Ethnographic and theoretical accounts of the transnational practices of Chinese elites, showing how they constitute a dispersed Chinese public, but also how they reinforce the strength of capital and the state.
This book picks up where author Vanessa Fong left off in Only Hope: Coming of Age under China's One-Child Policy (Stanford, 2004), and continues by telling the stories of the Chinese youth who left China in their teens and 20s to study in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, North America, or Singapore. Fong examines the expectations and experiences of Chinese students who go abroad in search of opportunity, and the factors that cause some to return to China and others to stay abroad.
Anthropological reflections on citizenship focus on themes such as politics, ethnicity and state management. Present day scholarship on citizenship tends to problematise, unsettle and contest often taken-for- granted conventional connotations and associations of citizenship with imagined culturally bounded political communities of rigidly controlled borders. This book, the result of two years of research conducted by South African and Japanese scholars within the framework of a bilateral project on citizenship in the 21st century, contributes to such ongoing efforts at rethinking citizenship globally, and as informed by experiences in Africa and Japan in particular. Central to the essays in this book is the concept of flexible citizenship, predicated on a recognition of the histories of mobility of people and cultures, and of the shaping and reshaping of places and spaces, and ideas of being and belonging in the process. The book elucidates the contingency of political membership, relationship between everyday practices and political membership, and how citizenship is the mechanism for claiming and denying rights to various political communities. ‘Self’ requires ‘others’ to construct itself, a reality that is subject to renegotiation as one continues to encounter others in a world characterised by myriad forms of interconnecting mobilities, both global and local. Citizenship is thus to be understood within a complex of power relationships that include ones formed by laws and economic regimes on a local scale and beyond. Citizenship in Africa, Japan and, indeed, everywhere is best explored productively as lying between the open-ended possibilities and tensions interconnecting the global and local.
From the award-winning author of Waiting and War Trash: an urgent, timely novel that follows an aspiring author, an outrageous book idea, and a lone journalist's dogged quest for truth in the Internet age. New York, 2005. Chinese expatriate Feng Danlin is a fiercely principled reporter at a small news agency that produces a website read by the Chinese diaspora around the world. Danlin's explosive exposés have made him legendary among readers--and feared by Communist officials. But his newest assignment may be his undoing: investigating his ex-wife, Yan Haili, an unscrupulous novelist who has willingly become a pawn of the Chinese government in order to realize her dreams of literary stardom. Haili's scheme infuriates Danlin both morally and personally--he will do whatever it takes to expose her as a fraud. But in outing Haili, he is also provoking her powerful political allies, and he will need to draw on all of his journalistic cunning to emerge from this investigation with his career--and his life--still intact. A brilliant, darkly funny story of corruption, integrity, and the power of the pen, The Boat Rocker is a tour de force of modern fiction.
In the last two decades, Chinese transnationalism has become a distinctive domain within the new "flexible" capitalism emerging in the Asia-Pacific region. Ungrounded Empires maps this domain as the intersection of cultural politics and global capitalism, drawing on recent ethnographic research to critique the impact of late capitalism's institutions--flexibility, travel, subcontracting, multiculturalism, and mass media--upon transnational Chinese subjectives. Interweaving anthropology and cultural studies with interpretive political economy, these essays offer a wide range of perspectives on "overseas Chinese" and their unique location in the global arena.
Contrary to predictions that it would become increasingly redundant in a globalizing world, citizenship is back with a vengeance. The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship brings together leading experts in law, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and geography to provide a multidisciplinary, comparative discussion of different dimensions of citizenship: as legal status and political membership; as rights and obligations; as identity and belonging; as civic virtues and practices of engagement; and as a discourse of political and social equality or responsibility for a common good. The contributors engage with some of the oldest normative and substantive quandaries in the literature, dilemmas that have renewed salience in today's political climate. As well as setting an agenda for future theoretical and empirical explorations, this Handbook explores the state of citizenship today in an accessible and engaging manner that will appeal to a wide academic and non-academic audience. Chapters highlight variations in citizenship regimes practiced in different countries, from immigrant states to 'non-western' contexts, from settler societies to newly independent states, attentive to both migrants and those who never cross an international border. Topics include the 'selling' of citizenship, multilevel citizenship, in-between statuses, citizenship laws, post-colonial citizenship, the impact of technological change on citizenship, and other cutting-edge issues. This Handbook is the major reference work for those engaged with citizenship from a legal, political, and cultural perspective. Written by the most knowledgeable senior and emerging scholars in their fields, this comprehensive volume offers state-of-the-art analyses of the main challenges and prospects of citizenship in today's world of increased migration and globalization. Special emphasis is put on the question of whether inclusive and egalitarian citizenship can provide political legitimacy in a turbulent world of exploding social inequality and resurgent populism.
This work tells the story of Cambodians whose route takes them from refugee camps to California's inner-city and high-tech enclaves. We see these refugees becoming new citizen-subjects through a dual process of being made and self-making, balancing religious salvation and entrepreneurial values.
This book provides a detailed account of transnational practices undertaken by Indian ‘high-tech’ workers living in the United States. It describes the complexities and challenges of adapting to a new culture while clinging to tradition. Asian-Indians represent a significant part of the professional and ‘high-tech’ workforce in the United States, and the majority are temporary workers, working on contractual jobs (H1-B and L1 work visa category). Further, it is not unusual for Indian immigrant workers to marry and have children while working in the U.S. Gradually, they learn to negotiate the U.S. cultural terrain in both their place of work and at home in the U.S. As such there is the potential that they will become transnational, developing new identities and engaging in cultural and social practices from two different nations: India and the U.S. Against this background, the book describes the nature and extent of transnational practices adopted by high-tech Indian workers employed in the United States on temporary work visas. The study reveals that the temporary stay of these professionals and their families in the U.S. necessitates day-to-day balancing of two cultures in terms of food, clothing, recreation, and daily activities, creating a transnational lifestyle for these young professionals. Transnational activities at the workplace, which are forced by the work culture of the MNCs that employ them, can be considered as ‘transnationalism from above.’ Simultaneously, being bi-lingual at home, cooking and eating Indian and Western food, socializing with Indian and American friends outside work, and all the cultural activities they perform on a day-to-day basis, indicates ‘transnationalism from below’. The book is of interest to researchers and academics working on issues relating to culture, social change, migration and development.
Since China began its open-door and reform policies in 1978, more than three million Chinese students have migrated to study abroad, and the United States has been their top destination. The recent surge of students following this pattern, along with the rising tide of Chinese middle- and upper-classes' emigration out of China, have aroused wide public and scholarly attention in both China and the US. This book examines the four waves of Chinese student migration to the US since the late 1970s, showing how they were shaped by the profound changes in both nations and by US-China relations. It discusses how student migrants with high socioeconomic status transformed Chinese American communities and challenged American immigration laws and race relations. The book suggests that the rise of China has not negated the deeply rooted "American dream" that has been constantly reinvented in contemporary China. It also addresses the theme of "selective citizenship" – a way in which migrants seek to claim their autonomy - proposing that this notion captures the selective nature on both ends of the negotiations between nation-states and migrants. It cautions against a universal or idealized "dual citizenship" model, which has often been celebrated as a reflection of eroding national boundaries under globalization. This book draws on a wide variety of sources in Chinese and English, as well as extensive fieldwork in both China and the US, and its historical perspective sheds new light on contemporary Chinese student migration and post-1965 Chinese American community. Bridging the gap between Asian and Asian American studies, the book also integrates the studies of migration, education, and international relations. Therefore, it will be of interest to students of these fields, as well as Chinese history and Asian American history more generally.