State/Nation/Transnation
State/Nation/Transnation challenges the assumption that transnational movements herald the death of the nation-state per se, arguing rather that they involve a reconfiguration. This book takes as its main theme the interconnections between conceptions of the state, the nation and the transnation as they are played out in the AsiaPacific arena – one of the globe’s most prominent regions in terms of human mobility and migrations. Grounded in in-depth research, each chapter explores the productive possibilities of the tensions between the nation-state and the transnation. It concludes that while there is potential for transnational forms of activity to challenge the existing power structures of the nation-state, it is also clear that existing axes of power and influence are often maintained, or are reinscribed in new ways. Containing both theoretical chapters and detailed case studies, this volume will interest students and researchers of migration, the Asia-Pacific and the future of the nation-state.
Brenda S.A. Yeoh is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, and the principal investigator of the Asian Metacentre at the university’s Asia Research Institute. Katie Willis is a senior lecturer in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Transnationalism Series editor: Steven Vertovec University of Oxford
‘Transnationalism’ broadly refers to multiple ties and interactions linking people or institutions across the borders of nation-states. Today myriad systems of relationship, exchange and mobility function intensively and in real time while being spread across the world. New technologies, especially involving telecommunications, serve to connect such networks. Despite great distances and notwithstanding the presence of international borders (and all the laws, regulations and national narratives that they represent), many forms of association have been globally intensified and now take place paradoxically in a planet-spanning yet common arena of activity. In some instances, transnational forms and processes serve to speed up or exacerbate historical patterns of activity; in others, they represent arguably new forms of human interaction. Transnational practices and their consequent configurations of power are shaping the world of the twenty-first century. This book forms part of a series of volumes concerned with describing and analysing a range of phenomena surrounding this field. Serving to ground theory and research on ‘globalization’, the Routledge book series on ‘Transnationalism’ offers the latest empirical studies and ground-breaking theoretical work on contemporary socio-economic, political and cultural processes that span international boundaries. Contributions to the series are drawn from sociology, economics, anthropology, politics, geography, international relations, business studies and cultural studies. The series is associated with the Transnational Communities Research Programme of the Economic and Social Research Council (see http://www. transcomm.ox.ac.uk). The series consists of two strands: Transnationalism aims to address the needs of students and teachers, and these titles will be published in hardback and paperback. Titles include: Culture and Politics in the Information Age A New Politics? Frank Webster (ed.) Transnational Democracy Political Spaces and Border Crossings James Anderson (ed.)
Routledge Research in Transnationalism is a forum for innovative new research intended for a high-level specialist readership, and the titles will be available in hardback only (except titles marked *). Titles include: 1 New Transnational Social Spaces International Migration and Transnational Companies in the Early 21st Century Ludger Pries (ed.) 2 Transnational Muslim Politics * Reimagining the Umma Peter G Mandaville 3 New Approaches to Migration? Transnational Communities and the Transformation of Home Nadje Al-Ali and Khalid Koser (eds) 4 Work and Migration Life and Livelihoods in a Globalizing World Ninna Nyberg Sorensen and Karen Fog Olwig (eds) 5 Communities across Borders New Immigrants and Transnational Cultures Paul Kennedy and Victor Roudometof 6 Transnational Spaces Peter Jackson, Phil Crang and Claire Dwyer (eds) 7 The Media of Diaspora Karim H. Karim (ed.) 8 Transnational Politics Turks and Kurds in Germany Eva Østergaard-Nielsen
9 Culture and Economy in the Indian Diaspora Bhikhu Parekh, Gurharpal Singh and Steven Vertovec (eds) 10 International Migration and Globalization Rey Koslowski (ed.) 11 Gender in Transnationalism Home, Longing and Belonging among Moroccan Migrant Women Ruba Salih 12 State/Nation/Transnation Perspectives on Transnationalism in the Asia-Pacific Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Katie Willis (eds) 13 Transnational Activism in Asia Problems of Power and Democracy Nicola Piper and Anders Uhlin (eds) 14 Diaspora, Identity and Religion New Directions in Theory and Research Waltraud Kokot, Khachig Tölölyan and Carolin Alfonso (eds) 15 Cross-Border Governance in the European Union Olivier Kramsch and Barbara Hooper (eds)
State/Nation/Transnation
Perspectives on Transnationalism in the Asia-Pacific Edited by Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Katie Willis
First published 2004 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. © 2004 Brenda S. A. Yeoh and Katie Willis for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors their contributions All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data State/nation/transnation : perspectives on transnationalism in the AsiaPacific / edited by Brenda S.A. Yeoh and Katie Willis. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Asia–Emigration and immigration. 2. Pacific Area–Emigration and immigration. 3. Transnationalism. 4. Alien labor–Asia. 5. Alien labor–Pacific Area. 6. Asians–Foreign countries. I. Yeoh, Brenda S. A. II. Willis, Katie, 1968– JV8490.S73 2004 304.8'5––dc22 2003019867 ISBN 0-203-49734-1 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-57299-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–30279–X (Print Edition)
dedicated to the memory of Natalie Yap
Contents
List of illustrations Notes on contributors Preface Acknowledgements 1
Introduction: transnationalism as a challenge to the nation
xi xii xvi xvii 1
K AT I E W I L L I S , B R E N DA S . A . Y E O H A N D S . M . A B D U L K H A D E R FA K H R I
2
The myth of the controllability of difference: labour migration, transnational communities and state strategies in the Asia-Pacific region
16
STEPHEN CASTLES
3
Spheres of speculation and middling transnational migrants: Chinese Indonesians in the Asia-Pacific
37
DONALD M. NONINI
4
Citizenship and differential exclusion of immigrants in Japan
67
K E I KO YA M A N A K A
5
Is there a transnation? Migrancy and the national homeland among overseas Filipinos
93
F I L O M E N O V. A G U I L A R J R
6
Expatriating is patriotic? The discourse on ‘new migrants’ in the People’s Republic of China and identity construction among recent migrants from the PRC PÁL NYÍRI
120
x Contents
7
From nation to networks and back again: transnationalism, class and national identity in Malaysia
144
TIM BUNNELL
8
Indian information technology professionals’ world system: the nation and the transnation in individuals’ migration strategies
161
X I A N G B I AO
9
Beyond transnational nationalism: questioning the borders of the Chinese diaspora in the global city
179
IEN ANG
10 Democracy, culture and the politics of gate-keeping in Cambodia: the transnation goes home
197
C A RO L I N E H U G H E S
11 Internal transnationalism and the formation of the Vietnamese diaspora
218
A N D R E W H A R DY
12 Shifting the axis: feminism and the transnational imaginary
238
VERA MACKIE
Index
257
Illustrations
Tables 6.1 8.1 9.1
Top ten news stories as reported by new migrant newspapers in Japan and Hungary Australia’s immigration intake programme, 1995–2001 Diaspora and global city as transnational communities
127 173 191
Figures 6.1 9.1
The segmentary structure of new migrant organizations A symbolic representation of varieties of Chinese
134 188
Contributors
Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr is a professor in the Department of History, School of Social Sciences, and director of the Institute of Philippine Culture at the Ateneo de Manila University. He is also Editor of Philippine Studies. His research interests include the constructions of nationhood, the cultural politics of migrations, the political culture of colonial sugar economies, and class relations and transformation. He is the author of Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island (University of Hawaii Press and Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998) and editor of Filipinos in Global Migrations: At Home in the World? (Philippine Migration Research Network and the Philippine Social Science Council, 2002). He worked and lived in Australia and Singapore for ten years before repatriating in early 2003. Ien Ang is professor of cultural studies and director of the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney, Australia. She is internationally renowned for her ground-breaking work in the fields of media, communication and cultural studies and has published work on wide-ranging issues from the social construction of the television audience to questions of multiculturalism, migration, ethnicity and globalization. She has published several books, including Desperately Seeking the Audience (Routledge, 1991), Living Room Wars: Rethinking Audiences for a Post-modern World (Routledge, 1996) and On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (Routledge, 2001). Professor Ang is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and is a much sought-after speaker at conferences around the world. Tim Bunnell is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore, where he has been based since completing doctoral research at the University of Nottingham in 1999. His research interests centre on issues of landscape and national identity, the politics of urban development and the socio-spatial implications of information and communications technologies. He has published recent articles on these issues in Urban Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and Antipode, and he is co-editor of Critical Reflections on Cities in Southeast Asia (Times Academic Press, 2002) and author of Malaysia, Modernity and the Multimedia Super Corridor: A Critical Geography of Intelligent Landscapes (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004).
Contributors
xiii
Stephen Castles is professor of migration and refugee studies and director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. He has worked in Germany, Australia, Asia and Africa. His books include Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe (Oxford University Press, 1973, with Godula Kosack), Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities (Pluto Press, 1984), The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World (Palgrave, third edition, 2003, with Mark Miller), Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging (Macmillan, 2000, with Alastair Davidson) and Ethnicity and Globalization: From Migrant Worker to Transnational Citizen (Sage, 2000). S.M. Abdul Khader Fakhri completed his doctoral work at Cambridge University on Tamil Muslim politics in India, 1930–67. He joined the former Centre for Advanced Studies, National University of Singapore in 1999 for two years as a post-doctoral fellow. He is currently back in India and is continuing research on print culture and transnational Tamil identities in Southeast Asia. Andrew Hardy is a member of the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) and is responsible for the EFEO’s centre in Hanoi. He was formerly a lecturer at the Southeast Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore. His research focus is migration in Vietnamese history, which he uses to approach the study of highland change, transnational communities, social and economic aspects of the Vietnam wars, and the Cold War in Southeast Asia. In addition to journal articles in English, French and Vietnamese, his principal publications include Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam (Nordic Institute of Asian Press and Hawaii University Press, 2003); Des montagnards aux minorités ethniques. Quelle intégration nationale pour les habitants des hautes terres du Vietnam et du Cambodge (Institut de Recherche sur l’Asie du Sud Est Contemporaine-L’Harmattan, 2003, with Mathieu Guérin, Nguyen Van Chinh and Stan Tan Boon Hwee) and ‘Migration, markets and social change in the highlands of Vietnam’ (special issue of Asia Pacific Viewpoint, vol. 41, no. 1, April 2000, edited with Sarah Turner and Jean Michaud). Caroline Hughes is a lecturer at the School of Politics, University of Nottingham, and deputy director of Nottingham’s Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies. Her research focuses on the politics of intervention with respect to Southeast Asia and has, to date, focused upon the impact of international democracy and human rights promotion in Cambodia. Her publications include monographs entitled The Political Economy of Cambodia’s Transition, (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003) and UNTAC in Cambodia: the Impact on Human Rights (ISEAS, 1996). Vera Mackie is foundation professor of Japanese studies and dean of research and graduate studies in the Division of Humanities at Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia. In 2004 she will take up a professional fellowship at the University of Melbourne. Her major publications include Creating Socialist Women in Japan: Gender, Labour and Activism, 1900–1937
xiv Contributors (Cambridge, 1997; paperback edition, 2002), Human Rights and Gender Politics: Asia-Pacific Perspectives (Routledge, 2000, co-edited with Anne Marie Hilsdon, Martha Macintyre and Maila Stivens), Relationships: Japan and Australia, 1870s–1950s (History Monographs, 2001, co-edited with Paul Jones), Feminism in Modern Japan: Citizenship, Embodiment and Sexuality (Cambridge, 2003) and Gur™baruka to Jend‰ Hy™sh™ [Globalization and Representations of Gender] (Ochanomizu Shob™, 2003). Donald M. Nonini is professor of anthropology and chair of the Working Group in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of many journal articles and book chapters on the anthropology of transnational migration, ethnic and race relations, and the cultural politics of citizenship in Southeast Asia and the USA. Books that he has authored or edited include British Colonial Rule and the Resistance of the Malay Peasantry, 1900–1957 (Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1992), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism (Routledge, 1997, with Aihwa Ong) and If This Is Democracy: Public Interests and Private Politics in a Neo-liberal Age (under contract, with Dorothy Holland et al.). He is currently completing a book entitled ‘Getting through Life’: Class, the State, and the Cultural Politics of Chinese Citizenship in Malaysia. He has received research grants from the National Science Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. Pál Nyíri is a fellow at the Wissenschafts Kolleg zu Berlin. He is interested in the identity politics related to human movement, mainly in the context of Chinese migration and tourism. His most recent books are Transnational Chinese: Fujianese Migrants in Europe (Stanford University Press, 2003, with Frank N. Pieke, Mette Thuno and Antonella Ceccagno); China Inside Out: Contemporary Chinese Nationalism and Transnationalism (Central European University Press, forthcoming, co-edited with Joana Breidenbach) and Globalizing Chinese Migration (Ashgate, 2002, co-edited with Igor R. Saveliev). Katie Willis is a senior lecturer in geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her main research interests lie in the fields of gender and migration, transnationalism, and gender and development. She has conducted fieldwork in Mexico, China, Singapore, the USA and the UK and has published widely in journals such as Geoforum, Regional Studies and Gender, Place and Culture. She edited Gender and Migration (Edward Elgar, 2000, with Brenda Yeoh) and Challenges and Change in Middle America (Pearson, 2002, with Cathy McIlwaine). She is also a co-editor of the International Development Planning Review. Xiang Biao (BA and MA, Beijing University; PhD, Oxford) is a post-doctoral research fellow at the Asian Metacentre and the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. He was a research officer of the International Organization for Migration prior to his joining the NUS. He has worked on migration and social change in China, India and Australia. His main work includes studies on a migrant community in Beijing (A Village
Contributors
xv
beyond Borders, Chinese version by Sanlian Press, 2000; English version by Brill, 2004), migrant workers in south China (‘Peasant Workers’ and Urban Development, Beijing University, 1995), and migrant Indian computer professionals in Australia (PhD thesis on ‘Global “body shopping”’, 2002). He has also published a series of journal articles and book chapters. Keiko Yamanaka is a sociologist and lecturer with the Department of Ethnic Studies, and Research Associate in the Institute for the Study of Social Change, University of California at Berkeley. Since 1993, she has been studying transnational migration and social transformation in Japan, focusing on two contrasting immigrant populations: 250,000 authorized Brazilians of Japanese descent and 3,000 unauthorized Nepalese. She has published many journal articles, book chapters and newsletter articles on these topics. Most recently, she has co-edited (with Nicola Piper) ‘Gender, Migration and Governance in Asia’, in a special issue of Asian and Pacific Migration Journal (2003). In that volume, she authored an article on Brazilian women’s community activism in Japan. Brenda S.A. Yeoh is an associate professor in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, and principal investigator of the Asian Metacentre at the university’s Asia Research Institute. Her research foci include the politics of space in colonial and post-colonial cities; and gender, migration and transnational communities. She has published over fifty scholarly journal papers and several books, including Contesting Space: Power Relations and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial Singapore (Oxford University Press, 1996; reissued Singapore University Press, 2003); Gender and Migration (Edward Elgar, 2000, with Katie Willis), Gender Politics in the Asia-Pacific Region (Routledge, 2002, with Peggy Teo and Shirlena Huang) and The Politics of Landscape in Singapore: Construction of ‘Nation’ (Syracuse University Press, 2003, with Lily Kong).
Preface
The majority of the papers in this book were first presented at a conference on ‘Transnational Communities in the Asia-Pacific Region: Comparative Perspectives’, co-sponsored in 2000 by the UK Economic and Social Research Council’s Transnational Communities Programme and the former Centre for Advanced Studies at the National University of Singapore. We are very grateful for their financial and administrative support. The conference brought together scholars of different disciplinary backgrounds from a range of countries, including Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Hungary, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, the UK and the USA. The transnational subjects that provided the focus for the thirty-odd papers presented were themselves of an even wider assortment of ethno-nationalities: British, Burmese, Cambodians, Filipinos, Indians and other South Asians, Indonesians, Vietnamese, PRC Chinese, Indonesian Chinese, Singaporean Chinese, Malaysian Chinese, Australian Chinese, American Chinese, Hong Kong Chinese, other diasporic Chinese, South Americans of Japanese ancestry, Jews and Muslims in Hong Kong, and the Hani/Akha in the China–Burma–Thai borderlands. The difficulties of naming by ‘nationality’ were patently obvious in these fluidly transnational times. However, it was out of this at times bewildering (dis)array of people, nation-states, borders and mobilities that define and demarcate one another in interesting and cross-cutting ways that the idea for this book was conceived. Two sets of papers drawn from the same conference have been published, the first on ‘Transnational Elites’ in Geoforum (vol. 33, no. 4, 2002) and the second on ‘Transnational Edges’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies (vol. 26, no. 2, 2003). This volume puts together a third set of papers that give primary interest to what we see as the complexly folded relationship between the ‘nation-state’ and the ‘transnation’. The editors
Acknowledgements
From putting together the conference programme to reworking the papers for the book, our work was much facilitated by many individuals. Dr Abdul Fakhri worked closely with us in developing the idea for the conference and was instrumental in ensuring its success. We are grateful to the contributors for their commitment to the book project and for opening up many new fronts in our ongoing dialogue on the possibilities and pitfalls of contemporary transnationalism. We are also indebted to the support staff at the former Centre for Advanced Studies and the Asian MetaCentre for Population and Sustainable Development Analysis (at the National University of Singapore’s Asia Research Institute) – Kathleen, Valerie, Yati, Selvi, Verene, Theresa and Wai Kit – for their unstinting help in the organization of the conference as well as the long process of putting the book together. Our research assistants Ms Natalie Yap, Mr Hamzah bin Muzaini and Ms Ong Shir Nee worked indefatigably on cleaning up and formatting the manuscript, while Ms Grace McInnes and Ms Heidi Bagtazo at the London Routledge office were ever patient with our queries. Finally, we would like to dedicate this book to the memory of Ms Natalie Yap. We fondly remember her grace and cheer in all things big and small. The authors and publishers would like to thank Taylor & Francis (www.tandf.co.uk) for granting us permission to reproduce ‘Expatriating is Patriotic?’ by Pál Nyíri, originally published in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27 (4): 635–531. We are also grateful to Taylor & Francis for allowing us to include ‘Beyond Transnational Nationalism’, which is based on chapter 4 in On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West by Ien Ang (London: Routledge, 2001); to Edward Elgar Publishing for permission to include ‘The myth of the controllability of difference’ by Stephen Castles, which is a revised version of his ‘Introduction: migrant settlement, transnational communities and state strategies in the Asia-Pacific region’ published in R. Iredale, C. Hawksley and S. Castles (eds), Migration in the Asia-Pacific: Population, Settlement and Citizenship Issues (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2003).
1
Introduction Transnationalism as a challenge to the nation Katie Willis, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and S.M. Abdul Khader Fakhri
Introduction While it seems clear that notions of the ‘national’ are inherent in the concept of ‘transnational’, much early work on the processes of ‘transnationalism’, particularly in the field of cultural studies, dwelt on the ‘death of the nation’ (see, for example, Bhahba 1994). While this has been tempered somewhat with talk of ‘crisis’ rather than ‘death’, there is still widespread acceptance that transnationalism is a challenge to the continued existence of the ‘nation’, or more often, the ‘nation-state’. Arjun Appadurai, one of the key commentators on contemporary cultural processes, claims that ‘states throughout the world are under siege’ (1990: 305) and ‘I am … inclined to see globalization as a definite marker of a new crisis for the sovereignty of nation-states’ (2000: 4). Similar arguments regarding the role of the nation-state and challenges to state sovereignty are also propounded by authors such as Hirst and Thompson (1996), Sassen (1996), Castells (1997) and Tambini (2001). These challenges are, it is argued, coming ‘from above’ in the form of global governance organizations (for example, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization) and supranational institutions such as the European Union (Soysal 1994), as well as transnational corporations. ‘From below’, migrant networks and cross-border forms of political activism are regarded as usurping the power of the nationstate, as possibilities of transnational activities open up new spaces of resistance (Smith and Guarnizo 1998). However, if transnationalism is understood as sustained activities across national borders1 (Glick Schiller et al. 1992: 1; Basch et al. 1994: 7; Portes et al. 1999), then the importance of a ‘national scale’ and ‘national space’ that can be transcended through these processes is obvious. With no ‘national’, there can be no ‘transnational’ (Faist 2000a). Many authors (see, for example, Kearney 1995; Al-Ali and Koser 2002: 2) have argued that the continued importance of the ‘nation-state’ is a key feature distinguishing ‘transnationalism’ from the supposedly more deterritorialized concept of ‘globalization’. While much of this work has used ‘national’ as a shorthand for pertaining to the ‘nation-state’, it is important to recognize the diverse ways in which ‘nations’, and therefore ‘national’, can be conceived. In later chapters, the contributors
2
Katie Willis, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and S.M. Abdul Khader Fakhri
examine different dimensions of the ‘national’ in the context of greater crossborder processes, which have been termed ‘transnationalism’. For many, the reference is to the nation-state, a political entity based around a defined territory, within which the institutions of the state have power to implement policies through legislation or diktat, depending on the nature of the state. Under international law, these boundaries are constructed as fixed, and states have the right to protect their borders and control mobility of people, capital and resources across them (Giddens 1985). What the concept of the ‘nation’ adds to this is the idea of ‘the people’ as a ‘nation’ with a shared heritage, values and culture. While some (for example, Smith, 1981) argue that these feelings of belonging are rooted in some form of essentialized and primordial identity, others have stressed the socially constructed nature of this form of ‘national community’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Anderson 1991; Foster 1991; Billig 1995). As Stephen Castles outlines in his chapter in this book, the link between territory and a homogeneous national identity is a key theme in nation-state building projects. In many cases, this attempt to forge a national identity requires the subsuming of other ethnic, gender or religious markers into a common affiliation with ‘the nation’. If ‘national’ space is conceived in this way, as territory within which a singular people reside, the challenges presented by transnationalism are very apparent. Much of the increasing interest in, and for some people the reason for, transnationalism in the early twenty-first century is the extent of migration across national boundaries (Castles and Miller 1998).2 This, it is argued, is a reflection of greater ease of movement and access to information with improvements in transport and communication (Vertovec 1999). In addition, spatial shifts in production processes have created new opportunities for economic migration: highly skilled migrants are becoming increasingly involved in migration circuits, which are often associated with the activities of transnational corporations (Findlay 1995), while low-skilled or unskilled migrants are crossing international borders to work in agriculture, service-sector activities or, in some cases, manufacturing. Finally, in some parts of the world, vast numbers of refugees flee their countries of origin due to conflict or natural disaster. With such a level of migration, the policies of nation-states on immigration control and restricted access are threatened. In addition, new legal arrivals often contribute to a growing cultural diversity within the nation-state, creating added pressure to the contrived and contested identity of the ‘nation’ (Castles 2000). Migrants are increasingly likely to maintain contact across borders, often back to their place of origin, becoming part of what have been termed ‘transnational social fields’ (Smith and Guarnizo 1998) through daily practices such as reproductive activities, remittances and business transactions. Faist (2000a, 2000b) stresses the importance of recognizing diversity within transnational practices. He identifies three forms of ‘transnational social space’: ‘transnational kinship groups’, ‘transnational circuits’ and ‘transnational communities’. While practices cross national borders, this does not necessarily mean that individuals’ ‘national’ identities are similarly fluid and malleable. In many cases, there is a continued identification with the nation-state they have come from (often because of the
Introduction
3
intention to return) and as such, they may be regarded as a challenge to the destination state. However, as shall be highlighted below and exemplified throughout the following chapters, what this transnational moment involves is not the death of the nation-state per se but rather a reconfiguration. While the power of the state has been challenged in some circumstances by subnational, supranational and transnational institutions, the organs of the nation-state still play a crucial role. If the concept of ‘nation’ is decoupled from ‘state’, then the spatial fixity of the concept is often erased, as ‘peoples’ can form ‘nations’ without occupying the same territory. While these groups have, at times, been termed ‘diasporas’ (Cohen 1997), other terms such as ‘transnational communities’ or ‘transnational social fields’ may be used. As stressed by Faist (see above), it is important to recognize the diverse processes that can be captured by such terms. In his tripartite typology, ‘transnational kinship groups’ are engaged in reciprocal relationships based on social norms and expectations. Remittances would fall into this form of transnational activity. In contrast, ‘transnational circuits’ involve ‘exploitation of insider advantages’ (Faist 2000b), such as through ethnically based trading networks. Finally, he uses the term ‘transnational community’ to refer to communities of solidarity and collective identity, for example diasporic groups such as Jews, Armenians and Kurds. For many other researchers on transnationalism and migration, the scope of ‘transnational communities’ is much broader. This means not that these ‘communities’ are constructed as internally coherent entities but that there is some form of shared identification (Willis and Yeoh 2002). In some cases, the term ‘nations’ may be used. In this situation, the notion of ‘transnation’ may be useful to distinguish this formation from the nation-state. This concept stresses a common identity, but the ‘trans-’ prefix emphasizes that this identity is not linked directly to residence in a particular territory and forms a type of ‘delocalized practice’ (Appadurai 1993: 424). A territorial focus remains in ideological or imaginary terms, for example in the Chinese diaspora (see Chapter 9) or among migrant Filipinos (see Chapter 5). By calling the book State/Nation/Transnation, we wanted to stress the importance of these three forms of human organization in the era of globalization. While we have highlighted the distinct nature of the three concepts, it is clear that as they are socially constructed, so they can be interrogated, not only by researchers but also by other actors. New or expanded possibilities for transnational forms of activity have created opportunities for new expressions of power and challenges to existing processes of exclusion. However, throughout the remainder of this chapter and the rest of the book, it is clear that existing axes of power and influence are often maintained, or are reinscribed in new physical locations or spatial scales.
The Asia-Pacific By focusing on the Asia-Pacific in this book, we aim to contribute to understandings of transnationalism and the locating and placing of transnationalism within
4
Katie Willis, Brenda S.A. Yeoh and S.M. Abdul Khader Fakhri
specific ‘local’ configurations of economic, social, cultural and political processes (Mitchell 1997). As Al-Ali and Koser (2002: 4) highlight, much of the transnationalism research, particularly in relation to migration, has focused on Latin American labour migration to North America. While this is clearly important, there is a need to examine the concept in different spatial contexts. However, by adopting this regional focus, we are not suggesting that the region is clearly demarcated and bounded (Appadurai 2000). As Kelly and Olds (1999: 2) stress in their introduction to Globalization and the Asia-Pacific, the label ‘Asia-Pacific’ is highly contested, but there is ‘a certain utility in its vagueness’. When considering ‘transnationalism’, with its supposed potential to destabilize and undermine existing spatial certainties, it is even more appropriate to use a term as fluid as ‘Asia-Pacific’. In general, we have included in this term the countries of Southeast and East Asia, and Oceania, but throughout the book, it is clear that the circuits of migration, political organizing, kinship and the tentacles of nation-states reach far beyond this geographically bounded space. In terms of migration flows, the Asia-Pacific is one of the globe’s most prominent regions in numerical terms. High levels of economic growth in some nation-states have resulted in labour shortages and led to state-sponsored immigration (albeit within defined limits). These opportunities draw migrants from throughout the region, and elsewhere (see Willis and Yeoh 2000; Beaverstock 2002 for a discussion of highly skilled migration flows from North America and Western Europe to the regional financial centres), through both legal and illegal channels (Hugo 1995; Castles 2000). In addition, migration networks outside the region have also been developed across the class spectrum, from the so-called ‘astronaut’ families of well-off Hong Kong and Taiwanese migrants in particular to the globalized spaces of reproduction involving women from the Philippines and Indonesia employed as domestic servants (Skeldon 1995; Anderson 1999; Pratt 1999; Stiell and England 1999; Parreñas 2001; Chee 2003). Trying to quantify the number of labour migrants in the region is complicated not only by problems of data collection and the extent of illegal movements but also by the very fluidity of the migration flows and migrant communities. While some migrants are willing and able to ‘stay put’, in many cases, as we shall see throughout the book, one migration experience is often only part of a shifting pattern of mobility and engagement across national borders. In the mid-1990s, Asian labour migrants working outside their national borders were estimated at about six million, with three million of these working within the region and three million elsewhere (Martin et al. 1996: 163). However, this does not cover illegal labour migrants and refugees. Within the region, the Philippines stands out as the labour-exporting country; it is now second only to Mexico in terms of global standing as a source of labour (Go, in OECD 2002: 265). A number of chapters in this book focus on mobility that has been forced largely by war and other forms of civil unrest. For example, ‘over 2 million people fled from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975. Over a million were resettled in the US, with smaller numbers in Australia, Canada and western Europe’ (Castles 2000: 109).
Introduction
5
Thus, a key rationale for focusing on the Asia-Pacific is to give it a prominence not so much as a space of place as a space of flows, to use Castells’ terms, since it is a region constituted by intense and increasing flows of people (labour) within the region and beyond. It is the human flows that help to give shape and identity to the region. However, as supposed by the title of this book, the nature of the nation-state within the region also needs to be highlighted. The flows of labour (as well as capital) are not unregulated, but as is outlined in more detail by Castles in Chapter 2, the nation-states of the region are implicated in their construction. In many cases, these nation-states are recent formations, created as a result of decolonization in the postwar period by a number of European powers. Other states, such as China and Japan, have had longer histories, but the current configuration of state power is often relatively recent (post-imperial in the case of Japan and having undergone a series of transformations from imperial to communist in the case of China). The theme of this book in examining how transnationalism is experienced, moulded and promoted within the region is therefore set in a context where, for many, the nation-state is a relatively new actor.
Nation-states as gate-keepers One of the key processes in the construction of transnational communities or social fields is migration. As highlighted above, greater global migration flows have resulted in millions of individuals living outside their nation-state of origin. Such movements contribute, it is argued, to the porosity of national borders, the declining power of the nation-state and the uncoupling of territorial base and identity. However, such celebratory (from some perspectives) interpretations fail to recognize the continued importance of the ‘national’ (in state terms) as a space that has to be negotiated and entry to which is still strongly influenced by state institutions. For all the talk of fluidity and porosity, nation-states still exercise power over who legally enters the national space (Ong 1999; Anthias 2001: 635–7). In Chapter 2, Stephen Castles provides an overview of how East Asian states have used immigration policies to manage the different flows of migrants in the region. He points out that far from being a regional migration system within which there is complete freedom of movement, there is a differential incorporation of migrant groups into nation-states. For countries that are net importers of migrants (such as Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and Brunei), a key factor is the type of labour that is required in that country; thus, certain skills and qualifications are privileged over others, leaving some able to enter and excluding those regarded as less able to contribute to economic growth. Castles stresses that within the region, states have been keen to construct immigrants as sojourners rather than settlers, and they have developed policies to facilitate this process. He compares this approach to ‘controlling difference’ with the longer-established migrant-receiving nations of Australia, the USA and Western Europe, which have increasingly recognized the tensions involved in trying to manage migration
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in such a way and instead have moved to a more overt policy of ‘multiculturalism’ within the constructions of ‘national identity’. Donald Nonini’s chapter on ethnic Chinese Indonesians in Australia draws on Foucauldian notions of discipline to examine different regimes of ‘governability’ and how nation-states, in this case Australia, are able to mould access routes into the national territory. Nonini focuses on the movement of thousands of Chinese to Australia in the aftermath of anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia in May 1998. Despite the well-documented cases of ethnic persecution, the majority of Chinese from Indonesia granted entry into Australia came through ‘business skills’ or ‘independent skills’ routes. These migrants were therefore constructed by the Australian state as economic migrants able to contribute to the future well-being of the Australian economy rather than individuals fleeing persecution. In Chapter 4, Keiko Yamanaka discusses the changing immigration policies adopted by the Japanese state. The complexities of immigration policies and associated welfare and social support highlight the continued power of the nation-state as exercised through particular institutions and bureaucratic structures. Yamanaka shows how immigration policies are constructed to bring in the type of labour that the Japanese economy requires and to maintain the links between Japanese citizenship and Japanese ethnic identity. However, she stresses the tensions between nation-state discourses regarding ethnic purity and the reality of Japanese society. Historically, despite claims of ethnic purity, the heterogeneity of Japan’s society was clear, with significant Korean and Chinese communities. This form of state discourse meant that during the postwar period, citizenship was denied to non-ethnic Japanese. The ‘hyphen that links the nation to the state’ (Appadurai 1990: 304) is also challenged through the arrival of ethnic Japanese individuals from Brazil attracted by the lure of manufacturing jobs and their links to the ‘homeland’. Yamanaka demonstrates that this shared ancestry counts for little as the Japanese state treats them as ‘non-citizens’.
Transnational reincorporation While in Japan the state attempts to present the Japanese ‘nation’ within Japan’s territory as ethnically homogeneous, for other countries in the region it is emigration that is challenging the territory–nation identity link. While emigration is nothing new, the ways in which some nation-states have begun to mobilize discourses of migration within discourses of nationalism have become increasingly prominent. Through such processes, it is clear that ‘the nation-state’ is a continued presence in processes of transnationalism well beyond the physical state boundaries. This expansion of the ‘imagined nation’, ‘transnation’ or ‘trans-territorial nation-state’ (Guarnizo and Smith 1998: 8) can be considered in Benedict Anderson’s discussions of ‘imagined communities’. However, what is happening in the case of nation-states in the Asia-Pacific is that it is the nationstate that is promoting this vision and implementing policies to encourage links ‘back home’ among migrants outside the national territory (see Levitt 2001 for a
Introduction
7
discussion of such processes in the Americas). Basch et al. (1994) put this form of activity at the heart of their analysis of transnationalism, claiming that this was part of ‘deterritorialization’ and the usurping of the role of territory in nationstate construction. However, as Glick Schiller (1999: 211) admits, ‘our choice of terms was unfortunate because a national and bounded territory still remains an important part of the imaginary of the transnational nation-state’. States have a number of reasons for using the discourse of ‘the nation’ to encompass individuals who no longer live within the territorial boundaries over which the state institutions have power. The reasons are all linked to concepts of economic development. Much of the work on transnationalism and the role of the state has focused on the role of remittances in supporting and contributing to economic growth. The Philippines is often held up as a country that epitomizes the ways in which non-resident Filipinos are vital in economic progress of the national economy. Because of this importance, the Philippine state has been keen to facilitate emigration, while seeking to ensure that emigrants maintain their ties to their ‘homeland’. In Chapter 5, Filomeno Aguilar highlights how discourses around migrants as ‘new heroes’ promote the concept of the ‘Philippine nation’ spreading far beyond the national boundaries and encompassing Filipinos all over the world. Guarnizo and Smith (1998: 7) term this process ‘transnational re-incorporation’. In addition, policies such as dual citizenship and particular advantages for returning migrants help to tie members of the Filipino diaspora to the nationstate. Chapter 6, by Pál Nyíri, continues with this theme of ‘emigration as patriotic’ by examining the changing nature of state discourses around emigration from the People’s Republic of China. He highlights how broader state policies regarding ‘modernization’ have provided a background to the mobilization of discourses around the wider ‘Chinese nation’. While, in the past, individuals migrating from the PRC have been regarded as ‘traitors’, such mobility is now encouraged for certain groups because of the business potential inherent in the development of overseas-based networks. Previous constructions of the ‘Chinese nation’ as based on a shared ethnicity continue but are built on through appeals to a more ‘modern’ vision of China that can flourish through the actions of Chinese individuals. This example clearly shows the ways in which nation-states are using a ‘transnational imaginary’ (Appadurai 2000) for nation-state development purposes. A shifting state discourse about the ‘nation’ is also used by the Malaysian government of Prime Minister Mahathir. Tim Bunnell uses the example of Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) to demonstrate two major shifts in the construction of ‘Malaysian-ness’. Both of these draw on an awareness of transnational processes, in particular the presence of Malaysian citizens outside Malaysia’s territorial borders. Bunnell argues that the Malay-centred nation-state building project adopted after independence in 1957 excluded non-Malays in both discursive and material ways through, for example, education policies. Key groups excluded through these policies were ethnic Chinese and those of Indian
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(largely Tamil) descent, some of whom moved overseas to further their education or to work. Bunnell demonstrates that the high-technology focus of Malaysia’s current development strategy has led to a blurring of the Malay-centred constructions of the nation, appealing to a much wider constituency both within and beyond Malaysia’s national borders. These appeals are to both Malaysian passport holders and to others who possess the skills that are required for the knowledge economy that is being developed. Such discourses and policies of ‘reaching out’ beyond the nation’s borders can also be regarded as an indicator of ‘modernity’ and an ability to perform on a world stage (Levitt 2001).
Flexible citizenship The focus on nation-states and their continued influence despite increasing forms of transnationalism must not hide the ways in which forms of transnational practices can be regarded as liberating and positive for individuals or groups. In this regard, a key issue is to consider the axes along which individuals are able to exercise power. Breaking out of the restrictions of the ‘national’ is not an option available to everyone, and even within those for whom nations’ borders are more porous, the nation-state will still be important. In Chapter 8, Xiang Biao focuses on the mobility of Indian information technology (IT) professionals. With the increasing importance of a so-called ‘knowledge economy’ and the shortage of appropriately skilled workers in many countries, qualified IT professionals from India have been able to move from country to country. While such mobility may be resonant of Sklair’s (2001) concept of a ‘transnational capitalist class’, Xiang makes it clear that nationstates are not absent in this process; instead, immigration regulations create friction in the smoothness of mobility. However, regulations are also used, along with information about the state of the national IT industry, by the professionals themselves to construct migration strategies to maximize individual incomegenerating possibilities. Xiang shows that IT professionals, located as they are in intricate transnational networks of friends, kin, ex-colleagues, brokers, employers and immigration officials, develop strategies in which nation-states remain crucial. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, Xiang describes how the USA is constructed by IT professionals as the most desirable place to live and work, but Canada and Australia are regarded as more secure locations that can act as havens during times of economic hardship. Discourses regarding Malaysia and Singapore present them as nations from where individuals can launch their transnational careers, providing useful training and contacts. Using individual cases, Xiang shows how migrants are able to negotiate using their skills as bargaining tools and then using access to permanent residency or citizenship rights elsewhere as new tools with which to move on. This description echoes that of Ong’s (1999) discussion of ‘flexible citizenship’ among some Hong Kong Chinese in the USA, but as with her cases, it is important to recognize the ‘boundaries of flexibility’, in particular who is allowed to draw on the advantages that operating transnationally can bring.
Introduction
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For many of the Chinese Indonesians discussed by Nonini in Chapter 3, their ability to enter Australia is dependent on their ability to perform the role of entrepreneur or business professional, regardless of what other skills or occupations they may have. Nonini describes how certain individuals, often with the assistance of agents, have been able to present the appropriate financial documentation to be granted entry to Australia, thus highlighting how individuals can resist the disciplinary focus of the nation-state. However, Nonini’s follow-up work clearly demonstrates that in some situations, the reach of state institutions remains key; some Chinese Indonesians did not have their visas renewed when it was discovered that their capital was not being used in accordance with immigration regulations in Australia. Both these examples demonstrate the constant presence of state institutions in the lives of migrants engaged in transnational activities. However, they also reveal the room for manoeuvre that is available to at least some individuals or groups. Rather than transnational activities being an escape route from marginalization and powerlessness, ‘immigrant transnationalism is associated with a more secure economic and legal status in the host country’ (Portes 2001: 189).3 Thus, recognition by state institutions can help to sustain or develop transnational activities, rather than acting as an obstacle or barrier to them.
Transnational organizing It is in the sphere of global civil society that some people argue the ‘nation-state’ is being most seriously challenged. With the advance of telecommunications systems that allow rapid cross-border exchange and the development of ‘cyberspace’ as a non-territorially based space for political action, individuals and organizations have, it is argued, been able to transcend the limitations of the nation-state and move towards new, liberating forms of organization (Castells 1997; Vertovec 1999). In the Asia-Pacific region, the development of civil society has been rather limited, particularly in those societies where a more authoritarian form of political organization has been adopted. However, in some places there are increasing opportunities for grass-roots organization, and the development of the Internet has proved to be of great importance (Lim 2002; Law 2003; Acharya 2003). Other forms of transnational organization take place not only in a deterritorialized ‘cyberspace’ but also in specific locations where individuals and groups from a range of nations come together. In Chapter 12, Vera Mackie uses forms of feminist organization to examine the processes involved in transnational political activities. She starts with a discussion of the ‘women in black’ protest in Japan. This group of women protesting about the use of women as sexual slaves used the same forms of organizing and protest as groups of women in the Middle East and elsewhere who mourn for women who have been victims of human rights abuses. This construction of ‘shared sisterhood’ is drawn on to add weight to the protest. Mackie then goes on to discuss the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery in 2000, where non-governmental
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organizations and individuals from throughout the region gathered for a ‘tribunal’ that was to parallel more ‘official’ tribunals into sexual slavery. Mackie uses this contrast to show that even in such a supposedly ‘transnational space’, albeit grounded in a particular physical location, the nation-state is still writ large. Throughout the tribunal, individuals were identified by their ‘nationality’. In addition, as Mackie discusses later, while feminist organizing may take place across national boundaries, the nation-state as the sphere in which policy decisions are made and acted upon is still vital. In the case of sexual slavery, it is the Japanese state that is lobbied and that will, finally, make a decision.
Inclusion and exclusion in constructions of the ‘nation’ A key theme of this introduction has been the need to recognize processes of exclusion and inclusion that operate within transnational spaces. Not only are there limits on who can act transnationally but also, within transnational spaces, there are clear divisions. Ien Ang’s chapter on the notion of the Chinese diaspora is concerned with this very issue. Rather than representing a form of liberation from the constraints of the nation-state, Ang demonstrates how the notion of ‘diaspora’, as with constructions of ‘transnational community’ or ‘nation’, has boundaries. These boundaries may be policed by state institutions, but they may also be ‘controlled’ by processes of ‘othering’ in the material and ideological practices of individuals and non-state actors. For a diaspora to exist, Ang argues, there have to be people who do not belong to the diaspora. While these boundaries may be debated, as she demonstrates, what is not in doubt is that these borders exist as socially constructed boundaries, although the ‘normality’ of such distinctions may mean they are interpreted as being a reflection of ‘natural’ differences between groups. ‘While at any one time, culturally constructed boundaries – be they nations, ethnicities or races – may seem fixed, timeless or primordial, dynamic processes of reformulation underlie the apparent fixity’ (Basch et al. 1994: 32). In Chapters 10 and 11 on Cambodia and Vietnam, respectively, Caroline Hughes and Andrew Hardy describe how exiled groups re-imagine ‘the nation’ and seek to draw on their transnational position to influence the (re)construction of the state. Hardy uses the concept of ‘internal transnationalism’ to describe the links between different groups of Vietnamese overseas and the territory and government of the Vietnamese state. As he states in the introduction, ‘Vietnamese transnationalism should be understood in the context of Vietnamese nationalism’. The extensive Vietnamese diaspora is largely a product of the internal unrest and conflict within the territory of what is now a single nation-state but in the recent past was divided on the basis of two competing ‘nationalisms’. For Vietnamese now living overseas, their constructions of ‘nation’ are based on these ‘state’ discourses of nationhood dating from the pre1975 distinctions between the communist ideologies of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and the anti-communist Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam). It is only by recognizing the ‘internal transnationalism’ that
Introduction
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existed within Vietnamese territory, Hardy argues, that some of the divisions within the Vietnamese diaspora may be understood. These attachments to particular forms of Vietnamese nationhood lead to boundaries between groups overseas and divisions within the Vietnamese diaspora. For the Cambodians described in Chapter 10, their transnational position as both ‘insiders’ as Cambodians and ‘outsiders’ in their location outside the boundaries of the nation-state is negotiated in the process of nation-state reconstruction. For many, their absence from the ‘contamination’ of communism and ‘Vietnamization’ means that they are able to draw on notions of an ‘authentic’ Khmer nation with greater authority than those who remained in Cambodia during the 1970s and 1980s. In addition, exiled Cambodians, particularly those who have lived in the West, are able to mobilize human rights discourses and understandings of modernity to highlight their potential contributions to the forging of a new Cambodian state. Hughes highlights the tensions and contradictions in such discourses and how transnational practices and discourses have been mobilized in politics, not only in Cambodia but also in the USA and on an international scale. The role of members of transnational communities in postcivil war reconstruction is found elsewhere in the world but is often complicated not only by reconstruction but also, in some cases, by the founding of a modern nation-state as an outcome of unrest (see, for example, Al-Ali et al. 2001 in relation to Eritrea; Povrzanovi‰ Frykman 2002 in relation to Croatia). In these cases, the lack of a recent ‘myth of the nation’ reminds us of the importance of examining the relations between ‘nation’, ‘state’ and ‘transnation’. In Chapter 9, Ang tries to go beyond the ‘nation’ or ‘diaspora’ to consider ‘global cities’ as more inclusive spaces into which nobody is a priori excluded. For her, it is ‘global cities’, rather than any form of ‘diaspora’, that have the potential to be considered as ‘transnational communities’. While this is certainly a useful intervention in a consideration of spaces of liberation within a transnational field, the reality of global cities is, as many have argued (see, for example, Smith 2001), one of great inequality and spatial division. Mackie (Chapter 12) and Brah (1996) also remind us that even within supposedly coherent constructions of ‘diaspora’ or ‘transnational community’, there are manifold differences based, for example, on gender or class.
Challenges of transnationalism The title of this book was selected to highlight the interconnections between these concepts, both in the ways in which they are mobilized in ideological terms but also in the materiality of how individuals experience them. This chapter has focused on how processes that can be described as ‘transnational’ have been interpreted both as a challenge to the nation-state as a form of political, social, cultural and economic organization and as how some nation-states have engaged with the realities of large-scale international migration to reinscribe the strength and power of the state, albeit in a metamorphosed form – states have been using the ‘transnational’ to underpin the ‘national’. This may involve a complete
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reconfiguration of ‘national’ development policy and shifts in discourses used to promote national cohesion. It is not only nation-states that are confronted with challenges in the face of ‘transnationalism’. Earlier in this introduction, we highlighted the highly debated nature of ‘transnationalism’ as a useful theoretical or descriptive tool in social science and cultural studies research. In addition, associated concepts such as ‘transnational communities’ and ‘transnational social fields’ are similarly contested. Throughout the book, it is clear that authors have drawn on different understandings of these terms, in some cases choosing to abandon them for alternative constructions such as ‘diaspora’. This does not necessarily mean that the concepts are invalid (Kivisto 2001), rather that researchers are grappling with ways in which to understand and theorize cross-border processes at the start of the twenty-first century. What makes the contributions to this book even more interesting for us are the ways in which the very complexity of migration, identity and nationality are embodied in the individuals and research processes described. Filomeno Aguilar refers directly to his Filipino nationality in Chapter 5, and Ien Ang has also written previously on her ‘Chinese identity’ in ‘non-Chinese spaces’ (2001), but for all contributors in this book, the boundaries between research and nonresearch are fluid as we engage in examining the nature of transnational activities and experiences. In addition, we ourselves are constitutive of transnational communities and networks in multi-site collaborations. As academic researchers, however, we tend to have greater scope to take advantage of the possibilities offered. The final challenges associated with transnationalism that we would like to highlight relate to individuals and families within the Asia-Pacific. The exciting possibilities that transnationalism offers some academics are not shared by all potential migrants. Individuals with differing levels of social and economic capital navigate the world in flexible ways, negotiating the borders that carve out nation-states, some with transnational ease and finesse and others with considerable hardship and distress. The following chapters, while focusing on ‘state’, ‘nation’ and ‘transnation’, do not ignore the range of individuals that make up these entities; nor do they underestimate the continuing ways in which individuals’ agency is constrained by the operations of larger social structures. Rather, they highlight the possible spaces of individual agency within the spaces of flows that constitute the Asia-Pacific.
Notes 1
We are aware that the concept of ‘transnationalism’ is a highly contested one, in terms of both the scope of activities it covers and whether it is actually just a new way of describing long-standing processes (see, for example, Portes et al. 1999; Vertovec 1999; Kivisto 2001; Levitt 2001; Portes 2001). We do not intend to rehearse these arguments again here, but we hope that the contributions to this book highlight the potential usefulness of this concept, but also the limits. Given the breadth of ‘transnationalism’, we have largely focused in this book on the migration-related aspects of ‘transnationalism’.
Introduction 2
3
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Claims that the late twentieth century represented the start of a ‘transnational moment’ in history have been widely challenged. Many authors (see, for example, Foner 1997; Kivisto 2001) have stressed the existence of cross-border activities that could have been described as ‘transnational’ long before ‘time–space compression’ made such activities easier (at least for some groups of people). Nina Glick Schiller (1999), Michael Peter Smith and Luis Guarnizo (1998) – key individuals in the development of transnationalism studies in the field of migration – are similarly aware of the historical presence of transnational processes and communities. We would agree with such analyses but would also argue, as they do, that current levels of crossborder migration, flows of capital and forms of communication and technology allow for more widespread transnational activities as well as new forms of transnational organizing and experiences (Vertovec 1999). Portes would not include skilled migrants such as Xiang’s Indian IT professionals in his definition of ‘transnational migrants’, but we feel that this statement about the role of legal security in the development of transnational activities is useful here.
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The myth of the controllability of difference Labour migration, transnational communities and state strategies in the Asia-Pacific region Stephen Castles
Introduction To speak of ‘transnational communities’ implies taking the ‘national’ as a given. The concept of transnationalism only has meaning in a world divided into nation-states. This leads to two paradoxes, one global and the other peculiar to the Asia-Pacific region. The global paradox is that transnationalism is a relatively new, emerging paradigm, whose discourses are clearly and consciously linked to globalization – a process that many argue weakens the nation-state. The AsiaPacific paradox is that, although many states have roots that go back to great monarchies or empires of antiquity, the nation-state as a dominant political form is quite recent and is often still in the process of formation. Young post-colonial states are trying to define national belonging and identity in a context not experienced by older nation-states in their period of formation: the context of globalization, mobile populations and erosion of national boundaries. A core feature of the classical nation-state is its claim to manage ethnic difference – through border control, as well as through processes of cultural homogenization or subordination of minorities. This capacity has been eroded by the mass migrations of the second half of the twentieth century and by the resulting emergence of multicultural societies. Transnational theory points to a new stage in the erosion of the controllability of difference: the proliferation of groups that have political, economic, social or cultural affiliations in more than one country. This may hinder homogenization, lead to permanently diverse and mobile populations and recreate the nemesis of nationalism on a new level: groups with multiple identities and divided loyalties. This chapter starts by examining dominant attitudes to migration and settlement in the region and then looks at the way constructions of the nation-state are changing. The next section deals with the evolution of policies for controlling ethnic difference. A central argument is that the proliferation of transnational communities renders ineffective the traditional nation-state strategies for controlling difference. Transnational theory is therefore important for understanding contemporary developments in international migration, settlement and community formation. However, the forms of such developments in the Asia-Pacific
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region differ from Western experiences due to specific historical and cultural contexts. Transnational processes are poorly understood by policy makers in Asia, so the current migration policies are often ill-conceived and may fail to achieve their objectives.
Dominant attitudes on migration and settlement Asian and Pacific countries have a long history of permanent or cyclical migration for purposes of trade, work, religion or cultural interchange. Migration led to complex links between areas and ethnic groups. In pre-modern territorial states with agricultural economies, permanent emigration was seen as desertion and was generally strictly prohibited, except for purposes of trade or temporary work. However, temporary sojourners often turned into settlers. The establishment of colonial states led to migrations for the purposes of administration, labour recruitment and trade. Some early migrant groups later returned to their homelands; others settled and became assimilated into local populations; yet others settled but did not assimilate, remaining as permanent ethnic, cultural or religious minorities. Some groups took on the character of diasporas. The classic example is the Chinese: historical mobility made them an important population in all Southeast Asian countries, while more recent movements have turned them into a truly global diaspora (Sinn 1998; Wang 1998a). One also can see the ‘Malay maritime world’ as a space of historical interchange. In an area encompassing the Malay peninsula and the Indonesian and Philippine archipelagos, seaborne mobility was a fact of life for many centuries, affecting many ethnic groups. Some of these came from the outside, with traders of Arab origin playing a major part in both commercial and religious development. Similarly, the Pacific islands have long histories of trade, cultural interchange, conquest and migration.1 It would be anachronistic to call the groups involved transnational communities, since they pre-date national boundaries. Their significance for the study of contemporary transnationalism is that pre-modern migratory patterns often help to shape contemporary movements. Some sending communities are linked by long traditions with certain receiving areas. Attempts by recently established nation-states to control such movements are often hampered by time-honoured customs and cultural affinities, as well as by modern economic, social and political factors. Modern nation-states in Southeast Asia and the Pacific have thus been constructed in contexts of long-standing ethnic diversity. By contrast, some East Asian states have remained relatively mono-cultural. However, all these states have experienced new factors that have precipitated large-scale migrations: • •
Political instability connected with the Cold War and the processes of state formation, which has given rise to massive refugee flows in the region. The Asian economic boom and the resulting uneven development, which has led to significant flows of migrant workers from countries with large labour surpluses and stagnant economies to countries with rapid economic
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By 2000, 6.2 million Asians were estimated to be employed outside their own countries within the Asian region, and another five million were employed in the Middle East. Emigration for employment from the region grew at about 6 percent a year between 1995 and 1999 (International Organization for Migration, 2003: 195–9). In addition, there is the emigration of millions of nonworking family members accompanying migrant workers, as well as significant refugee movements. All Asian countries experience both emigration and immigration, but it is possible to differentiate between mainly labour-importing countries (Japan, Singapore, Taiwan and Brunei), countries that import some types of labour but export others (Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia), and countries that are predominantly labour exporters (China, the Philippines, India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia). A range of differentiated policy regimes have emerged, generally favouring the circulation of highly skilled personnel (who are often not perceived as migrants at all) while seeking to control labour migration and prevent permanent settlement. The Asian financial crisis of 1997–99 led to an interruption in labour recruitment. Indeed, some destination countries announced policies of large-scale repatriation. However, actual departures were limited, and migrant populations did not fall sharply. Economic growth and labour recruitment had resumed by 2000 (Battistella and Assis 1998; Böhning 1998; Skeldon 1998; Supang 1999). Migration to East Asian countries with growing economies and rising incomes is perceived by Asian policy makers as temporary labour migration and is not expected to lead to permanent settlement. This understanding matches the wishes of most of the main actors: employers seek low-skilled workers to meet immediate labour needs; many migrant workers wish to work abroad for only a limited period to improve the situation of their families at home; governments of sending countries do not want to lose their nationals permanently; and the governments of receiving countries are strongly opposed to settlement. Ideas of ethnic community formation, growing cultural diversity and the emergence of multicultural societies are anathema in labour-importing Asian countries, while turning immigrants into citizens is unthinkable. Yet all these things could also have been said of the European countries that were recruiting ‘guest workers’ in the 1960s. Even ‘New World’ countries open to permanent immigration did not envisage the development of multicultural societies. In the meantime, the dynamics that transformed temporary migrants into new ethnic groups and multicultural citizens are well known (see Castles and Miller 2003; DeWind et al. 1997). This experience has been analysed by Asian scholars and policy makers, particularly in Japan (Weiner and Hanami 1998).
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They generally conclude that ‘Asia is different’ and that labour migration will not lead to major social and cultural changes. There are two main reasons for this: first, the volume of migration relative to population is generally lower in East Asia than in Western countries, reducing social and cultural impacts; and, second, legal frameworks and policy settings differ. Important factors in turning temporary migration into settlement in Western countries have included strong legal and human rights guarantees, which facilitated family reunion and hindered large-scale deportations in the 1970s and 1980s, even when migrant labour was no longer wanted. Moreover, strong welfare states encouraged further immigration and settlement, despite poor employment prospects. Such factors are generally seen as absent in East Asia. Thus the dominant policy model for dealing with migration and ethnic diversity in Asia-Pacific countries can be summed up in the following principles: • • •
Immigrants should not be allowed to settle. Foreign residents should not be offered citizenship except in exceptional cases. National culture and identity should not be modified in response to external influences.
Nation-states and globalization I will turn now to a discussion of globalization and transnationalism to show how such trends may undermine the assumptions on which Asia-Pacific migration regimes are based. To understand this fully, it is necessary to look back at the history of the nation-state. The contemporary international geopolitical system consists of about 200 states and has its origins in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which ended a long period of war in Europe. The core characteristics of the modern state up to the middle of the twentieth century can be summed up as follows (see Held et al. 1999: 32–86): 1
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State sovereignty over a specific territory was guaranteed through international treaties, and through mutual respect for territorial sovereignty within a ‘world of sovereign states’. State autonomy in controlling the economy, culture, environment and society within a bounded territory. A state’s laws and policies were not subject to external scrutiny. State control over its borders. The state had final control of all flows across the borders, whether of capital, commodities, cultural products or people (provided that it had the capacity to enforce this control).
However, in the course of its evolution and expansion in Europe and North America, the modern state became a nation-state. This was linked to the successful struggle of economically powerful middle classes against absolutist forms of government and the resulting emergence of democracy. If the people
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became the sovereign and could express their collective will through elections and democratic institutions, then it was essential to define who belonged to the people or nation (Habermas 1996a). This development led inevitably to struggles not only for political rights but also for social rights, because genuine participation in the political process required certain minimum standards of education and welfare (Marshall 1950). Thus the modern nation-state acquired the following additional features: 4
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The rule of law, democracy and citizenship as indicators of political legitimacy. The democratic revolutions had established the principles of constitutionally guaranteed rights for citizens and democratically elected law-making bodies. The dream of ‘a space for each race’ (Cohen 1997: 175): the linking of the state as a territorial political community with the nation as a cultural community and thus the linking of citizenship with nationality. Citizenship depended on membership of the nation, seen as a cultural community whose members were held together by bonds of solidarity based on shared history, values and traditions. However, since the great majority of nations were the result of amalgamation or incorporation (often by conquest) of diverse ethnic groups, the shared identity was often the result of suppression of minority identities – sometimes leading to resistance and separatist movements. Two principles existed for defining membership of the nation: (1) ius soli (literally: law of the soil), according to which anyone born in a territory could belong; and (2) ius sanguinis (literally: law of blood), according to which belonging was based on descent from an existing citizen (Castles and Davidson 2000: 85). The emergence of the welfare state. Struggles by labour and social movements established the principle that full participation in nation-states required basic economic, social and educational standards. The need to secure mass loyalty, especially during the two world wars and the Cold War, forced states to take responsibility for guaranteeing such standards. State sovereignty and autonomy played a crucial part in making it possible to regulate labour markets and provide social services.
These six characteristics can be seen as constituting an ideal type of the modern nation-state at the height of its development around the middle of the twentieth century. In practice, few states lived up completely to the ideal, and key aspects, such as the principles of popular democracy and welfare, were always contested. In the context of a discussion of the nation-state in the Asia-Pacific region at the beginning of the twenty-first century, some special factors must be noted: •
Western nation-states expanded historically by destroying the sovereignty of other states through conquest and colonialism. The principle of respect for sovereignty did not apply to non-Western states. Democracy and prosperity in Western countries was based on repression, exploitation and racism in the colonies. It is only since 1945 that decolonization has created the conditions
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•
•
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for proliferation of the nation-state model in the Asia-Pacific region. However, by the late twentieth century, the democratic nation-state based on the rule of law had become a global aspiration – even though the reality often falls far short of the ideal. In the Asia-Pacific region, state formation and nation formation have gone hand in hand under the conditions of decolonization, the Cold War and rapid but uneven industrialization. Asia-Pacific states can be generally regarded as nation-states, since they have sought to define who belongs and who does not belong to the state’s people (i.e., the nation). They have mostly adopted the principle of ius sanguinis: belonging by virtue of descent, which generally implies ethnic belonging on the basis of shared culture, language, traditions and history (Singapore is an exception here). This has led to complex processes of inclusion, partial inclusion or exclusion of minority groups. Asia-Pacific states generally do not make it easy for immigrants to obtain naturalization and become citizens (Davidson and Weekley 1999). Asia-Pacific states show enormous diversity in history, culture, religion, language, political institutions and economic development. A key difference relates to the colonial experience: populations of countries that were colonized tend to have different attitudes and policies on migration and ethnic diversity compared with those that were not. Another (often related) distinction concerns the high degree of ethno-cultural diversity of Southeast Asian and Pacific states compared with the lesser diversity of East Asian states like China, Japan, and North and South Koreas. This makes it easier to sustain ideas of cultural homogeneity in the latter, although these are really myths, since even here there are significant minorities. Since the late twentieth century, all nation-states have been affected by processes of globalization, characterized by the rapid increase in crossborder flows of all sorts and by the formation of transnational networks in the economic, cultural, political and social spheres (Castells 1996, 1997, 1998; Held et al. 1999; Hoogvelt 1997).
Globalization threatens to undermine all the key characteristics of the nationstate: •
•
• •
Sovereignty is reduced by international law and human rights principles, which legitimize intervention in states by the ‘international community’ (as in the former Yugoslavia and East Timor). Autonomy is limited by the power of transnational corporations and supranational bodies, which reduces a state’s capacity to make and implement economic, political and social decisions. Border controls are undermined by burgeoning cross-border flows of capital, commodities, migrants, environmental factors and ideas. Democracy may be reduced if elected parliaments no longer make key decisions because these have moved to the supranational level, where there is no popular representation.
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•
The crucial link between the national and the citizen is undermined: where there are diverse and mobile populations with affiliations in more than one state, there can no longer be ‘a space for each race’. Welfare states decline when international markets and transnational corporations have the power to restrict government intervention and to demand deregulation and privatization.
•
Western nation-states could develop over long historical periods in which they gradually became the dominant entity for organizing politics, the economy, culture and identity. By contrast, Asia-Pacific nation-states are being formed in the era of globalization, in which the nation-state is under great pressure. AsiaPacific leaders have had to struggle to create political institutions and national identities in very short time-spans and under strong cross-border influences. Migration, and the formation of transnational communities, is one of these. Another is the growing salience of international law and human rights regimes. Finally, globalization goes hand in hand with the proliferation of transnational communities. This results from growing cross-border mobility of populations and increasing possibilities of maintaining close links with the homeland and with co-ethnics elsewhere due to improved transport and communications technologies. Transnational communities can also be seen as an expression of the erosion of border control and the decline of the link between the national and the citizen (see above). Moreover, transnational communities can undermine the principle of territorial sovereignty by creating durable crossborder links, multiple identities and divided loyalties. This questions the most fundamental tenet of the nation-state.
The controllability of difference International migration and ethnic minorities have always presented problems for nation-states, since they threaten the ideology of cultural homogeneity (Castles and Davidson 2000: chapter 3). Labour-importing strategies are usually motivated by short-term economic considerations. The potential long-term social and political consequences are often ignored, particularly where migrant workers are seen as temporary entrants who will not be allowed to stay. In other cases, governments do anticipate permanent settlement but believe that this will not bring about major changes in their society and culture, as in ‘classical immigration countries’ like the USA and Australia. In varying ways, such official attitudes share a belief in the controllability of difference. Governments think that they can prevent ethnic diversity becoming a force for social transformation through policy approaches that mainly fall into one of two categories: assimilation or differential exclusion. A third approach – multiculturalism – has become significant only quite recently (Castles and Miller 2003: chapter 10). Assimilation means encouraging immigrants to learn the national language and to take on the social and cultural practices of the receiving community. The underlying belief is that the immigrants’ descendants will be indistinguishable
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from the rest of the population. When labour immigration started after 1945, Britain, France and several other Western European countries emphasized assimilation. The nineteenth-century US ‘melting pot’, which was meant to ‘Americanize’ immigrants from Europe, was crucial for both industrialization and nation building. Both Canada and Australia encouraged mainly British immigration up to 1945 and assumed that the relatively small numbers of other Europeans would be absorbed culturally. When large-scale non-British immigration started from the 1950s, there were explicit policies of assimilation. Indeed, many sociologists have viewed assimilation as an inevitable and necessary process for immigrants (Alba and Nee 1997; Portes et al. 1999: 228–9). In the AsiaPacific region, there are plenty of historical examples of assimilation. However, assimilation policies are hardly to be found in contemporary Asia, with a few exceptions, such as policies towards highly skilled migrants in Singapore (International Organization for Migration 2000: 82). The emphasis remains on temporary labour migration. Differential exclusion means accepting immigrants only within strict functional and temporal limits: they are welcome as workers but not as settlers; as individuals but not as families or communities; as temporary sojourners but not as long-term residents. In this model, immigrants are integrated (temporarily) into certain societal subsystems such as the labour market and some parts of the welfare system but excluded from other areas, such as political participation. In post-1945 Europe, the differential exclusion model, in the guise of the ‘guest worker system’, played a major part in several countries (especially Germany, Switzerland and Austria) but failed in its objective of preventing settlement and minority formation (Castles 1986). Contract labour systems in the oil-producing countries of the Gulf and in Asia are based on this model. One can also consider the use of undocumented labour as an extreme form of differential exclusion: where states accept or even create ‘back doors’ and ‘side doors’ for irregular migrants, they are tacitly exploiting the rightlessness and vulnerability of this group. Such practices are to be found in Japan (Mori 1997; Komai 1998), Malaysia (Jones 2000) and elsewhere. Both the assimilation and differential exclusion models share an important common principle: that immigration should not bring about significant social and cultural change in the receiving society. Ethno-cultural diversity is seen by political elites as a threat to the integrity of the nation, which could seriously weaken it in the event of economic recession, war or other catastrophe. However, they also believe that difference is controllable: either the immigrants will be absorbed into an unchanged national community (assimilation), or they will be sent away as soon as their labour is no longer needed (differential exclusion). It was not difficult to sustain such views in earlier times: when transport and communications were slow and costly, the long-term persistence of ethnic communities with strong links to their homelands was not considered likely. In the classical immigration countries of North America and Oceania, assimilation was the dominant model until the 1960s or 1970s. In Western Europe, the assimilation model predominated in some countries (the UK, France and the
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Netherlands), while differential exclusion was the rule elsewhere (Germany, Switzerland and Austria). In all these places, such models lost their effectiveness and were being replaced by new approaches from the mid-1970s. There were several reasons: after the 1973 oil crisis, it became apparent that temporary migrants were turning into settlers. States based on the rule of law and human rights proved incapable of deporting large numbers of unwanted workers. Nor could immigrants be completely denied social rights, since this could lead to serious conflicts and divisions. The result was family reunion, community formation and the emergence of new ethnic minorities. The expectation of long-term cultural assimilation proved illusory, with ethnic communities maintaining their languages and cultures into the second and third generations. Immigrants began to establish cultural associations, places of worship and ethnic businesses, which further strengthened the infrastructure of ethnic communities. The introduction of a policy of multiculturalism (under a variety of labels) seemed the best way to manage increasingly diverse populations (Castles and Miller 2003: chapter 10). Multiculturalism means abandoning the myth of homogeneous and monocultural nation-states. Yet it can still be seen as a way of controlling difference within the nation-state framework because it does not question the territorial principle. Essentially, it assumes that migration will lead to permanent settlement and to the birth of second and subsequent generations who are both citizens and nationals. Thus multiculturalism maintains the idea of a primary belonging to one society and a loyalty to just one nation-state. Hyphenated Americans are still Americans when it comes to war or other conflicts. In Australia, the Liberal–National government looked set to abandon multiculturalism in 1996 but has since reconsidered. Following a review by the National Multicultural Advisory Council (NMAC), it came to the conclusion that multiculturalism was the only suitable policy for Australia’s highly diverse society. However, the review redefined the model as ‘Australian multiculturalism’ (implying that it is unique and distinct from other national models) with an explicit expectation of undivided loyalty to Australia (NMAC 1999). Again the late and incomplete process of nation-state formation in the AsiaPacific region implies a special problematic: no countries in the region except the white settler colonies of Oceania have had the historical opportunity to work through the various models of migrant incorporation. The dominant approach is still that of differential exclusion, based on the notion that migrant labour will remain temporary and that there will be no significant settlement or formation of ethnic communities.
Defining transnationalism and transnational communities In the early twenty-first century, globalization and the proliferation of transnational communities undermine all the modes of controlling difference premised on territoriality – even the most recent one: multiculturalism. The idea of the person who belongs to just one nation-state, or at most migrates from one state
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to just one other, is undermined by increasing mobility, the growth of temporary, cyclical and recurring migrations, cheap and easy travel, and constant communication through new information technologies. Transnational communities are groups whose identity is not primarily based on attachment to a specific territory. They therefore present a powerful challenge to traditional ideas of belonging to a nation-state. According to Vertovec (1999: 447): ‘transnationalism broadly refers to multiple ties and interactions linking people and institutions across the borders of nation-states’. This indicates the close relationship between transnationalism and globalization, which also refers essentially to the rapid expansion of cross-border transactions and networks in all areas of life. The notion of a transnational community puts the emphasis on human agency: such groups are the result of cross-border activities that link individuals, families and local groups. In the context of globalization, transnationalism can extend previous face-to-face communities based on kinship, neighbourhoods or workplaces into far-flung virtual communities that communicate at a distance. The key defining feature of transnational communities is that they are based in two or more countries and engage in recurrent and significant transactions, which may be economic, political, social or cultural, over long periods. Portes et al. (1999: 221) make the useful distinction between transnationalism from above (activities ‘conducted by powerful institutional actors, such as multinational corporations and states’) and transnationalism from below (activities ‘that are the result of grass-roots initiatives by immigrants and their home country counterparts’). Transnational communities can develop countervailing power to contest the power of corporations, governments and intergovernmental organizations. Some transnational communities develop formal organizational structures, but more frequently they function as informal networks with multiple nodes of control. This diffuse structure makes it harder for states to control them, giving rise to a great deal of anxiety on the part of governments. Indeed, informal links in the form of migration networks often undermine official migration policies, which ignore the interests of migrants. This helps to explain the frequent failure of official migration policies – even of the most powerful states – to achieve their objectives. The term ‘transmigrant’ may be used to identify people whose existence is shaped in important ways through participation in transnational communities based on migration. ‘People who live their lives across borders, developing social, familial, political, economic and religious networks that incorporate them into two or more states, can be considered to be “transmigrants”’ (Schiller 1999: 203). Inflationary use of the term should be avoided: the majority of migrants still do not fit the pattern. Workers who sojourn abroad for a few years, send back remittances, communicate with their families back home and visit them occasionally are not usually transmigrants. As long as they definitely intend to return home and their main social and cultural affiliations remain in the homeland, they are simply temporary migrants. Similarly, permanent migrants who leave for ever and simply retain loose contact with their homeland do not have the characteristics of transmigrants. The essential feature is that transnational activities are a central
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part of a person’s life. Where this applies to a group of people, one can speak of a transnational community. A key research question is therefore to work out which migrant groups become transmigrants and to establish what conditions bring about or hinder this outcome. Types of transnational community include: •
•
•
•
Transnational business communities based on the use of cross-border ethnic connections as a resource to run businesses of many different types and sizes. The small ethnic business that trades in homeland products and services in the ethnic neighbourhood and sends back host country goods and possibly capital is an example of transnationalism from below.2 The multinational corporation that creates its own transnational corporate culture and abandons the base country or ‘headquarters’ mentality (Ohmae 1991) is a form of transnationalism from above. Transnational business communities of all kinds are abundant in the Asia-Pacific region. Transnational political communities, which involve the use of solidarity with coethnics in two or more countries, usually to bring about change in the homeland, although sometimes also to improve the situation of the group in settlement countries. Transnational political diasporas are often the result of forced exoduses from the homeland. This often leads to multiple migrations and a strong consciousness of being a refugee or exile (van Hear 1998). Political or refugee diasporas were significant long before contemporary discourses on transnationalism, playing major parts in the creation of modern China, Greece, Armenia, Israel and other nations. An example of a refugee diaspora that now functions as a political, business and cultural community is the overseas Vietnamese. Transnational cultural communities seeking to maintain the homeland heritage and language among the settler group. These also often seek recognition from the homeland authorities that the diaspora is still part of the nation. Demands for voting rights while abroad or for dual citizenship are typical. In such cases, there is no clear distinction between the cultural and the political community. Transnational social communities. These exist when migration becomes part of normal life for people from a certain place, for instance where there is regular cross-border migration from a village or town of origin to a specific destination. Sometimes migration becomes a normal part of life for substantial elements of a whole society, so that the transnational social community includes most of the nation (either as migrants, their relatives or as people whose lives are influenced in some way by the process). This applied to Italy between the 1860s and the 1960s and is typical of the Philippines today. In such cases, emigration takes on an important role in defining the nation. As Aguilar (1996) points out, this can be in the negative sense of ‘national shame’ because the nation-state is incapable of providing a livelihood for its citizens and protecting them adequately. It can also be in the positive sense of finding ways of including emigrants in the nation, even if they take up
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the citizenship of the receiving country, as the special status of Balikbayan for Philippine emigrants indicates (Blanc 1996; Aguilar 1999).3 Other types based on family, religion or other factors could be added. Transnational communities are not new, although the term is. The diaspora concept goes back to ancient times and was used for peoples displaced or dispersed by force (e.g., the Jews, African slaves in the New World), as well as for trading groups (e.g., the Greeks in West Asia and Africa or the Arab traders who brought Islam to Southeast Asia) and labour migrants (e.g., Indians in the British Empire; Italians since the 1860s) (Cohen 1997). There is no clear demarcation between the notions of transnational community and diaspora: some authors use them as synonyms, others to refer to different types of group. Due to its history, the term ‘diaspora’ has strong emotional connotations, while the notion of a transnational community is more neutral and therefore probably preferable for social scientific use. The new factor that justifies the emergence of a new field of study is the rapid proliferation of transnational communities under conditions of globalization. As Vertovec (1999: 447) points out: Transnationalism (as long-distance networks) certainly preceded ‘the nation’. Yet today these systems of ties, interactions, exchanges and mobility function intensively and in real time while being spread throughout the world. New technologies, especially involving telecommunications, serve to connect such networks with increasing speed and efficiency. The implication is clear: transnationalism is likely to go on growing rapidly, and transnational communities will become an ever more important way to organize activities, relationships and identity for the increasing number of people with affiliations in two or more countries.
Some consequences of the emergence of transnational communities One obvious consequence of the rise of transnationalism is the end of the nationalist dream of the homogeneous nation, as Cohen (1997: 175) points out: What 19th century nationalists wanted was a ‘space’ for each ‘race’, a territorializing of each social identity. What they got instead is a chain of cosmopolitan cities and an increasing proliferation of subnational and transnational identities that cannot easily be contained in the nation-state system. Since more and more countries are experiencing migration, the implication is that the old nation-state project of ethnic homogenization has no chance any more. That, in itself, should lead to a fundamental rethinking of some basic tenets on national identity and political culture. Patriotism based on emotional
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identification with national symbols may be declining in power as a means of integration and mobilization for multicultural or transnational populations. A related consequence could be a rethinking of modes of immigrant incorporation into host societies. The idea of assimilation as the norm for migrant incorporation seems to be losing its validity even in its heartland, the USA. However, perhaps the idea of assimilation into a society as a whole has always been misleading. Portes (1999) argues that assimilation has always meant ‘incorporation into a specific segment of society’. Selectivity on the basis of economic and social factors, as well as stereotypes and discriminatory practices, has caused certain groups to experience ‘upward assimilation’ and others ‘downward assimilation’ (see also Zhou 1997). In the USA, this might mean assimilation into the white population for privileged groups (such as Europeans or Asians with high human capital) as against assimilation into the black underclass (for Mexican and Central American labourers and low-skilled Asian migrants). The new opportunities offered by transnationalism from below may be a source of strength for disadvantaged immigrant groups: Transnational economic enterprise offers opportunities to immigrants of modest origins to escape dead-end menial jobs and find their way into the middle class. … Participation in transnational political activities can empower immigrants and invest them with a sense of purpose and selfworth that otherwise would be absent. … Socio-cultural transnational activities can have similar effects, reinforcing self-images and collective solidarities. Involvement in these activities does not block successful integration into the host society, but facilitates it by endowing second-generation youths with cultural anchors with which to face difficult external challenges. (Portes 1999: 471–2) Thus the construction of transnational communities can be seen as reactive ethnicity: the use of ethnic resources, solidarity and symbols to survive in a situation of exclusion and disadvantage. It is because the democratic state does not live up to its promise of equal opportunities for minorities that people constitute themselves as transnational communities. In the US context, Portes (ibid.) believes that this will not, in the long run, lead to separatism, because transnational activities will help individuals to overcome class barriers and participate more fully in society. Transnationalism could replace assimilation as the main paradigm for immigrant incorporation, because it prevents ‘downward assimilation’. In this interpretation, transnationalism does not necessarily undermine social and political cohesion. However, this presupposes the willingness of the host society to offer assimilation and citizenship – a condition not usually present in Asian immigration countries. An alternative consequence of transnationalism could be the emergence of what have been called ‘deterritorialized nation-states’ (Basch et al. 1994). Where migrants cannot achieve equality and recognition within the host society, they may well base their identity on links with people of the same origins wherever
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they live. In the extreme case of a group that has been deprived of its homeland (like Jews until the foundation of Israel or Kurds at present), this would mean basing identity only on ethnicity, since no territorial base exists. However, this situation is perhaps better captured by the concept of a nation without a state, which implies the dream of return, of regaining the homeland and building a new nation-state. A more common situation of nation-state building by diasporas exists when only a minority of the population of an area is dispersed abroad but these migrant groups develop a strong and active national consciousness. The role of overseas Chinese in helping to create the Chinese Republic in 1912 is an important example. Some authors have referred to such political diasporas as ‘deterritorialized nation-states’, but the term is perhaps misleading, because the imagery of a bounded national territory always remains significant (Schiller 1999: 211). However, the notion of the deterritorialized nation-state has another important implication: if a nation’s identity cannot be based on territory, then its sole source is likely to be ideas of belonging together on the basis of origins, culture, language, and so on. Thus transnationalism can lead to a revalorisation of ethnicity and race. This seems contradictory, because, as argued above, the transnational phenomenon undermines traditional forms of national identity. Generally, transnational groups have dual or multiple identities, based on having important links with more than one society. But if their status in the host society is one of exclusion and discrimination, it cannot be a source of self-esteem and identity. In these circumstances, ethnic, racial or national identification may develop as a reaction. In other words, being a member of a transnational community, can, under conditions of racism and exclusion, lead to strengthening of nationalism. As Wang (1998b) has pointed out, Chinese nationalism did not really exist before the encounter with the West. Chinese migrants’ exposure to the nationalism and racism of Western countries helped to create Chinese nationalism, which was then reinforced by the external threat to China culminating in the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. In my view, it is more common today for transnational activities to lead to a decline rather than an increase in nationalism and racism. However, both outcomes are possible, depending mainly on the policies and attitudes of the host country. Repressive policies towards migrants actually create the separatist consciousness that policy makers fear – a classic self-fulfilling prophecy. Where immigrants and their descendants can obtain rights and opportunities they are less likely to emphasize their ethnicity. In the past, there might then have been an expectation of assimilation. Under conditions of globalization, transnational consciousness and multiple identities are the probable outcome.
Transnational communities and citizenship Recognizing transnational belonging has important consequences for the way in which societal belonging is defined. The main instrument for this is citizenship. The multiple identities resulting from transnationalism can be institutionally recognized
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through laws allowing dual or multiple citizenship. Indeed, in recent years many emigration and immigration countries have changed their laws to permit dual citizenship. Emigration countries do so as a way of binding emigrants to the home country because this brings benefits in the forms of remittances, technology transfer, political allegiance and maintenance of culture. Immigration countries do so as a way of improving the social integration of minorities, because it has been found that insistence on renunciation of the previous affiliation blocks naturalization for many immigrants, who remain foreigners – even into the second and subsequent generations – where the ius sanguinis principle prevails. The existence of permanently disadvantaged minorities leads to social disadvantage and divided societies. This linking of ethnicity with social class is at the root of many ethnic conflicts and racism. This is why even the countries that imported ‘guest workers’ and practised differential exclusion have now changed their citizenship laws to encourage naturalization. The German citizenship law introduced in 2000 represented an important (although still incomplete) move towards the ius soli principle (Castles 2000; Castles and Davidson 2000). The increasing number of countries that recognize dual citizenship is a ‘remarkable departure from earlier times, when emigrants were almost regarded as defectors and where naturalization in another country entailed the automatic loss of the original citizenship’ (Portes 1999: 467). The acceptance of dual nationality by the Mexican government has led to a rapid growth in the dualcitizen population of the USA. The hope of gaining political influence in powerful immigration countries can be very important to homeland governments, as Schiller (1999) points out for Asian countries. Transnationalism from below applies with regard to citizenship too. Where governments refuse to recognize this right, it becomes a major focus for migrant struggles, as has been the case in Western Europe. Gender rights play an important part here: since the 1960s, increasing numbers of states have recognized the inheritance of citizenship through the mother as well as the father. The growing number of cross-national marriages automatically creates dual citizens. Where states fail to recognize dual citizenship, ordinary people often discover loopholes. Germany, with its large Turkish immigrant population, was estimated to have 1.2 million dual citizens in the early 1990s (Çinar 1994: 54). Transnationalism will inevitably lead to a rapid increase in multiple citizenship, creating the phenomenon most feared by nationalists: the potentially divided loyalties of people with an instrumental rather than an emotional attitude towards membership of a state. The growth of transnational communities may, in the long run, lead to a rethinking of the very contents of citizenship. Such debates are too complex to pursue further here.4
Perspectives on future patterns of migrant settlement and transnationalism Recognition of transnationalism, easy naturalization and dual citizenship are still distant dreams for most migrants in the Asia-Pacific region. The authorities in
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emigration countries may well encourage some forms of transnationalism as a way of retaining the loyalties of emigrants. Dual citizenship or quasi-citizenship (that is, special rights for emigrants who have taken the citizenship of immigration countries) can have important economic, political and cultural benefits for emigration countries, as the Balikbayan policy in the Philippines demonstrates (see note 3). On the other hand, governments of emigration countries may well fear the potential role of transmigrants as agents of political and cultural change. Governments of immigration countries in the region are highly unlikely to recognize transnational communities in the foreseeable future. The perception of migrants as temporary workers who will not settle is still very much the conventional wisdom for Asian elites (Skeldon 2000: 379). Immigrant settlement is not permitted officially anywhere (with some exceptions for people with high levels of financial or human capital). Settlement and community formation are seen as threatening. For instance, in Malaysia, immigration is perceived as having the potential to destabilize a delicate ethnic balance devised to deal with the consequences of colonial divide-and-rule policies. In Japan, increased immigration and settlement forces people to confront powerful myths of homogeneity and racial superiority (Yoshino 1992; Yamanaka, Chapter 4). Immigration and settlement have the potential to upset established ideas on national identity. In this climate, rights for migrants are granted grudgingly, if at all. Undocumented migration is still widespread, making it easy for authorities to turn a blind eye to abuse and exploitation. Even legal migrants have no rights to family reunion, secure residence permits, welfare benefits or political participation. Access to citizenship for immigrants is not even on the political agenda in most places. Yet there are reasons to believe that exclusionary policies will be unsustainable in the long run. Trends towards increased migration, long-term settlement and formation of transnational communities have become inescapable. International migration is just one aspect of much broader processes of globalization and social transformation. The increasing porosity of borders to various types of flow (capital, commodities, ideas and people) makes it much harder for governments to control migration and settlement. Growing regional cooperation also makes it difficult for immigration countries to enforce draconian control policies. The failure of mass repatriation policies during the Asian crisis made such constraints on national sovereignty clear to many policy makers. Economic motivations remain strong for workers to move from areas with large labour surpluses but slow employment growth (such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Indo-China, South Asia and China) to fast-growing economies with slow or negative labour force growth (Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand). Governments of countries with labour surpluses will probably continue to see exporting labour as economically and socially beneficial and to include it in their development plans. Employers and governments in labour-deficit countries may see importing labour as an easy solution to labour shortages that might otherwise slow economic growth. The expansion of temporary labour migration seems probable. The smaller than predicted fall in employment of migrant workers during the 1997–99 Asian crisis and the rapid resumption in mobility since confirm such expectations.
