Abstract
“Chineseness is back on the agenda” yet again. In the introduction to the special issue on “Chineseness Unbound” published in Asian Ethnicity in 2009, historian Anthony Reid argues that “The tension between the center and the periphery, the political and the cultural, the lumpers and the dividers or deconstructers, makes Chineseness again a critical field of contestation.” Even after the debate presented in the seven papers published in the special issue on whether Chineseness could or should be “unbound” from China, race, or definition of culture, many scholars continue to take the category of “Chinese” as a given and remain focused on the essentialist notion of Chineseness.
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Notes
- 1.
In studies on China, the emphasis remains on how leaders of the Han ethnicity explained ethnic differences and integrated people of different ethnicities into the Chinese nation. The category or idea of the Han or Chinese ethnicity in the context of China is thus uncritically applied rather than rigorously tested. The works cited here have tried to remedy this issue in the field.
- 2.
In a similar vein, Allen Chun (1996, p. 123) argues that, “The difference between their ethnic disposition as characterized by custom or language and their sense of identity as a bounded community vis-à-vis others is important for understanding why Chinese overseas could continue to claim to have a sense of ethnic Chineseness, regardless of how deeply they were actually assimilated into indigenous society.” To him, Chineseness will continue to exist as long as the bounded concept of identity or ethnicity persists (p. 125).
- 3.
Wang argues that many Chinese overseas choose essentialist cultural elements to preserve in order “to defend their descendants from becoming rootless” (2009, p. 213).
- 4.
The Chinese overseas had played an instrumental role in the early stages of China’s journey of economic growth. They brought in as much as two-thirds of foreign direct investment (FDI) flows when China implemented the Reform and Opening-Up Policy in the late 1970s and gave China a resource unavailable to any other rising power (Lee 2016).
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Chan, Yk., Hoon, CY. (2021). Introduction: The Historicity of Nation and Contingency of Ethnicity. In: Hoon, CY., Chan, Yk. (eds) Contesting Chineseness. Asia in Transition, vol 14. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6096-9_1
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