Note: This essay by my friend A.L. was originally published in Abolitionist Approaches to Hate Crime (ed. Remember & Resist, 2021). I asked A.L.’s permission to republish this as an individual post on my blog because there’s very little public-facing information on this topic. I’ve reproduced it completely with some light formatting for this blog; I have not checked if links still work.

The piece looks at numerous contradictions in the idea of a “Chinese diaspora” in a UK context. It’s wonderfully different from the usual sort of writing you get about this subject. A.L.’s writing provides a refreshing perspective and pursues a line of inquiry that refuses any easy answers about liberal belonging or an ineffable, cod-philosophical, essential cultural Chinese identity.

Thank you for allowing me to re-post your work, A.L.! I am honoured to have it on my blog.

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Against diaspora – has ethnic identity failed to organise? A.L.

Following the surge in racist attacks against Asian communities since the pandemic began and the recent mass killing in Atlanta, people from Asian communities are more and more aware of the power of collective action. I have both seen and participated in discussions on organising — how to organize, who to organize with, in what way organising could serve the communities in need. There is also a very important debate on unity vs division in the anti-Asian violence effort¹.

Last year between summer and fall, I did some fieldwork for my dissertation in a Chinese takeaway in north London, where the owner, Huang, and two undocumented workers, Lin and Chen, work 10 hours per day, 7 days a week. Starting off with the intention to learn more about this under-theorised workforce in the UK and reflect on my own ethnic/national identity through comparative efforts, I proceeded to critique the use of ethnic identity as an organizing principle. I hope that my work can contribute to the current discussions and below is the final chapter of my dissertation.

Aihwa Ong argues terms like ‘model minority’ and the ‘underclass’ are economic terms standing in for racial ones.² The conflation is the result of associating perceived racial contributions with liberal conceptions of citizenship: who deserves to belong would depend on productivity and consumption. Despite being commonly classified as ‘model minority’ (with all the upward social mobility and educational success stories), Chinese people were often associated with the images of illegal immigrants, snakeheads, gangmasters, exploitation, and bogus-asylum seekers, and these connotations were drummed up even by the relatively compassionate and left-leaning The Guardian when the Morecambe Bay tragedy happened.³

The embodiment of both ends of this ‘model minority’ and ‘underclass’ continuum could be traced back to a lot of things, including migration histories, the dynamics between the established community and newcomers, individual background, including their class, gender, the social capital and cultural capital they brought with them, and UK immigration policies.⁴⁵

Power and resources are not evenly distributed among the ethnic Chinese ‘community’. The ‘not causing a fuss’, ‘model minority’ characteristics of the Chinese communities described in Daniel York Loh’s monologue,⁶ however, are commonly displayed both by those who “made it” and by those who still struggle to survive. David Parker points out that a lot of male elites in the Chinese community subscribe to the ‘model minority’ worldview, including working hard and downplaying social problems.⁷ The ‘illegal migrants’, who are often associated with low-skilled labour, stay quiet and hidden because they fear the possibility of being deported with outstanding debt, and even if they have paid off debts, going home might mean losing an income that has given them or their family a better life.

In academia, although the loosely-termed ‘Chinese diaspora’ is quite commonly accepted to denote ethnic Chinese dispersed outside of their homelands, not a few voices are raised against this concept. Wang Gungwu has said in a lecture that he has used the term ‘diaspora’ for ‘dispersed Chinese communities’ with great reluctance and regret, since it carries the wrong connotation. The fears of ‘the yellow peril’ or Chinese domination persist, even hidden behind phrases like ‘Chinese diaspora’.⁸

Shu-mei Shih is also against the idea of Chinese diaspora, but for different reasons.⁹ For Shih, the ‘Chinese diaspora’ reinforces the perpetual otherness and foreignness under the western gaze, hence one could never be ‘local’, and most importantly, the term is simply tied too closely with the nationalistic, historically imperial Chinese state. Studies have explored how ‘overseas Chinese’ was used officially as a recognition of the ties between people considered ‘ethnic Chinese’ and the government and territory of China, both in the early Republic of China and the later People’s Republic of China.¹⁰ But for the new migrants after the 1980s particularly, the Chinese state has produced a collective Chinese identity that is divorced from the territorial limits of the nation-state. It has done so through actively engaging in the transnational community, encouraging the ‘new diaspora’ to contribute to the home country from afar, promoting a Chineseness that is both global but also tightly woven with PRC – expatriating can still be patriotic.¹¹

I’m interested in ‘against diaspora’, however, precisely because I found how fragmented and actually ‘dispersed’ the so-called Chinese community is and how ethnicity, or even sub-ethnicity, could not unify people automatically in times of crisis, for example, when facing the surging racist attacks that happened and is still happening during the pandemic. Shih tries to debunk the use of Chineseness as an organising principle in Chinese diaspora studies, but I wonder why the Chinese ‘community’ are so scarcely organised here in the UK.¹² Shih’s analysis does not acknowledge the impact of class differences in the fragmentation of the Chinese community – I thought of the workers, and how they viewed themselves as the ‘lowest class’ in the UK, and who were aware of the inaccessibility of those guilds designated for ‘overseas Chinese’. 

