Diaspora

Queering the Asian Diaspora

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New Publication
Hongwei Bao, Queering the Asian Diaspora (Sage, 2024)
ISBN: 9781529619683 (paperback, 168 pp., £11.99; $18.00)

The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified global geopolitical tensions, bringing Sinophobia and anti-Asian racism into sharp focus. At the same time, a growing Asian diasporic consciousness is emerging worldwide, celebrating Asian identity and cultural heritage. Yet, in the space between anti-Asian racism and the rise of Asian advocacy, the voices of queer people have often been largely missing.

This book addresses that gap. Exploring a range of contemporary case studies from art, fashion, performance, film, and political activism, Bao offers a powerful intersectional cultural politics—anti-nationalist, anti-racist, decolonial, feminist, and queer—that challenges dominant narratives and amplifies marginalized voices.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Visualising the Rabbit God: Reclaiming Queer Asian Heritage
Chapter 2 – Decolonising Drag: When Queer Asian Artists Do Drag
Chapter 3 – Queering Chinoiserie: Performing Orientalist Intimacy
Chapter 4 – ‘Secret Love’: Curating Queerness and Queering Curation
Chapter 5 – Digital Video Activism: Popo Fan’s Cinema of Desire
Chapter 6 – Imagining Queer Bandung: Creating a Decolonial Queer Space

(Readers can get a 25% discount when they order the book from the Sage website using the discount code SSSJ25: https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/queering-the-asian-diaspora/book284796)

Posted by: Hongwei Bao <hongwei.bao@nottingham.ac.uk>

How Trump divides Chinese who aspire to democracy

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Source: NYT (11/11/24)
How Trump Divides Chinese Who Aspire to Democracy
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A new HBO documentary about opposition to autocrats says a lot about the complex politics the president-elect inspires for people fleeing countries.
By Li Yuan

Rosa María Payá and Nanfu Wang sitting side by side in a dark theater looking straight ahead, each with one hand resting on her mouth.

Rosa María Payá, left, and Nanfu Wang met at a film festival in 2016 and found they were kindred spirits. Ms. Wang’s new film, “Night Is Not Eternal,” portrays Ms. Payá, a Cuban activist who fights for democracy in her home country. Credit…HBO

The long and loud campaign of Donald J. Trump, and now his re-election as president, have prompted deep divisions among many Chinese who advocate for democracy.

Wang Lixiong, a Beijing-based author, has been imprisoned and surveilled for his critical writings about China. The day before the election, he posted on X that Mr. Trump’s political alliance with the tech entrepreneur Elon Musk was worrying: “A Trump presidency combined with Musk’s influence may become a singularity that backfires on democracy.” People responded by condemning him, leaving hateful comments, including ones that wished him death.

Luo Yufeng, an online influencer who moved to New York more than a decade ago and posts about the possibilities that freedom brings, has also received abhorrent comments on her X account. She had been posting about her support for Mr. Trump, saying she opposed President Biden’s immigration policies.

On social media and around dinner tables, businesspeople, intellectuals and scholars I know who have fought side by side for democracy in China since the 1980s have been fighting one another over Mr. Trump. I have adopted a policy for gatherings with friends at my dining table in New York: No talk of American politics when we are eating.

I have been thinking a lot about China, democracy and Mr. Trump recently because of “Night Is Not Eternal,” a documentary by Nanfu Wang, a Chinese-born filmmaker I first met over a year ago. The film, which will debut on HBO on Nov. 19, is a moving portrayal of a Cuban activist, Rosa María Payá, who fights for democracy in her home country. Continue reading How Trump divides Chinese who aspire to democracy →

The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo lecture

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USC EASC Guest Speaker Series: The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo
Talk by Scott D. Seligman
Saturday, September 28, 2024 | 10:00AM-11:20AM | Zoom (meeting link will be emailed) | RSVP

EASC Guest Speaker Series: Talk by Scott D. Seligman with Faculty Moderator Li-Ping Chen (GESM 120: Moving Stories from China)

Chinese in America endured abuse and discrimination in the late nineteenth century, but they had a leader and a fighter in Wong Chin Foo (王清福, 1847–1898), whose story is a forgotten chapter in the struggle for equal rights in America. The first to use the term “Chinese American,” Wong defended his compatriots against malicious scapegoating and urged them to become Americanized to win their rights. A trailblazer and a born showman who proclaimed himself China’s first Confucian missionary to the United States, he founded America’s first association of Chinese voters and testified before Congress to get laws that denied them citizenship repealed. Wong challenged Americans to live up to the principles they freely espoused but failed to apply to the Chinese in their midst.

