The politics of Chinese immigrants’ double unbelonging and deglobalization

From flexible citizenship to double unbelonging

Around the turn of the new millennium, many (especially affluent) Chinese immigrants enjoyed great opportunities to benefit from their transnational mobility. This phenomenon was captured by anthropologist Aihwa Ong (1999) in her seminal analysis of “flexible citizenship” as embodied by “astronaut families” (p. 127). Members of an astronaut family fly between China and their host societies because they are dispersed throughout several countries. By maintaining their transnational connections, members of an astronaut family are able to respectively maximize business opportunities, social ties, and educational resources in different countries. Ong’s work invited us to rethink the notion of citizenship, which had been traditionally confined within one nation-state. Astronaut families, in contrast, display “flexible citizenship” in the sense that they experience multiple, distributed belongings in different countries (Ong, 1999, p. 112).

Back in 1999 when Ong published her work, the multiple belongings of Chinese immigrants represented the tenor of the movement we call globalization in the post-Cold War era. As the Chinese state sought to expand the country’s presence in global markets, it hailed overseas Chinese as patriots for creating international business opportunities for China (Nyíri, 2001). This open attitude had resonance in the western world, which had much optimism regarding China’s contribution to the global economy, as well as its potential democratic transformation through participating in international trade.

Now, roughly two decades after the golden age of Chinese global migration, a drastically different circumstance, which I call double unbelonging, has emerged. The phenomenon of double unbelonging can be illustrated by two excerpts from a BBC interview with Chinese students studying in the USA (Feng, 2020). Shizheng Tie, a student at Johns Hopkins University, complained that “America wants to kick us out, while China doesn’t allow us to return” (para. 18). Iris Li, from Emory University, similarly remarked that “we are getting the short end of the stick from both sides” (para. 21).

The quandary of these Chinese international students was largely symptomatic of the latest geopolitical tensions surrounding China. Over the 2010s, encouraged by the country’s economic boom, the new Chinese leadership began displaying a more assertive stance in global affairs. It unveiled the Belt and Road Initiative, a multitrillion-dollar project that involves investment and infrastructure development in more than 70 countries across Asia, Europe, and Africa. This project has since led to a strong pushback from western countries, most notably the USA, in a high-profile trade war.

The international competition was not merely economic in nature. It was further overshadowed by ideological struggles over China’s growing authoritarianism, with Beijing’s tightening reign over Hong Kong and the Uyghurs as the focal points. Against this backdrop, in the western world there has been increased antipathy toward Chinese immigrants with regard to intellectual property and even national security. The rise of the COVID-19 pandemic has only made things worse, leading to widespread anti-Chinese sentiment based on a conflation of the pandemic, race, and geopolitics (Gao, 2022b). For example, biopolitical metaphors such as the “communist virus” and “sick man of Asia” have capitalized on COVID fears to fuel the US–China conflict (Henninger, 2020; Mead, 2020).

As many studies have pointed out, the story of Sinophobia is not particularly new (Viladrich, 2021). There is a strong continuity between the discourse of the yellow peril in the 19th century and today’s racial tension fueled by geopolitics and the COVID-19 pandemic (Gao, 2022b). In this study, I suggest that Sinophobia is only part of the picture. We must look at the Chinese side of the story in order to fully comprehend the circumstances of Chinese immigrants. Less known to western readers is that Chinese immigrants have recently been subjected to marginalization from China. Before COVID-19, a new wave of nationalist campaigns had taken place in China, leading to the mass perception of expatriation as a breach of national pride. China’s conflict with the West further fueled this aversion to Chinese immigrants.

During the pandemic, guided by a zero-COVID policy, the Chinese government initiated stringent border controls against coronavirus transmission from overseas. This created tremendous legal, financial, and practical difficulties for Chinese international travelers, many of whom were stranded overseas without a valid visa, financial resources, or access to health care (Chin, 2020). Out of desperation, several dozen Chinese, although at risk of being arrested, broke into the Nepali prime minister’s palace to plead for help in returning home to China (Chin, 2020). One of my research participants was stranded in Spain. After months of repeatedly failed efforts to return to China, he developed severe psychotic symptoms (Gao, 2021a).

