates that there arelimits to how much restriction mainlandauthorities can impose on the use of local“dialects.”94 Sometimes derided as “culturallyinferior” to their fellow “Chinese” on themainland, some Southeast Asian Chinese haveresponded by claiming access, via their ownlocal “Chinese” culture, to an authentic“ancient” China that survives throughcenturies-long, transplanted Chinese customsand rituals no longer practiced – or, for a time,proscribed by the government – in their placesof ancestral origins in mainland China.95

Negotiating between their self-identificationsas “overseas Chinese” (huaqiao) and “ethnicChinese” (huaren) has on occasion enabledSoutheast Asian Chinese to lay claim tospeaking, not in the name of China and Chineseunification, but as the voice of China itself. Thishappened, for example, in the coverage ofHong Kong’s turnover and the Taiwan Questionby the Malaysian Chinese newspaper Kwong-Wah Yit Poh.96 In other cases, the response maytake the form of a compensatory gesture ofdefensive ethnocentrism. An Internet documentcirculated by and addressed to the “49 millionHokkien-speakers” all over the world, forexample, valorizes the Minnan “dialect” as “theimperial language” of the Tang Dynasty and“the language of your ancestors.”97 Advocatinga Han-Sinocentric approach while denying theequation of Chineseness with the state-promoted national language, Mandarin, theanonymous author appeals to “all Mandarin-speaking friends out there – do not look downon your other Chinese friends who do not speakMandarin – whom you guys fondly refer to as‘Bananas.’ In fact, they are speaking alanguage which is much more ancient &linguistically complicated than Mandarin.”

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Mandarin is characterized as an alien tonguespoken by a non-Han minority, “a northernChinese dialect heavily influenced by non-HanChinese.” In attesting to its ancient Chineselineage, this argument is grounded in acomparison of vocabulary and pronunciation,not with other local Chinese “dialects” but withforeign languages such as Japanese and Koreanthat were part of the “Golden Age” of the TangChina-centered Sinosphere. Such an argumentconveniently overlooks the complex ways inwhich ethnic identity and differences wereconstructed during the Tang dynasty, and thefact that the ancestry, cultural practices, andgeographic focus of the Tang elites were inlarge part already oriented toward Inner Asiaand “barbarized” northern China.98 The aboveexample is revealing of “pressures” brought tobear on Southeast Asian Chinese to learn andspeak putonghua/Mandarin, when their“dialects” had long been the basis of their claimt o a C h i n e s e e t h n i c i d e n t i t y . T h i s“Mandarinization” of Hokkien-, Teochiu-, orCantonese-based “Chinese” identities, however,also const i tutes proof of an internalcontestation over what “Chinese” means, whocan claim Chineseness, who counts as Chinese,and who can “represent” it.

Multiple cultural sites and centers ofChineseness produce different, at timescompeting, visions of Chineseness. Twoopposing views are laid out in Shanghai-bornand Hong Kong-based director Wong Kar-wai’s2046 (2004) and mainland China-based ZhangYimou’s Hero (2002).

Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (2004)

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Zhang Yimou’s Hero (2002)

Set in 1960s Hong Kong, 2046 tells the story ofa young author of erotic newspaper serials.Among the women with whom this writer fallsin love is his landlord’s daughter, whom heeventually helps to reunite with her Japaneselover. In this movie, Wong not only imaginesthe possibil ity of a Japanese-Chineserapprochement, couched in the language ofromantic love and family reconciliation – avision that stands in stark contrast to theworsening of China-Japan relations owing toPrime Minister Koizumi’s 2001 and 2002 visitsto the Yasukuni Shrine. More important, he letshis characters speak to each other in thelanguage wi th wh ich they are mostcomfortable, even though Cantonese,Mandarin, and Japanese are in reality mutuallyunintelligible. The lingua franca is not found inthe movie, but rather on the movie, in the formof subtitles, the language of which varies fromone market or set of audiences to another. Inthis way, the film evades the politically charged

hierarchy of languages based on the assumedstandard set by Mandarin or Putonghua that isaudibly rendered in such films as Ang Lee’sCrouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2003) and,more problematically, Zhang Yimou’s Hero.

