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Beyond Chinese groupism:Chinese Australians betweenassimilation, multiculturalismand diasporaIen AngPublished online: 10 Dec 2013.

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Beyond Chinese groupism: Chinese Australians between assimilation,multiculturalism and diaspora

Ien Ang

(Received 16 October 2012; accepted 16 October 2013)

This essay argues that the tension between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is notcontingent, but structurally embedded in the workings of the contemporary nation state.Through an analysis of ‘the Chinese’ in ‘Australia’ it aims to demonstrate that seeminglyunambiguous concepts such as assimilation (the ethnic is absorbed by the national),multiculturalism (the ethnic coexists with the national) and diaspora (the ethnictranscends the national) cannot capture the diverse difficulties, ambivalences andfailures of identification, belonging and political agency experienced by ChineseAustralians. A more satisfactory analysis requires a questioning of the groupness of ‘theChinese’ (as well as ‘the Australians’) and overcoming conceptual groupism(Brubaker): the tendency to take discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogen-eous and externally bounded groups as basic constituents of social life. Instead a moreprocessual and flexible understanding is proposed, where the relationship between‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity is one of constant evolution and mutual entanglement.

Keywords: Chinese; Australia; assimilation; multiculturalism; diaspora; groupism

Introduction: the ethnic and the national

A starting point for this special issue is ‘the need to redefine the meaning of “nation” andto rethink the policies for nation-building in multi-ethnic societies’ (Benton and Gomez,in this issue). The rationale here is to replace homogenizing and exclusionary definitionsof national identity with a concept of the nation that incorporates diversity and difference.This conceptual move is associated with multiculturalism. As a political philosophy,multiculturalism typically posits the peaceful coexistence and equality of multiple ethnicgroups and communities within the nation, to the effect that the latter can be described asa ‘unity in diversity’ (Parekh 2002; Taylor 1994). In practice, however, achieving thisideal of peaceful and equal coexistence has proved difficult if not impossible, signallingan enduring tension between national unity and ethnic diversity.

The incorporation of multiculturalism in state policies around the world has been metwith varying support or rejection. In Britain, for example, Prime Minister David Cameron(2011) recently pronounced with much fanfare that multiculturalism policies in Britainhave been a failure, arguing that ‘under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we haveencouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and themainstream’. Cameron articulates a rising backlash against multiculturalism in contem-porary Europe, where it is accused of reinforcing divisions between different groups,rather than enhancing their integration into a shared sense of nationhood (Vertovec andWessendorf 2010).

A different but comparable discursive contestation exists in a country such as Malaysia,even though this postcolonial nation state has not had a major influx of immigrants since

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2014Vol. 37, No. 7, 1184–1196, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2014.859287

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independence. Here, struggles over the meaning of the national have focused primarily onthe place of the descendants of colonial minorities – in particular, Chinese and Indians, whohave lived in the territory since the moment of the birth of the nation state. In what ways cannon-indigenous, non-Malay Malaysians belong to this postcolonial nation without beingrelegated to the status of secondary citizens? Here again, the political issue at stake is one ofnational inclusion. For Malaysian Chinese (as well as Indians), the key demand is to berecognized as part of the Malaysian nation whose identity should be defined explicitly interms of multi-ethnicity rather than in majoritarian, indigenous-only terms (Ang 2010;Hefner 2005; Lim, Gomes, and Rahman 2009).

Such demands assume a teleological political horizon: the trajectory is conceived asone from ethnic to national – the nation as destiny. The assumption is that once those whoare positioned as ‘ethnic’ are included as fully and legitimately part of the ‘national’,equality and justice will have been achieved. Yet, as both the British and the Malaysiancases exemplify, this linear movement from ethnic to national identity seems virtuallyimpossible to realize. Indeed, there is a persistent tension between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’identity, which, I argue, is structural, not contingent. Precisely because nation states,whether as a consequence of recent immigration or as a legacy of the colonial past, areirrevocably ethnically diverse spaces, they will always have to contain within them thefrictions between sameness and difference, unity and diversity. These frictions, caused bythe presence of ethnic minorities within national boundaries everywhere, alert us to thehistorically artificial nature of the nation state as a bounded territorial unit, sovereignpolity and cohesive population. Indeed, the nation state is a modern construct. We may bemore aware of this in relation to new, postcolonial nation states such as Malaysia than tothe long-established nation states of Europe. Nevertheless, the general point to be made isthat the national cannot be conceived as a simple destiny of belonging, at least not in anydefinitive and permanent way, because any nation state is, by definition, always bothinclusive and exclusive (Gellner 1983).

