Diaspora

Thailand obeys China on refugees and kidnapping

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On the burning issue of Thailand’s pending forced repatriation to China of forty-some Uyghur refugees, to certain torture and probably death there, because of international protests (even from UN-appointed experts), and global media attention, top Thai political leaders and the national police chief have now come out, to tie themselves in knots while trying to defend their country’s actions and shore up an image of decency.

Thailand’s police chief has the audacity to say that the refugees, WHO HAVE BEEN DETAINED FOR TEN YEARS NOW, are “doing OK”.

This article also mentions the brave Thai senator Angkhana Neelapaijit, chairwoman of a Senate committee that has now asked to at last be allowed to see the detained men, and who also “expressed concerns shared by human rights organisations that the Uyghur group could face danger if they are sent back to China.”

She also reminded us all about how the coup government of general Prayut Chan-o-cha in 2013 already forcibly returned 109 Uyghur men to China at Beijing’s request, and to this day, their fate remains unknown. (Of course, we can assume they have all long since put to death).

In another report, a deputy PM and defence minister says Thailand will handle this decently (again, that’s after holding these refugees for 10 years!!), and “promises to adhere to human rights.” This minister’s pronouoncement has been seized upon as a hopeful sign, by Uyghurs in exile.

But I for one wonder, about Thailand and human rights. The country has refused to sign the international refugee convention on refugee treatment, and that same coup general once mocked the very same Uyghur refugees he sent to their probable death, as lowly animals. Continue reading Thailand obeys China on refugees and kidnapping →

New Chinese Migrants in SE Asia

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Dear colleagues,

The Contemporary China Centre at the University of Westminster is pleased to announce the next event in our Conference Deconstructed. Please feel free to circulate it widely in your networks and with colleagues whom might be interested, thank you.

New Chinese Migrants (Xinyimin 新移民) in Southeast Asia: Partnerships, Engagement and Faultlines
Wednesday, 26  March 2025,  11:00 AM  – 1:00 PM  GMT
Online, Zoom

Speakers: Associate Professor Wasana Wongsurawat, Dr Sylvia Ang, and Professor Enze Han
Chair: Dr How Wee Ng

Registration: The event is free to attend and open to all. A Zoom link will be provided to all those who register before 26th Mar 2025.

Book your tickets here Continue reading New Chinese Migrants in SE Asia →

Statement on Uyghur asylum seekers in Thailand

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See below for information on signing a statement protesting the Uyghurs being held by Thailand and who are at risk of being deported to China. –Magnus Fiskesjö

======================

Dear Friend and colleagues,

You will have seen the tragic news that 48 Uyghurs face immediate deportation from Thailand to the PRC where they will certainly face persecution.

We urge you to sign the following statement addressed to the Thai authorities asking for the group of detained Uyghur men to be given safe haven: https://forms.gle/zWw3GbTvvqiuNLRX7.

We hope that this statement will raise awareness of the detainees’ situation and prevent their deportation to the PRC.

Kind regards,

Nyrola Elimä, Rune Steenberg, David Tobin <d.tobin@sheffield.ac.uk>, and Emily Upson.

Dissidents thought he was an ally, but he was a spy

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Source: NYT (1/10/25)
New York’s Chinese Dissidents Thought He Was an Ally. He Was a Spy.
Shujun Wang seemed to be a Chinese democracy activist, but an F.B.I. investigation showed just how far China will go to repress citizens abroad.
By Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Shujun Wang, a New Yorker convicted of acting as an illegal foreign agent for the Chinese government, in December. Credit…Adam Pape for The New York Times

One morning in late July last year, Shujun Wang shuffled into a courtroom at the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, leaning on his cane as he made his way to the defense table. Settling into a seat next to his lawyers, the 76-year-old Chinese American scholar smoothed his jet-black hair and adjusted his tie, whose red-and-blue pattern, set against his white shirt, vaguely suggested the American flag. After an exchange of greetings with his Chinese interpreter, he surveyed the courtroom with an amused expression, almost beaming at the visitors’ gallery. For someone facing trial on charges of working as an illegal agent for China, Wang looked remarkably cheerful. It was hard to say if he was oblivious to the gravity of his situation or pleased to be the center of attention.

The government accused Wang of having led a double life for years. A historian who migrated to the United States from China in 1994, he had written many books on military and naval history, including one about the heroism of the U.S. Navy in the Pacific during the Second World War. Starting in the mid-2000s, he had also been a member of a community of Chinese dissidents in the United States who oppose the Chinese Communist Party and push for democratic reforms in China. Wang helped organize events and rallies in the greater New York area to commemorate the Tiananmen Square massacre and protest the authoritarianism of the Chinese government. In 2006, he founded, with a group of prominent dissidents, a nonprofit in Flushing, Queens, called the Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang Memorial Foundation, with the mission of promoting democracy in China. Warm and affable, Wang became a recognizable face within the organization, managing its media relations and working to publicize the foundation’s activities in New York’s Chinese-language newspapers.

