Organizer: James A. Cook, Central Washington University
Chair: Dorothy Ko, Rutgers University
Discussant: Philip A. Kuhn, Harvard University
Dominant narratives of the construction and significance of ties between overseas Chinese communities and the Chinese motherland have tended to fall into two categories, economic and political. Some describe the crucial role of Huaqiao in the economic development of Southeast Asia and China proper, while others analyze the role of overseas Chinese in the Chinese revolution. This panel intends to move away from high politics and investment patterns and will focus on popular culture and everyday life as a vehicle for analyzing how overseas Chinese negotiated questions of community and identity while abroad and in China. The dynamics of the complex cultural encounters and tensions that lay at the heart of how most overseas Chinese approached the question of "being Chinese" and/or "being modern" reveals much about the process of how a Huaqiao community flourished.
The papers that make up this panel tell us much about how popular notions of culture and community crossed oceans and seas in different regional and temporal contexts. Madeline Hsu looks at how networks of native place and mutual trust provided the basis for the movement of large amounts of groceries, newspapers and magazines, clothing, and tools by Hong Kong-based import-export firms. James Cook examines the uniquely Huaqiao construction of Chinese identity that one sees in the move to establish primary schools throughout rural Fujian and which culminated in the establishment of Xiamen University. Finally, Andrew Morris discusses the exchange of sports and martial arts teams between China and Southeast Asia in the late 1920s. Together, the papers provide a mix of perspectives that allow us to examine how crucial questions of shared culture and community must inform our future discussions of the transnational relationship between China and Chinese abroad.
Trading with the Gold Mountain: Jinshanzhuang and Networks of Kinship and Native Place, 1848–1949
Madeline Hsu, San Francisco State University
In 1853, the Daily Alta California described the wide array of Chinese goods available in San Francisco’s Chinatown. " . . . The majority of the houses were of Chinese importation, and were stores, stocked with hams, tea, dried fish, dried ducks and other . . . Chinese eatables, besides copper pots and kettles, fans, shawls, chessmen, and all sorts of curiosities . . ." (21 November). The presence of this variety of Chinese goods in the young state of California was due in no small part to a handful of businessmen who had fled Guangzhou’s economic depression of 1847 to start anew in California the following year. They established the first outposts of a Chinese network of trade that by 1930 would provide overseas Chinese with groceries, newspapers and magazines, clothing, tools, as well as postal and banking services in urban centers throughout North America including San Francisco, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, Newark, San Diego, Portland, Washington D.C., Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Baltimore, Seattle, Vancouver, Toronto, Victoria, Calgary, Winnipeg, Montreal, Houston, Hawaii, and Hobart. The backbone of this extensive trade network was Hong Kong-based import-export firms called jinshanzhuang.
Jinshanzhuang began as Chinese grocery exporters but grew in response to the needs of growing numbers of Chinese overseas to maintain other kinds of contact with their families and native places. Jinshanzhuang expanded their range of services to include postal, remittance, and banking activities in an age when government-run institutions did not yet provide this array of connections across such a broad expanse of territory. Cantonese businessmen employed networks of native place and mutual trust to develop secure and reliable communications pathways that bridged the Pacific long before the era of telephones and television. This examination of the functioning and development of jinshanzhuang reveals the flexible nature of the social and cultural resources that Chinese brought to their encounters with the west, the changes in their values and identities as they adapted to a capitalist world economy, and the role of village and family networks in directing or at least mediating such change.
Currents of Education and Identity: Overseas Chinese and Minnan Schools, 1912–1937
James A. Cook, Central Washington University
This paper analyzes the explosion of Huaqiao-led philanthropic efforts in education that occurred throughout southern Fujian or Minnan during the Republican era. In the districts surrounding the port city of Xiamen, returned overseas Chinese opened hundreds of primary and middle schools, in some instances contributing up to 93% of county funding. This trend culminated in the establishment of Xiamen University in 1921.
These schools reflected their benefactors’ uniquely Huaqiao construction of Chinese identity. The experience of a Chinese diaspora confronting itself and its colonial rulers in Southeast Asia led to the creation of a new sense of selfhood among many Huaqiao. This identity looked to wed the commercial success of overseas Chinese merchant life with a revamped Confucianism and a newly discovered Minnan historical identity. The overseas Chinese intellectual, Lim Boonkeng (Lin Wenqing), would utilize this formula in organizing Xiamen University during his long tenure as the school’s first chancellor. In contrast to the intellectual milieu dominated by politics that characterized Beijing’s universities, Lim fostered an atmosphere that integrated commerce and Chinese identity via a curriculum that emphasized economics and "Sinology" (guoxue) while clearly distancing itself from a Chinese state and its chaotic politics. Analysis of the cultural flows that stood at the heart of Huaqiao activism in education provides important insights into two areas. First, it will help to reveal how notions of "China" as a fixed geographic entity became increasingly unstable in the modern era. Second, looking at the movement of people and ideas across national and cultural boundaries illuminates the development of a consciousness that made many overseas Chinese feel a part of a transnational community.
Southeast Asia in a Greater Chinese Sporting Community, 1920–1948
Andrew Morris, University of Oregon
Modern sports and martial arts, by the 1920s, were commonly viewed as important modes of strengthening and modernizing a Chinese nation and race for the twentieth century. It was not long before this physical culture impulse was extended to Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, who served as key subjects of visions of a Chinese sporting community that could transcend the borders of the troubled Republic.
In the 1920s, the Shanghai-based Pure Martial (Jingwu) Association established dozens of branch martial arts academies in Indonesia, Malaya, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, providing Huaqiao in these colonized locales the opportunity to join a strong and specifically "Chinese" cultural realm. Guomindang sporting bureaucrats and promoters of the 1930s sought to base links to these Huaqiao communities within the realm of competitive sport. Chinese varsity and national teams, often raising money for sporting or charitable causes, toured Southeast Asia, playing against local Huaqiao teams. These locales sent large delegations to compete in Chinese National Games between 1933 and 1948, and many Huaqiao also represented China in international competition.
These martial arts and competitive sports models, however, had very different implications for visions of a greater China. One was based on "traditional" cultural forms which knew no modern borders. The other assumed the very forms of competition and fair play which shaped the new twentieth-century nation-state order. Narratives of sport and a unified "China" allow us to see the diversity, as well as the common assumptions, within the open-ended historical process of creating Chinese communities in the early twentieth century.