Writes critic and scholar Gina Marchetti,99

In Hero, mainland Chinese directorZhang Yimou also takes a chance,through his proxy Nameless (JetLi), that the world is ready for thereturn of the wandering hero.Nameless/Jet Li travels from thePRC to Hong Kong, to Hollywoodand back again to China. Hero alsorepatriates Hong Kong’s TonyLeung (as Broken Sword) andMaggie Cheung (as Flying Snow)as well as Chinese-AmericanDonnie Yen (as Sky) who sacrificethemselves to maintain theChinese nation-state. The diasporicChinese from the far edges of theworld symbolically capitulate tothe central authority of theE m p e r o r Q i n ( C h e nDaoming)/Beijing/the PRC/Chinesecinema.100

Conclusion

Scholars who look at China from a broader,international perspective have generally beenwary of subscribing to culturalist arguments.Wang Gungwu,101 for example, offers animportant refutation of cultural essentialistarguments about “Chinese” economic success.Such scholars have highlighted instead theimportance of the specific situatedness andlocations of the “Chinese” in China, SoutheastAsia, and beyond. Questions of “roots” and“routes”102 are of paramount concern and havereal consequences – including life-and-deathones – for the “Chinese” in Southeast Asia. Inmaking sense of the historical construction of

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“China,” “Chinese,” and “Chineseness,” in theirmodern articulations, their concern has been toemphasize the importance of both structureand agency.

Tu Wei Ming’s103 notion of symbolic universesthat make up “cultural China,” and JamieDavidson’s 1 0 4 attempt to explain therestructuring of Southeast Asian countries byeconomic globalization as a form of “Chinese-ization” or becoming “structurally Chinese” ofurban, middle-class, capitalist Southeast Asiansocieties, are useful reminders that assertingthe heterogeneity and historical variability of“becoming-Chinese” is the starting point, notthe concluding statement, of any inquiry intoquestions and issues of “China,” “Chinese,” and“Chineseness.” The propensity in overseasChinese studies for taxonomic essays thatclassify ethnic Chinese according to theirpolitical orientations and loyalty is both aninstructive symptom of the uneasy fit amongthe core concepts of territory, people, nation,culture, state, and civilization, and a valiantattempt to catalogue the various manifestationsof their critical disjunctions. “Transnational”approaches that purport to move beyond thestrictures of nation- and state-centered analysisto stress the “different ways of beingChinese” 1 0 5 or “deconstruct modernChineseness”106 offer nuanced case studies.Because they invoke “China” as a self-explanatory straw figure against whichtransnational or diasporic difference is thenasserted, however, they overlook the broaderimplications of critical disjunctions andhistorical hybridization. William Callahan’ssophisticated study of “Greater China” isrightly critical of binary thinking in China/Westand center/periphery studies, advocating “anunderstanding of China and civilization interms of popular sovereignty, heterotopia, andan open relation to Otherness.”1 0 7 YetCallahan’s analysis is marked by aporia withregard to Japan’s mediating role in “Chinese”modernity, be it historical or contemporary.This is apparent in his exclusion of Japan on

methodological grounds. Although for Callahanit “is very important to regional economics andis crucial to a geopolitical understanding ofEast Asia, it is not included here, since Japan isperipheral to the transnational relations andtheoretical challenges of Greater China.”108

The “problem of clarifying what ‘China’ is”109 ishardly novel. This article suggests that lookinginto the pressures and opportunities for“becoming Chinese” by colonial, “China”-driven, post-colonial (national), and market-driven processes of Sinicization in East Asia (aterm that now includes Southeast Asia) enablesus to specify not just individual differencesacross time and space, but just as importantly,identify patterns of differences that arehistorically identified and lived as “Chinese” inChina, Southeast Asia, and beyond. Among themost important of these patterns of differencesis the identification of “Chinese” withcommerce and capital in Southeast Asia; acomparable process happened also in HongKong and to the benshengren in Taiwan.Another pattern of difference is the regionalcirculation of socialist ideas and creation ofrevolutionary networks in Southeast Asia. Thehistorical incarnation of economic capital by“Chinese” bodies is a personification by whichcapital, and the “pragmatic” values, habits, andp r a c t i c e s a s s o c i a t e d w i t h i t , a r eactively/passively/forcibly incorporated byliving beings as “second nature.” This processcannot be understood apart from the culturalmatrices that embed two historical processes:Sino-Japanese-English hybridization after themiddle of the nineteenth century; and theAnglo-Sinicization, regionalization, andglobalization of the ethnic-“Chinese” in Chinaand Southeast Asia, especially in the secondhalf of the twentieth century.