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Migration tends to create structural dependence for both emigration and immigration countries. Emigration countries need a continuing outflow of workers to alleviate unemployment and remittances to support their balance of payments. This is one reason why the Philippines has not been able to reduce emigration drastically despite major political pressures to do so. Immigration countries need continuing inflows because their nationals will not move back into menial jobs in plantations, factories or the services, even in the event of recession and unemployment. That is why authorities in both Malaysia and Japan have been half-hearted about deportations of undocumented workers despite the rhetoric of political leaders (Skeldon 1998). Employers form powerful lobby groups to retain good workers and to obtain new ones. This structural dependence gets translated into interest group politics, which leads to a politicization of migration (Pillai 1999). In addition, migration networks and the transnational migration industry help to organize and perpetuate migratory flows even if governments wish to stop them. They also play an important role in processes of settlement and community formation, as research in Malaysia (Kassim 1998) and Japan (Komai 1995; Mori 1997) has shown. Trends towards democratization in Asia-Pacific countries also help to stabilize immigrant populations, even though such processes are uneven and uncertain. Japan fulfils all the criteria of procedural democracy and the rule of law. Increasing use of legal and human rights guarantees by immigrants and their supporters, particularly in the many NGOs, may help to stabilize the situation of settlers and eventually facilitate family reunion and community formation (Kondo 1998, 2000). In Malaysia, democracy and human rights guarantees are far less developed. Nonetheless, civil society organizations are campaigning for the rights of migrants, using the legal system where possible (Jones 2000). Similarly, welfare rights can play a major part in stabilizing immigrant populations. Again there are clear signs that this is happening in Japan with increasing access to general and special social services by immigrants. Such trends are not much in evidence in Malaysia or other immigration countries. However, the development of social safety nets is on the political agenda following the crisis of the 1990s, so change is possible. If we put all these trends together, there is every reason to expect that transnational communities will play an increasingly important role in the AsiaPacific region. Indeed, the failure of state policies to come to terms with settlement and the formation of communities may actually encourage the proliferation of transnational communities. Where states deny rights to permanent settlers, they force them into a state of permanent marginalization. This leads to reactive ethnicity (see above), in which groups discriminated against use ethnic resources as a means of survival and upward mobility. Under the conditions of globalization, this strengthening of ethnic ties is likely to strengthen transnational links and may well help to reduce the power of nation-states to control their borders and to manage difference within them. The refusal of Asia-Pacific elites to accept that labour migration will lead to some degree of settlement and community formation is therefore counterpro-
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ductive. It will not prevent the development of transnational communities, but it is likely to force them into oppositional or even separatist positions. It would be better to recognize the existence of transnational communities and to take steps to break the nexus between minority ethnicity and disadvantaged social position. If minority groups can enjoy rights to equal economic, social and political participation, they are still likely to maintain their transnational networks under contemporary conditions. But such transnational links can be seen as a source of economic and cultural enrichment rather than a threat. Clearly, a major conceptual leap is needed. This is not likely to happen quickly, but the human costs of delay may be high. Acknowledgements An earlier version of this chapter was published as ‘Introduction: migrant settlement, transnational communities and state strategies in the Asia-Pacific region’ in R. Iredale, C. Hawksley and S. Castles (eds) (2003) Migration in the Asia-Pacific: Population, Settlement and Citizenship Issues, Cheltenham, UK, Edward Elgar. The author thanks Edward Elgar for permission to republish here.
Notes 1 2 3
4
This is summed up in Hau’ofa’s (1993) notion of ‘our sea of islands’ in which the Pacific Ocean does not divide peoples but provides routes to link them. A fascinating use of modern transport and communication technologies to run small ethnically based businesses by Cape Verdean women is analysed in Marques et al. (2001). The category of Balikbayan was established in the 1970s by the Marcos regime. Balikbayan are literally ‘people coming back home to the Philippines’. Programmes have been set up to facilitate their return, including special travel documentation, tax privileges and import concessions. Balikbayan may be overseas contract workers, US permanent residents or even US citizens of Filipino origin. The aim of the Balikbayan concept seems to have been to retain a feeling of national belonging for emigrants. Useful discussions of these issues are to be found in Bauböck (1994), Bauböck et al. (1996), Bauböck and Rundell (1998), Gutmann (1994) and Habermas (1996b). These debates are examined in Castles and Davidson (2000) and specifically for the AsiaPacific region in Davidson and Weekley (1999).
References Aguilar, F.V.J. (1996) ‘The dialectics of transnational shame and national identity’, Philippine Sociological Review 44 (1–4): 101–36. —— (1999) ‘The triumph of instrumental citizenship? Migrations, identities and the nation-state in Southeast Asia’, Asian Studies Review 23 (3): 307–36. Alba, R. and Nee, V. (1997) ‘Rethinking assimilation theory for a new era of immigration’, International Migration Review 31 (4): 826–74. Basch, L., Glick Schiller, N. and Blanc, C.S. (1994) Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Post-Colonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-States, New York: Gordon and Breach.
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Battistella, G. and Assis, M. (1998) ‘The impact of the crisis on migration in Asia’, Manila: Scalabrini Migration Center. Bauböck, R. (1994) ‘Changing the boundaries of citizenship: the inclusion of immigrants in democratic polities’, in R. Bauböck (ed.) From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe, Aldershot, UK: Avebury. Bauböck, R. and Rundell, J. (eds) (1998) Blurred Boundaries: Migration, Ethnicity, Citizenship, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Bauböck, R., Heller, A. and Zolberg, A.R. (eds) (1996) The Challenge of Diversity: Integration and Pluralism in Societies of Immigration, Aldershot, UK: Avebury. Blanc, C.S. (1996) ‘Balikbayan: a Filipino extension of the national imaginary and of state boundaries’, Philippine Sociological Review 44 (1–4): 178–93. Böhning, W.R. (1998) ‘The impact of the Asian crisis on Filipino employment prospects abroad’, Geneva: International Labour Office. Castells, M. (1996) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 1: The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —— (1997) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 2: The Power of Identity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —— (1998) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 3: End of Millennium, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Castles, S. (1986) ‘The guest-worker in Western Europe – an obituary’, International Migration Review 20 (4): 764–78. —— (2000) Ethnicity and Globalization: From Migrant Worker to Transnational Citizen, London: Sage. Castles, S. and Davidson, A. (2000) Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging, London: Macmillan. Castles, S. and Miller, M.J. (2003) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, third edition, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave. Çinar, D. (1994) ‘From aliens to citizens: a comparative analysis of the rules of transition’, in R. Bauböck (ed.) From Aliens to Citizens: Redefining the Status of Immigrants in Europe, Aldershot, UK: Avebury. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, London: UCL Press. Davidson, A. and Weekley, K. (eds) (1999) Globalization and Citizenship in the Asia-Pacific, London: Macmillan. DeWind, J., Hirschman, C. and Kasinitz, P. (1997) ‘Immigrant adaptation and nativeborn responses in the making of Americans’, International Migration Review (special issue) 31 (4). Gutmann, A. (ed.) (1994) Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Habermas, J. (1996a) ‘Der europäische Nationalstaat – zu Vergangengheit und Zukunft von Souveränität und Staatsbürgerschaft’, in J. Habermas (ed.) Die Einbeziehung des Anderen: Studien zur politischen Theorie, Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp. —— (1996b) Die Einbeziehung des Anderen: Studien zur politischen Theorie, Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp. Hau’ofa, E. (1993) ‘Our sea of islands’, in E. Waddell, V. Naidu and E. Hau’ofa (eds) A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of Islands, Suva, Fiji: University of the South Pacific. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. and Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations: Politics, Economics and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press. Hoogvelt, A. (1997) Globalization and the Postcolonial World, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan.
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International Organization for Migration (2000) World Migration Report 2000, Geneva: International Organization for Migration. —— (2003) World Migration 2003: Managing Migration – Challenges and Responses for People on the Move, Geneva: International Organization for Migration. Jones, S. (2000) Making Money Off Migrants: The Indonesian Exodus to Malaysia, Hong Kong Wollongong: Asia 2000, Centre for Asia-Pacific Social Transformation Studies. Kassim, A. (1998) ‘The case of a new receiving country in the developing world: Malaysia’, in United Nations ACC Task Force on Basic Social Services for All (ed.) Technical Symposium on International Migration and Development, The Hague. Komai, H. (1995) Migrant Workers in Japan, London: Kegan Paul International. —— (1998) ‘Migrants in Japan’, in United Nations ACC Task Force on Basic Social Services for All (ed.) Technical Symposium on International Migration and Development, The Hague. Kondo, A. (1998) ‘From the “mono-ethnic” state to cultural pluralism in Japan’, Stockholm: Center for Pacific Asia Studies at Stockholm University. —— (2000) ‘Immigration law and foreign workers in Japan’, Fukuoka: Faculty of Economics, Kyushu Sangyo University. Marques, M.M., Santos, R. and Araùjo, F. (2001) ‘Ariadne’s thread: Cape Verdean women in transnational webs’, Global Networks 1 (3): 283–306. Marshall, T.H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mori, H. (1997) Immigration Policy and Foreign Workers in Japan, London: Macmillan. National Multicultural Advisory Council (NMAC) (1999) Australian Multiculturalism for a New Century: Towards Inclusiveness, Canberra: National Multicultural Advisory Council, Commonwealth of Australia. Ohmae, K. (1991) The Borderless World, New York: HarperCollins. Pillai, P. (1999) ‘The Malaysian state’s response to migration’, Sojourn 14 (1): 178–97. Portes, A. (1999) ‘Conclusion: towards a new world – the origins and effects of transnational activities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2): 463–77. Portes, A., Guarnizo, L.E. and Landolt, P. (1999) ‘The study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research field’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2): 217–37. Schiller, N.G. (1999) ‘Citizens in transnational nation-states: the Asian experience’, in K. Olds, P. Dicken, P.F. Kelly, L. Kong and H.W. Yeung (eds) Globalization and the AsiaPacific: Contested Territories, London: Routledge. Sinn, E. (ed.) (1998) The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Skeldon, R. (1998) ‘The impact of the current economic crisis in Asia on population migration in the region’, Geneva: International Organization for Migration. Skeldon, R. (2000) ‘Trends in international migration in the Asian and Pacific region’. International Social Science Journal 165: 369–82. Supang, C. (1999) ‘Thailand’s responses to transnational migration during economic growth and economic downturn’, Sojourn 14 (1): 159–77. van Hear, N. (1998) New Diasporas: the Mass Exodus, Dispersal and Regrouping of Migrant Communities, London: UCL Press. Vertovec, S. (1999) ‘Conceiving and researching transnationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2): 445–62. Wang, G. (1998a) ‘Upgrading the migrant: neither Huaqiao nor Huaren’, in E. Sinn (ed.) The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. —— (1998b) ‘Introduction: migration and new national identities’, in E. Sinn (ed.) The Last Half Century of Chinese Overseas, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
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Weiner, M. and Hanami, T. (eds) (1998) Temporary Workers or Future Citizens? Japanese and US Migration Policies, New York: New York University Press. Yoshino, K. (1992) Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan, London: Routledge. Zhou, M. (1997) ‘Segmented assimilation: issues, controversies and recent research on the new second generation’, International Migration Review 31 (4): 975–1008.
3
Spheres of speculation and middling transnational migrants Chinese Indonesians in the Asia-Pacific Donald M. Nonini
Introduction During the days of mid-May 1998, panicking ethnic Chinese abandoned their devalued luxury cars on the approaches to Jakarta International Airport, desperate to catch whatever flights to foreign destinations they might be able to buy tickets for. From late 1997 to mid-1998, as the Indonesian economy foundered due to the sudden and massive withdrawal of foreign capital from Indonesian banks and corporations and the radical devaluation of the rupiah, Chinese Indonesians, and their homes and businesses, became the targets for looting, arson, rape and even murder by pribumis (‘indigenous’, i.e., non-Chinese Indonesians) in cities and towns in Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi. To mention the most serious incidents: in January 1998, in the rural town of Ujang Pandang in Sulawesi, more than 1,000 Chinese shop-houses were burned to the ground and several Chinese were killed or assaulted. Later, from April to July, Chinese were attacked and their shop-houses looted, then set afire, in the cities of Medan in Sumatra, Solo and Jakarta in central Java, and Surabaya in eastern Java. Christian churches, to which many Chinese belonged, were also targets for arson. The violence culminated in the events of 12–14 May 1998 in Jakarta, when approximately 1,200 persons were killed, hundreds were beaten and injured, scores of Chinese women were raped – 168 assaults were confirmed – and thousands of shop-houses were set on fire, damaged or looted (Aglionby 1998; Volunteers for Humanity 1998a, 1998b, 1998c). Chinese Indonesians have subsequently referred to these events simply as ‘May’ events, which seared the consciousness of many of them. Violence continued into late 1998, with Chinese targeted in Llokseumawe in Aceh (Torchia 1998) while in Jakarta, human rights activists investigating the rapes were harassed, intimidated and, in the case of one woman, tortured to death (Mydans 1998; Heryanto 1999: 322). In the months during and after the violence of 1998, an estimated 110,000 Chinese families fled to Singapore, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia and other countries in the Asia-Pacific region; they made up 7 percent of Indonesia’s ethnic Chinese population of six million. Those who fled expatriated an estimated $80 billion in capital, $50 billion to Singapore alone (Oxford Analytica 1998). According to my informants, as many as 15,000 Chinese from Indonesia
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left for Australia during the same period.1 Although the situation in Indonesia has improved since 1998 and the majority have returned, many still remain overseas, as has part of their capital. When this chapter was being written (May 2003), Chinese Indonesians residing both in Indonesia and abroad feared for their prospects in an Indonesia under Megawati Sukarnoputri that faces economic and political instability, and widespread ethnic, religious and regional strife. Even as Chinese in Indonesia have, since 1998, re-established their businesses and professions while seeking a broader role in Indonesian politics than they had under the New Order (Anggraeni 2002a, 2002b; Lubis 2002; Diani 2002), they wonder: will new disorder deflect its internal tensions onto them as a target? Will ‘May’ occur again? Aggregate estimates of the hundreds of thousands of people who ‘fled’ and the billions in capital they ‘took’ with them belie a multitude of complex processes of migration by Chinese Indonesians overseas, of sojourning and of returning or refusing to return to Indonesia. In this chapter, I focus on the situation of Chinese Indonesians who migrated to Australia, of those who left in 1998 and after, but also of those who went to Australia prior to ‘May’. More specifically, I want to discuss what happened to those who entered Australia as ‘business skills’ or ‘independent skills’ migrants to suggest just how problematic the concepts of ‘flight’ and of ‘migration’ are to begin with. Instead, I will argue, it makes more sense to speak of many of them as being engaged in circuits of ‘transnational connection’ between Australia and Indonesia: connections that involve not only their moving back and forth but also their being stalled or ‘stuck’, as well as being engaged in long-distance family politics that cross between Australia and Indonesia. In my analysis, I contend that their strategies as migrants positioned them uneasily between two specific national regimes of ‘governmentality’ that are themselves emergent, contingent and historically specific. By ‘governmentality’, I begin by referring to Foucault’s (1991) and others’ (see, for example, Ong 1999; Dean 2001) notion of governing rationalities that posit specific and differentiated relationships between the modern state, most broadly conceived, and the subject populations being governed. However, unlike most Foucauldians, I see a gap between grasp and reach: governmentality is an unfinished project for which there are no unequivocally constructed subject positions within populations inscribed by technologies of governing power. In fact, I would argue, ironies abound. Whereas in the case of Australia’s neoliberal governmentality, its attempts to become ‘disciplinary’ by requiring that its ideal immigrants have the ‘business skills’ (and capital) and ‘independent skills’ it sees as ‘in demand’, its practices actually fail to produce this ideal among Chinese Indonesians who seek to become Australian citizens by promising skills they often do not have; in contrast, in the case of Indonesian pastoral governmentality, its efforts to preserve the citizenship differences between the majority population, for whom care is provided, and the Chinese, who are not seen as ‘indigenous’ but who can be coerced into providing the capital for national ‘development’, has led many ethnic Chinese to leave Indonesian territory altogether.
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In this light, I see the strategies of evasion, accommodation and resistance practised by Chinese Indonesian migrants to Indonesia vis-à-vis these regimes as constructing differentiated hybrid subjectivities and practices that challenge the technologies of power and knowledge that each governmental regime sought to apply to them. I thus concur with Ang (2001), who defines Chinese-Indonesian subjectivity as characterized by a sense of in-between-ness and spatial dislocation.
Competing conceptions of citizenship: nationalism, speculation and the hypertrophy of financial capital While ‘globalization’ has many meanings, in the present context it signifies a world historical confrontation over the last three decades between political and social forces harnessed to two complex forms of governance associated with modern nation-states and, more broadly, with the forces of capitalist modernity in geographical terms, one dominant in the West, particularly in the USA, and the other dominant in much of East and Southeast Asia (Nonini 2003).2 This is the encounter between a ‘disciplinary neoliberalism’ (Gill 1995a, 1995b) arising in the West and a ‘pastoral’ liberalism associated with most, if not all, Asian societies (Ong 1999). Disciplinary neoliberalism, according to Gill (1995a: 411–12), is a contradictory formation of ‘structural and behavioural power’ that ‘combines the structural power of capital with “capillary power” and “panopticism”’, institutionalized in ‘new constitutionalist proposals’ that emphasize ‘market efficiency, discipline and confidence; economic policy credibility and consistency; and limitations on democratic decision-making policy’. Ultimately, the claim of disciplinary neoliberalism, however radically it departs from actual practice, is that a government is always accountable to markets. In the West, disciplinary neoliberalism combines the ‘sovereignty’ associated with the modern state’s monopoly on violence within a national territory with a ‘biopolitics’ or ‘a politics concerning the administration of life, particularly as it appears at the level of populations’ (Dean 2001: 47), but where the administration of human life is viewed as best organized by markets, with the state confined to preserving the rights of private property holders and providing the least regulation possible of rational, self-interested individuals whose successful participation in these markets makes up ‘society’. In contrast, most (but not all) Southeast Asian nation-states display a dominant pastoral governing rationality that connects the state to its majority ethnic, racial or religious subject population in a relationship of care, protection and encouragement.3 Here biopolitics has to do with rationalities of governance that promote the welfare of ‘human beings constituted as a population’ (ibid.: 47) – for that ethnic, racial or religious majority. In Southeast Asia, this majority is most often characterized as ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’. The state is expected to generate and guide markets in line with this paternalistic relationship to members of the majority, by example, providing them ensured or preferred access to government or private employment. However, a very different
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governing logic from that of pastoral care is to be applied to populations of groups who do not form the favoured majority – in particular, coercive strategies of rule apply towards those marginalized minorities who are at the edge of or outside the imagined national ‘native self ’ (Heryanto 1998). Ethnic Chinese have been among the minority groups so marked in most of capitalist Southeast Asia. These differentiated rationalities of governance by the state over varied subject populations – of pastoral care towards an ethnic or religious majority; of coercive regulation towards various stigmatized minorities – are deployed across what Ong (1999) has called ‘zones of graduated sovereignty’.4 The confrontation between these two different governmentalities occurs in many registers at more than one scale. For instance, the ongoing conflict between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the government of Indonesia over the terms of economic governance it would have to abide by in order to receive loans needed to recover from the Asian (financial) crisis of 1997–98 represents but one of the most recent overt transnational manifestations of this confrontation. According to Oxford Analytica (2002), here lies a three-sided struggle between the ‘neoliberal technocrats’ in the Megawati cabinet, who support IMF conditions demanding reduction in the scope of state activities (for example, government industries or staples subsidies) and ‘opening’ the Indonesian economy to ‘free trade’ and ‘free capital flows’, the ‘dirigiste nationalists’ in the cabinet, who are committed to major state guidance of the economy on behalf of specific favoured religious and regional groups (for example, Muslims, Javanese), and the IMF itself. However, the point I wish to follow up is that the conflict between the IMF and the Indonesian government makes sense only if the alternative Western and Asian governing rationalities animating this conflict are not already in an antagonistic relationship towards each other at a more fundamental level of individual subjectivities and group ‘structures of feeling’ (Williams 1973) within and beyond Indonesia.5 Each of these two radically different governance regimes generates a profoundly contrasting concept of citizenship vis-à-vis the other. As a cultural product, citizenship is not a binary entity where one either is, or is not, a citizen but instead consists of a set of differential privileges related to the nation-state, where some persons possess a larger complement of such privileges than others, so that it makes sense to speak of some persons being ‘full citizens’ or even ‘super-citizens’, while others are not ‘full citizens’ but are even ‘sub-citizens’. My argument is that, under disciplinary neoliberalism, the privileges of full citizenship are ideally reserved for rational, capital-owning individual entrepreneurs, so citizenship becomes a quasi-speculative commodity traded between the neoliberal state and those who appear to approach these ideal figures, whether domestic or foreign. In contrast, under Asian pastoral liberalism, the privileges of full citizenship inhere in persons belonging to one or more pluralities of ‘native’, racial, ethnic or religious groups defined as making up the ‘nation’, while capitalowning subjects who are not members of such groups, such as Chinese business owners, continually compensate for their citizenship deficiency by exchanging their capital for the privileges of full citizenship.6
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These specific conceptions of citizenship arise from the history of Western disciplinary neoliberalism, on one hand, and postwar Asian pastoral liberalism, on the other. To take the latter first, while those groups favoured with full citizenship by reason of their ethnic, racial or religious status vary across Southeast Asia, they tended to be those whose elites gained control of state power via wars of independence or peaceful succession from European colonial powers in the late 1940s to the 1960s – Malays in Malaysia, Javanese in Indonesia, ethnic Vietnamese in Vietnam, and so on. Once such elites came to control the independent post-colonial state, they began to harness its forces simultaneously to the tasks of national ‘development’ and to the economic, political and cultural aggrandizement of the group to which they belonged. Within the new administrative arrays of the Southeast Asian post-colonial state, their group then became a population whose ethnic, racial or religious attributes defined eligibility to be a full citizen of the state. Populations not thus favoured with full citizenship vary greatly by class, ethno-racial or religious status; some, such as ethnic Chinese, have been able to compensate for being defined as sub-citizens by, in effect, purchasing additional privileges pertaining to full citizenship: this, at one level, is what ‘corruption’ has meant in Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia (Nonini 2003: 180–2). In the case of disciplinary neoliberalism, here too there is vast variation, but as a generalization, one can argue that older Western conceptions of citizenship grounded in membership in a certain racial, ethnic, gender or religious group have recently been supplemented by the conception of citizenship as a commodity purchasable through ‘global markets’, the result being a syncretic citizenship whose privileges are fully obtainable by satisfying one of several quite different criteria for eligibility: by birth (i.e., ius solis, which still registers large Euro-American racial majorities), by military service (as in the USA) or by purchase. The most recent phase of disciplinary neoliberalism – one in which the US government is engaged in unilateral military and economic violence towards many other nation-states driven by a racialist nationalism7 – merely demonstrates how closely entwined these different bases of citizenship as a cultural formation are in one another. In the light of this development, citizenship by purchase in nation-states under disciplinary neoliberalism has been culturally produced within the setting of an enormous expansion in the circulation of financial capital in the global system, a circulation increasingly divorced from the processes of production, distribution, exchange and consumption of commodities, although it often has manifest consequences for these processes. In so far as the circulation of capital is increasingly disembedded from the real economy constituted by the embodied or grounded processes that create new values, and yet ultimately originates in them, it deserves to be called speculation. That is, increasingly, capital operates in speculative markets ‘in which prices move in response to the balance of opinion regarding the future movement of prices’ (Strange 1998: 111) rather than in response to the balance of values
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created, consumed, traded or destroyed.8 A more ethnographically productive way of stating this is that speculation is a ‘form of life’ that is tied to certain ‘language games’ (Wittgenstein 1958) to which the telling of stories about the future of a commodity is central: in speculation, a good story told by a seller creates an expectation in listeners that raises prices and so confers value; told by a buyer, a good story works to create an expectation that prices will fall, yet it still confers value. It is perhaps unsurprising that speculation – the simultaneous trade in commodities whose future prices depend on good stories about them, and trade in these stories as such – should become a more generalized feature of the governing logic of nation-states under disciplinary neoliberalism (Harvey 1989; Strange 1986, 1998). In the case at hand, nation-states of North and Central America, the Caribbean, Australia and New Zealand have increasingly sought to attract capital from beyond their borders through ‘business migrant programmes’ (Borjas 1990; Cheng and Katz 1998; Inglis 1999). In the case of each of these programmes, in return for importing a certain amount of personal capital into a country and promising to establish an enterprise with it, a prospective immigrant receives permanent residence status (and by extension citizenship) in that country after several years of residence. Although the avowed purpose of these programmes is to attract ‘productive capital’ that will ‘increase jobs’ and bring about ‘economic growth’, I would argue that their actual operation takes place within a quasi-speculative market for capital and ‘entrepreneurship’ in which the entrepreneur, his capital and his skills9 are seen as in perpetual short supply by a contending crowd of buyers made up of like-minded states. The title of one source put the conundrum well: ‘The worldwide market for skilled migrants: can Australia compete?’ (CobbClark and Connolly 1997). Buying the entrepreneur, his skills and his capital through an offer of permanent residence partakes of speculation because their price is seen as increasing within a culturally grounded set of expectations held by the elites of competing states that all three are scarce and intrinsically increasingly valuable, irrespective of any actual demand or need for them in a country. In nation-states dominated by a disciplinary neoliberalism, for state elites who are captivated by good stories – ‘speculation’ – about the future value of foreign capital and the entrepreneur who owns it, the price of both can only go up; the only question is what bundle of citizenship rights the state can afford to buy them at. Indeed, over the long term, given the nature of this market, where the commodity’s price is held captive by ideology rather than determined by a critical assessment of added value, the historical volatilities of the price of the roaming capitalist, his skills and capital are a reflection of the cycle of globalization itself; thus, when good stories about the future of capitalism in a country are no longer being told, such as during global depressions or deep recessions, the bust in the speculative market for ‘global capital’ and the entrepreneur who owns it will take place.
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Middling transnationalists: situating Chinese Indonesian migrants to/in Australia As has been noted, shifts associated with post-Fordist capitalism and the global spread of disciplinary neoliberalism, such as global professional standards of certification, ‘world best practice’, new international codes of business law and arbitration, and national programmes for attracting foreign investment (Sklair 2001; Sassen 1996) have called forth not only flows of capital but also the transnational movement of professionals, managers and business owners between regional urban centres. In many instances, these mobile populations have created new consumption- and lifestyle-based ‘third cultures’ that negotiate cultural differences that cross national borders (Featherstone 1990). Other populations such as affluent retirees or refugees fleeing political or religious persecution, such as Chinese Indonesians since 1998, are also accompanied by capital as they move transnationally. When capital flows and human movements are closely connected, there is what is called ‘capital-linked migration’ (Wong 1993). In the case of Chinese Indonesians who have shifted both themselves and (at least some of) their capital to Australia, it makes sense to speak of most as being ‘middling transnationalists’ (Nonini 1997). They are middling transnationalists in that while their migration is capital-linked, it is not capital-driven. Middle-level managers, highly skilled professionals and owners of small- and medium-sized businesses have been increasingly mobile across national boundaries within the Asia-Pacific region in seeking out opportunities not only for investment and speculation with their capital – for trade and new business opportunities – but also new countries of residence for themselves and their families that provide employment opportunities, educational certification, political safe harbours and tax havens. These are, above all, the persons who have sought to take advantage of the recently enacted immigration provisions of neoliberal nation-states seeking to attract foreign capital or entrepreneurial and technological talent by offering permanent residence status and ultimately citizenship to those who have either, as for example, middle-level Hong Kong professionals migrating to Vancouver prior to the handing back of Hong Kong to the PRC (Mitchell 1997), small-scale Taiwanese capitalists seeking refuge from political instability given the threatened ‘takeover’ of Taiwan by the PRC (Tseng 2000), or the group I studied, Chinese Indonesian business people migrating to Australia after the anti-Chinese violence of 1997–98. Although they are the bearers of moveable capital, middling transnationalists are capitalists manqué: they are unlike truly wealthy corporate owners and managers, who relocate their businesses overseas first and foremost because it is profitable to do so and then follow to oversee their operation, such as Taiwanese factory owners who have invested in southeastern China, Southeast Asia or Central America because of lower labour costs (Tseng 2000). Middling transnationalists include small-scale business owners with modest funds of mobile (liquid) capital, professionals with sideline business operations and middle-level
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managers. Unlike the case for factory owners, their capital follows them in their movement overseas; they do not follow it as a path of investment. They are also distinguishable from the jet-setting technocrats and managers employed by transnational corporations and stationed in branch operations in the AsiaPacific: if the latter should happen to move capital as well as themselves, it is the firm’s capital and not their own (see, for example, Willis and Yeoh 2000). In this chapter, I wish to focus on the ‘habitus’10 and practices (Bourdieu 1977) of these Asian middling roving elites who are implicated in culturally specific ways of moving both themselves and their capital. Asian middling transnationalists both speculate about (i.e., tell ungrounded stories about) and participate in speculative markets in the neoliberal nation-states to which they migrate – markets that are socially and politically situated and oriented in ways profoundly different from the Asian markets in which they have accumulated capital. Most crucially, they gamble on a complex set of foreign state rationalities regarding immigrants and immigration that are manifestations of neoliberal governmentalities that contrast radically with the pastoral governing logic towards populations of the states from which many of them migrate, such as Indonesia, Taiwan, Hong Kong and China – and with respect to which they have formed their business habitus. Asian middling transnationalists are like their corporate counterparts in that they bring real skills and talents acquired in their countries of birth to the labour and local capital markets to which they move overseas – their abilities come from their business experience, their technical qualifications (in law, architecture, design, accountancy, etc.) and their academic qualifications. However, unlike the abilities of mobile corporate elites, with a few exceptions, the abilities they possess are not ones that they can adapt for use overseas; they are abilities out of context and so without function. In opposition to the reifications by many business pundits (and some radical critics) of globalization, their experience suggests that whatever globalization is, it produces heterogeneity not homogeneity and that capitalism, however much exploitation or the appropriation of surplus value remains its essential diagnostic feature, has many variants – or perhaps better put, that there are many nationally and culturally specific capitalisms. Among other things, in this chapter, I hope to elucidate the unique disjuncture between the business habitus of origin of Chinese Indonesian migrants in/to Australia and their subject positions as immigrants. On the one hand, they seek to present themselves – or allow themselves to be presented – as the ideally active, highly skilled, rationally calculating and risk-taking subjects posited by Australian neoliberal policies that seek to attract a certain kind of foreign talent (and often the same thing, its capital) to Australia through business skills and independent skills visa programmes. On the other hand, they engage in, and find themselves constrained to engage in, speculating in real estate, owning smallscale import–export firms existing ‘on paper’ only, and serving only as silent partners in Australia once they have migrated there. In casting themselves and being cast as ‘foreign investors’ while actually acting as bit players in the speculative sectors of the global economy, Chinese Indonesian migrants in/to Australia
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present themselves as commodities to be purchased within the more encompassing quasi-speculative market for global capital in which competing nation-states like Australia participate.
Chinese Indonesians meet the Australian immigration regime: the vagaries of ‘business skills’ and ‘independent skills’ migration The migration to Australia of people with qualifications and relevant work experience can help to address skill shortages in Australia and enhance the size, skill level and productivity of the Australian labour force. Business skills migration – encourages successful business people to settle permanently in Australia and develop new business opportunities. (DIMA 1999: 15)
Several thousand ethnic Chinese Indonesians fled Indonesia for Australia during the months of late 1997 to mid-1998, a period marked by the onset of Indonesia’s financial crisis, the fall of Suharto’s New Order regime and widespread political violence, including violence specifically directed against Chinese people. Although there were no official estimates, the leader of an Indonesian NGO whom I interviewed in 2000 estimated that in the three weeks following the violence of 13–14 May 1998 in Jakarta, no less than 15,000 Chinese from Indonesia successfully entered Australia, presumably out of fear of being targeted.11 The vast majority of those who left Indonesia for Australia at that time were business people, professionals and students, but they were still highly diverse in their backgrounds and endowments. Very few, if any, of the Chinese Indonesians who left Indonesia for Australia were members of the extraordinarily wealthy Chinese elite consisting of industrial, commercial and banking tycoons and cukong or ‘bankrollers’ connected to the Suharto family, who controlled transnational or state-owned corporations in Indonesia, had access to state concessions, managed major global capital flows and engaged in transnational jet-setting – Liem Sioe Liong, the Riadys et al. (Robison 1986). Those very wealthy families, already well protected by the Indonesian military if they fled at all, left temporarily for pieds à terre in Singapore or the USA that they had set up long ago in connection with their transnational trading or banking activities. In contrast, most Chinese Indonesians who migrated to Australia were middling transnational migrants, while a few were even quite poor and migrated to find illegal wage work or to be with family members. According to the same informant, the Chinese Indonesian population in Australia could be distinguished as falling into the following categories, which provide the beginning of a guiding thread to the transnational strategies of Chinese Indonesians there: ‘those studying in Australia, the largest group’; ‘those coming as tourists who overstay their visas, and work in factories and do similar
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work’; and ‘professionals’ and ‘business people’. This classification, in its broad terms, appears to be accurate on the basis of what other informants told me. Many migrants merely followed family members, relatives and friends who had relocated in Australia from the early 1970s onwards after it liberalized its immigration legislation to end the invidious White Australia policy of previous decades. I estimate on the basis of an analysis done elsewhere (Nonini, n.d.) that in 1996, there were 30,000–35,000 Indonesians of Chinese descent out of a total of about 44,000 Indonesians residing in Australia, the vast majority (80 percent) living in Sydney, Melbourne or Perth. Those who left Indonesia during the period 1997–98 were thus able, in many instances, to obtain assistance from family members, friends and members of their Christian (Protestant and Catholic) church congregations already resident in Australia. Chinese Indonesians who applied for residence visas in Australia could do so on only a limited number of grounds predicated by the discourse of Australian immigration law: as ‘students’, ‘visitors’ (i.e., tourists), ‘permanent residents’ married to Australian citizens, ‘business skills’ migrants, ‘independent skills’ migrants, ‘refugees’ or migrants for ‘family reunification’. Here I am concerned with those who applied for and successfully received permanent residence visas as either business skills or independent skills migrants, although their family members might also have entered as students or tourists or for family reunification.12 For the year 1997–98, skills visas (including business skills and independent skills) granted to Indonesians made up 4.8 percent of the total 34,670 grants given out, or 1,664 persons (DIMA 1999: 15). The vast majority of these appear to have been grants of business skills visas, the remainder being for independent skills.13 Indeed, given the extraordinarily few refugee visas granted to Chinese fleeing persecution in Indonesia,14 business skills and independent skills visas, and visas for family members accompanying the holders of these visas were the only options available to Chinese Indonesians who sought permanent residence but were either beyond university student age or not married to Australian citizens. As one DIMA immigration officer observed to me in 2000, there was a definite increase in the number of applications for business skills visas from Indonesia as a result of the 1998 violence. Obtaining Australian business skills visas or less frequently independent skills visas were valuable to middling Chinese migrants from Indonesia because this provided migrants with the legal status they needed to engage in a strategy of contingent transnational relocation from Indonesia to Australia – what I have elsewhere (Nonini 1997) called ‘traversal’. Traversal had the goals of providing security for family members from violence and terror in Indonesia, finding university (and professional certification) opportunities for adolescent or adult children, investigating business prospects outside Indonesia and investing (at least part of) one’s capital in a setting overseas where it could not be destroyed, looted or stolen. For older couples, where the man (and infrequently) the woman were retired from income-producing work, traversal involved finding a comfortable residence in Australia where they could live out their remaining years. Emblematic of successful traversal were the ownership of one or more houses in
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an affluent suburb of Sydney, Melbourne or Perth and the enrolment of one or more of one’s children in Australian universities. It is a truism to say that the immigration authorities of a nation-state set the rules by which the citizens of other countries are allowed to enter and reside within its borders. Even when some migrants do not play by the rules and enter the nation-state illegally or overstay a temporary visa, it is a truism with important implications. Chinese from Indonesia intending to migrate to Australia or to reside permanently once there had to argue their case for entry within the discourse of legal immigration language created by legislation and interpreted in official regulations by bureaucrats whom they encountered and interacted with. Like other prospective migrants seeking residence and perhaps citizenship in Australia, Chinese from Indonesia were subject to discipline and control by an array of state agents – immigration officers and appeals review panels – and by non-state actors as well, such as by migration agents, who acted as brokers between applicants and immigration authorities. Such discipline had very real effects in channelling the lives and defining the identities of Chinese Indonesian migrants. The legal provisions surrounding each visa category, as interpreted by immigration officers, police and appeals board members, generated a discursive regime that sought to discipline migrants applying for temporary and permanent residence visas and had been more or less in effect for the last two decades.15 To pose the Foucauldian question: where did the disciplining of migrants come from, and what forms did it take? The disciplining in question arose from the process of assessing applicants’ dossiers to determine whether they initially satisfied the provisions of the visa for which they applied and monitoring those granted visas to determine whether or not they continued to qualify for them. The process required an initial application in one of two locations: ‘offshore’, in which the decisions of Australian embassy or consular officials in Indonesia were final; and ‘onshore’ in Australia, in which the applicant, if their application was rejected, had rights of appeal. If the visa was granted, then the decision was subject to periodic review, as those who have received business skills visas have unpleasantly discovered, as I describe below. If a visa extension was denied, there was an onshore appeals process that might take years, during which the applicant had rights to reside temporarily and to have legal counsel present during appeals hearings. Sanctions came from the final denial of the initial visa application or of its extension, and after the appeal process had been exhausted they took the form of deportation. However, a Foucauldian approach would assume that the discipline entailed in the Australian neoliberal immigration regime is not so much punitive or coercive as it is constructive, at least towards these subjects (Foucault 1977).16 Discipline seeks to construct, prescribe and shape the business skills or independent skills migrant into the forms of a rational capital-owning, risk-bearing agent who will ‘develop business opportunities’ or of a high-tech skills agent who will ‘enhance the size, skill level and productivity’ of Australia’s labour force. Therefore, these two visa categories have to be situated within the discursive
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economy of neoliberal governmentality that has prevailed in Australia over the last two decades: like similar versions of neoliberal governmentality that have become dominant over the same period in Canada, New Zealand, the USA, the Caribbean and elsewhere. In the case of Australia, the provisions for the ‘business skills’ visa required its possessor to bring into Australia a minimum amount of capital (currently set at A$300,000) and provide for the employment of at least five Australian citizens in some active ‘risk-taking’ industrial or service business – as distinct from a merely ‘passive investment’ such as the buying of real estate within five years of receiving the visa. These provisions are closely connected to the premises of Australian neoliberalism with respect to which it approaches the quasi-speculative market for ‘global capital’ and entrepreneurship. The Liberal government of John Howard, like the Labour government before it, has fully bought into the idea that global capital and its owner, the entrepreneurial, rationally oriented individual, must be enticed through this market from outside to invest in Australia if Australia is to ‘have jobs’ and ‘economic growth’, while Australia’s ‘comparative advantage’ is the political stability and social peace to which permanent residence rights and citizenship provide access. The ‘independent skills’ visa arose from the same neoliberal discourse in that Australian immigration law held that persons with a mastery of scarce (for example, information technology) skills and Englishlanguage capabilities in high demand by Australian corporate employers, whatever their race or national origin, should be offered permanent residency, then citizenship, on easy terms. However, the forms of discipline that the Australian immigration regime takes vis-à-vis the applicants for and recipients of business and independent skills visas do not generate a kind of subjectivity, at least in any assured way, and this is where I part company from a strictly Foucauldian notion of a ‘discursive regime’. As I have suggested above, governmentality is emergent, contingent and historically specific: in this case, governing discipline engages in an elaborate fencing match with the strategic evasions, accommodations and resistances that Chinese Indonesians practise when approaching the immigration regime – a match structured not only by governing surveillance but also by bargaining in a quasi-speculative market where appearance, presence and good stories count as much as compliance in any realist sense. Consider, for instance, the following dialogue I had with Hendra, a migration agent living in Perth, Western Australia, who spoke of his loss of clients seeking to apply for the business skills visa in Indonesia in light of the drastic devaluation of the rupiah in 1998: Yes, I lost, can be said, a lot of clients, so I’m assessing them mid of the year in 1997, most of them is qualified [sic], but after that currency fluctuation their assets is becoming something [like] A$100,000, [which] is half of the value before. DMN: And these were assets that had to be in Australian currency, so the minimum was A$300,000 in currency that they could show the immigration. HENDRA:
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Not just show, but must be substantiate[d], by the certificate or by the evaluation or something like that.
HENDRA:
Later, he spoke to me of ‘credibility’ and of how he dealt with the suspicion by DIMA officials that the documents that ‘substantiate’ his client’s wealth were not authentic: he said that he avoids the credibility problem by requiring his clients to sign a paper stating they believe the documents (in Chinese, Indonesian, etc.) state the truth, so that he has no legal liability if things go wrong and the documents are called into doubt during the application process. Score one for the ‘regime’. Consider, however, how Hendra counsels his clients: I see. Have any of your clients been doctors, or lawyers or accountants – in other words professionals, not people with known business, or have you mostly focused on businessmen? HENDRA: A doctor, as you are aware, will not be qualified, because under Australian immigration law, if you are a medical practitioner, or a doctor, and you apply as a migrant, your point pack will be penalized by 25 points reduction, so you won’t be qualified. DMN: I see, right. HENDRA: So I try to do whatever I could but if you are coming as a doctor you won’t be qualified. So usually if you are a doctor, and then you own a business, it’s better to apply under the business category. DMN:
Here, the score is more ambiguous. On one hand, Australian immigration law regards foreign medical specialists as not being in scarce supply or able to ‘enhance’ the labour force’s size or productivity: sad but perhaps not tragic for the prospective migrant who also has the capital for the business skills visa. However, DIMA officials might also not be surprised if such an applicant once in Australia fails to possess the business skills necessary to ‘develop business opportunities’ in accordance with neoliberal premises of who constitutes a desirable citizen. Finally, what about the following, in which Hendra describes the quasispeculative market that the Chinese Indonesian business migrant plays in, one in which speculation (i.e., generating good stories about doing business in Indonesia and elsewhere beyond Australia), underscores the contingent loyalty towards the nation-state that ‘consume’ the business skills migrant who has bought legal citizenship in trade for cash on the barrelhead? Here Hendra describes how his clients experience doing business in Australia: Yes, so every day is a holiday, they mention it to me, ‘in Australia every day is [a] holiday’, they don’t feel the business is quite dynamic, just like in a holiday business. DMN: And so how do they overcome that, this problem? HENDRA:
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A lot of them it is a temptation [sic], you know, that is causing them to go back to Indonesia or to [some other] Asian country again. DMN: Where things are faster paced? HENDRA: Yes, if they [are] still business-minded. … for the youngster, or for the people with business in Asia, usually there is a big temptation to return. DMN: To just go back, or to go somewhere else then? Where might they go? Would they go to Canada, or to USA? HENDRA: I think the US is more attract them [sic], the US. Canada, also, I think [it] is a gateway to US, this I know. HENDRA:
Hendra thus elaborates on the arts and practices of Chinese Indonesians in their strategic encounters with the Australian immigration regime. Attempts to discipline them have been successful, but certainly, as further confirmed below, not always towards the ends intended by neoliberal ideologues. Moreover, missed messages, dissimulation and strategic presentations of identity, marked by evasion, compliance and resistance temper, limit and shift the effects of discipline. Chinese Indonesians quickly mastered the arts and practices of navigating the immigration regime in the course of their encounters with DIMA officials as they acquired information about procedures and regulations from friends, family members, relatives, members of their church congregations and migration agents (who were licensed by DIMA, and, like Hendra, operated one or more offices in Indonesia). They learned how to present themselves at the immigration counter of the Australian embassy in Jakarta; how to behave before DIMA officials and perhaps, later, before members of the appeals panel if their visa applications were denied, say by tempering their case for a business or independent skills visa by mentioning their fears of persecution if they were forced to return to Indonesia; how to travel first to Australia on a temporary residence visa as a ‘visitor’ (tourist) or as someone doing business in Australia, and only then applying ‘onshore’ for the business skills visa; and even how – as I describe below – to respond to the official refusal to extend business skills visas by preempting the Australian neoliberal discourse that valorised ‘risk’.
Risk-taking entrepreneur or speculator? Doing business Down Under is not for everyone, mate! Theoretically, one of the major claims I am making in this chapter is that, however important Foucauldian analytics are as framing devices for studying how regimes of knowledge and power like the Australia visa regime work, these regimes are actually open-ended, contingent, and – in the case of neoliberal governmentality – often emergent and experimental, while instead of becoming ‘docile bodies’ constructed or disciplined as ‘subjects’, the persons in question prove to be recalcitrant, evasive or simply ‘don’t get it’. The circular assertion by Foucauldian purists that eventually ‘subjects’ will get it and become docile in the ways of these regimes through the operation that their micro-technologies of power ‘require’ is no more than a functionalist article of faith seriously out of touch with the ethnography of everyday life.
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In the case of the Chinese Indonesians discussed in this chapter, the Australian visa regime has to deal with two constraints: (1) the quasi-speculative market for ‘global capital’ that a neoliberal governmentality itself brings into being; and (2) the differences in business habitus that distinguish neoliberal governmentality from Indonesian pastoral governmentality. Indeed, the tensions between what could be called Indonesian Chinese practices connected to ‘shopping around’ for citizenship that are in line with Indonesian business habitus (and pastoral governmentality), and the demands that the visa regime seeks to impose on business skills migrants to make them good capitalists on Australian terms, are intimated in the last dialogue with Hendra above. Like any other such tension, its effects are not simple or singular but rather are distributed and varied across the population of migrants. Let us consider this tension more closely. Once in Australia, many Chinese Indonesians holding the desirable ‘business skills’ visa found themselves on deeply unfamiliar terrain, as they discovered in the light of their experience in Indonesia, the disorienting ways in which capitalism operated in Australia and the state that was oriented towards it. Business skills migrants brought with them a ‘predatory clientelist’17 habitus (i.e., a set of cultural predispositions) geared to a distinctively Indonesian governmentality. That is, they were culturally predisposed to expect business relations to be oriented around sustained particularistic ties marked not only by social and political inequality but also by predation between transacting parties, the exemplary transaction being between Chinese merchants and state officials or military officers in which money passes from the former to the latter for ‘protection’. However, patron–client ties are not always predatory, where one party suffers (is eaten) as the other gains (eats), but this is the default expectation. This habitus was systematically discordant with what these migrants experienced of the actual operation of Australian capitalism and with the Australian state’s representations of ‘successful business people’ (and their capital) whom it sought to attract. In short, they just did not ‘get it’. I was startled in this regard during fieldwork in 2000 when I heard what Willyanto, a successful building contractor in Melbourne, said about most of his fellow businessmen18 from Indonesia: Many of them are businessmen who move here because [they] have money, to migrate to Australia, but the problem [is] many of them couldn’t find a job here. So many of them become unemployed, and many of them have a very stressful life, family, and then themselves … because even if they got money, they not really really rich [sic]. Willyanto positions most business skills migrants as middling transnationalists who lack not only capital but also the ‘cronies’ and ‘contacts’ possessed by those who are ‘really, really rich’, who anyway are back in Indonesia or in Singapore: The really, really rich either stay in Indonesia or they have a base in Singapore, because I think they still have a business in Indonesia. I met some of the really rich people, and they still think that making money in
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He then sets out what he sees as the fundamental difference between doing business in Indonesia and in Australia; between ‘who you know’ in the former versus ‘what you know’ in the latter: In Asia, usually we speak rather [about] saving face, we speak [about] try[ing] to get contact, etc. In here it’s less likely [to be] like that. In here, in Melbourne, they need our performance, and I believe the younger generation, they can adopt it, but the older generation, it’s very difficult to adopt it. … In Indonesia it’s who you know [that] is important, and here [it] is what you know [that] is important, that’s the difference. It’s really [about] skill. In Indonesia, it’s whom you know, and then you can buy skill, you can buy everything. The opportunity [to ‘get contacts’] first, and then after that they buying everything [sic] – they become just like that. (italics added) Willyanto concluded his analysis as follows: Actually, some of them [in Australia] are very broken-hearted because here they cannot do anything. There [they are] only imitator, there [they are] not the real businessmen! And here [in Australia], you got to compete with the Jewish, every kind member [sic], the Polish, very smart businessmen, Americans, the Yankees are very good too, so you have to be able to compete with the real world. Indonesia is not the real world! The question of ‘who you know’ and why it matters in doing business in Indonesia also came out in other interviews. Hendra, for instance, pointed to ‘language’: ‘As you know it’s the language and the culture because I can feel myself from the people from the other side before, it’s [a] totally different system and different manners [sic]’. By ‘language’, however, Hendra, following the meaning of bahasa in Indonesian, means not only narrow linguistic competence but also how to speak under what circumstances of relationship and what speech means: Like say, I’m telling you orally and [there’s] no witness around, and you following [sic] when you sign the contract without reading the contract, even [if] the contract detail is not what I said to you, when it comes to a dispute, you cannot sue me. This is what is the difference in Australia…. DMN: So in Australia, it’s what’s written down that matters. HENDRA: Yes, unless there is a witness, but in the other side [Indonesia] it is a common practice, if I say to you this is going to be green, even if there is no black and white, it’s going to be green. HENDRA:
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DMN: It’s HENDRA:
going to be green. No change, that is like a gentleman. And if you did it the other way, next time your name will be around [sic], it’s not good, no people will deal with you.
Hendra thus points to ‘language’ in Indonesia as having immanent in it the binding quality of oral agreements between persons who know each other when doing business and to the recognition that not honouring an oral agreement will lead to sanctions by gossip via networks of Chinese businessmen there; something long recognized in the literature (Dewey 1962). However, what is also important here is that such a recognition prevails among persons doing business with one another who are roughly social equals and who recognize the potential ‘predator/prey’ relationship they have to each other but seek to ward it off; most inclusively other Chinese businessmen in Indonesia. Hendra also mentions how ‘time is money’ when one can take advantage of who one knows: If you [are] just [a] common or ordinary Indonesian businessman and they want to continue to work [in Australia] as the way they were [in Indonesia], I don’t think they will be successful, because it’s different. Like some country, as you know, time is money, they say, time is money, in Indonesia, usually they ask people or they ask friends for free, for everything, because the standard also is different and cheap. So like say, I can employ a receptionist in Jakarta, just for 30 Australian dollars a month, you cannot do it in Australia either. This is more than a comment about the relative cost of labour in the two countries. From the perspective of Hendra, vicariously adopting the position of his wealthy male clients, it also refers to drawing someone subordinate (female, less well educated) into a relationship of predatory clientelism; the manager on one side, the time-pressed, lowly paid receptionist on the other. In Australia, in contrast, the lack of familiarity with the English ‘language’, a lack of technical expertise and an inability to deal effectively with the depersonalized and highly bureaucratized fronts presented by Australian government and corporations alike; all these, it appears, were among the major causes that conduce the ‘broken-hearted’ and ‘stressful life’ that Willyanto reported for many of his acquaintances. As evident in the earlier dialogue with Hendra about the dissatisfactions that Indonesian migrants have with Australian business (‘in Australia every day is holiday’), I found a sense of longing among migrants for the way of doing business in Indonesia that they were accustomed to. Several told me how easy it was to make money in Jakarta, how there you could have profit margins of 30 percent – twice that of business in Australia; and by contrast how difficult it was in Sydney, Melbourne or Perth. Many remarked how difficult it was to establish even a small business: a restaurant, a small import–export firm or a construction
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company. In fact, a few informants with business experience in Indonesia said that they found themselves in Australia having to step down in status to work as factory operatives, in tales told to me full of ambivalence – part embarrassment, part pride in their capacity to adapt. For Indonesian migrants, there are fundamentally two different kinds of capitalism in Indonesia and Australia, and moreover crucially different ways in which the respective states in each seek to relate to capitalist enterprises within their territory. In Indonesia, as Willyanto puts it, making money involves ‘speak[ing about] saving face, we speak [about] try[ing] to get contact’, it comes down to ‘their culture and their cronies, also because of their contacts’, and ‘it’s who you know [that] is important’. Business transactions between Chinese business people take the form of patron–client ties in which the wealthier person allocates credit, loans capital or goods, or provides commercial intelligence to the other, but relationships are not, in any sense, coercive, and oral agreements are binding. However, one expects a different relationship with pribumis who are one’s employees or customers: one is predator, they are prey. I noted above that Indonesian pastoral governmentality under the New Order regime was one in which the state separated subject populations along ethno-racial and religious lines in zones of graduated sovereignty (e.g., Java versus the outer islands) and set up differential relationships to each, especially vis-à-vis their presence in markets, while the ‘native’ Javanese Islamic majority was favoured as the population on behalf of which the national projects of ‘modernization’ (modernisasi) and ‘development’ (pembangunan) were undertaken. Other groups have been cast as the populations that are enemies of or impede these projects. Within this partitioning of the biopower of the national population, ethnic Chinese have become the ‘ethnic other’ opposed to the pure ‘native’ pribumi self (Heryanto 1998). So it is, as Willyanto put it, ‘you can buy skill, you can buy everything’: one can buy licences, permits and other privileges of citizenship by fending off predatory state functionaries on a regular basis with whom one has a structured relationship of inequality (one party has more power, the other more capital) – a pattern of predatory clientelism. This was precisely what the Chinese business habitus in Indonesia predisposed one’s practice towards. Specific clientage ties to state officials and members of a hierarchy of business patrons that culminates in the Chinese economic elite (with its connections to the Suharto family and high military officers) were situated within a framework of state repertoires of pastoral care towards certain populations who formed the core national self, but sustained predation vis-à-vis Chinese, and outright military and police repression against the (spatially and culturally) marginalized primatif of Irian Jaya and (until recently) Timor and separatists (for example, Achenese). Within this array of governmental logic, predatory clientelism bound state civilian and military functionaries who actively guided the economy towards ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ to the practices of Chinese business people who ‘can buy anything’, a relationship more derogatorily described as ‘rent seeking’ or ‘corrupt’ (korupsi or kakaan) (MacIntyre 2000).
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By contrast, in Australia, the state and its officials were engaged in constructing a neoliberal governing rationality in which government officials set the broad frame for market competition but did not seek to actively direct it. Rather, they focused on selecting immigrants who sold themselves as rationally self-interested, risk-taking entrepreneurs with capital they could offer to Australia. In image, at least, ‘here it’s what you know is important, that’s the difference, it’s really skill’.19 In short, the Australian economy was opaque to most middle-level Chinese businessmen: they might understand the ‘rules’ for immigrant subjects, but most neither possessed the proper habitus for Australian business nor engaged in practices generated by it: practices that favoured, in Australia as elsewhere where advanced Euro-American corporate capitalism prevails, a presumption of market impersonalism between different levels of the business hierarchy, and between state officials and small- and middling-size businessmen. Not all Chinese Indonesian skills migrants played off the tension between the demands of Australia’s neoliberal visa regime and the quasi-speculative global market in foreign capital, skills and entrepreneurship in quite this way. There were those few exceptional persons granted ‘independent skills’ visas who, it can be argued, had not only technical skills but also a business habitus more in line with that of Australian corporate neoliberalism. Santoso, for example, whom I interviewed at his home in a Melbourne suburb, graduated with a degree in information technology from an Australian institute in the early 1990s and, having returned to Jakarta, worked as a computer systems analyst and then as a general manager for a US corporation for several years. In 1998, when Santoso applied to a firm in Australia for a similar position as computer systems analyst, he was offered the position, and with the help of his new employer, applied for and was granted an independent skills visa. Compared with other Chinese Indonesian migrants I interviewed, he was relatively young (in his early thirties), had prior university training in Australia and had been employed by an American transnational firm in Indonesia: all very unusual traits. I was also forcibly struck by his statement that he was surprised that his family members (father, mother, one brother, sisters; wife’s mother, brothers and sisters) did not wish to leave Indonesia to join him in Australia; he appeared to be the most independent, most self-consciously ‘modernized’ and least family-oriented informant among the more than twenty Indonesian Chinese migrants I interviewed. If the habitus, skills and practices of most Indonesian business people were so inappropriate to the Australian economic climate, what did they in fact do once they received their business skills visas? For these middling transnationalists, there appeared to be two options. One was to remain in Australia. The other was to commute between Australia, where their houses and family members were, and Indonesia, where their employment or productive property were. A third option – moving back to Indonesia permanently or migrating onward to another country as a business skills migrant – was also possible, and comments by informants like those cited above suggest that this option has been adopted by some, but unfortunately I have little data about its frequency.
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On the basis of my interviews, what is most striking about those who remained in Australia was that they have taken up various speculative enterprises – most small in scope, some much larger. Consider this exchange: So when they have been successful, what sorts of work, what sorts of business have they…? HENDRA: Mostly they are in property, mostly they are involved in property investments, in development … houses, or offices, or a block of development subdivided and sell [sic] it to Indonesians again at that time. But now the time is [sic] changed, I don’t think so, real estate is not so successful in [the] Indonesian market, but real estate is [the] one, actually, attract[ing] a lot of Indonesians to come to Australia. DMN: And under the business skills requirements, they can invest in real estate, it’s okay as long as they employ…? How does that work? HENDRA: Yes, as long as [they] establish business here, and they continue to trade, so it’s sustained, it’s not just in pass[ing] and then they left the country. DMN:
When Indonesian business people have undertaken active building construction, their activities satisfied the DIMA’s provision that holders of business skills visas must ‘actively [be] doing business by placing their money at risk’; but more often than not, informants noted, visa holders merely bought and sold real estate that they hoped would appreciate in value. Another informant put it thus: that ‘left to their own devices, over the last two years [1999–2001] most Chinese businessmen have not been active entrepreneurs but rather have just bought houses and paid educational fees for their children’s schools and universities’. Even where they themselves undertook housing construction, business visa holders encouraged speculation in real estate and rentier capitalism on the part of absentee real estate owners. A glossy (2000) pamphlet with colour photos produced by the (pseudonymous) Sylvan Terrace Developments, owned by a prominent Chinese Indonesian, which constructs residential estates in the suburbs of a major Australian city, lauds its locational decision to build near a university – a ‘growth accelerator’ that will ‘maximize the opportunity for capital growth’ for owners – and advertises a ‘7% rental guarantee’ for landlords, while Sylvan Terrace itself is ‘dedicated to providing real estate products that satisfy the needs of local and overseas investors’. In addition to the buying and selling of real estate, according to informants, Chinese businessmen have also established import–export firms that on paper appear to import goods from Indonesia but in fact only do so in small lots, often through arrangements with friends and family members in Jakarta, for instance, while they actually handled goods as imports on behalf of some other company. Therefore, when they do remain in Australia, holders of business visas engage in speculative and rentier ventures that reflect their own uncertain and hazardous positions – both within Australia’s neoliberal economy as such but also within the regional quasi-speculative markets for ‘business skills’ and ‘global capital’ among competing nation-states in which they find themselves simultane-
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ously willing and unwilling participants. Indeed, one might say, the latter regional/global speculation calls forth the more local form of speculation in its trail.
The Jakarta Express and everyday transnational connections Other Indonesian Chinese holding business or independent skills visas provide their families with political safety and educational opportunities in Australia, while they themselves commuted between their employment or sites of incomeproducing investment in Jakarta and their Australian home bases.20 Let me briefly describe the transnational circuits undertaken by two such businessmen I interviewed – one living near Perth, the other near Sydney – who showed a pattern like the elite ‘astronaut’ pattern described by Ong (1999) and Mitchell (1997). John told me of commuting between his family home in an affluent suburb of Perth and his import–export business in Jakarta, spending two weeks in one location then two weeks in the other. Speaking to me in a virtually empty but large ‘superhouse’ in what was otherwise a staid and prosperous AngloAustralian neighbourhood, he said that he could continue to commute as long as his wife maintained her small sundry goods business in a corner store in the Perth area while his daughter attended one of the local universities, because both were then safe from whatever might happen in Indonesia. However, John was deeply worried by the fact that his daughter’s new boyfriend was an Indonesian Muslim. Such are the pains of fatherhood! A second informant led an even more complex life as a transnational commuter. Iwan’s house was situated in a wealthy suburb northwest of Sydney; his two daughters attended two universities in the Sydney area, while his son attended one of the local high schools. His wife took care of the home, looked after their daughters and son and engaged in charitable work in and around Sydney. He was a high-level executive in a corporation located in Jakarta. DMN: IWAN: DMN: IWAN: DMN: IWAN: DMN: IWAN:
How often do you usually go back and forth? One month, two months, depends on the situation there. You spend two months here or two months in Indonesia? I come back for one week, two weeks, then go back there. How long have you been here in Sydney? This time, what, nearly two months. So I’m going back this end of the month. Is your work such that you do trade between Indonesia and Australia? Before, yes. The first year or two. … That’s why I was asking to be posted here. We wanted to do some business. But at that time there was really a recession, there was nothing I could offer my company. On the other hand, Indonesia was in an improving situation, so my boss asked me to help him over there. But it was [sic] few years with all my children in school and with friends and everything, so I thought, okay, let my
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DMN: IWAN: DMN: IWAN:
family stay, and I’ll just come and go. So that’s why I’m more based in Indonesia, because there’s more work to do there than here. I cannot suggest any detachment from my company, but on the other hand, I would want to stay here, to finally make a joint venture with my company over there, and was successful there. That’s great. So that’s the result of my being here. [Laughs] That must be hard to come and go like that. Yeah, first five years, but after that it got easier. I think with the globalization trend it’s become common.
In one sense, Chinese Indonesians like John and Iwan have tried to make the best of two capitalisms and two nation-state governmentalities. But from their perspectives, there are certain losses. John spoke unhappily of his wife’s petty enterprise that he could not watch over, while he worried about his universityage daughter who was dating an Indonesian, all right – but a Muslim – while Iwan, in the dialogue presented above, witnesses the suffering he has experienced from being separated from his wife and grown-up children. Other informants told me stories of adolescent children left alone and unsupervised, and of university students who were spoiled financially but never saw an absentee parent. Although John and Iwan presented their split situations as ones of suffering that ‘got easier’ with time, as Iwan put it; these presentations of self might obscure other gratifications, such as those from work and travel that both men received and this does become evident in Iwan’s interview. From other perspectives (e.g., of family members), one can infer that the frequent absences required by commuters on the Jakarta Express might have other connotations: a deficit in paternal authority, certainly, but also an absence from the responsibilities of care and nurture of family members, and the loneliness of wives. It is interesting, in this connection, that narratives of the excesses of overindulged, spoiled grown children in Australian cities – their traffic accidents while intoxicated or drugged, their gambling binges in casinos, their sexual antics – recur as anxious stories throughout my interviews of their elders. There are, perhaps in compensation for these separations between family members and others like them, two quite evident forms of transnational connection that span the distance between those living in Jakarta or elsewhere in Indonesia and those residing in Australia. First, although one should be chary of functionalist reduction, particularly in the case of religion, it does appear nonetheless that Christian clergy, both Protestant and Catholic, appear to play major roles as authorities in loco parentis vis-à-vis younger Chinese Indonesians on behalf of parents separated from them. Protestant ministers and Catholic priests originally serving in local churches attended by families in Indonesia, or affiliated internationally to these churches, were often contacted by anxious parents in Indonesia and asked to watch over their ‘youths’ in Australian cities when they themselves were absent. A second form of transnational connection was electronic; I was impressed by the sheer number of persons residing in Australia who kept in daily contact
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through e-mail with family members, friends and business associates in Indonesia and elsewhere in Australia. As an example of what is very common, one woman, in her thirties, a graduate student in an Australian university, told me that one brother and her sisters are still living in Surabaya, and she is in contact with him via e-mail almost every day, along with her cousins and her mother’s cousins who live in Sydney. E-mail lists also connect members of church congregations and charities; and they cross between Australia and Indonesia.
Fashioning or marketing the risk-taking immigrant entrepreneur? In June 2001, I revisited Australia and was able to meet again, Hardoko, one of my informants who had lived in Australia for many years and was well respected as a community leader by Chinese Indonesians there. He brought me up to date regarding the current status of Indonesian business skills migrants. Recently, he said, he was approached by Chinese Indonesian businessmen who faced the problem of reporting to the Australian government regarding their adherence to requirements for the business skills visas they held. Many came over from Indonesia almost exactly three years previously in May 1998 and the weeks and months that followed. As part of the requirements for their visas, which apparently many of them ignored at the time, twenty months after receiving the visa they had to provide a report of how they were ‘actively doing business by placing their money at risk’ by submitting a detailed business plan for their business. Then, thirty-six months after receiving the visa, they had to demonstrate to DIMA that they actually placed their capital ‘at risk’ or they would forfeit the business skills visa. Then was the third anniversary for many who received the visas, and they now faced having to report back to the Australian government to demonstrate their active risk-taking business activity. Their visa did not allow them to simply deposit money in a bank and therefore not place it at risk, that is, of losing it. Hardoko said that a crisis of sorts had been precipitated when DIMA revoked the visas of several holders of business skills visas. Hardoko gave his account of what led to the crisis. There had been a change in government oversight of the business skills programme over the last year or two. ‘They [the government] have become more aware of what the Chinese businessmen are doing.’ That is, the government has discovered that many holders of business skills visas merely bought and sold real estate, or engaged in import–export businesses whose operations existed only on paper. Australian immigration officials were becoming more aware of these practices, Hardoko said, and were becoming more vigilant in giving out these visas and monitoring to make sure their conditions were met. Hardoko mentioned that while his own job as an engineer was in jeopardy given the recession in Australia, the crisis had opened a new business opportunity for him. Over the last several weeks he had been asked by several acquaintances who were ‘millionaires’ in Indonesia to help them to establish themselves as business skills migrants in Australia. But the requests for his assistance, which he
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originally gave as a favour for friends in his spare time, he said, had recently grown more onerous. In the previous week, for instance, he had met a delegation of about thirty such businessmen who came over from Jakarta to inquire about business skills visas. So, he said, he had decided to start a business to make money from it. To deal with this, he and his two friends, an accountant and an attorney, have recently formed a company to assist Chinese businessmen from Indonesia in return for a fee or a share of profits. ‘I ask for 50 percent of the fee to help them to form a business plan for the Australian government as part of the visa application, and if they then receive the visa, they pay me the other 50 percent, otherwise I return the original 50 percent’. The new company he and his partners formed planned to look for distressed Australian-owned businesses – businesses poorly managed or in need of capital – and then his company would organize a group of Indonesian Chinese investors to purchase the business and operate it. The investors would form the board of directors of the company, which would hold monthly meetings with minutes being recorded and sent to the Australian government as evidence of the active involvement of the Indonesian investors in the enterprise. The innovative arrangements by Hardoko and his associates to construct not only a marketable but also a surveillable immigrant subject who could be slotted into the appropriate position of the active, rational, risk-taking owner of foreign capital required by the Australian visa regime have not, I am sure, been unique. They indicate a wider set of practices that are ambiguous, as one might expect given the quasi-speculative regional market for ‘foreign capital’, differences in habitus and the encounter between two distinct forms of govenmentality. Do these arrangements serve to fashion a new and appropriate ‘business skills’ visa holder for the Australian government who will only be comprehensible in terms of neoliberal sensibility – or do they purport (as they are presented to ‘millionaire’ participants) merely to market the image of one? It is unclear where the attempted artifice leaves off and where the practices of ‘actively doing business by placing their money at risk’ begin. As eager Chinese millionaires and other middling elites have continued to seek out refuge from Indonesia’s civil instability, Hardoko’s business and others like it have boomed. In any event, the representations of the good, rational, risktaking immigrant capitalist that these arrangements have sought to foster have stood in marked contrast to the rentier-based and speculative practices engaged in by many Chinese Indonesians residing in Australia. However, it is crucial to reaffirm that these practices arise not from their past engagement with a supposed Southeast Asian ‘ersatz capitalism’ (Yoshihara 1988) putatively inferior in its transformative capacities to Western (or Japanese) capitalism. Instead, their petty speculative and rentier-based practices while residing in Australia are symptomatic of the condition of ‘being stuck’ (Gooding-Williams 1993) in a structural condition arising from the transnational connections that constrain their lives. This condition offers few concessions to a business habitus that comes from a set of rationalities governing capitalism and the state in Indonesia alternative to the governing rationalities they have encountered in Australia. This
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business habitus marks an Indonesian political economy that is equally sustainable and certainly no less ‘genuine’, if no less exploitative, than the one they find in Australia. In short, it is the disjuncture that Chinese Indonesians experience of ‘being stuck’ in this way that goes far not only to explain the speculative careers of many who remain in Australia but also the pathos in which so many find themselves, in Willyanto’s words, with ‘a very stressful life [and] family’ and ‘very broken-hearted because here they cannot do anything’. This disjuncture arising from displacement (being out of place) in turn can only be understood if we attend to the broader regional speculative market in which they and certain nation-states confront one another. Acknowledgements This chapter is a revised version of a paper originally delivered at the conference ‘Transnational Communities in the Asia-Pacific Region: Comparative Perspectives’, 7–8 August 2000, at the National University of Singapore. A later version of that paper was delivered at the joint annual meeting of the Canadian Anthropological Society and the Society for the Anthropology of North America, 4 May 2002, in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. The observations on which this paper are based come from seven weeks of research in 2000 and 2001, which consisted of key informant interviews and documentary analysis in three Australian cities in which large numbers of Chinese Indonesians have resettled: Sydney, Melbourne and Perth. All persons quoted have been given pseudonyms, and identifying particulars of individuals have been left out or altered for this chapter. I thank the editors and an anonymous reviewer for their suggestions for improvement, which led to the current version of this chapter. Above all others, I thank the many Indonesians whom I met in Australia, whose kind and generous giving of time, knowledge and resources, often at times of great personal stress, was crucial to my research, and who taught me everything that I know about the situation of Chinese Indonesians there: terima kasih.
Notes 1
2
No official Australian estimates of Chinese Indonesian migration to Australia during 1997–98 are available, although my analysis, to be published elsewhere (Nonini, n.d.), suggests that the figure of 15,000 is approximately accurate, given a margin of error of several thousand. My analysis here parts company with the approach of Ferguson and Gupta (2002), who see a global diffusion of transnational neoliberal governmentality as transnational multilateral organizations such as the WTO, World Bank, IMF and even NGOs (Worldwide Fund for Nature, etc.) take on informal governance functions within a neoliberal framework in countries outside the West. There is much to be said in support of their empirical observations, but their theoretical approach is limited. Since they presuppose a Foucauldian monotonic shift that sees no alternative forms of governmentality to Western neoliberalism, they recapitulate the prior simplistic
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Donald M. Nonini models of ‘modernization’ and ‘Westernization’ that presuppose diffusion of values, institutions, etc. out of a Western centre to the rest of the world. While the forces of neo-imperialism (e.g., the World Bank, some NGOs) are indeed evident, so too are forces of opposition to it. It was only in the mid- to late 1990s, particularly in the light of the Asian financial crisis and the liberalizing reforms demanded by Western financial institutions of Asian states, that many of these differences between Western and Asian economic logic have come under wide discussion (see, for example, Brohman 1996). This is a bit of a simplification of Ong’s (1999) sophisticated analysis, which also refers to state rationalities of encouragement towards foreign investors who are conferred special privileges within the specific state-designed zones where they reside, for example, high-tech science parks like Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor, which even members of the national majority do not have. Ong’s (ibid.: 214–39) analysis of Asian pastoral governmentality, which employs the notion of ‘zones of new sovereignty’, is decidedly superior to Philpott’s (1997) use of the concept of ‘authoritarian governmentality’, not to speak of Dean’s (2001: 46) extension of this concept into ‘authoritarian forms of rule’ that would encompass New Order Indonesia, the People’s Republic of China and the German Third Reich under the same rubric of ‘biopolitical racism’. There is a need to be on guard against orientalist assumptions that erase fundamental cultural-political differences. In early 1998, for instance, newspapers in Jakarta and elsewhere throughout the island of Java in Indonesia prominently displayed on their front pages a photograph of Michel Camdessus, managing director of the IMF, standing tall with his arms folded, fists clenched, towering over the sitting and stooped figure of President Suharto, who was shown putting his signature to the then latest agreement to yet another set of requirements demanded by the IMF as its price for a so-called ‘bailout’ of the Indonesian economy. The photograph enraged Javanese readers, for its spatial semiotics of the ‘high’ European versus the ‘low’ Asian recalled the vicious didacticism of a stern colonial Dutch schoolmaster disciplining his errant Javanese pupil in this latest episode of ‘teaching the natives a lesson’. However, it would be a mistake to see this merely as anti-colonial animus; such rage came out of the experiences by Javanese of the last fifty years, which sought to redress Dutch colonial inequities by post-colonial structures of governance; an alternative pastoral governmentality with certain subjective implications for them. See Castles and Davidson (1998) for some of the broader implications for the meaning of citizenship brought up by the increase in transnational migration during the current episode of globalization, which began, by most accounts, in the mid1970s. This is done with quite evident antagonism towards Muslims and persons of Middle Eastern origin: a resurgence of what I (Nonini 2003: 167–70) have identified as American ‘socially conservative, homegrown neoliberalism’ based on a neoconservative racial project, in temporary ascendancy over American ‘transnational corporate neoliberalism’ with its pragmatic liberal (i.e., multicultural) racial project. There are many institutional manifestations of the new forms of speculation generated within the flow, investment and disinvestment of capital – for instance, the rapid emergence of global stock, bond, currency and real estate markets, of global markets in derivatives, and in markets that securitize new kinds of future income streams (mortgages, performers’ future fees and royalties, and so on). These new speculative markets are made possible by the technologies and institutions that facilitate the instantaneous movement of stupendously large volumes of electronic money into and out of specific sites in highly volatile cycles of investment and disinvestment – whether we are speaking about the global system of bank clearances (i.e., through the Bank of International Settlements) or the networks of offshore financial centres and
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11
12 13
14
15 16
17
18 19 20
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tax havens linked to one another and thus connected to markets twenty-four hours a day from anywhere on Earth (Harvey 1989; Strange 1986, 1998). Scarce ‘global capital’ and the capitalist who owns it always appear to be gendered masculine; see Gibson-Graham (1996). According to Bourdieu (1977: 72), habitus is ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of the generation and structuring of practices and representations which can be objectively “regulated” and “regular” without in any way being the product of obedience to rules, objectively adapted to their goals without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary to attain them and, being all this, collectively orchestrated without being the product of the orchestrating action of a conductor’. I consider this estimate relatively reliable, since this leader had resided in Australia for many years prior to 1998, received many such migrants when they arrived from Indonesia and was politically active through this NGO in gathering political and financial support in Australia for those who had fled. On business and skills migrants to Australia, see Cobb-Clark and Connolly (1997), Iredale (1999) and Veltman (1990). This is a logical inference based on the fact that although in 1997–98 Indonesians appear to have received less than 1 percent of 13,270 ‘independent visa grants’ (i.e., less than 133 people), they received 4.8 percent of all 34,670 ‘skills visa grants’, which include both ‘business skills’ and ‘independent skills’ categories. (I am also assuming on the basis of my ethnography that very few Indonesians received two other categories of ‘skills visa grants’ – ‘employer nomination’ and ‘Australian-linked skills’). Remarkably, given the violence of mid-1998 directed specifically at ethnic Chinese in Indonesia, very few ‘humanitarian’ or ‘refugee’ visas were given out by Australian immigration authorities to Chinese migrants from Indonesia: of the 1,505 applications for a refugee visa made by Indonesians ‘onshore’ (residing already in Australia), only three, 0.2 percent, were successful. However, Indonesian applicants made up the largest pool of onshore ‘asylum seekers’ – 19.5 percent of all applicants by nationality (DIMA 1999: 19). As Foucault might point out, a corollary discipline of ‘professionalization’ applies to immigration officials and police, and that of being a ‘good citizen’ to appeals board members (who are not professionals), but that is beyond the scope of this chapter. But then there are other stigmatized migration subjects. One cannot but note the contrast between the Australian government’s treatment of affluent business skills migrants like Chinese Indonesians and poor Afghanistan migrants seeking asylum via sea off Western Australia: fulsomely welcoming on one hand, violently rejecting on the other. The term ‘predatory clientelism’ is my own. As Hutchcroft (2000: 215–16) suggests, the literature on clientelism (e.g., Scott 1972) often neglects the place of coercion in structuring patron–client ties, but this is precisely what I found most striking about the Indonesian business environment, particularly, but not exclusively, as it applies to ethnic Chinese; hence ‘predatory clientelism’. Most but not all those granted business skills visas were in fact men; in the case of those who married in Indonesia, their wives and children then joined them in Australia as family members of a migrant with a permanent residence visa. Australian state officials do become involved in active market guidance through the legislation they sponsor – but not in a public way in which money obviously changes hands. Although most such commuters were men, I was told by informants that a few such were women – that it depended on their economic positions in Indonesia at the time they left for Australia.
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References Aglionby, J. (1998) ‘Raped for the “crime” of being Chinese’, The Guardian, London, July 15. Ang, I. (2001) On Not Speaking Chinese: Living Between Asia and the West, London: Routledge. Anggraeni, D. (2002a) ‘Activists of a different kind’, Jakarta Post, August 15. —— (2002b) ‘Indonesia: the battle to be accepted’, Far Eastern Economic Review, September 19. Borjas, G.J. (1990) Friends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigrants on the US Economy, New York: Basic Books. Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brohman, J. (1996) ‘Postwar development in the Asian NICs: does the neo-liberal model fit reality?’ Economic Geography 72 (2): 107–30. Castles, S. and Davidson, A. (1998) Citizenship and Migration: Globalization and the Politics of Belonging, New York: Routledge. Cheng, L. and Katz, M. (1998) ‘Migration and the diaspora communities’, in R. Maidment and C. Mackerras (eds), Culture and Society in the Asia-Pacific, London: Routledge. Cobb-Clark, D.A. and Connolly, M.D. (1997) ‘The worldwide market for skilled migrants: can Australia compete?’ International Migration Review 31 (2): 670–93. Dewey, A. (1962) ‘Trade and social control in Java’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 92 (2): 177–90. Dean, M. (2001) ‘Demonic societies: liberalism, biopolitics, and sovereignty’, in T.B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (eds), States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Diani, H. (2002) ‘Mayling breaks the gender ceiling’, Jakarta Post, January 27. DIMA (Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) (1999) Population Flows: Immigration Aspects, Canberra: Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. Featherstone, M. (1990) ‘Global culture: an introduction’, Theory, Culture and Society 7: 1–14. Ferguson, J. and Gupta, A. (2002) ‘Spatializing states: toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality’, American Ethnologist 29 (4): 981–1002. Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books. —— (1991) ‘Governmentality’, in G. Burchell, C. Gordon and P. Miller (eds), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gibson-Graham, J.K. (1996) The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Gill, S. (1995a) ‘Globalization, market civilisation and disciplinary neo-liberalism’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 24 (3): 399–423. —— (1995b) ‘The global panopticon? The neo-liberal state, economic life and democratic surveillance’, Alternatives 2: 1–49. Gooding-Williams, R. (1993) ‘Introduction: on being stuck’, in R. Gooding-Williams (ed.), Reading Rodney King, Reading Urban Uprising, New York: Routledge. Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Heryanto, A. (1998). ‘Ethnic identities and erasure: Chinese-Indonesians in public culture’, in J.S. Kahn (ed.), Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and the Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, New York: St Martin’s Press / Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. —— (1999) ‘Rape, race and reporting’, in A. Budiman, B. Hatley and D. Kingsbury (eds) Reformasi: Crisis and Change in Indonesia, Clayton, Australia: Monash Asia Institute.
