Feminism and Global Chineseness: The Cultural Production of Cont ...

While it is no longer unproblematic to include Hong Kong, Taiwan, and overseas Chinese communities under the same umbrella of “China,” new terms have been coined and new concepts brought forward to respond to this complicated situation. One of the most popular emphasizes the transnationality of Chineseness, which not only acknowledges internal differences in interpreting Chineseness but also recognizes interactions, negotiations, and sometimes antagonism between these unequal geopolitical Chinese locations.³

While I am inspired by and sometimes employ the idea of transnational Chineseness, I prefer a similar term “global Chineseness” that recognizes some global connection among different geopolitical expressions of Chineseness while allowing distinct local constructs, unlike Fredric Jameson’s argument on globalization in which the global (the United States) forces a kind of economic and cultural unity upon the local (the rest of the world).⁴ In other words, global Chineseness is not to create an absolute center that refers to China, but to accentuate flexibility, hybridity, negotiation as well as negation.

My inclusion of Taiwan and Hong Kong into the discussion certainly has to do with my Mainland-China background, but my goal is not to construct a homogeneous Mainland-centered Chinese empire. On the contrary, it is to problematize and decenter with a comparative perspective on the development of Chineseness in nationalist discourses at these three geopolitical locations. It is not only to present how Chineseness is being imagined and contested, but also to illuminate intense negotiations—even oppositions—between the different locational nationalisms, particularly in relation to the traditionally and conservatively defined China, which is considered to have absolute right of sovereignty over Taiwan and Hong Kong. On many occasions I use the more specific term “Mainland” instead of the more ambiguous “China” that is still in contestation. I hope to keep that border open and flexible instead of drawing an absolute distinction between China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.

I also take the mapping of transnational Chineseness beyond this popular China / Mainland–Taiwan–Hong Kong triangular relations, the so-called “three locations across the Taiwan Strait [liang’an sandi],” and include Chinese America into this project.