Cosmopolitan Capitalists: Hong Kong and the Chinese Diaspora at the End of the 20th Century, by Gary G. Hamilton (ed.)

 

6: Chineseness The Dilemmas of Place and Practice

Wang Gungwu

 

Some years ago, I was invited to write an introduction to a reference volume on China and was given the subject "The Chineseness of China." My first response was to say that since everything in China was Chinese, it was a non-question for the Chinese people, and what was there to write about? But I was challenged to rethink that topic. So I set out to explore whether or not there was such a thing as Chineseness. Two factors led me to write the essay (Hook 1982). Firstly, as a historian, I was sure that the land called China, with a continuous history, must surely have produced something that could be pointed to as Chineseness. Secondly, as a Chinese who was born and grew up outside of China, I assumed that all Chinese outside China would have something in common with those inside China, and that would be Chineseness. In fact, I found it easier to find the Chineseness rooted in history than in the shared qualities among people known as Chinese around the world.

 

Identifying Chinese

The Chineseness in people is much harder to pin down. It calls for judgments about identity and meaning. It is my subject today, and it is still a difficult problem for me. So you will understand if you find me struggling with it. About the only thing that encourages me to try again is that it is an outsider's question and, being part of the Chinese diaspora myself, the outsider in me remains intrigued by it. Parts of this volume of essays are concerned with the origins of the Chinese diaspora. Other parts seek to describe what that diaspora looks like now. What is being studied are questions such as, how have the different communities of the diaspora changed in response to the demands of their adopted countries? What kinds of ethnic identities are being constructed to deal with other people's sense of nationhood? Does Chinese nationalism still mean anything for ethnic minorities outside China?

These are far-ranging questions, and I do not propose to deal with all of them. I have argued that outside the borders of China, Chinese ethnicity derives from cultural identity and is subjectively determined (Cushman and Wang 1988: 10–15). Apart from official population statistics set out according to local legal definitions and requirements in their adopted countries, the only reliable tests of a person's identity is that a person's self-identity as a Chinese, and other people agreeing that the person is Chinese, even to the point of insisting on it whether the person likes it or not. The former centers on aspects of psychology and the latter largely on physical attributes. This would certainly be true of those of Chinese descent in Southeast Asia and North America. These concerns, however, are different from those that would be of interest to Chinese within China. For them, Chineseness is of little interest unless it is changing or is forced to defend itself against change. And underlying the changes that have been the most meaningful for them this past century are the forces of modernization.

I shall approach this difficult subject by looking at the differences produced by place and practice. By place, I refer to the locality and environment in which people live. Each place obviously has its own set of practices. I shall focus on changes in practice over time and the ways in which each ethnic community coped with those changes. In the context of place and practice, does being Chinese always mean the same thing, or does it change from time to time and place to place? Do we begin with variations and adaptations of the Great Chinese Tradition that has always been associated with the power and intellectual centers of North China in the past? Do we assume that modern urban Chinese today have moved away from all that? Could we still say that numerous small traditions of rural China, with their distinctive sets of local practices, may each be more directly and quintessentially Chinese? Or is Chineseness something more abstract, a collection of cultural traits that can be isolated and used to measure each person's willingness to acknowledge them whether they lived inside Chinese territory or not?

These questions bring out the relationship between the concrete experience of being Chinese and the abstract qualities of Chineseness. They imply that being Chinese is not absolute. One could be more or less Chinese at any one point in time. One could remain stationary, true and unwavering in maintaining what one believes to be vitally rooted in tradition. That suggests an act of will, without which one could become less Chinese. This also means that if found to be inadequately Chinese, one could correct that by acquiring cultural attributes that would intensify the qualities that make one Chinese. This implies a "scientific" approach that tries to determine, however inexactly, the attributes that make someone Chinese and to measure the degrees of change that could either diminish or enhance one's Chineseness.