Huang had expressed nationalistic and even militant views regarding the politics of China (e.g., “if China sends troops to Hong Kong, Hong Kong will be reclaimed in no time”), and he didn’t dread the Communist Party like Loh did – he once told me that the Communist Party did some good and some bad, but the overall outcome was good: the Communist Party improved people’s lives. For some, this might prove the effectiveness of the Chinese government’s long-distance nationalism project. Without realizing it, I actually went into the field ready to witness the observation made in that Global Times article mentioned before—“The patriotism felt toward China by Fujianese immigrants … is greater than that of any other Chinese immigrant in the US as far as I can see”.¹³ But the categories like ‘patriotic’ or ‘nationalistic’ seem way too crude to me now. For the workers I interviewed, the Chineseness they grasped through their own experience and what was happening in the homeland, which they mainly learned about through Chinese social media, was not simply the result of the Chinese state’s transnational state-building. 

The restaurant, the ‘island’, was where the workers spent most of their time. After work, Huang would go back to his east London home, but the other two workers lived just upstairs of the restaurant, so they didn’t need to go anywhere else – the restaurant became an infrastructure that both protected them and isolated them from the outside world. Although Lin spoke more English than the other workers in the restaurant as someone who was university-educated, he sometimes couldn’t understand when the customers asked him about things beyond ordering food. Huang’s tattoos of his children’s name were the embodiment of his ‘cosmopolitan’ side: he was happy to tattoo the romanised version of the names simply because they looked better that way, and he trusted a ‘ghost’ tattoo artist.¹⁴ But for him, the cultural gap between the ‘ghosts’ and Chinese was too big to bridge. There weren’t that many cosmopolitan events and activities in the workers’ life apart from selling Chinese food to all the black, brown, and white British people.

Apart from the restaurant, the workers don’t belong anywhere else. They might have kinship networks in the UK ready for them when they first got here, but since a lot of the migrant workers might be only sojourning – for example, for Huang’s father, settlement was not realistic and thus he went home – the networks could be quite weak. Although Chinese state agencies encourage the formation of migrant organisations based on province of origin or by profession,¹⁵ the actual situation is that for the less prominent or successful migrants, these communities almost have nothing to do with them, although they are aware of the existence of these communities. When I asked Huang’s wife if they participated in activities held by their tóng xiang huì (谿券삔, townsman association) or if they had any connections with the association, Huang’s wife said no – “We take care of everything by ourselves, we don’t need anything from them.” For the workers, whether it’s employers’ exploitation or racist attacks, problems are to be solved on an individual basis.

Scholars have pointed out the racial and class undertones of numerous immigration policies of the UK¹⁶  – it didn’t begin with Theresa May’s ‘Hostile Environment’. From the 1962 Commonwealth Act, to the point-based system in use today that has chained migrants to their sponsors (mainly employers), the tightening control of immigration has rendered migrants, especially undocumented and ‘low-skilled’ ones, who are largely non-white and from lower-class, vulnerable. The studies of Beck and Pai¹⁷ suggest that the anti-trafficking policies and the ‘immigration raids’ are either far from effective in regulating labour providers, or have made migrants more exploitable and made it harder for the migrants to get jobs. 

I want to point out that the ‘illegal immigrant’ narrative doesn’t come solely from the UK government and media, but also from the Chinese government. In this sense, China complies with the UK in commodifying migrants, classifying migrants with their relative contributions. In a podcast by the Remember the Essex 39 Campaign (2020), Jabez Lam, manager of Hackney Chinese Community Centre, talked about the battle of narratives he encountered back in 2000 when dealing with the government officials:

At that time the main narratives from the Home Secretary and Shadow Home Secretary are quite the same: both of them are emphasis on the illegal entrance, emphasis on that evil trade of trafficking. The Chinese government also rephrased the same narrative, what they are saying is that they were illegal emigrants, and the evil trade of trafficking.

The workers I interviewed have no rights or willingness to organise or participate in the UK’s political life. Or in China’s – maybe apart from closely watching it from afar. The most important thing for the workers, even after arriving in the UK for more than 10 years, is still to work and survive. For now, Huang owns the takeaway restaurant, and the workers still have stable jobs; they don’t need to juggle multiple jobs in the gig economy. However, the pandemic has hit the whole Chinese catering business hard. The government helped Huang’s restaurant with a £10,000 grant, but Huang wasn’t feeling hopeful or optimistic. 

China is the homeland that these workers care about and are deeply attached to, but they couldn’t see themselves having good prospects in their homeland, apart from maybe going back for retirement. They knew they were at the bottom of the social hierarchy in the host country they were living in, but they wouldn’t simply be better off back home. They are no longer considered young; the culinary skills they learned here are not ‘transferable’, because no one in China would like the modified, westernized Chinese takeaway food. The market is too competitive in China, and the living expenses are too high – although they didn’t have to spend much in the UK largely because they worked long hours and didn’t have time or even that many acquaintances to socialize with. Nyiri says that the new Chinese migrants who felt disenfranchised at home, might feel being heard or acknowledged as an ‘overseas Chinese’ through participating in the state-building from abroad.¹⁸ I don’t see that much actual participation of the workers: after all they are not part of ‘the club’ of those who have wealth and status. Nonetheless, a sense of belonging might be found in the ‘imagined community’¹⁹ that is extended to them via technology in their mere leisure time—WeChat, Douyin, Kuaishou. 