Additionally, many Chinese immigrants find it increasingly challenging to communicate with their contacts in Internet-censored China, as they are separated by very different media representations of the same reality, be it the progress of the trade war, the country of origin of COVID-19, or public health measures against the pandemic (Gao, 2021b; Yang et al., 2021). Given the widespread anti-West sentiment in China, it is difficult to delineate the different versions of information and their associated value judgements. Consequently, many of my research participants had to censor themselves in order to avoid arguments with their contacts in China.

All of these factors contribute to a sense of alienation. Having been able to convert their transnational mobility into socioeconomic privileges over the past decades, many Chinese immigrants now find themselves marginalized and excluded by their homeland.

Double unbelonging: From culture to politics

The concept of double unbelonging was first proposed by Salman Rushdie (2012), a celebrated British American novelist who was born in India, in his autobiography Joseph Anton: A Memoir. According to Rushdie, double unbelonging indicates a state of the migrated self, who, while not a full member of the host society, mourns the loss of their cultural roots. Here is an excerpt from Rushdie’s (2012) writing:

He was a Bombay boy who had made his life in London among the English, but often he felt cursed by a double unbelonging. The root of language, at least, remained, but he began to appreciate how deeply he felt the loss of the other roots, and how confused he felt about what he had become. . . . The migrated self became, inevitably, heterogeneous instead of homogeneous, belonging to more than one place, multiple rather than singular, responding to more than one way of being, more than averagely mixed up. (p. 54)

Rushdie’s depiction of double unbelonging is largely within a cultural framework. It addresses how one’s sense of self is intertwined with one’s cultural roots, native language, and ethnic community, without directly engaging with political issues. Rushdie’s writing reflects a conventional understanding of belonging that prevails in the literature and scholarship alike. Maslow (1970), for example, studied belonging on the basis of biographies, novels, poems, and plays. He identified belonging as a basic human need and lamented its loss as a result of over-mobility. Following this intellectual lineage, scholars have since understood belonging to be a personal, subjective feeling of “at home” (hooks, 2009), a sense of rootedness (Lovell, 2003), or emotional attachment to a particular group or place (S. Liu & Gallois, 2022).

The cultural–humanistic perspective sheds light on important aspects of migrant life but does not seem to help us deal with thorny political issues such as deglobalization (Billig, 2023; Khawaja et al., 2023; Stenner & Andreouli, 2023). Thus, it is necessary to modify the existing cultural–humanistic framework of belonging, and of double unbelonging for that matter. This initiative would entail two changes. The first is an expansion of the analytical framework for studying (un)belonging as a politically contingent phenomenon. To enhance this new framework, I suggest, second, a shift of theoretical perspective, as well as associated research strategies. Specifically, I suggest that there is an epistemological advantage to replacing the popular positivist view of belonging as a relatively stable, coherent, and authentic state with a social constructionist view of belonging as a dynamic and contested state torn by intersecting political forces. I discuss these two changes in the following sections.

Situating (un)belonging in international politics

First, I outline the development of an expanded analytical framework that accounts for geopolitics. Toward this objective, I borrow insights from Antonsich. According to Antonsich (2010), belonging consists of two dimensions. First, there is a personal, subjective, and affective dimension in terms of an intimate feeling of being at home. This is the popularly recognized dimension of belonging, and it tends to be romanticized. Second, there is an external, sociopolitical dimension—namely, “belonging as a discursive resource which constructs, claims, justifies, or resists forms of sociospatial inclusion/exclusion (politics of belonging)” (Antonsich, 2010, p. 645). This dimension is key to my study, as this is where belonging does “the dirty work of boundary maintenance” (Crowley, 1999, p. 30).

I suggest that effective use of Antonsich’s (2010) framework would require us to identify how the two dimensions of belonging interact with and constitute one another. On the one hand, the sociopolitical environment has a major impact on the subjective experience of belonging: whether one is being welcomed or rejected on legal, social, and cultural grounds in a society has a major impact on whether one feels at home. On the other hand, the reproduction of the sociopolitical entitlement of belonging depends on particular modes of an internalized sense of self, attachment, and identification (Yuval-Davis, 2006).

