Book Review: Shelly Chan, Diaspora's Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration

Book Review: Shelly Chan, Diaspora's Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration

More than 20 million people left China in the century between 1840-1940, and their journeys and lives across the globe have left significant documentary records for historians to write accounts of various cultural, commercial, familial exchange across borders; many fascinating and rich stories of Chinese overseas have since been recognized as an integral part of various local and national histories--especially in the Americas, postcolonial Southeast Asia, and South China. However, as historian Shelly Chan proposes in her recent book Diaspora’s Homeland: Modern China in the Age of Global Migration--the question that remains unasked is how this massive wave of out-migration over the course of a century, changed China? To be sure, there is a sizeable body of scholarship which has ably demonstrated how migration did indeed transform families, commercial networks, interpersonal relationships--many of which did Yet, returning to the question of how mass emigration “changed China” does not necessarily entail a Sinocentric view of China-as-homeland as the migrant’s principal preoccupation; instead, Chan seeks to underscore how claims such as diaspora and homeland are negotiated, constructed, and deployed by both emigrants and state-actors. Such an intervention is necessary, Chan argues, as current scholarship on transnational Chinese migration has readily challenged spatial constraints of nation-state bounded histories, but paid insufficient attention to time, in fact reinforcing “national time.” For Chan, diaspora has its own temporality and functioned as a key driver of modern Chinese history in the transition from empire to nation-state. Hence, it was a “modern relationship between the homeland and diaspora that changed China” (2), a homeland-diaspora dynamic encompassing a “temporary” diaspora and a permanent, eternal homeland (zuguo, 祖國). There was not one unified diaspora scattered across the globe to be commanded by the state; rather, efforts to designate China as homeland and incorporate a variety of actors in the diaspora at any given time--the making and unmaking of diaspora--contributed to the formation of the modern Chinese state (8).