As Rogers Brubaker (2004, 120) puts it: ‘No matter how open and “joinable” a nationis… it is always imagined, as Benedict Anderson (1991) observed, as a limitedcommunity. It is intrinsically parochial and irredeemably particular.’ The same applies,however, inter alia for ethnic groups. They, too, are generally imagined as boundedentities, with clearly demarcated boundaries, and therefore as inherently exclusive.Membership of an ethnic group, just as that of a nation, is generally deemed to be fixed, ifnot predetermined. From this point of view, tensions between ethnic minorities andnational communities are conceived as the clash between two ontologically separateentities: tensions heighten if the national and the ethnic are defined in mutuallyincompatible ways (i.e. when the nation defines the ethnic as an undesirable orincompatible other), and they may lessen if the nation opens itself up and makes itselfmore joinable and inclusive (i.e. more accepting of multi-ethnicity). In either case, thetension between the national and the ethnic remains structurally extant: it is theconsequence of a way of seeing the world ‘as a multichrome mosaic of monochromeethnic, racial and cultural blocs’ (Brubaker 2002, 164).

A different way of considering the relationship between the national and the ethnicrequires us to go beyond what Brubaker (2002, 164) calls ‘groupism’: the tendency ‘totake discrete, sharply differentiated, internally homogeneous and externally boundedgroups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, andfundamental units of social analysis’. Obviously, this is a tendency that is particularly

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persistent in relation to ‘ethnic groups’, which are routinely treated – in common-senseknowledge as well as in governmental arrangements – as substantial entities to whichdistinct interests and agency can be attributed. Against such reification of ethnic groups,Brubaker suggests that ethnicity, race and nation should be conceptualized not insubstantive terms – as given collectivities or communities with delineated identities – butrather ‘in relational, processual, dynamic, eventful and disaggegrated terms’ (167). Thismeans ‘taking as a basic analytical category not the “group” as an entity but groupness asa contextually fluctuating conceptual variable’ (167–168).

In this essay, I will take this theoretical stance as a starting point to interrogate theChinese in Australia. Speaking about ‘the Chinese in Australia’ immediately conjures uptwo entities: ‘the Chinese’ (as the ethnic group) and ‘Australia’ (the nation). This groupistmanner of speaking is so ingrained in our language that we tend to take its referentialvalue for granted. But we will gain more analytical traction in our efforts to comprehendthe vexed issues of ethnic identity formation and national belonging if we go beyond thereification involved in the groupist way of thinking. This requires us to address ‘theChinese’ and ‘Australia’ not in categorical terms, but in processual and relational terms.Neither ‘the Chinese’ nor ‘Australia’ is a fixed and bounded category. Indeed, it isprecisely by considering the shifting and uncertain boundaries that demarcate theirgroupness that we will develop a clearer understanding of the challenges of minoritypolitics in today’s world, which remains compartmentalized in nation states despitedecades of unprecedented globalization.

Chinese Australian diversity

The Australian national context is interesting because it is, unlike Malaysia, a migrant-receiving nation state with a very elaborate migration and settlement programme. At thesame time it is still, unlike Britain, a country that remains committed to multiculturalism.Since the 1970s, Australian governments have embraced the notion of cultural diversityand the right of migrants to express their cultural heritage within an overriding andunifying commitment to Australia. This was officially articulated in the National Agendafor a Multicultural Australia in 1989 (Office of Multicultural Affairs 1989). As recently asFebruary 2011, Chris Bowen, then the minister for immigration and citizenship, affirmedthe government’s continued endorsement of Australian multiculturalism, in direct rebuketo the negative pronouncements of David Cameron and other European leaders (Bowen2011). Australia today prides itself explicitly as a multicultural nation that has beenextremely successful in integrating migrants from all over the world. This inclusionarynational self-definition has been put forward as an enormous break from the old,exclusionary policy of ‘White Australia’, which imposed a strictly homogenizing andassimilationist national image on the citizenry (Brahm Levey 2012; Jupp and Clyne 2011;Stratton and Ang 1998).