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Hutchcroft, P. (2000) ‘Obstructive corruption: the politics of privilege in the Philippines’, in M.H. Khan and J.K. Sundaram (eds), Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development: Theories and Evidence from Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Inglis, C. (1999) ‘Australia “new” Asian immigration and its impact in a period of globalization’, in Y.F. Tseng, C. Bulbeck, N. Chiang and J. Hsu (eds), Asian Migration: Pacific Rim Dynamics, Monographs 1, Interdisciplinary Group for Australian Studies, Taipei: National Taiwan University. Iredale, R. (1999) ‘The need to import skilled personnel: factors favouring and hindering its international mobility’, International Migration 37 (1): 89–123. Lubis, D.A. (2002) ‘Chinese-Indonesians want their role recognized’, Jakarta Post, November 11. MacIntyre, A. (2000) ‘Funny money: fiscal policy, rent-seeking and economic performance in Indonesia’, in M.H. Khan and J.K. Sundaram (eds), Rents, Rent-Seeking and Economic Development: Theories and Evidence from Asia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mitchell, K. (1997) ‘Transnational subjects: constituting the cultural citizen in the era of Pacific Rim capital’, in A. Ong and D. M. Nonini (eds), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, New York: Routledge. Mydans, S. (1998) ‘New threats reported as rapes in Indonesia are investigated’, New York Times, New York. Nonini, D.M. (1997) ‘Shifting identities, positioned imaginaries: transnational traversals and reversals by Malaysian Chinese’, in A. Ong and D.M. Nonini (eds), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, New York: Routledge. —— (2003) ‘American neo-liberalism, “globalization”, and violence: reflections from the US and Southeast Asia’, in J. Friedman (ed.), Globalization, the State, and Violence, Walnut Creek, Calif.: Altamira Press (Rowman & Littlefield). —— (n.d.) ‘Refugees, class and governmentality: Chinese-Indonesians in Australia and Indonesia’, in C. Coppel (ed.), Chinese Emigrants and Refugees: Recent Population Movements in East and Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand, Melbourne: University of Melbourne History Department Publication Series, under review. Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Oxford Analytica (1998) ‘Indonesia: ethnic Chinese plight’, Oxford Analytica, daily briefing, July 15. —— (2002) ‘Indonesia: nationalists and technocrats still do battle’, Oxford Analytica, daily briefing, April 18. Philpott, S. (1997) ‘Knowing Indonesia: orientalism and the discourse of Indonesian politics’, unpublished PhD thesis, Australian National University, Canberra. Robison, R. (1986) ‘Class, capital, and the state in New Order Indonesia’, in R. Higgott and R. Robison (eds), Southeast Asia: Essays on the Political Economy of Structural Change, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Sassen, S. (1996) Losing Control? Sovereignty in an Age of Globalization, New York: Columbia University Press. Scott, J.C. (1972) ‘Patron–client politics and political change in Southeast Asia’, American Political Science Review 65 (1): 91–114. Sklair, L. (2001) The Transnational Capitalist Class, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Strange, S. (1986) Casino Capitalism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —— (1998) Mad Money: When Markets Outgrow Government, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
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Torchia, C. (1998) ‘Rioters rampage in Indonesian town’, Associated Press, August 31. Tseng, Y.F. (2000) ‘The mobility of entrepreneurs and capital: Taiwanese capital-linked migration’, International Migration 38 (2): 143–68. Veltman, L. (1990) ‘Bring us your brains and business’, Eurobusiness 2 (10–11): 18–21. Volunteers for Humanity (1998a) ‘Early Documentation No. 1’, Jakarta, Volunteers for Humanity. Available online at http://www.huaren.org/focus/id/072098–05.html —— (1998b) ‘Early documentation No. 2’, Jakarta, Volunteers for Humanity. Available online at http://www.huaren.org/focus/id/072098–06.html —— (1998c) ‘Early Documentation No. 3’, Jakarta, Volunteers for Humanity: 1–15. Williams, R. (1973) The Country and The City, New York: Oxford University Press. Willis, K. and Yeoh, B. (2000) Gender and Migration, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar. Wittgenstein, L. (1958) Philosophical Investigations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wong, L.L. (1993) ‘Immigration as capital accumulation: the impact of business immigration to Canada’, International Migration 31 (1): 171–90. Yoshihara, K. (1988) The Rise of Ersatz Capitalism in Southeast Asia, Singapore: Oxford University Press.
4
Citizenship and differential exclusion of immigrants in Japan Keiko Yamanaka
Introduction Japan was once a country of emigration and immigration. During the period from 1885 to 1945, the country sent 800,000 emigrants to other countries as labourers, as well as two and a half million settlers to territories it had annexed as a result of victories in wars. In a reverse flow of migration, between 1910 and 1945, labour migrants arrived in Japan in successive waves from imperial colonies, mostly from Korea. Expanding military aggression resulted in serious labour shortages in the country as adult males were drafted to fight overseas. Colonial immigrants supplied a large pool of alternative, inexpensive labour, rapidly increasing to two million by the end of the Second World War. The majority returned to their home countries as soon as Japan lost the war, but a minority of Koreans (and Chinese) remained in the country to establish their lives and raise children. Now, half a century later, Japan has received more than half a million immigrant workers, mostly from Asia and South America. A heated debate arose in the late 1980s that polarized the participants into two opposing camps: one urging that the unskilled labour market be opened to increase the labour pool, the other that the door be closed to Third World labourers to preserve ethnic and class homogeneity. Omitted completely in this new debate on ethnicity and nationhood was the century-old presence of communities of ‘cultural others’ in the country. The 700,000 Korean and 200,000 Chinese descendants of earlier colonial immigrant populations in Japan have long suffered social exclusion and lack of civil rights because of their ‘foreign’ status and the ethnic prejudice deeply embedded in all levels of state bureaucracy and all forms of social institution. In the ‘age of global migration’ (Castles and Miller 1998), the analysis of historical continuities in Japan’s exclusion of immigrants has a crucial relevance for an understanding of renewing ethnic and national ideologies in contemporary Japan (Lie 2001). A case in point is the recent example of the 250,000 Nikkeijin (people of Japanese descent) who have ‘returned’ to their ancestral homeland from South America, mostly from Brazil, to work on contract in labour-starved manufacturing industries. Upon their arrival, these second- and
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third-generation descendants of Japanese emigrants met a cold reception from a state that defined them as ‘foreigners’, corporations that treated them as ‘temporary’ employees and citizens who regarded them as ‘inferior’ to ‘true’ Japanese. This systematic exclusion of the Nikkeijin flatly contradicts the Japanese saying that ‘blood ties are stronger than water’. Evidently, something other than genetics or ancestry is involved in defining Japanese notions of ethnicity, nationality and citizenship. By reviewing immigration history before and after the Second World War, this chapter analyses changing meanings of ethnicity, nationhood and citizenship in Japan over time. A close link between ethnicity and nation in the Japanese definition of nationality has led to ‘differential exclusion’ (Castles 1997) of noncitizen, long-term residents for both old-comers (i.e., Koreans) and new-comers (i.e., Nikkeijin). This suggests that interrelationships between the three – ethnicity, nation and citizenship – need to be examined in the specific historical circumstances in which new ideologies and practices are constructed to accommodate volatile ethnic relations in order to cope with new challenges to the state, corporations and citizenry. Japan constitutes an interesting example of contradictions between advanced global capitalism and an obsolete national ideology. Such contradictions inevitably lead to change. As a result of its economic success since the 1960s, Japan had been under international pressure to ratify many international human rights agreements. Some of these agreements and conventions that Japan signed have proved to be vital in effecting major reforms in the inequality and discrimination against women and ethnic minorities that are built into Japan’s domestic laws and bureaucratic practices. Moreover, since the 1990s, a shift to decentralized power has triggered the rapid growth of civil activism throughout the country. The systematic exclusion of immigrants and their families based on their foreign birth has attracted the attention of activists, as a result of which multiculturalism and human rights have become an agenda vigorously pursued by many citizens’ groups. This chapter begins with a comparative and theoretical overview of the Western experience of migration and ethnic diversity and the resulting changes in definitions of citizenship over time. It then turns to an investigation of Japan’s changing ideologies and practices of citizenship for long-term resident foreigners over the last five decades, focusing on (1) Korean colonial immigrants and their descendants between the late 1940s and early 1980s, and (2) Japanese Brazilians since the early 1990s. It concludes with a discussion of Japan’s evolving definitions of citizenship, ethnicity and nationhood, with reference to its immigrant communities during the twentieth century.
Citizenship, diversity and activism By the 1990s, relationships between citizenship and immigration had become an important topic of analysis in international migration studies. This has been especially relevant in the case of Western Europe, where massive numbers of
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post-Second World War immigrants and refugees have settled with families. The end of the Cold War also contributed significantly to changing immigration patterns there, while the establishment of the European Union added further complexity to immigration policies and practices of its member nation-states (Cornelius et al. 1994). Citizenship constitutes the foundation of a nation-state by entitling its members to exercise their individual rights in exchange for fulfilling a set of civil duties (Marshall 1950). The ways in which rules for membership, entitlements and obligations apply to permanently settled immigrants and their children are indicators of the nature of a nation’s democracy and the degree of its societal openness (Castles 1997, 1999). There are diverse patterns of relationships between citizenship and immigration in Western European nations, ranging from relatively inclusive ones (e.g., England and France) to relatively exclusive ones (e.g., Germany and Switzerland) (Brubaker 1989, 1992; Soysal 1994; Cornelius et al. 1994; Jacobson 1997; Piper 1998). Historically, Western countries that host large numbers of immigrants have adopted one of three distinct models for managing ethnic diversity while maintaining national integrity (Castles 1997:115–17). The model of ‘cultural assimilation’ is currently the central ideology and practice of former colonizers, such as Great Britain and France, where the large presence of diverse immigrants and refugees demands their incorporation into dominant cultures and values (Brubaker 1992; Piper 1998). The model of ‘ethnic pluralism’, on the other hand, is the approach recently experimented with by traditional countries of immigration such as the USA, Canada and Australia, where the cultural assimilation model has proved to be ineffective and is therefore being replaced by tolerance of ethnic diversity as a way to organize these increasingly multicultural societies (Castles 1997; Juteau 1997). In contrast to these two is the model of ‘differential exclusion’, closely linked to rigid nation-states where national integrity rests on the ethnic homogeneity of the population. Under this model, ethnic diversity brought about by immigration is deemed a threat to social cohesion, leading to ‘a situation in which immigrants are incorporated into certain areas of society (above all the labour markets) but denied access to others (such as welfare systems, citizenship and political participation)’ (Castles 1997: 115). This model has commonly been adopted by countries such as those in Central and Eastern Europe, most notably Germany, where the formation of the nationstate came relatively late and met significant difficulties uniting the nation. In practice, despite the promise offered by each model, equal rights have seldom been fully guaranteed for immigrants and ethnic minorities (Bader 1997; Cesarani and Fullbrook 1996; Dunne and Bonazzi 1995; Piper 1998; Steenbergen 1994). In countries practising differential exclusion, immigrants are often legally excluded from citizenship, as a result of which their children remain foreigners despite their cultural assimilation (Brubaker 1992: 8). In a country practising ethnic assimilation or cultural pluralism, immigrants and their families may be able to acquire citizenship through naturalization, but because of institutionalized discrimination in the labour market and social organizations, formal citizenship rarely ensures equal access to satisfactory opportunities (Miles 1982,
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1993; Small 1994). Throughout Europe and the USA, deep-seated racism has cemented the image of strangers as threatening, especially the young males of racial minorities as potential criminals (Essed 1991). Moreover, achieving a comfortable material life may not satisfy immigrants in their cultural and spiritual lives if the host society denies them public expression of their religious values (Feldblum 1999). The persistence of racism, together with the growing incongruity between the ideal and the practice of these multi-ethnic models of ethnicity and nationality in specific nation-state settings, has led scholars to seek new concepts that will apply transnationally. In the 1950s, when social and economic equality for all became a national goal in the UK, ‘citizenship’ constituted a promising concept because it was defined as shared rights and obligations in the entire population occupying the territory of a nation-state regardless of ethnicity (Marshall 1950). Since the 1960s, however, as a result of increasing numbers of non-nationals in their territories, states have expanded the rights of citizenship to residents without citizenship. The concept of ‘substantive citizenship’, as distinguished from formal citizenship, has therefore emerged to refer to de facto citizenship, which is ‘concerned with the welfare of people as citizens, taking “welfare” in a broad sense to include such things as work, education, health and quality of life’ (Roche, cited in Piper 1998: 90). In this definition, the ‘people’ include both citizens and permanently settled non-citizens. In the wake of a unified European market and polity, this kind of ‘global’ or ‘transnational citizenship’, comprising access to many of the benefits of statutory citizenship, is being granted to noncitizen permanent residents (Lister 1997: 55–63; Soysal 1994). At the grass-roots level, exploitation and marginalization of ethnic minorities spurs community activism to protect and advocate their rights (Sassen 1998). A concrete example can be seen in ‘global cities’ such as London, New York and Los Angeles, where expanding global capitalism, weakened state power and enlivened rights activism intersect in dynamic and complex ways (Sassen 1991). In the racially and sexually segregated labour markets in these cities, the lowskilled – predominantly ethnic minorities, immigrants and women – serve the professional and personal needs of the highly skilled as manual labourers, service workers and domestic helpers. The growing asymmetry between the two in wages, working conditions and lifestyles makes the low-skilled visible as objects of economic, social and political exploitation (Naples 1998). Under growing neoliberal conservatism, the government reduces or discontinues social welfare programmes for the needy while refusing public services to non-citizens and illegal immigrants. These contradictions of economic globalization sow the seeds of resentment, resistance and therefore social change. Daily experience of oppression enables ethnic minorities, immigrants, women and other socially disadvantaged groups to develop collective identities with shared interests that lead them to rally for change (Guarnizo and Smith 1998; Portes 1999). Advanced information and transportation technologies make instantaneous communication possible across national boundaries, thus permitting transnational networks to develop exten-
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sively among activists and between communities of origin and destination (Vertovec 1999). The expansion of global capitalism also heightens the international consciousness of activists, which in turn leads them to apply international human rights principles and laws in the defence of rights of the oppressed, including specifically women, ethnic minorities and migrant workers (Gurowitz 1999, 2000). Designed to define and protect rights of all human beings as inalienable, these conventions therefore address issues confronting all residents regardless of legal status, nationality or ethnicity (Sassen 1998; Soysal 1994).
Differential exclusion in Japan International labour migration is a response to differentials in labour and wages across national borders (Borjas 1990). By the mid-1990s, with more than five million migrant workers, Asia had become one of the most active sites of international labour migration in the world. This is primarily due to its rapid economic development and increasing regional integration, accompanied by growing economic disparity between a few rich countries and their many poor neighbours in the region. Literature on regional labour migration in Asia has therefore emphasized economic and demographic factors as the most important causes and effects of migration (Martin et al. 1995; OECD 1994, 1998). Currently, the five developed Asian polities with mature economies (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore) import labour, whereas the two countries with more recently developed economies (Malaysia and Thailand) simultaneously import and export labour. Most East, Southeast and South Asian neighbours of these seven labour importers suffer from stagnant economies and large populations, and they therefore export redundant labour to the seven labour importers (Yamanaka 1999). Despite the abundance and increasing ethnic diversity of immigrant labour, the literature on international migration has paid scant attention to the relationship between immigration and citizenship in the Asia-Pacific.1 Migrant workers in Asia are especially vulnerable compared with those in Europe, where various regional organizations have worked to harmonize their countries’ rules on migration and to define migrant rights on principles of individual rights (Soysal 1994; Piper 1998; Uçarer 1999). In Asia, there are no regional organizations to oversee immigration policies and the treatment of migrant workers by employers (Gurowitz 2000). Each government implements its own immigration policies, which are designed to rotate a pool of temporary workers in order to reduce the economic and social costs of massive long-term migration and the threat of possible permanent settlement (Martin et al. 1995; Wong 1997). These policies continue even though the countries constantly require large reservoirs of inexpensive foreign labour to maintain their competitive edge in global markets while satisfying the consumer lifestyles of citizens and the needs of middle-class households (see, for example, Chin 1998). Many Asian governments pursue national economic development while limiting political freedom and discouraging civil activism. As a result, the attention of citizens is directed towards consumption
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and personal well-being, and away from public affairs (Pinches 1999). Some governments promote ‘Asian values’, emphasizing collective goals while discouraging individual rights (Rodan 1996; Bauer and Bell 1999). In short, the highly restrictive policies and citizenship rules that characterize the treatment of immigrants in Asian countries emphasize the critical importance of examining the rights of such immigrants (Castles 1999). Among Asia’s major labour-importing countries, Japan stands out for its reluctance officially to admit foreign labour despite growing labour shortages. The maintenance of ethnic and class homogeneity is said to be the primary reason why the government has closed the door to unskilled foreigners (see Kritz and Zlotnik 1992: 11; Weiner 1998). Such official rhetoric notwithstanding, the country was home to about 1.8 million foreigners by 1997, 1.4 percent of a population of 126 million. This figure is comparable with 1.7 percent in Italy in 1993 (Castles 1997: 137). Japan also differs considerably from other Asian labour-importing countries in terms of national development over the last century. From the turn of the twentieth century until the post-Second World War period, Japan, like several Western countries, was a major colonial power in Asia. While some of the colonies achieved independence shortly after the war, others remained under foreign rule until the 1960s, which delayed political and economic development. Throughout the postwar era, Japan enjoyed economic prosperity as a stable constitutional democracy. In contrast, other recently industrialized countries, such as Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and Korea, underwent authoritarian or military rule, which suppressed popular democratic movements. After the postwar repatriation of its colonial immigrants (see below), Japan maintained a relatively homogeneous culture and class system while other Asian countries of immigration faced divisive political and ethnic conflicts inherited from the colonial era. Nevertheless, Japan, like other Asian nations, lacked ‘the long historical process which led to the emergence of the democratic citizenry’ in European nations (Castles 1999: 33). Social scientists and legal scholars have long debated whether Japanese ways of exercising democracy and individual rights differ from those common in Western societies (see, for examples, Upham 1993; Feldman 2000). The analysis of immigration and citizenship in Japan thus requires a differential exclusion model that takes into account the historical, social and political contexts of its late nation building and relatively homogeneous population.
The differential exclusion of Koreans Armstrong (1989: 337–8) suggests that the ideology of ethnic homogeneity played a key role in the rise of Japanese nationalism throughout the periods of the founding of the modern nation-state and rapid industrialization (1880–1910). It gave rise to an ‘imagined community’, comprising one big family or children of the Emperor, racialized on the basis of shared ancestry and culture (Anderson 1983). The fact that Japan is a nation of islands, together with
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its two centuries of diplomatic isolation between 1633 and 1868, contributed to the persistence of that ideology (Yoshino 1992). However, never in its history has Japan been ethnically homogeneous (Lie 2001). From the fourth to the eighth centuries, Chinese and Korean immigrant artisans frequently settled in Japan and became Japanese. Under military regimes from the late twelfth to the middle of the nineteenth century, those who engaged in stigmatized occupations were treated collectively as a distinct ‘untouchable’, even sub-human, population that today comprises the two to three million Burakumin in Japan (de Vos and Wagatsuma 1966; Lie 2001: 84–9). During the period of modern nation building in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Japanese territorial expansion incorporated two other ethnically distinct populations, today numbering 1.6 million Okinawans in the far south and 250,000 to 300,000 Ainus in the far north (ibid.). Modern Japanese history is also replete with massive flows of international migration in both directions (Suzuki 1992; Watanabe 1994). Between 1885 and 1942, nearly 800,000 Japanese migrated to North and South America, Asia, the Pacific and Russia in search of better economic opportunities (ibid.). The first wave of immigrants to North America, mostly single males, toiled as underpaid labourers in plantations, fields, orchards, fisheries and construction sites. When the 1908 USA–Japan ‘gentleman’s agreement’ restricted entry, Japanese began to migrate to Brazil to work as farm labourers on coffee plantations (Yamanaka 1997, 2000a). Despite the immense difficulty of living under harsh conditions in rural Brazil, Japanese immigrants had become independent farmers by the 1930s, first leasing and then purchasing land in remote and undeveloped areas. By the early 1940s, 190,000 Japanese had emigrated to Brazil, followed by 60,000 during the two postwar decades (1953–73), increasing to 1.2 million in 1988 (São Paulo Jinbum Kagaku Kenkyujo 1988). In a reverse flow of migration between 1910 and 1945, successive waves of migrants arrived in Japan from its imperial colonies, mostly from Korea, which had been annexed in 1910. As colonial subjects, all Koreans were granted Japanese nationality and were therefore able to move freely from Korea to Japan in search of jobs (Tanaka 1984: 156). What began as a trickle of colonial subjects grew to a large influx in the 1920s as the expanding Japanese economy demanded more inexpensive and unskilled labour (Weiner 1994; Yamawaki 2000). By 1925, 150,000 Korean immigrants worked in jobs shunned by the Japanese in labourintensive and dangerous industries such as mining, construction and arms manufacturing. This number had risen dramatically to 800,000 by 1937, the year Japan initiated war with China. By this time, Japan had instituted a policy of completely assimilating Koreans into Japanese culture, as a result of which Korean children were forced in 1938 to follow the Japanese school curriculum, and in 1940, all Koreans were required to adopt Japanese names (Lie 2001: 105). At the height of the Pacific war (1942–45), Korean men and women, as Japanese nationals, became an important source of conscripted, and later forced, labour working under extremely harsh conditions (Weiner 1994). By the end of the war in 1945, the Korean population in Japan had grown to two million.
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Japan’s surrender in 1945 liberated its Korean colonial subjects, the majority of whom were soon repatriated to their homeland. However, a quarter of them (600,000) chose to remain in Japan for political, economic and familial reasons. With the looming threat of war in the Korean peninsula, repatriation efforts were further deterred (Lie 2001: 197). For seven years between 1945 and 1952, the state regarded its former Korean-born nationals as foreigners, excluding them from political participation and requiring them to register as foreign residents (Onuma 1993; Tanaka 1995). In 1951, Japan signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty with the USA, with the result that the country had full independence restored, and it re-entered the international community. In April 1952, when the treaty took effect, the Ministry of Justice issued a communication by which the 600,000 Koreans were formally deprived of Japanese nationality.2 In 1950, when the Nationality Law was revised, Japan had retained the principle of ius sanguinis (law of blood) in defining Japanese citizenship. As a result, descendants of non-Japanese nationals, including Koreans, are to this day defined by law as foreigners no matter how long or over how many generations they have lived in Japan (Miyajima 1997: 126). In 1965, the Japan–Korea Peace Treaty imposed South Korean nationality on most ethnic Koreans in Japan but granted them permanent resident status in the country. Both the Japanese government and leading Korean organizations regarded Koreans in Japan as foreigners or sojourners, despite their lives having already taken deep root in the country (Lie 2001: 108). By 1990, the Korean population had increased to 700,000, constituting Japan’s largest foreign population. From the late 1940s, the loss of Japanese citizenship had denied Koreans most of the benefits of public services to which Japanese citizens are entitled, including national health insurance and workers’ pensions – this despite their obligation to pay taxes on their earnings (Miyajima 1997: 127). This institutional discrimination was eliminated only in 1981, when Japan ratified the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which required its signatories to grant equal treatment to foreign nationals in the areas of social services, social security and welfare (Takafuji 1991; Tanaka 1995; Gurowitz 1999). As a result of being defined as foreigners and despite their permanent resident status, Koreans were subject to surveillance under the Alien Registration Law, which, until 1992, required fingerprinting as well as an alien registration card (Lee and de Vos 1981: 141–2; Tanaka 1995: 77–100).3 Most private companies and public offices have continued to exclude Koreans on the basis of their nationality. As a result, they are heavily concentrated in self-employment as owners of small businesses and workers in family businesses (Tanaka 1995: 129–50). In the mid-1980s, for example, in Kanagawa Prefecture, more than 40 percent of Korean residents were self-employed, compared with 20 percent of Japanese residents (Kimbara et al., cited in Miyajima 1997: 133). Today, most young Koreans have adopted the Japanese language and education, thus identifying themselves as culturally Japanese (Fukushima 1993; Harajiri 1998; Kajita 1998). However, widespread discrimination and deep-seated prejudice have
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caused the majority of them to use Japanese names in order to remain invisible. As a result, many report experiencing serious conflict as a result of the disparity between their Korean ancestry and Japanese upbringing (Fukushima 1993). At the outset of Japan’s postwar economic reconstruction, the 1952 denationalization of 600,000 Koreans had consolidated the postwar Japanese myth of ethnic homogeneity in a population then of 100 million (Oguma 1995; Onuma 1993). In the late 1950s, when Japan’s postwar ‘economic miracle’ was about to take off, the notion of ‘one nation, one people’ served as a new national ideology to unite the nation and the labour force in pursuit of economic goals. The emphasis on social homogeneity was also closely linked to political objectives of the time: the construction of postwar democracy and the welfare state was based on the assertion that ‘everyone is equal because everyone is Japanese’. In reality, such ideology had long been contradicted by the presence of diverse ethnic minority communities (notably Okinawans, Ainus and Burakumins in addition to Koreans), as well as by labour market exploitation of female and older workers and by the underdevelopment of peripheral regions. By the late 1960s, when Japan was acclaimed as the country with the highest rate of economic growth in the world, Japanese nationality provided its citizens with a source of ethnic pride. As a result of the nation’s postwar educational curriculum, postwar generations – comprising two-thirds of its population – are today unaware of Japan’s multi-ethnic history and its contemporary legacy. They have therefore accepted the idea of ‘mono-ethnic Japan’ uncritically. In their minds, Japanese nationality is synonymous with Japanese ethnicity (Lie 2001).
The arrival of global workers The arrival of the age of global migration in the late 1980s opened a new chapter in Japan’s recent history. Its growing labour needs increasingly challenged its tenacious efforts to maintain the myth of a mono-ethnic state and nation. As immigrant workers arrived, not only from South, Southeast and East Asia but also from South America, the reality of a ‘multi-ethnic Japan’ could no longer be denied (Lie 2001). Between the late 1960s and early 1970s, Japan’s rapid economic expansion caused severe labour shortages as its prolonged economic boom demanded more labour than ever before. Although foreign labour was requested by employers as a way of alleviating labour shortages, the government advocated other solutions. These included increasing productivity by the introduction of automation, exporting production to low-wage countries (especially in Asia), mobilizing unused labour (e.g. women and the elderly), allowing inflation to increase, and permitting the transfer of income from capital to labour (Bartram 2000: 19). In the late 1960s, when these labour-saving measures proved inadequate to alleviate labour shortages, Japan resorted to some attempts to recruit foreign workers from neighbouring Asian countries (Lie 2001: 10). However, by 1975, OPEC’s oil embargo had triggered a serious economic recession, and demands for labour quickly fell. The recession lasted for ten years, creating a surplus of labour until
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the mid-1980s (Bartram 2000: 26). Thus, as a result of having virtually avoided importation of labour for four decades, Japan became an anomaly among highly industrialized countries with similar problems of labour supply during the postwar economic boom. Most of the others had chosen to rely heavily on foreign labour as a solution (ibid.: 15). By the 1970s, Japan’s rapid economic success had elevated the country to one of the most influential nations in world affairs. An effect of this global recognition was that Japan became signatory to many international conventions on human rights proposed by the United Nations and other international organizations (Takafuji 1991; Gurowitz 1999). In 1979, Japan ratified both the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. This was followed by the 1981 ratification of the International Convention on the Status of Refugees and Protocol and, in 1985, ratification of the International Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination against Women. In 1994, Japan also signed the International Convention on the Rights of Children, and in the following year, the International Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Racial Discrimination. These international conventions are all based on the principle of equality for all nationalities and races as well as between the genders (Takafuji 1991). Once having signed an international convention, a government is obliged to make every effort, including legislation, to eradicate inequalities built into institutional arrangements in the country. Among the international conventions ratified by Japan during the postwar era, the International Convention on the Status of Refugees and Protocol has proved to be the most important in eliminating existing discrimination embedded in laws and administration against non-citizen residents (ibid.; Tanaka 1995). The government was obliged to revise domestic laws by which foreign residents had been treated unequally, especially in the areas of social security and welfare. As a result, Japanese nationality was no longer required for eligibility to obtain social benefits, including health insurance, worker pensions and public housing (Miyajima 1997). Subsequently, the 1985 ratification of the International Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination against Women led the government to revise the Nationality Act so that women would be equal to men in determining the nationality of their children. This has had a significant impact on the Korean population, because it opened a legal window through which children born of marriage between Japanese and Koreans could be Japanese citizens. A sharp upward revaluation of the yen following the 1985 Plaza Agreement triggered a short-lived recession among export-oriented industries (Yamanaka 1993). However, the yen’s high value increased the already large wage differentials between Japan and neighbouring Asian countries. In 1987, Japan finally emerged from its long economic recession. With the economy fully revived, small-scale manufacturing subcontractors turned to other Asian countries to meet their increased demand for labour. Construction companies, long troubled by labour shortages, also began to hire foreign workers as a construction boom
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got under way. The expanding service sectors also sought inexpensive, unskilled workers as the economy increasingly became information- and service-oriented. It was at this time that declining petroleum prices in world markets, together with heightening tensions in the Persian Gulf, drove many South and Southeast Asian workers out of Middle Eastern oil fields. Concurrently, China liberalized emigration rules, thereby adding to the pool of migrant workers in Japan. In 1989, a total of 3,500 Indo-Chinese ‘boat people’ arrived on Japan’s southern shores seeking political asylum and employment. All signs pointed to the fact that Japan was attracting global immigrant workers. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, no less than 200,000 unskilled foreigners entered the country’s labour force illegally (Morita and Sassen 1994). The majority came from other Asian countries on short-term visas, issued to tourists and business personnel, and overstayed. In July 1990, the officially estimated total of unauthorized visa overstayers was 107,000 in Japan, doubling to 216,000 by November 1991 (Cornelius 1994: 384). Since the late 1980s, a substantial debate has arisen among Japanese intellectuals, industrialists and policy makers over the economic and cultural impacts of the arrival of these diverse ethnic groups and nationalities on the Japanese population (Gurowitz 1999: 435–6). Their arrival has been likened to that of Commodore Perry with his ‘black ships’ in 1853 and is therefore referred to as the ‘second black ship’.4 Both these events brought threatening strangers to what had been conceived of as a homogeneous and unchanging society.
Ethnicity and the new immigration policy In June 1990, the Japanese government implemented its Revised Law on Immigration Control and Recognition of Refugees, which retained the principle of limiting foreign labour to skilled occupations, while instituting criminal penalties for employers found to have hired illegal foreign workers (Yamanaka 1993, 1996; Cornelius 1994; Weiner and Hanami 1998). In an effort to maintain the flow of unskilled workers while stemming the flow of unskilled ‘foreigners’, the same law created a ‘long-term residence’ (teiju) visa category for foreign descendants of Japanese emigrants (Nikkeijin). This applied to (1) Nisei (a child of persons born as Japanese); and (2) Sansei (a child of a child of those who were born as Japanese and who once held a household registration record in Japan). This new category would allow Nikkeijin, regardless of nationality, to stay for up to three years in Japan with no restrictions on their socio-economic activities. Spouses and children of those Nikkeijin allowed long-term residence would be permitted to remain, usually for up to one year. Renewal of visas in this category could be accomplished easily and was therefore frequently done. As a result, the Nikkeijin and their families often remained even longer than initially permitted. This longterm residence visa also became available to Indo-Chinese refugees already resident in Japan and to the non-Japanese children of non-Japanese spouses of Japanese citizens; but from the beginning, the majority of the users have been Nikkeijin from Brazil, China and Peru (Japan Immigration Association 1998: 16).
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These provisions of the Revised Immigration Law established new rules for managing the emerging ethnic diversity of unskilled workers. Foreign workers are divided into two categories based on the criterion of ‘Japanese blood’. The first category comprises Asians of diverse nationalities and ethnicities without Japanese ancestry, the majority of whom are illegal, i.e., undocumented, employees in labour-intensive industries such as construction, manufacturing and services, estimated to be 280,000 in 1998 (Japanese Ministry of Justice 1998). A small minority (about 40,000 annually) are admitted to serve legally under special provisions as company trainees but commonly end up as manual labourers, mostly in manufacturing industries. In addition to these pools of cheap labour are foreign students at the pre-college level (about 10,000 annually), who are permitted to work for up to four hours per day to support themselves while studying in Japan. Asian female entertainers (about 60,000 annually) are admitted as ‘professionals’, providing cheap labour in occupations shunned by Japanese women such as singers, dancers, bar hostesses and prostitutes. The second category of foreign workers includes a wide range of nationalities with Japanese ancestry, whose activities are unrestricted as to occupation. The 1990 Revised Immigration Law has opened the door to all descendants of Japanese emigrants. This new legal provision became necessary in the late 1980s, when Nisei and Sansei Nikkeijin began to arrive from South America, many of whom no longer held Japanese nationality (Yamanaka 1996). This was a result of the pre-1984 Nationality Law, which stipulated that when a child was born abroad, the parents were required to register the birth within fourteen days at a Japanese embassy or consulate or the child would lose his or her Japanese nationality.5 This law was intended to prevent dual nationality in the case of Japanese born in a country where the principle of ius soli (law of place) was in operation, as in Brazil and the USA. For many immigrants in Brazil who live in remote areas distant from a Japanese consulate, this registration rule imposed a hardship. Many second-generation Japanese children were therefore not registered as Japanese nationals and thus lost their Japanese nationality permanently. Under Japanese law, they were defined as foreigners despite their Japanese ‘blood’. This contrasts sharply with, for example, the German definition of German nationality. Although Germany, like Japan, mandates ius sanguinis, it implements the principle in a manner broad enough to include all people of German ancestry, regardless of generation or registration, as eligible to return to their ancestral homeland (Wilpert 1991). The above widely cited explanation for the creation of Japan’s long-term residence visa category has been recently challenged by Japanese sociologist Kajita (1999), who interviewed a team of officials in the Ministry of Justice who were in charge of amending the law in the late 1980s. His interviews revealed that there was then a need to create a category of long-term residence inclusive enough to handle the three distinct groups of foreigners whose legal status had been ambiguous under the previous law: (1) permanently settled Indo-Chinese refugees; (2) Sansei Nikkeijin; and (3) family members of holders of permanent or
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long-term visas.6 The policy makers Kajita interviewed described Nikkeijin as comprising not those from Latin America but primarily Japanese women and children who had emigrated to Manchuria or children born to Japanese parents in Manchuria who had remained there throughout the postwar period.7 The creation of the long-term residence visa category, they reported, was therefore an administrative decision intended to deal with the unresolved problem of Japanese stranded in Manchuria. The officials also described to Kajita that it was not intended to ameliorate the serious labour shortages prevalent at the time of the Revised Immigration Law. An ironic consequence of the revised law was an unexpected, massive influx of Nisei and Sansei Nikkeijin from Latin America, mostly Brazil, following its June 1990 implementation. Attracted by the availability of legal residence and the strong demand for labour, the number of registered Brazilian Nikkeijin and their families grew rapidly. Despite the economic recession that began in 1992, their number had surpassed 200,000 by 1996, reaching 233,000 in 1997 (Japan Immigration Association 1998: 8). Most Nikkeijin, males and females, found employment as manual labourers in the labour-short manufacturing industries (Yamanaka 1997, 2000a). The rapid growth of a non-citizen population in cities and towns throughout the country has created a situation inconsistent with the national policy of prohibiting unskilled foreign labour. From the perspective of the Ministry of Justice, Brazilian Nikkeijin are simply temporary residents who are unrestricted in their activities. Whether or not they work, or in what occupations, does not concern the ministry because they are not defined as ‘workers’ (Kokusai Jinryu 1990: 11–16). On the other hand, as legal residents, the Nikkeijin constitute an available reservoir of inexpensive, unskilled labour in high demand by Japanese employers. Most Nikkeijin come to Japan with the intention of making a large sum of money in a few years and then returning to their homelands (Yamanaka 2000a). Inconsistencies in the definition and expectations of Brazilian Nikkeijin by the different parties concerned have inevitably generated complex sets of contradictions in Japanese labour markets, social welfare services and civil rights. These contradictions can be exemplified and analysed by reference to the experiences of the Nikkeijin population and its host community in a Japanese city, as revealed in interviews and observations conducted in the period 1993–2000 (ibid.).
The differential exclusion of Nikkeijin in Hamamatsu Hamamatsu, with its population of 560,000, is one of many industrial cities that have acquired significant Nikkeijin immigrant populations since 1990. Together with its satellite cities, including Kosai and Iwata, it houses the headquarters of several major motorcycle and automobile companies, including Suzuki, Yamaha and Honda, as well as thousands of small- and large-scale subcontractors, which supply the parts for the major manufacturers. Contiguous with and lying to the west of these cities is Toyohashi, a city of 350,000 people, and its neighbours, Toyokawa and Toyota in the eastern part of adjacent Aichi Prefecture. These
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host another giant car maker, Toyota, with its thousands of subcontractors. Immigrant workers, both documented and undocumented, find this area attractive because of the chronic labour shortage among small-scale employers (see, for example, Kuwahara 2001; Yamanaka 2000a, 2000b). Until 1988, few Brazilians lived in Hamamatsu, so 1,900 Korean permanent residents, descendants of prewar colonial immigrants, had theretofore comprised the city’s largest, but largely invisible, ethnic minority. The first wave of Brazilians, 815 in number, arrived in 1989 in response to Japan’s booming economy. In 1990, with the implementation of the Revised Immigration Law, the Brazilian influx to the city grew suddenly to 3,500. Hundreds and thousands followed each year for the next ten years. By late 1998, 10,000 Brazilian nationals and their families had registered as alien residents, accounting for twothirds of Hamamatsu’s foreign population of 16,000 and comprising 3 percent of its total population.8 By the middle of the 1990s, various ethnic enterprises, broad cultural activities and extensive social networks had developed in its community, and between Japan and Brazil (Yamanaka 2000a). The Brazilian immigrant community in Hamamatsu thus exemplifies a ‘transnational community’ sustained by ‘a range of modes of social organizations, mobility and communication’ (Vertovec 1999: 449). As these descriptions and statistics suggest, by the late 1990s, Hamamatsu was spearheading the unprecedented grass-roots ‘transnationalization’ that is currently sweeping Japan in many nonmetropolitan industrial cities. That is, a form of social transformation is occurring in which citizens and immigrants interact with one another in their daily lives at work and on the streets, as a result of which each party is developing a new sense of collective identity and history. Social marginalization Prior to the recent influx of Nikkeijin, Japanese citizens in Hamamatsu rarely saw ‘foreigners’ with distinct languages, behaviour and physical appearance. By the mid-1990s, Nikkeijin had become a conspicuous presence in many everyday settings, including supermarkets, shopping malls, public transport, public housing developments, festival and entertainment sites, and public parks and schools (Roth 2002). The sudden increase in ‘foreigners’ (gaikokujin), many with Japanese facial features but distinctly foreign dress, demeanour and language, has spawned confusion, fear and resentment among local citizens (Weisman 1991). The Revised Immigration Law had been intended and expected to attract Nikkeijin as racially and culturally familiar substitutes for the shrinking Japanese workforce and for the ‘alarming’ influx of labour migrants from such countries as Bangladesh, Pakistan and the Philippines (Yamanaka 1996). These intentions and expectations proved to be ill-fated. Upon arrival, Nikkeijin found themselves regarded not as Japanese but as cultural strangers (Yamanaka 1996, 1997, 2000a). They were treated as lowerclass migrant workers from a backward country. The Japanese found the Nikkeijin to be disturbingly foreign and unwilling to conform to Japanese customs. Their
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complaints centred mostly on such everyday behaviour as the Nikkeijin’s irregular habits of garbage disposal, late-night visits with friends and noisy congregations in public places, all of which violated informally established community rules (Ikegami 2001). Although seemingly minor, such behaviour was sufficiently significant and resented by citizens that they came to comprise the basis for negative stereotypes of foreigners as uncivilized, undesirable and untrustworthy residents and customers. Economic exploitation Underlying the suspicion and antagonism between these two peoples of largely shared ancestry is the contradictory ethnic and class criteria employed in seeking to attract inexpensive Brazilian labour to Japan (Yamanaka 1996; Tsuda 1999). By law, Japanese ancestry has privileged ethnic Brazilians by offering them longterm residence visas irrespective of occupation. However, the majority of them work in factories, comprising a reservoir of temporary manual workers. According to Castles et al. (1984: 12), the guest-worker system embodies institutional discrimination designed to recruit and control temporary migrant workers. For local industries, the advantage of hiring migrant workers from the Third World rests on their vulnerability as a result of dire economic need, non-citizen status, linguistic handicaps and unfamiliarity with local labour customs. Foreign workers provide a cheap alternative labour pool that performs essential manual jobs shunned by local Japanese. In times of recession, they are the first to be laid off, while their Japanese co-workers’ jobs and wages remain secure. Their work requires physical strength and on-the-job experience but no complex technical or communication skills. It exposes them to danger and stress while providing no prospect of promotion and none of the fringe benefits that their Japanese coworkers enjoy. Brazilian workers of Japanese ancestry are no exception to this kind of systematic discrimination. The economic exploitation of Brazilian guest workers is most obvious and firmly established in the system by which job brokers hire them on short-term contracts and send them to their actual workplaces in subcontractors’ factories. This service saves factory owners the large expenses associated with hiring and firing, labour management, fringe benefits, social security, bonuses, and so on. Hiring foreigners through brokers also helps Japanese manufacturers in their public relations. Sensitive to their product images and company reputations, manufacturers are able to avoid the social stigma of exploiting foreign workers for cheap labour on the grounds that ‘only brokers do that’. Exploitation of foreign workers also excludes foreigners from the housing market. Japanese landlords customarily require one month’s rent in advance, a rarely returned damage deposit and a non-returnable deposit. In addition, they require the signature of a guarantor – either an employer or a relative – to secure regular payment of rent. Most landlords are also unwilling to lease apartments to foreigners. As a result, foreigners face serious difficulty in obtaining housing on their own. Job brokers frequently sublet apartments or houses to their
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foreign employees during the period of their employment contracts. This sublease system severely restricts foreigners’ choice of residence and limits their occupational mobility. At the same time, it constrains their private lives, particularly their children’s schooling, by the frequent and unpredictable change of jobs and residential locations. Political exclusion Since the early 1990s, the sudden and growing influx of Brazilians into Hamamatsu has put the local administration under tremendous pressure to accommodate the diverse needs of immigrants and their children in the area of social services. In the first few years, the city had welcomed Brazilian immigrants as new workers and residents by implementing various programmes to assist them in adjusting culturally and socially (Tegmeyer Pak 2000). When, after 1992, the city’s economy suffered a serious recession, its government grew increasingly anxious about the continuing flow of immigrants into the city. A turning point was reached in 1993 when, following central government guidance, Hamamatsu adopted a policy whereby newcomers of foreign origin were no longer entitled to membership in the National Health Plan. Instead, the city instructed foreign workers to participate in the National Social Security Plan, which combined health insurance with an expensive old-age pension plan. Because most immigrants did not intend to stay in Japan longer than a few years, they did not want to pay for the pension plan even though this meant they would have to forgo health insurance. Furthermore, employers and workers were to finance this National Social Security Plan jointly and equally. Since most employers of foreign workers were small-scale labour brokers, they were financially motivated to ignore such an expensive programme.9 As a result, among foreign residents of the city (of whom Brazilians comprised the majority), the proportion of those covered by the National Health Plan plummeted. According to a report by a volunteer group (Grupo Justiça e Paz 1999), in 1998 only 13 percent of the foreign population in Hamamatsu was enrolled in the National Health Plan. Children’s education was another critical aspect of immigrants’ life that required urgent attention by the local government. In 1996, 372 of the 1,134 Brazilian children under 14 years of age in the city were enrolled in its public primary and junior high schools (Ikegami and Kinpara 1997: 17). The sudden and rapid increase in Portuguese-speaking pupils left Japanese teachers and the city’s Board of Education ill-prepared, causing great difficulty in meeting their educational needs. In response, the city administration and its affiliated organizations hired bilingual Brazilians and Japanese as advisers, coordinators and teachers to assist Brazilian children studying in Japanese classrooms. Such efforts by the city notwithstanding, the task of meeting the educational needs of immigrant children remains overwhelming. In the national education system of Brazil, instruction in Japanese is virtually unobtainable for Japanese Brazilians. In Japan, schooling in Portuguese is difficult for them to access.10 As a result,
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most Japanese Brazilian children are linguistically and culturally unprepared to benefit from Japanese schooling. Moreover, as non-citizens, they are not required to attend schools. Therefore, many Brazilian children remain unschooled or soon drop out. Many teenagers instead work in factories to make money. Others kill time roaming the streets in groups, which gives local citizens the impression that Brazilian teenagers are truants and delinquents. Foreigners as criminals The systematic exclusion of Brazilian workers and their children by the local administration and industries has reinforced the cold reception that they receive from Hamamatsu citizens. Prejudice and discrimination are common in stores and restaurants when serving immigrant customers (Essed 1991). Difficulty in communicating with foreign customers has resulted in some merchants becoming reluctant to serve them. Foreigners often bring with them unfamiliar customs and behaviour, such as removing merchandise from its packaging and eating food before paying for it, and congregating, loitering and speaking loudly in stores and restaurants. These violations of Japanese customs aggravate the merchants’ negative perceptions of foreigners. Such cultural conflicts have rapidly led to rumours and widespread suspicion among Hamamatsu merchants that foreign customers are troublemakers, even criminals. A news item in the New York Times (Weisman 1991) included a report by Brazilians that when they entered a department store in Hamamatsu, a loudspeaker warning was broadcast that a group of foreigners had come in and clerks should be on guard. The mass media have paid a great deal of attention to police reports of increasing violence and crimes committed by foreigners at both national and local levels. According to the annual reports by the Hamamatsu Police Headquarters (1995, 1996), in 1994, eighty-eight foreigners were apprehended as suspects in 120 criminal cases. In the following year, the figure rose to ninetyfour foreigners apprehended in 505 cases.11 Most of these were minor offences such as petty theft or shoplifting. According to Herbert (1992), Japanese police reports on the crime rate among foreign workers are inflated because of bias against them and serious flaws in data collection methods. For example, the reported ‘crimes’ included those that could only be committed by foreigners, such as overstaying and illegal employment, which in any case are victimless crimes. In Hamamatsu, such offences accounted for 44 percent of all crimes in 1994. These contributed to the reported increase in crime rates by foreigners and, as a result, to the growing image of them as dangerous criminals who threaten the safety of Japanese citizens.
Challenges to differential exclusion Having faced systematic exclusion and discrimination at the hands of the Japanese bureaucracy, industry and citizenry, some Brazilians in Hamamatsu have become increasingly conscious and assertive of their civil rights as residents
84 Keiko Yamanaka (see, for example, Koga 2000). A court ruling in 1999 in a lawsuit relating to charges of racial discrimination was symptomatic of growing pressure on the state and local governments to remove institutional discrimination in their treatment of immigrants, and on citizens to overcome negative attitudes and behaviour (Yamanaka 2003). The lawsuit was brought by Brazilian journalist Ana Bortz, a non-Nikkeijin wife of a Nikkeijin man in Hamamatsu (Japan Times 1998) in August 1998. Bortz sued a jewellery store owner and his mother, who, she testified, had refused to serve her and attempted to expel her from their store on the basis of her ‘nationality’. On 12 October 1999, a district court judge astounded the nation by ruling that Ana Bortz had suffered discrimination solely because of her Brazilian nationality. The defendants were ordered to pay $15,000 in compensation. The ruling was based on the legal premise, unprecedented in Japan, that the nation’s 1995 ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination made it mandatory that Japanese citizens abide by its provisions. The government had failed to legislate against ‘all forms of racial discrimination’, broadly defined, despite its obligation to do so as a signatory to the convention’s principles. The judge ruled that, in the absence of such legislation, the articles of the international convention would serve as the standard for defining illegal discrimination and would provide the basis for compensating the plaintiff for the damage that the discrimination had inflicted upon her. Japanese courts had never before ruled on a discrimination case between private persons. Thus the Bortz case stands as the first legal judgement in Japanese history on the issue of discrimination and therefore sets a precedent for future anti-discrimination litigation. Its significance has been recognized far beyond Japan. It was, for example, the subject of a front-page story in the New York Times on 15 November 1999 (French 1999). The mounting problems facing immigrants have recently drawn Japanese volunteers into social activism to benefit the immigrants (Roberts 2000; Shipper 2002). Among the volunteers are healthcare professionals, legal experts, community activists, labour unionists and religious groups. These concerned citizens have formed support groups to provide cultural and technical assistance to immigrants, thereby contributing to the achievement of civil, human and social rights and equal opportunities for all residents. Underlying this surge of community activism in Japan is a growing emphasis on self-governance at the grass roots. Arising from the ashes of the 1995 Kobe earthquake and encouraged by the 1998 Law to Promote Specified Non-profit Activities, this new civil society movement stresses voluntarism, public interest, non-profit making and non-governmental organization (Tajiri 2001: 19). In contrast to traditional community activism serving the interests of a specific neighbourhood, the new community activism addresses broad societal concerns, including education, health, ageing, disability, immigration, human rights, multiculturalism and the environment. The unprecedented influx of immigrant workers into Hamamatsu since the early 1990s has mobilized small but committed numbers of concerned citizens to
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organize a variety of community services for foreign citizens and their families. These citizens’ services were intended to meet the needs of foreigners whose lack of citizenship denied them public services, legal rights and political participation. As early as 1990, the Hamamatsu Overseas Labourers Solidarity (herusu no kai) began consultation and mediation services for legal and illegal workers caught in labour disputes. In the mid-1990s, having witnessed increasing numbers of uninsured patients, the Medical Association for Foreigners (MAF) of Hamamatsu launched a programme of free annual check-ups in collaboration with local hospitals, professional associations and voluntary organizations. In 1999, the Grupo Justiça e Paz (Association for Justice and Peace), an inter-ethnic group of Japanese, Brazilians and Peruvians, directly petitioned the Ministry of Health and Welfare regarding foreign residents without health insurance. During these years, in response to an absence of means by which foreigners could learn the Japanese language, a number of citizens’ voluntary groups offered free Japanese classes to foreigners (Takeuchi 2001). These social and political processes affecting immigrants’ rights and quality of life have taken place in the context of the dramatic economic, demographic and political changes that Japan is currently undergoing. The severe slowdown in economic growth since 1992 has triggered many institutional changes in national and local administration, corporations, finance, industry, labour, employment, law, education and welfare. A sharp drop in the fertility of Japanese women throughout the postwar period has given Japan one of the lowest fertility rates in the world: 1.36 in 2000 (Yeoh et al. 2003: iv). As a result, the country faces a rapidly ageing society in which the proportion of the population 65 and older is expected to reach 25 percent by 2020 (Kimura and Muto 1992: 21–31). Population decline is expected to begin as early as 2010, with obvious consequences for labour supply and a need to supplement it with increased immigration. This is demonstrated tellingly in the recent report by the UN Population Division (2000). The report predicts that Japan will need 33.5 million immigrants over the period 1995–2050 in order to keep the size of the workingage population constant at 1995 levels. This would require an average of 609,000 immigrants per year during this period (ibid.: 50).
Conclusion Drawing upon two immigrant populations in different historical periods, this analysis of citizenship and ethnic diversity reveals the mechanisms by which differential exclusion of non-citizens as cultural others and temporary residents with few rights is reproduced. It also demonstrates that Japanese nationalism is closely associated with definitions of who belongs to the nation and territory and who does not. However, these definitions can be altered as national goals and boundaries shift with the rapid changes in international politics and economy. The ‘imperial’ Japanese state defined Koreans as colonial subjects and citizens to be mobilized into the labour force and the military. In times of peace and prosperity, the ‘democratic’ state defined former colonial citizens as foreigners,
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excluding them from social and political participation. In the age of global migration, the ‘capitalistic’ state has redefined foreigners of Japanese ancestry as a source of temporary foreign labour while excluding them from becoming members of the ethnic and national community. Japan’s complex international migration history during the period of modern nation building has had interesting consequences in the current age of global migration. Korean ‘external’ immigrants, the result of colonial immigration, and Nikkeijin ‘internal’ immigrants, the result of return migration following emigration nearly a hundred years ago, have both experienced social, economic and political discrimination based on their foreign nationality. The historical circumstances of these two immigrant flows differ radically, but both groups have been subjected to variants of what Castles (1997) calls differential exclusion, in which membership in civil society does not confer a right to citizenship in the nationstate. The close link between ethnicity and nationality in Japan’s definition of citizenship has denied citizenship to Koreans who have been born and raised to be ‘sociological Japanese’ (Kajita 1998). By contrast, the Japanese definition of citizenship has provided South American Nikkeijin, whose cultural roots remain in their countries of birth and yet are ‘ethnic Japanese’, with access only to its labour market and not to social citizenship. Now, with the growing population of ‘visible races’ such as Brazilians, Peruvians, Iranians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, neither the nation nor the state can avoid acknowledging the country’s ethnic diversity and acting in accordance with international standards of civil and human rights to guarantee freedom, equality and justice to all groups. As a response to the market-led development and glaring governmental neglect, since the mid-1990s, robust grass-roots activities by immigrants and citizens who have stood up for the rights of immigrant workers on issues like labour abuse, health, education and human rights have emerged. These activists of all ages, sexes and classes have struggled to understand and cope with inter-ethnic interactions. As a result, a new social agenda that constructively confronts the complexities of the unprecedented multiculturalism has evolved among them. Their voices are now emerging as a new and increasingly prominent popular discourse that challenges the rigid notions and practices of the nation-state, which were hitherto upheld by the government and the public at large.
Notes 1 2
3
Recent books edited by Oomen (1997) and Davidson and Weekley (1999) are notable exceptions. The San Francisco Peace Treaty had formally ended the seven-year occupation of Japan by the USA. In April 1952, when the treaty took effect, the Japanese government exercised its sovereignty by legally defining former colonial citizens as foreigners, thereby completing their exclusion from membership in the nation-state (Onuma 1993: 264). In August 1999, the Revised Alien Registration Law ended the practice of fingerprinting all foreigners (Gurowitz 1999: 431).
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4 From 1641 to 1854, Japan had enforced a national policy of isolation, closing all seaports except Nagasaki, which remained open for trade exclusively with the Netherlands and China. In 1853, Commodore Perry approached with four black steamships in Tokyo Bay, demanding that Japan open the country. This led to the Japan–USA Friendship Treaty about opening two other seaports. Soon Britain, Russia and the Netherlands had signed similar treaties, ending Japan’s 200 years of isolation. 5 In the 1984 revision of the Nationality Law, the period within which children born abroad must be registered was lengthened from fourteen to ninety days (Yamada and Tsuchiya 1984). 6 According to Kajita (1999), when the immigration law was about to be revised in the late 1980s, the Ministry of Justice was also preparing the new provision regarding the legal status of third-generation Korean residents. The previous (1965) agreement with the Korean government had conferred permanent resident status on Koreans up to the second generation of residents in Japan. It was apparently coincidental that revisions of this 1965 Japan–Korea agreement and the 1981 Immigration Law took place at about the same time. 7 More than 60,000 have returned from China as Nikkeijin (in the long-term residence visa category) or family members of former Japanese settlers to Manchuria (in the relatives of Japanese visa category) (Kajita 1999). 8 In November 1998, other major nationalities registered in Hamamatsu included 1,695 Koreans, 973 Filipinos, 892 Chinese, 876 Peruvians and 436 Vietnamese (Hamamatsu City Municipal Office 1999). 9 Since April 1996, a partial refund of the first three years of instalments that foreigners invested in the National Social Security Plan has been made available to them when they leave Japan (Roth 2001: 73–4). However, this benefits few Brazilians as they rarely enrol in the plan. If they were to do so, they would receive no return beyond their first three years because many work more than three years, while continuing to be required to pay into the plan. 10 Brazilian schooling is not entirely unavailable in Japan. In the absence of Brazilian governmental assistance, in the early 1990s, Brazilian families and communities commonly resorted to home schooling or correspondence courses. Some of these developed into small-scale Brazilian schools. By the late 1990s, private schools in Brazil, such as Colégio Pythágoras, opened branch schools for Brazilian children in Japan. However, these efforts do not meet the educational needs of most immigrant children. They also fail to provide quality education because of the lack of qualified teachers and adequate facilities. 11 In 1996, those apprehended seemed to have been responsible for an average of four criminal cases each, which explains why many more were not apprehended in 1996 than had been in 1995. According to a police officer in Hamamatsu, during their investigations, police frequently find that suspects who have been held responsible for one crime are often proved to be responsible for other crimes as well (Hamamatsu Police Headquarters 1998).
References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Community, London: Verso. Armstrong, B. (1989) ‘Racialisation and nationalist ideology: the Japanese case’, International Sociology 4 (3): 329–43. Bader, V. (ed.) (1997) Citizenship and Exclusion, New York: St Martin’s Press. Bartram, D. (2000) ‘Japan and labour migration: theoretical and methodological implications of negative cases’, International Migration Review 34 (1): 5–32.
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Bauer, J.R. and Bell, D.A. (1999) The East Asian Challenge for Human Rights, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Borjas, G.J. (1990) Friends or Strangers: The Impact of Immigration on the US Economy, New York: Basic Books. Brubaker, W.R. (ed.) (1989) Immigration and the Politics of Citizenship in Europe and North America, Lanham, Md: University Press of America. —— (1992) Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Castles, S. (1997) ‘Multicultural citizenship: the Australian experience’, in V. Bader (ed.), Citizenship and Exclusion, New York: St Martin’s Press. —— (1999) ‘Citizenship and the other in the age of migration’, in A. Davidson and K. Weekley (eds), Globalization and Citizenship in the Asia-Pacific, New York: St Martin’s Press. Castles, S. and Miller, M.J. (1998) The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, New York: Guilford Press. Castles, S., Booth, H. and Wallace, T. (1984) Here for Good: Western Europe’s New Ethnic Minorities, London: Pluto Press. Cesarani, D. and Fullbrook, M. (1996) Citizenship, Nationality and Migration in Europe, London: Routledge. Chin, C.B.N. (1998) In Service and Servitude: Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the Malaysian ‘Modernity’ Project, New York: Columbia University Press. Cornelius, W.A. (1994) ‘Japan: the illusion of immigration control’, in W.A. Cornelius, P.L. Martin and J.F. Hollifield (eds), Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Cornelius, W.A., Martin P.L. and Hollifield, J.F. (eds) (1994) Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Davidson, A. and Weekley, K. (eds.) (1999) Globalization and Citizenship in the Asia-Pacific, New York: St Martin’s Press. de Vos, G. and Wagatsuma, H. (1966) Japan’s Invisible Race: Caste Culture and Personality, Berkeley: University of California Press. Dunne, M. and Bonazzi, T. (eds) (1995) Citizenship and Rights in Multicultural Societies, Keele, UK: Keele University Press. Essed, P. (1991) Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory, Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage. Feldblum, M. (1999) Reconstructing Citizenship: The Politics of Nationality Reform and Immigration in Contemporary France, Albany: State University of New York Press. Feldman, E.A. (2000)The Ritual of Rights in Japan: Law, Society and Health Policy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. French, H.W. (1999) “‘Japanese only” policy takes body blow in court’, New York Times, international edition, 15 November. Fukushima, Y. (1993) Zainichi Kankoku, Chosenjinn: Wakai sedai no aidentiti (Resident South and North Koreans: young generations’ identity), Chuko Shinsho 1164, Tokyo: Chuo Koronsha. Grupo Justiça e Paz (1999) Gaikokuseki Teijusha no Iryou Hoshou wo motomeru Chinjosho: Tokei shiryou (Petition for medical security for foreign residents), Hamamatsu: author. Guarnizo, L.E. and Smith, M.P. (1998) Transnationalism from Below, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Gurowitz, A. (1999) ‘Mobilizing international norms: domestic actors, immigrants, and the Japanese state’, Journal of Asian Studies 51 (3): 413–45. —— (2000) ‘Migrant rights and activism in Malaysia: opportunities and constraints’, Journal of Asian Studies 59 (4): 863–88.
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Hamamatsu City Municipal Office (1999) Gaikokijinn Toroku Kokusekibetsu Junin Chousahyo (Survey of registered foreign residents by nationality), Hamamatsu: Hamamatsu City Municipal Office. Hamamatsu Police Headquarters (1995) Hamamatsu Chiku Hanzai Hakusho, 1994, (Survey of registered foreign residents by nationality), Hamamatsu: author. —— (1996) Hamamatsu Chiku Hanzai Hakusho, 1995 (The white paper on crime in the Hamamatsu District, 1995), Hamamatsu: author. —— (1998) interview with an officer, Seikatsu Anzen-ka, Hamamatsu, 15 December. Harajiri, H. (1998) ‘Zainichi’ toshiteno Korian (Koreans as ‘residents’ in Japan), Kodansha Gendai Shinsho, 1410, Tokyo: Kodansha. Herbert, W. (1992) ‘Conjuring up a crime wave: the “rapid growth in the crime rate among foreign migrant workers in Japan” critically examined’, Japan Forum 4 (1): 109–19. Ikegami, S. (ed.) (2001) Burajirujinn to Kokusaika suru Chiiki Shakai: Kyoju, Kyoiku, Iryou (Brazilians and internationalizing community), Tokyo: Akashi Shoten. Ikegami, S. and Kinpara, T. (1997) Seikatsusha to shiteno Burajirujin to Hamamatsushi ni okeru kokyu saabisu (Brazilians as residents and public services in Hamamatsu City), in S. Ikegami (ed.) Seikatsusha To Shiteno Nyuukamaa To Chiiki Shakai: Hamamatsushi Ni Okeru Kokyo Saabisu Wo Megutte (Newcomers as residents and the receiving community: public services in Hamamatsu City), Hamamatsu: Shizuoka Kenritsu Daigaku Tanki Daigakubu. Jacobson, D. (1997) Rights across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Japan Immigration Association (1998) Zairyu Gaikokujin Tokei, 1997 (Statistics on resident foreigners), Tokyo: Japan Immigration Association. Japanese Ministry of Justice, Immigration Control Bureau (ed.) (1998) Shutsunyu Kanri: 21 Seiki no Enkatsu na Kokusai Koryu no tameni (Immigration control: for the smooth international exchange in the twenty-first century). Tokyo: Ministry of Justice, Immigration Control Bureau. Japan Times (1998) ‘Brazilian files discrimination suit’, The Japan Times, 3 September. Juteau, D. (1997) ‘Multicultural citizenship: the challenge of pluralism in Canada’, in V. Bader (ed.) Citizenship and Exclusion, New York: St Martin’s Press. Kajita, T. (1998) ‘The challenge of incorporating foreigners in Japan: “ethnic Japanese” and “sociological Japanese”’, in M. Weiner and T. Hanami (eds), Temporary Workers or Future Citizens? Japanese and US Migration Policies, New York: New York University Press. —— (1999) ‘Kairi suru Nationalism to Ethnicity: ‘Nikkeijin’ ni okeru Hoteki Shikaku to Shakaigakuteki Genjitsu tono aida’ (Estranging nationalism and ethnicity: between legal qualification of Nikkeijin and sociological reality), in K. Aoi, T. Takahashi and K. Shoj (eds), Shiminsei no Henyo to Chiiki, Shakai Mondai: 21 Seiki no Shimin Shakai to Kyodosei: Kokusaika to Naimenka (Transformation of citizenry regional and social problems: civilian society and partnership in the twenty-first century: internationalization and internalization), Tokyo: Azusa Shuppan. Kimura, F. and Muto, Y. (1992) Nihon no Jinko Mondai (Japan’s population problems), Tokyo: Nihon Keizai Shimbunsha. Koga, E.A.I. (2000) “‘Dekasgi Taizaisha” to “Jumin” no aida de: Nikkei Nanbeijin no Chiiki Shaka Sanka’ (Between ‘sojourning settlers’ and ‘residents’: participation of Japanese South Americans in regional society), in Takashi Miyajima (ed.), Gaikokujin Shimino to Seiji Sanka (Foreign citizens and political participation), Tokyo: Yushindo Kobunsha.
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Kokusai Jinryu (1991) ‘Nikkeijin no U-turn Gensho wo kou Miru’ (Perspectives on return migration of Nikkeijin), Kokusai Jinryu 38: 11–16. Kritz, M. and Zlotnik, H. (1992) ‘Global interactions: migration systems, processes, and policies’, in M.M. Kritz, L.L. Lin and H. Zlotnik (eds), International Migration Systems: A Global Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kuwahara, Y. (ed.) (2001) Gurobaru Jidai no Gaikokujin Rodosha: Dokokara Kite Dokohe (Foreign workers in the global age: where they are from and where they are going), Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Shinposha. Lee, C. and de Vos, G. (1981) Koreans in Japan: Ethnic Conflict and Accommodation, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lie, J. (2001) Multiethnic Japan, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University. Lister, R. (1997) Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, New York: New York University Press. Marshall, T.H. (1950) Citizenship and Social Class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, P., Mason, A. and Tsay, C. (eds) (1995) ‘Labour migration in Asia’, ASEAN Economic Bulletin 12 (2), Special Focus. Miles, R. (1982) Racism and Migration Labour, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. —— 1993 Racism after ‘Race Relations’, London: Routledge. Miyajima, T. (1997) ‘Immigration and the redefinition of “citizenship” in Japan: “one people–one nation”’, in T.K. Oommen (ed.), Citizenship and National Identity: From Colonialism to Globalism, New Delhi: Sage. Morita, K. and Sassen, S. (1994) ‘The new illegal immigration in Japan 1980–1992’, International Migration Review 28 (1): 153–63. Naples, N. (ed.) (1998) Community Activism and Feminist Politics: Organizing Across Race, Class and Gender, New York: Routledge. Oguma, E. (1995) Tanitsu Minzoku Shinwa no Kigenn (The myth of the homogeneous nation), Tokyo: Shinyosha. Onuma, Y. (1993) Tanitsu Minzoku Shakai no Shinwa wo Koete: Zainichi Konkou, Chosenjin to Shutsunyu Kanri Taisei (Beyond the myth of homogeneous society: immigration control system for Korean residents), Tokyo: Toshindo. Oomen, T.K. (1997) Citizenship and National Identity: From Colonialism to Globalism, New Delhi: Sage. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (1994) Trends in International Migration: Annual Report 1993, Paris: OECD. —— (1998) Migration and Regional Economic Integration in Asia: OECD Proceedings, Paris: OECD. Pinches, M. (ed.) (1999) Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia, London: Routledge. Piper, N. (1998) Racism, Nationalism and Citizenship: Ethnic Minorities in Britain and Germany, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Portes, A. (1999) ‘Conclusion: towards a new world – the origins and effects of transnational activities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2): 463–77. Roberts, G.S. (2000) ‘NGO support for migrant labour in Japan’, in M. Douglass and G.R. Roberts (eds), Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society, London: Routledge. Rodan, G. (ed.) (1996) Political Oppositions in Industrializing Asia, London: Routledge. Roth, J.H. (2002) Brokered Homeland: Japanese-Brazilian Migrants in Japan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. São Paulo Jinbum Kagaku Kenkyujo (1988) Burajiru ni okeru Nikkei Jinko Chousa Houkokusho, 1987, 1988 (Population survey report on Nikkeijin in Brazil, 1978, 1988), São Paulo: author.
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Weiner, M. and Hanami, T. (eds) (1998) Temporary Workers or Future Citizens? Japanese and U.S. Migration Policies, New York: New York University Press. Weisman, S.R. (1991) ‘In Japan, bias is an obstacle even for the ethnic Japanese’, New York Times, international edition, 13 November. Wilpert, C. (1991) ‘Migration and ethnicity in a non-immigration country: foreigners in a united Germany’, New Community 18 (1): 49–62. Wong, D. (1997) ‘Transience and settlement: Singapore’s foreign labour policy’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 6 (1): 135–67. Yamada, R. and Tsuchiya, F. (1984) Wakariyasui Shinkokusekiho (Easy new nationality law), Yujikaku Livre 7, Tokyo: Yuhikaku. Yamanaka, K. (1993) ‘New immigration policy and unskilled foreign workers in Japan’, Pacific Affairs 66 (1): 72–90. —— (1996) ‘Return migration of Japanese-Brazilians to Japan: the Nikkeijin as ethnic minority and political construct’, Diaspora 5 (1): 65–97. —— (1997) ‘Return migration of Japanese Brazilian women: household strategies and search for the “homeland”’, in R. Krulfeld and D. Baxter (eds), Beyond Boundaries, Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants, Volume 5, Arlington, Va: American Anthropological Association. —— (1999) ‘Illegal immigration in Asia: regional patterns and a case study of Nepalese workers in Japan’, in D.W. Haines and K.E. Rosenblum (eds), Illegal Immigration in America: A Reference Handbook, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press. —— (2000a) “‘I will go home, but when?”: labour migration and circular diaspora formation by Japanese Brazilians in Japan’, in M. Douglass and G.R. Roberts (eds), Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society, London: Routledge. —— (2000b) ‘Nepalese labour migration to Japan: from global warriors to global workers’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 23 (1): 62–93. —— (2003) ‘A breakthrough for ethnic minority rights in Japan: Ana Bortz’s courageous challenge’, in M. Morokvasic-Müller, U. Erel and K. Shinozaki (eds), Gender and Migration: Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries, Volume 1, International Women’s University Series, Opladen, Germany: Verlag LeskeBudrich. Yamawaki, K. (2000) ‘Foreign workers in Japan: a historical perspective’, in M. Douglass and G.R. Roberts (eds) Japan and Global Migration: Foreign Workers and the Advent of a Multicultural Society, London: Routledge. Yeoh, B., Wolfgang, L., Prachuabmoh, V. and Arifin, E.N. (2003) ‘Fertility decline in Asia: trends, implications and futures’, Journal of Population Research 20 (1): iii–ix. Yoshino, K. (1992) Cultural Nationalism in Contemporary Japan: A Sociological Enquiry, London: Routledge.
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Is there a transnation? Migrancy and the national homeland among overseas Filipinos Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr
Territorial nationalism: vicious or virtuous? Since the 1990s, the political-symbolic relationship of emigrants to their national homelands has been rearticulated in the direction aptly described by Tölölyan (1996: 19) as ‘the proliferation and valorisation of diasporas’. The trend is occurring in the context of accelerated mass migrations, the sensation of time–space compression generated by global telecommunications technology and the questioning of the nation-state’s prospects in the face of globalization. Part of the contextual frame, but less frequently recognized by those who stress the postmodernity of the current age, is the continuing power of states to decide on the entry and exit of individuals. Also undeniable are the inequalities of capitalism within and across countries and regions of the world. Many have postulated that at the present historical juncture, economic migrants, as well as the broader category of ‘travellers’ adduced by Clifford (1992), would develop multiple deterritorialized identities. Displaced from various homelands, migrants to the more economically prosperous countries of the world often suffer the pangs of alienation and are consequently compelled to grapple with their social identities. Commentators have argued that such enforced reflexivity leads writers and intellectuals to appreciate and extol the enabling potentials of exile and the lack of attachment to the constraints and politics of the nation-state. It is notable that such celebratory praises on the traversal of boundaries are seldom applied to the mobility of global capital. The dualism that pits vicious capital against virtuous people, or resisting migrant against oppressive state, is a persistent theme. And, yet, triumphalist voices about diasporic subjectivities, as Behdad (2000: 399) acutely observes, tend to stress the ‘literary and artistic expressions of diaspora’ and ‘to generalize the oppositional, redemptive and transformative possibilities of displacement’ but, in the process, obscure ‘the everyday conditions of immigrants around the world’. Indeed, caution must be taken in extrapolating from the experiences of diasporic intellectuals. The assertion that emigration is liberating is often linked to the migrant’s position as a detached observer whose amorphous loyalties are precisely those of one unrestrained by the spatial boundary and territorial sovereignty of the
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nation-state. What Appadurai (1993: 413, 421) calls a ‘revolution in the foundations of nationalism’ is occurring in a global order where the nation-state is said to be fast becoming ‘obsolete’ and ‘certainly in crisis’. In its place, deterritorialized ‘post-national formations’ generate allegiances and identities without the oppressive and parochial politics of the nation-state, which, in the specific instance of Appadurai’s theorizing, seems to refer particularly to the ‘white’ USA. This ‘revolution’ gropes for a new vocabulary and, for the moment, remains ‘entrapped in the linguistic imaginary of the territorial state’, but the goal is to forge ‘translocal solidarities, cross-border mobilizations and postnational identities’ (ibid.: 418). Among the emergent ‘post-national social formations’ is the ‘transnation’, conceived as a ‘delocalized’ practice that ‘retains a special ideological link to a putative place of origin but is otherwise a thoroughly diasporic collectivity’ (ibid.: 424). Interestingly, Appadurai (ibid.: 424–5) does not consider immigrants who put ‘loyalty to a non-territorial, transnation first’ as negating outright their avowed loyalty to the USA as country of settlement, because ‘there is a special American way to connect to these global diasporas’. Although US nationhood is seen as in crisis due to its diasporic entanglements, Appadurai (ibid.: 424, 428) avers that ‘the idea of the nation flourishes transnationally’, that is, the ‘homelands’ at the receiving end of these diasporic tentacles from the developed world flourish, if not in their empirical national locations then at least as ‘transnations’ that occupy ‘the most important social sites in which the crises of patriotism are played out’. Deviating from Appadurai’s perspective, the authors of Nations Unbound, Basch et al. (1994: 8) argue that the ‘identities of migrant populations continue to be rooted in nation-states’. Although transnationalism occupies a force field that stretches across state boundaries, its dynamics produce a ‘new projection of polity’ in which rhetoric barely conceals exploitative relations, and multiple identities coexist with the maintenance or consolidation of class hierarchies. Transnationalism, they argue, is comprehensible as ‘the nationalism of the deterritorialized nation-states’ or, more specifically, as a ‘borderless nationalism’ (ibid.: 216, 284). In their analysis of ‘the Haitian “Tenth Department”, the Grenadian “constituency” in New York and the Filipino balikbayan [repatriate], transnational ties are taken as evidence that migrants continue to be members of the state from which they originated’ (ibid.: 8). Ultimately, transnationalism is ‘a form of post-colonial nationalism that reflects and reinforces the division of the entire globe into nation-states’ (ibid.: 269–80). The migrants’ nationalism of the ‘borderless nation’ breaks free from spatial boundedness, territorial rootedness and cartographic specificity, but in most other respects, transnationalism is deemed the cousin of nationalism. From a somewhat different angle, Anderson (1991: 145), who has argued that ‘the nation was conceived in language [and] not in blood’, cautions against a nationalism devoid of its specific spatio-temporal coordinates and thus without a geographical arena to act out civic commitments and responsibilities. For Anderson (1992, 1994, 1998), the ‘long-distance nationalism’ of expatriated zealots who are guided by the constricting logic of bounded and essentialized
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ethnicity, and who spawn violence and terrorism in the homeland while safely residing in advanced economies, is worrisome. Although he expressly states that ‘obviously [it] would be a mistake to assume that long-distance nationalism is necessarily extremist’, Anderson (1994: 327) discerns a connection between the ‘embattled ethnic identity’ of migrants in the metropolis and the desire to play hero at the other side of the globe by engaging in ‘radically unaccountable’ politics. Remarking on Anderson, Balakrishnan (1995: 68) puts it thus: The transnationalization of the productive forces does not extinguish the desire for stable, clear and authentic ‘identities’. As the patterns of contemporary cultural and economic life relentlessly frustrate the desire and need to live in communities, these become ‘imagined’ only in the bad sense. The resulting identity is nothing but ‘a pseudo-archaic ethnicity cranked out in made-to-order forms by the heritage industry’. Although the deterritorialization of identities is a commonly shared view, and the pains of displacement are not to be denied, the views about the symbolic relationship of economic migrants to their homelands differ. These disparate views echo the complexities of migrancy and may be seen as falling into different points along a spectrum of representations. At one end is celebration of the unhinging of patriotic attachments to a slice of territory and of the emancipatory possibilities of discursive post-national forms of allegiance. At the other end is lamentation over the inauthentic and unethical selves of long-distance nationalists not bound by the rights, duties and accountabilities of territorially bounded citizenship. Somewhere in the middle of this continuum is the assertion that migrancy and devotion to the empirical nation-state are not contradictory in so far as the ties between (ex-)citizens and the geographical homeland are reconfigured through the cultivation of transnational social fields that link two separate spatial entities, neither of which suffer in their integrity as nations. In this intermediate view, the ‘supra-territorial nationalism’ (Scholte 1996: 60) of migrants, quite simply, is nationalism of a homeland unhinged from its physical moorings but with much the same kindred spirit, dreams and responsibilities as good oldfashioned nationalism. What are we to make of the divergent meanings of the transnation, transnational community and transnationalism, and the realities that they purport to signify? Can we find our way through the polyphonic portrayals of migrants and homelands? Robbins’ (1998: 11) position that there is neither ‘inherent virtue’ nor ‘inherent vice’ in transnationality, along with Cheah’s (1998: 31) admonition that ‘neither cosmopolitanism nor nationalism can be seen as the teleologically necessary and desired normative outcome of past and present globalizing processes’, constitute useful starting points. But rather than seeking conclusive answers, this chapter intends to further the interrogation of transnationalism and the transnation as realities and representations by reflecting upon the contemporary migrations of Filipinos to the USA as permanent immigrants and around the Asia-Pacific region as contract workers.
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I focus on migrants from the Philippines because, as one of them, the situations described here are somehow internal to, albeit not identical with, my own life experiences. With the foregoing statement, I realize that I have offered a scheme of identity unavoidably phrased in national terms. But the categories of the nation, I submit, need not pose an insurmountable barrier to the discernment of pre- and any post-national trends. At the same time, because, to borrow Chun’s words (1996: 132), ‘the problem of uncovering real indigenous voices poses questions about the role of academics in this enterprise’, I disavow any claim to speak on behalf of Filipino migrants of whatever type. This chapter discusses two broad groupings of migrants from the Philippines that, due to their apparent contrasts, are in the main studied and examined separately. I would argue that these two categories of migrant are dialectically intertwined, both at the level of discursive abstraction and in the materiality of remittances to the Philippines. From the perspective of their destinations, the relative stability and legal entitlement of immigrants in mainly liberal-democratic countries suggest a situation markedly different from the relative social, political and legal deprivations of so-called guest workers in less than liberal democratic states. In the former, migrants from the Philippines tend to be characterized as ‘invisible’, whereas migrant workers in the latter, because of supposedly undesirable traits, tend to be ‘highly visible’ aliens. From the perspective of the homeland, a pervasive discourse similarly divides these two groups of migrants. Public intellectuals in the Philippines often cast immigrants to advanced capitalist countries, particularly the former colonial ruler, the USA, as having abandoned and betrayed the nation; their emigration is seen as unpatriotic (Vergara 1996; Rafael 1997). On the other hand, the Philippine state has popularized the official designations of migrant workers as the nation’s ‘new heroes’ who endure the pains of separation from kin but reap precious foreign exchange that helps to rescue the ailing Philippine economy. Their departure from the homeland is routinely described as patriotic (see also Chapter 6 in relation to China). The homeland’s normative standards of nationalism portray the transnationality of the developed world immigrant as ‘inherently vicious’ while that of the labour migrant is ‘inherently virtuous’. Persons falling into the former group have somehow been ‘lost’ by their native land, whereas those in the latter are believed to have a certainty of return, thus remaining essentially within the national geography. Interestingly, immigrants depicted in the homeland as reneging on patriotism and thus ‘lost’ are those described by Basch et al. (1994) as the newfound transnationalists, their book thus emblematizing a metropolitan academic discourse that runs counter to that of the periphery. This chapter does not aim to resolve the binary logic of these discourses and counter-discourses. Rather, it seeks to amplify the broader messiness in the affective and non-monetary relations of economic migrants to their homelands. There is no intention of supporting the view of ‘the diaspora’ as either a ‘politically strategic project’ or an abstraction of ‘an already existing community’ characterized by ‘a particular kind of aesthetic force’ (Axel 1996: 433). I do not wish to deny the political element in global migrations. However, trumpeting the
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politics of migrants’ deterritorialized identities must be tempered by such memories as the victimization of ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia in the twentieth century because of their presumed loyalty to mainland China in what may be seen as a prototypical case of transnationality. We must also guard against taking for granted the assumption that the ‘transnational imaginary’ holds political promise. For in many instances, scholarly texts on transnationalism serve as an epistemological mirage, which fundamentally dislocated scholars may have conjured up precisely to deal with their own displacement and the existential aridity of their own fragmented lives. As the following discussion seeks to show, contrary to the claims of some scholars, the politics of transnationality remains an open question.