Posted by: Li-Ping Chen <lipingch@usc.edu>

Representations of East Asian Migrants conference

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CONFERENCE: Representations of East Asian Migrants and Settlers in the Western United States ca. 1850-1929
Hager Auditorium, Museum of the Rockies, Montana State University, Bozeman
26-28 September 2024

This conference provides scholars from universities, museums, libraries, and archives an opportunity to exchange research on the ways Asian American and Euro-American artists represented Asian migrants and settlers in art between the Gold Rush and the Great Depression. Over the last thirty years, historians have probed Asian American migrants’ experiences of work, settlement, and discrimination in the mining and railroad towns of the West while art historians have explored Asian American artists’ production of original works rooted in transnational dialogues, aesthetic choices, and social experiences on the East and West Coasts. This conference builds on these scholarly trends by ascertaining how Asian and European artists who journeyed through or resided in the American West between 1850 and 1929 contributed to a rich array of representations of Asian sojourners and settlers in different genres—documentary, picturesque, academic, expressive, illustrative, satirical—that promoted a range of views—ethnographic, nationalistic, empathetic, propagandistic, associational, filial, ethnic, gendered. A range of papers illuminate not only how Euro-American artists imposed naturalized, stereotyped, racist, and other identities but also how Asian American artists and individuals deflected, contested, or rejected such images in the construction of their own identities.

In the first half of the conference, “Daily Life in the West,” presenters will discuss images of Asian migrants and immigrants in contexts of labor, leisure, worship, and celebration; in the second half of the conference, “Contested Claims,” presenters will discuss representations of Asians in contexts of association, discrimination, and exclusion as well as visual strategies Asian Americans employed to negotiate hostile surroundings and to construct independent identities. In the last session, contemporary Asian American artists will share how they have engaged with, referenced, or distanced the past in their art. Continue reading Representations of East Asian Migrants conference →

U of Nottingham censorship

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University of Nottingham censorship — is it linked to fears over the Ningbo campus, and Gui Minhai’s case?  On the occasion of Norway’s PM Jonas Gahr Støre traveling to China recently to make new business deals, I wanted to re-up my piece on Norway’s indifference to China’s ongoing genocide and how they censored their own king, when he spoke out about it on his visit:

“Of Kings and Concentration Camps: Xinjiang and Norway,” in Asia Dialogue, the online magazine of the University of Nottingham’s Asia Research Institute, which is listed online as “a world leading centre for expertise on the Asia-Pacific region.”

I then discovered that the Nottingham magazine has deleted my article — without notice! Luckily it can still be read at a Taiwan site under a different title: “Norway, China and the Deep Hypocrisy of the ‘Human Rights Dialogue’ Ritual.”

Then I discovered that another Nottingham article of mine was also deleted without notice, namely this: “The Xinjiang camps as a ‘Stanford Prison Experiment.'” Being very proud of that piece, I now reposted it here: https://www.academia.edu/37656489/ (and also on ResearchGate.net), to make it accessible again.

The question remains:

Why this censorship by Nottingham university?  In fact, I have learned that it is not just me: Several other scholars have had their published scholarship deleted by Nottingham. Continue reading U of Nottingham censorship →

Kobe Overseas Chinese History Museum talk

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Dear all,

The ‘Global Diasporic Chinese Museums Network Initiative Public Talk Series’ will host the 10th talk on Friday 30 August 2024. Our speaker is Dr. Jiang Haibo, Chief Researcher, Kobe Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall; Operating Committee Member, Kobe Overseas Chinese History Museum, Japan. He will give a talk on The 150-Year History of Kobe’s Chinese Communities and the Kobe Overseas Chinese History Museum 神户华侨150多年来的历史与华侨历史博物馆

Date: Friday 30 August 2024
Time: 12:00 pm to 13:30 pm (BST)
Venue: Online via Zoom

The event is free to attend and open to all.

Zoom ID: 849 7219 3901
Password: 12345
Zoom meeting link: https://ntu-sg.zoom.us/j/84972193901?pwd=Qkf1owW61P79CLzW9etEoKaTDhv1Re.1#success

The talk will be given in Mandarin Chinese. Simultaneous translation into English will be provided.

Chair: Cangbai Wang, University of Westminster.
Speaker: Jiang Haibo, Kobe Overseas Chinese History Museum, Japan.

