Rethinking Chineseness: Translational Sinophone Identities in th ...

integrated global economy and shrinking world, whose diversity is brought ever closer home [sic] by expanding international trade, rapid flow of information, capital and labour across national boundaries and jet-age travel.²⁸

For Wang, the overseas Chinese are those who acknowledge the essence of the flexible concept, luodi-shenggen (a concept that balances the productivity of traditions and the potentiality of assimilation). Here, he pinpointed a crucial role of the overseas Chinese as mediator or even actor for the betterment of global societies and communities, in which proximity has minimized, and diversity has been embraced through global economy, and I would add, global cultural productions.

Wang Gungwu reminded readers that luodi-shenggen (which he translated “growing roots when the [overseas] Chinese land”) is a phenomenon that has been overlooked by both Chinese and foreign scholars. The approach to realizing the potential of luodi-shenggen not only reveals the phenomenon as more of a norm then the two repressive paradigms, but it also contributes greatly to revamping the field of overseas Chinese studies.²⁹ Most important, it restores agency to overseas Chinese communities, whose constituents can now speak for or of themselves, at the very least, academically in the study of Chinese diaspora.

Khun Eng Kuah-Pearce and Evelyn Hu-Dehart regarded this new direction as an epistemological shift in the study of overseas Chinese from the focus on immigration to one on diaspora. However, they argued that this shift reveals a discrepancy between the scholarship in Chinese and that in English. This discrepancy lies specifically in the lack of a comparable word or phrase in Chinese for the Western imported concept and term diaspora.³⁰ In their edited volume, Voluntary Organizations in the Chinese Diaspora, Kuah-Pearce and Hu-Dehart adopted and expanded on Wang Ling-chi’s theme of luodi-shenggen in order to explore the utility of the diaspora concept in their research on voluntary clans and associations in the Chinese diaspora: