No longer Chinese? Residual Chineseness after the Rise of China

I tell this personal story to reflect on the changing meaning of the problematic term “diaspora,” especially Chinese diaspora, in the new global condition of the twenty-first century. Of course, I cannot claim that my experience is in any sense representative – on the contrary. It is from the singularity of my story – enunciated from a place “truly on the periphery,” in the murky borderlands where it is impossible to unscramble “Chinese” from “non-Chinese” – that I wish to make some observations about the politics of Chineseness in the era of the “rise of China.” My interest here is in making that murky, peripheral, ambiguous place productive for global intercultural dialogue that can be freed from the absolutist sign of “Chineseness,” which, as I will argue, is being reinforced, not diminished, by the reductive logic of diaspora in this age of China’s rise.