Abstract

This talk will introduce the Kobe Overseas Chinese History Museum’s main exhibition that narrates the formation, expansion, development and transformation of the Kobe Chinese communities over the past 150 years. The exhibition includes topics such as the immigration of Chinese to Kobe, the role of Kobe’s Chinese communities in the cultural exchanges between China and Japan, their support of the 1911 Revolution, the establishment and development of various Chinese organisations, overseas Chinese and the War of Resistance against Japan, post-war reconstruction, and the changes in the new era. The exhibition also introduces the history and current state of Chinese schools, cemeteries, community halls, Chinatown, the Guan Di Temple and other facilities in Kobe. Continue reading Kobe Overseas Chinese History Museum talk →

Battle over Li Rui’s diaries

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Source: BBC News (8/20/24)
US trial begins in battle for Mao secretary’s diaries
By Tessa Wong, BBC News, Reporting from Singapore

Getty Images Li Rui in an interview in 2006

Getty Images Li Rui was a former secretary to Mao Zedong and vocal government critic. Getty Images

A trial has begun in California to decide whether Stanford University can keep the diaries of a top Chinese official, in a case that is being framed as a fight against Chinese government censorship.

The diaries belong to the late Li Rui, a former secretary to Communist China’s founder Mao Zedong.

Following Li’s death in 2019, his widow sued for the documents to be returned to Beijing, claiming they belong to her.

Stanford rejects this. It says Li, who had been a critic of the Chinese government, donated his diaries to the university as he feared they would be destroyed by the Chinese Communist Party.

The diaries, which were written between 1935 and 2018, cover much of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rule. In those eight tumultuous decades, China emerged from impoverished isolation to become indispensable to the global economy.

“If [the diaries] return to China they will be banned… China does not have a good record in permitting criticism of party leaders,” Mark Litvack, one of Stanford’s lawyers, told the BBC before the trial began. Continue reading Battle over Li Rui’s diaries →

Chinese student pleads guilty to violating US espionage act

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Is it naivete or negligence? The American law professor commenting in the article below, Mary Ellen O’Connell at Notre Dame, either really is, or pretends to be,  unaware of Chinese law requiring Chinese citizens to obey all orders to spy for the Chinese state intelligence services — and, not to reveal the circumstances. And it’s just not conceivable that a Chinese grad student in Minnesota takes off on his own initiative, with a drone, to a US naval base in Virginia, to make a spy film. He must have been pressed into it by agents of the Chinese state, just like those lab-thieving students at U. Florida a few weeks ago. On the circumstances of the Virginia case, see also here. –Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Source: Nikkei (7/9/24)
Chinese student pleads guilty to violating U.S. espionage act
Shi Fengyun is accused of violating rarely used provisions of the Espionage Act
By MARRIAN ZHOU, Nikkei staff writer

Chinese 26-year-old Shi Fengyun pled guilty to espionage misdemeanors for flying a drone near a U.S. naval facility.   © Reuters

NORFOLK, Virginia — A Chinese student pleaded guilty to misdemeanor espionage charges at a federal courthouse here on Monday for taking photographs of U.S. military infrastructure using a drone.

Shi Fengyun, a 26-year-old graduate student from the University of Minnesota, walked into the courtroom in a light green and gray jacket and sports pants. He appeared nervous, taking several deep breaths while shaking his legs before he entered his plea.

Shi pleaded guilty to two out of six counts of violations under two provisions of the Espionage Act, which prohibits the photography of military installations and the use of unregistered drones to do so in national defense airspace. The U.S. Department of Justice dismissed the remaining four counts. Continue reading Chinese student pleads guilty to violating US espionage act →

Malaysian Chinese Museum lecture

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Dear all,

The ‘Global Diasporic Chinese Museums Network Initiative Public Talk Series’ will host the 9th talk on Thursday 27 June 2024. Our speaker is Lim Kah Koe, chief curator of the Malaysian Chinese Museum. He will give a talk on From Overseas Chinese to Malaysian Chinese: The Curatorial Concept & A Brief History of the Malaysian Chinese Museum 从落叶归根到落地生根——马来西亚华人博物馆策展思路与创馆历程

The talk will be given in Mandarin Chinese. Simultaneous translation into English will be provided.

Date: Thursday 27 June 2024
Time: 12:00 pm to 13:30 pm (BST)
Venue: Online via Zoom

The event is free to attend and open to all. Please register via Ticket Tailor here.

