Toward a Diasporic–Decolonial History of China

The study of migration in Chinese history has largely been about the impact of Chinese overseas on China and around the world. For instance, my own work has been part of a broader conversation started by scholars of the overseas Chinese, Asian Americas, and world history. Bringing that together with diaspora studies, I have argued that “diaspora” in the Chinese mode (“huaqiao”) contains an imagined “temporariness,” which helps produce China as a “permanent” homeland-nation undergoing massive transformations. Disjunctures in this relationship lead to “diaspora moments.” Going further, this paper proposes moving from a Chinese history of diaspora toward a diasporic history of China. The former engages in thinking the specificity and diversity of Chinese overseas, as in “Chinese among others” (Kuhn 2008), its key agents being emigrants, settlers, and returnees. The latter conceptualizes Chinese history as a “diasporic world,” without necessarily limiting to the study of emigrants or migration (Sinn 2013). Rather, it follows the trajectory of circulatory processes and lateral connections to question a nested, progressive hierarchy of human agency in spatial and temporal scales. A diasporic history problematizes how scholars have diversified China’s contents without always diversifying its containers, producing an object with great subnational diversity yet also distinct and self-sufficient. It also provides opportunities to challenge binaries in both China-centered history and transnational history – center/periphery, internal/external, overland/overseas. This paper situates these ideas in Nanyang the “South Seas,” a zone of intense coastal interactions between China and Southeast Asia from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. Largely omitted from major historical narratives, the Nanyang had no place in a later construct of landed, discrete nation-states. However, a diasporic history asks why the “China” we write about often had no coasts, and what social and cultural containers we might have lost as a result.