Events

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

PROGRAM

ABSTRACT

For more than a century, inhabitants of Shenzhen’s villages have migrated to Southeast Asia, the Pacific, North and South America, and Europe. With China’s economic global ascendancy, these villages no longer consist of peasants dependent on their rich overseas relatives. As the villages have become part of the special economic zone of Shenzhen, the megacity that embodies China’s rise, emigration has waned. This talk explores the transformations of Pine Mansion—a Shenzhen former emigrant community—and its members’ changing relationship with their diaspora around the world.

Lineage ties have long been central in choosing migration destinations and channeling donations to village projects. After China’s reopening, Shenzhen’s villagers used diaspora as a resource to participate in the city’s booming economy and to reestablish and protect their ritual sites against government plans. As overseas financial contributions diminish and diasporic relations change, this talk highlights the way emigration is being reconceptualized in regards to China’s changing position in the world.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Anne-Christine Trémon is a directrice d’études (full professor) at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Paris, and a member of the Center for the Study of Modern and Contemporary China. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica in Taiwan, a lecturer at the Ecole normale supérieure (ENS) in Paris, a Marie-Curie EURIAS fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and a senior lecturer in anthropology at the University of Lausanne. Her research focuses on the Chinese diaspora and China’s urbanization. She led the project “Public Goods in Urbanizing China” funded by the Swiss National Foundation for Science from 2017 to 2022. Her recent publications include Diaspora Space-Time: Transformations of a Chinese Emigrant Community (Cornell University Press, 2022).

Frank N. Pieke studied Cultural Anthropology and Chinese Studies at the University of Amsterdam and the University of California, Berkeley, where he received his PhD in 1992. After lectureships in Leiden and Oxford, he took up the Chair in Modern China studies at Leiden University in 2010. In Oxford, Pieke set up and directed the University of Oxford’s China Centre. In Leiden, he was the co-founder and first executive director of the Leiden Asia Centre. Between 2018 and 2020, he was the director of the Mercator Institute for China Studies (MERICS) in Berlin. Pieke’s research revolves around governance in China and the evolution of the Chinese Communist Party, Chinese globalization and the impact of China on Europe. His new, forthcoming book Superpower China asks how being an emerging superpower status will change China. His earlier books include The Good Communist (2009) and Knowing China (2016), both published by Cambridge University Press. In 2021, Pieke and Koichi Iwabuchi published the edited volume Global East Asia with the University of California Press.

Kenneth Dean is Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Professor in the Humanities Division at Yale-NUS College, and Professor at Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also the research cluster leader for Religion and Globalisation at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. His recent publications include Epigraphical Materials on the History of Religion in Fujian: Zhanghou Region, Fuzhou 2019, Secularism in South, East, and Southeast Asia, NY: Palgrave, (2018) co-edited with Peter van der Veer, and Chinese Epigraphy of Singapore: 1819-1911 (2 vols.), Singapore: NUS Press (2017), co-edited with Dr Hue Guan Thye. He directed Bored in Heaven: A Film about Ritual Sensation (2010), on celebrations around Chinese New Year in Putian, Fujian, China. Other publications include Ritual Alliances of the Putian Plain, 2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2010 (with Zheng Zhenman). His current project involves the construction of two interactive, multi-media databases, Singapore Historical GIS (SHGIS) and Singapore Biographical Database (SBDB) databases. These projects can be viewed online at http://shgis.nus.edu.sg and http://sbdb.nus.edu.sg.

REGISTRATION

Registration is closed, and instructions on how to participate in this webinar has been sent out to registered attendees. Please write to aritm@nus.edu.sg if you would like to attend the webinar.