While there may be different forms of organising and protesting against racism happening in the UK right now, among the Chinese community, or even the East Asian and Southeast Asian communities, the organizing rarely reaches Chinese migrant workers that don’t have good English skills and whose (virtual) social space is largely Chinese social media, at least from my observation. The imagination of being (or not being) Chinese varies on this ‘model minority-illegal immigrants’ continuum, due to the differences in class, social capital, cultural capital, due to the politics in the imagined or real homeland. The in-betweenness felt by a British-born Chinese person is different from the in-betweenness felt by a Fujianese migrant worker, and the latter might have less say about being a Chinese in Britain. 

By studying the daily life and the personal history as well as the collective history of these Fujianese migrant workers of a Chinese takeaway restaurant; by comparing their narrations with what is said about the new Chinese migrant cohort in the account of the UK government, the media, and the academic studies, and with what is expressed by the descendants of the ‘old-timers’, the ‘Chinese diaspora’ who are no longer attached to the Chinese state; by putting their stories against a broader background of UK immigration policies, I come to the conclusion that the Chinese ethnic identity is not an adequate ‘organising principle’, whether in diaspora studies or in real life. But the reason behind this is not only about the abstract differences between sub-ethnic identities, but also about class, about the material conditions. The host country’s immigration policies and the homeland’s emigration policies have together shaped the migration history and classified the deserving and undeserving migrants, which affected both the migrants’ way of living and also their perception of identity. Chineseness is one thing that the workers could hold onto via their homeland’s social media but never get the chance to define and express in a ‘cosmopolitan’ way. At the very end of this essay, I would like to ask something that could be further discussed and studied in the future: is there any possibility for the Chinese community in the UK to organise against racial injustice and the Hostile Environment, and if there is, how? 

Footnotes

1. See Promise Li’s ‘ Fighting anti-Asian violence cannot include apologism for the Chinese state’ for Lausan [https://lausan.hk/2021/fighting-anti-asian-violence/] ↩︎
2. Ong, A. (1996). Cultural Citizenship as Subject-Making: Immigrants Negotiate Racial and Cultural Boundaries in the United States, in Current Anthropology, Vol. 37, No. 5 ↩︎
3. Pieke, F. (2004). Chinese Globalization and Migration to Europe. (working paper) ↩︎
4. Beck, S. (2007). Meeting on the margins: Cantonese ‘old-timers’ and Fujianese ‘newcomers’, in Population and Space, Vol 13, No. 2  ↩︎
5. Ong, A. (1999). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Duke University Press. 
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6. See No Time For Fears [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSY04KJcbuk]  ↩︎
7. Parker D. (1998) Chinese People in Britain: Histories, Futures and Identities. In: The Chinese in Europe. Palgrave MacMillan. 
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8. See footnote 3 ↩︎
9. Shih, S. (2010). Against Diaspora: The Sinophone as Places of Cultural Production. In: Global Chinese Literature. Brill 
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10. Suryadinata, L. (2001) Elections and Politics in Indonesia. ISEAS Publishing; Schiller N.G. (2005). Long-Distance Nationalism. In: Encyclopedia of Diasporas. Springer; Barabantseva, E. (2011). Overseas Chinese, Ethnic Minorities and Nationalism: De-Centering China. Routledge 
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11. Nyiri, P. (2001). Expatriating is patriotic? The discourse on “new migrants” in the People’s Republic of China and identity construction among recent migrants from the PRC. Journal of Migration and Ethnic Studies, Vol 27, No. 4 ↩︎
12. Of course, there has been, and there is still actual organizing regarding migrant rights and racial justice within the Chinese community, for example, a campaigning community organisation called Chinese Information and Advice Centre (CIAC) mentioned by Parker (see footnote 7). Also, in 2001, around 1,000 people attended a protest against the surging racism during the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak. ↩︎
13.  Rong, X. (2019). Migrants death shows lack of understanding. [https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1168590.shtml] ↩︎
14. The “ghost”— gui lao in Mandarin or gweilo in Cantonese, written in simplified Chinese as “鬼佬”—a slur for “the Westerners”, particularly white people, which can be used in a derogatory sense or as a general descriptor.  ↩︎
15. See footnote 11 ↩︎
16. Goodfellow, M. (2020). Hostile Environment: How Immigrants Became Scapegoats. Verso; Pai, H.-H. (2008). Chinese whispers : the true story behind Britain’s hidden army of labour. Penguin.  ↩︎
17. See footnotes 5 and 16. ↩︎
18. See footnote 11
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19. See Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities. Verso.
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