Patterns of differences also account for thecomplexity and diversity of “Chinese”responses to, and perceptions, of power andauthority in China and elsewhere, which rangefrom enthusiastic accommodation with the

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mainland state on the part of so-called “RedCapitalist” taipans of Hong Kong, to militantchallenges against the colonial state posed bythe Communist guerrillas of Malaya, to hedgingby Chinese-Filipino businessmen whocontribute to the campaign coffers of allpres ident ia l candidates . “Chinese”identification with capital has meant a greaterawareness of and sensitivity to the arbitraryexactions of the state and the vicissitudes ofbusiness. Anglo-Chinese who are safelynationalized and whose citizenships are not inquestion are under less pressure to be“apolitical” compared to earlier generations of“overseas Chinese.” 1 1 0 Long distancenationalism, however, continues to shapeoverseas Chinese responses to mainland China.

The existence of multiple actors, acts, and sitesof Chineseness foregrounds the importance ofl i ved exper i ences i n comp l i ca t ingcommonsense notions of “Chinese” identity.Civilizational notions of “Chineseness” continueto be haunted by race, nation, and territory.Cultural, political, and circumstantial ideas of“Chineseness” are often articulated as Han-Chinese ethnic identity; and Han-Chinesenessas ethnic identity is, in turn, inflected bymodern ideas of race.111 Yet these ideas actuallyencompass older notions of patrilineal kinshipthat are concerned less with racial purity thanwith often mythical origins. The genealogy theyconstruct i s f lex ib le and capable o ftranscending place, disregarding physicalappearances, encompassing intermarriage andadoption, and incorporating diverse culturalpractices, including “non-Chinese” ones.112

Patrilineal kinship may be linked to theideology of “Confucian culturalism” and its(ethnocentric) claims to absorb “outsiders” andSinicize them. But as lived experience – anddespite the pressures exerted by colonial,“China”-driven, post-colonial and market-drivenSinicization – becoming Chinese is neitherpreorda ined nor un id i rec t i ona l o rassil imational.

Rather, Sinicization entails an interactive anddialogical process capable not just of blurringthe lines between “self” and “other,” but oftransforming them across territorial boundariesand civilizational divides. Viewed in theseterms, the phenomenon of “re-Sinicization”might be better understood not as recovery orrevival (implied by the prefix “re-”) of long-occluded Chineseness, but as a process of“becoming-Chinese” whose origins aretraceable neither to the “core” nor to the“periphery” of so-called “Cultural China,” butto the vicissitudes of the broader phenomena ofmulti-sited state-, colony- and nation-, region-,and world-making.

Contrary to the idea that mainland China iscurrently remaking the region and the world ini ts image, parts of mainland China –particularly its urban, middle-, and upper-classpopulations in the coastal areas – are actuallyundergoing a form of Anglo-Sinicization thatmakes specific groups and communities morelike the modern hybrid “Anglo-Chinese” thatemerged, in the course of 150 years, out ofEast Asia. These mainland Anglo-Chinese havemore in common – in terms of lifestyle,upbringing, education, mores, and values – withurban, educated, middle-class “East Asians”than with the rural and impoverished peopleswho remain rooted within China, East andespecially Southeast Asia, and beyond. Thisdoes not discount the possibility that mainlandChina’s political and economic dynamics overthe next few decades – especial ly i f aSinocentric order were actually to emerge anda power shift occur in China’s favor, changingthe rules and norms of doing business andpolitics, for example – might create pressuresand incentives toward Sinicization that will besubstantively different from the currentphenomenon of Anglo-Sinicization. Comparedto the processes discussed in this chapter, theevidence for this mainland-driven form ofbecoming-Chinese – such as the proliferation ofChinese newspapers using simplif iedcharacters among overseas Chinese

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communities, the popularity of mainlandChinese popular culture (particularly historicaldramas) among non-mainland Chinese migrantcommunities, de-Anglicization in Hong Kong113

– exists to some extent. But its capacity tosupplant other forms of becoming-Chineseremains debatable.114