For example, the current discrimination against Chinese people in the USA must be seen in light of recent sociopolitical events, such as the 9/11 terrorist attack and the 2008 financial crisis, which led to heightened concerns over national security and the economy. This gloomy reality has translated into xenophobia against various immigrant groups, especially the Chinese in the wake of the trade war. Chinese individuals have found their visas denied, professional and financial connections probed, and mainland China-based social media applications scrutinized. The heightened vigilance over Chinese individuals pertains to where their loyalty lies; it is a matter of belonging. Canada, which also has conflicts with China, has followed suit. When a Canadian politician questioned the effectiveness of Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, in handling the COVID-19 crisis, he posed the question of whether Tam was “working for Canada or working for China” (Boutilier, 2020). Making implicit reference to Tam’s Hong Kong-born Chinese ethnic background, this politician turned Tam’s belonging into ammunition.

Now let us turn to the Chinese side of the story. As mentioned earlier, during the heyday of globalization, the transnational belonging enjoyed by Chinese immigrants was made possible by a conducive international environment (Nyíri, 2001; Ong, 1999). Similarly, their double unbelonging today should not be seen as merely a matter of individual mishaps. In 2019, the Chinese government suffered harsh criticism domestically as well as internationally for having covered up the news of the COVID-19 virus. In response, the Chinese government capitalized on its zero-COVID policy to justify its legitimacy. This self-legitimization exercise was simultaneously a means to retaliate against the western world, which had been criticizing China regarding its trade practices, Hong Kong, and the Uyghurs, among other controversies. Thus, while highlighting its own capacity to reduce domestic COVID-19 transmissions, the Chinese government claimed that the soaring numbers of COVID-19 infections in the western world were indictive of the bankruptcy of liberal democracy (Gao, 2021b).

It is also necessary to consider the proliferation of conspiracy theories. For example, in China, it has become a widespread belief that COVID-19 originated in the USA and was spread to China (Yang et al., 2021). One might say that this is symptomatic of the post-truth era we all live in, only that it is made worse for Chinese immigrants who live across national, ideological, and linguistic borders. It has become a daily struggle for Chinese immigrants to make sense of the different versions of media representations of their reality, as well as competing political values (Wang et al., 2022; Yang et al., 2021). Additionally, according to many of my research participants, these pervasive gaps have created difficulties for them in communicating with their contacts in China. Considering the nationalist, anti-western sentiments in China, many Chinese immigrants have become used to staying quiet on topics that are even remotely political (Gao, 2021a).

From positivism to social constructionism: The politics of belonging

In the preceding section, I expanded the analytical framework for studying Chinese immigrants’ double unbelonging amid geopolitics. Building on this, I now move on to address theoretical perspectives underpinning the scholarship of belonging. More specifically, I call for a shift from positivism to social constructionism.

Mainstream psychological research on belonging has been shaped by positivist thinking, which views belonging to be a relatively stable, coherent, and authentic state. Positivist psychologists are interested in verifying where immigrants’ true sense of belonging lies. Here, belonging is treated as if it were a concrete entity, the essence of which awaits being revealed through scientific scrutiny. Positivist psychologists may measure immigrants’ sense of belonging to ascertain whether it is inclined more strongly toward the host country or toward the country of origin. They might further study predictors of belonging, such as immigrants’ age, gender, language capacity, and education; as well as the implications of belonging, such as mental health and financial achievement (Allen et al., 2021; Chen & Zhou, 2019; Painter, 2013).

An example of a positivist approach to belonging can be found in Berry’s (1992, 2005) acculturation theory, which to date remains the most influential theory used to study immigration. According to Berry, immigrants tend to choose from four acculturation strategies. Among these strategies, integration is the ideal, meaning that an immigrant decides to simultaneously maintain their heritage culture and develop contact with the larger host society, including other ethnic groups (Berry, 2005). Meanwhile, Berry considers the other three strategies to entail some sort of inadequacy. Assimilation involves immigrants’ loss of heritage culture while fitting into the mainstream culture of the host society; separation, conversely, involves immigrants’ refusal to seek contact with the dominant group while clinging to their heritage culture. Marginalization is the worst possible strategy as it leads to the loss of contact on both sides (Berry, 1992).

