Abstract
Shelly Chan’s Diaspora’s Homeland is a fascinating re-envisioning of migration studies, national and transnational histories, and family history. Chan focuses on huaqiao, defined as those temporarily located outside the motherland, specifically the more than twenty million Chinese who migrated abroad from the mid-nineteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. Chan’s goal is to analyze the relationship between these migrant families that stretched great distances and the countries of temporary residence to understand how these overlapping geographies, familial and national entities, and temporalities changed China. Chan specifies altered temporal understanding through two ingenious creations and analytical frameworks. The first is what Chan calls “diaspora time,” meaning “the diverse, ongoing ways in which migration affects the lifeworlds of individuals, families, and communities” (p. 12). Chan notes that diaspora time flows continuously, almost imperceptibly, as migrants and their families navigate several national histories and trends in the increasingly globalized world. When diaspora time intersects with national and global events, diaspora time accelerates, erupting in what Chan calls “diaspora moments” (p. 13). It is this creation of a frame through which to analyze Chinese history and family-based migration that Chan finds the most fruitful instances for analysis. Chan asserts that these moments, which resist categorization confined by traditional, national chronologies, must be seen from several perspectives. By understanding diaspora moments from the perspectives of Chinese history, Chinese American history, the history of the Chinese experience throughout South Asia, and family-based strategies of South China that prompted migration as a communal wealth-accumulation strategy, Chan analyzes moments when diaspora time intersects with traditional national narratives, producing unexpectedly long-term and significant implications. Through this work Chan achieves her goal of understanding how the mass emigration of more than twenty million Chinese influenced China’s politics, economy, national development, and culture.
With in-depth coverage stretching from the 1870s through the 1960s, and inference as to how these trends impact China in the twenty-first century, the chronological scope of the work is impressive. Equally impressive is the level of detail Chan achieves in recounting and analyzing each of the five diaspora moments that comprise the study. The first diaspora moment studied is the 1893 Qing Dynasty revocation of the ban on emigration, seen by Chan not as a belated cancelation of an outdated policy, but as an important step for China to recognize responsibility for its people abroad and the financial benefits that welcoming returning migrants could have for the nation. Chan asserts that it was in conjunction with extending protections to citizens abroad that China began to move toward nationhood by sending diplomats to deal with mistreatment of Chinese in the Americas. Thus, the intersection of national histories with diaspora time created, in Chan’s view, a diaspora moment with long-term implications for China’s political development.
Chapters 2 and 3 share a similar emphasis through a focus on intellectual reactions to and interpretation of how Chinese experiences abroad shaped China at home. Chan discusses the development of Shanghai’s Jinan University in the 1920s, specifically focusing on a small, influential group of intellectuals who adopted European and Japanese understandings of projection of colonial power to re-envision Chinese migrant experience throughout South Asia. By seeing this group not as cast offs dispersed through attempts to avoid poverty but as indispensable to China’s modern growth through the infusion of capital, labor, skills, and services, Chan asserts that the Jinan intellectuals combined Western and Japanese schools of thought on migration and colonial power to apply to China’s situation. According to the Jinan intellectuals, the projection of colonial power through these migrants’ experiences brought China into modernity in the sense of achieving equal footing with the non-Chinese nations that vied for control of the region contemporaneously.
Chapter 3 investigates tensions between Chinese intellectuals, notably Lu Xun who advocated progressive movement beyond Chinese traditional grounding in Confucius, and Lim Boon Keng, who argued that China needed a return to tradition through renewed commitment to the teachings of Confucius during the turbulent times of the 1920s and 1930s. Chan specifically focuses on the colonial experiences of both intellectuals, illuminating how different visions of the utility of Chinese traditions could either shackle and hold back China’s development, or advance China through strength gained from tradition.
Chapters 4 and 5 take the reader into the era of New China when Communist Party policies intended to speed the achievement of the socialist dream conflicted with the reality of huaqiao families and emigrant experiences. Chapter 4, “The Women Who Stayed Behind,” is likely to be of most interest to readers interested in family history. Chan focuses on the diaspora moment created when Communist Party policies of land and marriage reform in the early-1950s conflicted with family realities that had evolved as geographic and temporal separation caused evolution in traditional family arrangements for huaqiao families. Forced to acknowledge the reality of migrant families still connected through shared interests and familial-bonds, though separated by thousands of miles and apart for years at a time, Communist officials crafted new agreements that altered the rigid implementation of marriage and land reform as applied to huaqiao families. Realizing the significance of the women who stayed behind and the men whose remittances not only supported families but, to a considerable degree, the regional economy, Party officials lessened enforcement of marriage and land reforms on this population. Officials recognized that migrants working overseas would stop sending remittances if heavy-handed policies negatively affected family members; thus, officials enacted a special status for huaqiao families, viewing these geographically diffused entities very much still as families and seeking to leverage the financial resources for national development. According to Chan, the realities of the huaqiao families and the recognition by government officials put these families outside of socialist time because of the unique status created by the diaspora moment.
Chapter 5 continues the analysis of how diaspora moments emerged during the attempts to create the socialist state under Mao Zedong. Fleeing anti-Chinese, anti-communist movements in South Asia, some migrants hoped to return to China and expected a relatively smooth transition as their families had been recognized with special status due to the benefits the transnational arrangement brought to the mother land. However, the increasingly radical implementation of steps toward the socialist vision, with programs such as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, conflicted with the special status afforded to huaqiao families. Viewing foreign connections and experiences abroad as reason for suspicion, huaqiao families and returning migrants were seen as disobedient, capitalist, and possibly traitorous. Though little had changed in the migrant experience, conditions in China caused neighbors and officials to view returning migrants with suspicion. Thus, the intersection of national temporalities with diaspora time created a diaspora moment with significant ramifications for China during the 1950s and 1960s.
Chan’s research on these five diaspora moments is impressive and extensive, building the case by accessing archives in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and British governmental, colonial records. Chan brings to the forefront diverse voices of Communist Party officials, rural women connected to migrant men through refashioned huaqiao family dynamics, indentured laborers in Peru and Cuba, Chinese migrants across South Asia, and highly educated university scholars debating the significance of the diaspora on China’s development. As an insight into family history, Chan builds upon the traditional view of emigration as a family-based decision to persevere during difficult times and to diversify earning possibilities by adding analysis of the back-and-forth of the experiences of the emigrant abroad, and the changes these experiences—and reactions to these experiences—had for family members back home. Expansive in scope both chronologically and geographically, the work remains focused because of Chan’s consistent application of the lens of the “diaspora moment.” Thus, both impressive in its focus and ambitious in its goal, Diaspora’s Homeland succeeds in illuminating the impact the diaspora had on China during these moments of national, economic, political, and cultural change.