We have sought to identify the broaderhistorical patterns of hybridization and analyzehow these patterns, arising from multiple sitesand sources of creating “differences” that arelived as “Chinese,” complicate the notion ofSinicization. The signifier “China” is theenabling as well as the delimiting condition of apolitics of identification , which is notnecessarily a politics of identity rooted in, asRey Chow115 has argued, the dominant myths ofconsanguinity and claims to ethnic onenessabout “China.” The challenge, then, is notsimply one of retailing the various discoursesabout “China” and attempts by different agentsto fix the meaning of Chineseness. Nor is it asimple issue of repudiating or resisting allclaims to “Chineseness” in terms of origins orancestry. Instead, the challenge is tounderstand how processes of territorializingand de/reterritorializing “China” and“Chineseness” regulate the complex interplayof proximity and distance in the geographical,political, economic, and cultural identificationsamong the “Chinese.” This interplay allowsmigrants and their descendants – at certaintimes, in certain places, and under specificcircumstances – to claim, and base their actionson, commonalities and/or differences withSoutheast Asians, other “Chinese,” and others.What is at stake in the rise of China andprocesses of “Sinicization” is nothing less thanhow “Chinese-ness” is constituted out of forcesboth of its own making and beyond its control,and what kinds of capacities, effects,possibilities, and limits structure theseprocesses and the human condition among theChinese everywhere.”116

This is a revised and updated version of a

chapter in Peter J. Katzenstein, ed. Sinicizationand the Rise of China. Civilizational processesb e y o n d E a s t a n d W e s t(http://www.amazon.com/dp/0415809533/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20) (London: Routledge, 2012).

Caroline S. Hau is Associate Professor at theCenter for Southeast Asian Studies, KyotoUniversity. Her most recent book is TravelingNation-Makers: Transnational Flows andMovements in the Making of Modern SoutheastA s i a(http://www.amazon.com/dp/9971695472/?tag=theasipacjo0b-20), co-edited with KasianTejapira.

Recommended citation: Caroline S. Hua," B e c o m i n g “ C h i n e s e ” — B u t W h a t“Chinese”?—in Southeast Asia," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10, Issue 26, No. 2, June 25,2012.

Notes

1 Phongpaichit and Baker 1996, 135.

2 Tejapira 1997, 76.

3 Hau 2005.

4 See the definition, among many such works,provided by Tjon 2009, 360.

5 See, for example, the critique of Chan andTong 2001, 9 and Crossley, Siu, and Sutton2006, 6-7; on resinification as an ideologicalactivity of inventing unity through theproduction of “Chineseness,” see Dirlik 1997,308.

6 Fogel 2009, 4, drawing on Matisoff 2003, 6.

7 The use of the word “hybridization” (andrelated terms like “hybrid”) in this chapter isnot meant to imply that there is a pre-existingpurity that is then subject to cultural mixture.

8 Shaffer 1994, 8-12. For a succinct discussion

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of the history of China’s southward expansionand the impact of differing dynastic policiestoward the southern frontier on Southeast Asia,see Sun 2010.

9 Liu 2004.

10 Wang 2004, 224.

11 Territorialization, deterritorialization, andreterritorialization are routinely employedalongside “coding,” “recoding,” and “decoding”across a range of single- and co-authored textswritten by Deleuze and Guattari (1983; 1987)to refer to particular instances of configuration,deconfiguration, and reconfiguration of“territory” understood in its spatial/physical,representational, social, psychoanalytic,economic, and political senses. I use theseterms insofar as their emphasis on both fluidityand fixity of cultural flows and identitiesencourages critical thinking about, as well asbeyond, the concepts of territory, nation, andsovereignty that inform studies of the“Chinese” in Southeast Asia.

12 Duara 1997, 40.

13 Levi-Strauss 1987 (1950), 63.

14 Duara 1997; Godley 1981.

15 Guo 2004.

16 Wang 1992a, 6-7.

17 According to Anthony Reid, terms such asChijs, Cina, and sangley were already in use inSoutheast Asia during the sixteenth century torefer to traders and artisans from Guangdongand Fujian, regardless of the regional orlinguistic variations among them (2010, 53-54).It is instructive to note that a term like sangley,which was used in the Philippines and SouthSulawesi, does not necessarily denote place-name or ethnicity; its ambiguous etymology –the term is said to have been derived fromshanglu (a classical Chinese term for merchant

traveler), sengdi (Hokkien for “commerce”), orsionglai (Hokkien for changlai, “frequentlycoming”) – distinguishes this group of (mainlyFujian) “frequent comers” by their occupationand mobility.

18 Tejapira 2001b.

19 Tejapira 1997.

20 Ibid., 86.

21 Coppel 1976, 31.

2 2 See Liu Hong 2011 for an excellentdiscussion of the intellectual and culturalimpact of this relationship in Indonesia.