This has particular bearings on the situation of ‘the Chinese’ in Australia. Chineseimmigrants came to Australia as early as the mid-nineteenth century, mostly fromsouthern China, in particular to take advantage of the gold rushes in Victoria and NewSouth Wales (e.g. Choi 1975; Cronin 1982). By the time of Australian Federation – theofficial birth of Australia as a nation state – in 1901, there were almost 30,000 people ofChinese descent in the country. Their numbers froze as a result of the passing of theImmigration Restriction Act in that year, which was specifically adopted to keep Chineseand other Asians out. Those who managed to stay raised families whose descendants

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became known as ABCs (Australian Born Chinese), in circumstances where discrimina-tion and assimilationist pressure was pervasive. This began to change from the late 1960sonwards, when discriminatory immigration restrictions were gradually removed. In theaftermath of the final end of the ‘White Australia’ policy in 1973 and the introduction ofmulticulturalism as official policy, new immigrants of Chinese background began toarrive from a range of origin countries. During the 1970s, many ethnic Chinese refugeesfrom Vietnam and Cambodia were given permission to settle in Australia. From the 1980sonwards, new waves of migration from Hong Kong, but also Taiwan, Singapore,Malaysia and Indonesia, brought different strata of Chinese-identified migrants intoAustralia, settling mostly as skilled professionals and entrepreneurs (Inglis and Wu 1992).Meanwhile, after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, the Australian governmentallowed thousands of students from mainland China to stay in the country. According tothe 2011 census, there were 866,200 people in Australia who self-reported as being ofChinese ancestry (amounting to 4.3% of the total Australian population). Focusing onancestry data is useful because it provides an indication of the cultural group that a personmost closely identifies with, irrespective of country of birth. Of those who identified withbeing of Chinese ancestry, 36% were born in China, 26% in Australia and 38% in othercountries. In the past decade, the proportion of those born in China has rapidly increased,as the people from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) are one of the fastest growingnew migrant groups in Australia (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2012–13). Whilehistorically most Chinese immigrants have been Cantonese speakers, with growingnumbers of migrants from the mainland, the number of Mandarin speakers is increasingrapidly. Most ABCs, however, speak English only.

Such variegated backgrounds and trajectories over a period of more than 150 yearshighlight the extremely diverse range of people who identify themselves as ‘Chinese’ inAustralia today (Inglis 1998; Sun et al. 2011). This puts into question their cohesion as asingular ‘ethnic group’, posing a challenge to the groupist perspective. At a global level,too, we should problematize the presumed existence of a singular entity called ‘theChinese diaspora’. As millions of people have dispersed from China across the globe forat least 200 years, can they and their descendants all be encompassingly grouped asdiasporic ‘Chinese’, whose commonality presumably resides in a shared ethnicity? Or isthis unifying language part of the very problem that we need to disentangle? As Anderson(1998, 131) once quipped, critiquing the tendency to assign particular people a priori toparticular diasporic groupings: ‘Wherever the “Chinese” happen to end up – Jamaica,Hungary, or South Africa – they remain countable Chinese, and it matters little if theyalso happen to be citizens of those nation-states.’ Indeed, why is it, for example, thatMalaysian ‘Chinese’, most of whom are descendants of Chinese migrants who settled inMalaysia many generations ago, are still called ‘Chinese’, by the state as well as bythemselves? Whose interests does such persistent ethnic identification serve, and withwhat effects? Similarly, what (analytical and political) implications are there in groupingall people of Chinese ancestry in Australia, however diverse their histories andexperiences, into a singular ethnic category?

This is not just an academic question: it has important political relevance. Let meillustrate this with an ethnographic vignette. In April 2011, the Chinese CommunityCouncil of Australia (CCCA), an ethnic community organization whose aim is torepresent Chinese Australians on the national stage, organized a conference entitledFinding the Chinese Australian Voice.1 During the conference, which brought together a

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range of progressive and politically active Australians of Chinese descent, severalspeakers lamented the lack of unity and visibility of Chinese Australians as a group,pointing to the fact that there were more than 400 Chinese community organizations inSydney alone. How, participants asked, can such fragmentation among the Chinese beovercome, and how can they be collectively mobilized to promote their group interests?

Such questions presume the self-evident meaningfulness of ‘the Chinese’ as a unifiablegroup. This was indeed what happened during the conference, which I attended as aparticipant observer. This self-evidence was achieved through the reification ofChineseness as the obvious common element of identity, shared by all those who areof Chinese descent. The fact that ‘ultimately, we are all Chinese’ was presented as thenatural reason why a united front was not only desirable but logical. Precisely because ofthe unquestioned prevalence of this presumption, however, conference goers did notmanage to develop pertinent answers to their own questions. Notwithstanding being ajoyous occasion for social bonding, the conference ended without a clear way forward forthe organization.

