Read her interview.<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\nWang Gungwu believes stems from people conflating Chinese people’s affinity for our own culture as a political identification. He writes,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“Most of them identify themselves with the country where they live. A Chinese in Thailand is first of all a Thai. The confusion is that If you ask them, they tell you that they find it useful to learn Chinese to do business or, it is a way to regain some pride in their culture, to try to understand who were their ancestors. But such attitude does not translate into a political identification.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He talks about how the European concept of a nation-state, which means that in order to be a full citizen, one must have certain characteristics to the exclusion of everything else. However, Chinese people might see more fluidity between these characteristics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Chinese diaspora definition<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
There’s also another aspect to it. Wang Gungwu says that “diaspora” implies wealthy migrants who have a “business acumen and wealth.” Wang observed the migration patterns of the recent centuries and noted that most Chinese migrants were poor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, at the end of the day, Wang Gungwu wants us to stop using the term “diaspora,” assuming you agree with him. Here’s why,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“The word diaspora is in itself an oversimplification and I find personally very alarming that people talk commonly of a Jewish diaspora, an Indian diaspora or a Chinese one, as if the world consist of few ” leagues “. It is simply not true, but unscrupulous people can use such description to build up the image of a new yellow peril … with a lot of imagination, one\u2019s could even end up saying: “The Chinese are coming, the Chinese are coming! “<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“So, I would say that it has to be scrutinized, even from the scholars, I hope they will come out and say : Hey! That\u2019s not what you mean, you use that word for this political purpose, that is not legitimate. Scholars must have to say that.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What do you think?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I used to sling the term “Chinese diaspora” in the same way as “Overseas Chinese” but someone argued that it might be a very damaging term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":343,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/farfromchina.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/farfromchina.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/farfromchina.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farfromchina.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farfromchina.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/farfromchina.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":351,"href":"https:\/\/farfromchina.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336\/revisions\/351"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farfromchina.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/farfromchina.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farfromchina.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/farfromchina.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}