Becoming “Chinese”—But What “Chinese”?—In Southeast Asia 東南アジアでの「中国性」びいき−−その「中国性」の意味合い
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Volume 10 | Issue 26 | Number 2 | Article ID 3777 | Jun 17, 2012 The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Becoming “Chinese”—But What “Chinese”?—in Southeast Asia 東南アジアでの「中国性」びいき−−その「中国性」の意味合い Caroline S. Hau Becoming “Chinese”—But What epic from the Philippines, Mano Po (I Kiss Your “Chinese”?—in Southeast Asia Hand, 2002), spawned five eponymous “sequels.”3 In Indonesia, the biopic Gie (2005) Caroline S. Hau sets out to challenge the stereotype of the “Chinese” as “material man,” communist, and Over the past three decades, it has become dictator’s crony by focusing on legendary “chic”1 to be “Chinese” or to showcase one’s activist Soe Hok Gie. In Malaysia, the award- “Chinese” connections in Southeast Asia. winning Sepet (Slit-eyes, 2005) reflects on the Leaders ranging from President Corazon vicissitudes of official multiracialism through Cojuangco Aquino of the Philippines to King the story of a well-to-do Malay girl whose Bhumibol Adulyadej, Prime Minister Kukrit passion for East Asian pop culture leads her to Pramoj, and Prime Minister Thaksinbefriend, and fall in love with, a working-class Shinawatra of Thailand to PresidentChinese boy who sells pirated Video Compact Abdurrahman Wahid of Indonesia and Prime Discs. Minister Abdullah Badawi of Malaysia have proclaimed their Chinese ancestry. Since 2000, The term “re-Sinicization” (or “resinification”) Chinese New Year (Imlek) has been officially has been applied to the revival of hitherto celebrated in Indonesia, after decades of legal devalued, occluded, or repressed restrictions governing access to economic “Chineseness,” and more generally to the opportunities and Chinese-language education, phenomenon of increasing visibility, use of Chinese names, and public observance of acceptability, and self-assertiveness of ethnic Chinese customs and ceremonies. Chinese in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.4 The phenomenon of “re-Sinicization” marks a Beyond elite and official pronouncements, significant departure from an era in which popular culture has been instrumental in “China” served as a model for the localization disseminating positive images of “Chinese” and of socialism and propagation of socialist “Chineseness.” In Thailand, for example, the revolution in parts of Southeast Asia in the highly rated TV dramaLod Lai Mangkorn 1950s and 1960s, and Southeast Asian (Through the Dragon Design, 1992), adapted “Chinese” were viewed and treated as from the novelistic saga of a penurious Chinese economically dominant, culturally different, immigrant turned multimillionaire and aired on and politically disloyal Others to be “de- the state-run channel, has claimed theSinicized” through nation-building discourses entrepreneurial virtues of “diligence, patience, and policies. self-reliance, discipline, determination, parsimony, self-denial, business acumen, For want of a better word, the term “re- friendship, family ties, honesty, shrewdness, Sinicization” has served as an expedient [and] modesty” as “Chinese” and worthy of signpost for the variegated manifestations and emulation.2 The critical acclaim andrevaluations of such Chineseness. Its use does commercial success of another rags-to-riches not simply affirm the conventional 1 10 | 26 | 2 APJ | JF understanding of Sinicization as a unilinear, created, reinvented, and transformed received unidirectional, and foreordained process of meanings associated with “China,” “Chinese,” “becoming Chinese” that radiates (or is“Chineseness.” Sinicization cannot be studied expected to increasingly radiate) outward from apart from the related concepts of re- mainland China.5 Since the “Sinosphere”6 was Sinicization and de-Sinicization; taken inhabited by different “Chinas” at different together, they can best be understood as a times in history, the process of moderncongeries of pressures and possibilities, “Sinicization” cannot be analyzed in terms of a constraints and opportunities for “becoming- self-contained, autochthonous “China” or Chinese” that are subject to centripetal and “Chinese” world, let alone “Chinese” identity. centrifugal forces – as Wang Gungwu10 has These “Chinas” were themselves products of noted for the cultural context of hybridization7 and acculturation born of their territorialization and de/reterritorialization.11 intimate and sometimes contentious cultural, One crucial implication is that in this process of economic, and military contacts withrecalibration no single institution or agent, not populations across their western continental even the putative superpower People’s frontiers, most notably Mongols and Manchus, Republic of China, has so far been able to and with Southern Asia (India and Southeast definitively claim authority as