At face value, acculturation theory readily provides a vocabulary to describe the circumstances of Chinese immigrants. For example, it would denounce the current double unbelonging as an instance of marginalization. Yet there are several problems. Sunil Bhatia and Anjali Ram (2009) have argued that Berry’s (1992, 2005) model assumes linear, universal psychological processes—such as “behavioral shifts,” “culture shock,” and “acculturative stress”—in the course of acculturation. Such a universalistic model cannot sufficiently explain, for example, the impact of 9/11 on Indian communities in the USA (Bhatia & Ram, 2009). Similarly, I argue that double unbelonging is a highly specific phenomenon affecting first-generation Chinese immigrants at a particular historical juncture. Berry’s (1992, 2005) quadripartite categorization of acculturation is incapable of capturing the sheer complexity of the national/political/racialized identities of Chinese immigrants amid geopolitics.

In particular, I suggest that Berry’s (2005) model of acculturation risks falling prey to neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism originated as a system of economies and policies defined by government deregulation and privatization that was intended to maximize market freedom. Against this background, a neoliberal mentality has emerged that promotes individualistic, entrepreneurial practices at the expense of collective action (Teo, 2018). Even though Berry’s (2005) model briefly acknowledges the role of the host society’s receptivity to multiculturalism, its core focus remains on the individual—the immigrants themselves. The different trajectories of acculturation are conceptualized as strategies—namely, choices made by immigrants on their own initiative. Highlighting individual agency, the concept of strategy cannot account for external structural problems (such as the trade war) that affect the fate of Chinese immigrants without their choosing.

Another reason why Berry’s (2005) acculturation theory might form an alliance with neoliberalism lies in the fact that it establishes normative justification on the basis of individual well-being, which does not always translate into societal well-being. For example, Berry’s model would celebrate Chinese astronaut families for having successfully chosen an integration strategy. But is this really ideal? Ong’s (1999) work is a critique of how neoliberal globalization favors privileged classes. Ong (1999) succinctly articulates why affluent Chinese left Hong Kong for the West: “Caught between British disciplinary racism and China’s opportunistic claims of racial loyalty, between declining economic power in Britain and surging capitalism in Asia, they sought a flexible position among the myriad possibilities (and problems) found in the global economy” (p. 123). An application of the oversimplified, celebratory integration label to Chinese astronaut families would ironically promote what Ong is critical of. In my fieldwork, I have similarly found that upper-class Chinese immigrants are more capable of fending off the impact of the China–West confrontation. It is the underprivileged who weather the brunt of it (Gao, 2022a). In one extreme case, one of my participants was unable to afford the soaring price of a flight ticket and, as a result, had to watch her well-off peers returning to China one by one while she herself remained stranded in the UK with an expired visa for nearly six months.

To overcome the shortcomings of the positivist approach to belonging, I recommend social constructionism, which views belonging to be an ever-evolving dynamic phenomenon that is contingent on various social conditions and processes (Burr, 2015; Gergen, 1985; Parker, 1998). For example, Elspeth Probyn (2015) conceptualizes that “individuals and groups are caught within wanting to belong, wanting to become, a process that is fuelled by yearning rather than positing of identity as a stable state” (p. 19). This nonessentialist definition opens a theoretical space to account for the impact of sociopolitical circumstances on belonging. This direction was explored by Bhatia and Ram (2009), who view the formation of immigrants’ identity to be “within a historical context, bound up in a set of political positions, and based on negotiation, dislocation and conflict” (pp. 142–143).

Following the social constructionist line of thinking, I would like to highlight Yuval-Davis’s theory. Yuval-Davis (2006) calls for scholars to take a step back from belonging to examine the politics of belonging as the subject matter. This sociologically oriented perspective would require us to shift our focus to how belonging is constructed, maintained, contested, and denied by various agents and political forces. Instead of asking the positivist question, “Where do immigrants belong?”, social constructionists are more interested in “Where are immigrants made to belong, by whom, how, and why?” Instead of attempting to pin down the truth of one’s belonging, social constructionists are committed to unpacking its complexity and contingency.