Transmigrants as transnationalists? In Imagined Communities, Anderson (1991) makes a strong case for linking migration with nationalism, which first emerged among creoles in the Americas. It may be useful to retrace the origins of the national idea, as theorized by Anderson, among these children of migrants. Creoles were, on all counts, the same as Europeans except for the fatedness of their being born outside Europe: Even if he was born within one week of his father’s migration, the accident of birth in the Americas consigned him to subordination – even though in terms of language, religion, ancestry or manners, he was largely indistinguishable from the Spain-born Spaniard. There was nothing to be done about it: he was irremediably a creole. (Anderson 1991: 57–8; italics in original) The single fact of birthplace excluded the otherwise elite creoles from top positions in the administrative entities formed by the imperial powers. Before the crystallization of national consciousness, the creoles sought to identify with their ancestors’ homelands, which many of them had not seen but whose existence was, for them, indubitable. In central Massachusetts, a non-English Englishwoman, Mary Rowlandson, wrote about her captivity in February 1675 in a manner that made her see ‘before her “English Cattle”, an “English Path” and “deserted English Fields”, though she has never been within three thousand miles of England’ (Anderson 1994: 314–15). The oddity (from a European perspective) of the creole – of the non-English English and the non-Spanish Spaniard – would find its resolution in the forging of creole nationalism. Although certainly not at the bottom of the social hierarchy, the creoles formed a subordinated group who struggled with displaced identities in the context of a glass ceiling determined by one’s birthplace. In their journeys through the imperial bureaucracy, which turned out to be veritable secular pilgrimages, creole functionaries met fellow sojourners with whom eventually they were to imagine a community of co-nationals. The personal biographies of these creole pioneers, as Anderson calls them, acquired a territorial locus,
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thereby transforming administrative units into a plural world of nations. Subsequently, the idea of the nation was modularized and imitated in Europe and in the rest of the world. Accordingly, migrations in our present age are inextricably bound up with the national idea and with territorial states, the raison d’être of which is the imagined community of the nation. Migrants since the 1950s have embarked on their physical journeys with the idea of the nation embedded in their consciousness. They are thus unlike the first-generation pre-national migrants to the Americas – the word ‘generation’ used here in the broad sociological sense explained by Abrams (1982: 256) as ‘that span of time within which identity is assembled on the basis of an unchanged system of meanings and possibilities’. Postwar migrants are also unlike the massive numbers who moved during the great age of migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which pre-dated the consolidation of the idea of the national state in the wake of the First World War. The waves of migrants since the resumption of global movements at the end of the Second World War form the group of movers whom many take for granted as carrying forward their sense of nationhood across political borders. When ‘transnational communities’ in the USA began to engage actively in the politics of their countries of origin, this phenomenon was seen largely as natural and even quite predictable. As Basch et al. (1994: 255) remark: Some of the Filipinos, Vincentians, Grenadians and Haitians who arrived during the 1970s were radicalized youth, intellectuals, and political elites who brought with them experiences with or knowledge of anti-imperialist struggles. Each brought a ‘pride of nation’ that grew in response to periods of political upheaval in their home societies and the racial barriers the immigrants confronted in the US. While the veracity of this statement need not be questioned, the assertion glosses over the multiple and contradictory visions of the homeland. For instance, while the role of Filipino immigrants in ‘challenging the Marcos regime and its rule by martial law, and the US support for this regime’ has been acknowledged (Basch et al. 1994: 275), the activism of immigrant Filipinos, such as those in Hawaii who are avowedly ‘Marcos loyalists’ and who have their own perspective on ‘national leadership’ (Aquino 2000), has been quietly obscured. One faction’s ‘pride of nation’ is the other’s national shame. Even the US-based Filipinos who opposed the Marcos regime were far from constituting a homogeneous movement, since they were deeply divided by ideological conflicts (Vergara 1999). Indeed, one could ask if immigrant Filipinos in the USA who, in the 1970s and 1980s, became actively involved in the political processes in the Philippines (whether for or against Marcos) constituted a majority or even a sizeable minority. The majority could have been plainly indifferent. Some US-based intellectuals, on the premise that there is one identifiable community, continue to complain about the ‘appallingly apolitical Filipino community – “fragmented and inutile”’ (Vergara 1996: 85). This lament is based on the premise that a
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Filipino community exists, or ought to. Shall the behaviour, then, of a conspicuous minority signal the existence of a transnationalism that would purport to encompass US-based Filipino immigrants as a ‘community’, or should such visible action speak of no more than the political inclinations and interests of specific migrant groups? The objection may be raised that quantifying political action is inappropriate as a gauge of the vitality and significance of transnationalism. Still, one of the foremost theorists of the transnational public sphere recognizes that ‘imagination’ is vital to group mobilization (Appadurai 1996: 145). Following that assertion, one can inquire into the ‘imagination’ among Filipino immigrants in the USA. Broadly, one can ask to what extent a putative ‘transnational community’ is truly an imagined community, that is, one whose countless members they would never meet personally but about whose existence they believe and with whom they share a connectedness that transcends perceptible differences and inequalities (cf. Anderson 1991: 5–7). Perhaps it may be more appropriate to think in terms of ‘transnational communities’ and of transnationalisms as plural even in the singular case of Filipino immigrants in the USA. Although Filipino immigrants anonymous to each other may share the knowledge of a common national origin, the real differences they see and hear about may overshadow any sense of connectedness with others who are similarly labelled ‘Filipinos’. For not only in the realm of political sentiments are Filipino immigrants fractionalized. Class and regional divisions, as well as distinctions between immigrant generations prior to and since the liberalization of immigration laws in 1965, heighten diversity, ‘making it more difficult for the contemporary Filipino populations to build a comprehensive group consciousness’ (Espiritu 2002a: 86). In this context, one doubts if there can be one, even discursively defined, transnation that can embrace the heterogeneous immigrant populations from the Philippines. In the homeland, social differences can be momentarily forgotten during moments of national communitas, to use Turner’s (1974) term. Among immigrant populations, however, a collective celebration of the nation approximating communitas is not easy to organize, although some attempts are made. It may well be that migration situations finally unravel the fictive unity, comradeship and homogeneity of the nation (much as an analogous migration situation splintered the initial fictive unity of creole and peninsular), consequently rendering transnationalism a tenuous ideological construct and friable abstraction. How many migrants are transnationalists who regard the empirical nation, despite their physical absence, with such profound affection as to think consciously of what they can do to uplift the nation? It may be quite unfair to ask how many emigrants would be willing to lay down their lives in the event of armed conflict. Nonetheless, the purposeful act of contributing to nation building on the part of migrants must be problematized because the creation of transnational social fields involving kin and friends does not automatically suggest love of the nation or transnation. In fact, the proliferation of transboundary ties to kin, friends, colleagues and/or business associates made possible by modern telecommunications ‘may entail a kind and a degree of tuning out, a
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weakened personal involvement with the nation and national culture’ as Hannerz (1996: 89) suggests. As Portes (1999: 464) also observes, ‘where migration is a more individualized process, grounded on personal and family decisions, transnational activities are more selective … lacking the normative component attached to them among participants in a political diaspora’. In other words, the formation of so-called transnational social fields may point towards the creation of a new private sphere, an autonomous transboundary space in which it is possible to ‘tune out’ the nation-state without necessarily becoming cosmopolitan. Transnational social fields may be intensely personal and intimately individual. Therefore, migrants who may be subsumed inadvertently into projects of state elites in their country of origin do not, by their transnational activities, necessarily articulate political love in a borderless nationalism. Yet such is the assumption made in Nations Unbound: ‘By living their lives across borders, transmigrants find themselves confronted with and engaged in the nation-building processes of two or more nation-states’ (Basch et al. 1994: 22, 34) – a premise that unwittingly privileges state structures and denies migrants their human agency. However, I submit that unless there is some deliberateness on the part of migrants to contribute to the nation, their incidental involvement in national processes cannot be adduced as necessarily issuing from transnationalism conceived as a ‘type of consciousness’ (Vertovec 1999: 450), an ideology of and belief in the nation without borders. Although in the homeland, nationality derives largely from the accident of birth in a given place, that fatality is rescinded in the immigrant’s case because of the opening of choice. Among those who settle in liberal-democratic societies, the immigrant can consciously choose – in a way not fully accessible to the territorially ensconced non-migrant – the placements of affection, the formal political belonging through citizenship and the curtailment or nurturing of links with the facts and accidents of birth. The assumption that immigrants are latent transnationalists derives from the untenable antecedent assumption that, because contemporary migrations are (correctly) seen as a product of global capitalism, economic migrants (from which we exclude refugees) would not have left the homeland had they not been impelled by economic factors. In his famous essay on ‘Travelling cultures’, Clifford (1992: 108), for example, writes that ‘Such cultures of displacement and transplantation are inseparable from specific, if violent, histories of economic, political and cultural interaction’. A statement that seeks to signal the varieties and specificities of travel unwittingly implies a parallelism, if not comparability, in ‘cultural, political and economic compulsions’ (ibid.). The simultaneous lumping and disaggregation legitimizes a portrait of economic migrants as people all of whom would have preferred to ‘stay home’. Thus driven by the ‘violence’ of the market, economic migrants are presumed, at least, to cherish the nation in their hearts as they sojourn or settle down elsewhere. It becomes almost taken for granted that at their destinations, emigrants will be transnationalists. But there are a number of problems with this view. In the first place, this assumption runs counter to what is well established in the migration litera-
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ture: it is not the poorest who migrate, and those who do get to move are driven by desires for the modern and for the metropolitan lifestyles imbibed from the imagery of the mass media, formal education systems and homecoming migrants. In other words, many who ‘stay home’ would rather be living elsewhere if only they could (hence, are also ‘travellers’ in Clifford’s view); and many who have left need not have been miserable economically at home. The economism in immigrants’ constant refrain about the ‘hardship of life back home’ may conceal many other motives for emigrating; but that refrain, often accepted uncritically, acquires a life of its own. Second, there are indeterminable numbers of migrants who leave their homelands as a wilful strategy to distance themselves from painful memories. One survey of immigrant parents in California reveals that ‘over half (57%) reported that they seldom talked to their children about the Philippines and close to threequarters (72%) admitted that their family seldom celebrated special days connected with the Philippines’, symptomatic of a ‘cultural void’ and a distancing from the homeland (Espiritu and Wolf 2001). That immigrants are transnationalists cannot therefore be presumed but rather must be proved. In Tölölyan’s (1996: 30) summary statement: ‘a diaspora is never merely an accident of birth … lacking collective practices that underscore (not just) their difference from others but also their similarity to each other and their links to the people in the homeland’. At the same time, however, the apparently anti-nationalist act of erasing memories of the homeland need not necessarily be a repudiation of the nation. Carsten (1995: 317) shows in her study of villagers in Langkawi in Malaysia – whose migration histories can be traced to such disparate origins as Kedah and other parts of Malaysia, southern Thailand, Aceh and Minangkabau in presentday Indonesia, even India and Hong Kong – that ‘the past, or where they have come from, has no special value or authority’. She asserts: ‘There is no sense that villagers are anxious to maintain traditions from their diverse places of origin. The emphasis is on absorbing and blending rather than on maintaining regional and cultural difference’ (ibid.: 324). The creative process of forgetting and the active forging of new and shared identities with little reference to the past are related to the wider phenomenon of kinship in Southeast Asia, which has been labelled ‘structural amnesia’ or ‘genealogical amnesia’. The Austronesian stress on ‘horizontal’ siblingship (rather than ‘vertical’ lineage descent) facilitates attachment to new places and co-residents in a region where, historically, spatial mobility has been endemic. Although overlaid by the colonial Spanish discourse on ‘the family’, Filipinos share the Austronesian emphasis on siblingship (Aguilar 1998: 57–8). Because of creative forgetting, migrants anticipate the future and build a broadly based identity based on marital alliances and exchanges in the place of settlement. This aspect of the kinship system is often overlooked in internal, regional or transcontinental migration. The impact of global telecommunications technology on genealogical amnesia remains unexamined. Langkawi may or may not be very different from Daly City. For now, we can only note that, except for passing references to ‘strategic forgetting’ (Pratt 2002:
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132), the processes of collective forgetting as known to have been deployed in Austronesian cultures have not been addressed in studies of transnationalism. Many first-generation Filipino immigrants in the USA (and, also, to my personal knowledge, Australia) may retain their identity as Filipinos and may even be quite insistent about it, but – while possibly cherishing some fond memories – may also regard the Philippines as a nugatory place. An examination of familial dynamics undertaken among Filipinos in some parts of California reinforces the point that the relationship between migrants and the transnation cannot be taken for granted, because the homeland may be remembered but regarded in profoundly negative, anti-national terms. To exert control, some immigrant Filipinos threaten their children who do not behave according to parental expectations with banishment to the Philippines, as Wolf ’s (2002: 362, 368) pioneering study of the contradictions of immigrant Filipino families has shown. Through parental threats, the national homeland becomes a site of familial deportation. In pursuit of this form of discipline and punishment, some children have been, so to speak, ‘exiled back’ to the Philippines. Those ‘exilic’ journeys to the homeland do not conform to diasporic visions of return but are made possible precisely because parents have maintained social fields across state boundaries. In this case, transnationalism generates anti-national sentiments even as it sustains national-turned-ethnic identity among immigrants. The negative transnationalism described here appears to be worlds apart from cosmopolitanism, which, in one view, delights at engagement with alien cultures (Hannerz 1996) or, from other perspectives, may not be fully universalistic but nonetheless partakes of some attachment to certain humanistic ideals (Cheah and Robbins 1998). Transnationalism may even be anti-cosmopolitan. Transnational immigrant Filipino parental practices emphasize ‘the family’ as a positive basis of Filipino identity. At the same time, ‘the family’ is also ‘a deep source of stress and alienation which, for some, has led to internal struggles and extreme despair as manifested by [high] rates of depression and suicidal thoughts’ (Wolf 2002: 347). Although familial conflict is not surprising, what is not easy to reconcile ‘is the high level of Filipino assimilation and economic success in the US particularly when compared with other immigrant groups, juxtaposed with the despair, alienation and unhappiness experienced by a significant proportion of youth’ (ibid.: 458). Grappling with US assimilatory and ‘Filipino’ familial pressures, children of immigrants experience what Wolf calls ‘emotional transnationalism which situates them between different generational and locational points of reference – their parents’, sometimes also their grandparents’, and their own – both the real and the imagined’ (ibid.: 350; italics in original). The transnational parental practices of immigrant Filipinos issue from idealized cultural norms transported from the homeland, but also from realities in the USA that immigrant parents may not be able to bring together with expectations conceived in their minds prior to immigration. Unlike immigrants from non-English-speaking countries (among whom children often serve as the linguistic bridge between parents and American society), the fact that Filipinos speak English on arrival in the USA leads them to claim, relative to their
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offspring, a privileged understanding of American society. On the basis of claiming to know US society as well as Filipino culture, immigrant parents assert their authority to impose familial practices that turn out to be riddled with contradictions and that betray their lack of understanding of the milieu in which their children actually lead their lives. Paradoxically, these strategies, which involve the reality or threat of deportation back to the Philippines, get labelled as ‘Filipino’ even if these bear greater resemblance to the statist strategy of imperial Britain in dumping its convicts in Australia than with what most Filipinos in the Philippines could, or would, do.
Modes of re-imagining and de-imagining the nation The facile assumption that transmigrants who create and sustain social fields across territorial limits adhere to the nationalism of the homeland elides the complex processes of re-imagining and de-imagining the nation among immigrants. While some retain and deepen their sense of nationhood, others disavow, forget and negate the nation. Many seem engaged in transnationalism but, on closer analysis, may be merely consuming the nation commercially as business interests market ‘nostalgia’ through local ethnic/national newspapers as well as through global television networks (Vergara 1996: 94–5). Transmigrants may be no more than spectators of the nation from the other side of the ocean. Global mass media, no doubt, can connect immigrants to the country from whence they came. Along with floating emblems of the nation – flags, photographs, posters, magazines and books – global media make the imagination of the nation possible in a way that ‘staying home’ would not allow. But, beyond the pedestrian insight that global telecommunications compress time and space and facilitate engagement with the homeland, we must inquire into the complex nexus and mediations by which the nation is seen, perceived and beheld by migrants. This question is particularly pertinent for the Philippines in light of the events that compelled Joseph Estrada’s removal from the presidency on 20 January 2001. During this period, reports indicated that an unprecedented 400,000 or so readers viewed the Internet version of the Philippine Daily Inquirer (Tiglao 2001). Overseas Filipinos continually updated themselves with events in Manila, and many were deeply involved in electronic discussion groups and in circulating petitions to Philippine-based politicians. When Estrada’s ousting finally materialized, it was celebrated as heralding ‘a more inclusive notion and practice of citizenship with the active participation of Filipinos dispersed the world over’, whose physical locations outside the country did not deter them from ‘intervening in and interrogating even the most local struggles’ (Rivera 2001). But what sort of ‘virtual citizenship’ is involved in logging on the Net? How do the various moments of long-distance engagement with the nation relate to each other? How is the reading of electronic news during moments of political crisis different from their everyday reading? Is the consumption of electronic news ‘participation’ or mere spectatorship? What difference did Internet users outside the Philippines make to Estrada’s departure from office? How ‘real’ was their supposed intervention?
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In the case of media spectatorship, Shobat and Stam (1996) have argued that this phenomenon can occupy a liminal, polymorphous, contradictory and politically ambivalent, if also asymmetrically structured, space. Its analysis ‘must therefore explore the gaps and tensions among the different levels, the diverse ways that text, apparatus, history and discourse construct the spectator, and the ways that the spectator as subject/interlocutor shapes the encounter’ (ibid.: 159). To examine the claim of a borderless nationalism, we need to ask whether global media help in ‘the refraction of even “world events” into a specific imagined world of vernacular readers’ (Anderson 1991: 63), listeners and viewers . In other words, we need to investigate if the homeland’s transnational media filter world events and convey their specific national meanings to overseas migrants such that the latter apprehend the world from the perspective of the homeland. We need to investigate the highly contingent effects of ‘staying in touch’ with the country of origin through satellite broadcasts or newspapers on the Internet. Do such immigrants feel and act wedded to and immersed in the homeland as if they had never left? Or do they by turns ‘tune in’ and ‘tune out’ the homeland as they carry on with the multiple compartments of their lives in their countries of settlement? Do transnational migrants engage in multi-focal visions and practices, apprehending some realities of the world through the new country’s media and some others through the homeland’s media? Whatever the results of such an examination of the renationalizing or denationalizing effects of global telecommunications, it is also possible that immigrants may claim to shun the homeland and imagine themselves as no longer Filipinos but unconsciously persist in seeing and acting according to the cultural tools, resources and meanings learned from the country of birth. Others may apply every effort to retain their Philippine ways but unsuspectingly acquire the manner of life in the land of settlement. The social psychology of transnationalism is exceedingly complex, and facile generalizations merely gloss over the complexity of migrant experiences. Some immigrants who arrived in the USA as young children have turned to the education system to rediscover their natal country. They overcame ‘feelings of denial, shame, insecurity, loneliness and inferiority about being Filipino’ by exploring Philippine and Filipino-American history and deliberately understanding the Filipino culture of their parents and local communities (Strobel 1997: 67). Through ‘decolonization’, which in this context refers to the process of recovering the self and healing the wounds of dislocation, the migrant methodically seeks to know and value the nation of origin. Blooming as a transnationalist, one immigrant learned to assert: ‘Being Filipino is in the heart. What is it that you cherish and love despite everything and that brings you both joy and sorrow? For me a part of that is Filipino’ (ibid.: 69). The reconstruction of the Filipino self has also enabled these immigrants to reintegrate themselves into familial structures and to reverse the cultural amnesia of their parents. As another transnationalist avers in reference to her mother, who began to narrate more of the family’s history: ‘It was [as] if I had opened a new door into her memory’ (ibid.: 72; italics in original). These examples suggest that, depending on multiple
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factors in the country of residence, the transnation can exist as a collective project. But its discursive field is a highly constrained one, with memory and forgetting doubly implicated and having to compete with the paradoxes of antinational transnationalism. Akin to some first-generation immigrants in the USA, many migrant workers in Asia and elsewhere consolidate and deepen their Filipinoness as they grapple with feelings of dislocation and racial-cum-national discrimination and stigmatization, crises of gender roles and identities, unfamiliar cultural norms and state practices, and physical abuse and other forms of violence against personhood (Aguilar 1996; Chin 1997; Constable 1997; Margold 2002). Faced with a myriad of pressures and challenges in a foreign land, or on the open sea aboard a merchant vessel, the individual migrant worker often feels atomized and isolated. But in coming to terms with double liminality, the individual migrant undergoes the reconstitution of self in a journey analogous to a ritual process, albeit secular, modern consumerist and transnational (Aguilar 2002). Excluded from the dominant society, which tends to lump foreign workers into unsavoury stereotypical images, the labour migrant is propelled into a reappreciation of national identity and belonging. The prism of nation acquires an acute salience when issues of personal and social identity converge for the migrant who strives to cope with life’s vicissitudes and the affronts to the worker’s humanity and dignity (Aguilar 1996). However, even as the migrant worker beholds the nation from a distance in a way that he or she could never have done from within the physical nation space, there are moments of unease about the country of origin and embarrassment caused by co-nationals in the global workplace. For instance, construction workers in the Gulf states who have returned to the Philippines recall the shame they felt whenever a fellow Filipino was convicted of a crime and the punishment meted out in a public spectacle involved decapitation or mutilation. A worker recounts one afternoon when rumours began to spread as they strolled to window-shop: ‘It is a Filipino, they are saying. So we are already feeling ashamed. Kliftic is thief in Arabic. Filipino kliftic, we hear. We look at each other with grim faces’; as they walked to the site of punishment, he and his companions thought: Maybe if it is a Filipino, we will turn back, we cannot watch. But then we get to the place where they are putting the convict out of a van, a black van. And we see, it is a Pakistani! [laughs] All the Filipinos are smiling again, laughing, because it is a Pakistani. Some are even jumping, yay! (Margold 2002: 229) The connection with a criminal as a potential fellow national generates the contradictory feelings of solidarity and shame, even as it redounds divisively into an internationally competitive and non-cosmopolitan transnationalism. Despite the celebration of multi-location, transnational migrancy does not presuppose the breaking down of localism and national attachment; nor does it necessarily lead
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to universalism and global class identification. But while potentially cosmopolitan connectedness shatters under the weight of national sensitivities, the nation itself does not come off unscathed in the force fields of transnational encounters. The rejoicing is limited, not only because the culprit could well have been a co-national but also because, in fearing the social discipline while also internalizing the rigours of public order in a foreign land, migrant workers eventually reflect on the state of law and order in the Philippines. They entertain the thought that spectacular forms of punishment might help to alleviate the national situation (ibid.). In Japan, Filipina migrant workers wonder if the Philippines could have performed better economically had it ‘adopted’ the efficiency of the ‘Japanese working system’ (Osteria 1994: 42). In Hong Kong, one Filipina worker expresses the disjunctive sentiments in these words: ‘If you’re here for a long time and you go back to the Philippines, you see how poor it is – the traffic in Manila is so bad, the transportation so bad. I think Hong Kong is so much more organized; the technology is newer’ (Constable 2002: 390). Migrant workers derive a sense of achievement in literally having seen the world, having conquered any feelings of fear and inferiority or apprehension in dealing with non-nationals, and having acquired the tempo of living in a modern, efficient society. ‘In their liminal state, the reflective thoughts of labour migrants make them recognize objective differences between the country of their current residence and the homeland with its perceived shortcomings’ (Aguilar 2002: 431). This ‘plurality of vision’ (Constable 2002: 386) arising from multiple locations leaves open the future of transnationalism among migrant workers in the event that they are unable to resolve the conflicting impulses of loving and denigrating the homeland. As transnational workers, they may regard their remittances as contributions to nation building yet feel alienated from the nation. They may securely fasten their identity to Filipinoness yet dissociate themselves from the physical homeland. The lingering disjunctures in migrant experiences may result in some form of exilic existence with a homeland that beckons them, but which they eschew yet cannot deny and forget. Theirs may be a type of anti-national transnationalism akin to that of immigrants in the USA who value Filipinoness but not the Philippines. Their transnationality may ultimately rest upon a dislocated identity, a displacement of affect, a deterritorialized transnation that obliterates the nation. Devoid of fantasy and illusion, the social imagination may be so fractured, yielding ‘a fragmentation of self ’ (Constable 2002: 215) as to partake of homelessness notwithstanding the territorial homeland, of nomadism despite the local anchors of social life, of perpetual liminality amid an already reconstituted, status-filled self. One wonders what sort of imagined community is nurtured in such an ‘ethnoscape’, to use Appadurai’s term, if migrants are uneasy about their ideational links to a putative place of origin.
Journeys of transnationality? In the emergence of the nation as an imagined community, physical and metaphorical journeys enabled the formation of togetherness and comradeship
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among creoles within the same administrative unit, the secular pilgrimages serving as the key mechanism for such imagining. Among today’s migrants, the physical journeys that may trigger the imagining of a transnational community beyond the immediate neighbourhood of fellow nationals are travels to other parts of the world where co-nationals are found and to the homeland itself. However, the non-territorially bounded identification with the nation can be severely tested when higher-status Filipinos, such as permanent immigrants in North America or Australasia, meet lower-status Filipinos working as domestic servants or manual labourers in such places as Hong Kong and Singapore. On their sojourns, comparatively affluent tourists seek to dissociate themselves from lowly regarded migrant workers, whose initial assumption, unless tempered by experience, is that all Filipinos they meet abroad are contract workers like themselves. However, it does not take long for migrant workers to gain cognizance of the heterogeneity and separateness of different classes of Filipino. Within the country of employment, the physical journeys to places where meetings with potential co-transnationals take place negate transnationality because these encounters encourage segregation rather than communion, a tangible parting of ways rather than an illusory fellowship. Although segregation occurs in the homeland, the expectation of behaviour overseas, initially informed by a sense of oneness, is quite different. The momentary encounters that may provide a fleeting occasion to affirm solidarity through a simple gesture or a short greeting may often be avoided deliberately. In Singapore, for instance, journeys through public spaces by Filipinos in different occupational categories are marked by wilful detachment and estrangement. Men and women of professional standing present their public personas in such a way as to forestall their being mistaken for domestic workers, even to the extent of camouflaging their nationality. Acquiescing with the dominant society’s views about, and prejudices against, Filipino migrant workers, those employed in professional work drive wedges that divide the presumably unitary Filipino transnational community by erecting social and discursive walls, and by constantly protesting against homogenizing and totalizing stereotypes; ‘Not all Filipinos are maids’ is a constant assertion (Aguilar 1996: 120–5). In Canada, the very processes of arrival are marked by distinctions of unequal worth. The journey of the immigrant is juxtaposed as infinitely superior to the journey of the nanny, the former achieved through the ‘regular’ immigration system, the latter through the insecure route of a ‘pre-immigrant’. Filipina nannies in Vancouver are stigmatized by fellow Filipinas who are landed immigrants, the latter casting the former in the role of ‘husband stealers’ who resort to this strategy as a means of solving their uncertain migration status. ‘Moments of stigmatization tend to take place in transit, often quite literally on public transit’ (Pratt 2002: 132). The brief journeys for imagining community are thus truncated into disunity and disharmony. The presence of co-nationals in the same overseas location is confirmed, but the connection does not go beyond the fatedness of coming from the same national origin. The moment of communion is barren. The one common journey that migrants undertake is the trip back to the homeland, the one secular pilgrimage with the potential to adhere transnationals
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to fellow transnationals. Parenthetically, journeys to the centre were crucial to the territorially unbounded and poly-ethnic religious community and dynastic realm. The tolerance of diversity in these pre-national communities remains a dream in Appadurai’s (1993: 428) transnation. In travelling back to the homeland, usually aboard an aeroplane, the repatriate is unavoidably aware of the presence of co-nationals who are as much co-pilgrims as himself or herself. In an aeroplane that, say, begins in London and stops in Rome, Abu Dhabi, Delhi, Singapore or Hong Kong, then on to Manila, the chances that co-nationals will board the plane along its route are increased. The reality of the global spread of fellow nationals becomes palpable, and the transnational community acquires its focal impression. The synchronicity and simultaneity of air travel transpose it to such nationalist realms as singing the national anthem in unison, particularly as the plane’s landing may be greeted with applause and a chorus of cheers. The transitory bonding between transnational migrants may finally come to pass. But the plane ride is inherently transient, and soon the transnationals are jostling for space in the paradigmatic temple of the transnation: the airport with its priests and acolytes, the immigration and customs officers. The behaviour of these state functionaries does not always nurture a reverence for the nation. Nonetheless, the immigrant queues at Manila’s international airport embrace nationals and ex-nationals alike, as the counters that process the travel documents of ‘Filipinos’ accept returning residents along with balikbayan or migrant returnees, regardless of citizenship. In this case, the immigration queues overflow with transnational meanings. However, the actual return to the homeland is often replete with contradictions. Stereotypically, nationalist intellectuals view, and thus resent, return migrants from the USA as akin to neo-colonialists who brag about their new status as residents or even citizens of the modern centre (Vergara 1996; Rafael 1997). Indeed, their original departure from the homeland has often been seen as a form of national betrayal. Emigrants who strain to fit back adopt choreographed gestures ‘as if one had never left home’; otherwise they would be seen as strangers of some sort. Labour migrants, on the other hand, have been elevated by state discourse to the status of modern heroes; as such, one would expect their homecomings to differ from those settled permanently in advanced economies. But even migrant workers on their return may also receive ambivalent signals of welcome and unwelcome because of their new modes of behaviour and thinking (Aguilar 2002: 431–2). The physical homecoming may produce a welter of ambivalent signals that, by the time migrant workers troop back to the temple of the transnation, they may actually desire to quicken the exit from the country and hasten the arrival at their places of work and residence. As Constable’s (2002) study of Filipina domestic servants in Hong Kong shows, fitting back into the homeland is not easy, as the migrant situation has afforded them a sphere of autonomy and new senses of personhood that cannot be replicated ‘at home’. The transformation of the migrant self cannot easily be submerged or concealed, particularly when conditions in the homeland precipitate the self-awareness of changes in the individual. Many migrant
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workers, therefore, feel more ‘at home’ in their workplaces outside the Philippines than in the Philippines itself. Not surprisingly, as Constable (ibid.: 391) reports: ‘The feeling that “it is sometimes difficult to go back” – described to me in more or less poignant terms by several women – was not uncommon’. As a result, avoidance of return visits becomes a strategy for asserting the self and maintaining its coherence, as homecoming risks the ‘fragmentation of self ’ (ibid.: 215). These narratives of ambivalent returns encapsulate the risks of undoing the moment of transnational communion in the physical journey to the homeland. At the end of the day, the teleology of return may be undermined, suppressed, postponed or forgotten.
Creole nationalism: a reprise? A lesson to be learned from the origins of nationalism is that a later generation of immigrants becomes critical to the conceiving of the nation. In the case of today’s immigrants, the children they bear in the land of settlement may constitute the catalytic group in charting the prospects of transnationalism. Like the creole pioneers of nationalism, the offspring of immigrants, the second generation, feel the subordination and marginalization more acutely than their parents, who may feel excluded but still have memories of the former life in the homeland to cushion fears and experiences of discrimination. Members of the second generation have no such memory; but in groping for a mode of inclusion and participation in their land of birth, the memory of the parental homeland may be recovered and recultivated. Parental nationality becomes the second generation’s ethnicity. Survey data on children of immigrants in the USA indicate that this generation deepens in their sense of being Filipino or Filipino-American even if they are monolingual English speakers and know little about the Philippines whose identity they claim (Espiritu and Wolf 2001). Their national/ethnic identity may be asserted even if the picture of their social selves is associated with such simulacra as homeland cuisine (especially adobo) and Baguio carvings, and with notions of family that turn out to be extremely contradictory. But the most important point about these children of immigrants is that they consciously cultivate an ethnic identity in order to fit into the multicultural USA. The crafting of difference is in pursuit of sameness. As Espiritu (2002b) observes of the multiple identities of second-generation Filipinos, narratives of resistance are intertwined with narratives of conformity even as some consciously seek to construct their own hybrid identities as Filipino-Americans. Not unlike the creole pioneers, they cannot escape from the fatedness of their birthplace. Thus the second generation may identify with their parental homeland not for that homeland’s sake but for their homeland’s sake. In a context where multiculturalism is permitted or even celebrated (which is not to say that multiculturalism is the same everywhere), not to have an ethnicity – a discrete other culture – is to be misplaced somehow. In such an altered historical context, the terms of national belonging have changed such that everyone nurtures and even conjures the idea
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that they belong to a definite elsewhere in order to belong to the here and now. With their identities ‘forged out of their confrontation with and struggle against the dominant culture’ (ibid.: 265), the transnationalism of second-generation immigrants, therefore, is more concerned with fitting into their own native country than with connecting to their parent’s native land. In other words, the apparent transnationalism is a roundabout way to nationalism. An originary otherness serves as key to the new template of assimilation. Thus what appears as borderless or deterritorialized post-national identity may signify the reverse: the desire for inclusion in the nation, bounded and territorial, where secondgeneration migrants ineluctably lead their daily lives. As Vicente Rafael notes incisively, the attempt by some Filipino-Americans to learn Tagalog ‘tends to be seen by such students as a means to find for themselves a place in American society as American ethnics rather than as foreign nationals … as minoritized Americans wishing to assimilate, however fitfully, into a multicultural middle-class milieu here’ (SSRC 1999: 39). In this light, the ‘decolonization’ experience of Filipino-Americans mentioned earlier may be seen as a step towards fitting into – even ‘colonizing’ – the USA. To rediscover the Philippines in ‘decolonization’ activities that aim to heal the social memories of immigrants does not mean liberating the parental country or even seeking a niche in it. Rather, quite instrumentally, it involves finding the post-colonial country in one’s heart in order to claim some legitimate space in the country of settlement. Reclaiming the parental country as the basis of ethnicity may eventually result in a range of transnational acts that directly link the ethnic youth to the parental homeland. However, contrary to nationalist apprehensions, involvement in transnational activities ‘does not block successful integration into the host society, but facilitates it by endowing second-generation youths with cultural anchors … a “spiritual country”, a point of reference to establish their distinct identities and sense of self-worth’ (Portes 1999: 472). Dusenbery (1995: 33) observes instructively that, in the absence of a territorial Sikh homeland, ‘one of the appeals of Khalistan to diasporan Sikhs may be the creation of a publicly recognized “country of origin”, from which Sikhs may legitimately make claim to their own political voice and to the perquisites of public support for cultural diversity … in their countries of residence’. In Dusenbery’s (ibid.: 32) analysis, state policies of multiculturalism seem to be predicated on a common modernist assumption that one’s ancestral ‘place of origin’ – and, in particular, one’s ‘national origins’ or ‘country of origin’ – in some sense provides the natural building blocks out of which social units – the various ethnic, racial or cultural communities – are constructed in pluralist nation-states. But the predication of multiculturalism on an ancestral homeland translates into a new source of social pressure for the second generation. There must be a territorial homeland ‘out there’ with which to identify, without which one must be resurrected or even invented. This circuitous route to the second generation’s real nation perhaps may explain Appadurai’s (1993: 424–5) suggestion that immigrants who put ‘loyalty to a non-territorial, transnation first’ are not disloyal to
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the USA, because ‘there is a special American way to connect to these global diasporas’. This special way entails wearing the parental nation, with its distinctive spatial sitedness, as a badge of belonging not to it but to the creole’s very own nation. In societies where a hyphenated identity is not permissible and acceptable and where multiculturalism is not an overt state policy, second-generation immigrants may end up searching for identity through other routes. For instance, children of mixed marriages in Japan involving, in many cases, a Filipina mother, suffer from the Japanese myth of a homogeneous nation. Some Japanese kin intentionally derail the cultural identity of children of mixed parentage by suppressing the non-Japanese identity and culture within the family, some even forbidding visits to the maternal homeland (Satake 2000). Consequently, most children of mixed marriages assimilate into Japanese society and, as they grow older, become adept at eluding identification as gaikokujin or non-Western foreigners (Samonte 2001). In such cases, the seeds of transnationalism are being sown on rocky ground. The contrasting cases of the USA and Japan adumbrated here suggest that the potentials of transnationality are not beyond locational and territorial specificities. Identities, national or otherwise, remain enmeshed in the dialectics of physical space. For all that the transnation is or is not, what are the prospects of transgenerational continuity? Difficult as it is to predict the future, the experiences of earlier migrations suggest that, with the emergence of nationalism, the label ‘Filipino’ and the idea of ‘the Philippines’ may endure for several generations (analogous to the categories ‘Chinese’ and ‘China’), as in Louisiana in the American South, where migrants from the Philippines have formed stable settlements since the nineteenth century (Espina 1988). But what these appellations represent to later, more hybridized generations is indeterminate. One source reports that, in the 1950s the ‘Filipinos of Kalk Bay’, the descendants of migrants to Cape Town in the late nineteenth century, ‘are mindful of their motherland’ (MacMicking 1967: 32). Another source reports that the descendants of Tagalog troops sent to help the French in Vietnam in 1858–59 were identifiable in 1965 and indeed met a visiting historian (Abella, n.d.: 176–7). However, we do not know what it means for them to have a part-Philippine ancestry. Neither is it known how these identities have fared in the ensuing history of race relations in both South Africa and Vietnam. The histories of overseas Chinese do suggest that local and international contexts of power relations exert a profound influence upon the identity and historical trajectory of later generations (Chun 1996; Aguilar 2001). With the rising assertion of aboriginality, for instance, it would not be surprising if the descendants of ‘half-caste Filipinos’ in Darwin, Australia, identified in a 1911 census count (Aguilar 2000: 188) would today identify themselves simply as ‘aboriginal’, especially since the Philippine state has made no attempt to make a connection with them. However, among the children of today’s immigrants in multicultural societies like the USA, Australia and Canada, the contemporary politics of identity would point to the likely survival of ‘Filipino’ as a label denoting a particular ethnicity. It is possible then that, at least as a badge,
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Filipinoness may have a transgenerational vitality if such remains the route to national belonging in the country of the migrants’ descendants, even as the Philippines itself struggles to come to terms with these later generations (ibid.).
The spectre of Filipino descent I have avoided any discussion of state initiatives in fostering transnationalism, which many observers consider an important aspect of this global phenomenon. Suffice it to say that state initiatives have verged on the predatory. To post-1960s first-generation immigrants, the Philippine state has extended many concessions, especially on their return visits. In October 2002, the political ramifications of emigrants’ economic bounty led the Philippine Senate to pass a bill on the dualcitizenship rights of natural-born Filipinos. When it is signed into law, the bill would position the Philippines among about half the number of states in the world that recognize dual nationality (cf. Vertovec 1999: 455). The unprecedented passage of the Senate bill highlights the state’s instrumentalist approach to citizenship (Aguilar 1999). Whether ex-citizens will take up the offer enthusiastically, and how Philippine-based intellectuals will come to terms with this development, remains to be seen. On the second generation, the impact of state initiatives is undoubtedly contradictory and paradoxical, as illustrated by the recent participation of second-generation ‘Filipinos’ of mixed parentage in Philippine professional basketball (with comparable cases in the movie industry). Apart from those playing at the collegiate level, some twenty so-called ‘Fil-foreign players’ have participated in the games of the Philippine Basketball Association (Iñigo 2000). A number have sought to build a sporting career in Manila on the basis of having one Filipino parent, their chances of success being greater in the Philippines than in the USA. Although basketball aficionados have welcomed them to the courts because of their height and skills, the participation of ‘direct-hire’ second-generation ‘Filipinos’ – allowed since January 1999 – has caused a stir in the All-Filipino Cup. In September 1999, a senator complained that ‘half-breed players with falsified papers’ have invaded the basketball courts (Reyes 2000). The crisis blew over in April 2000, when Asi Taulava was ordered to be deported for being really ‘a Tongan national’, and in May 2000, when Sonny Alvarado was also ordered to be deported for being really a ‘Puerto Rican-American’. Interestingly, the newspaper reports on this issue have repeatedly interchanged Filipino citizenship with Filipino descent, as if having one Filipino for a parent entitled one to formal political inclusion, as in the immigration queues at the airport. Because professional basketball is ultimately about money, and the ‘half-breeds’ are seen as providing unfair advantage to corporate teams that hire them, the government was asked to intervene. The diasporic collectivity conceived in language and discourse reaches its limits when it begins to collide with the materiality of capitalist and allied state interests. Despite the porosity of political borders, money remains bordered and a coin two-sided. The transnation cannot remain a mere discursive entity
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or narrative field when money is involved, even if paradoxically money through remittances is also seen as a major conduit of transnationalism. Money and nation dance around each other, as in other moments of Philippine history (Aguilar 1998). As a result of state intervention in determining ‘Filipino descent’, amorphous membership in the putative transnation has given way to a new mechanism of legal boundary setting because of the fear that Filipinoness can be claimed fraudulently. Some apparently ‘genuine’ second-generation Filipinos of mixed parentage have been told to leave the parental homeland because of inadmissible evidence of Filipino descent, such as ‘unverified photocopies’ of legal documents that were not ‘duly authenticated’ (Ubac 2000). However, some of those who do provide legal proof of their Filipino origins may behave in inadmissibly un-Filipino ways, thereby testing the meanings and limits of Filipino transnationalism. For instance, the contrast has been made between legal ‘half-breed’ basketball players who have shown little respect for the nation (such as one who was ‘clowning around while the Philippine national anthem was being played, saying the only national anthem he knew was the one that talked of stars and stripes’) and those who have failed to supply legal proof of Filipino descent but have ‘made a not inconsiderable emotional investment in this country’ (de Quiros 2000). Such contrasting behaviour has prompted prominent journalist Conrado de Quiros (ibid.) to ponder the meaning of ‘Filipino descent’, suggesting the possibility of opening it to include those who make ‘emotional investment’ in the Philippines. More importantly, the taken-for-granted connection between generations, subsumed under the given conditions of nature, has been questioned: outside Philippine soil, Filipinoness would seem to be not ‘in the blood’ but ‘in the heart’. The dilemma raises another disturbing possibility: is Filipinoness questionable even among the large population of ‘natural-born’ Filipinos in the Philippines? In fact, the fiasco of Philippine basketball replays the paradoxes of Filipino nationhood and undermines the very roots of transnationalism. The culturally, and possibly somatically, hybrid second-generation ‘Filipino’ reignites the same nagging question that has been raised persistently by the predominantly (hybrid) Chinese–mestizo members of the intellectual and societal elites: ‘Who is the Filipino?’ The uncertainty over the ‘essence’ of Filipinoness has produced for the nation a profound sense of insecurity, friability and defensiveness (Aguilar 1997). The quest for Reinventing the Filipino, as Azurin (1993: 35) titles his book, translates into a search for ‘self and nation’ such that the challenge is to ‘piece together in a more authentic and dynamic manner these diverse parts of our heritage and selfawareness’. But before the interminable road to ‘authenticity’ and ‘wholeness’ is fully crossed, here come the ‘half-breeds’, who also stake a claim to Filipinoness. Who, and what, are they? The children of transnationalism haunt the nation. The first generation would seem to have been ‘lost’, but now they return through their children only to pose the same question about the essence of collective being. Their desired but questioned presence in the parental homeland – akin to an apparition that may be falsifiable – evokes a radical non-transcendence of the dilemmas of Filipino nationhood.
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These ‘half-breeds’, to use Derrida’s phrase via Cheah (1999: 240–1), are constitutive of a ‘paradoxical incorporation’ as they congeal ‘a prosthetic body’. They are the artifice that extends the national body who cannot be denied welcome, even as their presence opens up the repressed and haunting accusations of parental exit as betrayal. Pre-dating Derrida, Philippine cultural beliefs in the spirit world have treated the ‘half-breed’ Spanish–mestizo as the offspring of a tryst between a local maiden and an engkanto, the quintessential preternatural being that is simultaneously feared and admired (Aguilar 1998: 32–44). During the three centuries of Spanish colonialism, the engkanto became a trope for the hegemonic Spanish friar. Spanish–mestizos thus represented a ‘paradoxical incorporation’ into colonial society. Over the centuries, the mestizos’ social ambivalence and the contradictions in the rise of Filipino nationalism have resulted in deep uncertainty about Filipino identity. And now a new cohort of ‘half-breeds’ has descended upon the islands, admired and feared at the same time. They are extensions of the nation who must be welcomed, but they must also be inspected as their physical descent or emotional attachment may be fraudulent. But how does one really determine inclusion of the second generation in the homeland? Are ‘genuine’ ones being turned away and ‘fake’ ones admitted? Who is Filipino? What does Filipinoness mean? The children of immigrants have succeeded in injecting new blood into these vexed questions. Their transnational spectrality ‘contaminates and compromises all our rational efforts at incarnating ideals’ (Cheah 1999: 245). They create a conundrum out of the attempt to fashion a deterritorialized but incorporative nation.
Is there a transnation? It is doubtful if the transnation exists, or if its discursive existence can be made to jibe with social practices and realities, or if there is even coherence in the ambivalent and discordant voices of transnationalism. Perhaps there is some imagination of a transnational community among migrants, but it may well be that there are multiple transnational communities even in a single locality outside the homeland among supposedly the same national-ethnic group of settlers and overseas workers. If there is a transnation, perhaps such is to be conceived in the plural to account for the multiplicity of Filipino transnations, which are as numerous and complex as the number of those that consider themselves overseas Filipinos. But the innumerable, although ultimately finite, number of transnations may be the very sign of the concept’s tenuousness: where, when, and how shall the counting end? At the same time, as we have seen, the transnation may be the focus of a transnationalism without the passion of nationalism; indeed, the passion may be that of an anti-national transnationalism. Although former nationals may continue to craft their identities in relation to or against the homeland, diasporic bonds cannot be so easily conjured. The affective accoutrements of the transnation are exceedingly fluid, evanescent and unstable, eventually undermining its conceptual meaningfulness and the reality it purports to represent. To the extent that transnationalism is deemed to be an ‘ism’, the notion of the transnation is
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rendered superfluous. Moreover, contrary to the ideals of postmodern migrancy, the constraints of transnational bonding and imagination among supposed conationals do not nurture the possibilities of universal cosmopolitan connectedness. For all its failings, the territorial nation still retains the symbolic force with which any post-national politics must contend. That modern technology makes possible unprecedented exchanges, transactions and links across political boundaries is not to be denied. Transnational activities are being vibrantly pursued, and transnational networks do exist in a manner never seen before. But the espousal of such a concept as the transnation, no matter the claim to its being a ‘mere’ discursive phenomenon, rests on shaky, if not outright contradictory, grounds. The lived experiences of migrants, including revelatory encounters amid various modes of travel, highlight the incongruities of the transnation as constituting patriotism’s post-national future. The one pilgrimage route of transnationalism back to the homeland may momentarily crystallize the imagined transnational community, but it may also result in the suspension and even negation of the very idea of a homeland. The transmigrant may find the natal origin indelibly marked on his or her physiology or passport, but such identification may compel the deliberate forgetting of the homeland as a result of contradictions that remain insoluble. The inability to fit back leads to a fragmentation of self in what becomes an exilic existence. Still, creative forgetting may not mean anything at all but a redeployment of ancient cultural strategies. But while transnationalisms among first-generation migrants are highly indeterminate and inconclusive, for the second generation, transnationalism can well be a circuitous route to nationalism under the new terms of belonging dictated by multiculturalism in their, not their parents’, homeland. The discovery of ethnicity serves as a springboard to assimilation of the second generation under the current conditions that prevail in ‘multicultural’ societies. Paradoxically, the apparently borderless or deterritorialized post-national identity accentuates the strength of the bounded, territorial nation-space, where second-generation migrants ineluctably lead their daily lives. Conversely, the attempts by the parental homeland to embrace and reincorporate the second generation into its own nation-space have been attended by the unspeakable possibilities of fraud and inauthenticity. Members of the second generation who do not have any natal connection to the parental homeland but who have stepped onto ancestral soil, so to speak, have been deemed to have metaphorically ‘returned’ and, in the process, have come to embody the haunting return of questions of national identity. In the parental homeland, however, the constant regeneration of the national question may be the very echo of the inescapability, durability and potentiality of the nation, which no discursive transnation may yet surmount and supersede. Acknowledgements In addition to the International Conference on Transnational Communities in the Asia-Pacific, this paper was also presented in the Humanities Seminar Series at James Cook University on 3 November 2000. I would like to thank all participants
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in both meetings. I also wish to thank Russell McGregor, Manuel P. Diaz, Habibul Khondker and Caroline Hau for reading and offering comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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6
Expatriating is patriotic? The discourse on ‘new migrants’ in the People’s Republic of China and identity construction among recent migrants from the PRC Pál Nyíri
At a workshop on the theoretical and conceptual issues of transnationalism, Ewa Morawska (2000) pointed out that one distinguishing element of migration today is the state legitimization of sustained practices of dual anchoredness or dual allegiance (see also Vertovec and Cohen 1999: xiii). After 1978, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) moved to (re-)legitimize, by both institutional and discursive means, such practices in established overseas Chinese communities. In this chapter, I attempt to show how it has progressed to the next step: celebrating migration itself as a patriotic and modern act, thus encouraging transnational practices among people who are in the process of, or just preparing for, leaving China. In another paper (Nyíri 2002), I focused on the policy aspects of this process. Here, I discuss how the state discursively constructs ‘new migrant’ culture and how it engages in imagining the transnational community of new migrants and operationalizes imaginaries of the home province and the homeland. I also attempt to show how identity construction among recent migrants is manipulated by elites that participate in this state-promoted imagining process. The method I employ is a combination of anthropological fieldwork conducted in Europe over the past decade1 with a cultural studies approach to texts produced by new migrants from the PRC in both Europe and elsewhere.2 The production of media narratives by migrants in parallel with the process of migration, and the relation of such narratives to media production in the home country, which I discuss below, is an aspect of Chinese transnationalism of the 1990s and 2000s that calls for such a combination. The mixed method I chose allows for the tracing of certain discursive tropes – both content and terminology – from the official discourse in the PRC into lowbrow cultural production, migrant-produced texts and, finally, oral narratives. It bridges work by anthropologists of Chinese transnationalism such as Ong Aihwa (1998; Ong and Nonini 1997) with cultural studies of the influence of official identity discourse on lowbrow narratives in China itself (Barmé 1999). It is close to the method adopted by Louisa Schein (2002) in her studies of Miao/Hmong transnational interactions between the USA, Southeast Asia and China. It must be emphasized that the texts I analyse are narratives produced for public consumption, and public and private narratives of identity can be very
Expatriating is patriotic? 121 different, with public narratives largely serving the purposes of elites in gaining cultural and economic capital (see Duara 1995). Nonetheless, public narratives have an impact on private constructions of identity and are, in any case, an important component in the development of overseas Chinese identities.
The ‘new migrant’ discourse As Zhuang Guotu (2000: 45), a senior scholar of overseas Chinese in the PRC who is also involved in various overseas Chinese affairs organs and can be seen as representing the official point of view, writes: ‘two … changes … have attracted the attention of the Chinese government from 1978 onwards. One is the Overseas Chinese wealth, and the other is the new Chinese emigrants’. In publicly available official PRC literature on overseas Chinese affairs, people who have left China since 1978, including students, are now usually referred to as xin yimin, a term that obscures the traditional official dichotomy of huaqiao (Chinese citizens residing overseas) and huaren (ethnic Chinese citizens of foreign countries).3 Furthermore, the Qiaoban’s figures published on new migrants generally put together those who have left on student visas and work contracts with those who have left on family-sponsored or investor immigrant visas as well as with illegal migrants (Tanaka 2000). New migrants are recognized as a highly useful resource for economic construction in China, as an attraction for foreign investors and business partners, and as leaders of overseas Chinese communities in Japan, the USA, and Europe, which are judged to be losing touch with the homeland and Chinese culture. This approach, which involves arguments of development, modernity and patriotism, is reflected in a series of publications in the overseas Chinese studies journals, Huaqiao Huaren Lishi Yanjiu and Bagui Qiaoshi, as well as other periodicals by officials of the Returned Overseas Chinese Association (Qiaolian) and the Overseas Exchange Commission (the NGO that duplicates the Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau, or Qiaoban) (Zhongguo Xinwen 1999; Cheng Xi 1999a, 1999b; Tan Tianxing 1997; Zhu Huiling 1995; Shanghai New Migrants Research Project Team 1997) and interviews with them. These articles state that, since the late 1980s, the Qiaoban and the Foreign Affairs Ministry have issued directives on strengthening new migrant work. In one article in Fujian Qiaobao, new migrants from Mingxi are seen as people who want to become modern (zou xiang shijie, they ‘march towards the world’) and contribute to the development of the homeland: Thanks to benefits provided by Mingxi County, the column (duiwu) of new migrants going to Europe that grows day after day plays an important role in the construction of the homeland. (Zhang Zhongbin 1997) Another article (significant because an anonymous work team wrote it clearly on instructions from the Qiaoban and the Public Security Bureau) recommends the provision of better services to migrants such as the establishment of municipal
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migration service centres. It quotes the State Council’s ‘opinion on unfolding new migrant work’ (Guanyu kaizhan xin yimin gongzuo di yijian, probably 1995): Since reform and opening, people who have left mainland China to reside abroad (called ‘new migrants’ for short) have continuously been more numerous. They are currently rising as an important force within overseas Chinese and ethnic Chinese communities. In the future, they will become a backbone of forces friendly to us in America and some other developed western countries.… Strengthening new migrant work has important realistic meaning and deep-going, far-reaching significance for promoting our country’s modernizing construction, implementing the unification of the motherland, expanding our country’s influence and developing our country’s relations with the countries of residence. (Shanghai New Migrants Research Project Team 1997) Other articles also judge migration as normal and beneficial to China for the above reasons, although they condemn toudu (human trafficking). It is noteworthy that students are always included in the discussion of new migrants. In 1992, the State Council issued a note stating that the principles of work with students overseas were to ‘support study abroad, promote return, [uphold] freedom of movement’. At the same time, the Communist Party, in a ‘Decision on some questions of establishing a socialist market economy’, exhorted people to ‘promote overseas individuals to serve the country’. From then on, ‘serve the country’ (wei guo fuwu) became the standard slogan for overseas students, replacing ‘return to serve’ (huiguo fuwu) (Cheng Xi 1999b). Both Cheng Xi (of the Qiaolian’s Institute of Overseas Chinese History) and Zhu Huiling (head of division at the national Qiaoban) emphasize the contributions that (ex-)students can make to China being abroad, and either evade (Zhu) the problem of a brain drain or judge that its negative effects are outweighed by the positive side (Cheng). Cheng, for example, claims that a major reason why India has received more development aid than any other country is that Indians long ago started working in international organizations. An ex-student now working in a Paris bank has signed over a hundred deals with China; Cheng argues that had he returned to China, he would not have been able to make such an impact. Counting Chinese ex-students who are professors in US, Japanese and Australian universities or executives of successful Internet companies is part of the media discourse about the rise of China.4 Let us recall that, in 1978, editorializing on ‘Attention Must Be Paid to Overseas Chinese Affairs’, Renmin Ribao justified the argument that despite having left China, ‘the vast majority of the overseas Chinese are patriotic’, in terms of ‘class analysis’: Since the people in the old China could hardly earn a living, some of them were compelled to … cross the seas and work as coolies abroad. … The vast
Expatriating is patriotic? 123 majority … are still labouring people. … They are also oppressed and pushed around by imperialists, colonialists and monopoly capitalists. (translated in Peking Review 1978: 14–16) In the 1980s, students abroad were sometimes still criticized as unpatriotic and their host countries as ‘brain plunderers’ (Zhuang 2000: 51, note 21).5 However, in just over two decades, the nature of emigration has turned from treacherous to tolerated, from ideologically suspect to patriotic. A similar re-evaluation has taken place with regard to sportsmen who have left China to compete in other countries (Barmé 1999 mentions Chire Koyama’s case). Even some tabloid-style stories of Chinese women abroad marrying foreigners portray them as selfsacrificing patriots rather than as traitors to national dignity or just victims of ignorance. In Yu Lihua’s short story ‘Longing’, a Chinese student in the America marries a hateful old American to help her mother and boyfriend come to the USA. In a newspaper story, a student in Japan works as a ‘drinking companion’ in a bar and falls in love with a married Japanese man of nearly 60 because his ‘great predilection for Chinese culture and especially Chinese antiquities’ moves her (Li Jian 1999). As Geremie Barmé (1999: 255–80) has entitled his description of the ways in which sex with foreigners has been fitted into lowbrow production of patriotism: ‘To Screw Foreigners Is Patriotic.’ Barmé (1999) describes the literature (mainly pulp fiction) and soap operas about recent migrants, sometimes called ‘new migrant literature’ (xin yimin wenxue), that have thrived in the 1990s. As he points out, this literature, especially in the early 1990s, partly conformed to the state’s goal to portray capitalist enterprise – in which the texts’ heroes engage – positively while condemning capitalist regimes. Thus the Chinese Writers’ Association pointed out in 1992, they possessed a ‘patriotic spirit’ (aiguo qinghuai) (ibid.: 456–7, note 116). Some of the ‘new migrant literature’ criticizes the state of social relations in China by contrasting them with the foreign background against which the action is set; nonetheless, most of it keeps re-‘othering’ the West in a particular way associated with the experience of migrants. What in essence are official publications in the two overseas Chinese studies journals show how the state brokers of migration think of the migrants: as people who remain part of the Chinese economy and polity, strengthening the ties of overseas Chinese to China; and as highly skilled professionals and successful business people improving the standing of Chinese in their host societies. The language used to describe them is the late totalitarian language saturated with ‘ideologemes’ (Epstein 1995: 5–7), words combining description with valuation, that is used in publications describing society in China, not the more culturalist, traditionalist language used in reportage about overseas Chinese. This difference enforces the sense that new migrants, unlike the old diaspora, are bound to China not only by ties of blood and culture but also by sharing the modernizing goal of the state. Similarly, local officials regard migrants as continuing to be part of the local economy. At the Third World Fujianese Fellowship Conference in Quanzhou, it appeared that the recommendation of officials plays a role in judging a business partner’s creditworthiness, even if
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both partners are outside the PRC, as there is little reliable information available to them about each other. People inducted into the official pantheon of ‘overseas leaders’ – either by having been given honorary positions in the PRC or by being mentioned as such by officials or in the press – are often better known to Fujianese than migrants with some business success from their own county, indicating that the network brokered by officials is becoming a more important source of information than the native-place/kin network. For example, most of my interviewees knew about Yuan Binghua from Mingxi (about whom Fujian Qiaobao has reported in Zhang Zhongbin 1997) and about Guo Jiadi from Putian (who is a provincial Zhengxie member), but not about Chen Qi from Fuzhou or He Jiajin or Weng Ruilong from Fuqing. Both He and especially Weng are successful businessmen very well known and influential among Fujianese in London and Moscow, respectively, but they and Chen all head tongxianghui (native-place associations) that have been formed recently and whose activities have not yet been reported in the media or attended by officials. Official narratives of new migrants as patriots contributing to the development of their home country are being promoted and amplified by the media. Chinese globalization may have been relying mainly on personal communication, but it is rapidly becoming mediatized: in the second half of the 1990s, not only various commercial television channels but also China Central Television (CCTV) have begun to broadcast via satellite. As far as the triumphalist discourse of global Chineseness is concerned, commercial channels such as Phoenix and Star TV differ little from CCTV. In Hungary, nearly every Chinese I have spoken to regularly watches CCTV and the Chinese Channel, the first Chinese satellite station broadcasting specifically for Europe.6 CCTV news broadcasts conveying the PRC leadership’s condemnation of the bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999 probably played a role in the ensuing demonstrations by Chinese across Eastern Europe, which were initiated by local organization leaders but coordinated with the PRC embassies.7 Similar demonstrations took place in Japan (Zhongwen Daobao 2000a). Driven by higher education levels as well as greater access to news and multimedia, the growth of media run by new Chinese migrants has been much more rapid than in earlier periods. In Hungary, there are currently eight or nine Chinese-language periodicals for a Chinese population of around 10,000 (Nyíri 1999a). In Japan, more than ten new Chinese-language chapters were launched in 1997–98, and a Chinese-language television channel began broadcasting in late 1999 (Tajima 2000; Zhongwen Daobao 2000a). Much of the content, including all political commentary in Chinese newspapers in Hungary, comes from PRC-based Internet websites (Polonyi 1999). The first of the surviving Chinese newspapers in Hungary, Ouzhou Daobao, was founded by a journalist formerly employed by the propaganda department of the Mingxi County CCP. Owners of other newspapers (Ouzhou Zhi Sheng, Lianhe Shangbao) have invited editors from China, some of whom had worked for official publications for overseas Chinese such as Hua Sheng Bao, the Qiaolian newspaper, and Ningxia Ribao. This has also been the case with the first Chinese newspaper in Italy, Ouhua Shibao, founded in 1997.
Expatriating is patriotic? 125 Driven by a desire to manage the increasingly dense web of contacts with new migrants, Chinese state agencies encourage formation of migrant organizations based on province of origin or, for professionals, to whom the idea of a rural homeland does not appeal, by profession (Zhuang 2000: 48–9). They also organize or endorse frequent and large meetings, with thousands of participants, to bring together leaders of such organizations (Nyíri 2002). A leader of an organization may easily go to China two, three or more times a year to participate in such meetings, which have become important ad hoc clearing houses of merchandise, business information and capital at which contacts are forged and investment decisions made. These meetings structure the transnational social space of the ‘new migrant’ community, creating a critical density of encounters at which the officially supported discourse is recycled to significant numbers of people. To sum up, migrants are given to know through the press that they will not only be given economic benefits if they are successful – and success seems to mean the same: money and legal residence to the state as well as to the family – but will also be recognized as patriots. In this discourse of success tied to travel – a ‘spatial hierarchy’ in Liu Xin’s term – the path of migration is strikingly unimportant compared with its result. A newspaper article characterized a Chinese student in Japan working as a ‘drinking companion’ in a bar as having made almost ¥10 million in a year and a half ‘through her wisdom and ability’ (Li Jian 1999). The fact that migrants go abroad with the sense that their project is in line with the values of the dominant discourse of Chineseness, rather than violating it and having to make up for it later by proving their patriotism otherwise, is probably important in shaping their discourse of belonging and political organization. Regardless of education and social background, they have the chance to prove themselves as good citizens by being ‘successful’ abroad. This also generates pressure from both the government and their peers to be successful and to share the fruits of their success (investment, donations) with the homeland within a timeframe of several years, rather than being given over a lifetime or a generation. All tongxianghui and their leaders regarded as ‘successful’ Fujianese abroad have donated funds to Project Hope (a project to build schools in poor areas), flood relief and other projects. By providing recognition, the government promotes a discourse of success whose measures (whether investment, consumption, social status or official honours) are tied to the sending area. It remains to be seen whether this discourse can be a longterm alternative to measures of success (consumption, social status, profession, organizational leadership) in the country of residence or in the transnational community.
The state discourse and public narratives of identity The excerpt below, from an article on Howard Li, a garment manufacturer, importer and warehouse owner based in New York, in a magazine published in Budapest, is a typical depiction of a ‘successful’ new migrant.
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Pál Nyíri The new century is the century of the knowledge economy. Howard Li has included the Web in his vision. … He worked with the influential Chineselanguage Qiaobao to create ‘Meiguo Qiaowang’ (American Overseas Chinese Net). At the same time, he established the headquarters of a Net-based goods exchange system in Hong Kong, set up service provider stations at Peking Airport and in Shenzhen. The backbone of a worldwide Web-based goods exchange with hubs in New York and Hong Kong has already been formed. …By now, his joint and exclusive ventures in China extend over more than 30 provinces, cities, and regions. He has helped Chinese goods conquer (jinjun) the American market. He has enthusiastically supported the revival of life and production of earthquake victims in East and South China and Yunnan. He has injected funds from abroad into China in order to promote the economic construction of the motherland. As a representative of Chinese overseas (haiwai huaren), he has been specially invited to the 50th anniversary National Day celebrations and the ceremony honouring Macau’s return. … He is also Chairman of the Asian-American Entrepreneurs Association, Honorary General Advisor of the New York Federation of Chinese Associations, and holder of forty or fifty other honours. (Who’s Who of Chinese Origin Worldwide 2000: 31–2)
New migrant media share a remarkably standard content, style and layout. Their reliance on the same pool of content from the Internet is in part a technical necessity, as they usually work with a small staff. The range of opinions expressed in reporting on sensitive political issues – including any coverage of Chinese or American politics, and particularly the issues of Taiwan or NATO’s bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade – is, in fact, more narrowly aligned with the People’s Daily line than what is tolerated in PRC media. Apart from the reproduction of the discourse of Chineseness of the PRC – focusing on cultural heritage and ‘Chinese virtues’ (known elsewhere as ‘Asian’ or ‘Confucian values’) – all papers have a page devoted to overseas Chinese in the world. These pages offer fiction and reporting that frequently depict the dynamic, resourceful, transnational Chinese businessman, portray the experiences of Chinese in their countries of residence in a humorous way or report on atrocities committed against Chinese (these can range from the rapes and murders in Indonesia to the spying case of Lee Wen-ho, the Chinese-American physicist). In this way, the papers continually reproduce the Chinese/foreign dichotomy and re-‘other’ the foreign, while both categories are geographically global and parallel. They also report on the contributions of local Chinese and Chinese elsewhere to Project Hope and other donation drives in China intended to build schools, bridges, roads, and so on, and on visits to China by local Chinese organizations to participate in congresses and state celebrations; all of these are described in the official terms of patriotism and development.
Table 6.1
Top ten news stories as reported by new migrant newspapers in Japan and Hungary
Japan
Hungary
1
‘Azuma Shir ™ lost defamation suit [for publishing his memoirs of the rape of Nanjing]; 70,000 Chinese signed their names in his support’
‘Chinese Interpol officers Chen Xiaoxian and Jiang Shui came to Hungary to help Hungarian police to break cases violating the safety of Chinese lives and property; they brought the care of the motherland for Chinese compatriots’
2
‘Chinese Embassy in Belgrade bombed; all Chinese in Japan marched in indignation’ (…) ‘The events demonstrated that while the Chinese in Japan may live in the Eastern Seas, their hearts are linked to the motherland; this was another great explosion of the national emotion of Chinese in Japan’
‘The Federation of Chinese Organisations in Hungary, composed of 16 officially registered Chinese organisations, held elections for officers’
3
‘Federation of Chinese in Japan and General Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Japan established after nearly a century of development and convergence’
‘Over two thousand Chinese compatriots, organised by the Federation of Chinese Organisations in Hungary and other associations, held hugely forceful protest demonstration activities in front of the American Embassy in Hungary…fully demonstrating the patriotic spirit of loyal sons overseas’
4
‘Japanese Diet passed amendment to the Foreigners Registration Act, strengthening measures against illegal foreigners’
‘Orient Hotel opened’
5
The Wang Juan case [Chinese manager maltreated by court officers]
‘The city of Hangzhou was twinned with Budapest under the tutelage of Mr. Ni Weilin, general manager, Duonao Co.’
6
‘Chinese student in Japan He Gang single-handedly sued Tokyo Commercial University’
‘Fighting broke out at a [Chinese] company in the Xth District for reasons of passion, resulting in one dead and one wounded’
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Yingmei shocked society by killing Japanese public servant lover’
Ningkang was kidnapped by his nanny, causing outrage’
8
‘Forty-six Chinese trainees forced to kneel as punishment, prompting society to reexamine the Japanese trainee system’
“‘Three Celebrations Committee of Chinese in Hungary” established. It organized the following activities: (1) banquet in honour of National Day; (2) Culture Night with the Chinese Nationalities Art Troupe in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC at Erkel Theatre; (3) banquet in honour of the fiftieth anniversary of PRC – Hungarian diplomatic relations (jointly with the Hungarian–Chinese Friendship Association); (4) lion and dragon dance in Heroes Square, artistic performance at the ceremonial hall of the Chinese Embassy, and banquet in honour of Macau’s return to the motherland, reported on CCTV-4’
9
‘Xin Shiji TV’s Le Le Zhongguo Channel reaches 10,000 viewers.…Live broadcasts of the grand parade honouring the fiftieth National Day, celebrations of Macau’s return, and other important events allowed Chinese in Japan to follow the motherland’s heartbeat for the first time’
‘Li Jun, a 29-year-old man from Kunming, died after being attacked by bandits in the lift when returning home. A 29-year-old businessman from Zhejiang died while playing with a gun with friends’
10
‘The last group of war orphans visited Japan to search for relatives’
‘Eiwa Enterprise Association established’
Sources: Zhongwen Daobao 2000a and Ouhua Luntan 2000.
Table 6.1 compares the ‘1999 top ten news of Chinese in Japan’ (Zhongwen Daobao 2000a) with the ‘1999 top ten news of Chinese society in Hungary’ (Ouhua Luntan 2000). Even more than the overlaps in content and the kind of concerns the two newspapers attribute top importance to, what is striking is the similarity of styles, which are strongly influenced by the ‘ideologemes’ of PRC officialese. Similarly
Expatriating is patriotic? 129 remarkable is the similarity of layouts, including the wording and positioning of and choice of typefaces for titles and subtitles, the kind of photos (ranging from protocol pictures of leaders to soft-core pornography) and so on.8 Although this style has been seeping into established overseas Chinese newspapers, there is still a gap between the two kinds of publication in terms of both language and layout. Not just narratives of belonging but also the fact of the standardization of new migrant media contribute to the construction of a ‘global Chinese’ identity with shared values, raising cultural Chineseness and transnational modernity in importance above the immediate environment the reader happens to be in. One can move from Hungary to Japan, Italy or Sierra Leone, pick up a local Chinese newspaper, and what one will perceive in moving from one country to another will be equivalent to moving from a Budapest McDonald’s to one in Tokyo. In fact, there are magazines conceived expressly with a ‘global Chinese’ positioning; some of them are produced in Hong Kong, others in the USA; Worldwide Chinese (Tianxia Huaren) is published in London and Who’s Who of Chinese Origin Worldwide (Shijie Huaren Mingrenlu) by the World Chinese Press in Budapest. The latter has the slogan ‘Saluting the Descendants of the Dragon, saluting the Chinese race’, and is formatted as a society magazine with a price somewhat higher than Cosmopolitan. It contains interviews with personalities ranging from the ethnic Chinese governor-general of Canada to overseas Chinese businessmen, artists to party officials and generals in the PRC; the one thing most of them have in common is having been photographed with high PRC officials as well as local dignitaries (preferably presidents). Apart from advertisements for luxury hotels in Budapest and the address on the masthead, there is no indication that the magazine has anything to do with Hungary. It is in Chinese, with an editorial in English, and it carries a price tag in US dollars, euros and renminbi. New migrant media are a two-way communication tool: they are used to convey messages not only from China to the diaspora but also vice versa. The Chinese state media regularly pick up stories from these publications because they are written in the same style and sometimes by the same people as their own. This allows aspiring local elites to accumulate social capital in China by showing themselves as successful and patriotic. A Chinese newspaper in Hungary criticized a rival in these words: Some people who left China recently and want to achieve undeserved fame cover themselves with social influence gained through ‘reportage’ in the official Chinese press in order to engage in political and economic confidence tricks in China with even greater effect. … They … use geographical distance to produce false news to trick public opinion in our country. … [An article on the web page of the China News Agency (Lai et al. 2000) about Zhou Yongping, president of the Hungarian Chinese Association] says that while trade secures his livelihood, founding a newspaper was a spiritual need for him. What sort of spiritual need? ‘For the Chinese to learn more about their country of residence through my newspaper and thereby improve their long-term living conditions’. Thus, the paper of the Confucian merchant serves the public good more than generating commercial profit, which proves his noble spirit.
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Pál Nyíri In fact, the matter had to do with the fact that reminders from the Wumao company, based in Qingdao, Shandong, to repay his debt were causing him great problems. … Feeling the pressure of public opinion, the Confucian merchant decided to launch his paper, Qiyejia… Finally, the article about the ‘Confucian merchant’ mentions the most important organizational task that awaited the Confucian merchant in his new position [as chairman of the association]. This, ‘of course’, was obtaining permission for and organizing the peaceful demonstration held … by over two thousand Chinese protesting the bombing of China’s embassy in Yugoslavia by NATO… In reality … it was simply a sense of threat to the nation that prompted the descendants of Yan and Huang to express popular anger in this way. In the report by the China News Agency, the national wrath and sincere patriotic outburst of the Chinese in Hungary is portrayed as some blind obedience of a group of bandits under the command of the Confucian merchant to the chief of the robbers. This unscrupulous lie not only distorts the image of the Chinese in Hungary, but also slanders their characters. Official Chinese press enjoys high regard among Chinese overseas … no one has ever doubted the truthfulness of news reported by an official news agency. … Chinese in Hungary realize that this official agency makes untruthful claims about them. … False rumours from such a respected source accumulate political capital for those craving fame. … Can’t we say that you are accomplices of such people, who can be accused of economic crime? (Shichang 2000: 4)
I have quoted this source so extensively because it demonstrates several important aspects of the globalization of new Chinese diasporic media and public narratives in general. First, they are in constant touch with the Internet, to the extent that an article published only on the Web is deemed to be broad enough to elicit such a vigorous response. Second, they form a contiguous narrative space with domestic, official media in China, amplifying their impact abroad but occasionally also contesting their claims for domestic readership. In a different article, an author on the same side of the debate says that an article published by Zhou ‘is clearly not addressed to readers in Hungary. Your purpose is to spread slanderous information about me to Chinese around the world on the Internet, using the online version of [your newspaper] Lianhe Shangbao. And your main aim is to shape a certain image of me in China, wishing to discredit my writings there by means of the opinion formed about me’ (Fang Yongjun, Shichang 2000: 3–4) Third, the narrators manipulate the official discourse of patriotism and Chineseness (see Barmé 1999: 255–9 for a review) and alternative, conflicting discourses taken from their country of residence or from alternative globalizing narratives to discipline rivals, while on their part evading being disciplined (Nonini 1997). To quote Fang’s article again:
Expatriating is patriotic? 131 We can resolutely say that in modern society, it is a commonly accepted practice to express differing opinions in news articles. Have we not seen enough examples in the last years of Hungarian party struggles, debates in Parliament, criticism of government actions or scandals of politicians being revealed? What, then, are the grounds to believe that Westerners, who are much more used to democracy and the rule of law than we are, would somehow be shocked by articles debating social problems of the Chinese in the Chinese press? (Fang Yongjun, Shichang 2000: 3–4) The organization headed by the target of Fang’s criticism is the Hungarian Chinese Association, the oldest and most prominent Chinese organization in Hungary, founded in 1992. Chinese ambassadors in Hungary through most of the 1990s enjoyed close relationships with the HCA’s ex-president, Zhang Manxin, arranging meetings for him with visiting PRC President Jiang Zemin (Nyíri 1999b). Zhang has evolved into a transnational apparatchik: he has served a term as president of the European Federation of Chinese Organizations and convened a European congress for the reunification of China in Berlin in 2001. In 2000, the HCA published a five-point summary of its activities in the past two years and outlined its task for the coming year in a further four points. All of the points were concerned with building the organization and organizing or participating in meetings; none talked about social, cultural or interest representation tasks (Polonyi 2000). While Zhang is now something of a political celebrity, the HCA is quite typical of Chinese organizations in Europe, particularly those formed by new migrants. Apart from receiving and sending delegations, organizing festivities on traditional Chinese holidays and, increasingly, on PRC state holidays are an important part of the activities of overseas Chinese organizations. The newer they are, and the smaller the groups they represent, the greater the weight of such activities compared with efforts spent on mother-tongue education, poverty relief, care for the aged, religious activities and the like. Major festivities now overwhelmingly include a performance by a ‘nationalities arts troupe’ from China, with speakers of the television variety of Mandarin chosen as preferred hosts. ‘Pure’ Mandarin serves to distance the modernity of the actors from the ambivalent image of traditional overseas Chinese. The latter, in the eyes of ‘metropolitan’ – northern-oriented – PRC culture, is a group that, despite having served as a bridge to the West for a long time, has never fully shed its stain of boorishness inherent in its rural southern origins and is not sufficiently modern, global or mobile. When asked how his project was different from old Chinatowns, Song Wuqiang, the man in charge of a project to build the Asia Center in Budapest, heralded as the largest shopping centre in Europe, answered characteristically: The old generation of migrants was, in some ways, passive. … The Asia Center’s site has been selected after having studied the investment and
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Pál Nyíri market environment of various countries. … [It is] based on large-scale modern trade. … The Asia Center is an active initiative, not a bigger or smaller market that serves the livelihood of strangers in a foreign land. (Zhonghua Shibao 2000)
The PRC embassy is often involved in the preparation of such activities, which are attended by embassy officials and sometimes serve as occasions to communicate the PRC’s political messages, particularly regarding the ‘unification of the motherland’. In the case of organizations composed of recent migrants from China, the ‘guidance’ of the embassies is often easily traceable. For example, Chinese organizations around the world organized protests against the NATO bombing of the PRC embassy in Belgrade. I was in Bucharest on the day of such a demonstration and was told by the executive vice-president of the Fujian native-place organization that the embassy had been consulted regarding the protest.9 In the same year, Chinese organizations in Hungary convened a ‘Three Celebrations Committee’ to honour the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the PRC, the establishment of diplomatic relations between the PRC and Hungary and the takeover of Macau by the PRC. It is unlikely that the commemoration of an event of diplomatic history could be prepared without the involvement of the embassy. In the run-up to elections in Taiwan in 2000, the PRC issued a ‘white paper’ that threatened Taiwan with war if its government declared independence. Embassies organized briefings to explain to invited representatives of Chinese organizations why this had been done. Following the briefing, the Hungarian Chinese Association convened a ‘seminar’ discussing the white paper and condemned pro-independence views (Lianhe Shangbao 2000: 1). All these events should not be seen as orchestrated by PRC authorities; rather, they reflect the willingness of organizations to ‘seek guidance’ from the former and demonstrate their loyalty. All this, I believe, convincingly demonstrates how the state has successfully mobilized overseas nationalism, not so much through policy measures as through its discourse of patriotism, success and modernity, through its economic value to new migrants and through the cultivation of new migrant elites. At the same time, the state has been contributing to the construction of subnational identities by encouraging new migrants to establish associations based on area of origin (Zhuang 2000: 48–9). All eleven Fujianese organizations in Europe have been established since 1993, and leaders of several of them have told me that their preparations had been conducted in consultation with PRC embassies. On the surface, it may seem that, with the Chinese presence in Europe approaching the one million mark, PRC authorities are endorsing the creation of a classical segmented organizational structure with native-place organizations representing lower-level territorial units progressively fitted into those representing higher-level units like Russian matryoshka dolls (Crissman 1967). But two things are noteworthy about these associations in comparison with the traditional native-place associations. The first is that their territorial definitions, in most cases, are not co-extensive with dialect borders, so association business is
Expatriating is patriotic? 133 conducted in Mandarin. The second is that the associations’ activities and discourses are remarkably standardized, not only between themselves but also compared with other new organizations, whether based on native place or not. Even association premises are decorated with the same little banners and mementoes received from Chinese government bodies and from each other and with photographs with Chinese officials. It is as though the name of the native locality is a mere formality that legitimizes the organization as the representative of the host country’s Chinese population to elites of the corresponding administrative unit in China and, conversely, of that territorial unit to elites in the host country. The associations strive to be a bridge not only between their constituencies and local society but also between China and the country of residence; they sometimes name specific areas of business that they wish to promote or information services they offer. They send and receive delegations and organize fund-raising drives to build schools and help flood victims in China, both in and outside the native-place area. By contrast, they rarely undertake charitable and mediating functions for the benefit of fellow provincials in the country of residence, which was traditionally the main role of the tongxianghui, even though the vulnerable situation of masses of Fujianese asylum seekers and undocumented migrants in Europe should make that necessary. In other words, they engage in a highly situational and instrumentalized identity discourse. Chen Tiequn, provisional chairman of the Fujian tongxianghui in Italy, said that the establishment of this tongxianghui was motivated by three factors: 1
2
3
Since there were so many Fujianese in Italy, provincial leaders came to visit, but there was nobody to receive them formally. This stood in the way of even more frequent visits. Every year there are world Fujianese congresses, and it was not possible to go on selecting people randomly for these congresses as well as to represent the Fujianese in Italy to the province and embassy. There was a need to explain to the embassy and the province what kind of people the Fujianese in Italy were; otherwise they would not know whether these people were engaged in legal or illegal business.
As other migrants from Fujian told me, the embassy would not help efficiently individual applicants seeking to obtain proof of identity as required to obtain legal resident status in Italy, but the embassy would help when approached by the tongxianghui acting as an intermediary. Leaders of the French, German, and Romanian tongxianghui mentioned that their efforts were inspired by seeing, at congresses, how many tongxianghui existed in other countries or continents. The French tongxianghui was founded after the current president’s visit to the first World Fujianese Fellowship Conference in the USA.10 Thus, what we really have here is not a recreation of the segmented nativeplace organizational structure described by Crissman (1967) but an instrumentalization of the traditional and emotionally charged notion of
Figure 6.1
The segmentary structure of new migrant organizations
)
Expatriating is patriotic? 135 native place and the traditional organizational form of tongxianghui connection by the state – at its various levels – and by migrant elites for their respective goals: mobilization and control by the state of ‘flexible accumulation’ (Ong 1998) and legitimization of power by the elites. The new organizational structure reproduces the structure of the PRC administration and is largely standardized across host countries. The tongxianghui liaise with provincial bodies in the PRC. In cases where the population of migrants from the province warrants the establishment of sub-provincial tongxianghui, such as with migrants from Zhejiang or Guangdong in many countries, there is a province-level tongxianghui liaising with provincial authorities, while the others liaise with city or county authorities in China. Most countries have one or several organizations purporting to represent all Chinese, which liaise with the embassy and with national overseas Chinese bodies in the PRC, and also professional, commercial, sports or even religious associations that have their particular counterparts in China. The system can be drawn up as shown in Figure 6.1. These organizations have little active membership, but their activities – mainly those celebrating major festivals – draw significant numbers of those they claim to represent. Through these events and the media, their construction of identity has some impact outside the elites. Charges of inauthenticity do occasionally surface with respect to the organizations. One young Paris-born Fujianese complained that the Fujian native-place association in Paris ‘is gradually degenerating’ because, instead of transmitting Fujianese culture to the young, it focuses on business networking so much that even non-Fujianese can become members. Two of the leaders involved in preparing the ground for the Fujianese association in Italy were not born in Fujian but in Zhejiang, and, as some Fujianese pointed out, should thus traditionally be considered Zhejiangese. They explained that they became leaders of the tongxianghui because they had the necessary time and money, and because the president was located in Rome, where few Fujianese live but where, because of the presence of the embassy and delegations from Fujian, it was felt the tongxianghui should be headquartered. The efforts of these leaders to organize a Fujianese association must have been influenced by the fact that while resources in Zhejiang were ‘already taken’ by Zhejiangese, who dominate other Chinese organizations in Italy, connections in Fujian were still ‘up for grabs’.11 Operationalization of the imaginaries of the home province and the homeland is amplified by economic competition between provincial/local governments in China, but it also fits into the central government’s discourse of Chineseness, anchoring it in the easily understandable myth of the authentic ‘homeland’.12 Furthermore, encouraging the organization of migrants in different host countries along standardized provincial, prefectural and county identities corresponding to present Chinese administrative divisions – however ahistorical these may be – makes it convenient for the government to order and administer its relations with them.