You may be pleased to know that I have retreated from that line of inquiry. There is no way I can quantify those attributes, and I do not want to mislead others about how accurately one can weigh something like Chineseness. I shall stay with a simple historical approach, noting changes over time in different places. But I confess that the above questions of relative quality have been unavoidable. All I ask is that you note that my efforts at answering some of them have been impressionistic and many not attain a high degree of accuracy. I shall also be experimenting with direct comparisons between the Chinese overseas and samples of those who live in Chinese territories, and have chosen four large urban clusters for discussion in this chapter: Singapore and the Bay Area around San Francisco, on the one hand, and Shanghai and Hong Kong, on the other. My starting point is that Chineseness in the former underwent changes quite different from those in the latter during the past half century.

 

Who Are "Overseas Chinese"?

This leads me to make a correction to recent writings that define the "overseas Chinese" as all Chinese outside the People's Republic of China (PRC), including those of Taiwan and Hong Kong. ₁ This would immediately separate Hong Kong from Shanghai and place Hong Kong together with Singapore and San Francisco. This makes no sense where Chineseness is concerned. Also, many of the writings that take this approach show carelessness and ignorance. Others may have had an economic, or an ideological, agenda for separating "capitalist" Chinese from "communist" Chinese. The most striking example of this usage was the espousal by The Economist in 1992 of this distinction as a hard economic fact (Shambaugh 1995). According to that counting, the populations of Taiwan and Hong Kong–Macau were added to the estimated 25 million people of Chinese descent around the world which led to the author's total of over 50 million "overseas Chinese."

There are several problems with this definition and with the figures for Chinese. Firstly, although isolating all other Chinese from the PRC may serve the interests of Taiwan as the Republic of China, the Taipei government totally rejects the inclusion of the people of Taiwan as "overseas Chinese." Their own use of the term "huaqiao" (that is, overseas Chinese) has a long history going back to the beginning of this century, the decade before the Republic was founded in 1912. It referred to Chinese citizens who were temporarily living outside Chinese territories and under foreign governments, or who were so regarded by a series of Chinese governments (Wang 1981: 124–126). Adding to the confusion, the Taipei authorities have always treated Hong Kong Chinese as their huaqiao, for these same historical reasons, since Hong Kong was ruled by the British. However, the Hong Kong people do not consider themselves overseas Chinese, although many had once been overseas Chinese or still have family ties overseas. Some of them have, however, accepted the Taiwan usage because huaqiao status confers certain benefits in Taiwan, especially for entry into Taiwan's more prestigious universities. In contrast, where the PRC is concerned, the greater advantage for Hong Kong and Macau people comes from being called tongbao (compatriots). Indeed, in the PRC, the Taiwanese are also consistently called tongbao. In no way could Taiwanese be considered overseas Chinese, which would imply that they lived in foreign territory.

Secondly, even the lower figure of 25 million Chinese who live outside the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong–Macau assumes an accurate definition about who is and who is not Chinese that begs the question. For Southeast Asia alone, the 1992 figure is 23 million. Of this, only the census figures for Malaysia and Singapore define ethnic Chinese more or less consistently, but none of the other estimates can be considered reliable. What is remarkable is that Chineseness is equated with descent and blood, and ignores all questions of identity and the significance of cultural and social attributes. It fails to note the high percentage of mixed marriages in Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Myanmar that produced progeny who considered themselves local and only incidentally Chinese. Nor does it take into account the effectiveness of the national education that was introduced after the independence of each of the new nation-states. Thus, if this misleading figure is linked with political loyalties and the potential for subversion, as it was during the period of the Cold War, it could be most alarming to China's neighbors. Strategic and diplomatic considerations aside, this way of counting heads is dangerously close to a kind of racism that resembles anti-Semitism. I refer to the prejudice that, in modern times, turned into a systematic discrimination and political persecution that began by identifying every Jew in pseudo-scientific ways, in the name of social biology, breeding, even eugenics.