Chair: Huimei Zhang, Assistant Director, Chinese Heritage Centre, Nanyang Technological University

Speaker: Lim Kah Koe, chief curator of the Malaysian Chinese Museum.

Abstract

The Chinese diaspora in Malaysia has a long and rich history, with immigrants from different periods and backgrounds contributing to the diverse and complex Chinese society. As Malaysia’s first museum to comprehensively showcase the history and development of the Chinese diaspora, the Malaysian Chinese Museum extensively documents the history of immigrant pioneers and the contributions of the Chinese diaspora to the nation’s development. This talk will focus on the permanent exhibition content of the Museum, sharing its curatorial approach and the history of the birth of a privately-owned museum.

The event is jointly hosted by HOMELandS (Hub On Migration, Exile, Languages and Spaces) at the University of Westminster and the Chinese Heritage Centre of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. It is organised as part of the ‘Global Diasporic Chinese Museums Network Initiative’ project funded by AHRC. Continue reading Malaysian Chinese Museum lecture →

China’s targeting of overseas students stifles rights

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New chilling report out today from Amnesty International. The full report can be downloaded as a pdf at the link below. My own comment: It’s worth delving into the psychology of why so many Chinese officials and police officers actually seem to enjoy carrying out all this pointless harassment on behalf of their Great Leader and his Party.–Magnus Fiskesjö, nf42@cornell.edu

Source: Amnesty International (5/13/24)
China: “On my campus, I am afraid”: China’s targeting of overseas students stifles rights

Chinese and Hong Kong students studying abroad are living in fear of intimidation, harassment and surveillance as Chinese authorities seek to prevent them engaging with “sensitive” or political issues. This climate of fear on campuses in Europe and North America is the result of Chinese authorities’ transnational repression against overseas students, in violation of their human rights. The chilling effect engendered by these efforts prompts broad self-censorship in academic and social settings, and many affected students experience loneliness, isolation and negative mental health impacts.

New revelations on Chinese state spies

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Harrowing revelations today, in text and video from Australia’s ABC, on how Chinese state spies are force recruited and how they work in countries like Australia, harrassing and abducting victims, and in victim relay countries like Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand:

VIDEO: Unmasking the man who’s been spying for China | Four Corners. ABC News In-depth, 13 May 2024. 47:23 min.

TEXT: China’s secret spy, by Echo Hui, Elise Potaka, and Dylan Welch. Four Corners, ABC Australia, Published 13 May 2024.
For the first time ever, an undercover agent for China’s secret police steps out of the shadows to tell all about where he’s been and who he’s been targeting.

Posted by: Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42@cornell.edu>

Malaysian Crossings review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Carlos Rojas’s review of Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature, by Cheow Thia Chan. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/rojas2/. My thanks to Nicholas Kaldis, our literary studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language
in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature

By Cheow Thia Chan

Reviewed by Carlos Rojas

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright April, 2024)

Cheow Thia Chan, Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. xviii + 298. ISBN: 9780231203395 (Paperback); ISBN: 9780231203388 (Hardcover); ISBN: 9780231555029 (E-book).

In 1831, Charles Darwin left England for a trip to South America that included a five-week stay in the Galápagos Islands off the coast of Ecuador. Darwin was struck by how these islands were home to numerous endemic species, many of which appeared to have adapted in response to the specific environmental pressures found in the Galápagos. It was these observations that provided the basis for Darwin’s theory of evolution, which seeks to explain processes of species differentiation not only in the Galápagos but throughout the world.

Meanwhile, in 1826, at nearly the same moment but half a world away, the British East India Company established a group of colonies in Penang, Malacca, and Singapore known as the Straits Settlements. These settlements were redesignated as the Crown Colonies in 1858, and they subsequently became British Malaya, the Federation of Malaysia, and ultimately the Republic of Malaysia. Just as the evolution of the flora and fauna of the Galápagos was shaped by the unique evolutionary pressures that characterized their isolated archipelago, the distinctive sociopolitical environment of former British Malaya—including British, Japanese, and Chinese imperial legacies, multiple waves of migration, a large indigenous population, and so forth—has similarly helped shape the distinctive configurations of what has come to be known as modern Malaysian Chinese (“Mahua” 馬華) literature. Continue reading Malaysian Crossings review →

From China to Latin America exhibit

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Source: University of Kansas Libraries (3/7/24)
International Collections highlights, extends upcoming collaborative conference
By Abdullah Al-Awhad

Books on display in a case.