23 Chun 1989.

24 Hodder 2005, 8.

25 Wang 1981, 156-7.

26 Suryadinata 1995, 195, 208, 209-215.

27 Bao 2012.

28 Fitzgerald 1995.

29 Oyen 2010.

30 See, for example, Bell 2008 for a discussionof the Confucian revival in China.

31 Huang 2011.

32 Kang 2010, 91.

33 The salience of maritime geography can beseen in the fact that, over a period of 11 yearsfrom 743 to 754 AD, the Chinese Buddhistmonk Jianzhen (Ganjin) attempted five times tocross the East China Sea into Japan beforesucceeding on the sixth try. It was the Mongols’success in developing the capability to movelarge numbers of troops by ships that enabledthem to reach Japan and Java, but even then,they were beaten back. Although maritime

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technology had developed sufficiently toenable, for instance, the movement of largenumbers of troops at the time of Hideoyoshi’sattempt to conquer Korea toward the end of thesixteenth century, insurmountable logisticalproblems made it practically impossible tosustain long-term military campaign andpacification. Only in the nineteenth century didadvances in steamship technology make thelarge-scale movement of people a fact of life.

34 Reid and Zheng 2009; see also Giersch 2006on Qing expansion into Yunnan, whose Taielites also had relations with Burma and Siam.

35 Wang Gungwu (2011) offers a caveat on theuse of the word “civilization”: “although‘civilization’ is a word introduced into Chinaquite recently , there was an ancientconsciousness derived from ideas that wereeventually codified in the Yijing, Laozi, Yinyangwritings, Confucian stress on ancestors andindividual cultivation, down to the laterDaoists, Buddhists and Neo-Confucians thattogether distinguished the peoples of East Asia.The ideas were drawn from the many kinds ofethnic and social groups who were within reachof the lands of eastern Asia, and who interactedand intermingled with one another over themillennia. For this, using the modern wordcivilization may be misleading. The processinvolved was more important than the totalcontent.” See Kelley’s (2005, 31-35) discussionof Sino-Vietnamese relations in terms ofVietnamese self-conceptions of their country asa “domain of manifest civility.” The strongc u l t u r a l i d e n t i f i c a t i o n w i t h a n dacknowledgement of Vietnam’s politicalsubservience to China expressed in Vietnameseenvoy poetry raise interesting questions aboutaudience, intention, and reception thatcomplicate (rather than simply affirm)commonsensical notions of “Sinicization.” Onthe dynamism o f accu l tura t ion andhybridization and their impact on Qinginstitutions and borderland societies along theSino-Southeast Asian “frontiers,” see Giersch

2006 and Shepherd 1993.

36 Woodside 1971, 18-19, 21.

37 Sugihara 2005a, 2, 8-9.

38 Sugihara 2005b.

39 Lu 2004, 25, 39.

40 Liu 1995, xviii, 17-19, 31-42.

41 Ibid., especially the lists in Appendices B, C,D, and E.

42 Wong 1979, 5.

43 Wang Binbin 2000, 164-5.

44 Shiraishi and Hau 2009; Hau and Shiraishi2009.

45 Shiraishi 2010. The term “Anglo-China” hasbeen used to refer to the nineteenth-century“realm of economic, political and culturalexchange” with British Hong Kong as a capital(Munn 2009 [2001], 2). The use of “Anglo-Chinese” in this chapter highlights theimportance not only of the territories underBritish and American colonial rule orcommercial influence, but of a specific patternof hybridization that produced a certain type of“Chinese.” “Anglo” refers primarily to linguisticproficiency acquired through Anglophone(which includes British, American, and otherenglishes) education in the region as well as inBritain, the US, and Canada.

4 6 The reach and might of the Brit ishcommercial empire could be felt even in non-British territories such as Siam, SpanishPhilippines, the Dutch Indies, and FrenchIndochina in the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies. The extent of Spanish Philippines’dependence on trade with Great Britain (aswell as the United States), mediated by British,American, and Chinese country traders,provoked Spanish complaints that “From the

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commercial point of view the Philippines is anAnglo-Chinese colony with a Spanish Flag”(Recur 1879, 110, quoted in Wickberg 1965,280). As a consequence, English became the defacto regional lingua franca, although colonialstates also imposed their own languages on theelites in their territories. The scale, however,was far smaller compared to the spread ofEnglish under American hegemony in thepostwar and post-Cold War periods.