As far as the Chinese themselves are concerned, only those who live outside Chinese territories, especially those who have settled in foreign countries and become their citizens, might be included in the idea of a Chinese diaspora. More accurately, in order to avoid calling them huaqiao, or sojourners, these citizens of Chinese descent are referred to as "Chinese overseas" or are described as hyphenated Chinese–Malaysian Chinese, Sino-Thai, and Chinese-Americans, for example. But clearly, for them, the term huaqiao (conventionally translated as "overseas Chinese") is a misnomer, for it implies that such "overseas Chinese" are really citizens of China temporarily residing outside China. In the PRC, Taiwan, and Hong Kong today, these Chinese tend now to be called "haiwai huaren," or "huaren" for short. This has been rendered as "ethnic Chinese" in more recent scholarly writings—and is strongly preferred by L. Suryadinata (1995 and 1997)—but it must be said that the term "haiwai huaren" still causes confusion because it is the literal translation of "overseas Chinese." Allow me to simplify the matter thus: the diaspora or Chinese overseas do not include the people of Taiwan and Hong Kong–Macau, nor those, whatever their descent, who deny that they are Chinese and have nothing to do with the rituals, practices, and institutions associated with the Chinese.

 

Places And Practices

I mentioned earlier that I shall compare the diaspora with some communities in China and concentrate on four cities. Two of them, Shanghai and Hong Kong, are clearly Chinese; their Chineseness is entwined with problems of modernization. The other two, Singapore and San Francisco, have large Chinese communities for whom Chineseness means cultural identity, and this subject has divided each community as to how Chinese they are and ought to be. Before I proceed with these large cities, it is important to remember that the dilemmas of place and practice can be just as complex where Chinese communities are small as where they are large. I shall use three examples to illustrate that point.

In Tahiti in French Polynesia, the Chinese number about 10,000, almost 10 percent of the population (Moench 1963). More than 100 years ago, they had come as laborers and small businessmen from the villages and townships of the Pearl River delta just north of Hong Kong. They became well-off, and in some cases immensely wealthy, during the Second World War when the United States took over from the Vichy French and gave the Chinese some exclusive agencies and contracts. Since the end of the war when the French returned, the leading families have been true to their Chinese past and remained successful by positioning themselves in the middle, politically with the French and economically with the American companies that helped them get started. Among the young, however, there is intermarriage and conversion to Christianity, even sympathy for Tahitian independence, but also emigration to Europe and North America. Inevitably, this has caused a loosening of their ties with the community. This tight and small community consists mainly of Hakkas, who are particularly proud of the way they have carried their Chineseness with them wherever they have gone. There is concern that the younger generation should maintain their Chineseness. The generational struggle over being Chinese is no less intense, partly because the elders have tried hard to make up for their isolation in one corner of the South Pacific.

At the other end of the world, in mobile and cosmopolitan Britain, the Chinese are but one of many minorities and they do not have economic dominance over the native population as they do in Tahiti. Also, the Chinese have not clustered there as much as they have in some other parts of Europe (Parker 1998a, 1988b). The links with Hong Kong, from which most of them have come, are strong and maintaining their cultural identity is much easier. The bulk of the Chinese are first-generation immigrants. Among them are many whose educational backgrounds ensured upward social mobility for their children. Chinese language skills, including the ability to write Chinese, have been kept up and global ties with other Chinese communities have been encouraged. The serious test will come when another generation grows up. Stable politics and a sound economy in Britain will guarantee a high degree of tolerance toward the Chinese, which should increase the opportunities to assimilate.