Secretly, according to federal investigators, he was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. Evidence presented at trial would show that at the direction of his handlers in the M.S.S., Wang spied on Chinese dissidents in Flushing and the New York area for years. His enthusiastic participation in the Chinese pro-democracy movement appeared to have been a ploy to gain proximity to its leaders and activists and to collect information about them for the ministry. United States authorities say the Chinese government uses such intelligence to intimidate and silence dissidents overseas. Continue reading Dissidents thought he was an ally, but he was a spy →

Disoriented Disciplines review

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MCLC Resource Center is pleased to announce publication of Carles Prado-Fonts’ review of Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature, by Rosario Hubert. The review appears below and at its online home: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/prado-fonts/. My thanks to Michael Gibbs Hill, our translations/translation studies book review editor, for ushering the review to publication.

Kirk Denton, MCLC

Disoriented Disciplines: China,
Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature

By Rosario Hubert

Reviewed by Carles Prado-Fonts

MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright January, 2025)

Rosario Hubert, Disoriented Disciplines: China, Latin America, and the Shape of World Literature Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2023. 328 pp. ISBN 9780810146556 (paperback); 9780810146563 (hardcover); 9780810146570 (ebook).

The study of Sinographies, or “the particular forms of writing that produce and convey (within China as well as without it) the meanings of China,”[1] has become a meeting point where scholarship from Chinese studies, historiography, and comparative literature merge and interact in productive ways. To be sure, these studies differ depending on each scholar’s background, as well as on their scope and concerns. But, as a whole, they form a field that has now already gone a long way since its original formulation, which mostly covered writings about China in hegemonic Western contexts. The pioneering works of Haun Saussy, Eric Hayot, Christopher Bush, and a few others have now been enlarged, supplemented, and problematized from new angles and new linguistic perspectives, as well as with the aid of archives.

The study of Sinographies in Latin America is an excellent example of such fertile evolution. The past few years have seen a wide array of contributions that study the meanings of “China” in Latin America. Works by scholars such as Araceli Tinajero, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Ignacio López Calvo, and Kathleen López have recently been expanded in new directions by contributions from Andrea Bachner, Monica DeHart, Junyoung Verónica Kim, Ana Paulina Lee, Jorge Locane, Maria Montt Strabucchi, Brenda Rupar, and Laura J. Torres-Rodríguez, among many others.[2] Thus, while a common trope in prefaces and introductions may still claim that China in Latin America is a new and under-researched topic, the fact is that solid scholarship already exists about it—in Spanish and English. The future also looks promising: not only because there is a massive archive that has not yet been fully explored, but also because of the theoretical potential of these discoveries to come. As a “South-South” interaction that escapes the logic of hegemonic scholarship, the study of China in Latin America can raise pertinent critical questions in discussions about truly global and transnational issues. Continue reading Disoriented Disciplines review →

Politically correct designations for China’s borderlands

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Source: Ethnic ChinaLit (1/2/25)
The Battle over Politically Correct Designations for China’s Borderlands
By Bruce Humes

The word “Tibet” has been replaced by “Himalayan World” accompanied by “Tibetan art.”

Labels matter. As Confucius (reportedly) said:

名不正，則言不順
言不順，則事不成

If names are not rectified, then words are not appropriate.
If words are not appropriate, then deeds are not accomplished.

— The Analects (Trans. Raymond Dawson)

New politically correct designations for China’s traditional frontiers — homelands to Tibetans, Mongols and Turkic Muslims  — are emerging, but their usage outside the Middle Kingdom is proving controversial.

According to a report by Radiofrance (le mot “Tibet” supprimé), two major museums in Paris made changes to their labeling of Tibetan art in 2023 and 2024. On the explanatory panels in its galleries, Quai Branly began replacing “Tibet” with “Xizang,” China’s name for the Tibetan Autonomous Region. Then Musée Guimet — which houses one of the largest collections of Asian Art outside of Asia — repackaged its “Nepal-Tibet” section as “Monde Himalayen” (Himalayan World).

These changes were noted and vigorously critiqued by French scholars, who accused the museums of bowing to pressure from China in its campaign to force the outside world to accept its colonialist terminology. “Is it the job of museums to rewrite history at the behest of an authoritarian regime? “ queries French Tibetologist Katia Buffetrille, according to Radiofrance. Continue reading Politically correct designations for China’s borderlands →

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
阅读简体中文版 | 閱讀繁體中文版
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 →