Los Angeles Language Schools and Competing Chinese Nationalisms
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
Los Angeles language schools and competing Chinese nationalisms Calvin N. Ho Department of Sociology University of California, Los Angeles [email protected] October 2014 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: The author would like to thank Rogers Brubaker, Rubén Hernández- León, Ching Kwan Lee, and Roger Waldinger for their valuable comments on previous drafts. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-1144087. 1 Introduction Among the first things that a visitor to Zhongshan Chinese School sees are the flags flying at the school gate. This weekend and after-school language institute in Los Angeles’ Chinatown flies the United States flag and the flag of the Republic of China (ROC) at equal height. The two flags are also displayed in the school’s auditorium, where they flank the two sides of the stage; behind the flags are large painted characters for a slogan from ROC leader Chiang Kai-shek’s anti-communist New Life Movement. Decorations, computers, and other objects inside the building are labelled with plaques or stickers indicating that they were donations from the ROC government’s diaspora commission. The school’s apparent loyalty to the ROC is enacted in administrative- and classroom- level practices as well as being visually displayed through symbols like these. At assemblies in the auditorium, students sing the ROC national anthem and bow in the direction of the ROC flag. School administrators invite ROC officials passing by the neighbourhood to give speeches, and volunteer students and parents for interviews on state television programs about the successes of the ROC’s diaspora language programs. While Zhongshan’s prominent displays of ROC symbols and active engagement with the ROC government suggest strong ties to the state and an unequivocal belief that the ROC is the legitimate homeland, observations inside the classroom and conversations with teachers, administrators, parents, and students suggest otherwise. Indeed, the rival People’s Republic of China (PRC) features far more prominently in their lived experiences. Most of the adults involved in the school are recent immigrants from the PRC, and most of the students have family members living in the PRC. The school uses politically charged textbooks from PRC state presses and teaches the PRC’s official writing system. Upper-level administrators have even visited the PRC as guests of the state. Given the ROC and PRC’s history of conflict and mutual non-recognition of the other’s claim to sovereignty, how can Zhongshan continue to receive ROC support while making significant overtures to the PRC? How are other ROC-affiliated language schools in Los Angeles managing the existence of ‘two Chinas’, and how has that changed over time with evolving geopolitical and demographic conditions? Theories of diaspora engagement suggest that diaspora organizations and homeland states are constantly negotiating about the position of the diasporic groups with respect to the homeland (Cohen 2011; Lainer-Vos 2010). This negotiation becomes more complicated in a case like this one, where there are multiple states that can claim to be the state of the homeland. Drawing from documentary sources and ethnographic fieldwork, I trace the relationship between the ROC, PRC, and Los Angeles-area Chinese language schools since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949. I contend that the presence of an alternative homeland state acts as an external constraint on the relationship between the ROC and the language schools affiliated with it. While the schools may be symbolically and materially dependent on the ROC, the ROC does not control them. The schools’ structural position vis-à-vis the ROC and PRC creates opportunities to change the power dynamic between homeland state and diaspora organization. The schools can use the PRC’s claim to being the legitimate homeland state of Chinese people as leverage to cede concessions from the ROC. Theoretical Framework Following Brubaker (2005), the use of the term ‘diaspora’ in this paper refers to populations that are dispersed across states, oriented towards a territorially-defined homeland, and that have maintained distinct boundaries between themselves and the host population(s). Diasporas are very often fragmented along political, ethnic, linguistic, regional, or socioeconomic lines (Gabaccia 2000). Diaspora engagement projects are state-led initiatives to 2 encourage populations living abroad to act in the interest of the homeland. While much of the diaspora engagement literature focuses on economic projects (e.g. remittances), diaspora engagement also includes lobbying receiving country governments, fomenting long distance nationalism, and other forms of political participation (Østergaard-Nielsen 2003a; Sherman 1999; Bauböck 2003). Political diaspora engagement is broadly structured by the homeland state's domestic politics, its position in the international system, and its diaspora’s ability to engage in transnational politics (Smith 2003). Political diaspora engagement projects led by homeland states have potential implications for geopolitical change. This type of engagement puts migrants and other diasporans at the heart of relations between states. Some countries wish to take advantage of diasporans’ presence abroad by encouraging them to advocate for the homeland in their political practice, much as the Jewish American lobby for Israel has done (Østergaard-Nielsen 2003b). Building diasporic nationalist consciousness is often a prerequisite for creating this lobby, and states have tried to stoke the nationalist fire by involving themselves in diasporic organizations, media, and education (Choate 2007; Şenay 2012). The world is primarily organized along territorial boundaries by states that claim a monopoly on legitimate violence within these bounds (Weber 2013; Ragazzi 2009; Agnew 2005). States generally do not have the institutional capacity to coerce organizations outside of their territory, and thus must build relationships with organizations to engage with diaspora populations. Resource dependency theory proposes that all organizations depend on outside resources for survival. They obtain these resources through negotiations with other organizations. An organization that controls a particular resource thus enters a relationship of dominance over an organization that requires this resource (Casciaro and Piskorski 2005; Rao, Brown, and Perkins 2007; Pfeffer and Salancik 1978). To reduce risk in resource acquisition, the subordinate party may attempt to restructure the nature of the dependency through co- optation, merger, or other tactics (Casciaro and Piskorski 2005). One potential tactic to restructure dependency is through two-step leverage, in which the dependent party forms a relationship with a third party that may constrain the controlling party. Thus, the dependent party is able to use the relationship with the third party as leverage against the party that controls the resources it requires (Gargiulo 1993). Case Selection The case of the ROC and the Chinese diaspora is particularly useful for the development of theories of diaspora engagement because of the long history of institutionalized state- diaspora organization relations and because of the existence of ‘two Chinas’ since 1949. The ROC's Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission (OCAC), formally established in 1926, was among the earliest systematic efforts by migrant sending states to insert themselves in the concerns of overseas subjects. OCAC's involvement in Chinese diaspora affairs has persisted throughout all of the internal upheaval that the ROC has experienced since the early years of the Republic: the loss of the Chinese Civil War to the Communists and the subsequent retreat to Taiwan in 1949; military dictatorship on Taiwan from 1949-1987; and democratization and the rise of the Taiwan independencei movement since 1987. Since 1949, both the PRC and the ROC have claimed to be the legitimate government of all of China's historical territory and to be the homeland state of all Chinese people. However, until the end of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), the PRC had largely retreated from diaspora affairs, leaving the ROC to drum up diaspora organizations' support for its claim to China in the polarized Cold War context. The PRC began to reach out to the diaspora again after the Cultural Revolution. For diaspora organizations, this meant that since 1976 there have been two homeland governments vying for their attention and loyalty, a possibility that is generally not accounted for in theorizations of diaspora-state relations. 3 Language schools have been a central part of Chinese diaspora policy since the early 1900s (Lai 2000a, 2001; Liang 2000; Lai 2000b, 2006). Successive Chinese governments have treated language schools as spaces for the creation of Overseas Chinese diasporic subjects. Language schools are important sites for socialization with coethnics and for the building of social and cultural capital (Zhou and Li 2003; Zhou and Kim 2006; Nieto 2007). They bring migrants and their children together for explicit cultural and ideological instruction, guided by textbooks provided by the state. Method This paper draws from primary and secondary documentary sources, one and a half years of participant observation in Los Angeles, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews in Los Angeles and Taipei. Documentary sources included OCAC publications, ROC legislative records, and the schools’ publications, records,