the final cultural Asia) across their southern frontiers.8 This arbiter of what constitutes “Chinese” and Sinosphere began to break down in the mid- “Chineseness” or even, for that matter, nineteenth century. In their modern“China.” articulations, “China,” “Chinese,” and “Chineseness” are relational terms that, over Conceptual Disjunctions the past century and a half, point to a history of conceptual disjunctions and distinctive patterns From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, of hybridization arising from the hegemonic Qing China confronted a hegemonic challenge, challenges that the maritime powers of the not from across its continental borders to the “West” posed to the Sinocentric world. And in west, but from the maritime world to its east. A that world, social, economic, cultural, and far-reaching consequence of this period is that intellectual interactions among many different the genesis of the modern termZhongguo = sites were intense and largely enabled by the China and related signifiers such as Zhonghua regional and global flows and movements of = “Chinese” and “Chineseness” (a term for capital, people, goods, technologies, and ideas which there is no exact Chinese-language within and beyond the contexts of British and, equivalent) is characterized by later, American hegemony in East andreterritorializing as well as deterritorializing Southeast Asia. impulses that arise from conceptual disjunctions in the Zhongguo = China equation. Without discounting China’s contribution to Rising nationalist sentiments made modern world-making9 over the past century “Chinese/ness” an issue of paramount and a half, this article complicates the idea of importance for “China” in its multiple “Sinicization” as a mainland state-centered and discursive, territorial, and regime -driven process of remaking the world (and the manifestations, and for the so-called “Chinese” ethnic Chinese outside its borders) in its own in Southeast Asia (the principal region of image. Instead, it proposes to understand immigration from the mainland) and their host “Sinicization” as a complex, historicallystates and societies. This created multiple contingent process entailing not just multiple disjunctions between territory, nation, state, actors and practices, but equally important, culture, and civilization – key concepts in the multiple sites from which they, over time, have study of modern politics – in the signifiers 2 10 | 26 | 2 APJ | JF “China” and “Chinese/ness.” competing political visions of community, people, nation, and state. Political disjunction This is not to argue that the concepts of meant that there was no easy or necessary fit territory, nation, state, culture and civilization between nation and state.15 Different political lack any referent; on the contrary, modern movements, whose activities and mobilization Chinese history is an account of the prodigious sometimes took place outside of the territory of time and energy expended, not to mention the “China,” targeted specific “Chinese” localities blood-sweat-tears spilled, on determining, and communities and competed to capture the fixing, or challenging and changing the proper state and remake society in the image of their cultural, political, territorial, and civilizational visions of the nation. “China”-driven 12 referents of “China”. The fact that “China” Sinicization thus represents various attempts 13 was and continues to be a floating signifier – on the part of different “Chinese” regimes and that is, its referents are variable, sometimes actors to propound their notions of Chineseness indeterminate and unspecifiable – does not in and mobilize “Chinese” capital, resources, any way suggest that “China” is purely a labor, and specific talents/skills for economic, discursive construction; it only means that political, and cultural objectives inside and there is an irreducibly discursive dimension to outside the territorial boundaries of “China.” the relationship of ethnic-“Chinese” with “China.” Taxonomic studies of ethnic “Chinese” Such attempts to reterritorialize the “Chinese” political loyalty and orientations, and multiple in Southeast Asia were in some ways manifestations of “Chineseness,” can best be successful. They helped to create a new understood as attempts at making sense of the political, and more importantly, mobilizable multiplicity of assertions, commitments,entity called the huaqiao, a term that came into persuasions, declarations, and expressions general use at the end of the nineteenth generated by the floating signifier “China.” century but acquired its territorializing They highlight the productive potential of the connotations only at the beginning of the signifier “China” to be made to mean and do twentieth.16 But these efforts often came up something, conditioning practices and claims short against competing deterritorializations