Moving Peoples and Motion Pictures: Migration in Film and Other Media

Nearly from the start, cinema has registered, dramatized, and produced images of migration and its attendant anxieties. Indeed, movies have been fuelled by the movements of peoples thanks to the striking stories and images these always engender. After glancing at two distinct efforts in the 1960s in which cinema aimed to capture a mass phenomenon for a mass audience (one from Classic Hollywood, the other from the periphery of India), I will interrogate 21st-century strategies to come to terms with what the art form’s limitations may be. Can cinema get its arms around something so complex, multidimensional, and contested as migration? Jia Zhangke’s success in bringing internal Chinese migration to light may not be easily replicated by filmmakers in other nations faced with migration issues that cluster at their borders. Perhaps other art forms are naturally more capable in this regard. To isolate what cinema has done best, however, I will draw attention to films set on the edges of Europe.

Contesting Chineseness

Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of China. While many of these faces of China’s globalization headed for the popular Western destinations of the United States, Australia and Canada, others have been lured by the booming Asian economies. Compared with pre-1949 Chinese migrants, most are wealthier, motivated by a variety of concerns beyond economic survival and loyal to the communist regime. The reception of new Chinese migrants, however, has been less than warm in some places. In Singapore, tensions between Singaporean-Chinese and new Chinese arrivals present a puzzle: why are there tensions between ethnic Chinese settlers and new Chinese arrivals despite similarities in phenotype, ancestry and customs? Drawing on rich empirical data from ethnography and digital ethnography, Contesting Chineseness investigates this puzzle and details how ethnic Chinese subjects negotiate their identities in an age of contemporary Chinese migration and China’s ascent.

Imperatives, Impossibilities, and Intimacies in the Imperial Archive: Chinese Men and Women of Colour in Early Nineteenth-Century Trinidad

In this article, I elaborate on Lisa Lowe’s “intimacies as method” by examining the case of 198 Chinese men conscripted to Trinidad in 1806. I argue that tracing Chinese migration to the Caribbean in the early nineteenth century demonstrates that the British empire began to imagine new hierarchies of unfreedom for people of Asian and African descent before the abolition of chattel slavery. British imperial actors hoped that Chinese men would assume a mediating function between white planters and the extant population of colour in Trinidad. This vision was predicated on the assumption that the migrants would partner with women of colour to form heterosexual intimacies while also refraining from other forms of socio-political contact with Afro-Trinidadians. Lowe’s intimacies as method guides my navigation of the imperial archive and, in particular, compels me to think relationally about differentially colonized and racialized sub jects in early nineteenth-century Trinidad, both as they were positioned in the colony and as they refused these stereotypes, brokering their own transactions and collaborations.

Capitalizing on Opportunities during the Covid-19 Pandemic

This article analyses business transitions among Chinese immigrant entrepreneurs in France during the Covid-19 pandemic. Drawing on a historical overview of the development of ethnic Chinese businesses over the last century and an empirical study carried out in five different industrial sectors (import and export, retail, catering, hotel, and tobacco) of the French economy, we examine what challenges these entrepreneurs have faced during the pandemic, what strategies they have adopted in response to these challenges, and what has enabled them to shift business patterns and commercial practices in this unprecedented situation. Our findings show that the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the transition of Chinese immigrant entrepreneurship in France, from offline operations to digital business. However, the pandemic may not be the direct cause of this business transition; rather, it has created unique conditions which facilitate the transition. Before the pandemic, some Chinese entrepreneurs had already made or partially made the transition to “integrating online and offline businesses,” “hiring beyond Chinese ethnic networks,” and “paying attention to the local country’s policy directions,” which helped them greatly reduce the negative impacts of the pandemic. During the pandemic, two unprecedented business opportunities were opened up: “fostering local production” and “seeking low-risk sectors,” which some Chinese entrepreneurs have proactively pursued since April/May 2020. These may be the new trends for Chinese entrepreneurs in France in the future. Theoretically, our study suggests that business transitions among Chinese entrepreneurs in France need to be examined beyond the framework of pure economic rationality, taking into consideration the intersection of new dynamics of Chinese migration into host country and the cross-cultural, cross-institutional, cross-thinking, and cross-border social engagement of the entrepreneurs themselves before, during, and after the pandemic.