The story is somewhat different in Japan, another native but non-colonial setting on a group of islands where the Chinese community is small and dispersed. It is also a stable and economically prosperous country, albeit in Asia. The major difference is that the Chinese in Japan moved into a country whose people once acknowledged a great cultural debt to China. But modern Japan has always been more restrictive about immigration than Britain, and much more reluctant to assimilate their immigrant workforce. In contrast to their harsh policies toward Korean residents, however, the Japanese have shown great ambiguity in their treatment of the Chinese. The unique mixture of respect and contempt that the Chinese experience there aggravates the dilemmas of place and practice: a place that is proximate and even culturally familiar, and a practice that is hierarchical, discriminatory, and highly controlled. The diaspora experience there is not only totally different from that in the other two territories, but also markedly different from that in Southeast Asia (Shiba 1995; Tad 1980). All of them remind us that, even for the smallest communities, being Chinese is not simple.

 

Four Cities

Now for the four cities. The people of the four cities can be distinguished as the Hongkongers and Shanghainese who live on the edge of the China coast, and as Singaporeans and the Bay Area Chinese-Americans who live far away. As people living in different environments, with different political and cultural systems, they are obviously not the same. What kind of Chineseness then can be identified in all of them? The difference in place determines a great deal of what people do and think, how they live, and what loyalties they owe. But the fact that all four are great cities, and the regional centers of urban, commercial and cultural activity, bring out much that is common to all global cities. In an increasingly large number of areas, notably in business, technology, and academia, similar goals prevail and it hardly matters whether or not one is Chinese. Wealth, work, education, and certain levels of cultural pursuits bring the cities and their successful people together, making Chineseness far from essential for their respective successes.

Nevertheless, two factors remain important in challenging this prototype of Chinese who are urban, and middle class, and who may also be described as capitalistic, or people servicing a capitalist economic system. The first is that in a spectrum ranging from those who are obviously Chinese to those who are only barely recognizable as Chinese, the Shanghai Chinese, who are the pioneers of modern Chineseness, would be closest to what may be seen as historically Chinese. Along such a spectrum, Hong Kong Chinese today, despite having been ruled by the British for so long, would not be all that distant from those of Shanghai. Those who have settled in Singapore and the Bay Area are further along the spectrum because they have many more complex non-Chinese variables in their lives with which to contend.

The second factor is that political identities and practices still count for a great deal and will be more evident as an increasingly nationalistic China makes more specific demands on Shanghai and Hong Kong Chinese. Such demands may also influence the thought and behavior patterns of Chinese outside China, but there are good reasons why the Chinese in Singapore and San Francisco would be able to resist them. Of particular importance is the more general question, how will regional and global responses to a resurgent China impact ethnic Chinese residents in Southeast Asia and North America?

 

Shanghai

Although they are relevant, I shall not try to answer all these questions. For the rest of this essay, I shall concentrate simply on how the two factors of place and practice apply to the four varieties of Chinese. I begin with Shanghai because, by any criterion, its people are Chinese and have always been seen as Chinese (Wei 1987; Marie-Claire Bergere 1981). Chineseness for them simply means leading the way toward becoming modern Chinese. Shanghai became the model of a modern Chinese city for all Chinese inside and outside China. Its people were also considered the very models of modern Chinese. If there are dilemmas there, they stem from the question of how far modernization should go for its people. As an integral part of China, there were constraints on how much faster they could go without leaving their compatriots behind. Shanghai began by welcoming a wide range of Chinese from all over China, especially those from the wealthiest and best-educated peoples of the Yangzi delta. The city thus attracted a galaxy of creative and innovative talent who were drawn by its openness and a miscellany of practices that allowed far more leeway to challenge convention with innovation.

The Chinese who want to identify themselves as Shanghainese may be described as those who mastered the earliest challenges of the West's impact on China and indubitably became the first examples of modern Chinese. Their city was the first truly international city in Asia. Their success in learning and adapting from the West without losing their Chinese identity was greatly admired throughout China. But there was more, much more, that was contradictory and perplexing to the Chinese in the interior. Shanghai was home to both nationalism and revolution; it also produced some of the keenest minds, who proceeded to instruct the rest of China about the most advanced ideas in science and the arts from all parts of the world. Paradoxically, it was also the first city in China to symbolize the negative images of what had been borrowed from the West. It stood for extravagance and waste, glitter and shallowness, cosmopolitan rootlessness and disloyalty, betrayal of Chinese values, even treachery toward China itself. In short, identity of a modern Chinese in all its manifestations can be said to have evolved in Shanghai.

