Contesting Chineseness

Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-94-6372-246-9
Verlag: Amsterdam University Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 10, 154 Seiten, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 234 mm

Reihe: New Mobilities in Asia

Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of China. While many of these faces of China’s globalization headed for the popular Western destinations of the United States, Australia and Canada, others have been lured by the booming Asian economies. Compared with pre-1949 Chinese migrants, most are wealthier, motivated by a variety of concerns beyond economic survival and loyal to the communist regime. The reception of new Chinese migrants, however, has been less than warm in some places. In Singapore, tensions between Singaporean-Chinese and new Chinese arrivals present a puzzle: why are there tensions between ethnic Chinese settlers and new Chinese arrivals despite similarities in phenotype, ancestry and customs? Drawing on rich empirical data from ethnography and digital ethnography, Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants investigates this puzzle and details how ethnic Chinese subjects negotiate their identities in an age of contemporary Chinese migration and China’s ascent.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Ang, Sylvia

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Soziologie von Migranten und Minderheiten
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Differentielle Psychologie, Persönlichkeitspsychologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Contesting Chineseness

Global anxieties at China’s ascent and the outflow of Chinese immigrants

The invisibilities of co-ethnic politics

Immigration and the cultural politics of being Chinese

Imagining Chinese identity

Insider, outsider and digital ethnography

Overview of the book

1 Who’s Chinese?

Once a Chinese, always a Chinese

Realizing the China dream

De-Chineseness in Singapore

Re-sinicizing Singapore

Hostage to China’s rise and fall

2 Not the lower classes

“We won’t go overly dressed”

“I don’t dare to eat their food”

“Dirty” women

Sensory disturbances, repulsion, and class

Denying cultural citizenship

Marked as a Chinese migrant

3 A better Chinese man

Hierarchy of Chinese Masculinities

“We are of low quality”

Higher sushi makes a better man

Performing Chinese masculinity

Seeking solace on WeChat

Reimagining the better Chinese man

4 When a Chinese does not speak Chinese

Chineseness as Mandarin

Other ways to be Chinese

Fragmenting identities

My Chinese culture is better than your Chinese culture

Civilizational or national belonging?

Regulating the internet

Sanitized Chineseness

5 In the new Chinatown

Racialization and the politics of place

The original Chinatown and the European imaginary

Geylang: The new Chinatown

The media’s complicity

Chinese migrants react: Self Orientalisation

Locals’ displacement

Two Chinatowns, two imaginaries of Chineseness

Conclusion: A hierarchy of Chineseness

Coconstitution of China and Singapore’s Chineseness

Enduring Chineseness

Index

Über Autor(innen)

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