Chinese Migration in Poland — an Attempt to Characterize the Migrant Group, Including the Cultural and Educational Perspective of the Young Generation

Chinese Migration in Poland — an Attempt to Characterize the Migrant Group, Including the Cultural and Educational Perspective of the Young GenerationThis article presents selected examples related to everyday school life as experienced by one generation of Chinese immigrants in Poland. Apart from a theoretical framework, the statements and research questions were supported by empirical evidence showing that the process of acquiring Polish language and cultural norms may be a more complex challenge for Chinese immigrants in comparison to other immigrant groups in Poland. Migracja chińska w Polsce — próba charakterystyki grupy ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem młodego pokolenia uczęszczającego obecnie do polskich szkółCelem artykułu jest przedstawienie migracji chińskiej w Polsce, w tym pokolenia uczęszczającego obecnie do polskich szkół. Na przykładzie wybranej grupy uczniów podjęto próbę wykazania, z jakimi trudnościami o charakterze językowym i kulturowym mogą borykać się młodzi imigranci na drodze trudnej adaptacji w nowym kraju osiedlenia. Oprócz części teoretycznej, tekst zawiera także część badawczą, która ukazuje, jak złożony może być proces nabywania polszczyzny oraz norm kulturowych przez młodzież pochodzącą spoza Europy.

Ancient DNA Identification of Giant Snakehead (Channa micropeltes) Remains from the Market Street Chinatown and Some Implications for the Nineteenth-Century Pacific World Fish Trade

This study presents the results of ancient DNA analyses of eight snakehead (Channa sp.) bones from the Market Street Chinatown, a nineteenth-century Chinese diaspora archaeological site in San Jose, California. The sequences of a short stretch of the mitochondrial DNA identify the Market Street Chinatown snakeheads as Giant Snakehead (Channa micropeltes), a species native to Southeast Asia. These results provide the first archaeological evidence of the nineteenth-century trade of Asian freshwater fishes to North America, and they reveal that preserved fish products from throughout the Pacific World were readily distributed across the Chinese diaspora. We place our findings within the broader context of nineteenth-century Chinese migration to show how the common Chinese small shareholding business model and access to trade connections facilitated by Chinese-operated import/export firms known as jinshanzhuang allowed Chinese fishers to be successful across the Pacific World. Finally, we suggest avenues for future study by comparing Chinese migration-based, flexible fishing strategies using generalist methods with the highly specialized collection and trade of species like Atlantic Cod (Gadus morhua) in the North Atlantic.

Benevolent technocracy: The Chinese Protectorate, migration control and racialised governmentality in colonised Malaya

The Chinese Protectorate was first established in Singapore in 1877 with the limited objective of preventing abuses in Chinese labour migration, but it evolved multiple functions dedicated to governing Chinese migrants and residents in colonised Malaya. The Protector possessed extensive statutory powers and he was regarded as the official authority on all matters ‘Chinese’. This was an important yet under-studied colonial institution in the history of Chinese migration and settlement in Singapore and Malaysia. This article narrates the history behind the establishment of the Protectorate in the 1870s when ‘racialised governmentality’ of the Chinese population was institutionalised in colonised Malaya. The article underscores the significance of imperial and local contexts of the Protectorate's creation, arguing that it was a product of flexible adaptation of empire-wide practices of ‘protecting’ and governing liberated slaves, indigenous peoples and subsequently, indentured Indian labourers ‘humanely’. It is notable, therefore, that there was a coeval and conjoined discussion of migration control of Chinese as well as Indian labour migrants in Malaya during this period, but this history is hidden from plain sight by popular approaches studying labour migration as components of ethnic diasporas migrating from a single point of origin.