“Chinese, but not quite”: Huaqiaoand the Marginalization of the Overseas Chinese

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Soon Keong Ong
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
State Building ◽  
Overseas Chinese ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Nationalist Discourse ◽  
Late Qing ◽  
Chinese Nationalism ◽  
Chinese Nation

Abstract This article reflects on the representations of overseas Chinese in Chinese political and popular discourses from the late Qing to World War II. It argues that contrary to prevalent views, which credit the success of the Chinese nationalist discourse in mobilizing the overseas Chinese to their re-incorporation into the Chinese nation, extraterritorial Chinese nationalism depended not so much on the rhetoric of inclusion, but rather on the separation of the overseas Chinese as a sub-ethnic group, particularly after they were “rebranded” as huaqiao, or Chinese sojourners. This analysis begins by looking at the key reasons for Chinese political activists’ newfound interest in the diasporas — in soliciting huaqiao contributions to China’s state-building projects — and argues that they imbued huaqiao with certain positive qualities only insofar as these made them relevant to China. The truth is, prejudices against the emigrants have persisted and Chinese within China continue to view huaqiao as uncouth, uncultured, and even “unChinese.”

The Elusive Search for Evidence: Evgenii Khaldei’s Budapest Ghetto, Images of Rape, and Soviet Holocaust Photography

Slavic Review ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 76 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-89
Author(s):  
David Shneer
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Social History ◽  
The State ◽  
World War ◽  
Soviet Jews ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

I began studying Soviet photography in the early 2000s. To be more specific, I began studying Soviet photographers, most of whom had “Jewish” written on their internal passports, as I sought to understand how it was possible that a large number of photographers creating images of World War II were members of an ethnic group that was soon to be persecuted by the highest levels of the state. I ended up uncovering the social history of Soviet Jews and their relationship to photography, as I also explored how their training in the 1920s and 1930s shaped the photographs they took during World War II.

Maintaining Modernity

2018 ◽  
pp. 169-205
Author(s):  
Michitake Aso
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Industrial Agriculture ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Power Structures ◽  
World War ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Imperial Power ◽  
Indochina War

Rubber trees helped structure the violent transition from empire to nation-state during nearly thirty years of conflict on the Indochinese peninsula. Chapter 5 focuses on the struggle over plantations that took place in Vietnam and Cambodia between 1945 and 1954. During the First Indochina War, plantation environments served as a key military battleground. In the fighting that took place immediately after the end of World War II, many plantation workers, encouraged by the anticolonial Việt Minh, attacked the rubber trees as symbols of hated colonial-era abuse. Slogans placing the culpability of worker suffering on trees show how plantation workers often treated the trees themselves as enemies. Despite their colonial origins, plantation environments were important material and symbolic landscapes for those seeking to build postcolonial Vietnamese nations. French planters claimed to struggle heroically against nature, Vietnamese workers saw themselves as struggling against both nature and human exploitation, and anticolonial activists articulated struggles against imperial power structures. Industrial agriculture such as rubber was vital to nation-building projects, and by the early 1950s, Vietnamese planners began to envision a time when plantations would form a part of a national economy.

Stalinallee

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Stangl
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
State Building ◽  
Housing Crisis ◽  
World War ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
Housing Issue ◽  
Socialist Realist ◽  
Building Program

For more than a century before the war, debate over the “housing issue” engaged politicians and reformers in Berlin, although Communists refused to participate, seeking revolution rather than reform. After World War II, newly empowered Communists had no choice but to address the housing crisis. Initially they joined others in supporting modernist planning efforts, with a first “residential cell” that would be constructed along Frankfurter Allee in Friedrichshain. The introduction of socialist realism necessitated a halt in construction as new plans for a monumental Stalinallee were developed. This formed the centerpiece of the state building program until the 1953 Uprising, which along with a shift to industrialized construction in the Soviet Union would result in a search for a new “socialist architecture.” As a result, the section of the street between Straussbergerplatz and Alexanderplatz would be built combining some socialist-realist tenets with modernism, while highlighting technological power.