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Discussion In this chapter, I have attempted to contribute to our understanding of the state’s role in the ‘imagining’ of the transnational community, that is, in identity construction. It has been acknowledged that while migration weakens the state, transnational links can work to extend it (Shain 1995). This is particularly so in cases like China, where most migrants experienced little institutional or discursive participation in the practice of citizenship before they left. The state, with its institutions, symbols and officials, is frequently less involved in the everyday life of a rural non-migrant than of a migrant. Furthermore, while a migrant may have felt disenfranchised by the status quo as a farmer, worker or state employee in China, he acquires a vested interest in it as an entrepreneur abroad who sees a hope for his fortunes and his recognition in forging relations with the elite at home. Finally, a migrant has more opportunities to make his views heard at home through migrant-produced media without going beyond the realm tolerated by the government. In such cases, in the short term, migration can actually contribute to state building and embourgeoisement. To paraphrase Eugen Weber (1976), it can turn peasants into Chinese. The essays in Ong and Nonini (1997) come to the conclusion that in order to exercise its effect, a nation-state regime must localize its subject, and the subject will use various transnational tactics to evade this localization while himself employing the nation-state’s discourse to localize others. I would go beyond this to say that, in some cases, nation-states (or elites employing their discourse) may actually seek to delocalize, to transnationalize subjects. It turns out that subjects do not need clearly defined spatial referents to participate in the disciplining practices of the nation-state: wherever they may be, they can participate in the New Year rituals of a major overseas Chinese organization, pose for photos with officials, hear and make speeches in the national language, watch folk dances and have their donations noted in newspapers. Within this unified nationalist discourse of belonging, then, various elites – political, economic and, more traditional, social – and institutes of power both at the core and on the periphery of the transnational system contest transnational resources, and which of them comes out winning has everything to do with business interests. This is played out in the construction of identities in public narratives such as in native-place organizations. For example, some overseas Chinese leaders have the choice between positioning themselves as Fujianese and more specifically Sanmingese, Zhejiangese or Wenzhounese. Each of these affiliations or levels of affiliation carried particular benefits and implied a certain level of competition. Using their native-place affiliation as cultural capital, organization leaders nonetheless shop around for the most favourable investment and trade opportunities in China. Other countries of origin of migrants, such as Mexico, El Salvador and the Philippines, have used migration in ways strikingly similar to the PRC and provided more overt support for the migration projects of their citizens. Mexican government agencies have not just encouraged the establishment of home town associations by Mexican migrants in the USA but have created schemes under
Expatriating is patriotic? 137 which every dollar donated by such an association for the development of the home town is matched by one, two or three dollars of state money (Migration News 2000).13 The Chinese state has found its ideal agents in new migrant elites who have a sufficient measure of economic success and education to be responsive to the temptation of becoming ‘patriotic overseas Chinese leaders’ yet not enough to have an independent base of legitimacy. Incidentally, it is these arriviste semi-elites that have the least knowledge of or interest in the host society as they have neither the lowbrow, everyday cultural exchange with locals that a market peddler engages in nor a highbrow exchange that established elites are, to varying extents, exposed to. To these elites, the words ‘Japan’ or ‘Hungary’ merely denote different Chinese economies and regimes of immigration. This class of transnational apparatchiks is the main vehicle of the Chinese globalization project, which is constructed with an eye on Western globalization but which carries a claim of authenticity, in which the state has a stake. It is they who do most to institutionalize Chinese globalization, organizing holiday celebrations, exhibitions, arts festivals and sports contests, handing out awards, congratulating each other with them and then reporting on them. Even the most thorough of Hungarian art fans would not have heard about the ‘21st Century Budapest Arts Festival’, at which the ‘Chinese Culture Overseas Promotion Award’ was handed to an official of China Central Television. The backdrop to the ceremony was a European Union flag, symbolizing the exoticism and modernity of the setting as well as Western globalization (Who’s Who of Chinese Origin Worldwide 2000: 38). Conversely, if a Chinese in Germany encounters the name of a Hungarian president, it is most likely to be in a report about the leader of a Chinese organization who has been received by him. In the case of new migrants from China, state building overseas is accompanied by the state’s promotion of Chinese identity that is both global and grounded in the concept of the nation and in the People’s Republic of China. Indeed, the image of the global Chinese migrant has become so much of a carrier of authenticity and modernity that the ability of a homeland to muster its own migrants or diaspora boosts its claim to modernity and historical authenticity (see Thunø 2000). This, in Yoshino’s term (1999: 11), is ‘secondary nationalism’ in that it focuses less on historical memory and ancestral myth, which are taken for granted, than on essentialized character traits and patterns of behaviour, to which people in their everyday practices can relate. Global Chinese media are taking an active role as producers of this discourse, not just because of a desire to conform to the discourse promoted by the state, but also due to the expectation of both Chinese and non-Chinese audiences that they can consume essentialized images of Chineseness and because of a willingness of many Chinese elites around the world to consume and reproduce patriotism.14 But, along with Ong and in contrast to the importance that Yoshino or Barmé attribute to that willingness in itself, I stress that displays of patriotism in public narratives and ceremonies are symbolic instruments of proving one’s loyalty to an official audience in China and thereby, ultimately, of capital accumulation. The opinion that organizations are instruments of (economic) self-interest is
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widely shared among non-elite migrants and occasionally surfaces in the press. The only Chinese organizations in Europe that have an active membership rather than just a core of leaders are religious organizations (mainly Christian churches) and, in some countries, the China Democracy Party, a dissident organization. For management purposes, Chinese state agencies prefer to cut up global Chineseness into administrative units, typically by province of origin or, for professionals to whom the idea of a rural homeland does not appeal, by profession (Zhuang 2000: 48, 49). While I have not problematized the question of state agency for the purposes of this chapter, the discourse of belonging and achievement is used by various levels and branches of the state differently, depending also on the locality (Nyíri 2002). However, what is important here is that there is no separate, officially produced discourse of ‘Fujianeseness’ or ‘Cantoneseness’ of the kind that has traditionally been produced among overseas Chinese, especially in Southeast Asia. Provincial identities are derived from a single national discourse. Although in this chapter I have focused on the production of public narratives of identity, it is obviously a crucial question to what extent they are actually consumed and internalized. Ong Aihwa (1998) has captured the way in which migrants from Hong Kong selectively mobilize various elements of various identities to cope with ‘competing regimes’ of family, capitalist workplace and nation. In personal conversations, I often hear ‘secondary nationalist’ statements about the Chinese being industrious, hardworking and ‘an outstanding nation’ (youxiu minzu). I also often hear statements about China’s problem being that people are of ‘lower quality’ than abroad. Both kinds of statement fit into the speakers’ agenda of picturing themselves as embarking on a modernizing project having to do with opening China to the world but nonetheless carrying an intrinsic value that cannot be found in non-Chinese. This would be a natural agenda when speaking to a foreigner doing research into Chinese migrants. But in other situations, the nation is abandoned for either a cosmopolitan, a host-countryoriented or a subnationally based identity. In these two excerpts from a conversation, my interlocutor keeps including and excluding various groups in the ‘we’ group. All inclusions and exclusions are based on essentialized behaviour patterns, but the ‘we’ is distinguished by transgressing the normative behaviour of ‘Chineseness’ as often as by conforming to it: A XING:
Those inland people are strong on culture. We don’t have as much culture as them. Since we were little, we have been brought up to look only at money. LIU: The inland people want just to make a living, to have a normal living standard. We don’t want to live like average people [bu yuanyi guo pingmin de shenghuo]: we want to strike it big. We are not like those inland people, we are totally different. LIU: Just from the way someone walks, you can tell if he is from Fuqing or from Zhejiang.
Expatriating is patriotic? 139 How? For example, if someone wears his shirt like this [tucked in the trousers], that’s definitely from Zhejiang. [Actually, Liu wears his shirt loose, but others in the company wear it tucked in.] Or they wear slippers. A XING: We are cohesive. PNY: Whom do you include in the ‘we’? Fujianese or Fuqing people? A XING: Chinese people! Everyone with yellow skin! PNY: LIU:
[Later]PNY: What about Changle people? A XING: They are about the same. But they
are petty; we are generous. The saying goes ‘Fuqing dage [elder brothers], Fuzhou zi [children], Changle gui [devils]’.15
State building and nationalist mobilization in the transnational community of new migrants from the PRC are, for now, largely proceeding hand in hand. It is likely that state building will continue in the medium term. But the celebration of migrants by sending states – not just China – is now in its honeymoon stage. Migrants not only revel in new-found recognition as patriots but, significantly, unlike migrants from other countries, are also reaping economic benefits from it, rather than simply being donors. In the introduction to a volume published in Hong Kong, social scientists from the PRC wrote in 1997: ‘Propagating nationalism is the safest form of political opportunism there is [in China today] … It is also a way of achieving the greatest economic return’ (Xiao 1997). It is a question when Chinese migrants, like their Mexican counterparts, whose support for Vicente Fox helped to end the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, will demand a real say in the political process. Sooner or later, embourgoisement is likely to be decoupled from nation building and show its subversive potential. Economic changes in China – such as a general slowdown or reduced competitiveness of Chinese products abroad – can bring this moment forward. Acknowledgements This is a revised version of a chapter first published in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, 4: 635–53 (October 2001). Part of this research was supported by Economic and Social Research Council (UK) grant number L214252012 as part of its research programme into transnational communities. I wish to thank Xiao Putao and Zha Daojiong for providing me with sources used in this chapter and Joana Breidenbach for her critique of it.
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Notes 1 Unstructured conversations and semi-structured interviews were conducted mainly in the course of continuing fieldwork in Hungary since 1992 (see Nyíri 1999a: 7) and in the framework of a research project on migrants from Fujian province to Europe. I conducted seventy-six semi-structured interviews in Italy, Hungary, England and Germany, and fifty unstructured conversations in the same countries plus Spain, the Netherlands, Romania and Yugoslavia. 2 I have selectively reviewed Chinese newspapers published in the UK, Hungary, Italy, Germany, Russia and Japan, and Chinese-language books and soap operas produced in China and Hungary about Chinese in Eastern Europe since 1992. 3 As in ‘In Beijing around half of the managers of the foreign agencies are new Chinese emigrants’ (Zhuang 2000: 50). Read this to mean: ‘In Peking, around half of the managers of foreign corporations are returnees from abroad’. 4 In 1996, according to the Asian American Political Coalition, Asian immigrants – mainly Chinese and Indians – accounted for 28 percent of doctoral scientists and engineers in American high-tech R&D (Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars 1996). This number has grown since. According to a Chinese newspaper in Japan, more than 500 Chinese held faculty positions above lecturer level in Japanese universities in 1999 (Zhongwen Daobao 2000b). However, according to Zhuang Guotu (2000: 46) ‘it is well-known in China that perhaps 25 per cent –30 per cent; of first-level American scientists are Chinese’. 5 Overseas student politics have changed sharply during this time: whereas until 1989, students abroad were usually critical of the PRC’s political system and government, since then – paradoxically, since the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown – they have generally embraced a sort of Machiavellian nationalism as reactions to the second sentencing (1995) and release (1998) of China’s most famous dissident, Wei Jingsheng. The following reader response (1998), from a US account of a special report on Wei Jingsheng in an Internet newsletter, is extreme but typical in its general thrust: All Chinese both domestic and overseas hate you. If you realy [sic] love yoir [sic] motherland, why you alwayss [sic] separate your country [referring to Wei’s ambiguity on Tibet]. We hope we have the ability to defeat America. We will be Superpower in the World. We have the right to say China is No. 1 in the World. See readers’ reactions in China News Digest (1995b, 1998). 6 Chinese Channel, based in London, began broadcasting in March 1994 (see China News Digest 1995a). 7 Interview in Bucharest in June 1999. See also Shichang (Budapest), 18 January 2000: 4. 8 For a sample ‘layout analysis’, see Barmé (1999: 468, note 33), on a journal published by student exiles. 9 Interview with Chen Jian in June 1999. 10 This section is based on interviews with organization leaders as well as charters of the Romanian, Czech, Italian, Dutch and German associations. The interviews were with Guo Jiadi, honorary president of the Hungarian Fujian tongxianghui, in Budapest in February 1999; with Chen Shijin and Yang King Far, president and executive vicepresident of the Dutch tongxianghui, in Bolsward/Sneek and Rotterdam, respectively, in March 1999; with Chen Qi, president of the German Fujian tongxianghui, in Mainz in March 1999; with Chen Tiequn, provisional president of Italy’s Fujian tongxianghui, in Rome and Lin Zhuqing, president of the Prato–Tuscany organization, in Prato in April 1999; with Te Thay Eng, president of the French Fujian tongxianghui in Paris in March 1999; with Michael Chiu, president of the Fujian Chamber of Commerce (UK), and He Jiajin, president of the Fuqing tongxianghui, in London on 4 June 1999; with Chen Jian, executive vice-president of the Romanian Fujian tongxianghui, in
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11 12 13
14 15
Bucharest in June 1999; with leaders of the tongxianghui in Moscow on 23 June 1999; with Su Guoli, first president of the Fujian tongxianghui of the Czech Republic, in Quanzhou on 5 September 1999; and with migrants from Fujian in Prato, Campania and Treviso (Italy) in June 2000. Interviews in Paris in March 1999 and in Campania in April 1999 and June 2000. Compare this with the use of the concept of the rural ‘homeland’ in current Japanese nationalist discourse in Yano (1999). Gaspar Rivera-Salgado pointed out this development in his talk at the ESRC Transnational Communities workshop ‘Perceptions and Agency of Sending Countries towards their Citizens and Former Citizens Living Abroad’, London School of Economics, 10 July 2000. See Barmé (1999: 255–80) for a discussion of the role of the state and cultural producers in the PRC in the domestic rise of that discourse. More generally, see Unger (1996) on various aspects of its development. Interview with a migrant from Fuqing in Prato, 27 June 2000.
References Barmé, G. (1999) In the Red, New York: Columbia University Press. Cheng Xi (1999a) ‘Wenhua shiying yu Zhongguo liuxuesheng zai haiwai di dailiu’ (Cultural adaptation and Chinese students remaining abroad), Overseas Chinese History of Bagui 1: 1–8. —— (1999b) ‘Liuxuesheng di dailiu yu Zhongguo zhengfu di duice’ (Chinese students’ remaining abroad and the response of the Chinese government), Overseas Chinese History Studies 2: 63–76. China News Digest (1995a) 21 January. —— (1995b) ‘Special report on the charge against Wei Jingsheng, II–V’, News Global, 28 November–22 December. ——(1998) various issues, January–February. Crissman, L.W. (1967) ‘The segmentary structure of urban overseas Chinese communities’, Man n.s. 2 (2): 185–204. Duara, P. (1995) Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Epstein, M. (1995) After the Future: The Paradoxes of Postmodernism and Contemporary Russian Culture, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Fang Yongjun (2000) in Shichang (Budapest), 22 February. Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars (1996) ‘News Release 7086’, 20 February. Lai Hailong, Zhang Mingxin and Gu Lijun (2000) ‘Baergan jianwen: rushang Zhou Yongping’(Seen and heard in the Balkans: Zhou Yongping, the Confucian merchant), China News Agency, 15 June. Lianhe Shangbao (Budapest) (2000) 25 February–2 March. Li Jian (1999) ‘Zhongguo nüren zai Dongjing’ (A Chinese woman in Tokyo), Lianhe Shangbao (Budapest), 26 May–1 June. Morawska, E. (2000) ‘Transnational migration: comparative theory and research perspectives’, paper presented at a workshop on ‘Theoretical and Conceptual Issues of Transnationalism’, Wadham College, Oxford, 7–9 July. Migration News (2000) ‘Mexico: July 2 elections’, 7: 7. Available online at http://migration.ucdavis.edu Nonini, D.M. (1997) ‘Shifting identities, positioned imaginaries: transnational traversals and reversals by Malaysian Chinese’ in A. Ong and D. Nonini (eds) Ungrounded Empires, New York and London: Routledge.
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Nyíri, P. (1997) ‘Reorientation: notes on the rise of the PRC and Chinese identities in Southeast Asia’, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 25 (2): 161–182. —— (1999a) New Chinese Migrants in Europe, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. —— (1999b) ‘Chinese organizations in Hungary, 1989–1996: a study in PRC-oriented community politics overseas’, in F.N. Pieke and H. Mallee (eds), Internal and International Migration, Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon. —— (2002) ‘From class enemies to patriots: overseas Chinese and emigration policy and discourse in the People’s Republic of China’, in P. Nyíri and I.R. Saveliev (eds), Globalising Chinese Migration, Aldershot, UK: Ashgate. Ong, A. (1998) ‘Flexible citizenship among Chinese cosmopolitans’ in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Ong, A. and Nonini, D. (eds) (1997) Ungrounded Empires, New York and London: Routledge. Ouhua Luntan (Budapest) (2000) ‘Jiujiu nian Xiong hua shehui shi da xinwen’, 8 January, 1: 10. Peking Review (1978) ‘Attention must be paid to overseas Chinese affairs’, 3: 14–16. Polonyi, P. (1999) ‘A NATO jugoszláviai katonai fellépésének visszhangja a magyarországi kínai sajtóban’ (Echoes of NATO’s military campaign in Yugoslavia in Hungary’s Chinese press), Távol-Kelet. Available online at http://www.eastinfo.hu —— (2000) ‘Színe és visszája’ (Warp and weft), Népszabadság, 1 August: 10. Schein, L. (2002) ‘Mediated transnationalism and other elusive objects: anthropology, cultural studies and questions of method,’ in P. Nyíri and J. Breidenbach (eds), China Inside Out. Contemporary Chinese Nationalism and Transnationalism. Available online at http://cio.ceu.hu/extreading/CIO/Schein_text_transnational.html Shain, Y. (1995) ‘Multicultural foreign policy’, Foreign Policy 100: 69–87. Shanghai New Migrants Research Project Team (1997) ‘Shanghai shi xin yimin yanjiu’ (A study of Shanghai’s new migrants), Zhongguo renkou kexue 3: 36–41, 52. Shichang (Budapest) (2000) 18 January. Tajima, J. (2000) ‘International migration and process of formation of social networks between Japan and China’, unpublished manuscript. Tan Tianxing (1997) ‘Jin nian lai wo guo gongmin yiju haiwai qingkuang zhi guan jian’ (The official view on PRC citizens settling overseas in the past years), Overseas Chinese History of Bagui 1: 1–6. Tanaka, K. (2000) ‘New Chinese immigrants in Malaysia and Singapore’, paper presented at the workshop ‘The Past Decade of Migration from the People’s Republic of China to Europe and Asia’, Budapest, 26–27 May. Thunø, M. (2000) ‘Policies concerning “domestic overseas Chinese” and the impact on the construction and development of Qiaoxiang areas’, paper presented at the workshop ‘The Past Decade of Migration from the People’s Republic of China to Europe and Asia’, Budapest, 26–27 May. Unger, J. (ed.) (1996) Chinese Nationalism, London: M.E. Sharpe (Contemporary China Chapters, Australian National University). Vertovec, S. and Cohen, R. (1999) Migration, Diasporas and Transnationalism, Cheltenham and Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar. Weber, E.J. (1976) Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914, Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press. Who’s Who of Chinese Origin Worldwide (Shijie Huaren Mingrenlu) (2000) Budapest: World Chinese Press 4: 38.
Expatriating is patriotic? 143 Xiao Pang (1997) Zhongguo ruhe duidai Xifang (How China faces the West), Hong Kong: Mirror Books. Yano, C. (1999) ‘Distant homelands’, in K. Yoshino (ed.), Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press (ConsumAsiaN series). Yoshino, K. (1999) ‘Rethinking theories of nationalism’, in K. Yoshino (ed.), Consuming Ethnicity and Nationalism, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press (ConsumAsiaN series). Zhang Zhongbin (1997) ‘Mingxi lü Ou xin yimin chengwei jiaxiang jianshe di xin sheng liliang’ (New Mingxi migrants in Europe become a newborn force in the home county’s construction), Fujian Qiaobao, 21 December. Zhongguo Xinwen(1999) trial issue 2, 17 April. Zhonghua Shibao (Budapest) (2000) ‘Yazhou Zhongxin Asia Center’ (advertorial), 20–26 July. Zhongwen Daobao (2000a) ‘Yijiujiujiu nian zai Ri huaren shi da xinwen’ (Ten top news stories of Chinese in Japan in 1999) 1 January: 1. —— (Tokyo) (2000b) ‘Feng peng zheng ju: Er qian nian zai Ri huaren qianying liang li ren zhong dao yuan’ (The flying roc rights itself: In 2000, prospects of Chinese in Japan are bright and beautiful, their burden heavy, their road long), 1 January: 1, 5. Zhu Huiling (1995) ‘Dangdai Zhongguo liu Ri xueren ji qi zuoyong’ (Chinese students and scholars in Japan and their role at the present time), Overseas Chinese History Studies 2: 22–31. Zhuang Guotu (2000) ‘Policies of the Chinese government toward overseas Chinese since 1978’, in Ajia Taiheiy™ Sekai to Chùgoku: Kaihatsu no naka no ningen (The Asia-Pacific World and China: Human Development), Shirizu Chùgoku Ry™iki kenkyù (China Area Studies Series) 10, Tokyo: Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture, Scientific Research in Priority Areas 113: Structural Change in Contemporary China.
7
From nation to networks and back again Transnationalism, class and national identity in Malaysia Tim Bunnell
Introduction The emergence of a so-called ‘network society’ (Castells 1996, 2000) based on developments in information and communications technology (ICT) underlie notable shifts in Malaysia’s political and economic positioning from the 1990s. Perhaps most famously, a 50 by 15 kilometre zone stretching southwards from Kuala Lumpur was set aside for ‘high-tech’ development to turn the nation’s main metropolitan area into a ‘node’ or ‘hub’ in transnational social and economic networks (Boey 2002; Bunnell 2002a). In his speech at the launch of this Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad described the project as: a multicultural ‘web’ of mutually dependent international and Malaysian companies collaborating to deliver new products and services to customers across an economically vibrant Asia and the world. I fully expect that this ‘web’ will extend beyond Malaysia’s borders and out across Malaysia’s multicultural links to our neighbours. (Mahathir 1996) Mahathir thus appeared to be predicting Malaysia’s entry or dissolution into a ‘borderless world’ popularized by his one-time multimedia adviser and confidante, Kenichi Ohmae. Ohmae (1992) had elaborated a world in which transnational corporate connections and complementarities were the key to global success. By 1997, one US current affairs journal introducing an interview with Mahathir could announce that ‘even the Islamic leader of Malaysia’ recognized the importance of ‘positioning’ nation-states ‘less as sovereign bastions than as nodes in a network of information flows’ (New Perspectives Quarterly 1997: 4).1 To what extent did such repositioning imply – as New Perspectives Quarterly suggested – a shift from ‘nations to networks’? Conceptions of a shift from bounded nation-states to transnational corporate connections suggest a diminution of the power of the former at the expense of the latter (Ohmae 1995). Yet a range of recent work has pointed rather to the qualitative reorganization of the
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strategic emphases and capabilities of the nation-state (see Dicken et al. 1997). Such work suggests the continued, if reconfigured, importance of the role of the nation-state, which remains an important analytical category in transnational times, national policy shaping the outcomes and character of transnational processes (Ong 1999; Smith 2001). ‘Transnational’ is certainly to be distinguished from ‘post-national’ (cf. Appadurai 1996). In Malaysia, the federal government has played a prominent and decisive role in the MSC and other projects for transnational economic repositioning. Apart from the provision of physical and information infrastructure, the state retains significant control over the rights and ability of individuals and groups to enter the national territory (Ong 1999). For all the supposed hyper-mobility associated with technological advances, migration remains subject to state policing of national boundaries. In addition, in a ‘knowledge-based’ or ‘K’-economy, some states have become increasingly proactive in attempts to attract highly skilled individuals and groups. If the global financial imperative is one of investability, then in human capital terms, states seek to attract those with requisite skills by configuring their territories as ‘liveable’ or as desirable working environments. In a rather different way, the ‘national project’ may extend beyond the bounds of the national territory to include nationals overseas. Thus Michael Peter Smith (2001: 172) notes how ‘many nation-states that have experienced substantial outmigration are entering into a process of actively promoting transnational re-incorporation of migrants into their state-centred projects’. This may be in order to attract back those nationals who have acquired valuable skills, to secure their return investment or to capitalize on them as conduits to extra-national economies. In this chapter, I consider the implications of such transnational reworking in Malaysia, where ongoing amendments to labour and immigration policies form part of federal government strategies for achieving ‘K’-economy success. I argue that there has been an imaginative respatialization of ‘the nation’ in/for hightech times. An emerging Malaysian ‘transnation’ includes suitably skilled Malaysians overseas who are (re-)integrated through physical migration ‘home’ and/or through electronic networking at a distance. Associated policies and incentives have potentially significant implications for state conceptions of national identity and socio-economic equity. To what extent is the ‘K’-economy valorisation of ‘non-Malay’ skills, for example, undermining Malay-centred postcolonial state scriptings of national identity? And who are the winners (and losers) in the reconfiguration of belonging in a networked Malaysian transnation?
National territory and post-colonial identity Post-colonial Malaysia has been characterized by the promotion of the Malay bangsa (or ethnic group) and Malay–Muslim culture as the ‘core’ of Malaysian national identity (Kahn and Loh 1992) on account of claims to territorial indigenousness. The ‘special position’ of the Malay community in plural Malaysia was
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established as a political ‘ground rule’ even before independence in 1957. Demands by the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) for special rights for the Malay ethnic group were satisfied with the establishment of Persekutuan Tanah Melayu (Federation of Malay Land) in February 1948. Malaysia was thus protected and promoted through UMNO’s political dominance, as tanah Melayu (Malay land) (Muhammad Ikmal 1996). At independence, non-Malay groups were granted citizenship but, in the words of Tim Harper (1996: 240), ‘this citizenship did not amount to a nationality, and the citizenship rights for non-Malays in no way impinged on the special rights of the Malays’. This special position has not gone uncontested: Shamsul (1996: 323) sees UMNO-advocated ‘indigenist discourses’ as merely one of a number of competing ‘nations of intent’.2 Nonetheless, the economic and cultural privileging of this politically defined ‘indigenous’ position has been particularly pronounced since the late 1960s. In 1970, the New Economic Policy (NEP) introduced state interventionist positive discrimination (or ‘affirmative action’) on behalf of bumiputera (a constitutional term given to Malays and other ‘indigenous’ groups, particularly in east Malaysia), and a national cultural policy actively prioritized ‘the cultures of the people indigenous to the region’ (cited in Tan 1992: 283). Higher education quotas for Malays in particular caused widespread dissatisfaction, and tens of thousands of non-Malays went to study abroad. On the one hand, we must be wary of uncritically perpetuating popular conceptions of the NEP in terms of a dichotomy between bumiputera beneficiaries and victimized ‘others’. Studies of Malaysia’s political economy have shown that certain sections of non-bumiputera have prospered (Gomez and Jomo 1997; Gomez 1999), while for many Malays, affirmative action has been synonymous with proletarianization (Halim Salleh 1992; see also Chandra 1987). Even during the NEP, class as well as ethnicity remained a key social division (Jomo 1988). On the other hand, it is undeniable that Malay indigenist discourses and the policies that these legitimized have served to render Malaysia’s non-Malay communities ‘questionable and problematic citizens’ (Nonini 1997: 207). One barometer of this marginalization has been migration out of the country. Widespread economic and cultural dissatisfaction among non-Malays contributed to disproportionately high emigration levels among these groups during the 1980s (Gunasekaran and Sullivan 1990). At least 40,000 Malaysians, or an average of 5,000 per year, migrated to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA between 1983 and 1990 (Pillai 1992).3 Most of these were nonMalays seeking new and better homes (Gunasekaran and Sullivan 1990). While the attraction of higher standards of living and quality of life – not to mention economic recession in Malaysia in the mid-1980s – were strong factors encouraging such migration, disproportionate migration levels by ethnicity also reflect the problematic relationship of non-Malays to Malaysia as ‘home’ vis-à-vis Malay-centred state narratives of national identity. Significant changes in the state scripting of the nation have emerged since the 1990s. The new way forward for nation building announced by Prime
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Minister Mahathir in 1991 was rendered visible through his ‘Vision 2020’. The first challenge of Vision 2020 was to establish ‘a united Malaysian nation with a sense of common and shared destiny’ (Mahathir 1991), thus appearing to blur the existing national division between Malay ‘core’ and non-Malay ‘periphery’ (Harper 1996). Also in line with Vision 2020, this must be ‘a nation at peace with itself, territorially- and ethnically-integrated, living in harmony with full and fair partnership, and made up of one bangsa Malaysia with political loyalty and dedication to the nation’ (Mahathir 1991). If bangsa Melayu accounted for the shortfall between non-Malay citizenship and nationality, then bangsa Malaysia suggests the possibility for a future deeper level of national belonging for non-Malays. This is not to imply that such changes constitute a distinct rupture from a state-sponsored Malay-centred past, or that their political and cultural consequences are inevitable or uncontested. Nonetheless, the popular and increasingly sophisticated discourse of bangsa Malaysia multiculturalism contrasts with the ‘bumiputeraism’ (Brown 1994) of the NEP and the national cultural policy. In the next section, I connect this shift to changes in Malaysia’s global economic positioning.
Global shift and multicultural repositioning While extra-national economic interconnections and interdependencies are far from new in what is today Malaysia, economic repositioning associated with regionalization and globalization over the past two decades has impacted upon state conceptions of national identity. The British colonial economy was dominated by the export of primary commodities for overseas markets. Even prior to European contact, coastal sites in what is today peninsular Malaysia formed part of extensive networks of trade (Wang 2001). While in the post-colonial period there was an initial emphasis on import-substituting industrialization, since the 1960s in particular, Malaysia has embarked upon export-oriented industrialization (see Gomez and Jomo 1997) as part of a broader ‘global shift’ (Dicken 1998). While there are a variety of domestic political reasons for a move away from the defence of Malay cultural-economic interests – and of Malaysia as first and foremost home to the Malays (see also Bunnell 2002b) – an important factor in recent and ongoing redefinitions of Malay and Malaysian nationalism has been Malaysia’s accelerated integration into the global economy. One reason for this concerns the ‘non-Malay’ origins of investment capital into Malaysia. National economic transformation from exporter of commodities to producer of manufacturing goods was enabled by investment not only from Western and Japanese multinational corporations but also from second-tier ‘tigers’ such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. According to David Camroux (1994: 8), for the latter investors, ‘Malaysia’s attraction lay not only in its relatively cheap labour force but also in the existence of a class of ChineseMalaysian entrepreneurs and executives’. Thus, for Camroux, the increasing multiculturalism evident in official representations of the nation – he cites the
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launching of the ‘national car’, the Proton Saga, which portrayed ‘the multiracial nature of Malaysian society rather than its Malayness’ – is more than merely coincidental. Rather, a perception of the economic importance of transnational communal connections prompted a state rescripting of national identity to foster a multicultural extension of national belonging. A second reason concerns the apparent logic of regional economic competition. A popular analogy for the ‘miraculous’ economic growth of a greater ‘East Asia’ was that of a ladder (World Bank 1993). After Japan on the top rung came the so-called ‘tiger’ economies, followed by Malaysia and other Southeast Asian manufacturing countries on the third level, followed in turn by a recently added fourth layer consisting of countries such as China and Vietnam. An imperative of technological and economic upgrading came to define successful participation in this new region. For Malaysia, this meant a growing challenge from countries from ‘below’ entering manufacturing industrialization: India, China, Vietnam and Indonesia could out-compete Malaysia in terms of labour costs and abundance. As one Malaysian economist (Rasiah 1995: 90) concluded, Malaysia had reached a ‘ceiling position within a labour-intensive phase’ and was thus compelled to move to a ‘higher technological niche’. An often overlooked aspect of this move was its implications for a revalorisation of skilled (often non-Malay) Malaysians who had moved overseas during the earlier phase of national economic development and/or those who had gained high-tech education or skills abroad (See 1997). In addition, we might suggest that the growing attention accorded to transnational connections associated with globalization led to a reworking of Malay nationalist goals themselves. In the context of a valorisation of extra-national connectivity, the ‘problem’ of Malayness becomes one of the Malay community’s supposed lack of cultural-economic networking beyond the national territory. This is a condition that Clive Kessler (1999) has diagnosed as ‘diaspora envy’. Kessler focuses his discussion on Mahathir’s relation to the Jewish question, but the Malay communal ‘lack’ might equally have been constructed vis-à-vis the triumphalism surrounding the economic success of overseas Chinese communities (see Ong 1997). Kessler shows how diaspora envy has served to stimulate Malay intellectual interest in historical Malay trading networks and contemporary Malay communities overseas. To the extent that the ‘new Malay’ (Melayu baru) is thus (re-)imagined transnationally, political space is arguably opened up for Malaysian national identity to be conceptualized more multiculturally (see also Case 2000). Such transnational re-imaginings unsettle the very territorial claims upon which the Malay special political position is founded. Resistance to associated political change here should not be underestimated: any erosion of this position is hardly likely to be supported by a generation of Malays brought up to believe that their individual and collective economic gains are attributable to economic privileging from the Malay-dominated state. Yet I suggest that the pressure for repositioning has risen in the 1990s as Malaysia has sought to capitalize upon the emergent network economy.
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Transnational networks and respatialization Further transnational reworking of the Malaysian national belonging has formed part of state attempts to move into ICT. These may be traced back to the mid1980s, when the Malaysian Institute of Micro-electronic Systems was established to ‘develop a strong indigenous capability in microelectronics and information technology’ (Scientific American 1994a: 10), while 1992 saw the formation of the Malaysian Technology Development Corporation to provide venture capital for Malaysian research and development (R&D) projects. Two years later, Technology Park Malaysia, located on a 314-hectare site south of Kuala Lumpur, provided a local ‘home for technology development’ (Scientific American 1994b: 12). In line with Vision 2020, these were intended to foment ‘a scientific and progressive society that is innovative and forward-looking, one that is not only a consumer of technology but also a contributor to the scientific and technological civilization’ (Mahathir 1991). The official launch of the MSC in a speech by Mahathir at the opening of the inaugural Multimedia Asia conference and exhibition in October 1996 was therefore a culmination of increasing prioritization of high technology. Mahathir described a 750-square-kilometre ‘zone’ stretching southwards from Kuala Lumpur to the site of the new international airport at Sepang. According to Mahathir (1996), the MSC was intended as more than just a physical site; it represented part of a broader attempt to ‘develop … the country using the new tools offered by the Information Age’. From the outset, this meant more than merely physical or information infrastructure development but had implications for who belonged in the new high-tech ‘test bed’. MSC-status companies were entitled to employ unlimited numbers of ‘foreign knowledge workers’ (Multimedia Development Corporation 1996: 10). While there were precedents of industrial spaces being granted exemption from bumiputera quotas or ownership requirements, the MSC’s ‘Bill of Guarantees’ was qualitatively different from earlier free trade zones. The Multimedia Development Corporation, the MSC’s federal government-linked lead agency, worked with ministries and Malaysian corporations to produce a global space for IT and multimedia professionals. In the words of Mohd Nasir Shaari (cited in Jayaseelan 1997: 19), a planner in the Federal Department of Town and Country Planning: Only with a world-class environment can we hope to see people like Bill Gates work and live here. These people are not your usual office workers but those who go around lugging notebook computers. These are the brains in IT and multimedia industries. To attract them we must have a conducive working and living environment. Attempts to attract back overseas nationals that accompanied the shift in economic emphasis in the early 1990s gained momentum after the initiation of the MSC project. This culminated in a ‘returning scientists programme’
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coordinated by the Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment. In part, such a scheme was stimulated by state recognition of the key role of South Korean and Taiwanese return migrants to their respective high-tech economies (see Pereira 1997). One newspaper feature called for the promotion of ‘the Malaysian version of the American Dream – that with brains and hard work, success is within everyone’s reach’ (See 1997: 5). Between 1995 and 1998, ninety-three overseas-based foreign and Malaysian scientists were attracted to local institutions, but the Ministry of Finance reported that ‘their high wages posed a financial strain and contributed to wage inequities vis-à-vis local scientists’ (Ministry of Finance Malaysia 2002: 49). The quest for appropriate policy responses intensified partly because of the criticisms of Malaysia’s lack of its own human resources but also due to increasing international attention accorded to the global shortage of ‘knowledge workers’. While there have been a range of national human resource development initiatives in Malaysia (see Malaysia 1999), IT planning guru Annalee Saxenian has been among those to identify lack of a skills base as the biggest problem facing the MSC (Far Eastern Economic Review 2000: 50). In 2000, human resources minister Datuk Dr Fong Chan Ong suggested that Malaysia would face a shortage of 15,000 IT workers by the end of that year (New Straits Times 2000: 32). Thus, according to one Malaysian technology authority, ‘for our country to succeed, those with the tacit knowledge will have to be wooed to Malaysia’ (Azzman 2000: 13). While the mainstream press in Malaysia remained overwhelmingly preoccupied with the aims and means of ‘upgrading’ the national labour force, the government’s announcement that it had commissioned the Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS) – a government-linked think tank – to prepare a ‘K-economy Master Plan’ brought the perceived necessity for IT ‘wooing’ into the public domain (Wong 2000). Published in 2002, the K-economy Masterplan made a series of recommendations for developing Malaysia’s ‘K-based human resources’. The plan emphasized the need to launch a ‘brain gain programme’ to ‘attract top talents comprising overseas Malaysians and foreigners’ (Ministry of Finance Malaysia 2002: 71). Some 5,000 ‘world-class’ foreigners would be attracted through the guarantee that work permits would be approved within fourteen days and permanent right of abode would be granted after a year to those earning a minimum of RM20,000 per month. The problem with this strategy, as acknowledged in the plan, was the shortage of ‘high-level manpower’ (ibid.: 48) globally, which threatened to exacerbate the ‘brain drain’ from Malaysia rather than contribute to a national brain gain. Recruitment drives elsewhere – in the case of the USA, allowing firms to recruit 600,000 foreigners – would, according to the plan, mean that ‘the best and brightest Asians (including Malaysians) are likely to be lured by better wages, work conditions, occupational mobility and the quality of life in the US and Europe’ (ibid.: 48). However, the changes to immigration laws that had enabled such recruitment strategies elsewhere suggested possibilities for similar policy responses in Malaysia.
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In fact, the federal budget for 2001 (Ministry of Finance Malaysia 2000) had already emphasized the need for immigration policy to be changed and introduced some specific incentives to encourage skilled Malaysians overseas to ‘come home’: • • •
income remitted to Malaysia within the period of two years to be exempted from income tax; all personal effects brought into Malaysia, including two motor cars, to be given tax exemptions; and husband or wife and children who are not Malaysian citizens to be given permanent resident status within six months.
Previously, husbands who were not citizens were not entitled to permanent resident status, while non-citizen wives could apply for such status only after five years of residence in Malaysia. In addition, the returning scientists programme was revived in early 2001 to attract Malaysian scientists back on short-term contracts. The strategy of ‘bringing home talented Malaysians’ was also a prominent aspect of ISIS’s ‘brain gain’ recommendations: Overseas Malaysians should be lured home through promotional efforts, talent searches in top overseas universities, a personal welcome letter from the Prime Minister, the granting of PR [permanent resident status] without fuss or delay to foreign spouses and automatic entry into international schools for their children. (Ministry of Finance Malaysia 2002: 71) Part of the aim here was to make Malaysia as attractive as neighbouring hightech rival Singapore. According to the plan, more than half of the foreign ICT workers in Singapore are Malaysian nationals. If skilled Malaysians working in Singapore and elsewhere cannot be wooed back to the national territory, then perhaps they may be mobilized as potential transnational connections for national economic success. The K-economy Masterplan notes that ‘Malaysia currently has over 100,000 students overseas, in addition to at least 50,000 professional and technical personnel who migrated to Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Canada and Europe over the last 15 years’ (ibid.: 73). Some of these are said to have moved into ‘high-tech K-based economy related fields overseas’: between 500 and 1,000 Malaysians are reported to work for high-tech US firms in the Silicon Valley area alone. Recognizing that some of these people may not wish to move back to Malaysia on a permanent basis, the plan suggests: ‘alternatively, they could be based abroad, working for Malaysian foreign ventures, or could tele-work from overseas for Malaysian firms’ (ibid: 73). A related recommendation is the establishment of an Internet-based network with Malaysians overseas, building upon the Ministry of Human Resources’ existing Electronic Labour Exchange:
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Attempts in Malaysia to capitalize upon the development of the ‘new’ or ‘Keconomy’ may be said to have re-imagined Malaysia transnationally. What this implies, I contend, is a transnational respatialization to incorporate those suitably skilled Malaysians residing overseas. On the one hand, as we have seen, attempts have been made to induce such people and their families to return to Malaysian national territory. On the other hand, there is recognition that national development can be promoted through connections with Malaysians beyond national borders. The proposed ‘Internet-based network with Malaysians overseas’ mentioned above is perhaps the clearest expression of a transnational Malaysian economy connecting Kuala Lumpur with Silicon Valley and other high-tech hubs where Malaysians live and work. Clearly, however, we must think about who – as well as where – belongs to this imagined networked transnation. It is to this issue that I turn in the final section of the chapter.
The transnation and its ‘others’ Attempts to plug Malaysia into a network economy have clearly set in motion some potentially significant social and political transformations. The transnational respatialization of the Malaysian economy would appear to run counter to the Malay indigenist claims that underlie the post-colonial Malaysian nationstate. But to what extent has there been a shift towards a more egalitarian, multicultural state conception of national identity? And, while non-Malays – or certain non-Malay individuals and groups – have been rendered less ‘questionable and problematic citizens’, to what extent is such a K-economy shift progressive or desirable? In what follows, I deal with these two questions in turn. As I have argued elsewhere, the networked economic repositioning of Malaysia does not constitute a distinct rupture from a Malay-centred past (Bunnell 2002b). While the Malaysian authorities have relaxed Malay-centred cultural practices during the past decade, there has as yet been no official change in the national cultural policy. Resistance to any dilution of Malay ‘special rights’ retains considerable political weight. The furore in mid-2000 over the memorandum by the Election Appeals Committee (Suqiu Committee) of Malaysian Chinese Organizations to ‘take steps to abolish in all respects, the bumiputera/non-bumiputera distinction’ (Suqiu Committee 1999) is evidence of continued opposition to a decentring of indigenousness in the post-colonial nation-state (see Hadapan 2000). In addition, it is worth noting that media reports in Malaysia focus attention on initiatives designed to ‘upgrade’ indige-
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nous human resources, implicitly casting transnational wooing as a temporary measure (see Hamid 2000). Yet, in the medium term at least, ‘K’-economy authorities clearly do promote a recentring of suitably qualified ‘non-Malays’. According to the political scientist Robert W. Hefner (2001: 33–4), Prime Minister Mahathir is convinced not only of the importance of Malaysia rising ‘beyond its manufacturing base toward an information-based “knowledge economy”, but that the participation of Chinese-Malaysians in particular is crucial to the realization of this goal’. This faith has been demonstrated most clearly in debates about the decision of top-scoring Chinese Malaysian students to pursue their higher education in Singapore. Reports of official suggestions that the ethnic quota system for universities in Malaysia might be abolished followed news that 500 non-Malay Malaysians had been rejected by local universities. The Star newspaper has highlighted cases of top-scoring Malaysian Chinese students who had been rejected from courses in local universities. According to one article (Wong 2001): ‘It is unfortunate the rejection of these students comes at a time when the two universities in Singapore are aggressively wooing our top-scorers’. Mahathir’s championing of the cause of educational ‘meritocracy’ may have been motivated by a range of additional political factors – not least the supposedly ‘anti-government’ orientation of Malay students (see Ramasamy 2001) – but the K-economy factor, I would argue, is also significant. This significance – and its relationship to a broader transnationalization of Malaysian national identity – is also evident from the official valorisation of what we might term ‘other non-Malays’. In state (and popular) ways of seeing Malaysian society, being ‘non-Malay’ conventionally means being Malaysian ‘Chinese’ or ‘Indian’. Yet these ethnic or racial categories have also been applied to non-Malaysian ‘Indian’ and ‘Chinese’ migration to Malaysia in ways that now appear to be undermined by K-economy human resource strategies. In the 1970s and 1980s, the influx of as many as one million Indonesian and Filipino Muslim illegal immigrants (Hugo 1993) and their presumed ability to assimilate into the bumiputera community was interpreted by some non-Malay political leaders as a deliberate strategy to strengthen Malay parties in the ethnically based political system (see Azizah 1997). Meanwhile, according to Harold Crouch (1996: 174), the relatively harsh government treatment of Vietnamese refugees – culturally ‘closer to Malaysia’s Chinese population than to the Malays’ – was not lost on Malaysian Chinese. In contrast, Mahathir’s 2001 budget speech suggests a rather different way of seeing: To ensure success from the new economy, we need a pool of the best talents from at home and abroad. Efforts need to be undertaken to hire the best brains regardless of race and nationality, from Bangalore to California. This is a step towards creating a world-class workforce. (Ministry of Finance Malaysia 2000)
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More than this, the K-economy Masterplan specifically identifies ‘East Asians’ and ‘South Asians’ – other ‘non-Malays’ – who could be attracted to Malaysia’s ‘rich and tolerant multi-ethnic heritage’ (Ministry of Finance Malaysia 2002: 48). It is ‘Asian achievers’ who are singled out to enjoy the privileges of ‘right to abode’ or even citizenship as ‘world-class foreigners’. Who is – or will be – able to enjoy such privileges? Who has the right to citizenship as part of the emergent Malaysian (trans)nation? Who is ‘world-class’ (and who is not)? It is at this point that we turn to the second part of this section and a critical evaluation of the political and socio-economic implications of Malaysia’s transnational repositioning. To the extent that a large proportion of the beneficiaries of labour liberalization that has accompanied Malaysia’s hightech push are ‘non-Malays’ – in both senses of the term – K-economy measures might be welcomed as part of a move to less ethnically asymmetrical means to national economic development. Yet I would caution against such an overgeneralized positive reading. While the latest phase of Malaysia’s political economy does indeed appear to run against any narrow defence of ‘Malay interests’, the beneficiaries of actual and proposed labour and immigration enticements in Malaysia, as elsewhere (see Cheng and Yang 1998), are a highly skilled professional elite. It is important to think critically about the systems of evaluation governing inclusion in (and exclusion from/marginalization in) an emergent Malaysian transnation. One way in which to do this is to think through how individual ‘non-Malays’ are positioned very differently in relation to K-economy space. On the one hand, during a trip to India in 1997, Mahathir reassured the Confederation of Indian Industry that ‘qualified and skilled workers would not have any problems’ gaining visas and residence permits to Malaysia (cited in Jayaseelan 1997). Indian nationals with prized IT skills have been wooed by the Multimedia Development Corporation and, by mid-1999, they accounted for almost half of the foreign knowledge workers in the MSC (Valida 1999: 10; see also Chapter 8). On the other hand, the impact of the development of this showcase high-tech space has been much less positive for many ‘Indian’ Malaysian citizens. Tamil plantation workers from four plantation estates were displaced to make way for the construction of Putrajaya, the new federal government electronic administrative centre at the core of the corridor. Those that have been able to find work in the Malaysian information economy are largely limited to low-wage, nonunionized service-sector employment – as security guards and cleaners (Bunnell 2002c). An even more marked critical example of the new socio-spatial dividing practices associated with a shift from ethnicity to ‘skills’ as the basis for national belonging concerns the detention and expulsion of Indonesian migrant workers, particularly since the late 1990s. As alluded to above, the state attitude to illegal Indonesian and Filipino Muslim workers in the 1980s and early 1990s was interpreted as relatively tolerant when compared with attitudes towards ‘non-Malays’ (and non-Muslims). Aside from ethnic political and demographic ‘explanations’ here (see Spaan et al. 2002), there were rational economic reasons
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for such tolerance during the decade of rapid economic growth up to 1997: during this phase of the Malaysian economy, cheap unskilled and semi-skilled labour was needed in burgeoning factories and proliferating construction sites. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that detention and expulsion accelerated with the onset of the Asian economic crisis in 1997, followed by another round of expulsion in 2002 after a period of relative economic growth (Prem Kumar and Grundy-Warr 2003). Yet the fact that this latest round may have hurt Malaysia’s beleaguered post-crisis construction industry suggests that short-term economic explanations might be inadequate here (ibid.). Long-term political imaginings of Malaysia’s transnational ‘upgrading’, I argue, do not include space for the lowtech foreign worker. In sum, the transnational repositioning of Malaysia creates new ‘others’. We must be wary of positing a wholesale shift from ethnicity to skills as the basis for new dividing practices, yet to the extent that a gradual (and possibly temporary) change can be detected, it is associated not so much with expanded (trans)national inclusiveness but rather with a remapping of social and economic marginality. The K-economy encompasses high-tech spaces where ‘world-class’ Asians can live and work, exempt from national immigration and labour conventions. Yet this new economic terrain also includes rather different spaces of exemption – the detention camp, for example, which acts as the conduit for the expulsion of unwanted Asian workers. Prem Kumar and Grundy-Warr’s (ibid.) discussion of the discursive elision of ‘foreign’ and ‘illegal’ workers is instructive here. Workers belonging to classes unsuitable for high-tech wooing are rendered morally as well as economically ‘out of place’ (cf. Cresswell 1996) in the emergent Malaysian transnation.
Conclusion While cross-border connections forged by trade and migration are far from new, contemporary transnational networks associated with developments in technologies of travel and communications have had profound implications for nation-states. Conventionally regarded as a key unit of economic organization as well as the central building block of the geopolitical system, nation-states appear to have been decentred in a shift from nations to networks. However, rather than conceptualizing this change in terms of a zero-sum relationship resulting in the inevitable decline or erosion of the nation-state, in this chapter I have sought to contribute to work showing how nation-states are responding to, negotiating and even facilitating transnational flows and processes. More specifically, I have demonstrated how actual and proposed labour and immigration policy changes in Malaysia form part of a transnational economic repositioning. While ways of knowing and responding to a so-called ‘new economy’ in Malaysia are shaped in relation to discourses that are global in scope (OECD 2000), Malaysian authorities have actively performed the discursive and administrative work of constructing a respatialized ‘transnation’.
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I have argued that the transnational networking considered necessary for high-tech success has served to further problematize the ostensibly Malaycentred nature of state economic and cultural policy. However, to speak of a shift from ‘nation to networks and back again’ is not to imply that indigenist discourses and policies have been – or are likely to be – simply abandoned through the transnational valorisation of multicultural connectivity. Malaysian politics since the mid-1990s is perhaps more accurately characterized in terms of a growing tension between indigenist claims to economic territory and the multicultural logic of networked interconnectivity. These tensions are evident right up to the highest echelons of the state. While Mahathir may be convinced of the need to enrol ‘non-Malay’ and particularly Chinese professionals into ‘network Malaysia’, such a process runs against the very ethnicized regime of national representation that he has helped to create and perpetuate. The broader political-economic significance of these transnational tensions may be divined from an incident that is unfolding as I conclude this chapter. On Sunday 9 March 2003, up to 270 Indian nationals were arrested in Brickfields, Kuala Lumpur, on suspicion of visa irregularities (Agal 2003).4 According to the Indo-Asian News Service in New Delhi (2003): ‘The arrests and harassment of Indians, including IT professionals, had been received with shock and anger in India’. The shock waves prompted the Malaysian foreign minister to announce that Malaysia would ‘investigate allegations of mistreatment and wrong-doing by the police’ in the raid, which was reportedly part of the wider crackdown on ‘illegal immigrants’ (Utusan Malaysia 2003). There is perhaps a point to be made here, first, about the endurance of ethnic markers of labour market value. As one Indian executive asked: ‘Will any Asian country ever treat an American or a Briton in this manner?’ The incident appeared to have involved multiple cases of mistaken identity. A company official who had returned from a business scouting trip in Kuala Lumpur described the incident as ‘very shocking’, noting that ‘the illegal immigration problem Malaysia is facing is mainly from Indonesia’ (IndoAsian News Service 2003). Lim Kit Siang, chairman of Malaysia’s opposition Democratic Action Party, called for an official national apology: What happened at Brickfields yesterday was doubly unfortunate – a most nasty experience to the Indian IT professionals and a setback to the country’s plan to attract the best brains abroad to come to Malaysia to help transform Malaysia into a K-economy. (cited in Beh 2003) The second and more critical point, then, is that ‘shock and anger’ in India and opposition criticism in Malaysia appear to be motivated less by ‘wrongdoing’ or ‘mistreatment’ per se than by the fact that these are alleged to have happened to ‘IT professionals’. Such is the nature of the transnational economic formations within which the Malaysian authorities have strived to become increasingly entangled. While ‘world-class’ professionals are wooed to Malaysia and have the right to fair treatment in their new place of residence ‘regardless of race and
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nationality’ (ibid.), for workers of other ‘classes’, harassment and displacement continue to be normalized, irrespective of their ethnic ascription.
Notes 1
2
3 4
New Perspectives Quarterly is a publication of the US-based Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, which seeks to engage ‘the best minds and most authoritative voices in cutting edge debate on current affairs’. The interview with Prime Minister Mahathir was part of a special issue on the implications of the ‘Information Age’, entitled ‘From Nations to Networks’. In addition to the Mahathir interview, this issue included contributions from futurologist writers Alvin and Heidi Toffler and corporate IT leaders Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Raymond Lane (Oracle). The phrase refers to ‘a more or less precisely defined idea of the forms of a nation, i.e. its territory, population, language, culture, symbols and institutions. The idea must be shared by a number of people who perceive themselves as members of that nation, and who feel that it unites them. … the concept nation-of-intent depicts an idea of a nation that still needs to be constructed or reconstructed’ (Shamsul 1996: 328). Many more studied overseas and stayed on to work, particularly in city-state neighbour and high-tech rival Singapore (Hing 2000). Utusan Malaysia (2003) claimed that ‘only 165 people’ had been detained and that these ‘Indians’ included Pakistani as well as Indian nationals. A figure of 270 was the number alleged by the Indian high commissioner in Kuala Lumpur (Agal 2003).
References Agal, R. (2003) ‘Malaysia warned over Indian arrests’, BBC News, March 10. Available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-2/hi/south_asia/2836777.stm Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Azizah, K. (1997) ‘Illegal alien labour in Malaysia: its influx, utilization and ramifications’, Indonesia and the Malay World 71: 50–82. Azzman, M.S. (2000) ‘The changing world: ICT and governance’, in R.A. Rahim and K.J. John (eds), Access, Empowerment and Governance in the Information Age, Kuala Lumpur: National Information Technology Council. Beh, L.Y. (2003) ‘High Comm: Indians not given time to show documents’, Malaysiakini.com, 10 March. Available online at http://www.malaysia kini.com.my Boey, M. (2002) ‘(Trans)national realities and imaginations: the business and politics of Malaysia’s Multimedia Super Corridor’, in T. Bunnell, L.B.W. Drummond and K.C. Ho (eds), Critical Reflections on Cities in Southeast Asia, Singapore: Times Academic Press. Brown, R. (1994) The State and Ethnic Politics in Southeast Asia, London: Routledge. Bunnell, T. (2002a) ‘Cities for nations? Examining the city – nation-state relation in Information Age Malaysia’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 26 (2): 284–98. —— (2002b) ‘(Re-)positioning Malaysia: High-tech networks and the multicultural rescripting of national identity’, Political Geography 21 (1): 105–24. —— (2002c) ‘Multimedia utopia? A geographical critique of high-tech development in Malaysia’, Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography 34 (2): 265–95. Camroux, D. (1994) Looking East…and Inwards: Internal Factors in Malaysian Foreign Relations during the Mahathir Era, 1981–1994, Centre for Study of Australia–Asia Relations: Griffith University. Case, W.F. (2000) ‘The new Malaysian nationalism: infirm beginnings, crashing finale’, Asian Ethnicity 1 (2): 131–47.
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Castells, M. (1996) The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, Volume 1, The Rise of the Network Society, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. —— (2000) ‘Materials for an exploratory theory of the network society’, British Journal of Sociology 51 (1): 5–24. Chandra, M. (1987) Islamic Resurgence in Malaysia, Petaling Jaya: Penerbit Fajar Bakti. Cheng, L. and Yang, P.Q. (1998) ‘Global interaction, global inequality and migration of the highly-trained to the US’, International Migration Review 32: 626–53. Cresswell, T. (1996) In Place/Out of Place: Geography, Ideology and Transgression, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Crouch, H. (1996) Government and Society in Malaysia, New York: Cornell University Press. Dicken, P. (1998) Global Shift: Transforming the World Economy, London: Paul Chapman. Dicken, P., Peck, J. and Tickell, A. (1997) ‘Unpacking the global’, in R. Lee and J. Wills (eds) Geographies of Economies, London: Edward Arnold. Far Eastern Economic Review (2000) ‘Tech Mecca’, 16 March. Gomez, E.T. (1999) Chinese Business in Malaysia: Accumulation, Accommodation and Ascendance, Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon. Gomez, E. and Jomo, K.S. (1997) Malaysia’s Political Economy: Politics, Patronage and Profits, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gunasekaran, S. and Sullivan, G. (1990) ‘Cross-border labour flows in Southeast Asia: patterns and prospects’, Southeast Asian Affairs, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Hadapan, M. (2000) ‘Hapus hak istimewa Melayu’ (Abolish Malay special rights). Utusan Malaysia. Available online at http://www.utusan.com.my/ content_a.asp?url=/ archives/14-08-2000/utusan_malaysia/front_page/fp1_full.htm Halim Salleh (1992) ‘Peasants, proletarianisation and the state: FELDA settlers in Pahang’, in J. Kahn and F. Loh (eds), Fragmented Vision: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Malaysia, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Hamid, H. (2000) ‘Training of knowledge staff must be stepped up’, Business Times (Malaysia), 27 July. Harper, T.N. (1996) ‘New Malays, new Malaysians: nationalism, society and history’, Southeast Asian Affairs, Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Hefner, R.W. (2001) ‘Cultural pluralism in Malaysia and Indonesia: varieties of Malay multiculturalism’, paper presented at Third International Malaysian Studies Conference, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 6–8 August. Hing, A.Y. (2000) ‘Migration and the reconfiguration of Malaysia’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 30: 221–45. Hugo, G. (1993) ‘Indonesian labour migration to Malaysia: Trends and policy implications’, Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 21 (1): 36–70. Indo-Asian News Service (2003) ‘IT professionals enraged over arrest of Indians in Malaysia’, 10 March (Aliran mailing list, 12 March). Jayaseelan, R. (1997) ‘Bringing in the best’, Malaysian Business, 1 September: 19–22. Jomo, K.S. (1988) A Question of Class: Capital, the State and Uneven Development in Malaysia, New York: Journal of Contemporary Asia Printers. Kahn, J. and Loh, F. (1992) ‘Introduction: fragmented vision’, in J. Kahn and F. Loh (eds), Fragmented Vision: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Malaysia, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Kessler, C. (1999) ‘A Malay diaspora? Another side of Dr Mahathir’s Jewish problem’, Patterns of Prejudice 33 (1): 23–42.
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Mahathir, M. (1991) ‘Malaysia: the way forward’, paper presented at the inaugural meeting of the Malaysian Business Council, 28 January. Available online at http://www.smpke.jpm.my/pm3.htm —— (1996) ‘Opening address’, speech at the opening of Multimedia Asia on the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC), 1 August. Available online at http://www.mdc.com.my /news/archives/index.html Malaysia (1999) Mid-Term Review of the Seventh Malaysia Plan, 1996–2000, Kuala Lumpur: Government Printers. Ministry of Finance Malaysia (2000) ‘2001 budget speech’, delivered by Tun Daim Zainuddin, 27 October. Available online at http://www.treasury.gov.my/ englishversion baru/index.htm —— (2002) ‘Knowledge-based economy Masterplan’, Kuala Lumpur: Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS). Available online at http://www.treasury.gov. my/englishversionbaru/index.htm Muhammad Ikmal, S. (1996) ‘Malay nationalism and national identity’, in S. Muhammad Ikmal and Z. Emby (eds), Malaysia: Critical Perspectives, Petaling Jaya: Persatuan Sains Sosial Malaysia. Multimedia Development Corporation (1996) Investing in Malaysia’s MSC: Policies, Incentives and Facilities, Marketing brochure. New Perspectives Quarterly (1997) ‘From nations to networks: interview with Mahathir Mohamad’, 14 (2): 4–8. New Straits Times (2000) ‘Malaysia short of 15,000 IT workers’, 2 January. Nonini, D.M. (1997) ‘Shifting identities, positioned imaginaries: transnational traversals and reversals by Malaysian Chinese’, in A. Ong and D.M. Nonini (eds), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, London: Routledge. OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) (2000) Is There a New Economy? Paris: OECD. Ohmae, K. (1992) Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Global Marketplace, London: HarperCollins. —— (1995) The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies, London: HarperCollins. Ong, A. (1997) ‘Chinese modernities: narratives of nation and of capitalism’, in A. Ong and D.M. Nonini (eds), Ungrounded Empires: the Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, London: Routledge. —— (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, London: Duke University Press. Pereira, B. (1997) ‘Malaysia rolls out welcome mat to lure top talents home’, Straits Times (Singapore), 19 October. Pillai, P. (1992) People on the Move: An Overview of Recent Immigration and Emigration in Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur: Institute of Strategic and International Studies. Prem Kumar, R. and Grundy-Warr, C. (2003) ‘The forced migrant as homo sacer: fear, brutality and the withdrawal of human rights in the detention of irregular migrants in Malaysia, Thailand and Australia’, paper presented at the Eighth IASFM Conference, Chiang Mai, Thailand, January. Ramasamy, P. (2001) ‘Meritocracy versus special privileges’, Malaysiakini.com, 13 August. Available online at http://www.malaysiakini.com/News/2001/08/ 2001081301.php3 Rasiah, R. (1995) ‘Labour and industrialization in Malaysia’, Journal of Contemporary Asia 25: 73–92.
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Scientific American (1994a) ‘MIMOS: bridging technology and business’, Malaysia Advertising Section, April: 10. —— (1994b) ‘Technology park Malaysia: home for technology development’, Malaysia Advertising Section, April: 12. See Yee Ai (1997) ‘Courting Malaysian expats’, The Star (Section 2), 6 October: 4–5. Shamsul A.B. (1996) ‘Nations-of-intent in Malaysia’, in S. Tonneson and H. Antlov (eds), Asian Forms of the Nation, Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon. Smith, M.P. (2001) Transnational urbanism: locating globalization, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Spaan, E., van Naerssen, T. and Kohl, G. (2002) ‘Re-imagining borders: Malay identity and Indonesian migrants in Malaysia’, Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 93 (2): 160–72. Suqiu Committee (1999) Malaysian Chinese Organizations’ Election Appeals (official translation of the Chinese text). Available online at http://www.suqiu.org/Suqiu_english Tan, S.B. (1992) ‘Counterpoints in the performing arts of Malaysia’, in J. Kahn and F. Loh (eds), Fragmented Vision: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Malaysia. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Utusan Malaysia (2003) ‘We’ll investigate allegations against the police, says Syed Hamid’, 13 March. Available online at http://www.utusan.com.my Valida, A.C. (1999) ‘The Multimedia Super Corridor: a knowledge workers’ hub in the making’, Intermedia 27 (4): 8–10. Wang, G. (2001) Only Connect! Sino-Malay Encounters, Singapore: Times Academic Press. Wong, C.W. (2001) ‘We must not lose bright students’, The Star (Malaysia), 3 May. Wong, D. (2000) ‘Malaysia’s “brain gain” problems’, Straits Times (Singapore), 29 March. World Bank (1993) East Asian Miracle: Economic Growth and Public Policy, New York: Oxford University Press.
8
Indian information technology professionals’ world system The nation and the transnation in individuals’ migration strategies Xiang Biao
The current debate on how globalization is restructuring the nation-state and the international system involves a series of highly complex issues and has yielded few widely accepted conclusions. However, one near consensus standing out from the recent literature is that world system theory, which divided the world into ‘core’, ‘semi-periphery’ and ‘periphery’, no longer reflects reality. For example, Hoogvelt (1997) argues that the basic architecture of global society is no longer based on the nation-state. Social differentiation takes place across national borders, and there is now the ‘First World’ in the ‘Third World’ and the ‘Third World’ in the ‘First World’. Ong (1993) argues that the world capitalist system is now ‘polycentric’, with multiple nodes of power. Similarly, pointing to the mutual penetration between newly industrialized economies (NIEs) and the traditional core economies through investment and trade, Dicken (1998) describes the world economy as a ‘multi-polar’ system without a clear core–periphery division. This argument is closely linked to the more general notion of ‘transnationalism’, which has recently aroused intense interest in Western social sciences. By replacing the term ‘international’ by ‘transnational’, the new notion argues that to understand today’s world, it is no longer sufficient to use the nation-state as the primary analytical unit and to focus on the relations between nations with clearcut boundaries. Instead, transnational activities such as cross-border flows and connections have gained their own momentum and autonomy and have become a new research field in themselves (Sklair 1995; Portes et al. 1999; Castles 2001). Certainly there is important truth in the argument about the demise of the old world system theory and the ascendancy of transnationalism. The world economy today is far more complex than a system comprising unequal exchanges between industrial products from the ‘core’ versus raw materials from the ‘periphery’. Furthermore, developing countries have performed so differently in the last decades that it does not make sense to lump all of them into a single category such as the ‘Third World’ or the ‘periphery’. However, a series of important questions remain to be explored: to what extent can we understand the current world as ‘transnational’? Have the unequal international relations given way to multi-directed and horizontal transnational flows? How do new transnational flows interact with the old international system? Since the end of
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the 1990s, partly due to the Asian financial crisis, a group of scholars have been calling for the reinstatement of the nation-state in globalization studies (see Weiss 1998; Donahue and Nye 2001). This makes it even more relevant to scrutinize the tensions between the ‘national’, the ‘international’ and the ‘transnational’ in the globalization era. This chapter seeks to contribute to our understanding of this issue by examining how a typical transnational group, namely migrant information technology (IT) professionals from India, maps the world. My central argument is that the ‘international’ is a key to understanding the tension between ‘nation’ and ‘transnation’. First, I demonstrate that IT professionals have created a genuinely new pattern of migration and career development, which can be described as ‘transnational’. Second, I argue that their ‘transnational’ practices have not emerged from nowhere but are clearly structured by a series of ‘national’ factors, such as migration policy, the welfare system and even the geographical location of a particular country. Third, and most importantly, it is not national factors per se but the coexistence of situations in different countries that shape transnational activities. For example, IT professionals would not need to, nor could they, move from one country to another if there had not been convergence as well as differences between major receiving countries in immigration policy. IT professionals can easily migrate transnationally because major developed countries have commonly liberalized immigration regulations aimed at attracting overseas IT professionals. At the same time, differences between the countries make transnational mobility profitable; for example, some Indian IT professionals working in the USA have moved to Canada and Australia in order to obtain permanent residency in these countries, which is much easier than in the USA, although they move back to the USA later for better employment opportunities. More importantly, the migration trajectory of Indian IT workers is clearly mapped onto the different positions of nations in the global economy, which is largely a legacy of the established relationship between the core, the semi-periphery and the periphery. In turn, transnational processes influence national development to a large extent through their impact on the nation’s position in the international system. As far as the present case is concerned, there is little evidence that new transnational activities have led to fundamental changes in the traditional international system. On the contrary, these activities seem more likely to be reinforcing the existing structure. In the ensuing four sections, I will first establish Indian IT professionals as a ‘transnational’ group. The second section points out that India has become the centre coordinating the global mobility of IT professionals, particularly through a special labour management scheme known as ‘body shopping’. India’s position in this transnational process reflects its position in the international system, namely as a major source country for IT professionals for the global market. The third section discusses three groups of countries in the Asia-Pacific region that occupy different positions in the migration process of Indian IT professionals. The USA is the central destination of IT professionals, while Singapore and Malaysia serve as strategic gateways to the global market, and Australia and
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Canada are used as security bases in the face of the high uncertainties that come with transnational mobility. These different yet interlinked positions form part of the ‘Indian IT professionals’ world system’. In this world system, a particular country’s position is determined by its national situation in comparison with that of other countries and also by its general position in the world economy. The concluding section offers a brief comparison between the Indian IT workers’ world system and the world system portrayed by Wallerstein and his associates and points out that the emergence of this transnational group has so far largely reinforced the relationships between the core, the semi-periphery and the periphery. Most of the literature that discusses the relationships between the nation, the transnation and the world system has done so at the macro-level, particularly by focusing on national economic policies and the role of transnational corporations (TNCs) (see, for example, Sassen 1998; Dicken 1998). While similarly interested in the position of the nation in the world system, this chapter proceeds differently by offering a detailed ethnographic account of individuals’ migration strategies and trajectories. At the same time, unlike the bulk of anthropological and sociological research on transnational activities (see, for example, Georges 1990; Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Ethnic and Racial Studies 1999), this chapter is not concerned with issues such as identity negotiation, social networks or household life but aims instead to analyse international economic relations on a global scale through a study of individual migration strategies. In other words, this chapter attempts to fold ethnographic observation into macro-political economy analysis. This research is based on twenty-two months of fieldwork in Sydney (January 2000 to June 2001), Andhra Pradesh state in southern India, mainly in the capital, Hyderabad (June to September 2001), and New Delhi (September to October 2001). As the ‘home’ of 23 percent of all Indian IT professionals worldwide (Finance and Planning Department, Andhra Pradesh government 1999), Andhra Pradesh is obviously an important field site in understanding migrants’ place of origin. Sydney, as opposed to various US cities where the majority of migrant IT professionals head to, presents an interesting ‘destination’ site because of its relatively marginal position in both the global IT industry and in Indian IT professionals’ migration processes. From this vantage point, I was able to better observe how Indian IT professionals use Australia as a stepping stone to other countries such as the USA and UK. The main investigation methodologies employed were in-depth interviews and participant observation. I interviewed over 180 individuals, including IT professionals, their family members, manpower agents and other informants. During my fieldwork, I lived with about twenty Indian IT workers in total. Most of my interviewees were young and male, a reflection of the overall profile of the Indian IT workforce. I deliberately sought female informants to gain a different perspective. In order to maintain privacy and confidentiality, individual interviewees’ names in this chapter are pseudonyms.
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‘Brain bypass’ In the international migration of the highly skilled, ‘brain bypass’ has become a new phenomenon. The term refers to the movement of skilled migrants from the South to countries such as Canada and Australia, where using experience acquired in these countries as leverage, they then move on to other countries, particularly the USA (see Stackhouse 2000). Every year, as many as 20,000–35,000 mostly skilled people move from Canada to the USA (Steffenhagen 2000; Toulin 2000). IT professionals are the most mobile of this group. Between 1997 and 1998, Australia lost 4,477 IT and telecommunications professionals, compared with 3,318 between 1995 and 1996 (DIMA, cited in DCITA et al. 1998: 26). Migrants from other countries are also more likely to move on than nationals. According to a report from Canada (Rao 2000: 4), twenty-nine out of the forty-seven Asia-born IT workers surveyed planned to migrate to the USA, compared with two out of eight Canadianborn workers who expressed a desire to do so. An informant in New Delhi likened IT professionals to e-mails because both ‘can go anywhere in the world’. No accurate data are available on the number of Indian IT professionals who depart from Australia every year. A common estimate by my informants was that as many as half of the Indian IT professionals in Sydney were planning to move to the USA, and about 20 percent had done so. Two months before moving to Canada, Panika, an IT professional in his thirties, explained to me why he had decided to do so: It is my fundamental idea to go further. … You have to do survey often [by browsing the Internet] to see where you are. The way we think is: what’s the position you will have in two years? You have to follow the latest technologies, and know what salary they are getting. We have to think it in a big way. In three years time I may go to America. IT people are never happy with one place. This is IT professionals’ train. The plan is always open. The train can go anywhere. Multiple migration is inherently linked to upward mobility in both career and social status. Ravi Kolluru, an informant whom I met in Hyderabad, was offered the position of senior software engineer at Satyam (one of the largest software companies in India) with an annual payment of Rs.3 lakhs1 in 1999. Dissatisfied, he left for Australia. Six months later, he contacted Satyam again from Australia. He was immediately given the position of project leader with an annual salary of Rs.4 lakhs, even though the offer was made in May 2001 when the market was in recession. Ravi Kolluru reckoned that he would have been offered a Rs.5–6 lakhs a year job by Satyam had he been in the USA at that time. Another informant suggested that the USA has the highest ‘returning value’, i.e., an IT professional with US work experience will be better regarded than others upon returning to India.
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Given their strong transnational connections, IT professionals have eclipsed doctors, previously one of the most highly valued groups, in the Indian marriage market. Ganga, a young doctor in Saudi Arabia whom I got to know through an Internet chat room, asked me to hunt for brides in Australia for him so that he could migrate there. At the same time, Ken, a Tamil civil engineer in Sydney, was busy searching for grooms for his daughter. When I told Ken about Ganga, he turned the suggestion down immediately: ‘No doctors. We are looking for computer people only’. The reason is simple: while an IT professional’s permanent residency and job in Australia are practically guaranteed, doctors are subject to years of re-examination before they can practise independently. I did not pass this on to Ganga. Several weeks later, Ganga told me that he was thinking of taking an IT course in order ‘to get out of the present situation and move on’. In Andhra Pradesh, the dowry rate for male IT professionals is closely associated with the country where the groom is based. US-based grooms can typically get twice as much as those in Australia. Most families that I visited in Andhra Pradesh had intimate knowledge of the income and expenditure of an IT professional working in the USA. Some were also conversant with the corresponding figures in the UK and Australia. The slowdown in the IT industry starting from late 2000 led to a massive layoff of workers in the West, particularly in the USA. Although this reduced the absolute volume of migrant IT professionals, it also intensified their multidirectional movements. Workers started to explore new destinations, and Southeast Asia emerged as one of the most important new destinations. Many Indian IT professionals ‘move around’ between Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Bangkok in their hunt for jobs. Sumanth was an Indian student studying IT in an Australian college. His brother lost his job in Singapore in June 2001 and asked Sumanth to seek job opportunities for him in Australia. Two weeks later, the brother went to Kuala Lumpur to look for jobs. When I tried to contact him before I headed for Kuala Lumpur, he had gone to Bangkok. At the airport in Kuala Lumpur, I ran into an Indian IT worker from Melbourne. He had been waiting for jobs in Melbourne for four months to no avail, and was told that passengers could stay in Malaysia in transit for seventy-two hours without a visa. He flew to Malaysia on a return ticket in the hope of finding a job in Kuala Lumpur within the seventy-two hours! However, it turned out that only passengers heading for a third country were entitled to the stopover. He was not allowed to leave the airport and had to take the next flight back to Melbourne. In between he asked me, in all seriousness, whether I could get a ‘break’ (job opportunity) for him in China. One key reason for IT professionals becoming such a transnational group in the 1990s stems from changes in immigration policies in various developed countries and NIEs. These countries have been competing to hire foreign IT workers by means of liberalizing immigration schemes (see Krishnadas 2000). A key policy measure commonly adopted by these countries has been to relax the regulations regarding work-based, long-term, temporary migration. The USA introduced the H-1B visa in the early 1990s specifically for highly skilled temporary migrants with
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an annual quota of 65,000. The quota was raised to 115,000 for fiscal years 1999 and 2000, and in 2000, the quota was expanded to 195,000 for the following three years. More than half of the H-1B visa holders are IT professionals. The Australian government devised streamlined and demand-driven temporary migration arrangements for skilled workers in 1996 (the 457 visa scheme) (DCITA et al. 1998). According to the new regulation, temporary migrants sponsored by companies are not subject to market testing or formal skills assessments. The Australian immigration minister declared that ‘long-term skilled temporary migration has become a core element of Australia’s immigration program’ (Ruddock 1999: 6) and that the scheme is ‘rated amongst the most effective arrangements in the world for attracting what is a highly mobile and lucrative workforce’ and ‘will become the touchstone for migration’s international future’ (ibid.: 10). The proportion of entries on 457 visas to all immigrants increased from 4.4 percent in 1991, to just under 20 percent in 1996 and over 50 percent in 1999–2000 (Stewart 2000). An unintended consequence of these policy changes is the increasing gap between the intakes of temporary and permanent migrants in developed countries, which has led to the formation of a group of ‘institutionalized multiple transnational migrants’. For example, the USA issues only 140,000 employmentbased green cards annually, compared with nearly 200,000 H-1B visas. While the number of H-1B visa holders in the USA grew to 710,000 in 2002, the permanent immigration system could absorb only 25,000 H-1B workers and their families (Lowell 2000). Since the H-1B is an employment-based visa, once the contract is completed or the worker is laid off, he or she will be ‘out of status’ and will have to leave the country.2 A substantial proportion of these workers will move on to a new country to search for jobs, and some of them may move back to the USA later (see below). Similar to the situation in the USA, there are large gaps between the numbers of temporary IT workers and those who can be naturalized in Singapore, Germany and the Gulf countries. Without the simultaneous changes in the national immigration policies in different countries, the transnational mobility of IT workers would not have been possible on the current scale.
Body shopping and India-centred mobility Indian IT professionals do not move around purely on an individual basis; rather, mobility is facilitated by a special labour management scheme that is commonly referred to as ‘body shopping’ in the industry. Body shopping is the practice whereby a firm (‘body shop’) recruits IT workers from India then farms them out to clients for a particular project, although the firm itself is not involved in the project. Body shops in different countries are associated with each other, and they send workers from one place to another when required. By doing so, a flexible labour management system on a global scale is achieved (for more details, see Xiang 2001). Understandably, multinational connections are critical to the business of body shopping. India holds a central position in this global business, so body shops in different countries often establish connections with
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one another through India rather than directly. Before moving on to a new country, workers typically go back to India first to attend training courses to upgrade their skills and to consult body shops for more information about the labour markets in different countries. The immediate reason for India’s premier position is the large number of body shops in India and the intense connections between these body shops. In Hyderabad, all body shops claim that they can place workers in almost any country, and this is largely true. They are able to do so mainly through connections with other body shops, both in the city and overseas. The story of how ACPT, a body shop in Hyderabad, put through a 360 man-month deal in the USA typically demonstrates how these networks work. In mid-2001, a body shop in Hyderabad came to know that a US company urgently needed forty workers with a particular skill. Although this body shop could find plenty of workers in India, the visa process would take too long. Instead, the shop turned to ACPT for workers who were already on H-1B visas. ACPT found a group of recently laid-off H-1B workers in the USA through its associates there (also Indian-run body shops) and asked one of its associates in the USA to be the new sponsor of the forty workers. The client would send workers’ wages to this associate, and the associate would pass the wages on to ACPT. ACPT brought this associate into the picture because a representative was necessary to facilitate regular face-toface communication between the client and the workers for this nine-month project. It was also important that this particular associate was not deeply connected with the workers or the client and was therefore unlikely to circumvent ACPT. Another fundamental reason for India becoming a ‘coordinating centre’ for the IT professionals’ global mobility is related to its position as a major source country where IT professionals are produced for the global market. Body shops mushroomed in India precisely because so many IT professionals were eager to emigrate but also because both governments and the IT industry in the West had identified India as a major source of IT labour. According to a report commissioned by the Indian government, 85,000 computer professionals migrated from India in the year 1999–2000 alone (High-Level Committee 2001). In the period May 1998 to July 1999, 63,900 Indians were issued US H-1B visas, making up 47.5 percent of the total and far exceeding the second-leading country, China, which accounted for only 9.3 percent (INS 2000). Of all the computer systems analysts and programmers on H-1B visas in the USA, 74 percent were born in India (INS 2000). It is important to note that the large number of migrant IT professionals from India is more a cause than a result of the newly emerging IT industry in India. More than 70 percent of the total revenue of India’s IT industry is generated through exports (NASSCOM 2000). The exports are essentially of labour, either by sending workers overseas to implement IT tasks ‘onshore’ or by developing programmes in India for overseas clients (‘offshore’). According to one estimate, the Indian IT industry would need to send about 200,000 professionals to the USA alone to sustain its 40–50 percent growth rate over the period 2000–05
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(Ramesh 1999). In turn, migration enables IT professionals to establish connections with future clients in developed countries when they set up their own IT businesses back in India (see Arora et al. 1999). Thus India’s role in the global IT industry is not as a consumer or a producer of software products but as a major producer of IT labour. It may be said that since human capital has become so vital for the so-called ‘knowledge economy’, a new international division of labour has developed wherein certain societies specialize in producing the relevant human capital as a special commodity. One important plank in the link between India’s function of producing IT labour and its position as a coordinating centre of IT professionals’ mobility is India’s IT training institutes. With revenue increasing from Rs.33 crores in 1994–95 to Rs.125 crores in 1998–99, IT training in India has become a booming industry, responsible for a large part of the IT labour force that India has produced (NASSCOM 2000). It is a common practice that IT workers in Australia go back to India to take training courses before moving on to a new country. A course that costs A$300 (US$150) in Hyderabad would be priced at more than A$2,000 in Sydney. The courses in India are also believed to be of a higher quality. I-Logic, a training institute in Hyderabad, had 400 students in mid-2001. About fifty of them were from overseas, with more than thirty from the USA. When in India for training, these workers naturally contact Indian body shops for more information on overseas job markets. Many training institutes also perform the functions of body shops themselves, placing their own trainees overseas or offering them information on overseas employment opportunities after providing IT training.