A crucial step towards such a way forward, I argue, would be a critical interrogation ofthe groupism that underpins the assumption of ‘the Chinese’ as an ‘ethnic group’. Ratherthan reifying Chineseness as a primordial ethno-cultural substance, we should examinethe ways and contexts within which it is imaginatively produced and reproduced as themarker of a salient ethnic identity. After all, as Wang Gungwu (2009) reminds us,Chineseness is an ambiguous term that is quite new and that came out of questionsmainly asked by foreigners about what it means to be Chinese. Until the twentiethcentury, ‘Chinese’ was a word used only outside China. Only after 1912, withthe establishment of the Republic of China, did the term zhongguoren (Chinese people)come to refer to the citizens or nationals of the new, territorially sovereign nation state.Those who were born or lived outside China (whom we now call diasporic or overseasChinese) did not seem to be bound by any specific idea of Chineseness. As Wang (2009,202) puts it:

They accepted being called Chinese by other communities, but were more concerned withtheir identities as members of certain villages, lineages, ritual centres, counties or languagegroups, or of certain trades and occupations. It was only after the rise of modern nationalismthat an awareness of China emerged.

In this light, it makes sense to analyse the social and historical processes by which thelabel ‘Chinese’ continues to be used today to describe the ethnic identities of a very widerange of people, who can all be somehow subsumed, putatively, under the categoricalumbrella of ‘the Chinese diaspora’, even if the meanings attached to their ‘Chinese’identities may fluctuate wildly. Who is and is not Chinese? How is this determined, andwho does the determining?

These questions imply more than an anti-essentialist critique of identity. They point tothe profound variability, uncertainty and ambivalence of Chinese ethnic identity as such,across space and through time, shaped as it is by myriad factors including changinghistorical circumstances, geopolitical relationships, and social and political location (Ang2001; Tan 2004). It is by paying attention to this diversity of identification and self-identification processes that we can glimpse some of the limitations of conceiving ‘theChinese’ as a fixed and singular ‘ethnic group’ (Brubaker 2002; Brubaker and Cooper2000). I will illustrate the depth of this diversity through the stories of two Australian

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artists of Chinese descent. I highlight these two cases because both have reflectedeloquently on their own identities as ethnic Chinese in Australia, articulating a similarlyambivalent sense of belonging to the same ethnicity despite their contrasting back-grounds: one is an Australian-born Chinese, while the second is a migrant from the PRC.Juxtaposing their divergent stories will illuminate the tenuous nature of the groupness of‘the Chinese’. What will also emerge from these stories is the continuing tension between‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity, if variable in meaning and form, in the context ofAustralia as a self-declared multicultural nation state.

Chinese (dis-)identifications

William Yang was born in 1943 and grew up in remote North Queensland. Today acelebrated photographer and performance artist in Sydney, he is described as ‘a third-generation Australian-Chinese’. His grandfather left China for Australia in the 1880s.Growing up, he became aware of his own minority status early, when he was bullied atschool for his Chineseness. Thus, being (identified as) Chinese, for Yang, was an identityformed first of all because he was called that way by the dominant culture. For most ofhis life he felt uncomfortable about ‘being Chinese’, because it was a socially despisedidentity in the context of 1950s’ Australia. When Yang (1997) grew up, the experience ofChineseness was inseparable from that of racialized otherness.

This was a time when the ‘White Australia’ policy was firmly in place. Indeed, one ofthe most salient motives for the unification of a federated Australia in 1901 was a desireamong the dominant, white population to develop more effective policies to keep outChinese immigrants. These immigrants were resented because many of them proved to behighly efficient, hard-working and economically competitive (Webb and Enstice 1998).

The racist process by which Chinese migrants were constructed as an alien threatfundamentally involved a virulent form of discursive groupism: the construction of ‘theChinese’ as a separate, completely other group, which can be singled out, wholesale, as‘unAustralian’. What this groupist construct suppresses is the fact that many Chineseimmigrants played a significant role in the economic and social development of Australiaas locals. In this, they did not necessarily hang on to their own ethnic groups; manyworked together with Australians of European descent (Fitzgerald 2007; Rolls 1996).Nevertheless, it was this groupist separating out of ‘the Chinese’ from ‘the Australians’that underpinned the abject experience of the young William Yang. As a boy of parentswith Chinese ancestry, he was inescapably categorized as belonging to ‘the Chinese’, andthus to a group that was considered categorically antagonistic to ‘Australians’.