A Muslim Vision for the Chinese Nation: Chinese Pilgrimage Missions to Mecca during World War II

2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yufeng Mao
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
North China ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
Global Politics ◽  
World War ◽  
Muslim Population ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
The Republic

In the late 1930s, three groups of Sino-Muslims went on hajj trips to Mecca. Two of them represented the Republic of China, while one represented the puppet government in Japanese-occupied North China. Reflecting the political importance of the Muslim population in the Sino-Japanese struggle, each group engaged in propaganda efforts for its government. However the Sino-Muslims who participated in these missions were not merely the passive pawns of Chinese authorities. Rather, archival material and published sources in Chinese and Arabic show that Sino-Muslims actively used these missions to advance a vision of the Chinese nation in which Muslims would play an important role in domestic and foreign affairs. This vision was based on a particular understanding of global politics which allowed Sino-Muslim elites to reconcile the transnational characteristic of Islam with loyalty to the territorially bound “Chinese nation.”

Mothers, Sons and Lovers: Fidelity and Frugality in the Overseas Chinese Divided Family Before 1949

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-64
Author(s):  
Michael Szonyi
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Female Sexuality ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Family Management ◽  
Overseas Chinese ◽  
World War ◽  
Chinese Men ◽  
The Family ◽  
Married Men ◽  
Bodies Of Evidence

AbstractThe predominance of men, including married men, among Overseas Chinese emigrants gave rise to a distinctive family structure, in which the male emigrant lived apart from his wife and other family members who remained back home in China. This article considers two very different bodies of evidence, archives concerning Overseas Chinese efforts to recover property lost during World War II and magazines and newspapers published for Overseas Chinese in North America and Southeast Asia, in order to discuss tensions within the Overseas Chinese divided family in the early twentieth century. Family members who remained in China came to play important roles in the management of the family estate, including remittance-funded investments. Heightened anxiety about female sexuality and the trustworthiness of family members in general reflected the concern of absent Overseas Chinese men that their family members back home might make decisions about family management that were different than those desired by the migrants themselves.

What Is This “Chinese” in Overseas Chinese? Sojourn Work and the Place of China's Minority Nationalities in Extraterritorial Chinese-ness

2012 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 423-446 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Vasantkumar
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Diaspora ◽  
Overseas Chinese ◽  
Chinese Community ◽  
Qing Empire ◽  
Late Imperial ◽  
Chinese Nationalism ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Imperial Expansion ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiethnic Populations

This essay argues that to adequately answer the question its title poses, anthropological approaches to national and transnational China(s) must be grounded in the history of Qing imperial expansion. To this end, it compares and explores the connections between three examples of the “sojourn work” that has gone into making mobile, multiethnic populations abroad into Overseas Chinese. The first example deals with recent official attempts to project the People's Republic of China's multiethnic vision of Chinese-ness beyond its national borders. The second highlights the importance of the early Chinese nation-state in the making of Overseas Chinese community in Southeast Asia in the first decades of the twentieth century. The final case foregrounds the late imperial routes of nascent Chinese nationalism to argue that, in contrast to much of the current rhetoric on the Chinese “diaspora,” national and transnational modes of Chinese community emerged together from the ruins of the Qing empire. Together the three examples point to the need to question the usual ways scholars have conceptualized (Overseas) Chinese-ness.

scholarly journals The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia: Select Papers from the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symposia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan N. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Building ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Confederate States Of America ◽  
World War ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
Mail Service