The central destination, the gateways and the security bases The ‘world system’ of Indian IT workers comprises countries that occupy different positions in their migration process but are interlinked by their transnational mobility. This world system is dominated by two centres: India and the USA. While India functions as the centre for information exchange, motivation formation, networking and coordination, the USA is the major destination and serves as the standard reference when IT workers compare possible destinations. Between these two centres, there are two other groups of countries in the AsiaPacific region of interest, namely Malaysia and Singapore as examples of one grouping, and Australia and Canada forming a second group. The former are the strategic gateways through which Indian IT professionals enter the global market, and the latter are used as secure bases to facilitate transnational mobility. What follows describes and explains the different positions of these countries. The USA: the central destination According to my informants, the USA is still the most favoured choice for Indian IT professionals. There are various reasons for this. First, the income level of IT
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jobs in the USA is high, double that in Australia. Salaries in the USA are said to be raised every six months, compared with every one or two years in Australia. Moreover, Indians gave special emphasis to the currency conversion rate. As I was puzzled why the exchange rate would influence their everyday lives, Rajalaxmi, an IT professional whose husband worked in the same line, explained the significance to me by drawing on her experience: ‘When I just came from India to Australia, it hurt. Twenty-five rupees is only one dollar. When I went from Australia to London last year, it hurt again. Do you want pounds or do you want rupees?’ Indeed, IT workers project their life strategies in a transnational, rather than local, context. The devaluation of the Australian dollar in 2000 made Indians even more eager to move to the USA.3 An informant who was waiting to go to the USA from Australia complained: ‘I am losing money every day by staying here’. Second, Indian IT workers in the USA are said to have more promotion opportunities than those in Australia. I was told that such workers who hit the ‘glass ceiling’ in Australia moved to the USA, only to be sent back to Australia by US companies as senior managers a few years later. They could not have reached that level if they had stayed in Australia. Many informants attributed this to the fact that companies in the USA are more ‘performance-oriented’ and more ‘professional’. Others argued that this is mainly due to the fact that US companies grow much more rapidly than Australian ones and therefore companies always have new positions and opportunities for promotion. The USA is also attractive in that it provides more opportunities for internal migration between cities. A worker can move between places and companies to upgrade their skills (although this does not apply to H-1B holders, whose place in the country is tied to a sponsor). In contrast, there are few IT opportunities outside Melbourne and Sydney in Australia. More importantly, the large number of multinational corporation headquarters located in the USA offers more promotion opportunities to those working there in the long term. It is believed that working in the world headquarters brings employees much wider exposure and more networks. In contrast, most international companies in Australia are branches of US or UK companies. Rajan, a middle-aged IT professional running a small consultancy firm in Sydney, pointed to the fact that most Indian IT companies set up their first overseas offices in the USA: ‘Why do they do that? Because you can get all the top-level people and networks in America. Then you can go down to other countries’. Some entrepreneurs prefer to register their companies in the USA, although in fact the business is operated from Australia or India. According to them, registering themselves as a US company makes it easier to cut deals with partners. Technology is another concern related to promotion. Meena, one of the few female IT workers whom I met, was determined to go to the USA because of its leading position in IT. She put it in this way: ‘After you stay in Australia for five years, you can’t go anywhere. You will be outdated’. Third, H-1B visa holders are allowed to bring their spouses to the USA on H4 visas at any time, while it takes a 457 visa holder a minimum of six months to
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bring their spouse to Australia. Young IT workers often work in Australia for one or two years, return to India to be married and then move to the USA with their wives. H-4 visa holders in the USA are not allowed to work, but spouses of 457 visa holders in Australia are. However, this does not make Australia more attractive. It is a prevailing belief that since the salary in the USA is high, wives do not need to work there anyway. However, this means that H-4 visa holders would be deported immediately once they are divorced. This dependency renders Indian housewives in the USA highly vulnerable. Maitri, a San Francisco-based South Asian women’s organization, received over 1,500 calls from H-4 women reporting domestic violence in the period 2000–01 (Srivastava 2001). Finally, ethnic and familial networks also serve to push IT professionals to move to the USA. As the Indian community in the USA is much bigger than in Australia, it is quite common for an Indian IT worker in Sydney to have more contacts in the USA than in Australia. Singapore and Malaysia: global gateways Singapore and Malaysia serve as strategic gateways to the global labour market for Indian IT workers. Indian IT professionals without overseas work experience or well-regarded education certificates, who are therefore unlikely to be hired in countries such as the USA straight away, often try their luck in this region first. These two countries became global gateways for various reasons. First, both Singapore and Malaysia attach great emphasis to developing their IT industries and see the inflow of IT professionals as a key strategy for this. Singapore’s prime minister, Goh Chok Tong, described successfully competing for and recruiting foreign talent as ‘a matter of life and death’ for Singapore (Shu 2001). In the wake of the arrest of 270 Indian IT professionals by the Malaysian authorities for alleged visa irregularities, he described the incident as ‘unfortunate’ and made it clear to the press that ‘Indian IT professionals are welcome here [in Singapore]. Please keep it on the record’ (Sify News 2003). Across the causeway, Malaysia’s well-known Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) is the pet project of Malaysian prime minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad and a showcase of the projected ‘K-Malaysia’ (knowledge-based Malaysia). Large companies, particularly those with ‘MSC status’, are given the latitude to recruit employees, particularly IT professionals, from overseas on employment pass visas. Second, the two countries, particularly Singapore, are seen as ideal locations for the regional headquarters of multinational corporations for Asia. This creates further demand for IT skills. More and more Indian IT companies are also setting up branches in Singapore in order to have a larger presence in the Asian market. Singapore’s international position not only enables Indians to establish contacts with multinationals but also makes working in Singapore a valuable experience. The work culture of Singapore, with its emphasis on discipline and efficiency, as well as the country’s English-speaking and multicultural environment, is believed to be highly ‘résumé-enhancing’ in positioning oneself for the global market.
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Third, geographical proximity to India makes Singapore and Malaysia suitable places for trial trips, at least psychologically, since it is only a slightly over three-hour flight from south India to these two countries. Indeed, Singapore’s proximity to major sources of labour such as China, the Philippines and Indonesia has made it a world centre for human resources management, with a large presence of international recruitment agencies in the country. One informant estimated that there could be as many as 300 Indian-run body shops in Singapore managing around 4,000 IT workers at any one particular time in the 1998–2000 period. Placing workers from India and Malaysia to Singapore, and from Singapore to Canada, Australia and the USA, constitutes the standard business of Singapore-based body shops. Understandably, the key issue for Indian workers at these gateways is to search for job opportunities while coping with difficulties, such as financial problems, during the search. ‘Indian networks’, specifically the networks linking Indian workers and placement agents as well as the networks between Indian workers, play an important role. A large proportion of Indian IT workers in Singapore enter the country on social visitor visas, which are valid for one month. During this period, workers go door to door in large office complexes where IT placement agents, particularly those run by Indians, are concentrated, hoping to secure a job within the month. When their social visitor visa expires, some workers move to Thailand, Indonesia and particularly Malaysia to have their visas renewed, following which they return to Singapore on fresh social visitor visas to continue job hunting. In the small city-state, Indian job seekers quickly get to know each other. While understandably secretive about their search for Singapore-based jobs, they are open with each other about overseas opportunities that they try to access from Singapore. Uday, one of my key informants, applied for jobs in eleven countries, including South Africa, Germany and Japan, when he was in Singapore. Sometimes a group of fellow Indians may apply for overseas jobs collectively. For instance, in order to save money, four or five friends may use one computer to prepare their résumés and send them off together from an Internet cafe. Friends with more interview experience may take on telephone interviews as surrogates for those with less experience. For these reasons, Uday called Singapore a place ‘for networking and bridging’. In Malaysia, many Indian IT workers have difficulties finding jobs on first arrival through the sponsorship of body shops. In mid-2001, for example, there were an estimated 300 Telugu (of Andhra Pradesh origin) IT workers in Kuala Lumpur. Nearly half were jobless and had to rely on fellow Indians for survival, leading to the formation of a peculiar Telugu enclave in Kuala Lumpur. Palm Court, a four-block residential complex in Brickfields, central Kuala Lumpur, accommodated about 1,000 Indians, of whom Telugu people were the largest regional group. Indeed, body shops in Hyderabad advise workers to visit Palm Court on their arrival. It has become almost an obligation for single men living in Palm Court to accept new arrivals from India who have no jobs. This unique ethnic clustering makes it easier for workers without any international experience to move from India to Kuala Lumpur but also imposes burdens on those
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who are already there. Rejeshekar, a Telugu IT professional who has worked in Kuala Lumpur for a year, asserted that no Indian would stay in Malaysia for more than two years. He explained: ‘In Malaysia you can’t save. Many people ask for help. At least half [of wages] goes to … friends’. There is hence considerable motivation for Indian IT professionals to actively search for opportunities to move on to other countries from Malaysia. In effect, both the facilitating role of ‘Indian networks’ and the costs resulting from this reinforce Malaysia’s gateway position – a favourite first destination but only for the short term – in the world system of Indian IT professionals. Australia and Canada: bases for security Being highly transnational and mobile does not mean that IT professionals have no plans for long-term settlement or concerns about the uncertainties borne out of mobility. Indeed, obtaining permanent residency in a Western country is one of the Indian IT worker’s primary goals and a determining factor for his or her social status back in India. When I first met Siva, an IT professional who graduated from Queensland University, Australia, he was in a state of anxiety. His father was very ill, and the family wanted Siva to marry as soon as possible. However, his application for Australian permanent residency was still pending. He said: ‘In India, people have no information about Australia. If we tell them that IT students can get permanent residency easily, people won’t believe it’. Permanent residency is regarded as important in the marriage market because it provides basic security. Without this status, Siva would have difficulty finding a bride with a large dowry. Australia and Canada are attractive to Indian IT workers mainly because permanent residency in these two countries is thought to be easily obtainable. Both countries made significant changes in their immigration policy from the mid-1990s, most notably by increasing skilled immigration intakes. The Australian government, for example, increased the proportion of skilled immigrants from 29 percent in 1995–96 to 53 percent for 2000–01 (see Table 8.1). For the year 2002–03, the skilled stream of immigration further increased to 60,700, compared with 43,200 under the family reunification scheme.4 In the points test system, the main measure for selecting potential migrants, IT professionals are classified as a tier one occupation drawing maximum points (Birrell 2000: 80). From early 2002, all applications involving IT professionals were given priority over other applications (DIMA 2000). During the market slowdown starting in late 2000, Australia and Canada became particularly popular among Indian IT workers. Over a forty-eight-hour period in May 2001, my Indian flatmate in Sydney received four phone calls from two friends in Boston and New York asking him how to migrate to Australia. It is also becoming an increasingly common strategy for Indian IT workers, particularly those with families, to move to Australia or Canada first to secure their permanent residency status and then move on to the USA to make ‘quick bucks’ and gain more experience.
Indian information technology professionals’ world system Table 8.1
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Australia’s immigration intake programme, 1995 –2001 1995– 96
1996– 97
1997– 98
1998– 99
1999–2000
2000–01
Family Stream
56,700
44,580
31,310
32,040
32,000
34,400
Skilled Stream
24,100
27,550
34,670
35,000
35,333
40,000
Total Migration Programme *
82,600
73,900
67,100
67,900
70,200
76,000
Source: DIMA website, 2000, ‘Immigration Programme’ at http://www.immi.gov.au * ‘Total Migration Programme’ includes the Family Stream, the Skilled Stream and the Special Eligibility Stream.
Australia and Canada are also attractive because of their generous welfare systems. When discussing the social boundary between those with permanent residency and the temporary workers in the Indian community, an informant with permanent residency status said that the most important differentiating factor is that those with permanent residency can live on the dole while unemployed and this, according to him, generated considerable jealousy among the temporary IT migrants. ‘We are secured’, he said proudly. In India, being ‘secured’ is what many people are struggling for. For example, in highlighting how prestigious the IITs are, people often say: ‘if you graduated from IIT, you are “secured”’. Another reason why Indian IT workers take on Australia and Canada as bases for security is because the markets in the two countries are less volatile than that in the USA. When hundreds of dot.com companies in the USA closed down and announced 98,522 lay-offs in November 2001 alone (The Times of India 2001), there were still some openings in Australia. I came across three US-based Indian companies who moved to Australia during the slowdown. While Australia is not seen as a place to make quick fortunes, it is thought to be more conducive to keeping firms alive than the USA. Australia’s close connection with Asia, where there is a growing alternative market, is also perceived to contribute to market stability. In terms of the employer–employee relationship, the situation in Australia is also more favourable for employees than in the USA. It is said that, while it is a norm in the USA for a company to fire a worker with one day’s notice, Australian companies tend to try to maintain their staff members for a longer period even when they do not have enough projects coming in, largely due to state regulations as well as the prevailing egalitarian ideology.
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However, building a secure base in Australia or Canada does not make workers less mobile. On the contrary, permanent resident status in these countries is highly regarded partly because it makes further mobility easier. When I congratulated Venkate, an IT worker who had originally moved to Australia on a 457 visa, for his success in his permanent resident application, the first thing he said was: ‘Yes, I can go anywhere now!’ Chitra, an IT worker who had graduated from an Australian university, was eager to obtain permanent residency precisely because he wanted to go back to India to join a friend’s business. He explained: ‘I still have the job here now. I should apply now [before the contract is due]. Then I can come and go anytime’. After obtaining permanent residency status, some IT workers ‘check out’ the world before settling down. Navin, a former employee of Tata Computer Services, India’s largest software company, was assigned by the company to work in Australia for one year in 1996. He applied for Australian permanent residency after he returned to India and succeeded. However, immediately after that, he went to the USA on an H1-B visa. In the USA, he found that he liked Australia better. He went back to India in 1998, got married and brought his wife to Sydney. There are also workers who obtain permanent residency through back-andforth mobility. Chandary Shekhar, a dynamic IT professional determined to build his own business, went to the USA on an H-1B visa in 1997. Realizing the difficulty of getting a green card, he moved to Australia, where he obtained permanent residency and set up a company. Soon afterwards, he went to the USA on a H1-B visa again to work in a large IT company in order to explore the market there. In short, transnational mobility is a means by which IT workers exploit differences in the various countries to their benefit.
Discussion As indicated in the beginning, this chapter attempts to deepen our understanding of the relationship between the ‘nation’ and the ‘transnation’, or, borrowing Castells’ (1996) words, the relationship between the ‘space of places’ and the ‘space of flows’ in the case of migrant Indian IT professionals. It demonstrates that the migration strategies and trajectories of Indian IT professionals are genuinely ‘transnational’. Unlike the multiple migration of the earlier Indian diaspora (such as the remigration of Fijian Indians to Australia and of Indians from East Africa to the UK), the IT professionals’ multiple migration is a deeply institutionalized phenomenon, taken as a conscious strategy and facilitated by agents (body shops). While using migration as a means of improving one’s career and life status is nothing new, the strategic manoeuvring transnationally as a basis for social status claims is novel. At the same time, this chapter shows that the Indian IT workers do not form migration strategies and trajectories in a freewheeling fashion. Instead, their transnational activities are clearly influenced by a series of national factors in the countries involved, such as immigration policies, the size of the IT industry, employment relations and welfare systems. Indeed, the policies of national
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governments are often a precondition for the emergence of transnational processes. The ‘national’ and the ‘transnational’ do not interact directly. The key conclusion emerging from my ethnographic data is that the established international economic order forms the basic framework around which ‘nation’ and ‘transnation’ intertwine. What shapes transnational activities are not the national factors in themselves but the coexistence of different national situations in the countries involved. For instance, it is in comparison with the immigration policy in the USA that Australia and Canada have become particularly attractive, and it is due to the USA’s dominant position in the world IT industry, rather than the US IT industry per se that the USA becomes the central destination for many IT professionals. The emergence of the Indian IT professionals’ ‘world system’ is a process whereby the migrants compare the situations in different countries carefully and pursue their interests by capitalizing on the differences across countries. More fundamentally, the Indian IT workers’ transnational mobility not only reflects but also reinforces the established international economic order. Indian IT workers’ transnational mobility can be seen as a process by which a special commodity essential for the so-called ‘new economy’, namely human capital, is transferred globally. The new economy is often described as an economy with nearly exclusive reliance on human capital and limited financial capital requirements. What is neglected in such a description is the fact that the production of IT workers requires large and long-term investments, the major part of which is often contributed by the public sector rather than by individuals or households. In the Indian IT workers’ world system, India’s main function is exactly to produce IT workers for the global market, and it is because of this that India has become the coordinating centre for this mobility. The immediate reasons for India producing the disproportionately large number of IT professionals include national factors such as the emphasis on higher education as a legacy of Nehru’s era,5 the high level of social differentiation (along class, caste and gender lines), which siphons off value from the low end of society to produce a small elite and the extremely low subsistence cost in the country (which is again related to class divisions). When these national conditions are linked to the international system, they become particularly conducive to producing inexpensive IT labour for the global market. By comparison, the USA is in the position to attract ‘readymade’, qualified IT professionals from all over the world. Silicon Valley’s glory is, to a large extent, based on the surplus value absorbed from India through transnational migration. Countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and Canada are also indispensable for the IT workers’ world system. Singapore and Malaysia prepare junior Indian IT workers to enter the higher sectors of the global market. In Australia and Canada, less dramatic market fluctuations make them a critical buffer zone for IT professionals in pursuit of global mobility, without which the current migration system may not be sustainable against the high volatility of the market. Business studies often attribute the USA’s IT success to its flexible employment relations and its risk-taking ‘culture’. However, this flexibility can
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only be sustained because the costs of such flexibility (e.g., uncertainties and the lack of corporate investment in human capital) are exported, again through transnational mobility, to countries such as Australia and further to India. Therefore, in the world system of Indian IT workers, the USA, India and countries such as Australia largely correspond to the positions of the core, the periphery and the semi-periphery, as described by Wallerstein and his associates. This is not to say that nothing has changed. In the present case, what links the different countries together is not goods but human beings, who are active agents of social change. As has been widely reported, some IT professionals have returned to India to set up IT businesses by capitalizing on their transnational networks. But most of these businesses are still labour-intensive software services catering to the demands of Western clients. Unlike the relocation of manufacturing industries to Southeast Asia, which absorbed a large pool of labour and contributed to the increase of the general income level in the region, the IT industry in India can only create limited employment opportunities;6 yet it needs a large amount of surplus value from local society to produce this special labour force. Therefore, the newly developed IT businesses in India are still part of the chain whereby surplus value is transferred from the periphery to the core. In summary, while the notion of ‘transnationalism’ is certainly useful in understanding the dynamic movements that constitute the IT sector, it should be remembered that the emergence and sustaining of transnational practices continue to shape, and be shaped by, the nation and the international economic order. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Ms Theresa Wong for her help in editing an earlier draft of this chapter.
Notes 1
2
3
‘Lakh’ and ‘crore’ are common measuring units in India. One lakh is 100,000 and one crore is 10 million. One US dollar is worth approximately 40 rupees (Rs.40). In line with common usage in India, this chapter uses lakh and crore for the rupee and million and billion for other currencies. Laid-off workers are allowed to remain in the USA only if they can find another job within ten days. The US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) imposes a three-year ban on foreign nationals who have remained unemployed in the USA between 180 and 364 days. The ban can be extended to ten years for those beyond 365 days (Iyengar 2001). The massive lay-off of H-1B workers starting in 2000 forced INS to take an ambiguous stance on this. The INS announced that it would not deport H-1B visa holders immediately after their loss of jobs. Nevertheless, unemployed H-1Bs are still semi-illegal and are highly anxious about their status in the USA. The Australian dollar fell to a historical low in March 2001. One Australian dollar was worth just over 48 US cents, compared with 78 cents earlier. Long before the devaluation, David Hale, chief global economist with Zurich Financial Services in Chicago, had attributed the vulnerability of the Australian dollar to Australia’s weak-
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5
6
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ness in the IT sector. He also recommended that Australia increase skilled immigration further (see Birrell 2000: 78). There are two programmes admitting permanent immigrants to Australia, namely the migration programme and the humanitarian programme. The migration programme includes (1) a skills migration stream for people who have particular occupation skills, outstanding talents or business skills; (2) a family migration stream, where people can be sponsored by a relative who is an Australian citizen or permanent resident; and (3) special eligibility migrants, who are former citizens or residents wanting to return to Australia, and some New Zealanders. The humanitarian programme normally makes up less than 10 percent of total intake. Traditionally, the family stream was the major channel for immigration (DIMA 2003). Immediately after India’s Independence, Nehru put tertiary education high on India’s development agenda and devoted considerable resources to it. The number of universities in India increased from thirty-seven in 1950 to 129 in 1975, and engineering colleges increased from fifty-eight to 179 over the same period (Krishna and Khardria 1997: 351, table 2). In 1970 alone, India granted about 120,000 degrees in science and engineering (ibid.: 352, table 3). Modelled on MIT in the USA, seven elite Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) have been set up in different cities since 1950. IIT graduates became a major source of skilled migrants later. Currently, the entire IT industry’s workforce constitutes less than 0.02 percent of the national population.
References Arora, A., Arunachalam, V.S., Asundi, J. and Fernandes, R. (1999) ‘The Indian software services industry: structure and prospects’, working paper of Carnegie Mellon Software Industry Center. Birrell, B. (2000) ‘Information technology and Australia’s immigration program: Is Australia doing enough?’ People and Place 8 (2): 77–83. Castells, M. (1996) The Rise of the Network Society, New York: Blackwell. Castles, S. (2001) ‘Studying social transformation’, International Political Science Review 22 (1): 13–32. DCITA (Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, Australia), DETYA (Department of Education, Training and Youth Affairs, Australia), DEWRSB (Department of Employment, Workplace Relations and Small Businesses, Australia) and DIMA, Australia (1998) ‘Skill shortages in Australia’s IT&T industries’, discussion paper. Dickens, P. (1998) Global Shift, London: Paul Chapman. DIMA (Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs Australia) (2000) ‘Priority processing for ICT professionals’. Available online at http://www.immi.gov.au /ict/fs03.htm —— (2003) ‘Migration to Australia’. Available online at http://www.immi.gov.au/ allforms/migration_info.htm Donahue, J. and Nye, J.S. (eds) (2001) Governance in a Globalizing World, Washington: Brookings Institution Press. Ethnic and Racial Studies (1999) special issue 22 (2). Finance and Planning Department (FPD) of Andhra Pradesh government (1999) Information Technology Policy of the Government of Andhra Pradesh, FPD of Andhra Pradesh government. Georges, E. (1990) The Making of a Transnational Community: Migration, Development and Cultural Change in the Dominican Republic, New York: Columbia University Press. High-Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora (2001) Report of the High-Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, High Level Committee on the Indian Diaspora, government of India.
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Hoogvelt, A. (1997) Globalization and the Postcolonial World, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) (2000) ‘Characteristics of specialty occupation workers (H-1B): May 1998 to July 1999’, US Immigration and Naturalization Service, February. Iyengar, S. (2001) ‘Sad plight of fired H-1B workers’, Wired News, 13 March. Krishna, V.V. and Khadria, B. (1997) ‘Phasing scientific migration in the context of brain gain and brain drain in India’, Science, Technology & Society 2 (2): 348–85. Krishnadas, K.C. (2000) ‘U.S. finds itself competing for Indian engineers’, EE Times, 30 June. Lowell, B.L. (2000) ‘H-1B temporary workers: estimating the population’, Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University. NASSCOM (National Association of Software and Service Companies), India (2000) ‘IT software & services industry in India grows by 53% in 1999–2000’. Available online at http://www.nasscom.org/template/itinindia.htm Ong, A. (1993) ‘On the edge of empires: flexible citizenship among Chinese in diaspora’, Position 1 (3): 745–78. Portes, A., Guarnizo, L. E. and Landolt, P. (1999) ‘The study of transnationalism: pitfalls and promise of an emergent research’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 22 (2): 217–38. Ramesh, J. (1999) ‘Yankee go home, but take me with you: yet another perspective on Indo-American relations’, Economic and Political Weekly, special articles, December 11–17. Rao, B. (2000) ‘Economic migrants in a global labour market: a report on the recruitment and retention of Asian computer professionals by Canadian high-tech firms’, report for Strategic Policy, Planning and Research, Citizenship and Immigration Canada and Labour Market Policy, Human Resource Development Canada, CPRN working paper. Ruddock, P. (Minister of DIMA, Australia) (1999) ‘The coalition government’s position on immigration and population policy’, People and Place 7 (4): 6–16. Sassen, S. (1998) Globalization and its Discontents, New York: New Press. Shu, S.L. (2001) ‘Work policy worries some Singaporeans’, Asian Wall Street Journal, 9 October. Sify News (2003) ‘Come, work with us, Singapore PM tells Indian techies’, 6 April. Available online at http://headlines.sify.com/2116news3.html Sklair, L. (1995) Sociology of Global Systems, London and Baltimore: Prentice Hall and Johns Hopkins University Press. Smith, M.P. and Guarnizo L.E. (eds) (1998) Transnationalism from Below, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers. Srivastava. R. (2001) ‘H4 visa leaves many Indian women dependent on abusive husbands’, The Times of India, Hyderabad, 22 July: 9. Stackhouse, J. (2000) ‘Brain dead: why Canada just doesn’t cut it anymore for the world’s best and brightest’, The Globe and Mail (Toronto), 18 March. Steffenhagen, J. (2000) “‘Brain-gain” can’t replace loss of our stars’, Vancouver Sun, 26 May. Stewart, A. (2000) ‘Australia switches immigration focus to lure more expert workers’, Agence France-Presse, July 19. The Times of India (2001) ‘Dotcoms see hope despite gloom’, 30 December. Toulin, A. (2000) ‘Canada bleeding MDs, nurses to U.S.’, National Post, 25 May. Weiss, L. (1998) The Myth of the Powerless State, Cambridge: Polity Press. Xiang, B. (2001) ‘Structuration of Indian information technology professionals’ migration to Australia’, International Migration 39 (5) (issue 1): 73–90.
9
Beyond transnational nationalism Questioning the borders of the Chinese diaspora in the global city Ien Ang
Armenian-American scholar Khachig Tölölyan (1991: 3) has claimed that ‘diasporas are the exemplary communities of the transnational moment’. It would seem to make sense then to look at particular diasporas in our effort to analyze transnational communities. In this chapter, I will explore the theoretical and empirical implications of conceptualizing the Chinese diaspora as a transnational community – arguably, together with the Indian diaspora, the most well-established and prominent of diasporic groupings in the Asia-Pacific region, indeed globally. My aim is to do some conceptual ground clearing and to reflect on the concept of ‘Chinese diaspora’ itself: how it is currently used, how this relates to older conceptions of overseas Chinese, and the intellectual and political implications of the concept’s current popularity. In doing this, my theoretical starting point will be that, just like nations, diasporas are not natural, pre-existing entities but ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1983). As such, I will conclude that the transnationalism of the Chinese diaspora is actually nationalist in its outlook, because no matter how global in its reach, its imaginary orbit is demarcated ultimately by the closure effected by the category of Chineseness itself. An alternative, more open-ended model for the transnational community can be found in the multicultural global city, where the very notion of Chineseness is problematized and unsettled through the intense processes of cultural hybridization, which leaves no identity untouched. Tölölyan made his claim that diasporas are the exemplary communities of the transnational moment in the editorial of the first issue of the journal Diaspora: A Journal for Transnational Studies, which he set up in 1991.1 Since then, he has continued to edit this now influential journal, an influence that resonates with the increasing popularity of the term ‘diaspora’ itself. While this term was once reserved as a descriptor for the historical dispersion of Jewish, Greek and Armenian peoples, today the term tends to be used much more generically to refer to almost any group living outside their country of origin, be it Italians outside Italy, Africans in the Caribbean, North America or Western Europe, Cubans in Miami, or indeed Chinese all over the world. Indeed, as Tölölyan (1996: 3) remarks, ‘the significant transformation of the last few decades is the move towards renaming as diasporas … communities of dispersion … which were known by other names until the late 1960s: as exile groups, overseas communities, ethnic and racial minorities, and so forth’.
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So it is the case with the Chinese. While dispersed migrant Chinese communities around the world used to be known as ‘overseas Chinese’ (to use the common English term), in the past decade or so, they are increasingly frequently described collectively as ‘Chinese diaspora’. A key marker of this shift was the publication of Lynn Pan’s (1990) hugely popular book Sons of the Yellow Emperor, a sprawling history of the Chinese diaspora. This was followed in a more scholarly vein by the two volumes of essays edited by Wang Gungwu and Wang Ling-chi (1998), The Chinese Diaspora: Selected Essays. Pan was also the general editor of a massive encyclopaedia of the Chinese diaspora, published under the aegis of the Chinese Heritage Centre in Singapore, which was established in 1995 ‘to study overseas Chinese globally’. Interestingly, this impressive publication expressly avoids the word ‘diaspora’ in its title (even though it is used liberally in the text) and is instead called The Encyclopaedia of the Chinese Overseas (Pan 1998). This suggests that there is something problematic about the politics of naming and using the label ‘Chinese diaspora’ – an issue to which I will return shortly. It is clear that the discourse of diaspora owes much of its contemporary currency to the economic, political and cultural erosion of the modern nationstate as a result of postmodern capitalist globalization – what Tölölyan (1991) calls ‘the transnational moment’. Tölölyan (ibid.: 5) even nominates diasporas as the paradigmatic others of the nation-state: the increasing assertiveness of diasporic groups in representing and organizing themselves as transnational communities forces nation-states to ‘confront the extent to which their boundaries are porous and their ostensible homogeneity a multicultural heterogeneity’. Seen this way, diasporas are not only placed in direct opposition to the nationstate but are also implicitly designated as key socio-cultural formations capable of overcoming the constrictions of national boundaries, the means through which people can imagine and align themselves beyond ‘an oppressive national hegemony’ (Clifford 1997: 255). Much contemporary work on diaspora, both scholarly and popular, represents this transnational diasporic imaginary as a liberating force: simply put, the nation-state is cast as the limiting, homogenizing and assimilating power structure that is now, finally, being deconstructed from within by those groups who used to be marginalized within its borders but are now bursting out of them through their diasporic transnational connections. This diametrical juxtaposing of nation-state as site of oppression and diaspora as site of liberation is obviously an exaggeratedly simplified depiction of current theorizing on these issues. Yet it serves to elucidate what I wish to problematize in this chapter, namely the extent to which the idea of diaspora tends to be embraced as an unambiguously positive move forward in the emancipation of minority populations within and vis-à-vis nation-states. This is not because I think that nation-states are the privileged terrain for the struggle for recognition of ethnic minority groups; obviously, history has taught us otherwise. The modern nation-state has classically, in its nineteenth-century European conception, operated as a territorially bounded sovereign polity, imagining itself as an internally homogeneous community unified by a common language, culture and people. To be sure, this very ideal of the nation as (having
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to be) racially and culturally homogeneous was one of the main ideological justifications for the various policies of Chinese exclusion introduced in New World nation-states such as the USA, Canada and Australia in the late nineteenth century (Stratton and Ang 1998). The story of the plight of immigrant Chinese communities in these countries and elsewhere, where they have long suffered severe institutionalized discrimination as well as social marginalization and ostracism from mainstream society, is all too well known. ‘Being Chinese’, under these circumstances, meant being locked into an unenviable, paralyzingly disempowered position vis-à-vis the dominant national culture and the state undergirding it. From this perspective, the transnationalization of the imagination afforded by the notion of diaspora can be experienced as liberating indeed. By imagining oneself as part of a globally significant, transnational Chinese diasporic community, a minority Chinese subject can rise, at least in the imagination, above the national environment in which he or she lives but from which he or she may always have felt symbolically excluded. I would contend that much of the current popularity of ‘Chinese diaspora’ among ethnic Chinese around the world is fuelled precisely by this emotive desire not just to belong but to belong to a respectable imagined community, one that instils pride in one’s identity precisely because it is so much larger and more encompassing, in geographical terms at least, than any territorially bounded nation. Transnational diaspora, in this context, signifies deliverance and release from territorialized national identity and triumph over the shackles of the nation-state. In the economic realm, the rising power of what Ong and Nonini (1997) call ‘modern Chinese transnationalism’ – whose subjects are jet-setting businessmen criss-crossing the Asia-Pacific to enhance their commercial empires – has received much attention. This transnational Chinese capitalist class, mythically held together by supposedly unique Chinese cultural characteristics such as guanxi,2 has grown substantially since the opening up of mainland China in the mid-1980s. The World Chinese Entrepreneurs Convention, established in 1991, is only one of the most prestigious organizations embodying the new, self-confident and elite face of the Chinese diaspora in the era of globalization.3 But the strengthening of transnational Chinese identification goes far beyond the level of economic cooperation and trade connections: it is a transnational cultural movement involving many ethnic Chinese, whose concerns are mainly of a personal-political nature, dealing with basic issues of ethnic identity and belonging. An example of this is one of the most well-known popular Chinese diaspora institutions in recent years, the website Huaren (www.huaren.org). This website gained some international notoriety when it galvanized an unprecedented level of diasporic Chinese militancy in response to what came to be known worldwide as the anti-Chinese riots in Indonesia in May 1998 (Heryanto 1999; Ang 2001a, 2001b). More generally, the site’s main stated objective is ‘to promote kinship and understanding among all overseas Chinese’, a task hugely facilitated by the quintessential technology of contemporary transnationalism: the Internet. As the site owners describe it:
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The site owners go on: Chinese are estimated to be living in over 136 different countries, making it perhaps the most widespread ethnic group in the world. Such diversity is indeed awe-inspiring. Yet, it is the same diversity which creates gulfs among peoples. We often encounter Chinese-Americans or Chinese-Canadians who know or care little of their counterparts elsewhere. Such ignorance and indifference should be corrected. (Huaren website: About Us) Put briefly, then, Huaren’s activist desire is to unite the Chinese Diaspora (it is not insignificant that the word diaspora is generally capitalized in Huaren’s editorial statements). They wish to counter the fragmenting effects of centurieslong spatial scattering through a reaffirmation of historical continuity and perpetuation of a proto-familial blood connection that crosses geographical borders and dividing lines imposed by nation-states. In this way, Huaren contributes to the active production of the transnational community of diasporic Chinese. In his book Global Diasporas, Robin Cohen (1997: ix) notes that ‘a member’s adherence to a diasporic community is demonstrated by an acceptance of an inescapable link with their past migration history and a sense of co-ethnicity with others of a similar background’. It is precisely this acceptance of one’s primordial Chineseness that Huaren wishes to strengthen or instil in anyone who has some Chinese ancestry. From this point of view, any ChineseAmerican or Chinese-Canadian would do well to be Chinese first and American or Canadian only second and so help to bolster the internal cohesion and solidarity of the transnational Chinese diasporic community. Furthermore, the assumption is that this is a progressive move, a contribution not only to ethnic Chinese empowerment but also to world peace and better relations between Chinese and non-Chinese. It is clear what is involved in this particular instance of diaspora politics. First, it is based on the premise that historical origin is, or should be, ultimately more important than the geographical present in determining one’s contemporary identity and sense of belonging. It is also premised on the notion that the signifier ‘Chinese’ alone, whatever its meaning, is sufficient to differentiate between people who do and those who do not belong to this massively large diasporic community and to somehow seal and define the commonality of all those who do belong. Further, the motivation for diasporic solidarity is implicitly and explicitly justified by a stance of moral high ground: it is past and present
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‘mistreatments’ (read: anti-Chinese racism) that urges ‘us’ to stick together. Finally, it is assumed that the move towards transnational alignment with coethnics elsewhere provides an emancipatory lever that enables diasporic Chinese ‘to circumvent disciplining by nation-states’ (Nonini and Ong 1997: 3). It should be pointed out that the production of Chinese diaspora, as exemplified by Huaren, is first and foremost a matter of collective self-representation. The interactive and participatory nature of Internet communication is a very efficient vehicle through which a global sense of community and collective identity is created: this very process helps to bring the Chinese diaspora into being. As Tölölyan (1996: 29) puts it, ‘the diasporic collective subject [is] a figure that mobilizes dispersion into diaspora and is fleshed out in the course of that mobilization’. One can object that only relatively few diasporic Chinese would ever take part in the cyber-communication of Huaren and other similar organizations. However, according to Tölölyan (ibid.: 19), the (re)production of any diaspora worthy of that name depends on a small number of political leaders and, most importantly, intellectuals and artists who produce the cultural works and discourses that fuel the diasporic consciousness and identity. And ‘the fact that the committed, activist and militant diasporists rarely form more than a small percentage of old ethnic or new immigrant dispersions now emerging as diasporas does not prevent them from claiming the now-valorised “diaspora” label for the social formation in whose name they strive to speak to dominant groups’. In short, the redescription of a dispersed people as a diaspora is not an innocent act of name change but a transformative political move – a move that Tö1ölyan himself cautions against celebrating too uncritically. What then are its pitfalls? Wang Gungwu, the doyen of overseas Chinese historical scholarship, has recently expressed his disquiet about the use of the term ‘diaspora’, especially in relation to overseas Chinese. His reservations are not theoretical but primarily political and ultimately existential. ‘The more I think about it,’ he says, ‘the unhappier I am that the term has come to be applied to the Chinese. I have used the term with great reluctance and regret, and I still believe that it carries the wrong connotation and that, unless it is used carefully to avoid projecting the image of a single Chinese diaspora, will eventually bring tragedy to the Chinese overseas’ (Wang 1999: 15). Wang’s sense of foreboding, which he expressed with the difficulties faced by Chinese Indonesians during the May 1998 riots in Jakarta in mind, is informed by a profound knowledge of overseas Chinese history and awareness of the problems raised by earlier manifestations of Chinese diaspora politics even if that term was not used as such. Specifically, Wang’s concern is induced by the controversial historical role played by the ambiguous term huaqiao (sojourner) in the production of the Chinese diaspora. The term emerged in China in the 1890s and came into general use to describe all overseas Chinese after the revolution of 1911 (Wang 1992). It remained prevalent until well into the 1950s, when its use ran into trouble as newly independent post-colonial nation-states began to assert control over the Chinese minority populations within their
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borders. Huaqiao carried strong political and emotional connotations, implying the unity of overseas Chinese communities as one people and their unbroken ties with the Chinese homeland. This is how Wang (1999: 2) sums up the problematic political career of the term: From China’s point of view, huaqiao was a powerful name for a single body of overseas Chinese. It was openly used to bring about ethnic if not nationalist or racist binding of all Chinese at home and abroad. In the countries which have large Chinese minorities, the term had become a major source of the suspicion that the Chinese minorities could never feel loyalty towards their host nations. In other words, the term huaqiao, with its reference to temporariness of residence outside China and its wholesale application to all Chinese abroad, evoked a whole ideological scenario of ‘militant commitment to remaining Chinese or restoring one’s “Chineseness”’ (Wang 1992: 7). This ideological China-centredness and obsession with Chineseness helped to fuel anti-Chinese suspicion and discrimination in foreign lands, whether in Southeast Asia or in European immigrant societies such as Australia. The question lingering in Wang Gungwu’s (1999: 2) mind is: ‘Will the word diaspora be used to revive the idea of a single body of Chinese, reminiscent of the old term, the huaqiao?’ The power of these words – huaqiao then, diaspora today – is not solely associated with their capacity to consolidate the collective imagination. They also spur people into action: they buttress and legitimize organizing practices aimed at mobilizing dispersed communities around a single point of cultural and political identification: ‘China’, the centre of authentic ‘Chineseness’. Thus, the predominance of huaqiao discourse in the first half of the twentieth century was closely connected with the activist practices of mainland Chinese nationalists, who sought to ‘resinicize’ overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, who, in their eyes, had ‘lost’ their Chineseness. Through ideological apparatuses such as Chinese-language schooling and the unifying narratives of race and fictive kinship, the self-identification and identification by others of these communities as Chinese was reinforced and affirmed. The controversial history of overseas Chinese nationalism – a diasporic nationalism designed to support and strengthen the nation-state of China – does not have to be recounted here; suffice it to remark that its overall ideological effect was a general reification of the very idea of Chinese identity as something fixed and indisputable. As Prasenjit Duara (1997) has argued, before the intervention of the Chinese nationalist activists, the majority of Chinese outside China lived with a flexible and ambiguous sense of Chineseness that had relatively open and soft, permeable boundaries. The activists, in Duara’s (ibid.: 41) words, ‘sought to transform these multiple, mobile identifications into a Chineseness that eliminated or reduced internal boundaries, on the one hand, and hardened the boundaries between Chinese and non-Chinese, on the other’.
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It is this ideological effect, associated with the term huaqiao, that Wang Gungwu finds intellectually and politically debilitating and that he sees as in danger of being repeated in the current valorisation of Chinese diaspora. Indeed, there is little doubt that the global discourse of diaspora – pace Huaren – is a powerful instrument in stimulating the (desire for) transnational integration and essentialist homogenization of overseas Chinese communities and individuals around the world as ultimately Chinese, and by implication, as ultimately distinct from non-Chinese. In this sense, the language of diaspora is fundamentally nationalist: it feeds into a transnational nationalism based on the presumption of internal ethnic sameness and external ethnic distinctiveness. Unlike the nationalism of the nation-state, which premises itself on a national community that is territorially bound, diasporic nationalism produces an imagined community that is deterritorialized but nevertheless symbolically bounded. Its borders are clearly defined, at least in the imagination, and its actual and potential membership is finite: only certain people, notionally ‘Chinese’ people, can belong to the ‘Chinese diaspora’. It is this particularist vision inherent in the diasporic imagination that Benedict Anderson has scathingly criticized as lacking in ‘universal grounding’. In his view, it ‘represents a certain contemporary vision of cosmopolitanism based on a quasi-planetary dispersion of bounded identities’, attractive to some, Anderson (1998: 131) suggests, because it makes them feel ‘entitled to belong to ancient bounded communities that nonetheless stretch impressively across the planet in the age of “globalization”’. According to Anderson (ibid.: 131), this vision distorts the way in which global migrations and historical change form real social subjectivities because it assigns particular people a priori to particular diasporic groupings: ‘Wherever the “Chinese” happen to end up – Jamaica, Hungary or South Africa – they remain countable Chinese, and it matters little if they also happen to be citizens of those nation-states’. One does not have to share Anderson’s dismissive rejection of identitarian notions of ethnicity per se to agree that the discourse of diaspora is authorized in principle by a fundamental notion of closure: it postulates the existence of closed, limited and mutually exclusive universes of ethnic sameness. Seen this way then, diasporas cannot simply be counterposed to nation-states; interestingly, a cultural nationalism – in the sense of the proposition of an imagined cultural community with clear boundaries, whether territorial or ethnic – underpins the construction of both. But if this is so, then we can ask the question whether diasporas – no longer to be seen as unambiguous sites of liberation in opposition to the oppressive site of the nation-state – can exercise their own forms of disciplinary power on their members. If one of the key modes of power that nation-states have over the people in their respective territories is that of inclusion and exclusion, do not diasporas apply similar mechanisms in patrolling their boundaries? This, indeed, is how Duara (1997: 40) described the work of the early twentieth-century nationalist activists, who ‘with a totalizing vision of community seek to eliminate these permeable boundaries [of local overseas Chinese communities] or transform them into the hardened boundaries of a
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closed community’. In this light, practices of resinicization aimed at reimbuing those who apparently had ‘lost’ their Chineseness with their ‘true’ cultural identity, can be interpreted as practices of forced inclusion: they are attempts to prevent those who had dispersed themselves from the homeland from ‘going astray’ and to sharpen the boundaries of the Chinese diaspora. Ironically, these very migrants cannot help but blur these boundaries through their everyday interactions with, and adaptations to, their non-Chinese environments. Similar tendencies can be detected in today’s diasporic activism. Remember, for example, how the Huaren website lamented that many Chinese-Americans or Chinese-Canadians ‘know or care little of their counterparts elsewhere’ and the added militant directive that ‘such ignorance and indifference should be corrected’. The very suggestion that Chinese-Americans should consider any other ‘Chinese’ group elsewhere in the world as their ‘counterparts’ cannot be taken at face value as a natural and logical demand: it is one instance of the imposition of fictive kinship that is part and parcel of the production of the Chinese diaspora as an imagined transnational community. The claimed need for correction of transnational ignorance and indifference only stresses the desire for integrating, if not unifying, the diaspora. One could object that unlike nation-states, diasporas do not in general have the institutional resources to impose their disciplinary power on their members; they are, after all, stateless.4 Furthermore, one could point to the fact that many people with Chinese ancestry today voluntarily identify with their Chinese ‘roots’, a development in tandem with the emergence of identity politics and the rise of multiculturalism, mostly in Western nation-states, especially the USA. Indeed, novels by Amy Tan and many other Chinese-American writers have popularized the stories of young and old second-, third- or even fourthgeneration Americans with Chinese ancestry, who derive profound meaning and joy out of the rediscovery of their Chinese heritage, often underscored by return visits to China, the motherland.5 But these developments only confirm my point that the social and discursive production of the Chinese diaspora is in full swing, a process driven by a passionate identification with and reification of ‘Chineseness’ as a globally relevant marker for identity and difference, and for which ‘China’ – which can be culturally defined as much as geographically located – forms the centre (Ang 1998). The power of the diaspora here is ideological and emotional rather than institutional: it works through the imagination (Appadurai 1996). We can now return to Wang Gungwu’s unhappiness about the upsurge in the application of the word ‘diaspora’ to the overseas Chinese. To his concern, I would like to add the more radical suggestion that not only the word ‘diaspora’ needs to be problematized but also the word ‘Chinese’. Wang’s concern focuses on the danger that the expression ‘Chinese diaspora’, just like the word huaqiao in earlier times, would create the false image of a single global Chinese community that would be ultimately loyal to China – to the detriment of the autonomy and specificity of local Chinese communities in different parts of the world. As Wang (1999: 1) remarks: ‘I have long advocated that the Chinese overseas be studied in
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the context of their respective national environments, and taken out of a dominant China reference point’. To counter the homogenizing tendencies of ‘diaspora’, Wang wants to emphasize the large variety of overseas Chinese experiences, the real historical effects of the process of dispersal. For Wang (ibid.: 17), this emphasis on difference and diversity within the diaspora opens up the perspective of a diasporic pluralism, one that recognizes that there are ‘many kinds of Chinese’, even ‘many different Chinese diasporas’, variously settled in and oriented towards their new countries of residence. Indeed, Wang (ibid.: 16) is acutely aware of the pressure brought about by this emphasis on proliferating diversity, predicting that ‘the single word, Chinese, will be less and less able to convey a reality that continues to become more pluralistic. We need more words, each with the necessary adjectives to qualify and identify who exactly we are describing. We need them all to capture the richness and variety of the hundreds of Chinese communities that can now be found’. However, unlike Anderson (1998), Wang does not go so far as to problematize the use of the term ‘Chinese’ as such. And yet precisely in the light of the pluralization of diaspora advocated by Wang it is instructive to reiterate Anderson’s disturbing query: why would ‘Chinese’ who happened to end up in the most farflung corners of the world – Jamaica, Hungary, or South Africa – still count as Chinese, even if they are now citizens of those nation-states and, by and large, no longer adhere to Chinese cultural traditions? What makes them still Chinese? When do they stop being Chinese? This question drives us to the question of borders: the boundary between ‘Chinese’ and ‘non-Chinese’, which, as we have seen, is liable to manipulation and redefinition, to being moulded from soft to hard. What I am trying to get at is this: while Wang’s concern focuses on the need to diffuse the China-centredness of Chinese overseas (even though China remains inevitably the central core of the imagining of the diaspora, no matter how pluralized), Anderson’s question points to the need for a serious examination of the outer border of the diaspora, that shifty, peripheral area where ‘Chinese’ transmutes into ‘non-Chinese’. This image of core and periphery captures the central hierarchy that is key to the transnational nationalist imagination, which carries dominant renderings of the Chinese diaspora.6 Take, for example, the visual representation of the Chinese diaspora in the Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas, which displays all the paradoxes of the diasporic imagination I have discussed here (see Figure 9.1). The centrality of China and Chinese within China is dramatically represented in this picture, with Taiwan and Hong Kong slightly decentred. The Encyclopedia deals mainly with those in circle C. The definition of this group is quite comprehensive: it ‘encompasses those unequivocally identified as “overseas Chinese” (or “Chinese overseas”). Examples of these are the so-called “hyphenated” Chinese: Sino-Thais, Chinese-Americans, and so on; people who are of Chinese descent but whose non-Chinese citizenship and political allegiance collapse ancestral loyalties. If this book may be said to have a constituency, these foreign Chinese are it’ (Pan 1998: 15) Note this peculiar
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Figure 9.1 A symbolic representation of varieties of Chinese Source: Lynn Pan 1998.
term, ‘foreign Chinese’. However, the most interesting segment is circle D, the ‘assimilated’, described as ‘those of Chinese ancestry who have, through intermarriage or other means of assimilation, melted into another people and ceased to call themselves Chinese’. To which is added: ‘Whether they will call themselves Chinese at some future date must be left an open question, however, because it has been known to happen’ (ibid.: 15). Here then the ambiguous and uncertain boundary between ‘Chinese’ and ‘non-Chinese’ is most clearly spelled out and acknowledged. Circle D is the nebulous and fuzzy border zone where the Chinese/non-Chinese boundary is decidedly up for grabs, indeterminate and unsettled. Those interested in the Chinese diaspora would typically consider this border zone to be of peripheral relevance – too far removed from the ‘pure’ Chinese core in the inner circle. However, I would argue that it is precisely by focusing on
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this soft and porous border zone, which is only peripheral if one accepts the hierarchical model of concentric circles as the only valid representation of reality, that we can move beyond the nationalist imagination – territorial or deterritorialized ethnic – shared by both nation-states and diasporas. Indeed, in this era of globalization, where the mixing and interconnecting of people from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds is becoming increasingly commonplace, even in the still relatively closed and homogeneous nation-state of China, one could suspect that the border zone, where identities are unfixed and destabilized, will only become increasingly crowded and gain in size and significance. This border zone, the actual and symbolic contact zone of inter-cultural encounter and negotiation (Pratt 1992), is where processes of hybridization transpire on a regular and ordinary basis. It is my argument that if we are interested in analysing cultural transnationalism today, it is these processes of hybridization that need to be at the centre of our attention (Canclini 1995, 2000; Hannerz 1996). One of the merits of the concept of hybridization is that it undermines the binary and static way of thinking difference that is dominant in theories of cultural pluralism, which are premised on the distinctness of cultures and ethnicities. However, as Canclini (2000: 41) remarks: ‘Diversity and heterogeneity are terms that serve to establish catalogues of differences, but they do not account for intersections and mixings between cultures’. The importance of highlighting processes of hybridization is that it provides us with a conceptual ‘point of departure from which to break from fundamentalist tendencies and from the fatalism of the doctrines of civilizing wars’ (ibid.: 48). Crucially, the cut-and-mix circulation of cultural meanings activated by hybridization illuminates the relatively arbitrary and contingent character of all culture, its dynamic flexibility and profound open-endedness. Taking these processes of mixture seriously as productive of ‘a field of energy and socio-cultural innovation’ (ibid.: 49) has radical ramifications for how we think of different ‘peoples’. Indeed, as hybridization consists of exchanges, crossings and mutual entanglements, it necessarily implies a softening of the boundaries between ‘peoples’: the encounters between them are as constitutive of who they are as the proceedings within. These encounters are not always harmonious or conciliatory; often they are extremely violent, as the history of colonialism has amply shown. Nevertheless, they have to be gone through ‘when a collection of men and women feels challenged by another culture and has to choose between hybridization and confrontation’ (ibid.: 50). Even in the most oppressive situations, then, people are thrown into inter-cultural encounters, whether by force or by will, and they would seek to negotiate their differences if they are to avoid war. The result, after many centuries of contact history, is a thoroughly hybridized world where boundaries have become utterly porous, even though they are artificially maintained. As Canclini (ibid.: 49) asserts: ‘It is not possible to say where the British end and where the colonies begin, where the Spanish end and the Latin Americans begin, where Latin Americans begin and where the indigenous do. None of these groups still remain within their original limits’.
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In parallel, we can say that centuries of global Chinese migrations have inevitably led to a blurring of the original limits of ‘the Chinese’: it is no longer possible to say with any certainty where the Chinese end and the non-Chinese begin. Indeed, the very attempt to draw such a line would amount to a form of discursive reductionism, if not symbolic violence, that disparages the long history of profound imbrications of Chinese peoples and cultures in the world as they have dispersed themselves all over the globe. Obviously, ‘(non-)Chinese’ here is to be defined in more than strictly biological terms, not just as ‘race’ – with all its complicated connotations – but in cultural terms, in terms of the meanings and practices that over the centuries we have come to think of as what sets ‘Chinese’ culture apart from others. Wherever notionally Chinese communities and individuals routinely enter into relations with others, live and work together with ‘non-Chinese’, processes of hybridization are set in train that inevitably transform everyone involved. It is in these border zones that the fuzziness of the identity line, the fundamental uncertainty about where the Chinese ends and the non-Chinese begins, can be best recognized and empirically examined. In methodological terms, this means an interesting shift of our focus back to the space of the territorial nation-state or, more precisely, to the physical space of territorial co-presence. In this era of globalization, nation-states are no longer the enclosed beacons of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. Indeed, the very proliferation of diasporas in the past century or so has thoroughly undermined the nineteenth-century apartheid fantasies of ‘a place for each “race”’ so favoured by nationalists (Cohen 1997: 196). Instead, many if not most nationstates today are undergoing a process of what Kobena Mercer (2000: 234) calls ‘multicultural normalization’ – a massive process of social transformation that makes it increasingly appropriate for nation-states to be described as multicultural states consisting of many different, overlapping and intertwined groups and identities with multiple loyalties and attachments, exchanges and interactions both within and across the border. The metropolitan space of the contemporary global city may be more representative of this state of affairs than the nation-state as a whole (where non-metropolitan areas, such as rural Australia, are typically still more characterized by homogeneity and protective of it). The global city may indeed be described appropriately as a ‘transnational community’ par excellence, in the sense that its ‘membership’ typically consists of individuals and groups of myriad ethnic and racial backgrounds. But in contrast with communities of global diasporas (named by Tölölyan as the exemplary communities of the transnational moment), the imagined community of the global city is principally unbounded and open, in the sense that no one is a priori excluded from its space. Indeed, as transnational communities, global cities and diasporas may stand as contrasting models, as Table 9.1 shows. While diasporas are constituted by ethnic unity in the face of spatial dispersal, global cities are shaped by ethnic diversity through spatial convergence. While what matters for a diaspora is a connection with a symbolic ‘elsewhere’, a longdistance relationship with a global community of belonging, what grounds the
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Diaspora and global city as transnational communities
Diaspora
Global city
Ethnic unity, spatial dispersal
Ethnic diversity, spatial convergence
Transnational nationalism
Local hybridity
Virtual deterritorialized space
Actual social/territorial space
Sameness in dispersal
Together in difference
community of the global city is its firm orientation towards the ‘here’, the local, this place. While the transnationality of the diasporic community is one of ‘sameness in dispersal’ across global space, the transnationality of the global city is characterized by intense simultaneity and coexistence, by territorial ‘togetherness in difference’. The global city, in this sense, is one large, condensed border zone in which the processes of hybridization are rife. So what happens to Chineseness in the global cities of today? This is an empirical question that needs to be examined on a case-by-case basis, taking into account not just demographic features and population movements but also the socio-cultural contexts and ideological currents that influence the formation of local identities and communities. Singapore and Sydney, to name but two global cities in the Asia-Pacific region, provide two very different examples. Let me finish this chapter with a brief exploration of Chinese/non-Chinese hybridization in the two cities. In Singapore, the ‘Chinese’ are the majority ethnic group in an explicitly multiracial and multicultural city-state context – a unique situation in the Chinese diaspora. However, the Chineseness of the Singaporean Chinese has been a persistent object of significant concern to the PAP government, which has been insistent on the need to stop what it sees as the gradual erosion of Chinese cultural characteristics among its Chinese population. Hence, the famous Speak Mandarin campaign and other government policies to inculcate those of Chinese ‘race’ with Chinese ‘culture’ (Clammer 1985; Chua 1995). In other words, in Singapore, there is an officially orchestrated desire to counter the effects of hybridization as people of Chinese descent mix with others on a daily basis in a modern environment that has grown out of a British colonial legacy. As a result, a constant concern if not obsession with the distinction between what is Chinese and what is not Chinese is an enduring part of the Singaporean cultural mindset, even if that distinction is often impossible or nonsensical to make in the thoroughly hybrid conditions of everyday social practice. Such a climate, as Geoffrey Benjamin (1976: 118) remarked in his early analysis of Singaporean multiracialism, ‘puts Chinese people under pressure to become
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more Chinese … in their behaviour’. Chineseness, then, becomes a prescription, an artificially imposed cultural identity rather than a lived, uncontrived one. This explains why a 1999 survey showing that one in five young Chinese Singaporeans would rather be of another race – primarily white or Japanese – than Chinese caused so much consternation and anxiety in the city state (New York Times, 17 February 1999). However, it could well be that precisely the heavyhanded insistence on the importance of being Chinese in Singapore generates a refusal among young people – whose lives are perhaps most immersed in the processes of everyday hybridization in the global city – to accept that identity. Sydney is a very different environment for the formation of (non-)Chinese identities in the border zone. Surveys of ‘the Chinese in Australia’, whose numbers have increased substantially in the past few decades, now point routinely to the diversity of the Chinese population, having migrated into Australia from different previous countries of residence (Ho and Coughlan 1997; Inglis 1998). Thus Chinese from the PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam or East Timor, as well as those born in Australia, now share the metropolitan space of Sydney. The global city, then, is a meeting place of large sections of the dispersed diaspora, where ‘Chinese’ of very different and largely unconnected histories have the opportunity to intersect not in virtual cyberspace but in actual social space. It should not come as a surprise that these disparate groups have hardly recognized themselves as belonging to a singular Chinese community, even if the predominant mode of categorizing would insist on it. As Christine Inglis (1998: 282) observes: Attempts to bring the plethora of [Chinese] groupings together within a unifying structure or umbrella at either the national or local levels have so far been unsuccessful. The diversity of interests and backgrounds, as well as personal competition, has made it difficult to develop an organizational structure acceptable to all, and to identify individuals able to represent, or speak on behalf of, the Chinese community as a whole. One might ask whether it makes sense to speak of a unitary ‘Chinese community as a whole’ in the first place! Indeed, the very meaning of Chineseness, and who can or should be included in this category, can be the object of intense contestation among and between these groups. Here, then, we have a clear case where what counts as Chinese (or not) is tortuously uncertain. Inglis (ibid.: 285) remarks that one of the most isolated groups is the East Timorese Chinese, who after more than two decades in Australia are ‘only gradually developing contacts with other Chinese’. The tricky formulation here is ‘other Chinese’, which too hastily serves to stress the commonalities of East Timorese of Chinese ancestry with, say, Hong Kong Chinese or Vietnamese Chinese. But most East Timorese Chinese speak Hakka (if they still do), not a widely used language in other Chinese groups. Moreover, under the influence of the Portuguese, who were the colonial rulers of East Timor until 1975, most East Timorese Chinese are Roman Catholics and do not
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observe many traditional Chinese customs. I have been told that the East Timorese Chinese community in Sydney a few years ago decided to celebrate Chinese New Year in February together with some other Chinese groups in the city. This is a festivity that the East Timorese Chinese had long dropped from their annual programme, so their taking it up can be described as a small but meaningful instance of resinicization. However, after one year they abandoned the event again because they did not feel comfortable with the ‘others’. Instead, they decided to celebrate something akin to ‘Chinese New Year’ (signified by typical paraphernalia such as dragon dances) among themselves but on the ‘regular’ Christian New Year’s Day, the first of January.7 One might wonder whether ‘Chinese’ is still useful to describe this very hybrid cultural practice. Is the category Chinese meaningful to label the East Timorese-Chinese at all, and if so, why? The same questions can be asked, inter alios, about the Indonesian Chinese, most of whom speak Indonesian not Chinese and who do not feel much affinity with other Chinese groups. To put it bluntly, why are they so readily counted in the Chinese diaspora, as the Huaren website and others have so insistently done, and not in the Indonesian diaspora? For example, the Sydney suburb of Kensington, where many Indonesian students live because of its closeness to the University of New South Wales, has become known as an area where one can eat extremely good and cheap Indonesian food. Here, Indonesians of Chinese and non-Chinese ancestry alike celebrate their ‘Indonesian-ness’ in a way that is perhaps less fraught with tension than in Indonesia itself, where Chineseness is still a sign charged with unease and discrimination, despite the post-Suharto reforms introduced by successive democratic governments. In the hybridized and hybridizing environment of the global city, then, it is the continued validity of the category ‘Chinese’ itself that comes under scrutiny. In Singapore, it is pushed officially as a desirable and preferred Identity (with a capital I), which has led paradoxically to its rejection by significant numbers of Singaporeans. In Sydney, the coming together of many different groups who have carried the label ‘Chinese’ to describe themselves has exposed its contested nature and its failure to operate as a term of diasporic integration. In this sense, ‘Chineseness’ is subject to erasure, ‘not in the sense of being written out of existence but in the sense of being unpacked’ (Chow 1998: 24), denaturalized and stripped of its self-evident cogency as a category of social and cultural classification. In this regard, the transnational context of the global city brings out the intrinsic contradiction locked into the concept of diaspora, which, logically, depends on the maintenance of an apparently natural, essential identity to secure its imagined status as a transnational community. The global city is the space of diaspora’s undoing. Acknowledgements This paper appears in a slightly different form in my book On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West (London: Routledge, 2001, chapter 4), and I would
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like to thank Routledge for permission to republish here. I would also like to thank the Chinese Heritage Centre in Singapore for permission to reproduce Figure 9.1 here.
Notes 1 2
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The journal was first published by Oxford University Press and later by Toronto University Press. The term guanxi has acquired near mythical status in Western understandings of a peculiarly Chinese – and by implication, somewhat mysterious and different – way of doing business. A typical definition is the following: ‘The Chinese word “guanxi” refers to the concept of drawing on connections in order to secure favours in personal relations. It is an intricate and pervasive relational network which Chinese cultivate energetically, subtly and imaginatively. It contains implicit mutual obligation, assurance and understanding, and governs Chinese attitudes toward long-term social and business relationships’ (Luo 1997). The World Chinese Entrepreneurs Convention was an initiative of the Singaporean Chinese Chamber of Commerce and Industry. It holds biennial international conventions to facilitate global networking for Chinese entrepreneurs worldwide. Its inaugural convention was held in Singapore, where senior minister Lee Kuan Yew delivered the keynote address; since then there have been conventions in Hong Kong (1993), Bangkok (1995), Vancouver (1997), Melbourne (1999) and Nanjing (2001). An exception is Singapore, the only nation-state outside Greater China with a diasporic Chinese majority, where there has been a long history of government-sanctioned resinicization policies such as the Speak Mandarin Campaign. Lynn Pan (1990: 295) has made the astute remark that the very quest for ethnic selfdiscovery and identity is a mark of Americanness, not Chineseness: ‘To the villagers in Toishan, the Chinese-American who returns to rediscover his origins is doing a very American thing, for the last thing they feel is the need for roots’. Pan informs us that Toishan village has taken advantage of this diasporic longing by tapping into the ‘roots business’ in the USA, offering tours to ancestral villages and wooing investments by returning local sons. Here, diaspora consciousness is expressly encouraged by the homeland because it is economically profitable. A comparative analysis with other diasporic formations would enable us to assess to what extent the core/periphery divide is a general characteristic of all diasporic formations and in what ways they are variably imagined in particular diasporas. This ethnographic story comes from fieldwork among the East Timorese diaspora in Sydney by Amanda Wise (2002).
References Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities, London: Verso. —— (1998) ‘Nationalism, identity and the world-in-motion: on the logics of seriality’, in P. Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ang, I. (1998) ‘Can one say no to Chineseness? Pushing the limits of the diasporic paradigm’, boundary 2 25 (3): 223–42. —— (2001a) ‘Trapped in ambivalence: Chinese-Indonesians, victimhood and the debris of history’, in M. Morris and B. de Bary (eds), “Race” Panic and the Memory of Migration, Volume 2 of Traces: A Multilingual Series of Cultural Theory and Translation, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
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—— (2001b) ‘Indonesia on my mind: diaspora, Internet and global Chineseness’, in On Not Speaking Chinese: Living between Asia and the West, London: Routledge. Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, G. (1976) ‘The cultural logic of Singapore’s multiracialism’, in R. Hassan (ed.), Singapore: Society in Transition, Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. Canclini, G.N. (1995) Hybrid Cultures, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. —— (2000) ‘The state of war and the state of hybridization’, in P. Gilroy, L. Grossberg and A. McRobbie (eds), Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, London: Verso. Chow, R. (1998) ‘Introduction: on Chineseness as a theoretical problem’, boundary 2 25 (3): 1–24. Chua, B.H. (1995) Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore, London: Routledge. Clammer, J. (1985) Singapore: Ideology, Society and Culture, Singapore: Chopman Publishers. Clifford, J. (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, Seattle: University of Washington Press. Duara, P. (1997) ‘Nationalists among transnationals: overseas Chinese and the idea of China, 1900–1911’, in A. Ong and D. Nonini (eds), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, New York: Routledge. Hannerz, U. (1996) Transnational Connections, London: Routledge. Heryanto, A. (1999) ‘Race, rape and reporting’, in A. Budiman, B. Hatley and D. Kingsbury (eds), Reformasi: Crisis and Change in Indonesia, Melbourne: Monash Asia Institute. Ho, C.H. and Coughlan, J.E. (1997) ‘The Chinese in Australia: immigrants from the People’s Republic of China, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau’, in J.E. Coughlin and D.J. McNamara (eds), Asians in Australia: Patterns of Migration and Settlement, South Melbourne: Macmillan Education. Inglis, C. (1998) ‘Australia’, in L. Pan (ed.), The Encyclopaedia of the Chinese Overseas, Singapore: Archipelago Press. Luo, Y. (1997) ‘Guanxi: principles, philosophies and implications’, Human Systems Management 16, 1. Mercer, K. (2000) ‘A sociography of diaspora’, in P. Gilroy, L. Grossberg and A. McRobbie (eds), Without Guarantees: In Honour of Stuart Hall, London: Verso. Nonini, D. and Ong, A. (1997) ‘Chinese transnationalism as an alternative modernity’, in A. Ong and D. Nonini (eds), Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, New York: Routledge. Ong, A. and Nonini, D. (eds) (1997) Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, New York: Routledge. Pan, L. (1990) Sons of the Yellow Emperor: The Story of the Overseas Chinese, London: Mandarin. —— (ed.) (1998) The Encyclopaedia of the Chinese Overseas, Singapore: Archipelago Press. Pratt, M.L. (1992) Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, London and New York: Routledge. Stratton, J. and Ang, I. (1998) ‘Multicultural imagined communities: cultural difference and national identity in the USA and Australia’, in D. Bennett (ed.), Multicultural States: Rethinking Difference and Identity, London: Routledge. Tölölyan, K. (1991) ‘The nation-state and its Others: in lieu of a preface’, Diaspora 1 (1): 3–7. —— (1996) ‘Rethinking diaspora(s): stateless power in the transnational moment’, Diaspora 5 (1): 3–36.
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Wang, G. (1992) Community and Nation: China, Southeast Asia and Australia, St Leonards: Allen & Unwin. —— (1999) ‘A single Chinese diaspora? Some historical reflections’, in G. Wang and A.S. Wah (eds), Imagining the Chinese Diapora: Two Australian Perspectives, Canberra: Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora. Wang, G. and Wang, L.-C. (eds) (1998) The Chinese Diaspora: Selected Essays, Singapore: Times Academic. Wise, A. (2002) ‘No longer in exile? Shifting experience of home, homeland and identity for the Timorese refugee diaspora in Australia in light of East Timor’s independence’, unpublished PhD thesis, Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney.
10 Democracy, culture and the politics of gate-keeping in Cambodia The transnation goes home Caroline Hughes In her study of ‘flexible citizens’ in Southeast Asia, Aihwa Ong (1999) describes the creative juggling of identities across borders imposed by different regimes of nation-state and capital. This chapter examines the implications of such flexible citizenship in a particular context – the context of promoting international democracy in nations emerging from conflict and the participation of flexible citizens in such projects. It is argued that such projects represent the erection of new regimes of truth and that flexible citizens are well placed to benefit from these. However, it is also argued that in the Cambodian case, inequalities in access to resources and the conjoining of international and transnational discourses of power have not proved conducive to the emergence of the equality of juridical citizenship necessary for the promotion of democracy. The modern ideal of liberal democracy based upon citizenship has been criticized as a disciplinary mechanism that requires the regimentation of individuals in support of a reified conception of the national community as the paramount site of political experience and allegiance, contrasting with the opportunities for self-invention and play across boundaries offered by flexible transnational citizenship. Hardt and Negri (2000: 103) regard the process of citizen formation as a disciplinary process, distinguishing between a ‘multitude’ of pre-citizens – ‘a multiplicity, a plane of singularities, an open set of relations, which is not homogeneous or identical with itself and bears an indistinct, inclusive relation to those outside of it’, and a ‘people’ of citizens who ‘tend toward identity and homogeneity internally while posing its difference from and excluding what remains outside of it’. They conclude that, to acquire modern sovereignty, ‘every nation must make its multitude into a people’. Equally, for the democratic constitution of the people as the sovereign, the closure of the boundaries of ‘the people’ is required. As Chantal Mouffe (2000: 43) has argued, ‘the identity of a democratic political community hinges on the possibility of drawing a frontier between “us” and “them”’. Paradoxically, particularly since the end of the Cold War, the globalization of capital and the international promotion of democracy have gone hand in hand. While capital becomes more flexible in its operations and flows of capital and information proliferate, international promotion of democracy encourages a closing of the conceptual borders of sovereignty and a disciplining of multitudes,
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with the aim of promoting an inflexible citizenship oriented towards a sovereign territorial state. Arguably, the mismatch between the flexible operations of globalizing capital and the inflexible imaginings of community upon which modern democracy is based prompts fundamental tensions in projects to promote international democracy. This chapter examines these tensions as they were played out in the attitudes and perceptions of a group of returnee expatriate Khmers to wartorn Cambodia in the 1990s. Returning to promote democracy and human rights in a country emerging from war, foreign occupation and communism, these flexible citizens were engaged in a project of disciplining their fellow Cambodians into a juridical homogeneity that they themselves had escaped. Arguably, this tension underlay the force of denunciations of returnees by Cambodia’s stay-at-home leaders, who derided them as citizens of convenience, returning to make hay while the sun shone but retaining dual nationality in order to flee to the security of their Western homes in times of danger. For the returnees in question, however, this tension was played out in a more complex way. They viewed their contribution to the emergence of a new, disciplined and stable sovereign Cambodia as being based precisely on their experiences outside. For these elite returnees, who had not only survived but prospered following resettlement abroad, adjustments to life overseas represented valued co-optations of the norms and opportunities of their host societies. In promoting such norms in postwar Cambodia, these returnees sought to negotiate between the flexibility they had used to survive the experience of dislocation, flight and resettlement and the homogenizing process of regimentation required to promote the unity and sovereignty of the Cambodian nation. In negotiating between these distinct trajectories of change, a number of returnees identified their own personal success not with flexibility itself but with a notion of cultural redefinition, viewed as combining the secrets of Western success with a notion of essential ‘Khmerness’. In taking this line, the returnees drew upon a tradition in Cambodian political discourse that stretches back for generations. Every Cambodian regime since independence placed the problem of closing the boundaries of ‘Khmerness’ at the centre of the problem of modernity. The transformation of a multi-ethnic multitude into a modern people has been associated in Cambodia with the colonial desire to recover the lost glories of the Khmer Empire of the fourteenth century. For the returnees that are the focus of this chapter, this trope has been linked to recurrent themes of Cold War propaganda in an attempt to resolve the conflicting recognition of the importance of flexibility in their own subjecthood, and the importance of a unifying and strengthening purity in their conceptions of the nation they seek to rebuild. At the same time, transnational flexibility as a tactical strategy for attracting resources and promoting political action has come to the centre of Cambodian politics, furnishing the political landscape with actors who operate far beyond the sanction of Cambodian voters and who present themselves as operating on behalf of the Cambodian people to restore the Khmer nation. These strategies have had far-reaching implications for the practice of Cambodian statehood as influenced by returnee politicians in Cambodia since 1991.
Democracy, culture and the politics of gate-keeping in Cambodia 199 Thus this chapter begins by questioning the historical problem of closing the borders on ‘Khmerness’ in Cambodian politics, and the ways in which this was politicized in the context of the Cold War. It then examines the outcome of this for Khmers abroad in the 1980s and for the input of elite returnees into Cambodian politics in the 1990s. It is argued that the strategies of returnees, who seek to use flexible citizenship in the service of cultural authenticity, has promoted a graduated system of sovereignty in which disparities of power between the mobile and immobile are enhanced. The implications of this for the practice of Cambodian statehood and democracy are discussed.
Closing the borders of ‘Khmerness’ Cambodia is a country that has historically experienced difficulty in closing its conceptual borders. Cambodian identity has long been uncertain, linked to an unstable and paradoxical notion of ‘Khmerness’. Penny Edwards (1996: 51) suggests that ‘successive ruling elites have painted the Cambodian nation from the outside in, manipulating negative imagery of what Cambodia is not (the conceptual, diabolized “other”) to project an assumed image of what Cambodia is (the conceptual, angelic Khmer)’. This negative conception of ‘Khmerness’, which Edwards argues emerges from French colonial discourses of the nineteenth century, is linked to a further rhetorical trope – that of a national decline from the glories of the fourteenth century Khmer Empire of Angkor to the horrors of the recent past. ‘Khmerness’, in modern political discourse, invokes the idea of a nation that, in its pure state, was ‘an outstanding civilization, a prosperous, large, flourishing and glorious nation, with high prestige radiating like a diamond’, but which has ‘declined grievously during the past two decades, having gone through suffering and destruction, and having been weakened terribly’ (Royal Government of Cambodia 1993: preamble). In contemporary nationalist rhetoric, Cambodia’s decline is viewed as caused by the taint of foreign corruption, most frequently from Cambodia’s neighbours, Thailand and Vietnam. This view is primarily espoused by the rhetoric of the parties that formed from the border resistance in the 1990s – the Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Neutre, Pacifique et Co-operatif (FUNCINPEC), the Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party and the Sam Rainsy Party – but it also enters into the world view of staff of non-governmental organizations, the rhetoric of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP, the party most usually derided as associated with Vietnam) and also of state officials. Such corruption is regarded as taking the form of invasion, infiltration and miscegenation; of these, the last two are the most troubling, as they represent aspects of corruption that are not easily identified and purged. They are believed to lead to the same outcome as outright invasion: loss of territory through the twin processes of annexation and settlement by Cambodia’s neighbours. The dangers of intermarriage, for example, are exemplified in the commonly retold tale of the seventeenth-century Khmer king who married a Vietnamese princess and in an excess of love, was persuaded to permit an extension of
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Vietnamese power via the setting up of customs posts in the Mekong delta, at that time part of the Khmer domain. The result, according to the story, was a disastrous influx of Vietnamese settlers into ‘lower Cambodia’, which was consequently later transformed, by colonial state making and border drawing, into Cochin-China and South Vietnam (Chandler 1993: 82). Such myths refer to the immediate pre-colonial period – a period when anti-Vietnamese sentiment is thought to have originated, following factional infighting within the Khmer royal family and the victory of the pro-Thai royal line (Amer 1994). This period saw the shrinking of Khmer-controlled land as contending factions sought Thai and Vietnamese support, offering land and sovereignty rights in return. The moral of such parables – that corruption through relations with foreign neighbours would prompt the demise of Cambodia and the Khmers – was given solidity and urgency by the powerful colonial myth propagated by the French Protectorate, which was imposed, so the story goes, to save Cambodia from ‘disappearance’. Stories connecting loss of territory to machinations and weaknesses within the Khmer royal family continue to resonate in Cambodian politics. For example, one National Assembly candidate in the 1998 elections commented that the royalist FUNCINPEC represented a threat to Cambodian sovereignty because the party’s leader, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was married to an ethnic Cham princess. The candidate commented that wives of politicians were known to have inordinate influence on their husbands and that Princess Marie’s activities in patronizing mosques were viewed as dangerous by Khmers who feared that the Cham might become too powerful as a result of a revitalization of their culture (Beehive Social Co-operation Party candidate, personal communication, 1999). Even greater suspicions were expressed regarding politicians married to ethnic Vietnamese, historically viewed as the most powerful threat to Cambodian territorial integrity. Any past associations with Vietnam, however emphatically disavowed, are viewed with great suspicion in the political arena. This is illustrated by the case of Pen Sovann, installed as prime minister of Cambodia by the invading Vietnamese army in the early 1980s but subsequently ousted by the Vietnamese in favour of Heng Samrin and jailed. Sovann was labelled a pro-Vietnamese candidate by his opponents when he returned to launch his Cambodia National Sustaining Party in 1998, even though he had spent ten years in prison in Hanoi since his brief spell in power. Attention was drawn to Sovann’s marriage to a Vietnamese woman. Furthermore, opponents argued, if Sovann had been truly anti-Vietnamese, Vietnam would not have let him go: Penn Sovann – he is very dangerous. People are made to believe that Penn Sovann spent ten years in a Vietnamese prison. [Isn’t that true?] No – he’s been looked after, re-educated, reformed and brought back to replace Hun Sen. … Could Vietnam let Penn Sovann out to continue fighting the Vietnamese? I don’t think so. (FUNCINPEC candidate, personal communication, 1998)
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Such accounts of treacherous wives and agents provocateurs hidden in the Khmer population have long been viewed not as a peripheral phenomenon but as a threat to the very existence of the nation itself. This was particularly the case during the Democratic Kampuchea (DK, popularly referred to as the ‘Khmer Rouge’) regime of 1975–79, when foreign-sponsored ‘pests buried within’ were blamed for the failure of ambitious economic programmes: ‘They do whatever possible to infiltrate their agents into our internal forces and these pests continue at all times to block our economic progress’ (Democratic Kampuchea Regime 1976). The elimination of such pests was seen as the sine qua non of revolution, but their identification was problematic. The DK identified its enemies as possessing ‘Cambodian bodies and Vietnamese minds’ (Chandler 1993: 222), a charge that permitted wholesale slaughter of suspects designated as foreign traitors. The same charge is still sometimes levelled at the Vietnamese-backed CPP today: ‘Cambodia is fighting a battle against the Vietnamese. And you know CPP is backed by Vietnamese. Their parents are Cambodian but their hearts and their brains are Vietnamese’ (FUNCINPEC candidate, personal communication, 1998). The DK’s fears about Vietnamese infiltration became a self-fulfilling prophecy when, in 1979, following border raids into Vietnam by DK troops, Vietnam invaded Cambodia, overthrew the DK regime and occupied the country for the next ten years. The 1980s thus saw heightened concern about Khmer–Vietnamese marriages and the fear of corruption of the Khmer body linked to this in ideas of ‘miscegenation’. The mixture of Khmer and Vietnamese blood produces offspring embodying both Khmer and Vietnamese traits, who in consequence cannot be trusted but whose treachery is particularly difficult to spot. Thus the cover of a pamphlet sold on Phnom Penh bookstalls in the 1990s, entitled ‘Acts of Invasion by the Yuon against Cambodia’, shows two Vietnamese side by side. The first, in army uniform, carries an AK-47, a hammer and sickle symbol and a crown, which represents a Vietnamese drive for geopolitical power, while the second, in traditional dress, holds a sword in one hand and his penis in the other, which represents the Vietnamese threat to the Khmer body and blood (Soum Sekomar 1997). The association of these different forms of ‘invasion’ thus prompts an intense anxiety among Khmers concerning the border that demarcates them from those who they believe seek to destroy their culture, undermine their sovereignty and annex their land. Corrupted by a foreignness that is not merely burrowing in from outside but is also present within Khmer bodies and souls, Khmer culture has long been perceived as salvageable only by efforts to reassert the purity and power of the builders of Angkor and to purge foreign taints. Under the Sihanouk, Lon Nol and DK regimes, these latter efforts took the form of a crescendo of exclusions and massacres. In contemporary Cambodia, it takes the form of continuing anxieties over alleged illegal immigration and treachery within government. For example:
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The presence of such individuals induces anxiety over the purity of the Khmer nation and raises the spectre of Khmer disappearance or, to quote a formulation frequently cited in opposition party rhetoric, decline into a ‘minority in their own land’. It is significant that, while linked primarily to the question of Vietnam, such rhetoric has also been used to characterize the DK regime itself as a corruption that emerged from and perhaps continues to breed within the Khmer. Teeda Butt Mam (1996) describes the Khmer Rouge as ‘worms from our skin’, while Chanrithy Him (2000: 19) writes: ‘The Khmer Rouge are a continent away and yet they are not. Psychologically they are parasites, like tapeworms that slumber within you, living passively until something stirs them to life’. The use of these metaphors suggests that there is a wider sense that political misfortune is both the result and the cause of an internal corruption of the Khmer body. This is a corruption that Edwards (1996: 60–1) argues is regularly portrayed as prompted by foreign taints. Thus Edwards notes the tendency by both Cambodians and outside analysts to allocate blame for the rise of the DK to outsiders – the Americans, communism or the Chinese. The descriptions of the DK noted above indicate how external taints become incorporated into the Khmer body, not merely submerging ‘Khmerness’ but destroying it from within. Such concerns render the question of drawing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, as a basis for modern democracy, highly problematic in the Cambodian context.
The rhetoric of ‘Khmerness’ in the Cold War Cambodia’s position in the Cold War, particularly during the period of Vietnamese occupation in the 1980s, rendered anxiety about national identity particularly troubling, as tropes of Cambodia’s ‘disappearance’ were harnessed to the international campaign by ASEAN, China and Western powers to contain supposed Vietnamese expansionism in Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia was accompanied by rumours of a campaign of ‘Vietnamization’ – a process characterized as comprising settlement, intermarriage, destruction of cultural artefacts and repression of Khmer customs. In Western writings and in booklets produced and circulated in the refugee camps, emphasis was placed on a supposed massive immigration of Vietnamese settlers and the systematic destruction of Khmer culture by the pro-Vietnamese regime. One resistance figure, Son Soubert (n.d.: 20), now a member of Cambodia’s Constitutional Council, wrote that Vietnam’s intention was ‘to colo-
Democracy, culture and the politics of gate-keeping in Cambodia 203 nize and Vietnamize Cambodia through a process of “deculturating” the Khmer people’. He estimated that 700,000 settlers, as well as troops and administrators, had entered Cambodia under Vietnamese auspices and commented: ‘By 1990, the change of demography will be completed as was done in Cochin-china, former Cambodian territory, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’. Another report claimed that the settlers had brought with them prostitutes, criminals and beggars, as well as diseases such as syphilis and leprosy (Khmer Buddhist Research Centre, n.d.: 93). One Western commentator reported a plan to settle ‘several million [Vietnamese] settlers, approximately one million of whom seem to have been in place by the close of the 1980s’, and linked this to a policy of “‘ethnocide” – the destruction of culture within those who carry it’, a concept that further promotes the notion of a foreign taint implanted into a Cambodian body (Martin 1994: 229–30). In addition to the mistreatment of Khmer and the looting of Cambodian natural resources, a report by the Khmer Buddhist Research Centre (n.d.: 77) commented that Vietnamization took the form of a prevalence of Vietnamese dress on the streets of Phnom Penh, a plethora of shops and restaurants decorated in Vietnamese style, playing Vietnamese music and the almost exclusive monopoly held by Vietnamese tailors and shoemakers. Vietnamization of education as well as classical and folk dance was also alleged. A particular concern was the regulation of Buddhism, the state religion under the 1980s regime. One account described the taxation of religious activities and an educational offensive designed to encourage the belief that monks were lazy and that Buddhism made people ‘sluggish, numb, torpid, lazy or cowardly in all ways’. The cessation of monastery education, in decline since colonial times, was also reported. The author of the study commented: ‘It is hard to conclude whether Cambodia is now the real Khmer country or a second Vietnam’ (ibid.: 92). It is significant that these concerns mirrored, in some ways, the propaganda of the Phnom Penh regime in the 1980s. For that regime, too, Cambodia had almost been destroyed, although by the DK rather than by the Vietnamese. A description of the DK as a ‘genocidal clique’ was used to point out the urgent danger to the continued existence of the Khmer nation posed by DK rule. Political slogans and school texts that emphasized the ‘rebirth’ of Cambodia on 7 January 1979 – the day the Vietnamese army reached Phnom Penh – indicate a preoccupation with national death that resembles that of the resistance. One CPP official described the CPP’s contribution to preserving Cambodia as follows: When we meet [our district and commune activists] we always remind them that the second birthday of our people is the seventh January when we rescued them from genocide. And after that we realized many achievements for the people, even though we still had some problem. … The main thing was to abolish genocide from returning to power. (Oum Mean, personal interview, 1998)
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The key difference between the two sides, magnified by Cold War rhetoric, was the question of whether 7 January really represented a rebirth of Khmer culture in Cambodia through the liberating agency of Indo-Chinese fraternity and the 1,000-year friendship between Cambodia and Vietnam; or whether it represented the further destruction of it under Vietnamese communism. Any more ambivalent answer to this question was not possible, since ‘Khmerness’ and purity were inextricably intertwined conceptually. Thus the notion that the ‘real Khmer country’ had disappeared, at least on Cambodian territory, became a widespread anxiety among Cambodians living abroad. This notion was promoted further by Cold War political imperatives, specifically the international construction of Khmers living in refugee camps on the Thai border as the population represented by Cambodia’s internationally recognized government, the Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CGDK). One international aid worker, sympathetic to the Phnom Penh regime, commented, vis-à-vis the situation of Cambodian refugees on the Thai border throughout the 1980s: The Khmers in Thailand are needed to legitimize the ‘government’ of Democratic Kampuchea by creating an identifiable population which the CGDK controls. This enables the CGDK to be recognized at the UN as the ‘government’ of Kampuchea. (Mysliwiec 1988: 45) The elevation of Khmers on the border to a sovereign body in this manner not only contributed to the delegitimation of the Phnom Penh regime but also prompted greater anxieties over the fate of Khmers within Cambodia. Resonating with the long-standing tropes of purity/corruption associated with glory/decline, the black and white rhetoric of the Cold War promoted an opposition between the ‘freedom’, legitimacy and sovereignty of the displaced Khmer nation on the border – a characterization that incidentally bore little resemblance to the actual situation of lawlessness and violence in refugee camps – and the illegitimacy, lack of sovereignty and, consequently, corruption and disintegration of the Khmer nation living under ‘communism’ at home. Regardless of the credibility of the various statistics reported regarding ‘Vietnamization,’ the long-standing links in nationalist rhetoric drawn between foreign corruption and Khmer decline, and the association of ‘Khmerness’ with an ideal purity that must be recaptured, rendered difficult the representation of Khmers in Vietnamese-dominated Cambodia in the 1980s. Equally, it problematized the status of Khmers abroad as carriers of Khmer culture. For Cambodians abroad, adjustments to life in the West was threatening to their own Khmer identity. Judy Ledgerwood (1990: 3) reported: ‘Khmer refugees in the United States fear that the Khmer people as an ethnic group will cease to exist’, linking Khmer identity to a set of social practices that could not easily be transplanted to a new place: ‘To be Khmer means to live in accordance with a certain hierarchical order of society. … To move outside these roles is to enter the realm of chaos.’
