Chinese diaspora Essays

Chinese diaspora Essays Chinese diaspora Essay Chinese diaspora Essay Today, overseas Chinese communities are found in literally most countries of the world, and they have made significant economic, social and political impact in many of these places. Western social scientists have long postulated that ethnic Chinese communities in Asia have assimilated with their host societies and slowly lost their Chinese identity. On the other hand, all this raises the question of where the loyalties of ethnic Chinese overseas lie. Chinese overseas may owed their loyalty to host governments. This position has modified somewhat with the growth of Chinas economy. Benedict Anderson has argued that the nation is an imagined political community. Nationalism hence can be seen as a movement which includes the construction of the idea of the nation, and the identification of the communities which belong and dont belong to it.(Anderson,1983) As Singapores foreign minister, George Yeo said The idea and ideal of One China are deeply embedded in the Chinese mind. This cultural identification that inspires pride in Chinas recent achievements it has increasingly made use of ethnic Chinese business and political contacts to further its influence in Southeast Asia. Did the links between ethnic Chinese and their motherland be cut off? Did Chinese communities play any roles in internal and external relations respectively within both their host and homeland? If they do, how and what are the implications it brings to the inter-state relations, host-homeland and each other in the diasporic network? This paper attempts to analyse how and in what ways the Chinese diaspora interacts with Indonesian ethnic policies towards Chinese. It focuses on the commoditisation of Chineseness and explores the social networking of Chinese diaspora in order to understand how a virtual nation is being constructed.  2. Literature review  2.1 The process of migration  Migration denotes any movement of human from one location to another and it is usually being divided into international and internal ones. There are many extensive migrations throughout history, in both occasional or permanent manner, depending on historical setting, circumstance and perspective. Migration is an aggregation of individual behaviours into the social forms, usually not being explained by a single or constant theory as it is a combinated competing paradigm with trade-offs between differentiated pull and push factors in distinct circumstances involving some sort of empirical orientation. Ravensteins Law of migration, noticed some similarities of migration caused by economic development in the nintith centries, for examples, it stated that large towns were grow by migrantion more than natural increases, and the theory concluded that migration is always related to economic income maximization. Michael Todaro(1960, in Skeldon, 1997) correlated the concept to the income difference between rural and urban area and regard it as the main factor of migrational movement, in which people would migrant for better paid occupation or job opportunity. Everette Lee(1996 in Skeldon 1997). On the other hand, linked the initiatives of migration to the mutual concessions of pull and push factors, considering people desires with reference to different economic, cultural and political factors. Skeldon(1997) further explained that the migrants preference are not only regarding to profit-maximisation but also risk minimisation through family networks to perpetuating the migration flow, together with access to labour markets and claimed it as the new economics of migration. The risk minimization approach was built upon the segmented market theory which consists of varies sub-groups and hierachy of labours, with different remuneration or fringe benefits, and it is the decision of migrants to choose where to settle. Another strategy the writer gave is family network in which migrants were settled for generations and the risk of unintended consequences would be minimized. The world system theory, by Immanuel Wallerstein, suggested that migration is driven by the global economy through the expansion of Europe by setting up colonies from fifteen century, and resulting in the recent globalization of transnational corporations. There is a core and periphery relationship between European and other, where western countries are seen as leaders of urbanization, therefore this theory is being criticized as Euro-centric bias. 2.2 Problems caused by global migration  Associated with the increasing migrating populations, there leads a Global migration crisis, threatening the sovereignty and cultural integrity of the destination hosts. Migration is often associated with international movements, therefore there may be underlying problems of social or ethnical conflict along with national safety and identity crisis. Migrants, for instance, the politcal refugree of China may result in social unrest by either seeking institutional alternatives of their own motherlands or their hosts, leading to ethnical and political conflicts. Economic migrants who search for benefits from their host may alter the government decision in infrustrutures for the native residents, resulting in uequal distribution of social resources and social burdens. Immigrants, for example colonialists, usually imposed their own living styles to the migration destinations, therefore cultural hegemony will be formed as result. Diasporas may monopolized the economy of their hosts, broadening the rich-poor gap, causing lots of unintended social problems such as racial discrimination, slow down of economic growth, cultural imperialism or economic hegemony. And the problem of diasporas is a serious social issue many countries is facing. 2.3 Definition of Diaspora The term Diaspora, used to be refered specifically to the populations of Jews exiled from Judea by the Babylonians and Roman Empire, has primarily been associated to mass migration of an ethnic population being forced away from its native homelands, induced and dispersed to other corners of the globe usually by political forces(Cohen 1996). Unlike voluntary migrants, diasporas appear to emphasize a compulsory component and rootless identity, diasporas communities often being depicted as victims of involuntary migration by theorists. However, Cohen(1996) and Skeldon(1997) suggested that diasporas approach need to be modified because diasporas communities are not necessarily be victims nowadays as they hold a more active role in creating a new culture of exile which is a kind of strong bonds among the ethnic community and idealized concept of home culture neither be a original nor destination ones. Diasporic communities nowadays have largely altered their way of life to the suiting of their chosen contexts and developed an embiguous force in the society. A de-territorialized identity and link with the land of origin has always been the nature of diasporic identities, they are no longer suppressed ethnic minorities, instead they participate in the economy and society in destination areas and are obviously important to the hosts. There are various ways of thinking about the configuration of transnational diasporas, Sanguin(1994) explained that diasporas could be applied to those ethnic comes from countries where there is still misery, overpopulation, insecurity, dictatorship or religious or racial discrimination, therefore it maybe western-centric biased. Moreover, this word usually represent Oriental or African minorities like Chinese or Indian and is seldom used to describe occidental migrants away from their motherlands, thus the word itself may contain some sense of class discrimination and stereotyping. Diaspora is also a too generalised concept for representing the whole group, not all antecedents of these people were forced to move away from homeland, in doing so, it may not appropriate to use nowadays, instead, transnational ethnic minorities may be more suitable to describe this type of people. Diaspora nowadays somehow no longer only centred on passive involuntary migration but evolved into some new concepts about trading diasporas in 1990s indicated any ethnic groups formed by network of trading communities living in dispersal and yet highly interdependent. They are regarded as stranger merchants established with a host society. Seldon thought that the continued presence of diasporas sometimes be viewed as a threat in the aspect of national security, because these people may seek to destabilize the government in their own area, creating problems within the international system between host and original government. On the other hand, diasporas may to a certain extent, improve the economy of their host countries for example, the dominant economic role of Chinese diasporas in Indonesia. International and internal migrants or diasporas often believed to be having significant impacts on developments because they give rise to transfer of technological improvement and idea inspiration. To cite an example, German scientists and engineers exiled after WWII had significant impacts in later missile and space programmes in USA and USSR. Kotkin(1993) used the statement the making of global tribes to describe the influence to the world by British diasporas that moving out to exploit new opportunities, therefore the expansion of diasporic groups not only responsible for transnationalistic global cultural and economic flow between a core home and periphery away, but also raises critical issues of identity and political participation. According to Skeldon, the refugees gave a tremendous boost to urban growth in the immediate post-war period in Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. However, migration did not cause the rapid development of the East Asian economies and does not rank with the macro-political and economic factors that are so often cited, migration is neither a panacea nor a threat but holding a interrelation which economic development and underdevelopment shape migration, migration, in turn, shapes development, as both concepts often related to the pull and push factors of migration. The key question is how governments can use international migration as a development tool.