Like many Chinese families during this period, Yang’s parents responded to thisimposed categorical identification by de-emphasizing their cultural Chineseness, by nottransmitting their Chinese cultural traditions to their children. Instead, assimilation wasthe strategy that the family adopted in order to survive in ‘White Australia’ (Ngan andChan 2012). Yet Yang’s family never lost a sense of certainty that they were Chinese,even though they no longer observed Chinese cultural customs (including language). So,while they were identified as Chinese by others, they also self-identified as Chinese. Thissense of ethnic certainty is reinforced by an external world that insists on categorizingthem as ‘Chinese’. This contradictory condition – being categorized as racially Chinesebut culturally desinicized – marks the limits of the project of assimilation. Thus, Yang’sidentification as Chinese, the marker of his minority group status, is a sign of the ultimatefailure of his family’s attempt to assimilate fully into mainstream Australian culture.

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No matter how much Yang’s family Australianized itself, the fact that they remainedcategorically ‘Chinese’ meant that he could never be just an ordinary Australian.Chineseness, in this scenario, is the residue in Yang’s identity that points to assimilation –becoming same – as an impossible project. That is to say, the assimilated subject cannever become completely same, he/she can never completely merge into the dominantculture; at most, he/she can become almost Australian, but not quite (Bhabha 1994). Thishighlights the enduring tension between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity, even in the faceof voracious attempts to dissolve the ethnic fully into the national. To paraphrase MichaelNovak’s (1972) influential book, ‘the ethnic’ proved unmeltable.

The introduction of multiculturalism articulates a recognition of ethnic unmeltability:discursively and philosophically, it is based on an acceptance that cultural differencescannot be made to disappear and should therefore be recognized as such. This representsa clear redefinition of the nation: from a homogeneous, white one to one that is explicitlymulti-ethnic. In this way multiculturalism involves smoothing out the tensions between‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ by suggesting that they can exist harmoniously side by side. Whatit does not eliminate, however, is the very groupism that underpins the construction of‘ethnic groups’ as distinct, substantive entities. In other words, while as a public policymulticulturalism represents a process of facilitating migrant integration (Jupp and Clyne2011), it has at the same time spawned an ideology that cements a way of describingpeople as belonging to distinct ethnic groups.

This problematic equation of multiculturalism with what Amartya Sen (2006) calls‘plural monoculturalism’ is now widely acknowledged. For those who are positioned asmembers of particular ‘ethnic groups’, in this case ‘the Chinese’, it produces distinctidentity pressures. Multiculturalism has transformed the expectations of the nationtowards minority subjects and their identities. Where in the era of assimilationism thedominant national culture insisted on homogeneity and sameness, on ethnics to melt intothe national pot, multiculturalism assumes the opposite: they are not expected to melt, andare supposed to remain true to their ethnic identity. Ouyang Yu, a poet and a specialist inEnglish and Chinese literature who moved from mainland China to Australia in 1991,actively resists such ethnic determinism. ‘Where is the way out for people such as me?’Ouyang (1997, 10) asks. ‘Is our future predetermined to be Chinese no matter how longwe reside overseas?’ Ouyang expresses a desire to contribute to Australian (national)culture ‘more than as just a Chinese’ (35). However, his determination to write in English –he is a prolific author of novels, essays, poetry, and a tireless literary translator andeditor – has met objections from many Australians who insist that he be loyal to hisChinese heritage: ‘I found people preaching that I should be proud of being a Chinese. …I was made to feel uneasy with my disloyalty’ (10).

This highlights how multiculturalist ideology can actively inhibit national integration onthe insistence of the dominant culture. While assimilationism demands minority subjects tobecome same, multiculturalism expects minority subjects to remain different (even thoughtheir difference must remain within safe limits, not upsetting the dominance of the dominantnational culture). In other words, while assimilationism is ambivalently based on theillusion that the diasporic Chinese can shed their Chineseness, multiculturalism activelyreinforces the essentialist adage that ‘once a Chinese always a Chinese’. In this sense,multiculturalism, while ostensibly based on an inclusive ethos in the national (Australian)culture, simultaneously represents a declaration of the permanence and solidity of cultural

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difference. This is a groupist perspective that prevents people like Ouyang Yu frombreaking out of the cage of the ethnic group.