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This notion of ‘Khmerness’ precluded representation of the ambivalence of relationships between Cambodians and Vietnamese in Cambodia in the 1980s – a relationship that included resentment, rebellion and repression but also intermarriage, collaboration and reconstruction. The construction of Khmer identity as reaching backward in time to a glorious era of lost purity means that almost any portrayal of the globalizing present must be seen as posing a threat to ‘Khmerness’. The horrific experiences of death, war and displacement in the 1970s led to the view that the Khmer were on the verge of disappearance. The association of Cambodian sovereignty and power with a recapturing of a pure Khmer essence, symbolized by the magnificent ruins of the Angkor Wat temple complex and endangered by contact with foreign cultures, represented a rhetorical closure of borders that, in the context of the 1980s crisis of invasion and displacement, left little room for any representation of contemporary ‘Khmerness’ at all.
Redefining Khmer culture in the West For Cambodians abroad, this led to a particularly profound anxiety regarding the preservation of Khmer culture. Ledgerwood et al. (1994: 7) describe the paradox of ‘Khmerness’ for Khmer refugees in the USA as follows: Khmer culture is changing, yet Khmer speak of it as unchanging, indeed unchangeable. Their conception has an inherent contradiction: on the one hand, they view Khmer culture as dying or as having died; on the other hand, their fear of losing their culture leads them to the conviction that nothing should be changed. However, accounts offered in memoirs of refugees departing for the USA have often also described the USA as a place where Khmer culture can be reborn, in a rhetoric of rebuilding and rebirth that mirrors that of the Phnom Penh regime after 1979. Chanrithy Him (2000: 330) describes her departure for America from a refugee camp in Thailand as both a salvaging of ‘the dust of history’ and a redefinition or reincarnation: In my duffel bag, there are … pictures, tattered photographs I managed to keep safe during the Khmer Rouge time. … They travel with me to America, along with the indelible memories of Cambodia’s tragic years … of 28 members of my extended family and countless others who perished. With me, they are safely transported to America, a trip only made possible by Uncle Seng [her relative and sponsor]. He is the bridge leading me … to freedom. We are like the dust of history being blown away, and Uncle Seng is like the hand that blocks the wind. We are leaving behind Cambodia, ground under the wheel of the Khmer Rouge, and flying to America. There, we will face other challenges, other risks, in a new place in which we will have to redefine ourselves, a kind of re-incarnation of us all.
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America appears in this account as an ambivalent site. The creation of a new identity is necessary – a rebirth – but at the same time, blood ties and family memories must be preserved, and can be, in a land where freedom of culture and religion are assured. Although such a view is contradicted in other refugee accounts of life in America (see, for example, Welaratna 1993: 60), it accords with the views expressed by many elite returnees to Cambodia in the 1990s. Some stories of the restoration of Khmer cultural practices in refugee camps reflect a similar theme. For example, Teeda Butt Mam (1996: 16–17) describes her arrival in a refugee camp in Thailand: In April 1979, the Buddhist New Year, exactly four years after the Khmer Rouge came to power, I joined a group of corpselike bodies dancing freely to the sound of clapping and songs of folk music that defined who we were. We danced under the moonlight around the bonfire. We were celebrating miracles that saved our lives. At that moment, I felt that my spirit and my soul had returned to my weak body. Once again I was human. Again, this account conflicts with other accounts of refugee camps as chaotic and violent and places of deculturation of children who believed rice came from the back of a truck. Yet in Mam’s account, as in the accounts of a number of returnees who had flourished in exile, departure from the stifling atmosphere of ‘communist’ Cambodia permitted the retracing of Khmer customs and the resurrection of Khmer culture. However, these narratives also note that such a resurrection must necessarily include transformation – not only in response to transplantation into a new context but also as a means of harnessing a cosmopolitan modernity to reverse the process of Khmer decline. Returnees going back to Cambodia to take prominent positions in political parties and NGOs promoting democracy – usually individuals who prospered in exile – have also emphasized this portrayal of America as a haven in which Khmer culture could not only be resurrected but also redefined.
The transnation goes home The idea that Khmer communities abroad represented either an authentic or strengthened Khmer nation had significant implications for the process of return as the civil war drew to a close in 1989–91. A number of Cambodians who settled in Western countries during the 1970s and 1980s returned to Cambodia in the 1990s to contribute expertise acquired abroad to the rebuilding of the nation. Frequently, these were wealthy businessmen or highly educated professionals who had done well in the West and who now wished to assist their fellow countrymen who had stayed behind in Cambodia. The attitudes of these individuals, as illustrated in their comments set out below, reflected the flexible notions of identity that they had built for themselves, both in terms of their view of what they could offer to post-UNTAC Cambodia and in the ways they understood Cambodia as a political entity – as a state to be attached to a reforged
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nation, in the light of the corruption and decline of the population at home. The importance of their own contribution emerged rhetorically from their attachment of their own experiences outside with a form of self-improvement that renewed and strengthened ‘Khmerness’ while the experiences of those inside the country were viewed as having weakened it. Consequently, a frequently cited motivation for returning home was the view that knowledge and experience gained in the outside world was required to salvage Cambodia. For example, one returnee who had spent a number of years in the USA and returned to Cambodia in the 1990s to form a political party to contest elections commented: Most of us feel obliged to help. In big countries like the US if we have some qualification, like I have a PhD, it is a big plus for Cambodia if we can contribute in a positive way. We can build a bridge between the two societies – the old society like Cambodia and the new, liberal, free society like the US. It is a plus for this society to have Cambodian-born people to come and share experiences especially with a modern democratic society like the US. (Bit Seanglim, personal interview, 1998) For a number of returnees, their special contribution emerged from their knowledge of, and success in, the outside world: I have been living in France as a businessman, working in finance, so I travel a lot to US, Australia. I have been everywhere. I don’t think many Cambodian people travel as much. (Chrun You Hai, personal interview, 1998) From 1989–93, I was working in Site 2 Camp … I have experience in law and I helped to form the judicial system, legal system in Site 2. … I think through the work here I can share my experience to help my people. (Sok Som Oeun, personal interview, 1996) Living in Britain gave me a lot of ideas about human rights and rule of law. So when I returned to work in the refugee camp in 1988, I brought with me two basic concepts – human rights and rule of law. … I would like to bring back home ideas, knowledge and pass them on to my young compatriots. (Lao Mong Hay, personal interview, 1996) This view of self-improvement outside Cambodia was accompanied by a view of a grievous Cambodian decline within the homeland. Frequently, returnees decried the brutalization of Cambodians, their passivity, ignorance and selfishness, often attributed to unresolved trauma from the war: The problem is that many people in Cambodia haven’t coped with the trauma of the Khmer Rouge period. They are still within that trauma. And
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For these returnees, the policing of Cambodian society and culture was an urgent necessity in the light of the inability of in-country Cambodians to discipline themselves. For example, one returnee from the USA, commenting on the proliferation of casinos in Cambodia, argued that these were particularly destructive in the context of Cambodian society because: Cambodian knowledge is so low – they don’t know self-control. Like in America, Las Vegas, you and I can go and gamble, but we set limits and we don’t go any further. (Tik Ngoy, personal interview, 1998) The destruction of Cambodia’s education system and educated class under the DK regime is a prominent feature in the discussions of returnees. The restoration of education under the Vietnamese-backed regime of the 1980s is frequently discounted as potentially restorative of Khmer society, because of concerns over the ‘Vietnamization’ of history. For example, one returnee from France who launched an independent radio station and political party in the 1990s commented: We have to educate young people to love their own country so that they can love Cambodians. Concerning the education system, there are three main points: firstly, history; secondly, culture; thirdly, society. Because youngsters don’t know our history, so they don’t know how to love their own country. They are like children who don’t know their own family – street children. Secondly, in order to make Cambodians know how to love their country we must teach them about culture. And to prevent Cambodians quarrelling together, we need to teach them about society. If they know about society – what kinds of problems there are – they can understand one another, and learn tolerance. Society is the main thing. (Mam Sonando, personal interview, 1998) Such views, echoing the trope of Vietnamization in the 1980s, permit returnees to acquire responsibility for rebuilding the Cambodian nation and teaching those who have lost their culture – a responsibility that their fellow countrymen were palpably unqualified to uphold because of their experiences. Such statements were challenged by a counter-argument mounted by those who had held power
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in the 1980s to the effect that the very experiences of war and suffering that returnees had avoided had forged a solidarity within the Khmer nation that would be weakened through the return of the transnation. For example, then Cambodia’s second prime minister, Hun Sen, stated in 1996: If we want to take responsibility for the nation’s fate, we must be responsible before the people. … We must dare to take responsibility, to live and die with the people. Don’t say you are Khmer when it is easy and American when it is difficult. (Hun Sen 1996) For those, such as Hun Sen, who viewed themselves as having facilitated Cambodia’s ‘rebirth’ in 1979, the question of ‘Khmerness’ is resolved – it resides in the process of defeating the genocidal projects of the ‘Pol Potists’, rebuilding the country over the course of the 1980s and pursuing ‘national reconciliation’ in the 1990s. For returnees, by contrast, the refugee experience was at least as authentically ‘Khmer’, if not more so, in comparison with the war, occupation and Vietnamization experienced at home. The challenge for returnees was how to represent the relationship between the cosmopolitan savoir faire that had permitted them to thrive outside Cambodia and the belief in their own Khmer authenticity that legitimized their leading role in the new phase of national rebuilding launched in the 1990s. Two answers to this question are examined here: (1) the role of international human rights promotion in restoring an authentic ‘Khmerness’ in personal morality and behaviour; and (2) the role of democracy promotion in liberating Khmers from what was viewed by some returnees as a specifically communist form of oppression.
Human rights and culture in post-Cold War Cambodia Judy Ledgerwood (1990) notes that the role of women in refugee communities was crucial in sustaining notions of ‘Khmerness’ in exile. Among returnees, the problem of correcting deterioration in personal life was also a frequently cited concern when discussing Cambodia’s future. The question of how a ‘traditional family life’ ought to be conducted was a major concern, and this was brought to the fore by returnees working in human rights programmes. One returnee, engaged in programmes to promote human rights in Cambodia, commented that government officials had accused him of trying to import Western norms into Cambodia. He challenged this on the grounds that an authentic Cambodian culture itself, as sustained and perpetuated by Cambodians like himself, was consonant with human rights: If you beat your children and beat your wife, it’s not a good way. You say it’s culture – I say, no, it’s not culture. I have never beaten my children, I never beat my wife. I am Cambodian too. It’s not the culture, you can’t say Cambodian culture ever told you to beat your wife. It’s not true. If you say
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While mounting a challenge here on cultural grounds, this returnee also emphasized the importance of promoting international norms of human rights. His organization was engaged in a project to train Buddhist monks about international human rights so that the monks could draw parallels between the Buddhist Tripateka scriptures and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when teaching the people. In viewing these as parallel accounts of right action – neither identical nor contradictory – the interviewee was able to negotiate the boundary between a Buddhist text viewed as intrinsic to ‘Khmerness’ and an international text viewed as ‘foreign’, promoting a view of them as mutually implicating, although separate. The relationship between Buddhist scripture and international human rights treaties was similarly described by other returnees involved in the human rights movement. One commented, in a phrase popular among human rights activists, that the relationship was like ‘two wings of the same bird’ (Kek Galabru, personal interview, 1996). The human rights movement in Cambodia, many of whose leaders in the 1990s were returnees from the West, has focused to a great extent upon the inculcation of values of tolerance, respect and civility in personal conduct, rather than upon state–society relations. These values are viewed as intrinsic to Khmer culture but as having been endangered or lost during the years of war. Consequently, the ‘Asian values’ argument mobilized in other Southeast Asian countries as a challenge to human rights has rarely emerged in Cambodia. Instead, human rights have been promoted as complementary to, and even facilitating, a cultural renewal that will promote an innate propensity for peaceful coexistence among Khmers. Human rights arguments are promoted on cultural grounds through the assertion that practices that conflict sharply with international human rights norms are inauthentic, while practices that accord with human rights norms represent the linking of the pure Khmer tradition with a pragmatic adjustment to cultural loss and the transformations of modernity. For example, one human rights worker drew an explicit connection between the promotion of human rights and the recapture of lost prewar values and practices: Before, our young men used to go and live in the monastery and were taught by the monks how to live a good life. Now human rights organizations have to do this. (Leang Khem, personal interview, 1996) Another associated human rights and democracy with the presumed values of Angkor:
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If we can refer back to our glorious era, the twelfth to thirteenth centuries … there was a sense of values similar to freedom, human right and democracy. … The sense of moral values that high-ranking officials in those days had to adopt before becoming leaders of the people. Of course there were no elections. But they were not employed to take everything from the people, but to respond to the wishes of the people. (Lao Mong Hay, personal interview, 1996) Comments such as these frame human rights work within the project of restoring and reclaiming an authentically Khmer heart and mind, associated with the distant or prewar past and viewed as endangered by the years of war and foreign occupation. In the context of concerns over the decline of ‘Khmerness’, the authentic Khmer nation was viewed as preserved in the hearts and minds of the pure – in other words, in the intimate sphere of family life, personal morality and spiritual values. For human rights activists, this is the site of struggle over the articulation of the authentic Khmer and his or her appropriate behaviour in the postwar world. The attempt to restore the purity of the nation is consequently, like much human rights promotion in Cambodia, located in the sphere of moral behaviour. The ways in which the relationship between international human rights and local conceptions of ‘Khmerness’ were negotiated in human rights teaching mirrors the ways in which returnees negotiated their own flexible identities. Kathryn Poethig (1997: 172), reaching similar conclusions in her study of returnees and their conceptions of citizenship, suggests that for returnees ‘moral reasoning becomes a problem of cultural mediation’. For returnees in the human rights movement, the co-optation of key icons of ‘Khmerness’ – the role of the Buddhist Sangha as upholder of personal morality and spiritual identity; the status of Angkor as the fount of pure ‘Khmerness’ – and the juxtaposition of these with international norms, in a manner in which each is portrayed as consonant with and strengthened by the other, was a crucial strategy. It was a strategy that awarded a specific role to returnees, whose own flexible citizenship offered an analogy for the translation of norms across a cultural boundary for the purposes of redefinition, but without loss of authenticity or purity. As a group that had achieved self-recultivation in the aftermath of the killing fields, it awarded returnees a gate-keeping role in mediating between international assistance through human rights and promotion of democracy and the degraded remnants of Khmer culture that remained in Cambodian society after the war.
Recovering Khmer culture and defining the ‘foreign’ The simultaneity promoted within the human rights movement between international norms and standards and an authentic body of Khmer values represented a paradox; it represented the use of foreign resources to reclaim Khmer authenticity from foreign corruption. This paradox has been partially resolved, particularly in the rhetoric of opposition political parties in Cambodia, through
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a rhetorical association of ‘foreignness’ with communism, while the West was recast as the free air in which authenticity could blossom. Once again, this reflects the mobilization of Cold War tropes in an effort both to exonerate returnees from the West of the charge of deculturation and to resolve the problems of closing boundaries around a shrinking and ethereal concept of ‘Khmerness’. These strategies were notable in the programme and rhetoric of the Sam Rainsy Party (SRP), Cambodia’s rising opposition party, headed by Sam Rainsy, a returnee from France. The SRP has long been viewed with ambivalence by international democracy promoters in Cambodia, who regard with approval his liberal economic policies and his strong stance against corruption and violence but who express great concern at the flagrant racism of his anti-Vietnamese rhetoric, often viewed as a cheap vote-winning stunt on the part of a party that was, throughout the 1990s, the clear underdog in electoral contests. Arguably, however, the SRP’s stance reflects an attempt to resolve the tensions arising from a linking of return and liberation with the recapture of a lost ‘Khmerness’ on the part of individuals, like Sam Rainsy himself, who were brought up and educated outside Cambodia. While Rainsy’s stance is individual rather than representative of the diverse responses of returnees to Cambodia, it does represent one influential attempt to resolve the common problem of identity besetting elite returnees with far-reaching effects for the development of Cambodia’s fledgling democracy in the 1990s. For Rainsy, liberation came from the reassertion of ‘Khmerness’ within the individual body. Overlaid by foreign corruption, Khmer identity was stifled, but a reawakening of the conscience could permit a purging of foreign taints, which would permit a renewal of authenticity. For the SRP, this reawakening was to be achieved by means of moral and political action. For example, during the 1998 election campaign, the SRP, whose logo was a lighted candle, was portrayed by its leader as a beacon illuminating the Khmer soul: The light of the candle represents good deeds that we all want to share. The light of the candle represents morality, veracity and justice that we uphold in our hearts and in our society. When you pray to God and you see the light of the candle, the light of the candle shows your heart, so that you know what is wrong and what is right … so that we can take the right road. (Sam Rainsy 1998c) Equally, the fuel to keep the candle alight comes from activities that place the SRP in a specifically transnational setting. In his political activities, Rainsy makes extensive use of transnational networks and international forums. These include cultivation of support among Khmer communities abroad, activism in issueoriented transnational communities and the forging of alliances with actors in foreign governments. For example, Rainsy has testified in forums such as the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee in times of crisis and the Consultative Group of Donor Governments on a regular basis (see Sam Rainsy 1998a,
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1998b, 1998c). The SRP also regularly publishes criticisms of the Cambodian government made by foreign actors (see, for example, Sam Rainsy Party–USA 2003). Members of the parliamentary party regularly post statements on the Internet and publish open letters to international agencies (see Sam Rainsy 2000a, 2000b; Kim Leng et al. 2000; Cheam Channy et al. 2000). Furthermore, Sam Rainsy regularly tours Khmer communities abroad, upon which the party is heavily reliant for funding, and the activities of Khmer communities abroad, particularly in lobbying their own governments on foreign policy towards Cambodia, are reported in pro-SRP newspapers inside Cambodia (see, for example, Moneaksekar Khmer 1996a). Foreign governments’ criticisms of the Cambodian government are also reported by the SRP, in both international and domestic circles (see, for example, Moneaksekar Khmer 1996b). The extensive use made by Rainsy of transnational networks and international forums within which to promote Khmer national liberation once again raises the paradox of reconciling modern territorial democracy with a deterritorialized ethnicity that seeks to present itself simultaneously as pure and primordial and as modern and cosmopolitan. The employment of Cold War rhetoric, promoted by the SRP long after the end of the Cold War, was one strategy to square this circle. A rhetoric that associated ‘foreignness’ with ‘communism’ and ‘Vietnam’ permitted the portrayal of Western states like the USA and international organizations like the United Nations as legitimate actors in the Cambodian polity while delegitimizing the role of Cambodians like CPP leader Hun Sen on the grounds that he was, in a phrase commonly used in the SRP’s 1998 election campaign, an ‘ayong yuon communist’ (‘communist Vietnamese puppet’). In creating these discursive alignments, Sam Rainsy was able to make use of rhetorical tropes that resonated in Cambodian communities abroad, in forums such as the Republican Party in the USA and inside Cambodia itself. Furthermore, in aligning himself in this way, Rainsy was able to benefit from Western concern and assistance that provided an incomplete but nevertheless vital umbrella of protection for his nascent party. Calls for US and UN intervention to protect Cambodia from a Hun Sen government, particularly during the months of tense political confrontation and military fighting between 1997 and 1998, were viewed as legitimate acts consonant with this view of Cambodian sovereignty. For example, following the military battle of 1997 between units loyal to the parties that formed Cambodia’s coalition government and that led to the defeat of the royalist FUNCINPEC and the consolidation of CPP power, members of Cambodian communities across North America demonstrated to call for international intervention. Demonstrators at the UN headquarters in New York chanted ‘Down with Hun Sen and the CPP’s puppet regime pro-communist Vietnam’ while calling for ‘the United Nations to bring Hun Sen and the “coup” criminals to the international tribunal for punishment’ (Camnews 1997a). The agenda of a public meeting in Seattle included the stipulation: ‘This is an international affair’ (Camnews 1997b), while a press release by Cambodians in
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Washington state outlined several ‘messages to US government and the world communities’, which included ‘Make sure 1998 elections must be held and importantly must be under UNTAC supervision’; ‘We ask UN force to defend and protect our Angkor Wat, the great temple, immediately’; and, paradoxically, ‘We ask the US and the UN to watch for foreign involvement in the recent Cambodian conflict’ (ibid.). Such activities represent the pressing of flexible citizenship into the service of political campaigning in an attempt to promote a connection between flexibility itself and the ability to relocate an authentic ‘Khmerness’ to serve as a basis for redrawing Cambodia’s sovereign boundaries in the interests of democracy.
Conclusion: outcomes for democracy and the juridical citizen The outcome for the cause of democracy, as a regimenting and homogenizing process for constructing juridical citizens, is problematic. In drawing upon these resources, the rhetoric and strategies of the SRP leave the borders of ‘Khmerness’ open in the sense that they perpetuate anxiety over the difference between Khmer and yuon (a commonly used term for Vietnamese that is widely viewed as derogatory). At the same time, they continually call for intervention in Cambodia’s internal politics by external organizations and governments. Advocacy of the rights to participation in Cambodian politics of international actors and Khmers abroad goes hand in hand with a portrayal of remote communes in Cambodia as oppressed by the ‘communist yuon’ and hence unable to participate equally in a process of rebuilding the Khmer nation. In promoting a dualist opposition between notions of free/unfree and authentic/inauthentic, they problematize the representation of ‘Khmerness’ among Cambodians at home, thus denying the agency of Cambodia’s more immobile citizens. This marginalizes, in nationalist rhetoric, the significance of attempts by such citizens to negotiate the reality of state power at village level for the process of democratization. It has produced a graduated regime of citizenship whereby authenticity – or at least, the ability to draw upon cultural authenticity in the context of political action – becomes paradoxically linked to mobility and cosmopolitanism. Democratization becomes a project of the mobile and transnational in collaboration with external agencies perpetrated on behalf of the oppressed, rather than a project to be pursued by the oppressed themselves. In this regard, the activities of the mobile, transnational citizen and his or her international allies, conducted far beyond the reach of sanctions available to the immobile Khmer at home, are privileged. Thus the adopted position of these elite returnees as gate-keepers, mediating between the operations of global power and the salvaging of Khmer culture, is problematic for conceptions of democracy built upon the closure of community boundaries. It depends upon the positing of an absence at home – a degradation so thorough that renewal is possible only with outside aid. Claims that trauma debilitates the entire population, that people are brutalized or inured to violence
Democracy, culture and the politics of gate-keeping in Cambodia 215 and that they have lost any sense of their own culture preclude the restoration of sovereignty into the people’s hands. For returnees, their own contribution to Cambodia’s recovery was paramount precisely because of their unique status as both insiders and outsiders, bearers of Khmer culture but preserved from the taint of war and occupation and cultivated by their success in the outside world. This stance translated in the 1990s into political strategies, especially on the part of leading returnee politicians such as Sam Rainsy, which reflected their transnational orientation and were not conducive to the promotion of democracy within Cambodia, in three respects: (1) they perpetuated anxieties regarding the boundaries of ‘Khmerness’; (2) they reoriented conceptions of sovereignty to legitimize far-reaching intervention by international organizations that operated well beyond the democratic mandate of any conception of ‘the Cambodian people’; and (3) they promoted a connection between Khmer authenticity and a notion of a ‘free world’ that existed away from the stifling atmosphere of Cambodia’s ‘traumatized’ villages, thus downplaying the contribution of Cambodians at home to the rebuilding of the nation. These tendencies prompted, among nationalist politicians in Cambodia, significant problems in coping with dissonant political orientations and have led to a denigration of the capacities of individuals whose allegiance is uncertain. The attempt to reduce political activity to a cultural script elevates all policy questions to questions of patriotism and purity, narrowing the scope for public deliberation and debate. To the extent that this is further attached to activism and mobilization of international rather than domestic resources, it is disempowering to the juridical citizen, who becomes an incompetent child to be socialized into cultural norms rather than an autonomous adult capable of full participation in an albeit regimented scheme of political action. The result is a dilution, rather than a strengthening, of democracy that privileges those best placed to capture international resources and to use them to police and manipulate the boundaries of ‘Khmerness’ in the politics of gatekeeping. Acknowledgements This paper is based on field research sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.
References Amer, R. (1994) ‘The ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia: a minority at risk?’ Contemporary Southeast Asian Studies 16: 210–41. Camnews (1997a) ‘Cambodian protest against Hun Sen and Communist Cambodian People’s Party “CPP” (in front of UN, July 25, 1997)’. Online posting, available via email to
[email protected] —— (1997b) ‘Rally against violence in Cambodia’. Online posting, available via e-mail to
[email protected] Chandler, D. (1993) History of Cambodia, Chiang Mai: Silkworm.
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Cheam Channy, Tioulong Samura and Yim Sovann (2000) ‘Open letter to Monika Midel, country director, World Food Programme’, 3 February. Democratic Kampuchea Regime (1976) ‘The B-1 Ministry Congress, Phnom Penh, 10 July’, Doc. 4, in Cambodia Genocide Project, Ieng Sary’s Regime: A Diary of the Khmer Rouge Foreign Ministry 1976–9. Available online at http://www.yale.edu/cgp Edwards, P. (1996) ‘Imaging the other in Cambodian nationalist discourse before and during the UNTAC period’, in S. Heder and J. Ledgerwood (eds), Propaganda, Politics and Violence in Cambodia – Democratic Transition under United Nations Peace-keeping, London: M.E. Sharpe. Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Him, Chanrithy (2000) When Broken Glass Floats, London: W.W. Norton. Hun Sen (1996) extract from speech, Medical Training School, Phnom Penh, 27 April 1996, quoted in ‘Hun Sen: live and die with the People’, Phnom Penh Post, 3–16 May, 3. Khmer Buddhist Research Centre (n.d.) ‘The Vietnamization of Cambodia: an irreversible act? (On the basis of information collected in Cambodia)’, in Buddhism and the Future of Cambodia, Rithisen: Khmer Buddhist Research Centre. Kim Leng, Reach Somaly and Mao Born (2000) ‘Message from Cambodian farmers to the European Union’, Camnews. Online posting, available via e-mail to
[email protected] Ledgerwood, J. (1990) ‘Changing Khmer conceptions of gender, women, stories and the social order’, unpublished thesis, Cornell University. Ledgerwood, J., Ebihara, M.M. and Mortland, C.A. (1994) ‘Introduction’, in M.M. Ebihara, C.A. Mortland and J. Ledgerwood (eds), Cambodian Culture since 1975, Homeland and Exile, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Mam, Teeda Butt (1996) ‘Worms from our skin’, in Dith Pran (ed.), Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields, London: Yale University Press. Martin, M. (1994) Cambodia: A Shattered Society, translated by Mark W. McLeod, Berkeley: University of California Press. Moneaksekar Khmer (Khmer Conscience) (1996a) ‘What are the demonstrators doing in Paris?’ 18–19 June, 1. —— (1996b) ‘European Parliament announces EU connects aid to Cambodia with respect for human rights and democracy’, 3–4 July, 1. Mouffe, C. (2000) The Democratic Paradox, London: Verso. Mysliwiec, E. (1988) Punishing the Poor: The International Isolation of Kampuchea, Oxford: Oxfam. Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Poethig, K. (1997) ‘Ambivalent moralities: Cambodian-Americans and dual-citizenship in Phnom Penh’, unpublished thesis, University of California at Berkeley. Royal Government of Cambodia (1993) Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia, Phnom Penh: Royal Government of Cambodia. Sam Rainsy (1998a) ‘To the friends of Cambodia: elections must be postponed to ensure fairness,’ Camnews. Online posting, available via e-mail to
[email protected] —— (1998b) ‘Testimony of Sam Rainsy, president, Sam Rainsy Party, Cambodia, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Asia and Pacific Sub-committee, 2 October’, Camnews. Online posting, available via e-mail to
[email protected] —— (1998c) Campaign speech, Kien Svay district, Kandal province, recorded and translated by Caroline Hughes and Sok Ty, 22 July.
Democracy, culture and the politics of gate-keeping in Cambodia 217 —— (2000a) ‘Open letter to Japanese prime minister Keizo Obuchi’, Camnews. Online posting, available via e-mail to
[email protected] —— (2000b) ‘Donor community must push for communal elections’, Camnews. Online posting, available via e-mail to
[email protected] Sam Rainsy Party–USA (2003) ‘Re: Prime Minister Hun Sen to blame for riots. Extract from United States Senate Proceedings, Page S1808, 30 Jan. 2003’, Camnews. Online posting, available via e-mail to
[email protected] Son Soubert (n.d.) ‘The historical dimensions of the present conflict in Cambodia’, in Buddhism and the Future of Cambodia, Rithisen: Khmer Buddhist Research Centre. Soum Sekomar (1997) Acts of Invasion by the Yuon against Cambodia, Paris: Pruy Nokor. Welaratna, U. (1993) Beyond the Killing Fields, Voices of Nine Cambodian Survivors in America, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
11 Internal transnationalism and the formation of the Vietnamese diaspora Andrew Hardy
Introduction Vietnamese transnationalism should be understood in the context of Vietnamese nationalism. The existence of a large Vietnamese diaspora stems from a conflict between visions of the Vietnamese nation, yet these origins are glossed over in much existing literature. The recent formation of the diaspora, its origins in Vietnam’s political history and its current relationship to Vietnam make this a particularly interesting gap in our knowledge. This chapter argues that the formation and character of this diaspora is bound up in an event not of international but of internal migration. This was the southward movement of a million inhabitants of northern Vietnam after the Geneva Agreement in 1954. Their move was made in rejection of the communist version of Vietnamese nationalism. The establishment of two opposing states at this time became a defining moment in Vietnamese transnationalism, internal to the country. In 1975, many of these migrants fled to the USA, France, Canada and Australia. The existence of an internal transnationalism for twenty years before 1975, embodied in the country’s partition, was thereafter to dominate the politics of diaspora. Migrants’ values of anti-communism and identification with the West, expressed in homeland politics in their country of resettlement, were born in a million moments of life-changing decision: to move south in 1954.
Partition Dien Bien Phu fell in the early hours of 8 May 1954. This siege sealed the fate of French colonialism in Vietnam, but in Hanoi during those first days of May, informed Vietnamese observers had their eyes on developments further afield. The Geneva Conference had opened in late April, bringing together international politicians to resolve the crises in Korea and Indo-China. At the same time, communist and anti-communist participants in Vietnamese political life focused less on the military denouement to French colonialism than on what was about to replace it. The desire of all was to see a free and united Vietnam.
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This chapter argues that, in 1954, the spatial formalization of competing visions of independence had consequences reaching far beyond Vietnam’s temporary division. Neither Catholic prayers at Phat Diem nor political meetings in Hanoi nor force of arms at Dien Bien Phu were able to prevent partition, agreed at Geneva on 21 July 1954. The ‘regrouping’ of opposing forces redrew the wartime map of French and Viet Minh zones, leading to the crystallization of an internal transnationalism between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in the north and the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in the south. This state of affairs persisted through the cancellation of proposed national elections in 1956, until reunification under the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV) in 1975. The term ‘internal transnationalism’, as used in this chapter, may seem surprising in its association of two opposing concepts, and explanation is justified at the outset. The notion of the ‘transnational’ often identifies a common identity across national borders yet is qualified here with the word ‘internal’, which specifically excludes borders. However, the term is adopted to highlight the importance of the history of partition in the formation of the diaspora. For a twenty-year period, Vietnam was spatially divided at the seventeenth parallel. At the same time, its politics were polarized in a conflict between two nationalisms, each denying the legitimacy of the other, each seeking to abolish their common border. Internal transnationalism thus offers an explanatory vocabulary for the existence of two nationalisms within a single country. In Vietnam, internal transnationalism was a product of decolonization and the Cold War. It may be compared with situations elsewhere in East Asia: in the competing nationalisms of China and Taiwan, and those of North and South Korea. In the Vietnamese case, however, armed conflict came to an end in 1975 with the communist victory and subsequent overseas departure of more than a million refugees. But with these migrations, internal transnationalism was exported to become a focus for homeland politics among diasporic communities in the USA and other countries of resettlement. The concept of internal transnationalism thus serves to explain the historical origins and political development of the Vietnamese diaspora. The analysis presented here responds to a trend in geographical studies to apply the tools of diaspora theory to situations ‘within nations’ (Silvey 2000: 503). The phenomenon of transmigration in Indonesia has already prompted exploration of a notion of internal diaspora aimed at ‘framing identities that refuse the essentialism of “nation” and at the same time challenge the idea of ahistorical, indigenous identities that are rooted in place’ (Elmhirst 2000: 488). Here, however, the concept of diaspora bears its conventional meaning. Meanwhile, redefining transnationalism in internal terms serves to offer new insights into the character of diaspora, insights gathered above all from an understanding of its history. The history of Vietnamese internal transnationalism and its relationship to diaspora may be summarized as follows. The Geneva Agreement offered Vietnam’s inhabitants the right to decide which nationalism would best serve their interests. They were invited to exercise this right in spatial terms. Over a period of nearly a
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year, some opted for the communist north, while others headed for the anticommunist south. These migration decisions had effects felt long after the country’s spatial reunification. The nationalist regime in Saigon collapsed in 1975, but opposition between conceptions of Vietnam’s national identity did not simply go away. Or, rather, it did – in the form of hundreds of thousands of individuals and families who left the country, first in 1975 to join US warships off the coast and later in boats, aeroplanes and on foot to seek asylum in the West. While the ‘boat people’ phenomenon had its own momentum, the origins of Vietnam’s overseas communities may be traced back to the competing nationalisms enshrined in the war against the French and the 1954 partition. And the nature of those communities, especially in their political life, powerfully reflected the circumstances of their origins.
The formation of two nationalisms The Geneva Conference inaugurated a time of decision for Vietnam’s leaders and its people. As one observer, (Ton That Thien 1959: 32) wrote, ‘the problem of the post-independence period … is a problem of the choice between various alternatives. … The basic choice the Vietnamese have to make is what to do with independence’. How should Vietnam’s leaders shape their newly independent nation? How should its people respond to the options available? These were the questions of the hour. Few anticipated that they would shape the country’s politics and its people’s decisions for decades to come. What were these alternatives? This is not the place for a history of Vietnam’s anti-colonial movements, its communist and anti-communist nationalisms. Let us rather look forward from 1954 and examine how leaders made decisions on future national development. Our point of entry is two moments of retrospection a few years after Geneva. In 1959, RVN officials and American observers published an International Symposium, in which they discussed the development of RVN nationalism over its first five years. Meanwhile, in 1960, the Vietnamese Workers’ Party held its Third Party Congress. The two events are not strictly comparable – one was an academic debate, the other a communist government’s orchestrated view of itself – but both offer a glimpse of Vietnam’s competing nationalisms. They are two faces of the ideological coin of Vietnamese internal transnationalism. North Vietnam In his speech to the Third Party Congress, Le Duan outlined the aims of the DRV national project: We aim to bring about re-unification of our country on the basis of independence and democracy, and build a country called Vietnam which is peaceful, reunified, democratic and wealthy. We should also make a pragmatic contribution to the strengthening of the socialist bloc for the protection of peace in Southeast Asia and throughout the world. (cited in Vo Nguyen Giap 1960: 4; emphasis added)
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Two aspects of this speech bear mention. The first was the reunification goal. Negotiations with the French in 1946 had demonstrated the refusal of communist leaders to accept Vietnam’s division into three ‘countries’: Tonkin, Annam and Cochinchina. Partition at the seventeenth parallel was only temporarily acceptable. In their view, there could not be two Vietnams. The second was the popular legitimacy they obtained in opposing the French. David G. Marr (1995: 2) noted Viet Minh leadership of the 1945 revolution, emphasizing the attachment of many participants to an organization of which they knew little. Dissolution of the Indochina Communist Party (1946) aimed to present the Viet Minh as a movement broader than its communist leadership. Some people later made discoveries to the contrary and took decisions accordingly. Nonetheless, the Viet Minh retained popular credit for the French defeat spectacularly achieved at Dien Bien Phu. These points emerge in the Pentagon Papers, which condemned the US failure to recognize that ‘first, the Viet Minh was the main repository of Vietnamese nationalism and anti-French colonialism … Second, [that] the Viet Minh was sufficiently popular and effective to turn itself into a Vietnam-wide government that could have extended its authority throughout the country after the Second World War – except for the obstacle of re-asserted French power and, to a lesser degree, of indigenous political opposition in Cochinchina’ (Pentagon Papers 1971: 2–3). However, US policy focused on a third aspect of Le Duan’s speech: Vietnam’s links to international communism. South Vietnam Prior to 1954, multiple non-communist visions of the nation existed, as Ton That Thien (1959) explained in the 1959 symposium. By the late 1950s, however, such fractures appeared a thing of the past, and the symposium praised the South Vietnamese president’s success in eliminating divisions. As Joseph Buttinger (1959: 30) wrote, the ‘re-establishment of administrative and political unity … must be regarded as Ngo Dinh Diem’s major contribution to the “miracle of Viet-Nam”’. However, the miracle was a mirage. The symposium projected an assumption that Geneva had offered non-communist nationalism ‘not more than its last chance’ (ibid.: 29). In 1954, the RVN was not expected to survive. The ‘miracle’ was a rhetorical device and was measured in terms of the regime’s survival and the country’s ‘viability’. Three of the symposium’s preoccupations characterize nationalist development in South Vietnam: Ngo Dinh Diem’s leadership, an unfocused desire for reunification and the politics of opposition. Many saw Ngo Dinh Diem as the miracle’s architect. Much was made of his Catholicism, his Confucianism and his obscure interest in Personalism (Hammer 1959; Donnell 1959). He enjoyed firm anti-communist credentials. Others branded him a dictator. We need not return to these debates, but we should note his creation of an alternative nationalism and the limits to this achievement.
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Ngo Dinh Diem undoubtedly offered an alternative nationalism. Suppression of opposition and US aid contributed to this goal, as did the departure of the French. However, this alternative was weak in substance. Reunification remained on the agenda but was postponed in favour of nation building in the south. While the country’s name remained the Republic of Vietnam, the name South Vietnam appeared in official discourse. This contrasted with the DRV, which systematically referred to the north (mien Bac) and the south (mien Nam). For the government in Saigon, partition was, quite simply, a political reality. In the context of insurgency, Ngo Dinh Diem and his successors were acutely aware of the difficulty of a non-communist reunification by force of arms. The RVN also accepted the persistence of internal political divisions, as its leader depended on a limited constituency: migrants, relatives and US support. Neither Confucianism, Catholicism, Personalism nor the US proved attractive to the rural population. His officials’ activities were less appealing still. One writer (Tran Hoai Tran 1967: 8) observed: ‘the country suffers from an internal dilemma, that of a society run by a political authority based on a westernised urban bourgeoisie exerted over an essentially rural population’. In the countryside, behaviour reminiscent of the 1946–54 war re-emerged as people dodged ideological commitment in the interests of survival. And even among the urban elite, attentisme was common, some finding it convenient to fence-sit abroad (Fall 1964: 285–6). There they engaged in ‘constructive criticism’ of South Vietnam’s political authority (Tran Hoai Tran 1967: 271) or undertook political activities favouring a communist victory (Bousquet 1991: 53). However, it would be facile to portray Ngo Dinh Diem’s legacy as a reversion to the factionalism that he simultaneously fought and perpetuated. Certainly, after his murder in 1963, RVN nationalism relied increasingly on the twin fears of repression and insurgency. By the mid-1970s, the confidence of key constituencies – the USA, the Catholics and the middle classes – was lost (Elliott 1999: 381). In this respect, the RVN never rose to a challenge made in the 1959 symposium, to rise above colonial-era divisions: Now with the Vietnamese themselves making the policies, the habitual attitude of opposition must be changed to one of evaluating every policy as to whether it is right or wrong, or the most practical under the circumstances, for Viet-Nam. (Ton That Thien 1959: 32) But the challenge remained. Few rural southerners were convinced by RVN rhetoric. Indeed, DRV discourses may have enjoyed greater effect. But Ngo Dinh Diem’s achievement was to sow the seeds of an anti-communist nationalism. After his death, the South Vietnamese idea of nation gained a momentum maintained first by war then – after 1975 – by exile.
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One country, two nationalisms In 1954, the coexistence of divergent visions of the national future was far from new. However, they were now spatially expressed in a partition between north and south. After Geneva, three new elements entered the equation. The first was a legacy of war, which had obliged people to make ideological commitments. The second was the withdrawal of the French, leaving the Vietnamese alone to determine their future. The third was the internationalization of the conflict, as the lines of Cold War diplomacy were drawn in a short border separating ‘two violently opposed political regimes for one and the same nation’ (Buttinger 1959: 14). We may conclude, in the words of a Vietnamese observer in Paris, that ‘the fact that in Vietnam two forms of nationalism confront each other, one of them anti-communist and the other led by Marxists, explains that Vietnam was divided in 1954 and that it continues to be a field of conflict engaging stakes of planetary proportions’ (Tran Hoai Tran 1967: 62). In 1954, the spatial crystallization of this conflict presented every Vietnamese with a choice between two formally constituted nationalisms. For 300 days, they could cross the border in formation to express their decision. How did the population perceive this internal transnationalism? Analysis of migration decisions opens a window onto the political preoccupations of Vietnam’s ordinary people at the time. But in the experiences of internal transnationalism, we may also trace the origins of Vietnam’s diaspora.
Migration and internal transnationalism South Vietnam marked one major victory in its struggle for ‘hearts and minds’. Yet Ngo Dinh Diem did little to achieve it. The victory lay in the outcome of an exchange of rumour and propaganda carried out in the north in 1954–55 over a clause in the Geneva Agreement. As a result, about a million northerners chose to move south.1 This migration, which increased the population of the south by around 8 percent, was a defining moment in Vietnamese internal transnationalism, providing support for Ngo Dinh Diem’s vision of non-communist nationalism and offering us the beginnings of an explanation for the nature of the post-1975 Vietnamese diaspora. Let us focus, then, on events in the north in 1954–55 and in the south for twenty years thereafter, successive focal points for the politics of internal transnationalism. Migration from the north, 1954–55 A key DRV refrain in 1954 was ‘complete fulfilment of the Geneva Agreements’. As a French military analyst put it, ‘the Viet Minh … is firmly determined to exploit fully all the advantages offered to it by the Geneva Agreements, which it considers as a stage towards “ultimate victory”’.2 But a single exception to this emerged within weeks of the Agreement. Article 14d stated that:
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The Agreement came into force on 22 July 1954, and the last French sector of North Vietnam was evacuated on 16 May 1955. During this period, the world watched as Catholic farmers, urban business people, students and government employees left the north by boat and aeroplane. Described in Vietnamese as ‘migrants’ (dan di cu in Vietnamese), they became known as ‘refugees’ in the West, where the Christian faith of some obtained a particular sympathy for all. This migration was a complex phenomenon involving a multitude of individual, family and community decisions. A detailed examination, impossible here, would relate the threat of famine over a disrupted economy, land reform and taxation in Viet Minh areas, experiences of collaboration with the French, the impact of war and the vast effort of propaganda made by all sides in 1954. Many people left simply because the International Control Commission, responsible for the Agreement’s implementation, came to their village to offer them the choice. Let us focus instead on a single incident. The following events occurred in Thai Binh province in November 1954 and are presented here, in reconstructed form, to illustrate the migrants’ determination to reach the south. Just after the dawn of 10 November 1954, about 300 people left their village in the district of Kien Xuong (Thai Binh). Led by their priest, they walked along the road towards Haiphong from where they expected to be transported by ship to the south. Coming to the market of Me, they were greeted by a bamboo barrier across the road, a crowd of about 500 local villagers, four or five DRV cadres and a number of soldiers. The cadres spent the morning persuading them to turn around. Some of the migrants replied that they would rather die than do so. Towards noon, a scuffle broke out as cadres found their words insufficiently persuasive. One of the soldiers opened fire. Four of the refugees fell. Five were bound and taken to a Viet Minh post nearby. The others dispersed. A number were able, individually, travelling by boat or on foot across the paddy fields, to reach a French reception centre, at the Cuu ferry near Haiphong. This account was assembled from eyewitness accounts of the incident, told to French army interviewers on the evening of the events described.4 This was an unusual episode during which people were wounded and killed. Tactics of persuasion and legalistic obstruction were normally a sufficient deterrent. By the autumn of 1954, most who made their way through did so alone or in small groups, leaving families and co-religionists behind. Their stories became a major propaganda blow to the DRV and represented ‘a setback that the
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Catholics … have inflicted on communist policy by carrying out, often in dramatic circumstances, spectacular departures towards the south’.5 Northern Vietnamese did not leave only for the south. From 1945, there was a steady flow of people travelling to France, many of them young men and students hoping to avoid the war. In 1954, their numbers were swelled by Vietnamese and Eurasian holders of French nationality (Bousquet 1991; Simon 1981). There is little evidence that, in 1954, most of these people had strong political views or that their arrival in France had a defining influence on the Vietnamese community’s vision of its homeland. However, during the years after Geneva, they were joined by others, Catholics who had already moved once to the south, people alienated by politics and war. Patriotism among the Vietnamese in Paris became increasingly divided as ‘two main political factions emerged: pro-Hanoi and anticommunist’ (Bousquet 1991: 53, citing Le Huu Khoa 1983). France thus became home to the first politicized Vietnamese diaspora. Its members’ ideological positions began to reflect those of the internal transnationalism existing in Vietnam itself. Politics in the south, 1955–75 In Vietnam, the 1954 migrations had an immediate impact on nationalist politics. In the north, the DRV swiftly established its rule and set its population to the tasks of reconstruction, social homogenization and reunification. The impact was felt most strongly in the south. The migrant community in the RVN was made up of Catholics, in open conflict with the Viet Minh since 1949, as well as people compromised by collaboration with the French and those whose economic interests were threatened. These people had left their homes in exercise of a ‘right of option’ not to live under communism. Their choices were perceived as a ‘popular plebiscite against the Viet Minh’ (Gheddo 1968: 84). But they had a further long-term consequence. These became people who had already lost much. They stood to lose even more in the event of a communist reunification. The migrants became the more influential for their proximity to the RVN government. If we recall the low expectations for the RVN’s survival as well as the president’s own Catholic faith, we will understand the significance of Ngo Dinh Diem’s reliance on the refugees. Catholics represented, as one observer (Tran Hoai Tran 1967: 100) puts it, ‘the only organized force from which he could find support at the beginning. Above all, these Catholic refugees offered a precious basis for power, as they could become devoted propagandists and constitute shock troops and a political militia’. This somewhat sensationalized account was a generalization and did not apply to all refugees, most of whom settled quietly on farmland allocated to them in defensive circles around Saigon and Ban Me Thuot. However, even Catholic writer Piero Gheddo (1968: 176), citing a Vietnamese contributor to Eglise Vivante and at pains to show that the RVN was not a ‘Catholic state’, admitted that ‘a genuine political exploitation of the refugee drama’ had
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occurred, concluding that ‘the evacuation of the Vietnamese from the north constituted an essential political force for Diem’s government’ and that ‘the refugee clergy gave him open support’. The RVN relied on Catholic opposition to the communists, counting on their hostility to the Marxist philosophy of ‘atheist materialism’. A Catholic refugee was, by definition, an anti-communist. This too was the opinion of many Americans in Vietnam, whose own anticommunism, led by Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, was itself profoundly Catholic (Tran Hoai Tran 1967: 172, 196; Fisher 1997: 101). This situation developed in two directions. First, it provided Catholics with opportunities to achieve unprecedented social and political power (Gheddo 1967: 188). Conversions increased (30,000 baptisms annually) as people sought social promotion (Tran Hoai Tran 1967: 172). But they did not stop after Ngo Dinh Diem’s death in 1963. Over the decade from 1957, South Vietnam’s Catholic population increased from 1.2 million to over 2 million. Gheddo explained this not in terms of the opportunities available but as a spiritual movement of opposition to communism. Many of the converts were Buddhist refugees from the north. Others were of southern origin, like one young man interviewed by the Catholic press agency Fides, who gave the following explanation for his decision: The communists themselves, it seems to me, have cleared the road leading to the Church. The Vietnamese people have had the opportunity to see and admire Christian virtues practiced heroically by the Catholics: patience, sacrifice, courage and charity. We were convinced and conquered above all by the Catholic exodus of 1954 and by the example given by the Catholics in the red prisons. (Gheddo 1968: 193, citing Fides, 10 May 1958: 155) The purpose of this discussion of Catholic politics – and this is the second direction – is to show how religion, anti-communism and nationalism came together to create division and confusion in the south. Even the bishop of Saigon, desirous of maintaining Church unity, was prepared to countenance the ultramilitant activities of sectarian leader Hoang Quynh, who called for violence to ‘save the Church and Fatherland’. An influential religious minority thus alienated itself from the rest of the population (Tran Hoai Tran 1967: 197), an alienation that led, in part at least, to Ngo Dinh Diem’s fall in the Buddhist crisis of 1963. Its effects were felt to the end of the war as religious divisions developed alongside political factionalism. The RVN was held together only by regimes relying on increasingly dictatorial practices. Disintegration was not as rapid as many anticipated (see Fall 1955: 5). But the religious, political and social splintering that took place in South Vietnam contrasted vividly with the DRV’s national project. It constituted a real failure of nationalist mobilization. Some southerners, meanwhile, expressed their disillusionment in a departure. For Nguyen Thai, director of Ngo Dinh Diem’s news agency, a 1962 decision to resettle in the USA was the direct result of the
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regime’s shortcomings and prompted him to publish his thoughts. For a man who felt that the ‘primary task of South Vietnam is to survive politically as a nation and to develop itself into a self-sustaining country’, the act of migration was itself an admission of defeat (Nguyen Thai 1962: xi). For Nguyen Thai and many others, migration was a political expression of oppositional nationalism. And this wartime exporting of Vietnamese oppositional politics contributed to the post-reunification evolution of nationalism in the Vietnamese diaspora. However, the majority who remained were preoccupied by the war. The instinct to fight or flee, maintained in the memory of the 1954 exodus, was expressed vividly by militant priest Hoang Quynh (cited in Tran Hoai Tran 1967: 196–7): ‘There are a million of us Catholics and we cannot go any further than within these lands where we live, because these lands are still our fatherland. Beyond, there lie foreign countries which will turn us away or there are the sharks of the South China Sea’. Hoang Quynh’s words proved prophetic after the country’s reunification, and the world watched as, over a period of twenty years, leaking boats headed towards the beaches of Southeast Asia and groups of Vietnamese arrived in Australia, Europe and North America. Before examining the new lives they created for themselves, however, let us pause and reflect on the circumstances of their departure.
Departure: the invention of a tradition After 1975, as Hoang Quynh had foreseen, many Vietnamese left their country, braving sharks, pirates and other hazards. The priest’s predictions were accurate in every sense, except that most were not rejected by those ‘foreign countries’, receiving instead a welcome that varied over time and place. On resettlement, most integrated successfully, and Vietnamese people living outside Vietnam are now estimated at 2.6 million in seventy-nine countries (Tran Trong Dang Dan 1997: 58). People’s integration depended on the nature of their adopted culture, who they were and how they had travelled. Or, to turn the question around, we should ask: what were the social and political contexts of their departure from Vietnam? Many left for reasons directly linked to Vietnam’s history of war and partition. Others, who fled later situations, were confronted by that history on arrival in the West and were required to respond. Decisions of departure and decisions of response combined in the exporting of the conflicts of internal transnationalism. The contexts of departure In 1975, about 130,000 Vietnamese left with the Americans in a crisis evacuation precipitated by communist victory. They were followed by about 700,000 refugees by boat and land to countries of first asylum, a further 250,000 to China and 600,000 by air on the Orderly Departures Programme instituted in
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1979 (Kelly 1977: 2; Alley 1980: 6; Robinson 1998: 198, 294). These figures exclude people who failed to survive the journey, attempted to leave without success or were repatriated from a country of first asylum. However, 1.5 million people were resettled in Western countries, principally the USA, France, Canada, Australia, Germany and the UK. Their arrival had a major impact on communities of Vietnamese already living there, and it is the political dimension of that impact – their relationship with the politics of their home country – with which the rest of this chapter is concerned. The Indochina refugee phenomenon has a convoluted history, and it is not my intention to chart it here.6 Most analysts divide the migrants into two ‘waves’, a first wave of people who evacuated in April 1975 and a second wave of refugees and legal emigrants after 1977 (Dorais 1991: 555). I also identify a third wave, made up of people who left in the late 1980s. For the purposes of this argument, however, I prefer to see the exodus in a different light, focusing on historical contexts to the migration. A first context corresponds to the first refugee wave of 1975. My reflex reaction, when I started thinking about these people, was to wonder who they were. This swiftly led to a second question: ‘Can we compare this evacuation with the exodus of 1954?’ Evidently, Vietnam’s reunification by force rather than by treaty limits the applicability of such a comparison. One Saigon resident (Kim Ha 1997: 17) described her feeling of betrayal after President Duong Van Minh announced the surrender on 30 April 1975: ‘Everyone was utterly shocked and astonished. We could neither speak nor cry. We all felt the pain, shame and disgrace. We had not expected the war to end this way. We had thought it would end in a peace conference like the ones at Geneva’. She had already refused three opportunities to evacuate, but she had just a few days to consider her decision, rather than nearly a year as in 1954–55. There was no ‘right of option’, just a chance opened briefly to those with the right friends. However, analysis of the 130,000 people who left in 1975 confirmed the instinct to compare. The US government’s inability to choose who would benefit from evacuation during South Vietnam’s last days and the way people took advantage of contacts and chaos meant that the profile of the refugee community corresponded more to Vietnamese decisions than to US lists of who ‘we should have gotten out’ (Kelly 1977: 193). These decisions often reflected the migrants’ individual positioning with regard to partition and the war. More than half of the refugees were people involved in the war in an official capacity or by association with the American presence. The others were ordinary folk who seized their chance (ibid.: 1–2). Research conducted by Gail Paradise Kelly showed that many 1975 refugees were of northern origin. She found that ‘interview after interview I conducted with refugees at Indian Town Gap revealed that many of them were born in northern Vietnam. Either they themselves or their fathers had been associated with the French presence as officials in government or as army personnel’ (ibid.: 14). Moreover, official US data indicated that 34 percent of them were Catholics (Baker and North 1984: 29). Kelly (1977: 47) was left in little doubt on the matter: ‘The public affairs officer at Fort
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Indian Town Gap [reception centre] claimed that most of the residents of that camp came from families that were part of the 1954 refugee movement or had been refugees in 1954’. Kelly’s data show that the 1975 refugees acted under similar conditions of internal transnationalism as those of 1954. As after Geneva, many were prompted by fear of communism. Some responded to rumours of ‘bloodbaths’. For those who disbelieved such rumours, fear of changed livelihoods, property loss and reduced social status also motivated decisions to leave. One later migrant who disregarded the rumours was a northerner and a Catholic. Kim Ha was educated by a lecturer who worked for the communists. She believed what she later called his ‘propaganda’ about the Hanoi government. So, in April 1975, she passed up several chances to join relatives leaving with the Americans. In her memoir, Kim Ha (1997: 16) explained her decision: Why should we have to leave our country while the country was in peace? Why should we have to leave property, appliances, possessions and jobs for an uncertain future? Why should we have to leave our friends, family members, and neighbours behind for a strange environment? Why should we go when my mother, who had been living in the United States and had known too well the hard life there, advised us to stay home? With these questions in mind, we ignored all invitations and opportunities. We laughed at rumours. We stayed put while a lot of our neighbours and friends were crowding out of the country. Kim Ha became part of the ‘second wave’, and this corresponds to our second context. In 1980, she walked across Cambodia to Thailand. Her experience was similar to that of Nhat Tien, described in his short story, ‘Twice Farewell to My Father’, in which the author described his departure from Hanoi in 1954 and from Saigon in 1970: I left Hanoi to migrate to the South in 1954, when I was eighteen years old. I went South because of the wandering blood of youth. On the day I said goodbye to my father before going out to the bus, I said laughing: I am just going for two years and then I’ll be back.… I did not suspect that that simple goodbye would become distant separation lasting nearly a quarter of a century. On 30 April 1975, I did not have time to chase after the waves and evacuate abroad. In exchange, I was lucky enough to get a reunion.… In mid-1979, in a letter I sent to him, I hinted at asking my father for permission to leave the country. I did not need to explain my reasons for that, as he already knew and sympathized. Like a fish used to living in the immense ocean, I could not live in small and stagnant ponds. Once again, fate had created circumstances similar to those of twenty-five years before: to bid farewell to my own father and leave.…
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Nhat Tien’s story is significant for two reasons. It illustrates, over the quartercentury to which he alludes, how a youthful decision to go for a two-year adventure in the south hardened, by force of experience, into engagement with South Vietnamese nationalism. In 1975, he noted bleakly, he ‘lost his country’. But his country was not lost to foreign invaders. The significance of his account lies in the fact that, four years after a victory by other Vietnamese, he still considered his country lost. National reconciliation did not accompany reunification. Nor was such reconciliation attempted. We are not told the reasons for Nhat Tien’s second departure, but it is clear that many southerners felt the new society gave them little room to live. Choices made by Kim Ha and Nhat Tien illustrate a failure of reconciliation after reunification. But what did this mean in practice? I argue that this constituted a perpetuation of internal transnationalism after 1975 implemented by the SRV. Many people posed little threat to the new order and could have been admitted to the national community. Instead, they were systematically excluded. Amnesties might have been granted to former RVN officials and soldiers in a spirit of north–south reunion, of which Nhat Tien offers us a family metaphor. Instead they were offered programmes of re-education. And the socialist vision of national development applied in the DRV since 1954 and extended to the entire country after 1975, involving policies of nationalization of private enterprises, collectivization of agriculture and de-urbanization, was incompatible with the aspirations of many southerners. However, this argument should not be overstated. The war with China led to the exclusion of the Chinese. The invasion of Cambodia led to Vietnam’s diplomatic isolation and economic stagnation. Both situations provoked departures of boat people, and neither were direct consequences of failed reconciliation. But it remains true that while spatial reunification was achieved in 1975, the divisions of internal transnationalism persisted in the political, social and psychological worlds of ordinary southerners. They associated their difficulties with the imposition of a new and unfamiliar national project. Given the SRV vision of national development, reunification did not, and could not, involve reconciliation. This long-term failure to erase the conflicts of internal transnationalism represents the second context to the overseas migration of the late 1970s and 1980s. The third context grew from the second. Indeed, the two are difficult to distinguish, which is why most literature on the boat people acknowledges the existence of no more than two waves. However, it is important to explain the fact that more than a decade after the end of the war, and even after the announcement of the doi moi
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reforms (1986), tens of thousands of Vietnamese still took to the boats. Significantly, many of them were from the north. Moreover, up to the 1990s similar numbers left legally on aeroplanes as part of the Orderly Departures Programme. Failure of reconciliation cannot account for this. How may we understand it? In her study of the boat people, Indra (1987: 1) notes that the Vietnamese were ‘lacking a tradition of overseas migration’. We might nuance this conclusion in the light of Vietnamese emigration to Southeast Asian countries over the centuries (see Goscha 1998, 1999). But there is no doubt that, before 1975, there was little long-distance migration overseas, and much that did exist (to France, the South Pacific and the USA) consisted of sojourners travelling for contract labour and education. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Vietnamese invented such a tradition for themselves. This ‘invention’ had many features. Economic and political difficulties were important. The lure of a ‘paradise’ abroad – mediated through letters, gifts, photographs and invitations for family reunions – exerted a powerful influence over many imaginations. In the early 1990s, it was possible to meet people for whom everything in Vietnam was necessarily poor and dull and everything abroad was valuable by definition (Dang Phong 2000: 188–90). Recognizing the apolitical nature of many refugees’ motivations, countries of first asylum instituted a screening process in 1988 as the first step towards the repatriation of ‘economic migrants’. But these motivations, and the need to establish a ‘refugee profile’, meant that migrants associated their departure with anti-communism. We may understand this third context in two ways. First, it was a consequence and extension of previous boat people movements. Northern Vietnamese did not take to the boats during the 1945 famine or at other difficult moments in their history. Their decisions in the 1980s were influenced by southerners’ journeys in the 1970s. Second, acceptance for resettlement became conditional on establishing a refugee profile, which encouraged discourses of anti-communism in the reception camps. Life in a camp became a learning experience as migrants internalized the values and attitudes needed to achieve the coveted resettlement. Migrants with no particular attitude towards ‘communism’ thus found themselves expressing themselves in discourses reminiscent of internal transnationalism. They learned, above all, to articulate the idea that their nation – in its communist expression – had failed them.
Internal transnationalism and the politics of diaspora The war between nationalisms ended in 1975. But postwar migrants carried the divisions of war overseas. Migration internationalized Vietnamese internal politics. After leaving the camps, the migrants were confronted anew by the legacies of internal transnationalism. On resettlement in the West, earlier migrants pressed on them alternatives to communist nationalism. Where were these legacies exported? The largest numbers of Vietnamese abroad may be found in the USA and France (950,000 and 400,000, respectively). Many also settled in Canada, Australia and China (150,000, 160,000 and
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300,000, respectively) (Tran Trong Dang Dan 1997: 58–9). The main communities, despite government policies of dispersal, are concentrated in southern California and the Paris area. These concentrations were paralleled by the development of Vietnamese social, cultural and political associations. And while smaller communities maintained networks and organizations, the centres of ‘CaLi’ and ‘Pa-Ri’ had a defining effect on cultural and political expressions among all overseas Vietnamese (Hein 1993: 72, 81, 117; Bousquet 1991: 5–6). My analysis will focus, then, on these two communities. Let us look first at Paris, where Gisèle Bousquet (1991: 67) made a study of Vietnamese homeland politics. This community, in her analysis, is formed from three migrant generations (pre-1945, 1945–75 and post-1975). Prior to reunification, most Parisian Vietnamese opposed the war or supported North Vietnam. Refugee arrivals after 1975 changed the community’s political demography, favouring the anti-communists. By the time of her interviews (1984), two opposing factions (pro-communist and anti-communist) were using socio-political associations to promote their respective ideologies. This cleavage, she concluded, was permanent and self-perpetuating. Moreover, Bousquet’s (ibid.: 67–70) analysis is historical, tracing Vietnamese politics in France back to the early twentieth century, when ‘all Vietnamese political groups shared a common ideology: the creation of a national state to free Vietnam from colonialism’. After 1954, ‘issues were no longer focused on the independence of Vietnam but on the subsequent war’. The postwar period was characterized by competition over recruits to support Hanoi or to form an anticommunist government in exile. The Paris community thus offers a chronology of the exporting of Vietnam’s internal divisions. No such cleavage existed among Vietnamese in the USA. While some people favoured engagement with the SRV, anti-communist organizations were overwhelmingly powerful (ibid.: 6). This reflected the small size of the wartime community there: less than 20,000 (mostly wives of American servicemen), compared with 80,000 in France (Hein 1993: 31). It also reflected the influence of the 1975 evacuees, most of whom were linked to the defunct Saigon regime. At that time, as people waited in reception centres, former RVN leaders set to recruiting followers for their political ambitions: Nguyen Cao Ky illustrates such expectations on the part of Vietnamese political leaders. When he first arrived in the U.S. he set himself up in a mansion worthy of a political leader in Alexandria, Virginia. From his headquarters, he toured the camps with his staff, trying to establish his leadership of the refugee community. (Kelly 1977: 199–200) Nguyen Cao Ky’s efforts failed, owing to a policy of refugee dispersal. However, this was only a temporary setback. Secondary migration to southern California later facilitated recruitment efforts, a phenomenon replicated in France (Bousquet 1991: chapters 5–6). Their success created difficulties for Vietnamese-
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Americans voicing engagement with Vietnam, who became subject to attitudes of exclusion and acts of violence. The American community of Vietnamese came to offer a counterpoint to the vision of the nation embodied by the SRV. The politics of internal transnationalism were thus perpetuated overseas. However, these communities were not only sites of the old bipolar conflict between communist and non-communist versions of Vietnamese nationhood. Anti-communist activists also reproduced the factional politics that had for so long dominated the political scene in South Vietnam. According to Bousquet (1991), while the pro-Hanoi UGVF (Union Général des Vietnamiens en France) aimed to build an overseas Vietnamese community in France, anti-communists regarded their stay there as temporary. Moreover, the anti-communist side formed ‘splinter groups’, divided among themselves and between Vietnamese organizations across the Atlantic. Bousquet (ibid.: 143) described two of the more powerful anti-communist associations: They co-ordinate all Vietnamese anti-communist organizations worldwide. Their leaders’ goal is to overthrow the regime of Hanoi and set up a new democratic government. The creation of a Vietnamese government in exile has been one of the most difficult tasks of these organizations. Manh, a former leader of one such organization, explained to me how factionalism within the Vietnamese anti-communist movement has prevented it from establishing a united front. Although all the organizations are ‘anti-communist’ or against Hanoi, they cannot agree on the type of government that would replace the existing Vietnamese Communist Party. For example, most of the South Vietnamese military leaders fled to the United States. They naturally filled leadership posts in the overseas anti-communist organizations. Their concept of the type of government an anti-communist victory would bring, however, is quite different from the vision of their non-military counterparts in Vietnamese organizations in France. The Vietnamese anti-communist leaders in the United States favour replacing the Hanoi government with a military regime. The Vietnamese anti-communist organizations in France, however, strongly support a democratic government. Associations seeking the overthrow of communism proliferated (Hein 1993: 78–80; Bousquet 1991). But the number of people actively involved was probably quite small. Even anti-communist leaders recognized – to their displeasure – that many Vietnamese wished to make a new home abroad. And in the late 1980s, the SRV’s introduction of reforms (doi moi) gradually weakened the hold of these leaders. Since the 1990s, Vietnam’s increasingly open society, and the facility of travel there, has reduced the importance of internal transnationalism in the diaspora. The main agents of change were contacts developed between overseas Vietnamese and Vietnam itself. But the change was built on many people’s desire to forget the past and embrace their adopted society. This is clear in Australia, where the conflicts of internal transnationalism also dominated the diaspora
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through the 1980s. As time passed, and with the onset of reform in Vietnam, many migrants sought to escape their own communities. Upward social mobility translated into spatial mobility, away from the suburb of Cabramatta where most of Sydney’s Vietnamese live and where political posturing remained a part of daily life. Mandy Thomas (1999: 118–19), whose analysis highlights the challenge to homeland politicians and presents a caveat to this chapter’s argument, underlined this point: Many older men join the Vietnamese Community Organization to replace the feeling of status and power attached to military life. Others prefer to forget the past. Nghi, for example, who was in the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, says:
I decided to just forget about all of that when I came here. It seemed pointless to keep thinking about the war. I just wanted to get a good life for my children here. I miss Vietnam a lot and really try to keep my children Vietnamese, but I cannot understand how so many men who were fighting for the South keep fighting that war here. A lot of them get into the community organizations and try to be important. And they can only get in by showing that they hate communism and that they fought it. I think it’s really pointless. We have our church friends [Vietnamese Baptist Church] and that’s who we stay with. I don’t mix with military people at all. Twenty-five years on, many find homeland politics uninteresting, although some make use of these issues to justify the violent settlement of personal differences.7 Many have returned to Vietnam for family visits and to work and live. Images of the country of their origins are far less mediated by the period before their departure and what was for many a bitter journey. People’s relationship with their homeland over this period now constitutes a complex history in itself (Dang Phong 2000). Perhaps only in the renovation policy of the mid-1980s did the damage of exported internal transnationalism, with the corruption even of the previously neutral term Viet Kieu (overseas Vietnamese), start to be undone. Both Bousquet and Thomas remind us of the many dimensions to the story of Vietnamese nationalism over the last fifty years. In an attempt to synthesize, this chapter has inevitably failed to do justice to the complexity of the experiences of Vietnamese who – for reasons individual, ideological or both – became caught up in the migrations of these years, formative of alternative Vietnamese nationalisms and a driven diaspora. However, these experiences have one thing in common: all of them testify to the power of the Vietnamese sense of nation. This power was harnessed to competing ideologies after 1945, to the oppositional politics of internal transnationalism after 1954, and to their export after the fall of Saigon. We may now, a quarter-century after reunification, be starting to witness a return to more ordinary expressions of sentiment for home.
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Notes 1
2 3 4 5 6 7
Statistics on north–south migrants in 1954–55 are usually quoted to the last numeral: in 1959, the former director of the RVN Refugee Commission (Commissariat Général aux Réfugiés, COMIGAL) cited a total of 928,152 people, including those on the evacuation programme (768,672) and those who left by their own means (‘more than 109,000’). The figure excludes military personnel (approximately 120,000). COMIGAL files were destroyed in May 1955, so these data cannot be checked (Bui Van Luong 1959a: 49, 1959b: 60; Fall 1959: 56). Archives of the Service historique de l’Armée de terre (hereafter SHAT) 10H/575, Bulletin de renseignements mensuels 133, September 1954. Randle (1969) includes a text of the Geneva Agreements in the appendix. SHAT 10H/2533. My summary of declarations made by people arriving at Kien An reception centre near Haiphong, 10 November 1954. SHAT 10H/575, Bulletin de renseignements mensuels 133, September 1954. For a detailed account, readers are referred to Robinson (1998), and for briefer summaries to Hardy (2002, 2003, forthcoming b). Personal interview, Singapore, July 2000.
References Alley, R. (1980) Refugees from Vietnam in China, Beijing: New World Press. Baker, R.P. and North, D.S. (1984) The 1975 Refugees: Their First Five Years in America, Washington: New TransCentury Foundation. Bousquet, G.L. (1991) Behind the Bamboo Hedge: The Impact of Homeland Politics in the Parisian Vietnamese Community, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Bui Van Luong (1959a) ‘The role of friendly nations’, in R.W. Lindholm (ed.), Viet-Nam, the First Five Years: An International Symposium, Michigan State University Press. —— (1959b) ‘Bui Van Luong on Fall’, in R.W. Lindholm (ed.), Viet-Nam, the First Five Years: An International Symposium, Michigan State University Press. Buttinger, J. (1959) ‘The miracle of Viet-Nam’, in R.W. Lindholm (ed.), Viet-Nam, the First Five Years: An International Symposium, Michigan State University Press. Dang Phong (2000) ‘The Vietnamese diaspora: returning and integrating into Vietnam’, Revue Européenne des Migrations Internationales 16 (1): 183–203. Donnell, J.C. (1959) ‘National renovation campaigns in Vietnam’, Pacific Affairs 32 (1): 73–88. Dorais, L.J. (1991) ‘Refugee adaptation and community structure: the Indochinese in Quebec City, Canada’, International Migration Review 15 (3): 551–73. Elliott, Duong Van Mai (1999) The Sacred Willow: Four Generations in the Life of a Vietnamese Family, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Elmhirst, R. (2000) ‘A Javanese diaspora? Gender and identity politics in Indonesia’s Transmigration Program’, Women’s Studies International Forum 23 (4): 487–500. Fall, B.B. (1955) ‘Indochina since Geneva’, Pacific Affairs 28 (1): 3–25. —— (1959) ‘Bernard B. Fall on Bui Van Luong’, in R.W. Lindholm (ed.), Viet-Nam, the First Five Years: An International Symposium, Michigan State University Press. —— (1964) The Two Viet-Nams, A Political and Military Analysis, 2nd edition, New York and London: Praeger. Fisher, J.T. (1997) Dr America, the Lives of Thomas A. Dooley, 1927–1961, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Gheddo, P. (1968) Catholiques et bouddhistes au Vietnam, Paris: Editions Alsatia.
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Goscha, C.E. (1998) ‘La présence vietnamienne au royaume du Siam du XVIIème au XIXème siècle: vers une perspective péninsulaire’, in Nguyen The Anh and A. Forest (eds), Guerre et paix en Asie du Sud-Est, Paris: L’Harmattan. —— (1999) Thailand and the Southeast Asian Networks of the Vietnamese Revolution, 1885–1954, Richmond, Surrey, UK: Curzon. Hammer, E.J. (1959) ‘The political background of Ngo Dinh Diem’, in R.W. Lindholm (ed.), Viet-Nam, the First Five Years: An International Symposium, Michigan State University Press. Hardy, A. (2002) ‘From a floating world: post-war Vietnam and Vietnamese emigration to Europe’, Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 11 (2): 463–84. —— (2003) ‘State visions, migrant decisions: population movements since the end of the Vietnam War’, in Hy Van Luong (ed.), Postwar Vietnam: Dynamics of a Transforming Society, Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. —— (forthcoming ) ‘Au-delà des vagues: écrire l’histoire des boat-people vietnamiens’, in C.E. Goscha (ed.), Le Viet Nam depuis 1945, etats, marges et constructions du passé, Paris: L’Harmattan. Hein, J. (1993) States and International Migrants: The Incorporation of Indochinese Refugees in the United States and France, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Indra, D.M. (1987) ‘Introduction’, in K.B. Chan and D.M. Indra (eds), Uprooting, Loss and Adaptation: the Resettlement of Indochinese Refugees in Canada, Ottawa: Canadian Public Health Association. Kelly, G.P. (1977) From Vietnam to America: A Chronicle of the Vietnamese Immigration to the United States, Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press. Kim Ha (1997) Stormy Escape, Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland. Le Huu Khoa (1983) ‘Les Vietnamiens en France: la dialectique de l’insertion-identité’, unpublished thesis, University of Nice. Marr, D.G. (1995) Vietnam 1945, the Quest for Power, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press. Nguyen Bich Thuan (1997) Contemporary Vietnamese Readings, De Kalb, Ill.: Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University. Nguyen Thai (1962) Is South Vietnam Viable? Manila: Carmelo and Bauerman. Nhat Tien (1988) ‘Hai lan tu biet cha gia’ (Twice farewell to my father), in Tieng Ken (Sound of trumpets), Santa Ana, Calif.: Van Nghe. Pentagon Papers, The (1971), Volume 1, Boston: Beacon Press. Randle, R.F. (1969) Geneva 1956, the Settlement of the Indochinese War, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Robinson, W.C. (1998) Terms of Refuge, the Indochinese Exodus and the International Response, London and New York: Zed Books. Silvey, R.M. (2000) ‘Diasporic subjects: gender and mobility in South Sulawesi’, Women’s Studies International Forum 23 (4): 501–15. Simon, P.J. (1981) Rapatriés d’Indochine, un village franco-indochinois en Bourbonnais, Paris: L’Harmattan. Thomas, M. (1999) Dreams in the Shadows, Vietnamese-Australian lives in transition, St Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin. Ton That Thien (1959) ‘A Vietnamese looks at his country’, in R.W. Lindholm (ed.), VietNam, the First Five Years: An International Symposium, Michigan State University Press. Tran Hoai Tran (1967) Les forces politiques au Sud Viet-Nam depuis les Accords de Genève 1954, Paris: Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris.
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Tran Trong Dang Dan (1997) Nguoi Viet Nam o nuoc ngoai (Vietnamese people living abroad), Hanoi: Nha xuat ban Chinh tri Quoc gia. Vo Nguyen Giap (1960) ‘Cong tac cung co quoc phong, xay dung luc luong vu trang nhan dan’ (Reinforcing national defence, building the people’s armed forces), Nhan Dan (The People), 12 September: 4.
12 Shifting the axis Feminism and the transnational imaginary Vera Mackie
On a cool winter’s day in December 2001, a small group of women of several nationalities stood outside a public hall in central Tokyo, not far from major public buildings such as the Diet building, the National Diet Library and the headquarters of the major political parties. They were dressed in black from head to toe, faces covered in black veils, and they stood in silent vigil; no words issued from their mouths, no signs or placards announced the purpose of their vigil. These women were affiliated with an international movement called ‘women in black’; and their practice is to stand in public places, silently mourning the women who have been the victims of institutionalized violence and human rights abuses. The first such demonstrations were carried out by Israeli, Palestinian and American women in 1988. Since then, such demonstrations have been carried out around the world, including protests against the war in the former Yugoslavia and vigils associated with the terrorist attacks in the USA in September 2001 and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Women in Black 2003). By staging a vigil as ‘women in black’, these women were performing a visual affirmation of their links with women’s groups around the world, staking a claim to the use of public space and providing a visual affirmation of their place in what might be called a ‘transnational imaginary’. The public hall where this small group of women staged their vigil was the site of another example of transnational action. Their vigil prefaced a meeting of several hundred people who had gathered to hear a report of the verdict of a people’s tribunal: the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery. The tribunal had been held in December 2000 in order to pass judgement on the government and military of wartime Japan, which had subjected thousands of women to exploitation in the state-directed military prostitution system in the 1930s and 1940s. Advocates for the survivors of the military prostitution system had also taken their testimonies to the international conferences of the United Nations, where they had mixed with other international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) performing advocacy for the recognition of a range of gendered human rights issues, including the needs of migrants (Mackie 2002: 197; Law 2002: 213). The Beijing conference, in particular, saw the peak of an international movement for the recognition of ‘women’s rights as human rights’ and an
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expanded international discourse on the definition of human rights and on which practices constitute violations of human rights. In December 2001, people in Japan, Australia, Britain and the USA – the allies in the so-called ‘war against terrorism’ – were also being invited to imagine a connection with women in another country. The figure of the veiled woman, her freedom restricted by the oppressive Taliban regime, was mobilized as a justification for the advance of troops from the USA, Britain and Australia into Afghanistan. The initial impetus for the attacks on Afghanistan was the suspicion that members of the al-Qaeda terrorist group responsible for the ‘9/11’ terrorist attacks were being sheltered there. Soon, however, speeches about the oppression of women in Afghanistan were used as justification for the overthrow of the Taliban regime. Women and men in developed countries were encouraged to see themselves as the saviours of the women of Afghanistan. As the postwar conference on the reconstruction of Afghanistan was held in Tokyo in early 2002, the men and women of Japan also debated the veiling and unveiling of the women of Afghanistan and were encouraged to see themselves as contributing to the liberation of these women. In this case, too, there was a consciousness of connections between women in different countries, but the kind of connection being imagined was somewhat different from that espoused by the women in black. The connections imagined by those who invoked the figure of the Afghan woman in her burqa were steeped in notions of difference and hierarchy rather than mutual solidarity (Mackie 2003). In this chapter I will consider the gendered dimensions of transnational activism and advocacy in the context of recent debates on the concepts of ‘nation’, ‘transnation’ and ‘transnationality’. I will focus mainly on feminist activism and advocacy, but, as the example of the mobilization of the figure of the veiled women of Afghanistan in the ‘war against terrorism’ demonstrates, the actions of transnational actors will always have a gendered dimension, even if not explicitly framed as feminist issues.