After the Communist victory in 1949, cosmopolitan Shanghai came to an end, although it remained the most modern city in the PRC for the next 40 years. Four decades of resinification followed for the people of Shanghai. They were not asked to return to being Chinese in the Great Tradition, but to make their contribution to that curious mix of peasant simplicity and socialist experimentation that Mao Zedong imposed on all of China. In Shanghai, there was a conscious effort to eliminate all the dross of foreign capitalist practice and residual feudal values, while retaining the skills necessary for a basic industrialization modeled on another foreign example, that of the Soviet Union. When this experiment was declared a failure in the late 1970s, an older Shanghai tried to be reborn. Interestingly, this recrudescence did not seek to restore traditional Chinese culture but to rejuvenate something of the amalgam created by Shanghai earlier this century. That had been the peak of modern Chineseness, which was seen as the hallmark of the Shanghainese. And they are well on their way to succeeding in the opinion of most people who have been to Shanghai recently.

 

Hong Kong

In comparison, Hong Kong was marked by its beginnings as the colonial backwater of a single power, the British. Its small Chinese villages remained remarkably parochial and stubbornly impervious to modern influences. Thus, Chineseness in early Hong Kong was not associated with modernization. It remained traditional and provincial up to the 1940s. Whatever modernity the place could produce was either Anglo-Chinese or largely an imitation of the new Chinese practices that were emerging in Shanghai (Wong 1988).

Hong Kong's translation to a global meeting place of goods and services, peoples and cultures came about only after the 1950s. Since then, radical changes have given the place a multidimensional appearance. Certainly, what is Chinese there today is no longer easy to describe or understand because several processes took place at the same time. Although many modern Chinese from Shanghai brought their dynamism and creativity to Hong Kong, the place was also flooded by people who came out of traditional villages of the Pearl River delta in search of work in the newly developed industries. People voted with their feet against the Maoist revolution in the PRC. For the first time, there was a consensus in Hong Kong that modernization was to be found in the open, international, market-economy. It was another beginning of, a second chance for, an alternative Chineseness anchored in modern entrepreneurship and new standards of material and technological success (Leung and Wong 1994).

Given this new inspiration, the heart of this modernity came less from place than from practice. By practice, I refer to the Anglo-Chinese system of authority and management, marked in particular by efficient administration and the rule of law (Leung, Cushman and Wang 1980; Scott and Burns 1988). This modern system enabled rapid changes to occur without disorder and instability, and the Hong Kong people came to admire and depend on it. Although the system had begun with a foreign overarching authority, most Hong Kong people today accept it as a vital part of their modern heritage, a valuable accretion to what Hongkongers may eventually bring to another kind of Chineseness.

After the 1950s, British colonial policies were modified in response to the closure of Shanghai and the new opportunities thus provided. The new practices offered a unique experience of openness to restless and dynamic people who could readily come and go. But events in China after 1949 continued to bring uncertainty to Hong Kong. A series of campaigns and disturbances followed, which came to a climax during the Cultural Revolution. Although most of the subsequent surprises were more benign, they did not cease, not even after the tragedy at Tiananmen Square in 1989. The increasing tension in Sino-British relations is simply one of the symptoms of the underlying uncertainty.

For example, when the "one country, two systems" formula was elaborated in the Basic Law, it became a severe test of loyalty; its success depended on whether or not the Hong Kong people were sufficiently patriotic to accept it. The decolonization process has followed British practice closely, but the workability of having a colonially trained administration in a Chinese jurisdiction is unknown and the effects are quite uncertain. It is expected that gradual sinification in mode and style will occur. The results may not be easily recognizable as Chinese, but the accepted practices of a city that has become part of China must be seen as Chinese in time, no matter how they evolve.