In the remainder of this article, I apply social constructionism to Chinese immigrants’ unbelonging. I discuss several questions in particular: how to utilize the epistemological advantage of unbelonging; how unbelonging and belonging might dialectically constitute one another; how the nation-state and media produce unbelonging; and how bilateral international conflicts create polarized double unbelonging.

The epistemological advantage of studying unbelonging

In this section, I first discuss why unbelonging is particularly suited to a social constructionist analysis. Specifically, I suggest that unbelonging, as opposed to belonging, as an object of inquiry could provide us with a unique epistemological advantage. Then, I provide examples to illustrate how to utilize this epistemological advantage.

From a social constructionist perspective, positivist researchers commit the mistake of naturalizing belonging: in their eagerness to pin down a fixed truth of belonging, they fail to recognize its multifacetedness, fluidity, and contingency (Yuval-Davis, 2006). This mistake is hardly surprising. At times of peace, belonging tends to be well maintained and thus takes on a deceptively stable appearance. The stability of belonging can be questioned in times of historical rupture. For example, as Yuval-Davis (2006) points out, when feelings and claims of belonging were shaken by the 2005 terrorist attack in London, the contingency of Muslim immigrants’ belonging was laid bare.

In other words, the state of unbelonging, where belonging can no longer be taken for granted, may serve as a valuable case study opportunity for us to recognize the socially constructed nature of belonging. If identification is the result of repetitive discursive and cultural practices, disruptive sociopolitical events unsettle these habituated iterations and bring to light how various social conditions and processes have been maintaining belonging (Yuval-Davis, 2006). With its denaturalizing epistemological power, unbelonging renders typically hidden hegemonic power relations conspicuous (Yuval-Davis, 2006).

Next, how do we use the epistemological advantage of unbelonging? First, there is the discursive approach (Antonsich, 2010). In his discussion of belonging, Shotter (1993) suggests that “one must live within a number of conflicting and competing discourses, communicative practices, or (to use Wittgenstein’s terminology) ‘forms of life’ with their associated ‘language games’” (p. 126). Shotter’s theorization requires us to scrutinize the role of language in constructing belonging. Let me illustrate the discursive approach by using the example of the “model minority.” For several decades, Chinese immigrants have been designated as, along with other East Asian immigrants, one of the model minorities for achieving socioeconomic success through diligence and obedience (Kim, 1999). It was not suprising that many immigrants accepted this seemingly flattering label. The popularity of the model minority discourse worries migration scholars, who caution that it pits the so-called model minorities against other supposedly less desirable minorities, thus creating a racial hierarchy that discriminates to what degree one is entitled to belong (Kim, 1999). In 2015, this discourse evolved into Chinese demonstrations in support of Peter Liang, a Chinese American policeman who was convicted for killing Akai Gurley. These demonstrations countered the Black Lives Matter movement through the slogan “All Lives Matter,” which again involves an evasive “language game” (Atkins, 2019; Ho, 2021; W. Liu, 2018). How do we get out of this discursive trap?

The latest Sinophobia has come as a wake-up call for many Chinese immigrants. It has brought with it the realization that their model minority status remains conditional and could easily disappear. Here, the emergent unbelonging—signaled by racial profiling, racist graffiti, physical assault, and even homicide—has served as an epistemological catalyst for Chinese immigrants as well as relevant scholars (Ho, 2021; W. Liu, 2020). The power of unbelonging lies in that it exposes the power dynamics—including the racial hierarchy bolstered by the model minority discourse—that used to sustain Chinese immigrants’ sense of belonging. It has been a hard but effective way to learn this lesson. No longer seeing belonging as a natural state, many Chinese immigrants are now reframing it in political terms—that one must make an effort to claim the entitlement to belong. Such awareness has led not only to protests against Sinophobia, but also to a Chinese alliance with the Black Lives Matter movement (W. Liu, 2020).

In addition to discourse analysis, there is a second social constructionist approach to unbelonging. Yuval-Davis (2006) stresses the role of repetitive practices in constructing emotional attachment to cultural spaces. Consider the example of wearing face masks. In early 2020, when COVID-19 first appeared in the West, Chinese immigrant communities around the world intuitively resumed their culturally habituated practice of wearing face masks to protect themselves. At this point, most other ethnic groups resisted face masks because, according to mainstream western culture, only sick individuals wore face masks in order not to infect others. Both choices seemed reasonable according to the respective cultural norms.