Theorizing power in a transnational frame In the world of transnational corporations, transnational factories, transnational labour migration and other transnational economic and political links, it is also necessary to consider the possibilities of transnational political activism. The last three decades have seen an exponential growth in the scope, activities and numbers of INGOs. The growth of INGOs with a focus on women’s issues has been of particular interest and has been linked with the United Nations international conferences on women held in 1975 (Mexico), 1980 (Copenhagen), 1985 (Nairobi) and 1995 (Beijing); and the United Nations conferences on human rights (Vienna, 1993) and population (Cairo, 1994) (True and Mintrom 2001: 38; Reanda 1999: 54). Despite the existence of INGOs and transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink 1997; Appadurai 2000: 15), many commentators are sceptical about the possibilities of forging transnational links on truly equal terms. There has been criticism of women in the developed world who have been too hasty to
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make claims to ‘international feminism’, ‘global feminism’ or ‘global sisterhood’. Publications such as Robin Morgan’s (1984) edited collection, Sisterhood is Global, have been the focus of such criticism for the ways in which their texts constituted the figure of the oppressed third world woman while constituting the subjectivity of the liberated first world woman (Spivak 1985: 262–80; Mohanty 1988: 61–88; Grewal and Caplan 1994: 17, 438). While those who claim the position of ‘women of colour’ or ‘third world women’ have been critical of Eurocentric feminist writings, women from Europe, North America, Australia and Canada have been forced to question their own privilege, some focusing on the cultural and social constructions of whiteness (Mohanty 1991; Frankenberg 1993; Kaplan and Grewal 1994; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Shohat 1998; Kaplan et al. 1999; Weedon 1999; Donald 2000). However, much of this discussion has been carried out on an implicit East–West axis or, at times, a North–South axis, with Europe and North America (the ‘West’) being opposed to ‘the rest’. In these discussions, ‘Europe’, the ‘USA’ or the ‘first world’ often operate as shorthand terms that condense several different elements of power and privilege. We need to distinguish between economic power, military power, class power, cultural capital, the power that accrues to some men in patriarchal systems, the power that accrues to heterosexuals in heterocentric systems (Peterson 1999; Mackie 2001a), colonial power based on the expropriation of indigenous land, the power that comes with access to technology, the power that comes from access to the English language (Pennycook 1998), and the power that comes from the ability to orientalize, ethnicize, racialize or sexualize members of other nations or groups. In criticisms of ‘white feminists’ or ‘first world women’, these different forms of power are often collapsed into one overdetermined symbol, in the same way that first world feminists have been criticized for their use of the ‘third world woman’ as an overdetermined symbol of oppression and lack of agency (Mohanty 1988, 1991, 2003a, 2003b). I argue that we need to separate these different strands of power and privilege. One strategy for doing this is to shift the axis of our comparisons away from the USA and Europe. If we look at the Asia-Pacific region, for example, then economic power is in the hands of elites from Japan and the newer regional economies of Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. In this region, there may be significant cultural capital to be achieved through access to Japanese or Mandarin Chinese as well as the English language. Military power is focused on the USA and its allies, or on the People’s Republic of China. Memories of colonialism focus not only on the USA and the European powers but also on Japan as a former imperial power. I am not arguing that we simply replace a hegemonic USA or Europe with a hegemonic Japan or China. Rather than operating with simplistic models that collapse different dimensions of power and privilege, we need to be sensitive to the multiple dimensions of power in specific, local situations. This needs to include a sensitivity to the cultural constructions of identity and otherness that serve to naturalize the operations of power and a consciousness of the international routes for the transmission of knowledge (It™ 2002).
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Chandra Mohanty has also attempted to re-theorize the politics of the gaze and to transcend unidirectional models of power in a recent reflection on her path-breaking article, ‘Under western eyes’ (Mohanty 1988), and her experience of working in academia in North America: I no longer lie simply under the gaze of western eyes. I also live inside it and negotiate it every day. I make my home in Ithaca, New York, but always as from Mumbai, India. My cross-race and cross-class work takes me to interconnected places and communities around the world – to a struggle contextualized by women of colour and of the Third World. So the borders here are not really fixed. Our minds must be as ready to move as capital is, to trace its paths and to imagine alternative destinations. (Mohanty 2003a: 530) As I have argued in more detail elsewhere (Mackie 2000a, 2003b), we also need to go beyond the shorthand term ‘orientalism’ when describing the process of the cultural construction of otherness. The language of orientalism becomes strained when we move away from relationships determined on the East–West axis, and the metaphorical element of ‘East’, ‘West’, ‘Occident’ and Orient’ becomes all the more apparent. In many cases, it may be more useful to refer to a powerful country’s ‘metropolitan gaze’ or ‘dominating gaze’ on its neighbours rather than an ‘orientalizing gaze’. The ‘dominating gaze’ is not purely the privilege of the Western male observer. Rather, the gaze of powerful observers on those less powerful is structured in specific and localized relationships of domination and subordination. While men and women from Asian countries may indeed be ‘orientalized’ by Western observers, they may, in turn, represent men and women from neighbouring countries in ways that reinforce difference and domination. By shifting the axis of these discussions to the Asia-Pacific region, we can make some important conceptual advances in challenging the Eurocentrism and Anglocentrism of the discussions of the possibilities of transnational feminist activism (Mackie 2001b). We can also try to separate the different kinds of power that are operating in specific, localized contexts. A clear understanding of the complexities of power and privilege is necessary in order to formulate strategies for change. In focusing on specific localized situations and localized networks of power, we can also look more closely at the strategies that have been developed by participants in regional activist networks for transforming the situation of people dealing with the forces of globalization. The term ‘globalization’ here is used to refer to changing economic relationships accompanied by the increasingly rapid and intensified circulation of finance, commodities, people, signs and symbols. Many forms of corporate activity are carried out on a global scale, and production and consumption transcend the scale of the nation-state (Mattelart 1983; Hannerz 1987, 1989; Appadurai 1990; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Tolentino 1996; Mackie 1998a, 1998b; Tambiah 2000; Birch et al. 2001). As suggested in True and Mintrom’s (2001: 28) explication of the features of globalization, there are gendered dimensions to these processes:
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Lisa Law (2002: 205) has argued for the importance of transnational advocacy networks in working for the improvement of the situation of migrants in the Asia-Pacific region: Given that labour migration has also seen the increased importance of hundreds – if not thousands – of political organizations, there is a need to ask different questions about how labour migration might also be transforming Asian cultural politics. These organizations assert pressure for social change which transgresses clear national boundaries, and the networks produced through advocacy programmes provide interesting insights to emerging political spaces where activists negotiate the meanings of transnational labour migration. While Law is right to point to the ways in which these advocacy groups transgress national boundaries in performing advocacy for labour immigrants whose nationality does not match the location of their employment as contract workers, it is interesting that the particular advocacy groups she analyses are engaged in advocacy for Filipino immigrants, rather than all of the diverse groups whose labour is located in Hong Kong. Their advocacy work, Law (ibid.: 219) argues, ‘reflects the importance of the nation in migration – that is, the importance of specific political contexts and cultures in mobilizing political action’. This suggests that the nation-state is not so easily transcended after all, even if it reappears in the ghostly form of an ethnicized identity.
Transcending the national In considering the possibilities of transnational feminist activism, then, we need to think through the implications of the word ‘transnational’. Does the prefix ‘trans-’ simply refer to actions where individuals cross the geographical boundaries of a nation-state (either physically or by using some of the new communications technologies), or could it refer to actions that transcend, or go beyond, the structures of the nation-state in more radical ways (McLaren 2001: 367–9)? It seems to me that there is a tension in the word ‘transnational’, which always keeps the ‘national’ firmly in focus. Although political action is now carried out in a world in which the effects of the decisions of transnational corporations are
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felt across national boundaries, most of us carry out our political actions as citizens of a particular nation-state, and it is the nation-state that is the guarantor (or at times the violator) of our individual political rights. Even when individuals call on the United Nations, the International Court of Justice or the International Criminal Court for redress against violations of human rights, it is ultimately the nation-state that is called on to act in these cases. It is nation-states that are expected to ratify the various international conventions on human rights, and a state’s failure to ratify any one of these conventions weakens its citizens’ claims for vindication of their rights. In the context of migration, migrants may be treated, not as ‘citizens of the world’ but as ‘non-citizens’ wherever they live, travel, work, form relationships and produce children. As citizens of a particular nation-state, we have ‘the right to have rights’; as migrants, we may lose the right to make claims against the nation-state (Arendt 1951: 290, cited in Benhabib 1999: 357). When I use the word ‘transnational’, I want to keep this tension in view. It has been suggested that feminist movements are often complicit with nationalism. At its simplest level, it has been charged that liberal feminists seek political rights within the boundaries of their own nation-state without considering their connections with women in other countries. It has also been argued that feminists have failed to challenge the imperialism of earlier times or the imperialist and neo-colonial relationships of the present. Others have been criticized for their complicity with imperialist, colonialist, economic imperialist and neo-colonial projects (Chaudhuri and Strobel 1992: Kaplan et al. 1999). However, when we make this criticism, we need to recognize that this criticism is not peculiar to feminist political movements. Rather, it is part of the very nature of modern notions of citizenship and political activism that the nation-state constitutes the horizon and the boundaries of political action. Class structure is usually measured within the boundaries of one nation, while indicators of gender equity measure the wage differentials, employment opportunities and political participation of women and men within the boundaries of one nation. ‘New social movements’ are in turn defined in terms of their difference from class-based political movements that operate in a national framework. Nevertheless, since the earliest days of feminism, there have been activists who have attempted to transcend national boundaries (Rupp and Taylor 1999; Paisley 2002). Trade union coalitions have also forged transnational links, although campaigns to improve the conditions of workers in specific locations must necessarily engage with the local nation-state. In order to explore some of these tensions, let us consider in more detail the strands of feminist activism that came together in the above-mentioned Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery. Since the 1970s, such issues as prostitution, tourism and migration have brought together NGOs in South Korea, the Philippines and Japan, often involving Christian women’s organizations.1 In an attempt to raise the consciousness of the international community on human rights issues that have an international dimension, a series of non-governmental regional human rights tribunals have attempted to
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fill the gaps left by the more official tribunals. These involved testimonies from women who had suffered human rights abuses as workers in the transnational sex industry, as workers in transnational factories, in the military prostitution system of the Second World War, as victims of sexual violence in areas close to military installations, or as victims of state-supported violence and torture (Josei no Jinken Iinkai 1994). The performance of these NGO tribunals, which had no legal force, suggests a dissatisfaction with the workings of the mainstream legal system and the international instruments of the United Nations and its committees and affiliated organizations. The culmination of this series of NGO tribunals on human rights issues was the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, held in Tokyo in December 2000 and attracting over 5,000 participants, including sixty survivors from the Second World War, the testimony of survivors from North and South Korea, the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, the Philippines, the Netherlands, Indonesia, East Timor and Japan, lawyers and scholars, and spectators from over thirty countries. The tribunal was jointly sponsored by organizations from North Korea, South Korea, China, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Netherlands and Japan. The organizers presented their judgements in legalistic terms and justified their action in terms of ‘moral responsibility’ and participation in ‘global civil society’: This is a People’s Tribunal set up by the voices of global civil society. The authority for this Tribunal comes not from a state or inter-governmental organization but from the peoples of the Asia-Pacific region and, indeed, the peoples of the world to whom Japan owes a duty under international law to render account. Some will say this Tribunal lacks due process guarantees. It cannot and does not purport to provide such guarantees. Further, this Tribunal steps into the breach left by states and does not purport to replace their role. The power of the Tribunal, like so many human rights initiatives, lies in its capacity to examine the evidence and develop an enduring historical record. (VAWW-NET-Japan 2000) In many ways, this is indeed an example of feminist advocacy on a transnational scale. Kim Puja (2001: 614) describes the tribunal as ‘the result of a co-operative alliance between women from both perpetrator and victimized countries’ providing ‘one model for a form of feminism which transcends national borders’. Activists from throughout the Asian region worked to make possible the airing of the women’s testimonies. These testimonies were part of proceedings that took the form of a legal tribunal, supported by lawyers and judges who ensured that the proceedings followed international legal protocols. While the proceedings may be seen as an example of transnational collaboration, there are ways in which the nation-state was always present and apparent. Witnesses testified as representatives of their nation. When they appeared on the stage to present their testimonies, nameplates showed their nationality prominently.
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At times, the current configuration of nation-states was challenged. Koreans from north and south collaborated in ways that are usually impossible for the subjects of a divided nation. The testimonies from Japanese women complicated the picture of the subjects of former colonies and combatant nations bringing suit against the imperial Japanese state (Kim 2001; It™ 2002). Some Japanese women had also been forced to work in the military brothels. Their Japanese nationality had provided no protection against the sexed and gendered dimensions of the institutionalized violence of the military prostitution system, demonstrating that there was no simple or direct relationship between nationality and the categories of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’. (Indeed, the Korean women who had been forced to work in the military brothels were, at that time, classified as colonial subjects of the emperor of Japan.) Most poignantly, women from the newly independent nation of East Timor were now included as witnesses, speaking as national subjects for the first time. Kim (2001) reports that the East Timorese women also saw the tribunal as a model for their own indictment of the Indonesian military. Others have commented on the importance of this campaign as a focus for feminist activism by diasporic Koreans in Japan and the USA (Kim 2001; Thomas 2000). The tribunal on the military prostitution system was immediately followed by a hearing of the testimonies of women who had suffered gendered violence in recent conflict situations. At the December 2001 meeting, which reported back on the verdict of the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery, the organizers thanked all the people who had made the tribunal possible: the lawyers and judges, researchers who had conducted oral history interviews, collected testimonies and scoured the scant historical records, those who had kept records of the proceedings in written, audiotaped and videotaped form, those who had billeted participants in the tribunal, those who had provided transport, those who had provided food, those who had raised funds, and quite prominently, those who had provided translation and interpretation in the languages of witnesses, lawyers, spectators and the languages of the international news media.
Translation Transnational activism is thus often dependent on the largely invisible work of translation. In the case of such organizations as the United Nations, there is a sophisticated infrastructure devoted to the work of translation. Meetings take place with the assistance of simultaneous translation and the technical facilities that make this possible. In the case of such meetings as the United Nations International Conferences on Women, official translations of all documents are produced at great speed. Each document is the result of intensive negotiation. Words, phrases or clauses that do not gain the endorsement of all participants are placed in parentheses, and days are devoted to negotiation in order to produce a text that will be acceptable to all national participants, bracketed phrases gradually being replaced with agreed terminology (Riles 2000: 70–91).
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In the case of INGOs, the work of translation is largely carried out through volunteer labour. Those from non-English speaking backgrounds must often labour to translate reports and testimonies into English for an international audience. The effectiveness of their advocacy is often dependent on their ability to circulate information to the international media and international organizations in the English language. Much has been made of the role of the Internet in facilitating transnational activism, but Internet usage is dependent on access to the necessary technology, the ability to operate computers, facility in the languages used by most Internet users and the resources to translate materials into languages with wide international circulation. The majority of web pages on the Internet are in English, but recently other languages have gained a significant presence, with Japanese and Chinese currently competing for second place. Nevertheless, the English language is grossly overrepresented in cyberspace relative to the global population of English speakers (Warschauer 2000:158; Gottlieb and McLelland 2003: 5). The question of language in transnational collaboration has been dramatized by Susan Magarey and Susan Sheridan (2002: 129–52) in a recent article. The following anecdote describes Magarey’s encounter at a women’s studies conference in the Philippines in 1999: Carolyn Sobritchea, president of the Women’s Studies Association of the Philippines, was happily talking about the possibility of international collaboration on feminist research projects, when suddenly she cried, ‘Oh, but, Susan, it would all have to be in English. And English has been such an oppression!’ An international collaborative research project would need to be in Tagalog as well as English, then. However, although Sobritchea has excellent English, I do not have a syllable of Tagalog. If language is an issue for university-educated specialists in women’s studies, how much more so for activists engaged in outreach activities that cross national borders? Magarey and Sheridan are highly sensitized to the issue of linguistic imperialism, but it is easy for those who have been educated in English to be blind to the nature of our privilege and ignorant of the huge efforts expended in translation, interpretation and explanation to an international audience. In outreach work, too, language plays a crucial role. The teaching of English or other languages to sex workers in tourist sites is more than the acquisition of a form of cultural capital. It may facilitate the worker’s ability to bargain with her customers or to insist on the safer sexual practices that are linked to her very survival. Language teaching is thus one of the activities of NGOs in such sites. In the case of refuges or advocacy for migrant workers, members of these organizations must often learn the languages of the workers before they can even attempt to assist workers in trouble. In the case of immigrant workers to Japan, for example, those from the Philippines can often communicate with representatives of advocacy groups through the medium of English, while those from South Korea may have learned Japanese or have access to long-term Korean
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residents who may have facility in both the Korean and Japanese languages. In the case of Thai women, their lack of competence in both English and Japanese often places them beyond the reach of advocacy groups unless those representatives have spent the time to gain some competence in their language. In any discussion of the possibilities of transnational collaboration, it is necessary to address the practical and material effects of differential access to language skills, translation, interpretation and technical infrastructure. We also need to recognize that what is translated is not always transparent. There are unspoken assumptions behind any text. These assumptions are often only revealed when there are difficulties in translating from one language to another, or when communication between groups with different cultural assumptions becomes difficult.
Transculturation When activists from different national and cultural backgrounds come together in transnational feminist advocacy networks, questions of communication thus come to the fore. This is sometimes framed in terms of communication across cultures. The notion of a ‘culture’ is closely aligned with the definition of the nation-state. It is often assumed that the features of a ‘culture’ are aligned with the boundaries of a nation-state and, conversely, that a nation-state has one coherent and bounded national culture. In international conferences, individuals are often thought to appear as representatives of a unitary national culture, even in such alternative venues as the tribunal described above. When individual testimonies are translated and presented to an international audience, they must often bear the weight of representativeness, as explained by Robert Carr (1994: 157) with respect to the genre of published testimonios that appeared in the English-language publishing market in the last decades of the twentieth century: Although it has become standard operating procedure to assume an easy metonymic relation between the subject of testimonial and the ethnic group from which she or he comes, such closure on difference within the group celebrates the elite reader’s ignorance as the group is conversely constituted as infinite duplicates of the ‘original’ subject presented in the pages of the testimonial. However, oppositional political activists are often engaged in challenging what is seen as ‘mainstream’ culture in their national context. Feminist activists, for example, are often engaged in challenging the misogyny, sexism and heterosexism of mainstream cultures. In many cases, they will appeal to notions of human rights and gender equity, which are thought to transcend the specificities of national cultures. They will often challenge national leaders who make appeals to a unitary national culture or a regional culture as expressed, for example, in the so-called ‘Asian values’ debates. As Pheng Cheah (1999: 12) argues, ‘the figured face of statist cultural difference is not identical to the
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cultural diversity of its peoples’. While national leaders in international forums have a stake in speaking for a whole culture and asserting the unified nature of that culture, activists who make claims against a nation-state for vindication of their rights have a stake in asserting the diversity of needs within the boundaries of a nation-state and asserting that their claims may be justified in terms of transnational norms. Should this be taken to mean, then, that transnational feminist advocacy networks form a ‘culture’ of their own? This, too, seems naïve. We could posit the existence of a ‘transnational feminist public’, but we would then need to consider the features of this transnational sphere of discussion. In so far as feminists have been engaged in campaigns that attempt to influence such international organizations as the United Nations, they could be said to be participating in a ‘transnational public sphere’. However, these forums of transnational discussion, like the spheres of discussion at the national level, are riven with inequalities of gender, class and ethnicity, with hierarchies based on linguistic and cultural competence, access to more or less privileged languages, and access to the technologies that facilitate transnational communication. The transnational public sphere, if it can be said to exist, is a gendered, raced, classed and ethnicized public sphere (Enloe 1989; Grant and Newland 1991; Benhabib 1992; Tickner 1992; Peterson and Runyan 1993; Fraser 1997; Meyer and Prügl 1999; Youngs 1999; Stivens 2000; Mackie 2001b). It may be more useful to borrow from Nancy Fraser (1997) the notion of a ‘counter-public’ to refer to feminist communications across national borders. Activists engaged in campaigns on women’s issues across national borders often rely on the organizational networks and communication networks of NGOs, which may be locally, nationally or regionally based, or more broadly transnational in focus. We could perhaps refer to a ‘transnational feminist counter-public’ in opposition to the more mainstream communication channels of the United Nations and its related agencies and committees, regional organizations like APEC or ASEAN, and official relations between nations. What are the features that allow us to talk of transnational and transcultural communication, and what are the limits to communication in this sphere? Are we justified in imagining not only ‘transcultural communication’ but also a process of ‘transculturation’, where the cultures of participants might be transformed? In the work of Mary Louise Pratt (1992), ‘transculturation’ refers to a specific feature of what she calls ‘contact zones’. Her work has largely focused on travel writings, which have emanated from the metropolitan centres, but I wish to argue that the concept of ‘transculturation’ may be adapted to the situation of transnational feminist communication and collaboration. Pratt (ibid.: 6) asks a series of questions about cultural production in contact zones: How are metropolitan modes of representation received and appropriated on the periphery? That question engenders another perhaps more heretical one: with respect to representation, how does one speak of transculturation from the colonies to the metropolis? … While the imperial metropolis tends
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to understand itself as determining the periphery (in the emanating glow of the civilizing mission or the cash flow of development, for example), it habitually blinds itself to the ways in which the periphery determines the metropolis – beginning, perhaps, with the latter’s obsessive need to present and re-present its peripheries and its other continually to itself. This point may be clarified with reference to Karen Booth’s analysis of the World Health Organisation’s (WHO) campaigns around the prevention of HIV/AIDS. Booth (1998) argues that the practices of the WHO embedded a particular understanding of the sexual double standard whereby women were positioned as either ‘mothers’ or ‘whores’, with different kinds of prevention policies being proposed for these two groups. Booth (ibid.: 115–39) further argues that the two sets of strategies were based on two different understandings of the world system. Prevention policies for ‘mothers’ placed them in a domestic sphere, circumscribed by the boundaries of the home and the nation. ‘Prostitutes’, on the other hand, were dealt with through discourses of globalization: placed in a supranational public sphere, a globalized labour market and a transnational market for the purchase of sexual services: The [Consensus Statement from the Consultation of HIV Epidemiology and Prostitution] presents prostitution as first and foremost a market exchange and then situates that exchange globally. Unlike the mother, who is represented as producing and reproducing only for domestic use, the prostitute is portrayed as an essential part of the global economy. The consultation asserts ‘the importance of prostitution as a source of foreign exchange’ and reminds us of its value in the worldwide tourist industry. In terms of my discussion in this chapter, these campaigns may be seen as a negative form of transculturation or, perhaps, as a missed opportunity for a positive form of transculturation. Progressive advocacy networks were unable to transform the gendered discourse of WHO health campaigns, and the WHO became the agent for the dissemination of a hitherto culturally specific form of the sexual double standard.2 It may also be useful to consider the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery in terms of transcultural communication and transculturation. For Anglophone spectators and those familiar with the workings of international organizations and legal machinery, the proceedings may have seemed relatively transparent in form. However, Norma Field (Field and Takahashi 2001) has commented on some survivors’ responses to the legalistic form of the tribunal. For participants unfamiliar with these legal protocols, as Field comments, being asked to swear to tell the ‘truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ was seen as an insult rather than a guarantee of the reliability of the proceedings. Nevertheless, the participants in the tribunal were in the end satisfied that meaningful communication had taken place and celebrated the testimonies in poetic terms:
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This poetic summation of the fruits of the tribunal celebrates a process of individual transformation whereby individuals were healed through the process of testimony before an audience of sympathetic listeners and interlocutors who affirmed the truth of the women’s heretofore individualized experiences of trauma. Can we link these testimonies to wider processes of social change and to wider processes of transculturation and social transformation?
Transformation One major achievement of transnational feminist networks has been in the transformation of the discourse of human rights. Some of the women whose testimonies were aired in the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery engaged in a parallel process of seeking compensation from the Japanese government through the courts, once again demonstrating the difficulties of transcending the nation-state. These women have not yet been successful in gaining the compensation claimed from the Japanese government, but they have contributed to a transformed discourse on human rights which has meant that militarized sexual violence is now seen as an issue that can and should be discussed in public forums. This transformation of public discourse, which I have referred to elsewhere as ‘discursive social change’, has meant that incidents of sexual and military violence in the former Yugoslavia and in Indonesia in the 1990s became apparent almost immediately (Mackie 2000b). In the case of the former Yugoslavia, this has become one more ground for prosecution in international war crimes tribunals, with the first judgement on the issue of systematic sexual violence in a situation of military conflict being handed down in February 2001 (Mackie 2001b). In this case, discursive social change has been accompanied by a significant precedent in international legal protocol: in other words, a transformation in our understanding of human rights. True and Mintrom (2001) argue that transnational feminist advocacy networks have been a significant factor in the embedding of ‘gender mainstreaming’ policies
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and machinery in the structures of national governments. Their conclusions (ibid.: 27) are based on an analysis of 157 countries, 110 of which had adopted gender mainstreaming policies between 1975 and 1988: We argue that transnational networks composed largely of non-state actors (notably women’s international non-governmental organizations and the United Nations) have been the primary forces driving the diffusion of gender mainstreaming. … Our findings support the claim that the diffusion of gender-mainstreaming mechanisms has been facilitated by the role played by transnational networks, in particular by the transnational feminist movement. Further, they suggest a major shift in the nature and the locus of global politics and national policymaking. True and Minstrom (ibid.: 34) further argue that ‘studying the factors accompanying the spread of gender-mainstreaming mechanisms can provide fresh insights concerning the social and cultural dimensions of globalization and how the local and the global interact in politically significant ways’. In other words, transnational feminist advocacy networks have also been an important catalyst for institutional transformation at the level of the nation-state.
The transnational imaginary Appudarai (2000: 3) argues for the importance of ‘grassroots globalization’, or ‘globalization from below’, involving ‘forms of knowledge transfer and social mobilization that proceed independently of the actions of corporate capital and the nation-state system’. He argues for the importance of the role of the imagination in social life: The imagination is no longer a matter of individual genius, escapism from ordinary life, or just a dimension of aesthetics. It is a faculty that informs the daily lives of ordinary people in myriad ways: It allows people to consider migration, resist state violence, seek social redress, and design new forms of civic association and collaboration, often across national boundaries. This view of the imagination as a popular, social, collective fact in the era of globalization recognizes its split character. On the one hand, it is in and through the imagination that modern citizens are disciplined and controlled – by states, markets and other powerful interests. But it is also the faculty through which collective patterns of dissent and new designs for collective life emerge. As the imagination as a social force itself works across national lines to produce locality as a spatial fact and as a sensibility, we see the beginnings of social forms without either the predatory mobility of unregulated capital or the predatory stability of many states. Such social forms have barely been named by current social science, and even when named their dynamic qualities are frequently lost. Thus terms like ‘international civil society’ do not entirely capture the mobility and malleability of those
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I would like to refer to this form of the imagination as the ‘transnational imaginary’. The women in black who stood outside a public hall in Tokyo in December 2001 were imagining their transnational links with women in black from around the world. Their version of the transnational imaginary could be said to be based on the logic of affiliation (Haraway 1986). The women who participate in women in black demonstrations choose to affiliate themselves with an international movement directed at raising international consciousness of the gendered abuses that accompany military conflict. This affiliation need not be based on an essentialist and trans-historical notion of woman, although it would be easy to fall into this interpretation on a simple reading of their silent vigils as cultural text. The transnational imaginary also brought together the women who worked for the Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery in December 2000. Their version of the transnational imaginary could be said to be based on a recognition of similarity of situation (Mackie 2001b). This was also true of the groups of NGOs who came together at the United Nations Conference for Women in Beijing in 1995 in advocacy for women migrants. They recognized that the situation of migrants by definition transcended national boundaries and that recognizing the connections between migrants in different countries was the first step in remedying their situation. For migrant women themselves, their connection with other migrant women could be said to be based on a recognition of similarity of situation, similar to the networks of survivors of the military prostitution system. For many of the activists and advocates in transnational advocacy networks, their transnational imaginary could be said to be based on a recognition of their connection with migrant workers through chains of production and consumption, and a recognition that their own position of privilege was linked in a systematic way to the disadvantages suffered by migrant workers. These logics of affiliation, similarity of situation and connection through chains of production and consumption are all forms of the transnational imaginary. Another way of imagining transnational connection is revealed through the mobilization of the figure of the veiled woman as one of the forms of justification for the ‘war against terrorism’. Here, transnational connections are imagined as being based on vertical connections emphasizing hierarchy and difference, rather than horizontal connections, which emphasize solidarity. While imagining connections across national boundaries is the first step in transformation of the situation of those dealing with the past of colonialism and the present of post-colonialism and economic globalization, this must be translated into institutional change in order to effect social transformation. Examples of social transformation that have grown from the transnational imaginary and transnational links include the transformed discourse on violence against women
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and the associated legal and institutional changes; the transformed discourse on militarized sexual violence and the first prosecutions for such crimes; the creation of a consciousness of gender and development and the institution of gender impact statements in international aid projects; and the institution of gendermainstreaming policies in the national machineries of several nation-states, which it has been argued, has been facilitated by the pressure brought to bear by INGOs. Once it has been recognized that the processes of globalization have gendered dimensions, it becomes clear that one of the tasks of feminist analysis is to explore those gendered dimensions, to develop strategies for addressing issues of equity and diversity in transnational contexts, and to consider the appropriate locale and scale for campaigns around issues of gender equity.
Notes 1
2
It™ (2002) has pointed out the transnational character of Christian organizations. In the East Asian context, this dates back to the late nineteenth century. For further comments on the history of transnational women’s organizations in the Asia-Pacific region, see Mackie (2001a, 2001b) and Paisley (2002). By contrast, some campaigns around HIV/AIDS have made useful conceptual advances in making distinctions between sexual behaviour and sexual identity. It was realized that campaigns that mobilized around a specific identity, such as ‘gay man’, would not reach those men who engaged in sex with other men but did not identify themselves as ‘gay’. So the focus of campaigns shifted to the discussion of specific behaviour rather than identities and the coining of the phrase ‘men who have sex with men’ (see Kawaguchi 2003). See also Alison Murray’s discussion of alternative ways of conceptualizing campaigns around HIV/AIDS and risky behaviour (2001: 47).
References Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy’, Public Culture 2 (2): 1–24. —— (2000) ‘Grassroots globalization and the research imagination’, Public Culture 12 (1): 1–19. Benhabib, S. (1999) ‘Sexual difference and collective identities: the new global constellation’, Signs 24 (2): 335–61. Birch, D., Schirato, T. and Srivastava, S. (2001) Asia: Cultural Politics in a Global Age, Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Booth, K.M. (1998) ‘National mother, global whore and transnational femocrats: the politics of AIDS and the construction of women at the World Health Organisation’, Feminist Studies 24 (1): 115–39. Carr, R. (1994) ‘Crossing the First World/Third World divides: testimonial, transnational feminisms and the post-modern condition’, in I. Grewal and C. Kaplan (eds), Scattered Hegemonies: Postmodernity and Transnational Feminist Practices, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 153–72. Chaudhuri, N. and Strobel, M. (eds) (1992) Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cheah, P. (1999) ‘Posit(ion)ing human rights in the current global conjuncture’, in S.G. Lim, L.E. Smith and W. Dissanayake (eds), Transnational Asia-Pacific: Gender, Culture and the Public Sphere, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
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Index
Abella, M.I. 18 Abrims, P. 98 ACPT (Hyderabad body shop) 167 ‘Acts of Invasion by the Yuon against Cambodia’ pamphlet (1990) 201 Afghanistan, ‘war on terrorism’ (December 2001) 239; ‘women in black’ 238 African slaves in the New World 27 Aglionby, J. 37 Aguilar, F. 7, 12, 26–7, 101, 105, 107–8, 111–13 Ainus people (250,000), north of Japan 73, 75 Al-Ali, N. 1, 4, 11 al-Qaeda terrorists, 9/11 terrorists in Afghanistan 239 Alba, R. 23 Alley, R. 228 Amer, R. 200 Anderson, B. 2, 72; criticism of diasporic imagination 185, 187; discussion of imagined communities 6, 99, 104; Imagined Communities 97; ‘long-distance nationalism’ of expatriate zealots 94–5 Anderson, B. 4 Ang, I. 10–12, 39, 181, 186 Anggraeni, D. 38 Anthias, F. 5 apartheid fantasies, ‘a place for each race’ 190 APEC 248 Appadurai, A. 1, 3–4, 6; corporate activity and nation-state 241; revolution in the foundations of nationalism 94; tolerance of diversity 108, 110–11; transnational distinguished from postnational 145; ‘transnational imaginary’ 7, 99, 106, 186, 251–2; transnational links on equal terms 239 Aquino, B. 98
Arendt, H. 243 Armenia 26 Armenians 3 Armstrong, B. 72 Arora, A. 168 ASEAN 202, 248 Asia 23, 71–2, 105 ‘Asia is different’ 18–19 Asia-Pacific 3–5, 30; assimilation 23; challenges to individuals and families 12; citizenship 40; democratization helps stabilize immigrant populations 32; development of civil society limited 9; economic power in hands of elites 240; Eurocentrism and Anglocentrism of transnational feminist activism 241; Filipinos as contract workers 95; Indian diaspora 179; migration process of Indian IT professionals 162; nationstates 6; refusal to accept effects of labour migration 32–3; relationship between immigration and citizenship 71; state and nation formation 21; states formed in era of globalization 22; transnational advocacy networks for migrants 242; transnational business communities 26; transnational communities increasing role 32; use of the term 4 Asian countries 18, 28 Asian economic boom, effects of 17–18 Asian financial crisis (1997) 18, 31, 155, 162 Asian pastoral liberalism 39–40 ‘Asian values’ 72, 247 Asians, employed outside their own countries 18 assimilation, definition 22–3, 28 Assis, M. 18
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Australasia 107 Australia 5, 181; 457 visas 166, 169, 174; d ‘business migrant programmes’ 42; ‘business skills’ migrants 46, 51; Chinese fled to (1998) 37–8, 45–6, 63n.11; Chinese Indonesian migrants 43; comparison with USA 175; estination for Indian IT workers 172; encouraged British immigration 23; ethnic Chinese Indonesians 6, 9; ‘ethnic pluralism’ 69; generous welfare system and IT workers 173; immigration intake programme (1995–2001) 173; independent skills visas 46, 55, 57; Indian IT professionals use as stepping stone to USA and UK 163; IT professionals 8, 164, 175–6; legal provisions for each visa category 47; Malaysian immigrants 146, 151; migrants 4; migration arrangements for skilled workers (1996) 457 visas 166; multicultural society 111; National Multicultural Advisory Council (NMAC) 24; neoliberal governmentality 38; real estate investment by Chinese Indonesians 56; requirements for ‘business skills’ visa 48; used as security base 162–3; Vietnamese 218, 227–8, 231, 233–4; visa regime, workings of 50; ‘war against terrorism’ (December 2001) 239 Austria 23–4 Axel, B.K. 96 Azizah, K. 153 Azurin, A.M., Reinventing the Filipino 113 Bader, V. 69 Bagui Qiaoshi journal 121 Baker, R.P. 228 Balakrishnan, G. 95 Balikbayan status for Philippine emigrants 27, 31, 33n.3, 108 Bangladesh 18, 80 Barmé, G. 120, 123, 130 Bartram, D. 75–6 Basch, L. 1, 7, 10, 28, 94, 96, 98, 100 Batistella, G. 18 Bauer, J.R. 72 Beaverstock, J. 4 Beh, L.Y. 156 Behdad, A. 93 Beijing, UN Conference for Women (1995) 238–9, 252
Belgrade, CCTV and bombing of Chinese embassy (1999) 124, 130, 132 Bell, D.A. 72 Benhabib, S. 243, 248 Benjamin, G. 191 Bhahba, H. 1 Billig, M. 2 Birch, D. 241 Birrell, B. 172 ‘black ships’ 77, 87n.4 Blanc, C.S. 27 ‘boat people’ phenomenon of Vietnamese 220, 230–31 body shops 166–8, 171 Boey, M. 144 Böhning, W.R. 18 Bonazzi, T. 69 Booth, K.M. 249 Bordieu, P. 44 Borjas, G.J. 42, 71 Bortz, Ana, lawsuit by 84 ‘boundaries of flexibility’ 8 Bousquet, G.L. 222, 225, 232–3 Brah, A. 11 ‘brain gain programme’ 150 Brazil, ethnic Japanese from treated as‘non-citizens’ 6; ius soli in operation 78; Japanese migrated to 73; Japanese workers from exposed to discrimination 81; Nikkeijin to Japan (1990s) 79 Brubaker, W.R. 69 Brunei 5, 18 Buddhist Tripateka scriptures, Universal Declaration of Human Rights and 210 bumiputera (Malays and other ‘indigenous’ groups) 146 Bunnell, T. 7–8, 147, 154 Burakumin (untouchables) in Japan 73, 75 Burma 41 ‘business migrant programmes’ 42 Buttinger, J. 221, 223 Ca-Li centre for Vietnamese 232 Cairo, UN Conference on Human Rights and Population (1994) 239 Cambodia 4, 10; authentic Khmer nation for those outside the boundaries 1; Buddhist Liberal Democratic Party 199; CPP 199, 201, 203, 213; dangers of intermarriage 199–201; decline caused by foreign corruption 199, 201; Democratic Kampuchea Regime (1975–79) ‘Khmer Rouge’ 201;
Index 259 ‘foreignness’ associated with communism 212–13; human rights and culture in post-Cold War 209–11; postUNTAC 206; recovering Khmer culture and defining the ‘foreign’ 211–14; returnee expatriate Khmers (1990s) 198–9, 206–9, 214–15; rumours of ‘Vietnamization’ 202–3; stories about loss of territory 199–201; suspicion of politicians married to Vietnamese 200–1; UNTAC supervision for 1998 elections 214 Cambodian People’s Party see CPP Cambodian returnees, interviews with 206–9 Camnews 213 Camroux, D. 147 Canada 181; Chinese fled to 37; comparison with USA 175; destination for Indian IT workers 172; encouraged British immigration 23; ‘ethnic pluralism’ 69; IT professionals 8, 164, 175; IT workers and generous welfare systems 173; Malaysian immigrants 146, 151; multicultural society 111; neoliberal governmentality 48; refugees 4; used as security base 163; Vietnamese fled to (1975) 218, 228, 231 Canclini, G.N. 189 ‘Cantoneseness’ 138 ‘capital-linked migration’ 43 capitalism 43, 93; global 71, 100 capitalisms, many nationally and culturally specific 44 capitalists manqué, middling transnationalists 43 Caribbean 42, 48 Carr, R. 247 Carsten, J., villagers in Langkawi (Malaysia) 101 Case, W.F. 148 Castells, M. 1, 9, 21, 144, 174 Castles, S., ‘age of global migration’ 67; differential exclusion in Japan 68, 72, 81; ius soli principle in Germany 30; link between territory and national identity 2; membership of a nation 20; migration flows 4–5, 18; multiculturalism 22, 24; nature of nation’s democracy and immigrants 69; settlement and minority formation 23; study of cross-border flows 161 Central America 42–3 Central Europe 69
Cesarani, D. 69 Chandler, D. 200 Chandra, M. 146 Chaudhuri, N. 243 Cheah, P. 95, 102, 114 Cheam Channy 213 Chee, M.W.L. 4 Chela, P. 247–8 Chen Qi 124 Chen Tiequn (provisional chairman of Fujian tongxianghui in Italy) 133 Cheng, L. 42, 121, 154 Cheng Xi (Qiaolian’s Institute of Overseas Chinese History) 122 Chin, C.B.N. 71, 105 China 21, 26, 31, 148; condemns toudu (human trafficking) 122; embourgoisement subversive potential 136, 139; emigration turned from treacherous to tolerant 7,123; exporter of labour 18, 31; H-1B visas and 167; imperialism to communism 5; mobilised overseas nationalism 132; ‘new migrant literature’ (xin yimin wenxue) 123; new migrants encouraged to form organizations 125; new migrants as patriots promoted by the media 122–4, 139; pastoral governing logic 44; state discourse and public narratives of identity 125–35; Taiwanese factory owners and southeastern 43; Vietnamese fled to 227, 231; war with Vietnam and 230; see also Chinese diaspora; Chinese Indonesian migrants; Chineseness China Central Television (CCTV) 124 China Democracy Party, dissident organization 138 Chinese, ‘an outstanding nation’ (youxiu minzu) 138; ‘sub-citizens’ but purchase additional privileges 41 ‘Chinese Culture Overseas Promotion Award’, official of China Central Television 137 Chinese diaspora 3, 17, 179; boundaries 10, 187–8; desire to belong to respectable imagined community 181; fundamentally nationalist 185; imagined transnational community 186 Chinese Diaspora, The: Selected Essays 180 Chinese Heritage Centre (Singapore) 180 Chinese identity’, ‘non-Chinese spaces’ 12 Chinese in Indonesia, ‘ethnic other’ 54 Chinese Indonesian migrants, Australian
260
Index
immigration regime and 45–50; grounds for residence visas in Australia 46; ‘middling transnationalists’ 43–4; predatory clientism 51, 54; ‘rent seeking’ or ‘corrupt’ (korupsi or kakaan) 54; situating in Australia 43–5 Chinese nationalism 29 ‘Chinese’ and ‘non-Chinese’, boundaries between 187–8 Chinese religious organizations (Christian churches) 138 Chinese Republic (1912), role of overseas Chinese and 29 ‘Chinese’ signifier 182–3 Chinese tongxiaghui (native-place associations), business standardized and conducted in Mandarin 132–3; Hungarian Chinese Association 131–2; instruments of economic self-interest 137–8; liaise with provincial bodies in PRC 135; protests against NATO bombing of PRC embassy in Belgrade 132; structure of 134 Chinese Writers’ Association 123 Chinese-Americans 187 Chineseness 126, 130, 135, 137, 138, 179, 184, 186, 193, 191, 138, 192, 193 Chow, R. 193 Chrun You Hai (Returnee to Cambodia) 207 Chua, B.H. 191 Chun, A. 96, 111 Çinar, D. 30 citizenship, differential privileges related to nation-state 40; flexible 8–9; foundation of a nation-state 69; ‘global markets’ and 41; naturalization and 69; rights for residents without citizenship 70; through mother as well as the father 30 Clammer, J. 191 clergy, role in in loco parentis for younger Chinese Indonesians 58 Clifford, J. 93, 180; ‘Travelling cultures’ essay 100 Coalition Government of Democratic Kampuchea (CDGK) 204 Cobb-Clark, D.A. 42 Cohen, R. 3, 20, 27, 120, 190; Global Diasporas 182 Cold War, Cambodia since end of 197–9; changing immigration patterns in West 69; mass loyalty and 20; political instability and 17
Confederation of Indian Industry 154 Connolly, M.D. 42 Constable, N. 105–6, 108–9 Consultative Group of Donor Governments 212 Copenhagen, conference on women (1980) 239 Cornelius, W.A. 69, 77 corruption 41, 54 cosmopolitanism 102 Coughlan, J.E. 192 ‘counter public’, feminist communications across national borders 248 creole nationalism 97, 99, 107, 109–12 Cresswell, T. 155 Crissman, L.W. 132–3 Crouch, H. 153 cukong (bankrollers connected to Suharto family) 45 ‘cultural others’ in Japan 67 ‘cultural void’, distancing from the homeland as 101 ‘cyberspace’ 9, 246 cyclical migration, Asian and Pacific countries 17 Davidson, A. 20–2, 30 DCITA 164, 166 de Vos, G. 73–4 Dean, M. 38–9 decolonization, created nation-state model in Asia-Pacific 20–1 democracy 21, 197, 214 Democratic Kampuchea see DK Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) 10, 219 Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts see DCITA Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs see DIMA Derrida, J. 114 ‘deterritorialization’ 7, 9, 29, 93, 97 Dewey, A. 53 DeWind, J. 18 Diani, H. 38 Diaspora: A Journal for Transnational Studies, (1991) 179 ‘diaspora envy’ 148 diasporas 3, 10, 17, 179, 190; emotional connotations 27, 185, 193; history of partition and 219; proliferation and valorization of 93; Sikhs 110; Vietnam 231–4;
Index 261 Dicken, P. 147, 161, 163 Dien Bien Phu, fall of (8 May 1954) 218, 221 difference, controllability of 22–4 differential exclusion 22–3, 68–9, 83–5 DIMA 45–6, 172 DK, enemies ‘Cambodian bodies and Vietnamese minds’ 201–3 Donahue, J. 162 Donald, S.H. 240 Donnell, J.C. 221 Dorais, L.J. 228 ‘downward assimilation’ 28 DRV 219, 220–1, 222, 223, 224–5, 226, 230 dual citizens, cross-national marriages and 30 dual or multiple citizenship 30–1 Duara, Prasemjit 121, 184–5 Dunne, M. 69 Dusenbery, V. 110 East Asia 4, 39, 148, 219 East Asian states 17–19, 21 East Timorese women 245 Eastern Europe 69 Edwards, P. 199, 202 Eglise Vivant 225 El Salvador 136 Election Appeals Committee (Suqiu Committee) of Malaysian Chinese Organizations 152 electronic news 103 Elliott, Duong Van Mai 222 Elmhirst, R. 219 Encyclopaedia of the Chinese Overseas 180, 187 England, K. 4 English language, cyberspace and 246 Enloe, C. 248 Epstein, M. 123 Eritrea 11 Espina, M. 111 Espiritu, Y.L. 99, 101, 109 Essed, P. 70, 83 Estrada, Joseph, removal from presidency of Philippines (2001) 103 ethnic homogeneity, Japanese nationalism and 72 Ethnic and Racial Studies 163 ‘ethnocide’, definition 203 Europe, ability to recruit knowledge workers 150; eleven Fujianese organizations (1993) 132; ‘guest workers (1960s) 18, 23; Malaysian
workers 151; racism 70; rules about migration 71; Vietnamese 227; European Union 1, 69 Faist, T. 1–3 Fall, B.B. 222, 226 Fang Yongjun 130–31 Far Eastern Economic Review 150 Featherstone, M. 43 Feldman, E.A. 72 feminist activists, challenge mainstream cultures 247 feminist organizations, transnational political activities 9 Fiels, N. 249 Filipino Balikbayan (repatriate) 94 Filipino community, does it exist? 99 Filipino nationality 12; spectre of Filipino descent 112–14 Filipino-Americans, hybrid identities as 109; reason to learn Tagalog 110 Filipinoness 105–6, 112–14 Filipinos 3, 95; advocacy for Filipino immigrants 242; basketball players 112–14; feeling about crime by fellow 105–6; half-caste in Darwin (1911) 111; homecoming risks ‘fragmentation of self ’ 109; threaten children with banishment to Philippines 102 ‘Filipinos of Kalk Bay’, descendants of migrants to Cape Town 111 Findlay, A. 2 First world feminists, ‘Third World woman’ as symbol of oppression 240 ‘First World’ in the ‘The Third World’ 161 Fisher, J.T. 226 foreign descendants of Japanese emigrants (Nikkeijin) 77 former Yugoslavia 238, 250 Foster, R. 2 Foucauldian notions 6, 47–8, 50 Foucault, M. 38, 47 France 23, 69, 218, 228, 231 Frankenberg, R. 240 Fraser, N. 248 French, H.W. 84 French tongxianghui 133 Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Neutre, Pacifique et Co-operatif see FUNCINPEC Frykman, Povrzanovic (Croatia) 11 Fujian Qiaobao article 121, 124 ‘Fujianeseness’ 138 Fukushima, Y. 74–5
262
Index
‘full-citizens’ 40 Fullbrook, M. 69 FUNCINPEC 199–201, 213 ‘generation’ sociological sense 98 Geneva Agreement (1954) 218, 219–20, 223–4, 229 Georges, E. 163 German tongxianghui 133 Germany 23–4, 30, 69, 78, 166, 228 Gheddo, P. 225–6 Giddens, A. 2 Gill, S. 39 Glick Schiller, N. 1, 7, 29–30 ‘global capital’, speculative market for 42, 51, 56 ‘global cities’ 11, 70, 191, 193 global city, transnational community par excellence 190–91 global civil society 9, 244 globalization 3, 16; Asia-Pacific states formed in era of 22; of capital 197–8; Chinese project and transnational apparatchiks 137, 70; definition 241; diasporic imagination 185; grassroots 251; international migration 31; Malaysia 147–8; many meanings of 39; mixing of people from different ethnic backgrounds 1, 189, 93; nation-states 19–22, new Chinese diasporic media 130; proliferation of transnational communities 27; prostitutes dealt with through discourses of 249; resentment at economic 70, 241; strengthening of ethnic ties and transnational links 32; transnational consciousness and multiple identities 29 Globalization and the Asia-Pacific 4 Goh Chok Tong (Prime Minister of Singapore) 170 Gomez, E.T. 146–7 Gooding-William, R. 60 Goscha, C.E. 231 Gottlieb, N. 246 ‘governmentality’, meaning 38 Grant, R. 248 Greece 26 Greeks in West Asia 27 Grenadian “constituency” 94 Grewal, I. 240–1 Grundy-Warr, C. 155 Grupo Justiça e Paz (Association for Justice and Peace) 82, 85
Guanxi (Chinese cultural characteristic) 181, 194n.2 Guarnizo, L.E. 1–2, 6–7, 70, 163 guest workers 18, 23, 30, 81 Gulf countries 23, 166 Gunasekaran, S. 146 Gurowitz, A. 71, 74, 76–7 ‘habitus’ 44, 51, 55, 63n.10; business 60–61 Hadapan, M. 152 Haitian “Tenth Department” 94 Hamamatsu National Health Plan, (1993) 79–80, 82, 83–4, 84–5, 87n.8 Hamamatsu Medical Association for Foreigners (MAF) 85 Hamamatsu Overseas Labourers Solidarity (herusu no kai) 85 Hamamatsu Police Headquarters 83 Hamid, H. 153 Hammer, E.J. 221 Hanami, T. 18, 77 Hannerz, U. 100, 102, 189, 241 Harajiri, H. 74 Haraway, D. 252 Hardoko, on business skills visas 59–60 Hardy, A. 10–11 Harper, T.N. 146–7 Hart, M. 197 Harvey, D. 42 Hawaii, Filipinos who are Marcos loyalists 98 Hefner, R.W 153 Hein, J. 232–3 Held, D. 19, 21 Hendra (Perth migration agent) 48–50, 52–3, 56 Herbert, W. 83 Heryanto, A. 37, 40, 54, 181 Him, Chanrithy 202; account of departing for USA 205 Hirst, P. 1 Ho, C.H. 192 Hoang Quynh (militant priest) 227 Hobsbawm, E. 2 Honda company 79 Hong Kong, ‘astronaut’ families 4; Chinese fled to 37; compared with Philippines organization 106; families 4; Filipinos 107–8; importer and exporter of labour 18, 71; investment in Malaysia 147; migrants from and ‘competing regimes’ 138; pastoral governing logic 44;
Index 263 professionals migrating to Vancouver 43; social scientists from PRC wrote (1997) 139 Hong Kong Chinese in USA 8 Hoogvelt, A. 21, 161 Hua Sheng Bao newspaper 124 huaqiao (Chinese citizens residing overseas) 121 Huaqiao Huaren Lishi Yanjiu journal 121 huaqiao (sojourner), ambiguous term 183–6 huaren (ethnic Chinese citizens of foreign countries) 121 Huaren website 181–3, 186, 193 Hughes, C. 10 Hugo, G. 4, 153 Hun Sen, ‘ayong yuon communist’ (‘communist Vietnamese puppet’) 213 Hungarian Chinese Association (1992) 129, 131 Hungary, Chinese newspaper criticized a rival 129–30; Chinese watch CCTV 124, 140n.6; ‘Three Celebrations Committee’ 132 Le Huu Khoa 225 hybridization 189–93 Hyderabad 167 I-Logic ( Hyderabad training institute) 168 identities 5; based on ethnicity 6, 29; Chinese 12, 120–21; collective 70; deterritorialized 93; displaced 97; homogeneous national 2; national 6, 31, 94, 109–10; new and shared 101; public narratives of 125–35, 138; social 93; subnational 132 Ikegami, S. 81–2 Ikmal, Muhammad 146 ‘imagined nation’ 6 IMF 1, 40 immigrant transnationalism, economic and legal status in host country 9 immigrants, children of 109–10; cultural associations and 24; loyalty to nonterritorial transnation not disloyal to USA 110–11; naturalization and 69; sojourners rather then settlers 5 immigration, assimilation and differential exclusion and 23 immigration countries 31–2 India 148; body shopping 162, 166–8, computer professionals migrated (1999–2000) 167; exporter of labour 18; information technology (IT)
professionals 8; IT industry can create only limited employment opportunities 176; IT training a boom industry 168, 176, Nehru’s era and higher education 175, 177n.5; see also IT professionals Indian diaspora 179 Indian IT companies, setting up in Singapore 170 ‘Indian IT professionals’ world system’ 163 ‘Indian networks’, important role 171–2 Indian Town Gap, interviews with Vietnamese 228–9 Indian workers in Malaysian information economy, low-wage service-sector 154 Indians in British Empire 27 Indo-Asian News Service 156 Indo-China 31, 78, 218, 228 Indochina Communist Party, dissolution (1946) 221 Indonesia 41, 148; anti-Chinese violence (May 1998) 6, 37–8, 183; conflict with IMF 40; exporter of labour 18; Indian IT workers 171; Javanese in and full citizenship 41; labour surplus 31; pastoral govermentality under New Order regime 38, 54; pastoral governing logic 44; sexual and military violence 250; Singapore’s proximity to 171; transmigration in and notion of internal diaspora 219; women migrants as domestic servants 4 Indonesian Chinese, speak Indonesian 193 Indra, D.M. 231 Inglis, C. 42, 192 INGOs 238–9; pressure for gender mainstreaming policies 253; translation carried out by volunteers 246 Inigo, M. 112 INS (2000) 167 Institute of Strategic and International Studies (ISIS), ‘K’-economy Master Plan 150 Internaltional Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 76 international, tension between nation and transnation 162 international aid projects, gender impact statements 253 international conferences of the UN 238 International Control Commission 224 International Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Discrimination against Women 76
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Index
International Convention on Eliminating All Forms of Racial Discrimination 76, 84 International Convention on the Rights of Children 76 International Convention on the Status of Refugees and Protocol 76 International Court of Justice 243 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights 76 International Criminal Court 243 international labour migration, differential in labour and wages across borders 71 International Monetary Fund see IMF international non-governmental organizations see INGOs International Organization for Migration 23 International Symposium (1959), RVN never rose to challenge of 222; RVN officials and American observers 220–21 Internet 9, 126, 130, 183, 213, 246 Iraq, ‘women in black’ 238 Israel 26 IT 156, 162, 164–6, 165, 174, 175 Italy 26; Chinese newspaper Ouhua Shibao (1997) 124; foreigners in 72; Fujianese organization 135 Ito, R. 240 ius sanguinis (law of blood) 20–21, 30, 74 ius soli (law of the soil) 20, 41, 78 Iwan ( executive in Jakarta) 57–8 Iwata city 79 Jacobson, D. 69 Jakarta express, everyday transnational connections 57–9 Japan 21; 800,000 migrated to North and South America (1937) 73; (1880–1910) founding of the modern state 72; equal treatment of foreign nationals 74; (1989) Indo-Chinese ‘boat people’ arrived in 77; Alien Registration law 74, 86n.3; arrrival of global workers 75–7; categories of foreign workers 78–9; changing immigration policies 6; children of mixed marriages 111; citizenship, diversity and activism 68–71; construction companies hire foreign workers 76–7; country of emigration and immigration 67; demonstrations about bombing of Chinese embassy (1999) 124;
‘differential exclusion’ 68, 71–2, 86; difficulties of educating Brazilian children 82–3, 87n.10; economic power in hands of elites 240; ethnicity and the new immigration policy 77–9; Filipinos and ‘Japanese working system’ 106; growing population of ‘visible races’ 86; immigrants and social services 32; importer of migrants 5, 71, 73; ius sanguinis 74; job brokers and Brazilian guest workers 81–2; Korean migrants (1910–1945) 73; labour importing 18, 23; Law to Promote Specific Non-profit Activities (1998) 84; major colonial power in Asia 72; myth of ethnic homogeneity 6, 31, 73, 75; National Social Security Plan for foreigners 82; Nationality Law (1994) 78, 87n.5; new civil society movement 84; NGO issues of prostitution, tourism and migration 243; Plaza Agreement (1985) 76; postimperialism 5; ratification of UN international conventions 76; reluctant to admit foreign labour 72, 75; Revised law on Immigration Control and Recognition of Refugees 77–80; revision of Nationality Act 76; sexual slavery 9–10; slow down in economic growth (1992) 85; slow labour force growth 31; social exclusion for Koreans and Chinese 67; undocumented workers 32; ‘war against terrorism’ (December 2001) 239; war with china (1937) 73, ‘women in black’ protest 9, see also Koreans in Japan Japan Immigration Association 77 Japan–Korea Peace Treaty 74 Japanese Brazilians 67–8 Jayaseelan, R. 149, 154 Jews 3, 27, 29, 148 Jiang Zemin (PRC President) 131 Jomo, K.S. 146–7 Jones, S. 23, 32 Joseino Jinken Iinkai 244 Juteau, D. 69 Kahn, J. 145 Kajita, T. 74, 78–9 Kaplan, C. 240–41, 243 Kassim, A. 32 Katz, M. 42 Kearney, M. 1 Keck, M. 239 Kelly, G.P. 228–9, 232
Index 265 Kelly, P. 4 Kessler, C. 148 Khmer Buddhist Research Centre 203 Khmer Empire of Angkor (fourteenth century) 199 Khmer Rouge 201–2 ‘Khmerness’ 198, 199–202, 202–5, 207, 209, 211, 212, 214 Kim Ha, ‘second wave’ of Vietnamese refugees 229–30 Kim Leng 213 Kim, P. 244–5 Kimura, F. 85 Kinpara, T. 82 Kivisto, P. 12 knowledge economy 8, 145, 153, 168 knowledge workers, global shortage 150 Kobe earthquake (1995) 84 Koga, E.A.I. 84 Komai, H. 32 Kondo, A. 32 Korea 67–8, 71–2, 218 Koreans in Japan 67–8; deprived of Japanese nationality (1952) 74–5; (1945–1952) looked on as foreigners 74; Alien Registration Law and 74, 86n.3; differential exclusion of 72–5, 85–6; Japanese names (1940) 73, 75 Kosai city 79 Koser, K. 1, 4 Krishnadas, K.C. 165 Kritz, M. 72 Kurds 3, 29 Kuwahara, Y.80 labour migrants, difficulty in quantifying 4 labour-importing strategies, short-term economic considerations 22 Lai Hailong 129 Lao Mong Hay ( Cambodian returnee) 207 Laos 4 Latin America 4, 79 Law, L. 238, 242 Ledgerwood, J. 204–5, 209 Lee, C. 74 Levitt, P. 6, 8 Li, Howard (garment manufacturer New York) 125–6 Li Jian 123, 125 lianhe Shangbao 132 Lie, J. 67, 73–5 Lim Kit Siang (Malaysia’s opposition Democratic Action Party) 156
Lister, R. 70 Liu Xin 125 Loh, F. 145 Lon Nol 201 London 70 ‘long-term residence’ (teiju) visa category 77 Los Angeles 70 Lowell, B.L. 166 Lubis, D.A. 38 McCarthy, Joseph R. 226 Mackie, V. 9–11, 238, 240–41, 248, 250–51 McLaren, A.T. 242 McLelland, M. 246 MacMicking, R. 111 Magarey, Susan 246 Mahathir (Malaysian Prime Minister) 7, 144, 147–9, 153, 154, 156, 170 Maitri (San Francisco-based South Asian women’s organization) 170 Malaysia 41; authoritarian rule 72; democracy and human rights guarantees 32; excluded non-Malays 7–8; export-oriented industrialization 147; expulsion of Indonesian migrant workers (1990s) 154; gateway to global market 162; geographical proximity to India 171; global shift and multicultural repositioning 147–8; immigration and delicate ethnic balance 31; importer and exporter of labour 18, 23, 71; incentives to encourage skilled Malaysians overseas to ‘come home’ 151; Indian IT workers 171, 175; Indian nationals arrested in Brickfields (Kuala Lumpur) 156, 170; Indonesia and Filipino illegal immigrants (1970s and 1980s) 153–4; Internet-based network with Malaysians overseas 152; IT professionals 8, 170; K-economy Masterplan (2002) 8, 150–1, 154, 170; Malay bangsa (ethnic group) and Malay Muslim culture 145; Malays as full citizens 41; media reports on upgrading indigenous human resources 152–3; ‘national car’ the Proton Saga 148; New Economic Policy (NEP) 146; Putrajaya (MSC administrative centre) 154; regionalization 147; resistance to dilution of Malay ‘special rights’ 152; ‘returning scientists programme’ 149–50; slow labour-force growth 31; transnational networks and
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respatialization 149–52; treatment of Vietnamese refugees 153, undocumented workers 32, see also MSC; MSC-status companies Malaysian Institute of Micro-electronic Systems (1980s) 149 Malaysian Ministry of Human Resources’ Electronic Labour Exchange 151–2 Malaysian Technology Development Corporation (1992) 149 ‘Malaysian version of the American Dream’ 150 Mam, Teeda Butt 202, 206 Manchuria 79 Marcos regime, role of Filipino immigrants in challenging 98 Margold, J. 105 Marr, D.G. 221 Marshall, T.H. 20, 69–70 Martin, M. 203 Martin, P. 4, 71 Mattelart, A. 241 Megawati cabinet 40 Megawati Sukarnoputri 38 Mercer, K. 190 Mexico, 91975) conference on women 239; dual nationality and 30; migrants and support for Vicente Fox 139; source of labour 4; support for its migrants 136–7 Meyer, M.K. 248 Middle East, Asians employed in 18; victims of human rights abuses 9 migrants 4; contact across borders 2; continue to be members of state from which they originated 94; (dan di cu in Vietnamese) 224; deterritorialized identities 97; economic in Australia 6; highly skilled 18; illegal labour 4; ‘new heroes’ of Phillipines 7, 96, 108; perception of temporary workers who will not settle 31; ‘supra-territorial nationalism of ’ 95; trip back to the homeland by Filipinos 107–8; women’s connection with other migrant women 252 Migration News 137 migration and settlement, dominant attitudes 17–19 Miles, R. 69 Miller, M. 2, 18, 22, 24, 67 Mingxi, new migrants people who want to become modern (zou xiang shijie) 121 Mintrom, M. 239, 241, 250–51 Mitchell, K. 4, 43, 57
Miyajima, T. 74, 76 modern technology, unprecedented exchanges 115 Mohanty, C.T. 240, 241 Moneaksekar Khmer (Khmer Conscience) 213 Morawska, E. 120 Morgan, R., Sisterhood is Global 240 Mori, H. 32 Morita, K. 77 Mouffe, C. 197 MSC 144–5, 170; ‘Bill of Guarantees’ 149; Indian nationals and 154; lack of skill base and 150; ‘Malaysian-ness’ and 7 MSC-status companies, ‘foreign knowledge workers’ and 149 ‘multicultural normalization’ 190 ‘multiculturalism’ 18, 22; bangsa Malaysia contrasts with ‘bumiputeraism of NEP 147; meaning of 24; ‘national identity’ and 6, 109–10; where not state policy 111 Multimedia Asia conference and exhibition (October 1996) 149 Multimedia Development Corporation (1996) 149, 154 Multimedia Super Corridor (Malaysia) see MSC Muto, Y. 85 Mydans, S. 37 Mysliwiec, E. 204 Nairobi, conference on women (1985) 239 Naples, N. 70 NASSCOM (2000) 167 nation, the, ideal of as radically and culturally homogeneous 180–81; imagined community 106; inclusion and exclusion in construction 10–11; individuals who no longer live within territorial borders 7 nation without a state concept 29 nation-states, becoming ‘obsolete’ 94; citizenship by purchase 41; contemporary transnational networks 155; deterritorialized 28–9; diasporas as paradigmatic others of 180; gatekeepers 5–6; global civil society 9; globalization 19–22, 93, 161; guarantors of individual political rights 243; high levels of economic growth and labour shortages 4; immigration control 2; problems of international migration and ethnic minorities 22; process of transnationalism 6;
Index 267 reconfiguration 3; rules of membership for immigrants 69; speculation and stories about 42; still important 8, 243; trans-territorial 6; transnational reincorporation of migrants into statecentred projects 145; transnationalism distinguished from globalization 1 national, concepts of 1–2; transcending the 242–5 national governments, policies and transnational processes 175 national identity, immigration and settlement and 31 nationalism, competing of China and Taiwan 219; competing of North and South Korea 219; discourses of migration 6; feminist movements 243; second generation migrants 115; secondary 137–8 Nations Unbound 94, 100 naturalization 30, 69 Nee, V. 23 Negri, A. 197 neoliberalism 38 , 44, 51, 70; disciplinary 39–41, 43 NEP 146 Netherlands, assimilation of migrants 23–4 ‘network society’ 144 New Economic Policy (Malaysia) see NEP ‘new Malay’ (Melayu baru), re-imagined transnationally 148 ‘new migrant’ discourse 121–5 ‘new migrant literature’ (xin yimin wenxue) Chinese Writers’ Association 123 new migrant media 129, 130 new migrant newspapers, stories reported in Japan and Hungary 127–8 new migrant organizations 133–4 New Perspectives Quarterly 144 New Straits Times 150 ‘New World’ countries, multicultural societies and 18 New York 70 New York Times 83–4, 192 New Zealand 42, 48, 146, 151 Newland, K. 248 newly industrialized economies (NIEs) 161 NGO, human rights tribunals for women 243–5 Ngo Dinh Diem 221–3, 225–6 NGOs 10, 32, 246, 248, 252 Nguyen Cao Ky 232–3 Nguyen Thai (director of Ngo Dinh Diem’s news agency) 226–7
Nhat Tien, 229–30 Nikkeijin (people of Japanese descent), differential exclusion of 79–80, 87n.7; ‘internal’ immigrants 86; return to Japan 67–8, 77–8 Ningxia Ribao newspaper 124 Nisei (child of persons born as Japanese) 77–8 non-governmental organizations see NGOS Nonini, D. M. 6, 9, 39, 41, 43, 46, 120, 130, 136, 146, 181, 183 North America, assimilation 23; ‘business migrant programmes’ 42; Cambodian communities 213; higher-status Filipinos 107; Vietnamese (1975) 227; see also USA North, D.S. 228 North Korea 21 North Vietnam 220–21 Nye, J.S. 162 Nyíri, P. 7, 120, 124–5, 138 Oceania 4, 23–4 OECD 4, 71, 155 Oguma, E. 75 Ohmae, K. 26, 144 oil crisis (1973), temporary migrants turning into settlers 24 Okinawans 73, 75 Olds, K. 4 Ong, A., Chinese transnationalism 120, 181, 183; elite ‘astronaut pattern’ 57; ‘flexible accumulation’ 135; ‘flexible citizenship 8, 197; migrants from Hong Kong coping with ‘competing regimes’ 138; on nation-state regime 5, 136; state and those being governed 38; success of overseas Chinese communities 148; world capitalist system ‘polycentric’ 161; ‘zones of graduated sovereignty’ 40, 62n.4 Onuma, Y. 74, 75 OPEC 75 ‘orientalism’, construction of otherness and 241 Osteria, T. 106 ‘othering’ 10 Ouhua Luntan 128 Ouhua Shibao newspaper (Italy 1997) 124 Oum Mean (CPP) interview 203 Ouzhou Daobao newspaper 124 Ouzhou Zhi Sheng newspaper 124 Overseas Chinese Affairs Bureau or Qiaoban 121
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Overseas Exchange Commission 121 Oxford Analytica 37, 40 Pa-Ri centre 232 Pacific Islands, histories of trade, cultural interchange and 17 Pacific states, high degree of ethno-cultural diversity 21 Paisley, F. 243 Pakistan 18, 80 Pan, L. 187–8; Sons of the Yellow Emperor 180 Paris, complaint about Fujianese organization 135 Parreñas, R. 4 pastoral liberalism 38–41, 44, 51, 54 ‘patriotic overseas Chinese leaders’ 137 ‘patriotic spirit’ (aiguo qinghuai) 123 patriotism, declining in power 27–8 Peking Review 123 Pennycook, A. 240 Pentagon Papers (1971) 221 People’s Daily 126 People’s Republic of China see PRC Pereira, B. 150 Persekutuan Tanah Melayu (Federation of Malay Land) 146 Peterson, S.V. 240, 248 Philippine Basketball Association 112 Philippine Daily Inquirer 103 Philippines, basketball 112–13; dual nationality 112; immigrant parents in California 101; labour surplus 31; NGOs and issues of prostitution, tourism and migration 243; nonresident Filipinos and economic progress of national economy 7; returnee labour migrants ‘modern heroes’ 108; state intervention to determine ‘Filipino descent’ 113; support for its migrants 136; the labourexporting country 4, 18, 32, 80; transnational social community 26; women 4 Phoenix TV 124 Pillai, P. 23 Pinches, M. 72 Piper, N. 69–71 Poethig, K. 211 Polonyi, P. 124, 131 Portes, A., assimilation and immigrants 23; collective identities of minorities 70; dual citizenship 30; individualized process of migration 100; transnational
activities 110, 161; transnational communities 25; transnationalism 1, 9, 28 Pratt, G. 4, 101, 107 Pratt, M.L. 189, 248–9 PRC 7; Chineseness of 126; dual allegiance in overseas communities 120; fiftieth anniversary of founding (1999) 132; military power focused on 240; state building and nationalist mobilization in transnational community 139 PRC embassy, in charge of activities abroad 132 PRC-based Internet, Chinese newspapers in Hungary and 124 Prem Kumar, R. 155 pribumis (non-Chinese Indonesians) 37, 54 Project Hope 125–6 prostitutes 249 Prügl, E. 248 Putrajaya, Tamil plantation workers displaced for 154 Qiyejia newspaper 130 racism 29, 41, 70, 105 Rafael, V. 96, 108, 110 Ramasamy, P. 153 Ramesh, J. 168 Ranariddh, Prince Norodom 200 Randle, R.F. 224 Ranger, T. 2 Rao, B. 164 Rasiah, R. 148 Reanda, L. 239 refugees 2, 4, 18; Cambodian on Thai border (1980s) 204; Indo-Chinese in Japan 77–8; Khmer departing for USA 205; Vietnamese 225–6, 228–30; Vietnamese, treatment in Malaysia 153 Republic of Vietnam see RVN Returned Overseas Chinese Association (Qiaolian) 121 Reyes, M.A. 1112 Riles, A. 245 Rivera, T. 103 Robbins, B. 95, 102 Roberts, G.S. 84 Robinson, W.C. 228 Rodan, G. 72 Romanian tongxianghui 133 Roth, J.H. 80 Ruddock, P. 166
Index 269 Runyan, A.S. 248 Rupp, L.J. 243 RVN 10, 219, 221, 225, 232 Salleh, Halim 146 Sam Rainsy 212–13, 215 Sam Rainsy Party see SRP Samonte, E. 111 San Francisco Peace Treaty (1951), Japan and USA 74, 86n.2 Sansei (Child of a child of those who were born as Japanese) 77–8 Sansei Nikkeijin 78 Sapaan, E. 154 Sassen, S. 1, 43, 70–1, 77, 163 Satake, M. 111 Schein, L. 120 Scholte, J.A. 95 Scientific American 149 See, Yee Ai 148 sending communities, linked to receiving areas 17 ‘serve the country’ (wei guo fuwu), slogan for overseas students 122 Shain, Y. 136 Shamsul, A.B. 146 Shanghai New Migrants Research Project Team 121–2 Sheridan, S. 246 Shichang (2000) 130–31 Shipper, A.W. 84 Shobat, E. 104 Shohat, E. 240 Shu, S.L. 170 Sify News 170 Sihanouk 201 Sikhs, appeals of Khalistan to 110 Sikkink, K. 239 Silicon Valley 175 Silvey, R.M. 219 Simon, P.J. 225 Singapore, authoritarian rule 72; body shops 171; Chinese fled from Indonesia 37; complex process of inclusion 21; economic power in hands of elites 240; Filipinos as domestic servants or manual labourers 107; gateway to global market 162, 191; headquarters of multinational corporations for Asia 170; highly skilled migrants 23; importer of migrants 5, 18, 71; Indian IT workers on social visitor visas 170–71; investment in Malaysia 147; IT professionals 8, 166, 175; slow
labour force growth 31; Speak Mandarin campaign 191 Sinn, E 17 Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) 29 Sino-Thais 187 Skeldon, R. 4, 18, 31–2 Sklair, L. 8, 43, 161 Small, S. 70 Smith, A. 2 Smith, M.P. 1–2, 6–7, 70, 145, 163 social visitor visas 171 Socialist Republic of Vietnam (1975) see SRV Sok Som Oeun (Cambodian returnee) 207 Son Soubert interview 202–3 Song Wuqiang, Asia Center in Budapest 131–2 Soum Sekomar 201 South America, Sansei Nikkeijin came to Japan 78 South Asia 31 South Korea 21, 150, 240, 243 South Vietnam 221–2, 226, 233 Southeast Asia 4, 39; Africa or Arab traders 27; Asian pastoral liberalism 41; Chinese population 17; ethnic Chinese marginalized 40, 97; ‘flexible citizens’ 197; high degree of ethno-culture diversity 21; new destination for IT professionals 165; ‘structural amnesia’ 101; Taiwanese factory owners 43; Vietnamese emigration over the centuries 231 sovereignty, reduced by international law and human rights principles 21 Soysal, Y.N. 1, 69–71 ‘speculation’ 41–2, 62n.8 speculative markets, Asian middling roving elites 44 Spivak, G.C. 240 Sri Lanka, exporter of labour 18 Srivastava, R. 170 SRP 199, 212–14 SRV 219, 230–3 Stackhouse, J. 164 Stam, R. 104 Star TV 124 The Star newspaper 153 Steenbergen, B. 69 Steffenhagen, J. 164 Steill, B. 4 Stewart, A. 166 Stivens, M. 248 Strange, S. 41–2
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Stratton, J. 181 Strobel, L.M. 104 Strobel, M. 243 ‘sub-citizens’ 40 ‘substantive citizenship, de facto citizenship 70 Suharto, Thobig 45, 54 Sullivan, G. 146 Supang, C. 18 ‘super citizens’ 40 Suzuki company 79 Suzuki, Joji 73 Switzerland 23–4, 69 Sydney, diversity of Chinese in 191–3, 194n.7 Taiwan, ‘astronaut’ families as migrants 4; authoritarian rule 72; capitalists seeking refuge from political instability 43; economic power in hands of elites 240; importer of migrants 5, 18, 71; investment in Malaysia 147; pastoral governing logic 44; PRC threatened with war if declared independence 132; return of migrants to high-tech economy 150 Tajima, J. 124 Tajiri, K. 84 Takafuji, A. 74, 76 Takahashi, T. 249 Takeuchi, H. 85 Taliban regime 239 Tambiah, S.J. 241 Tambini, D. 1 Tan, A. 186 Tan, S.B. 146 Tan Tianxing 121 Tanaka, H. 73–4, 121 Tata Computer Services (India’s largest software company) 174 Taylor, V. 243 Technology Park Malaysia (Kuala Lumpur) 149 telecommunications, rapid cross-border exchange 9 Thai Binh province, migrants going south and 224 Thailand 18, 31, 71, 171, 199 ‘Third World’ in the ‘First World’ 161 Third World Fujianese Fellowship Conference in Quanzhou 123–4 ‘Third World Women’ 240 Thomas, M. 234
Thomas, P. 245 Thompson, G. 1 Thuno, M. 137 Tickner, J.A. 248 ‘tiger; economies 148 Tiglao, R. 103 Tolentino, R.B. 241 Tölölyan, K. 93, 101, 179–80, 183, 190 Ton That Thien 220–1 Toulin, A. 164 Toyohashi city 79 Toyokawa city 79 Toyota car company 80 Toyota city 79 trade union coalitions, international links and 243 Tran Hoai Tran 222–3, 225–7 Tran Trong Dang Dan 227, 232 trans-boundary ties, degree of personal involvement with nation 99–100 transculturation 247–50 transformation 250–1 transformed discourse, militarized sexual violence and prosecutions 253 transgenerational continuity 111 translation 245–7 transmigrants 25, 97–103 transnation 6, 105, 112–13, 114–15 transnational, distinguished from ‘postnational’ 145; implications for transnational feminist activism 242; states using to underpin the ‘national’ 11; tension and 242–3 transnational activism 245 transnational activities, decline in nationalism and racism 29; Indian IT workers 174–5; involvement does not block integration into host society 110; new field of research 161 transnational apparatchik 131, 137 transnational business activities 18 transnational business communities 26 ‘transnational circuits’ 2–3 transnational citizenship, granted to noncitizen permanent residents 70 transnational communities 3, 12; AsiaPacific 32; citizenship 29–30; diasporas 179; globalization 22; imagined communities 99; migration 5; political 26; reactive ethnicity 28, 32; some consequences of the emergence of 27–9; state’s role in ‘imagining’ 136; types 26–7
Index 271 transnational connection 58–60 transnational corporations (TNCs) 2, 163, 242–3 transnational cultural communities 26 transnational feminist advocacy networks 247, 248, 250–51 ‘transnational feminist counter-public’ 248 ‘transnational imaginary’ 7, 97, 251–3 ‘transnational kinship groups’ 2–3 transnational links 136, 239, 243 ‘transnational moment’ 180, 190 transnational networks, develop among activists 70–71 transnational organizing 9–10 transnational public sphere, feminists and United Nations 248 transnational social communities 26 ‘transnational social fields’ 2–3, 12, 100 ‘transnational social space’ 2, 10 transnational theory, erosion of controllability of 16 transnationalism, ambivalent and discordant voices of 114; ‘borderless nationalism’ 94; challenges of 1, 11–12; emotional 102; end of homogeneous nation 27; exploitive relations and multiple identities 94; global paradox 16; globalization 19, 25; immigrant incorporation 28; multiple citizenship 30; negative 102; revalorisation of ethnicity and race 29; second-generation immigrants 110, 115; Western social sciences 161 ‘transnationalism from above’ 25 ‘transnationalism from below’ 25 transnationalism and transnational communities, defining 24–7 transnationalization, non-metropolitan cities in Japan and 80 ‘transversal’ 46–7 ‘travellers’, multiple deterritorialized identities 93 Treaty of Westphalia (1648) 19 True, J. 239, 241, 250–51 Tseng, Y.F. 43 Tsuda, G. 81 Turner, V. 99 ‘21st Budapest Arts Festival’ 137 Ubac, M.L. 113 Uçarer, E.K. 71 UK 23, 69–70, 228, 239 UN Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees 74
UN Population Division 85 Union Général des Vietnamiens en France (UGVF), overseas Vietnamese community 233 United Malays National Organization (UMNO) 146 United Nations 213, 243, 245, 248 United Nations International Conferences on Women 245 Upham, F. 72 ‘upward assimilation’ 28 US Senate Foreign Relations Committee 212 USA 181; ability to recruit knowledge workers 150; assimilation 28; central destination for Indian IT professionals 168, 175; dual-citizen population 30; ‘ethnic pluralism’ 69; Filipino assimilation and economic success 102; Filipinos as permanent immigrants 95; globalization and capital 39; H-1B visas 165–7, 169, 174; H-4 visas for spouses 169–70; IT professionals 8, 164, 176; ius solis 41, 78; Khmer refugees 204–5; long -established migrant nation 5; Malaysian immigrants 146, 151; multicultural society 111; neoliberal governmentality 48; racism 70; Sam Rainsy and Republican Party 213; Vietnamese 4, 218–19, 228, 231; ‘war against terrorism’ (December 2001) 239; ‘women in black’ 238 USA–Japan ‘gentleman’s agreement (1908), restricted entry of Japanese 73 Utusan Malaysia 156 Valida, A.C. 154 van Hear, N. 26 VAWW-NET Japan (2000) 244, 250 Vergara, B. 96, 98, 108 Vertovec, S., dual allegiance 120; Philippines and dual nationality 112; transnational networks 71, 80; transnationalism 2, 9, 25, 27, 100 Vienna, UN Conference on Human Rights (1993) 239 Viet Minh 221 Viet Minh leadership (1945) revolution 221 Vietnam 4, 10, 41, 148, 199; (1975) second wave of migration 229–30; attitudes of exiles 234; doi moi reforms (1986) 230–1; internal transnationalism 10, 218–20, 223, 231–4; migration from the north
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(1954–55) 223–5; migration and internal transnationalism 223, 235n.1; one country, two nationalisms 223; Orderly Departures programme (1979) 227–8, 231; politics in the south (1955–75) 225–7; since (1990s) reduction of internal transnationalism 233; Vietnamese as full citizens 41; young men and students fled to France 225 Vietnam War, end of (1975) 4 Vietnamese refugee diaspora 10–11, 26, 218 Vietnamese transnationalism 218 Vietnamese Workers’ Party, Third party Congress 220 Vietnamese-Americans, exclusion and acts of violence 233 ‘Vision 2020’ 147, 149 Vo Nguyen Giap 220
women’s organizations, NGOs and Christian organizations 243, 253n.1 Wong, C.W. 153 Wong, D. 71, 150 Wong, L.L. 43 World Bank 148 World Chinese Entrepreneurs Convention (1991) 181, 194n.3. World Fujianese Fellowship Conference in USA 133 World Health Organisation (WHO), HIV/AIDS 249 World Trade Organization 1 world wars 20 Wumao company, Zhou Yongping 130
Wagatsuma, H. 73 Wallerstein, I. 163, 176 Wang, G. 17, 29, 147, 180, 183–7 Wang Ling-chi 180 Watanabe, S. 73 Weber, E. 136 Weedon, C. 240 Weekley, K. 21 Weiner, M. 18, 72–3, 77 Weisman, S.R. 83 Weiss, L. 162 Welaratna, U. 206 welfare states 20, 22 Western Europe 4–5, 23, 30, 41, 68–9 Who’s Who of Chinese Origin Worldwide 126, 137 Williams, R 40 Willis, K. 3–4, 44 Wilpert, C. 78 Wittgenstein, L. 42 Wolf, D. 101–2, 109 ‘women in black’ 238–9; Tokyo (December 2001) 252 ‘women of colour’ 240 Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Military Sexual Slavery (2000) 9, 238, 243–5, 249–51
Yamaha company 79 Yamanaka, K. 6, 31, 71, 73, 76–81, 84 Yamawaki, K. 73 Yang, P.Q. 154 Yeoh, B. 3–4, 44, 85 Yongs, G. 248 Yoshihara, K. 60 Yoshino, K. 31, 73, 137 Yu Lihua, ‘Longing’ (short story) 123 Yuan Binghua (Mingxi), known about 124
Xiang, B. 8, 166 Xiao Pang 139 xin yimin (people who have left China since 1978) 121
Zhang Manxin, transnational apparatchik 131 Zhang Zhongbin 121 Zhongguo Xinwen 121 Zhonghua Shibao 132 Zhongwen Daobao 124, 128 Zhou, M. 28 Zhou Yongping (president of the Hungarian Chinese Association) 129–30 Zhu Huiling (head of a division at the national Qiaoban) 121 Zhuang Guotu (senior scholar of overseas Chinese in PRC) 121–3, 125, 132, 138 Zlotnik, H. 72