<p>Writers in the field of postal history have incredibly diverse interests and approaches. As a result, the postal history symposia have been organized around themes. The three themes represented in papers here are mail and the Civil War (2012), the development of transoceanic air mail service (2014), and the influence of postal treaties on post office reforms (2016).</p><p>The American Civil War affected mail in many ways, particularly in the Confederate States of America, which faced the challenge of quickly developing its own postal system, as well as shortages of supplies, including paper. The mail itself can be used to tell the story of the conflict through the examination of patriotic and propaganda images on envelopes and through the study of shifts in mail routes and practices as the war progressed.</p><p>The histories of aviation and of mail delivery are intertwined. Pressure to deliver mail faster and more efficiently helped to propel investment in aviation innovations. In turn, developments in flight opened new possibilities for carrying the mail. The development of transoceanic air mail from its very early days in the 1920s through the rise of military air mail services during World War II is examined.</p><p> Throughout much of history, mail has been the primary means of communication both within and between nations; thus, the regulations and agreements concerning what may be mailed, and for what cost, have had a profound effect on a population’s access to information. Postal reform, and particularly the creation of national postal systems, required that immediate needs as well as political and economic visions of the future be considered and addressed legally and structurally during state-building. Cases of the United States in the revolutionary era and Brazil in the nineteenth century are examined here.<br></p>

scholarly journals The Winton M. Blount Postal History Symposia: Select Papers from the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Symposia

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan N. Smith
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Building ◽  
Access To Information ◽  
Confederate States Of America ◽  
World War ◽  
Revolutionary Era ◽  
Primary Means ◽  
Mail Service

<p>Writers in the field of postal history have incredibly diverse interests and approaches. As a result, the postal history symposia have been organized around themes. The three themes represented in papers here are mail and the Civil War (2012), the development of transoceanic air mail service (2014), and the influence of postal treaties on post office reforms (2016).</p><p>The American Civil War affected mail in many ways, particularly in the Confederate States of America, which faced the challenge of quickly developing its own postal system, as well as shortages of supplies, including paper. The mail itself can be used to tell the story of the conflict through the examination of patriotic and propaganda images on envelopes and through the study of shifts in mail routes and practices as the war progressed.</p><p>The histories of aviation and of mail delivery are intertwined. Pressure to deliver mail faster and more efficiently helped to propel investment in aviation innovations. In turn, developments in flight opened new possibilities for carrying the mail. The development of transoceanic air mail from its very early days in the 1920s through the rise of military air mail services during World War II is examined.</p><p> Throughout much of history, mail has been the primary means of communication both within and between nations; thus, the regulations and agreements concerning what may be mailed, and for what cost, have had a profound effect on a population’s access to information. Postal reform, and particularly the creation of national postal systems, required that immediate needs as well as political and economic visions of the future be considered and addressed legally and structurally during state-building. Cases of the United States in the revolutionary era and Brazil in the nineteenth century are examined here.<br></p>

scholarly journals State-Building after Disaster: Jiang Tingfu and the Reconstruction of Post-World War II China, 1943–1949

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 176-206
Author(s):  
Rana Mitter
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Civil War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
State Building ◽  
Humanitarian Relief ◽  
World War ◽  
Post World War Ii ◽  
Chinese Civil War ◽  
New Thinking

AbstractPost-World War II reconstruction in Europe and Asia is a topic of growing interest, but relatively little attention has been paid to the relief and rehabilitation effort in China in the immediate post-1945 period. This article reassesses the postwar program implemented by the Chinese Nationalist (Guomindang) government and the UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), not just in terms of humanitarian relief, but also as part of a process that led to new thinking about the nature of the postwar state in Asia. It focuses on the ideas and actions of Jiang Tingfu (T. F. Tsiang), head of the Chinese National Relief and Rehabilitation Administration that worked with UNRRA. Chinese ideas for reconstruction in China were simultaneously statist, international, and transnational, and were shaped by high modern ideas drawn from Soviet and American examples. They were also influenced by China's poverty and wartime vulnerability, which made locally directed solutions more relevant in areas such as public hygiene. Success was unlikely because of the incipient Chinese Civil War and the huge demands of reconstruction on a state that was near-destitute, with a destroyed infrastructure. Nonetheless, its characteristics still bear examination as a first, tentative chapter in a longer story of post-imperialist and Cold War state-building that would shape countries in Asia and beyond.

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