47 Lim and Ku were exceptionally gifted men ofletters and published books in English. Not allAnglo-Chinese at the turn of the twentiethcentury could write in English (a notableexample of a bilingual who also wrote inEnglish is Zhang Ail ing/Eileen Chang[1920-95], the celebrated Shanghai-bornwriter), but they nevertheless had reading andto a lesser extent speaking abilities in thatlanguage. It is instructive to note that China’sforemost translator of the time, the Fujian-bornLin Shu (1852-1924), had no foreign languageshimself, but instead relied on bilingualcollaborators to translate Anglo-American (andto a lesser extent French) writings into literaryChinese.

48 Yamamoto 1995, 37-45; Li 1991, chapters 2and 3.

49 Wang 2003, 166.

50 Ibid., 176.

51 Wang 2011.

52 I thank Wang Gungwu for his great help inidentifying Ku and Lee as exemplary Anglo-Chinese.

53 Lee 1999, 315-21; Shih 2001, 4; Lu 2004.

54 Ishikawa 2001, 459-84.

55 Dirlik 2008, 156.

56 Williams 1960, 72.

57 Ibid., 74.

58 Toer 1980.

59 Chandra 2011.

60 Tejapira 2001a.

61 Shiraishi 1997, 175-9.

62 The situation in Suharto’s Indonesia differsfrom the Sukarno era, when China’s culturaldiplomacy and the circulation of Chineseliterary principles informed Indonesia’s culturalpolitics, especially the discursive constructionof a “national allegory” (Liu 2006).

63 In some instances, owing to the vicissitudesof language policies, some Anglo-Chinese maybe functional in English and their mothertongue (Malay, Tagalog, Hokkien, Cantonese)but not necessarily in Mandarin. The situationhas changed as economic opportunities createdby the rise of China have given Anglo-Chinesemore incentives to learn Mandarin. Efforts topromote Mandarin in Singapore since the late1970s, for example, have been successful, butat the expense of marginalizing non-MandarinChinese “dialects” such as Hokkien.

64 Wang 2004, 166.

65 Wang 1981, 157.

66 Teo 1997, 111.

67 Law and Bren with Ho 2004, 291, 295.

68 Bordwell 2000, 66.

69 For an account of Japanese involvement inthe wartime Chinese film industry, see Fu2003.

70 Yau 2009, 169.

71 Law and Bren with Ho 2004, 203-210, 221.

72 Hau and Shiraishi forthcoming.

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73 Ma 1999, 45.

74 Hsiau 2000, 109.

75 Katzenstein 2005, 18.

76 Katzenstein 2006, 4-14; Chua Beng Huat2003; Qiu 2010.

77 Li 2008.

78 I thank Kasian Tejapira for his insights intothe Dragon Descendant Museum’s “strange”cultural politics of Chineseness (Interview withKasian Tejapira, Bangkok, 17 October 2009).

79 Phongpaichit and Baker 1996, 139-40.

80 Lim 2006.

81 Interview with Chitra Konuntakiet, Bangkok,19 October 2009; see also Pungkanon 2008.

82 A more recent example is Yale Universityprofessor Amy Chua, whose article “WhyChinese Mothers are Superior” (2011)provoked fierce debates on the Internet overthe merits (and demerits) of her self-proclaimed “Chinese” style of strict parenting.The Anglo-Chinese Chua invoked her ownupbringing by her parents, who were ChineseFilipino migrants to the US, as an inspiration.

83 Bickers and Yep 2009, 11-12.

84 Wang 2004, 210-26.

85 Su and Wang 1991.

86 Guo 2004, 109.

87 I thank Allen Carlson for first alerting me tothis anime series. In November 2009, theChinese government established the ChinaAnimation Comic Group to promote animationproduction, technology, and marketing. Plansinclude the building of a national hub, ChinaAnimation Game City, in Beij ing. Thegovernment also provides subsidies to Chinese

animation companies (Hosaka 2010).

88 “Chinese Cartoon to Land in InternationalMarket” 2009.

