| Chapter : | Introduction |
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order to delineate its contemporary implications? Later in the chapter I address this.
One important aspect of Chinese diaspora studies is its take on the question of cultural history. What is the relationship between the cultural history of the motherland and the cultural history of the host country? How do diasporic subjects negotiate different historical realities? How do they reckon the collision of multiple histories into new sets of instrumental modes of representations and identifications, and ground it in their own temporal and spatial context? A forerunner of Chinese diaspora studies, Tu Wei-ming, suggested the construction of “cultural China” as a new vision for reconsidering the concept of Chineseness. For Tu, cultural China is the concept of a global site in which Chineseness is repeatedly reformulated and renegotiated within various ethnic and cultural Chinese societies. Tu emphasized the crucial role of the overseas Chinese as one that “assume[s] an effective role in creatively constructing a new vision of Chineseness that is more in tune with Chinese history and in sympathetic resonance with Chinese culture.”42 This global community that Tu proposed is not at all unproblematic. Even though Tu claimed that cultural China encourages the active participation of Chinese diasporic subjects in global politics, economics, and culture without necessitating the sacrifice of “authentic” Chinese identity,43 this rhetoric inevitably reinforces the concept of culture as fixed and given. Like the concept of “global Chineseness,” cultural China assumes that there is a specific way to experience culture rather than acknowledging that culture, like identity, is a flexible entity always in the process of becoming. Tan Chee Beng argued against the uniformity such concepts advocate by emphasizing the significance of the respective local societies in the shaping of the experience and identifications of diasporic subjects. Tan stressed that
there is no global Chinese identity. The people of Chinese descent identify closely with their respective motherlands—the countries where they are born and which they are citizens of. Their identities are shaped by their experience of living in the respective national societies. The subjective experience of Chinese Malaysians are