However, if we take Yuval-Davis’s (2006) caution that it is necessary to situate habituated practices within broader sociopolitical conditions, we can see that the real story goes deeper than merely a clash of cultures. The two cultures—one dominant and one characterized as ethnic—are not on a level ground. The coronavirus outbreak had already led to widespread stigmatization of Chinese ethnic members, and face masks became a racialized marker that exposed wearers to potential discrimination (Weale, 2020). Against this backdrop, when one of my research participants realized that he was the only person wearing a face mask on a street in Vancouver, he felt he was sticking out like “a chicken without feathers.” This state of heightened self-consciousness and vulnerability reveals how deeply the power imbalance between cultures penetrated mundane practices that would have been deemed harmless before COVID-19.

The coproduction of belonging and unbelonging by the nation-state and media

In the preceding section, I discussed the merits and methods of studying unbelonging. One question follows: How should we address the relationship between unbelonging and belonging? I suggest that even though unbelonging might appear to be the mere absence of belonging, in reality, the two often complement and even constitute one another.

Here, I am inspired by Teo (2023) and his discussion of the negative dialectics of globalization and mental life. According to Teo, conflicting forms of globalization set the stage for contradictory mentalities, which eventually manifest in the coexistence of both a progressive and a reactionary backlash against globalization. Let me again use the model minority discourse as an example. In earlier decades, the model minority discourse was able to gain traction among Chinese immigrants partly because it promised a sense of belonging to a group who had long suffered marginalization and had not quite felt that they belonged in a foreign land. Here, we see that unbelonging paves the way for a negotiated state of belonging. This state of belonging was only partial, however, as the model minority discourse implicitly contained an othering assumption that posited these subjects to be minority in essence (Kim, 1999). When the promise of belonging becomes broken, as in the present time of racial tension, the negative dialectics sets in motion a new cycle of heightened awareness of unbelonging. In these consecutive transitions, belonging and unbelonging exist in constant fluctuation, with the possibility of one inducing the other.

It should be pointed out that the shift between belonging and unbelonging is rarely a natural, spontaneous process. Nationalism scholars have analyzed the role of the nation-state in defining who is legitimate in a sovereignty (Billig, 2023; Stenner & Andreouli, 2023). In their book Who Sings the Nation-State? Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2007) discuss why the nation-state is often behind the co-construction of belonging and unbelonging. Along this line of inquiry, readers familiar with Benedict Anderson’s (2006) work would expect to see the role of the media as an instrument of the nation-state. Here, I hasten to add that the media has become a crucial component of diasporic life, especially at a time of lockdowns and travel restrictions.

Here is an example illustrating the roles of the nation-state and the media in the coproduction of belonging and unbelonging. Prior to COVID-19, deteriorating relations between China and the West fueled media campaigns emanating from China to the Chinese diaspora (Gao, 2021b). Chinese nationalist media boasted about the Chinese state’s unwavering commitment to its overseas citizens while depicting migrant life abroad in terms of insecurity and racism. This discourse was magnified by a blockbuster film, Wolf Warrior (Wu, 2015), which featured a heroic military mission to evacuate Chinese citizens overseas. Influenced by such media campaigns, some Chinese students studying abroad came to believe that they would be similarly evacuated in case of danger (Zhao, 2019). This discourse evolved during the COVID-19 pandemic. After having largely got domestic coronavirus transmission under control, the Chinese government took the opportunity to portray itself as a capable and responsible caretaker of its citizens’ well-being in contrast to western countries, which had soaring infection rates (Gao, 2021b). Touting China to be the safest country in the world, Chinese nationalist media and public alike flaunted the idea that Chinese expatriates should return to the safe haven they had unwisely left.