When a place and its practices are subject to external pressures for change as Hong Kong has been, its people face the dilemmas involved in having to choose what kind of modern Chinese they wish to become (Lau and Kuan 1988). This may mean asking whether to stay or leave, whether to change with the times or stand firm, whether to be passive and receptive, or whether to actively seek to identify with China or not. Several of the other papers in this volume deal with this issue, so it is not necessary to cover the ground again. What does need saying, however, is that the dilemmas stem from many causes. The standards and qualities in the modern values to which people aspire must be placed in the context of trying to be both modern and Chinese on the periphery of China. The Hong Kong Chinese can claim to have developed their own version of a new Chineseness during the past four decades. The question is, will they be rewarded for that contribution? Or will they have to pay a price for having gone their own way?

 

Singapore

Let me now turn to Singapore, another city with a Chinese majority that has gone its own way but, unlike Hong Kong, has been fortunate enough to become an independent state. The city began in 1819 as a free port where varieties of Chinese, already in the neighboring territories, quickly gathered. Within decades, they were joined by large numbers of Chinese who came directly from China. Many later came via Hong Kong, since the British connection helped make that city the most convenient outlet for emigrant Chinese (Wang 1992: 22–28). Chinese and other businessmen then used Singapore as a transit stop from which Chinese laborers were distributed to the Malay States and the Netherlands East Indies.

The Singapore Chinese formed a commercial community that was the freest and most active in Southeast Asia (Sandhu and Wheatley 1989). Interactions with the neighboring areas of Java, Sumatra, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, and Thailand laid the foundations for the role the island was to play thereafter—the provider of trading services. The first Chinese leaders of the Straits Settlements came from the small Baba (local-born) communities that had left China generations earlier. Most of them had lost the use of the Chinese language, but, together with those of the Malay Peninsula, they retained close links with traditional Chinese organizations. Despite their ties to the British administration, they showed a willingness to support Chinese causes when there was occasion to do so. We might mention examples of loyal supporters of Sun Yat-sen who readily sacrificed their lives for China, and others later on who did likewise in the service of the Communist Revolution. Indeed, this phenomenon continued beyond the Second World War (Lee 1996) and was even truer of those first-generation Chinese who knew little or no English, as well as the thousands of others who were educated in local Chinese schools up to the 1950s. The latter were adept at using modern methods of organization and communication to bring much needed help to China. During the first 150 years of Singapore history, most of these Chinese considered themselves Chinese, and the question of Chineseness posed no problems for them (Chew and Lee 1991).

This was true not only in territories of the British empire. What distinguished local British practice in the Straits Settlements were the legal and administrative measures, the relative media freedom, and the mix of public and private education systems that produced many of the modern skills that China wanted. The links with another British colony, Hong Kong, brought the two cities close together and enabled a degree of coordination that facilitated common action. They thus shared Anglo-Chinese features in the way their peoples responded to modernization. Also the advanced business methods they imbibed from the capitalist world gave them distinct advantages when they returned more recently to be active on the China coasts.

During periods of grave uncertainty, traditional values provided some solace and sanity. The motley clutch of ideas that promoted modernization but was derived from multiple sources was more difficult to handle. In fact, in colonies open to many forces, new people came and went who had little expectation of permanence. They were migratory and pragmatic (Hassan 1976). For such Chinese, the institutional features of the Great Tradition had largely been left behind, and their personal cultural baggage was light and adaptable. This is the source of their strength, the willingness to adjust to any place and any practice if necessary.