89 Oakes 2000, 668. See Friedman 1994 andGladney 1994 on the reinvention of nationalidentity in the post-Mao era.

90 Xiamen Min’nan Tourism and CultureIndustry Co. 2010.

91 Friedman 1994, 83-87.

92 Wang Fan-sen 2000, 98-123.

93 Chang 1999, 58-9.

94 Tellingly, among the songs sung at theprotests which took place in Guangzhou andHong Kong were a Cantonese song by the HongKong boy band Beyond, and a Cantoneseadaptation of the theme song from theJapanese anime, Dr. Slump (Zhu 2010). Arecent example of hybridization at work inputonghua itself is geili (literally, “to give forceor power”; awesome, cool, exciting), whoseantonym bugeili (boring, dull) was firstpopularized over the internet by a Chinese-language dubbing of a Japanese anime basedon the Chinese classic, Xi You Ji (Journey to theWest), and quickly transmuted into the English“gelivable” and “ungelivable” and the French“guélile” (“Geili” 2010).

95 I thank Francis Loh Kok Wah for providinginformation on the Penang Hokkien Chinese’s“re-exporting” of rituals and ceremoniesassociated with ancestor worship back to theirlineage/family associations in Fujian, China.See the valuable research by Liu Zhaohui(2005, especially 143-4).

96 Lee 2009, 57. I thank Shih Chih-yu fordirecting me to Lee’s insightful analysis.

97 “Ancient Imperial Language of China – 2,000Years Ago” 2009.

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98 Abramson 2008, xxi.

99 Marchetti 2007, 7.

100 Marchetti’s critique (2007) cites Hong Kong-born and New York-based filmmaker EvansChan’s scathing analysis (2004) of Hero’spol i t ical subtext of legi t imiz ing theauthoritarian mainland Chinese state throughthe subordination of Greater China.

101 Wang 1992b.

102 Clifford 1997.

103 Tu 1994.

104 Davidson 2008, 222.

105 Nonini and Ong 1997, 26.

106 Ong and Nonini 1997, 326.

107 Callahan 2004, 96.

108 Ibid., xxix.

109 Young 1999, 63; Chow 2009, x.

110 I thank Wang Gungwu for prodding me tothink about the relationship between powerand capital.

111 Dikötter 1992.

112 Ebrey 2003, 165-76.

113 The leading Chinese-language dailies inSoutheast Asia continue to use traditionalChinese script, although there are nownewspapers that use simplified script.Mainland Chinese TV dramas are widelyavailable on cable and are watched by overseasChinese, but do not as yet command a widefollowing among non-Chinese Southeast Asiansas Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese dramasdo.

114 Increased enrollment in Chinese-language

programs of study in mainland China and theestablishment of Confucius Institutes aroundthe world are often taken as evidence of“Sinicization.” It should be noted, however,that just as incentives to learn Mandarin haveincreased among Anglo-Chinese as well as non-Chinese, learning English – now mandatoryfrom Elementary Grade 3 onwards in China –has become a big business in China, with well-to-do mainland Chinese sending their childrenabroad for English-language education(Thorniley 2010). Moreover, no power shift has(yet) happened in favor of China. In theabsence of a significant social formation inwhich acquisition of Chinese language involvesinternalization of “Chinese” norms, regulations,and values on a scale that is comparable towhat happened to Anglo-Chinese with Englishin the regional historical context of British andAmerican hegemony, it is difficult to ascertainthe degree to which “Sinicization” is actuallytaking place among people who are learningPutonghua (except on a limited, individualbasis), and preparing the ground for theemergence of a Sinocentric order. It isinstructive to note, for example, that Liang’s(2010) call for making Mandarin the primarymedium of instruction in publicly fundedschools in Hong Kong remains rooted in theassumption of a multilingual Hong Kong inwhich Cantonese and English continue to bespoken. A proof of mainland-driven Sinicizationwould be if large numbers of people, whetherethnic Chinese or not, seek to change theirpassports for a PRC passport, or putonghuabecomes the regional lingua franca that isspoken even among non-Chinese, or Chinesenorms (whether in business or politics) areaccepted as legitimate in the region. So far theevidence seems to point in the oppositedirection, with (Anglo-)Chinese professionalsfrom the mainland as well as internationalmovie stars such as Jet Li and Gong Li takingSingaporean citizenship and Zhang Ziyi takingHong Kong citizenship, mainly for the purposeof protecting their assets and properties. Anotable counter trend, however, is the fact that

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Hong Kong lawmakers have been underincreasing pressure from the mainlandgovernment (which does not recognize DualCitizenship, following its experience inSoutheast Asia) to give up their foreignpassports/nationalities.

115 Chow 1993, 24-6.

116 Cheah 2006, 7, 10.

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