In recent years, the phenomena and discourses related to China’s “rise” and “rejuvenation” have attracted a great deal of scholarly attention. This heightened awareness of China’s impact outside its borders and around the world coincides with a “transnational” and “global” turn in general historiography. This panel seeks to rethink the historian’s craft and its urgency for the 21^st century by raising questions about the unit, scale, and paradigms of historical analysis. Focusing on Chineseness as a contested category in global circulations, the panel features three decisive points of entry: diasporic history, ocean-based modes of regional differentiation, and indigeneity. Shelly Chan’s paper looks at the historical formation of “the South Seas” to reorient the study of the Chinese diaspora in terms of an alternative framing: the diasporic history of China. Sean Metzger draws on three transnational paradigms—archipelagic, insular, and oceanic—to track the mutability of Chineseness as it assumes different meaning across varying ranges of time and space. Howard Chiang zooms in on the recent history of queer indigenous activism in Sinophone Taiwan and treats the Han-Austronesian relation as a new lens for historicizing racial capitalism and settler colonialism. Taken together, the panel argues that rather than recentering China as a coherent nation-state, a more effective method is to decenter China and Chineseness for the purpose of provincializing a tradition of historiography overdetermined by Western preoccupations.