Events

Jointly organized by Asia Research Institute, Department of Chinese Studies, and Wan Boo Sow Research Centre for Chinese Culture, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Prof Kenneth Dean, Asia Research Institute, and Department of Chinese Studies, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, more than twenty million Chinese left China, crossed oceans, and lived in other lands. Numerous studies have detailed the impact of this mass emigration around the world, but one question is not often asked: How did it change China? Arguing that Chinese mass emigration drew China into a global system of nation-states, Shelly Chan will draw on her recent book Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration (Duke 2018) to discuss a “diaspora moment” in Chinese history, during which successive waves of Chinese arriving from Southeast Asia forced a reckoning of the nation. Driven by the upheavals of decolonization and the Cold War across 1950s-60s Southeast Asia, the “return” migrants were collectively known as “guiqiao” in Mao’s China. Although party leaders had recognized that the “guiqiao” occupied a distinct, transitional place in socialism—hence their resettlement on state farms or in showcase housing called “new villages”—internal documents suggest that criticisms mounted over the group’s unknown “foreign past.” From the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution, this “diaspora moment” signals a collapse of efforts to balance different times and spaces in high socialism, but which raised the specter of an ever-returning capitalism. Things came a full circle in 1978. When Deng Xiaoping resumed power and shifted China away from the Maoist course, one of the first things he did was to reach out to capitalists in the diaspora.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Shelly Chan is Associate Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studies Chinese migrant networks and circulations across China and Asia. Her new book, Diaspora’s Homeland (Duke 2018), brings together Chinese history and diaspora studies by examining how Chinese mass emigration changed China. To interpret this fragmented yet networked history, Chan develops the concepts “diaspora time” and “diaspora moments” to call attention to temporality in diaspora and historical studies. This book is shortlisted for the ICAS prize for the Humanities English edition (2019). Chan’s work has also appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies and The Journal of Chinese Overseas. Her current research is entitled “The Chinese South Seas (Nanyang): A History of Modern Asia.” Shelly Chan received her Ph.D. in History from the University of California-Santa Cruz and briefly taught at the University of Victoria in Canada before joining UW-Madison.

REGISTRATION

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