A new exhibit in International Collections on the fifth floor of Watson Library [University of Kansas] highlights the history and relationships between Latin America and China – combining materials from two of KU Libraries’ regional collection strengths and supplementing an upcoming collaborative conference. The exhibit, “From China to Latin America,” is on display now through the end of March.

Librarians Cecilia Zhang and Milton Machuca-Gálvez curated items for the exhibit, including books that present the historical connection between Latin America and China and offer a glimpse of their cross-cultural influence. The exhibit is presented in partnership with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (CLACS), the Center for Global and International Studies, and the Center of East Asian Studies (CEAS). All three centers are co-hosts of a hybrid conference, titled “When Global East Meets Global South: East Asia and Latin America” set for March 29 with open registration.

“While this conference is taking place, these books will be on display to speak to specific cases,” said Machuca-Gálvez, librarian for Spanish, Portuguese, Latin America, & Caribbean Studies. “There are books on China-El Salvador, Mexico, Peru, a large quantity of books from Panama, and large volumes from Cuba.” Continue reading From China to Latin America exhibit →

Emigres are creating an alternative China

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Source: NYT (2/23/24)
Émigrés Are Creating an Alternative China, One Bookstore at a Time
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From Thailand to America, Chinese denied a safe public space for discussion in their home country have found hope in diaspora communities.
By Li Yuan (Reporting from Tokyo; Taipei, Taiwan; and Chiang Mai, Thailand)

“What matters is not what you oppose but what kind of life you desire,” said Anne Jieping Zhang, the owner of bookstores in Taipei and Chiang Mai, Thailand. Credit…Simon Simard for The New York Times

On a rainy Saturday afternoon in central Tokyo, 50 or so Chinese people packed into a gray, nondescript office that doubles as a bookstore. They came for a seminar about Qiu Jin, a Chinese feminist poet and revolutionary who was beheaded more than a century ago for conspiring to overthrow the Qing dynasty.

Like them, Ms. Qiu had lived as an immigrant in Japan. The lecture’s title, “Rebuilding China in Tokyo,” said as much about the aspirations of the people in the room as it did about Ms. Qiu’s life.

Public discussions like this one used to be common in big cities in China but have increasingly been stifled over the past decade. The Chinese public is discouraged from organizing and participating in civic activities.

In the past year, a new type of Chinese public life has emerged — outside China’s borders in places like Japan.

“With so many Chinese relocating to Japan,” said Li Jinxing, a human rights lawyer who organized the event in January, “there’s a need for a place where people can vent, share their grievances, then think about what to do next.” Mr. Li himself moved to Tokyo from Beijing last September over concerns for his safety. “People like us have a mission to drive the transformation of China,” he said. Continue reading Emigres are creating an alternative China →

China’s rebel influencer is still paying a price

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Source: NYT (12/12/23)
‘I Have No Future’: China’s Rebel Influencer Is Still Paying a Price
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Li Ying used social media to help tell the world about last year’s protests. Now in exile, he has been threatened and lost his livelihood for his defiance.
By Li Yuan

An illustration of a set of stone feet on a stone platform facing a chaotic scene that includes flames, candles and flying papers.

Credit…Xinmei Liu

In November 2022, Li Ying was a painter and art school graduate in Milan, living in a state of sadness, fear and despair. China’s strict pandemic policies had kept him from seeing his parents for three years, and he was unsure where his country was heading.

In China, after enduring endless Covid tests, quarantines and lockdowns, people staged the most widespread protests the country had seen in decades, many holding roughly letter-size paper to demonstrate defiance against censorship and tyranny, in what has been called the White Paper movement.

Then Mr. Li did something that he never anticipated would become so significant: He turned his Twitter account into an information clearinghouse. People inside China sent him photos, videos and other witness accounts, at times more than a dozen per second, that would otherwise be censored on the Chinese internet. He used Twitter, which is banned in China, to broadcast them to the world. The avatar on Mr. Li’s account, his drawing of a cat that is both cute and menacing, became famous.

His following on the platform swelled by 500,000 in a matter of weeks. To the Chinese state, he was a troublemaker. To some Chinese, he was a superhero who stood up to their authoritarian government and their iron-fisted leader, Xi Jinping.

When the government abruptly ended the Covid policy last December, Mr. Li and other young activists faced a question: Was their protest a moment in history, or a footnote? Continue reading China’s rebel influencer is still paying a price →