<i>Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong: Family and Enterprise in an Overseas Chinese Community</i> (review)

AbstractDalforce, or the Singapore Overseas Chinese Volunteer Army as it was more popularly known among the Chinese community, was a hastily formed volunteer army created just before the fall of Singapore in February 1942. It was made up of 1,000–3,000 Chinese volunteers from all walks of life and political persuasions. Dalforce companies, armed with limited weapons and ammunition, were sent to defend the different fronts of Singapore Island after only a short stint of training. The soldiers of Dalforce, alongside the Australian, Indian and British armies, fought the Japanese invasion during the Battle for Singapore. The Overseas Chinese community in Singapore saw Dalforce as a medium through which they could join in the struggle, together with their comrades in China, against an aggressive and belligerent Japan. This small army became a symbol of something their comrades in China failed to truly achieve — the ability to unite in one force against a common enemy. The exploits of this little army became an Overseas Chinese legend.

Download Full-text

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

The Journal of Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0021911812000113 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 71 (2) ◽

pp. 423-446 ◽

Cited By ~ 9

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.

Download Full-text

Reterritorialization of a Balinese Chinese Community in Quanzhou, Fujian

Modern Asian Studies ◽

10.1017/s0026749x0800382x ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 44 (3) ◽

pp. 547-566 ◽

Cited By ~ 8

Author(s):

TAN CHEE-BENG

Keyword(s):

Overseas Chinese ◽

Chinese Community ◽

Cultural Life ◽

The People ◽

Special Category

AbstractThis paper is about a special category of guiqiao or ‘returned overseas Chinese’, in southern Fujian. Arriving in China from Bali, Indonesia in 1961, the people were settled in an overseas Chinese farm. The paper illustrates how the re-migrants coped with life in China and how they see themselves today. The returned overseas Chinese reterritorize their Indonesian and Balinese cultural life in China, and they, including the local-born children, speak Balinese and eat Indonesian food. Their experiences provide much food for thought on acculturation, migration and identity as well as on the idea of ‘homeland’.

Download Full-text

The Formation and Development of the Overseas Chinese Community - Focused on the Southeast Asian Overseas Chinese Community -

JOURNAL OF CHINESE HUMANITIES ◽

10.35955/jch.2018.12.70.279 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 70 ◽

pp. 279-304

Author(s):

Ju-A Kim

Keyword(s):

Southeast Asian ◽

Overseas Chinese ◽

Chinese Community

Download Full-text

Congregations and Associations: the Political Structure of the Chinese Community in Phnom-Penh, Cambodia

Comparative Studies in Society and History ◽

10.1017/s001041750000534x ◽

1969 ◽

Vol 11 (3) ◽

pp. 282-301 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

W. E. Willmott

Keyword(s):

Comparative Analysis ◽

Southeast Asia ◽

Urban Communities ◽

Social Economic ◽

Small Scale ◽

The Political ◽

Overseas Chinese ◽

Chinese Community ◽

Political Structure ◽

Phnom Penh

The study of overseas Chinese has continued for some time as a series of somewhat unrelated monographs with little comparative analysis. One of the few important attempts at sociological generalization about Chinese communities in Southeast Asia was made by Maurice Freedman in an article entitled ‘Immigrants and Associations’, which appeared in this journal in 1960. In this article, Freedman suggested that ‘the associations which in a small-scale and relatively underdeveloped settlement express social, economic and political links in an undifferentiated form, tend, as the scale and complexity of the society increase, to separate into a network of associations which are comparatively specialized in their functions and the kinds of solidarity they express’ (Freedman, 1960: 47 f.). He proposed a continuum of types of overseas Chinese urban communities. At one end stands Kuching, Sarawak, ‘as the model of a simple and relatively small-scale overseas settlement’, while ‘Later Singapore is … the model of the most developed form of immigrant Chinese settlement in Southeast Asia’ (ibid.: 45). Singapore exhibits a great number of associations, based on criteria of recruitment that allow memberships to overlap to a great extent; the urban Chinese community in Sarawak includes fewer associations and consequently less overlap among memberships. Other studies in Southeast Asia suggest that this continuum might be a useful way of looking at the development of Chinese communities.

Download Full-text