After the Second World War, we see this strong adaptability among the growing number of Chinese who settled in Singapore. They had preserved what they could of Chinese culture without much difficulty. But in the 1960s, they were forced to surrender parts of that heritage in order to take up the unexpected opportunity to become the political majority of a small Southeast Asian city-state (Lee 1996; Chua 1995). As Singaporeans, those of Chinese descent now face a different destiny. Their loyalties are to their new nation, whose survival has depended on looking outward. Apart from the immediate region, they have looked for their economic development in the international market economy. No less than the commercial and industrial cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong, they have turned to global business networks in which the Chinese connections have become important (Pan 1990: 225–274). Thus, when modernity is secure, it is in this direction that the new Chineseness has turned.

 

San Francisco

In comparison with the other three cities, San Francisco's Chinese population is not dominant but forms a significant minority. Although it is on another continent, it has also attracted clusters of different kinds of Chinese, especially during the second half of this century. The Chinese of San Francisco began by meeting the harshest tests of Chineseness. They had to endure hostile conditions for three generations before the United States' revision of its Chinese immigration policies brought new life to the Bay Area (Nee and Nee 1972). Thus, a century after the Chinese first arrived in California, Chineseness became legitimized for a strong and distinct minority in an immigrant country of European cultural origins. The story is one of many paradoxes.

On the one hand, there was the near disappearance of Chinese community life. Despite the strenuous efforts of small numbers of the local-born and educated to find acceptance as Americans through assimilation and to fight for the rights of other Chinese, the exclusion policies persisted (Chung 1988). They affected social attitudes toward Chinese at all levels, which led to the truncation or division of many families. This brought isolation for many, especially for the old who rejected Western ways yet did not wish to return to China. Nevertheless, tenacious links with relatives in China and Hong Kong managed to heighten certain kinds of Chinese loyalty (Chinese America 1994: Him and Chan). On the other hand, new arrivals after the 1950s enriched the new communities, reminiscent of the way the cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong became great amalgams of all kinds of Chinese. In addition to newcomers from cities of mainland China such as Shanghai, or from elite families of Taiwan, the population was also augmented by the relatives of earlier immigrants from Hong Kong and the Pearl River delta.

Will this new mix bring a unique brand of Chineseness peculiar to Chinese-Americans? The new community has continued to grow, and more and more of its members are participating fully in the modern political and social practices of the country (Tu 1994; Wang and Wang 1998). If this process continues, it could eventually offer new elements of modernity from which the Chinese elsewhere in Shanghai, Hong Kong, or even Singapore might be willing to learn. But it may also be that the Chineseness of China will always be considered the only authentic kind, and those outside must choose to return or forever confront their dilemmas of place and practice.

 

Towards Modern Chineseness

I have not tried to cover all four cities and their groups of Chinese equally. Each group in each city faces its own unique set of practices. In the cultural spectrum of Chineseness, the Shanghai Chinese would be at one end and the Singapore and San Francisco Chinese at the other, with the Hong Kong Chinese somewhere in between. The cultural gaps between Shanghai and Hong Kong, and those between them and the Singapore–San Francisco variety, are uneven and difficult to measure. But all Chinese faced modern transformations in this century, and the idea of Chineseness was exposed to the modern forces of international capitalism.

There is a presumption that modern capitalism requires common conditions and that increasing dependence on this powerful phenomenon by Chinese of whatever origins means that they will share certain goals and methods. If this is true, the Chinese in all four cities would seek upward mobility and would be increasingly alike in the way they conduct their businesses and in the professional careers they seek for themselves in a borderless world. But I hesitate to draw that conclusion. From the history of the Chinese in these cities, it seems unlikely over time that they will be modern Chinese in similar ways, or that their loyalties to their local place and practice will be diminished by their economic concerns (Tu 1994: 145–146; Chinese America 1996: 11–16, Wang and Him).

Events inside and outside of China will develop beyond the control of any of these groups, and much within their own respective localities will undergo change. Many will ask, what matter if they were more Chinese or less? Or whether they were rich or poor in tradition? Or, in some cases, even if they were Chinese at all? But if, after all that, others still treat them as Chinese and they continue to be proud to consider themselves Chinese, then they can well stand up and say that a resilient modern Chineseness has been reinforced. Each group could claim that theirs is the start of new tradition.

