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213. Reconfigured Mobilities: China, Taiwan, and Transnational Histories of Southeast Asia's Chinese after 1949

Sat, March 18, 10:45am to 12:45pm, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: Mezzanine, Norfolk

Session Submission Type: Organized Panel

Abstract

Histories of Southeast Asia's Chinese mostly treat the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the flight of the Kuomintang to Taiwan in 1949 as a watershed moment. Following decades of war, communist rule on the mainland is seen as destroying the diasporic networks that had sustained circulatory migration between south China and Southeast Asia since the mid-19th century. Across Nanyang, the territorialization of new nation-states further immobilized Chinese populations that once moved readily across older, imperial borders. Southeast Asian nationalisms and the ideological confusion caused by the split between Beijing and Taipei accelerated the loss of identification between Chinese abroad and their "motherland." And, as they were incorporated into national polities, so too have they been subjected to largely mono-national historiographies.

Drawing upon historical and anthropological methods, this panel complicates the turning away from transnationalism in studies of Southeast Asia's Chinese after the Chinese Civil War and before the Reform Era. By focusing on themes such as Communist and Nationalist China's claims upon Chinese overseas and Chinese migration from Southeast Asia to China and Taiwan, our papers show that both Chinese communities abroad and the rival Chinese governments that sought their loyalties remained persistently transnational in outlook and practice. Migration and border-crossing processes between China and Southeast Asia did not end after 1949; states and peoples instead reconfigured them in response to changes in the regional and domestic orders. Postwar Chinese transnationalisms articulated with both Southeast Asian and Chinese nationalisms, transforming identities, institutions, and imaginaries.

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