The emergence of multiculturalism as the dominant ethos has also transformed Yang’srelationship to Chineseness. While in the regime of assimilationism he was marginalizedbecause he was considered too Chinese (and therefore the easy object of racial othering),in the regime of multiculturalism, where the cultural ideal is that of the authenticallydifferent, he runs the risk being considered not Chinese enough, certainly compared topeople like Ouyang Yu. As a recent migrant from the PRC, Ouyang possesses thelinguistic and cultural capital that guarantees him the stamp of authentic Chineseness,which he can also use to his own advantage. In the past ten years or so, Ouyang seems tohave resolved his predicament by adopting the role of cultural translator, using the tensionbetween the ethnic and the national to negotiate and communicate the incommensur-abilities between Chinese and Australian culture. Rather than attempting to subsume hisChinese identity in an Australian one, he now moves in between the two, using hisinsider knowledge of both countries as raw material for his writing. In his recent novelThe English Class (Ouyang 2010), he tells the (semi-autobiographical) story of a Chinesetruck driver who aspires to a western lifestyle and obsessively strives to master theEnglish language, only to find himself, after managing to migrate to Melbourne,Australia, suffering from cultural disorientation, bilinguistic confusion, and alienation inthe face of racism (Fitzpatrick 2010). Ouyang seems to have resigned to the fact that hecannot escape his Chineseness, even if he wished to transcend it, at least in his creativeexpression.

For William Yang, meanwhile, it is much less certain what being Chinese means,precisely because he does not have the cultural baggage – as Ouyang has – to endow hisChinese identity with sufficiently authentic ethnocultural substance. Thus, Yang (1997,21–22) has said that after a lifetime of assimilated existence, a process in which ‘theChinese side was lost and denied’, he has had ‘to work hard to reclaim my heritage’.Significantly, his process of re-Sinicization was punctuated by numerous journeys toChina, visiting his ancestral village and tracing his ‘bloodlines’, which has become afeature in his performative shows, powerfully articulating the epiphany of ‘return’ to theancestral homeland: ‘The experience is very powerful and specific, it has to do with land,with standing on the soil of the ancestors and feeling the blood of China run through yourveins’ (23). Here, Yang makes a claim on membership of ‘the Chinese’ on the basis ofwhat Rey Chow (1993, 24) has called ‘the myth of consanguinity’. By 2009, Yangparticipated in an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art, entitled The China Project, atthe Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, where he was presented as a Chinese artist whohappens to have grown up in Australia. The other artists showcased in the display werecontemporary visual artists from the PRC. This reflects how far Yang has come in hisidentification as an integral part of ‘the Chinese’.

What we see illustrated here is the groupist pull of diaspora, of belonging to ‘theChinese race’ or ‘the Chinese people’ no matter how far removed one’s life history isfrom that of the territorial nation state of China. The popularity of the discourse ofdiaspora today may be explained by the very barriers for people of Chinese ancestryliving in a country such as Australia to bridge the gap between ‘ethnic’ minority statusand full belonging to Australian ‘national’ identity – a difficulty that, as I have suggestedabove, has not gone away in the transition from assimilationism to multiculturalism. Inthis regard, the idea of diaspora produces an alternative groupism based on fictive notions

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of ‘racial’ kinship and heredity (Balibar 1991; Gilroy 2001) – an idea eminentlyrepresented in Chinese culture by the enduring myth of the unity of the Chinese people aschildren of the Yellow Emperor (Dikötter 1992; Pan 1990). Diasporic identity can bedescribed as a simultaneous denationalization and transnationalization of the ethnic groupby relocating it ‘back home’ – but in the process it threatens to be incorporated in adifferent national sphere: that of China itself.

As Ouyang’s resistance to being pinned down as ‘just a Chinese’ suggests, thediasporic fiction of racial belonging poses its own ambivalences and difficulties. Itimplies a reductionist construction of the subject as passively and lineally (pre)determined by ‘blood’. ‘Race’ provides a reductionist, essentializing discursive shortcut,in which, to paraphrase Stuart Hall (1997, 472), the signifier ‘Chinese’ is ‘torn from itshistorical, cultural and political embedding and lodged in a biologically constituted racialcategory’. In the imagining of ‘the Chinese race’, differences that have been constructedby heterogeneous historical conditions and cultural experiences are suppressed in favourof groupist modes of bonding and belonging.