The four cities are now key nodes in the extensive business and professional networks established during the past two decades. But Hong Kong, whose people are not yet as fully Chinese as their compatriots in Shanghai, and also clearly not "overseas" as are those in Singapore and San Francisco, provides a valuable test of the politics of identity. Differences in practice will pull the cities in different directions. For example, Shanghai retains socialist goals for the market economy it is trying to build, and a new kind of modern Chinese may come of that experiment. At the other extreme, the Bay Area, is lodged deeply in the strongest capitalist economy in the world. Its Chinese population has by now fully absorbed the values there and can be expected to sustain its own brand of modified Chineseness in that environment (Wang and Wang 1998). In contrast, the city-state of Singapore has integrated public and private enterprise most successfully, and its mixed form of capitalism has taught Singaporeans to look at the value of being Chinese in more utilitarian ways.

Hong Kong's experience of capitalism is clearly of a different order. The fact that it stood as a sort of front line for the capitalistic world was nothing if not a strong political act, an affirmation of economic ideology. Diluting their concern for their Chineseness was the price the Hong Kong people had to pay. But they have demonstrated the strengths and virtues of capitalism. Now they need to show that with this new culture of place and practice, which is contingent on dynamic global factors unknown in the past, they can still pass the test of loyalty to a modernizing China.

Hong Kong's dilemmas at the handover remind us that Hong Kong people will have to face issues of being Chinese that are quite different from those confronting people in Singapore or San Francisco. Despite the capitalistic intercourse that might bring Chinese peoples together, location and the distance in political practice alone preclude the sharing of a common Chinese identity. Instead, being Chinese in Hong Kong hereafter may be compared with what Shanghai people had to face in the past (Wang and Wong 1997). Shanghai's role as an international city that led the way in creating a modern Chinese identity may be the nearest example for Hong Kong to emulate. Most Hong Kong people will choose to stay and turn toward that former Shanghai model. Some who left earlier have already returned, and many more may do the same. If they do, and join in the task of modernizing China as Shanghai will continue to do, they will have decisively discarded the superficial "overseas Chinese" image that foreigners have tried hard to project on Hongkongers in recent years.

Finally, for a variety of reasons that we cannot predict, there will be Hongkongers who will choose not to follow the Chineseness of new Shanghai but to leave China altogether (Skeldon 1994). If and when they do, they will be choosing to become ethnic Chinese in foreign countries, setting out to eventually lose themselves among non-Chinese or looking for a vision of universal Chineseness among the millions spread around the world (Tu 1994). If they truly want to pursue that quest, it is not obvious that such Hongkongers would find their way to Singapore, even though the city-state has a Chinese majority and is geographically closer to Hong Kong and China. Singapore's place in the Malay Archipelago is ultimately alien to people accustomed to a vast Chinese hinterland. Hong Kong people would tend to feel confined in space and limited in opportunity without a continental backdrop. Although it has far fewer Chinese, San Francisco, together with other similar cities in North America and Australia, may be more attractive to Hongkongers, not only because these cities promise more of the freedoms they have learned to enjoy but also because the Chinese there are more recent immigrants. As such, they display a familiar kind of modern Chineseness that makes them people with whom Hongkongers could more easily relate and, ultimately, the kind of Chinese overseas they themselves would like to become.

 

Note

Note 1:  There are many journalistic essays that take this view, notably The Economist (November 21, 1992). It is less comprehensible when serious studies follow this usage (Reading 1990: 23–24; East Asia Analytical Unit 1995; and Lever-Tracy, Ip, and Tracy 1996). For an earlier effort to correct this, see Shambaugh (1995).Back.

 

References

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Bergere, Marie-Claire. 1981. "'The Other China': Shanghai from 1919 to 1949," in Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis, edited by Christopher Howe, pp. 1–34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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