However, very soon the Chinese government implemented strict border control measures on noticing imported COVID-19 cases. This policy quickly shifted both media discourse and public opinion. Within weeks, the Chinese media started highlighting international travelers, including returning Chinese immigrants, as the primary sources of new coronavirus outbreaks. The previous glowing invitations quickly turned into harsh criticisms of returning Chinese immigrants for having supposedly brought risks back to China and for taking advantage of the country’s medical resources. A saying gained widespread popularity, which described returning Chinese immigrants as “useless in the development of the homeland, number one poisoner across thousands of miles” (Gao, 2021a, p. 209). The rapid changes of policy and public opinion led to much agony among Chinese immigrants, especially those who were facing financial difficulty or expiring visa status abroad. Now, stranded overseas, distraught Chinese immigrants flooded the social media outlets of China’s Aviation Administration and of Wolf Warrior’s director to voice their anger.

With this series of events, Chinese immigrants found themselves positioned in confusing, rapidly alternating modes of belonging and unbelonging. According to Butler and Spivak (2007), national belonging is not only a desire originating from the subjects—in this case, ordinary Chinese immigrants who need to maintain their ties with the homeland. It is also a problem that the nation-state needs to address. In order to manage the complexity and heterogeneity of modes of national belonging, the nation-state has to make national belonging stipulative and criterial (Butler & Spivak, 2007). Chinese immigrants were particularly deemed to require such an assessment because they stood out as a group of borderline subjects who had the potential to unsettle the legitimacy of the nation-state at a time of political turmoil. Thus, popular opinions on whether Chinese immigrants were welcome to return to the homeland frequently made reference to their emigration decision as a breach of national loyalty. Such a stipulation justified the Chinese nation-state’s initial touting and later suspension of its obligation toward its overseas members. Here, we can see the common rationale underlying belonging and unbelonging: the Chinese nation-state’s recognition and denial of Chinese immigrants’ national belonging are two sides of the same coin at the service of its self-legitimization.

Polarizing geopolitics: The binary logic of double unbelonging

Having discussed the significance of unbelonging and its intertwinement with belonging, the next theoretical issue is concerned with the status of double. Why double unbelonging? Why not multiple, fluid, or ambiguous unbelonging? Double seems to imply that unbelonging is a self-bounded, coherent, quantifiable unit. Theorists of social constructionism have discussed the problem of reification. Kenneth Gergen (1985), for example, poses the question: “How can theoretical categories be induced or derived from observation, it is asked, if the process of identifying observational attributes itself relies on one’s possessing categories?” (p. 266). In light of such skepticism, the concept of double unbelonging might appear to risk constituting yet another theoretical category that filters how we observe reality. More specifically, the concept of double unbelonging might risk imposing a binary logic on the phenomenon of interest. Ian Parker (2014) has criticized binary oppositions, as they “structure the way we think about ourselves and the ‘reality’ we construct to be able to communicate and relate to each other” (p. 3). In this regard, double might seem to imply that Chinese immigrants’ unbelonging necessarily and exclusively depends on China and the West being polar opposites, thus precluding other possibilities (W. Liu, 2020). How can we avoid this pitfall?

I argue that the solution again lies in the shift from belonging to the politics of belonging. Seen from a social constructionist perspective, the phenomenon of double unbelonging is not a quasi-natural, clear-cut, bidirectional state that exists out there, awaiting scientific description. It is instead shaped by the polarizing logic of international geopolitical contestation, which takes place through a spiral of mutual accusations that lead to entrenched black-or-white, us-versus-them, or West-versus-China thinking. Take the US–China trade war, for example. We can see that, instead of achieving reconciliation, the diplomatic interaction has escalated to fuel reciprocal radicalization (Mørck et al., 2023). It is such a vicious circle of bilateral power struggles that has made Chinese immigrants unbelong on both sides, sometimes as the victims of collateral damage and at other times as political pawns (Gao, 2021a, 2021b).

If we temporarily suspend the popular West-versus-China binary thinking, it is possible to recognize that, as I have mentioned earlier, Chinese immigrants are drastically different from one another (L. S. Liu et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2022; Zhou & Yang, 2021). Some are multimillion-dollar investors while others struggle for a living with undocumented status. Some protest against the Hong Kong democratic movement and some continue with anti-Chinese regime activism as exiles (Gao, 2022a; Manthorpe, 2019). Unfortunately, such diversity has been frequently neglected in policies, media representations, public perception, and even academic research.

The oversimplification of identity has been theorized by Yuval-Davis (2006). According to Yuval-Davis, while social locations—such as gender, class, religion, and nation—“are virtually never constructed along one power axis of difference,” the reality is that “official statistics—as well as identity politics—often tend to construct them in this way” (p. 200). Such reductionism can be partially attributed to the limits of signification—namely, the use of social categories to group subjects (Yuval-Davis, 2006). Whether out of negligence or stereotyping, such identification often reduces the vast diversity of the population to the grossly generic label of Chinese immigrant. This reductionism precludes multiple perspectives and paves the way for binary thinking (W. Liu, 2020). The aforementioned Chinese media campaigns, for example, depicted a powerful, committed Chinese nation-state that was ready to support its overseas citizens against a precarious, racist western society (Gao, 2022a). Meanwhile, on the US side, there have been vociferous right-wing voices calling China out for its allegedly Communist opposition to democracy, sidestepping the fact that China’s neoliberal capitalism shares much common ground with US right-wing politics. These discourses reduce highly complex geopolitics to bipolar oppositions, thereby contributing to Chinese immigrants’ double unbelonging.

The problem of signification also requires us to examine the basic social categories that positivist scholarship has taken for granted as its building blocks. Several scholars have pointed out that positivist research tends to conflate nation, culture, and race (Bhatia & Ram, 2001; W. Liu, 2022). In the Chinese case, the very concept of Chinese immigrant might be misleading as it, unless carefully used, could easily conflate cultural, racial, and national categories while erasing others (Gao, 2022b). Let me illustrate this with reference to a Sinophobic statement reported in the USA:

Roommate told me that the Chinese are filthy people who all deserve to die of COVID-19, and said it is no wonder all plagues spread from China. Said that the Chinese were selfish and horribly overpopulated, and they should have issued a 0-child policy so they could not proliferate. (Borja et al., 2020, p. 4)

While this discourse touches on a wide range of issues, including hygiene, morality, population, and government policy, it eventually funnels all these issues into a single Chinese signifier through a gross conflation of race, culture, government, and nation-state. How do we overcome such reductionism and retrieve the diversity, complexity, and fluidity of Chinese immigrants’ belonging? Yuval-Davis (2006) suggests that an intersectional approach could be helpful. Such an approach would allow us to examine how different social categories constitute or compete with one another and, through such analysis, undo reductionistic signification. Such an intersectional approach again entails an analysis of the politics of belonging. That is, when we examine how certain social categories are highlighted, negotiated, or erased, it is helpful to consider how these actions—embedded in existing social structures and power relations—intervene in particular groups’ belonging.

Conclusion

In this article, I have analyzed Chinese immigrants’ changing sense of belonging. For several decades, Chinese immigrants have enjoyed transnational belonging thanks to a conducive international environment. Now, in the wake of geopolitical contestation between China and the West, and COVID-19, many first-generation Chinese immigrants are experiencing double unbelonging due to marginalization in both their host society and China.

By analyzing the double unbelonging of Chinese immigrants, I have made three theoretical contributions. First, I have expanded the conventional cultural–humanistic framework of belonging to incorporate political analysis. Second, I have discussed why and how to replace the popular positivist approach with a social constructionist approach, which requires a shift of analytical focus from belonging to the politics of belonging. Finally, I have discussed several theoretical issues regarding unbelonging: how to use the epistemological advantage it offers; its dialectical relation with belonging; its production by the nation-state and media; and the polarizing logic of international power struggles in shaping double unbelonging.

Let me conclude this article with a reflection on how we, as scholars, are positioned in relation to the politics of belonging. According to sociologist Anthony Giddens (1991), in modern society, belonging is reflexively made in the sense that it is routinely monitored, analyzed, disembedded, and reorganized. In these processes, the social sciences, including psychology, play the role of gathering information and proposing intervention strategies regarding belonging. From this sociological perspective, it is possible to examine how psychological scholarship and practice regarding belonging is motivated by various political concerns—economic development, national security, race relations, human rights, cosmopolitanism, and so forth. In other words, scholars—whether we identify with positivism or social constructionism—are never passive, disinterested observers. Instead, we actively participate in the politics of belonging. Hence, the question we all need to reckon with is: What kind of a politics of belonging are we contributing to with our work?