Beyond Chinese groupism

The juxtaposition of the trajectories of William Yang and Ouyang Yu brings to light starkdifferences in the social construction of ‘being Chinese’. Each of them illuminates oneend of a long historical spectrum. Yang is a so-called ABC, whose trajectory ofinvoluntary and voluntary identification with ‘being Chinese’ reflects an evolutiontowards a more inclusive and pluralist, multicultural definition of the Australian nation inthe course of the twentieth century. ‘Being Chinese’, for him, is a matter of a symbolicharking back to an imaginary past, which he has, in his own words, only discovered laterin life. In this, Yang is representative of many descendants of Chinese migrants aroundthe world today who are seeking to re-identify with their ancestral links. Rather thanbreaking with the past (as was demanded by the assimilation paradigm), constructing acontinuity with the ancestral past has become an increasingly popular option amongoverseas Chinese, stressing their genealogical bind with the ancestral homeland (Liu1998; Louie 2004).

This diasporic practice has become more prevalent among many peoples in today’sglobalized world, but, as Wang (2009, 210) remarks, maintaining extended kinship tiesand family bonding has been a particularly strong cultural orientation among Chinese dueto the powerful legacy of Confucianism. In this regard, the break with this traditionthroughout the modernizing turbulences of the twentieth century was a temporaryaberration that can now be corrected through the reclaiming of a cultural Chineseness thatis quite detached from the actual realities of contemporary China. For Yang, thisaffirmation of his ethnocultural Chineseness is meaningful precisely because it gives hima new sense of belonging, which Australianness alone could not provide.

For Ouyang, however, being Chinese is not something to aspire to, but the naturalizedstarting point in his quest for personal identity. Having grown up in the PRC, the nationstate that today has the command to determine who is legally Chinese, he is (or has been)a bona fide Chinese national in the modern sense, and his personal history is bound upwith that of the nation state of China. As a recent migrant to Australia, his priority wasnot to affirm his Chineseness, but rather to establish an individual life and voice thattranscends his given Chinese identity. But he has found that a complete discharge fromChineseness is an impossible fantasy, given the realities of racial and ethnic identification

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in the multicultural West and the continuing hold of the Chinese nation state on its formercitizen-subjects (Nyiri 2001). Ouyang is one of the growing contingent of PRC Chinesewho have decided to migrate in recent times, whom the Chinese government in Beijingcalls its ‘wandering sons and daughters’ (Sun 2002, 8). Ouyang’s own narrative as anintellectual and writer in English may be exceptional, but he does exemplify that recentPRC Chinese migrants have very different understandings of Chineseness and beingChinese than other diasporic Chinese. As Wanning Sun has observed, there is ‘aconsistent refusal’ among former PRC nationals ‘to equate cultural products from HongKong, Taiwan, and other diasporic Chinese communities with “authentic” ones frommainland China’, indeed, ‘a general reluctance to consider these places of “GreaterChina” to be genuinely Chinese’ (100). For them, the epithet ‘Chinese’ is reserved for thepeople and the country of China the territorial nation state, not the expansive,transnational, deep-historical, civilizational China that descendants of older generationsof migrants tend to identify with.

This is only one axis of the internal differentiation of ‘the Chinese’ as an ethnic group,but it is a significant one, not least because the number of mainland Chinese migrants isexpected to rise exponentially in the foreseeable future, and is likely to overwhelm othercategories of overseas Chinese. During the proceedings of the CCCA conference that Idescribed earlier, the issue was explicitly raised. The active members of the CCCA tendto be more long-time Chinese Australians (ABCs, migrants from Hong Kong orSoutheast Asia, etc). They wondered why so few PRC Chinese were interested injoining their cause of unifying ‘the Chinese Australian voice’. This perceived problemcan be clarified, if not overcome, by highlighting how the use of the common category‘Chinese’ hides the lack of relational connectedness between those subsumed within thecategory to generate a strong sense of groupness, a feeling of belonging together andmutual solidarity (Brubaker and Cooper 2000).

Seen this way, would it help the CCCA to reflect on its own political predicament if itbegan with questioning the taken-for-granted groupism behind the notion of ‘the Chinese’as a singular ‘ethnic group’ in multicultural Australia? In fact, one conference participant,of Malaysian Chinese descent and a long-time Australian citizen, hinted at suchquestioning by asking: do we need to unite all Chinese? Unite for what? What is thecommon element that unites us? Is there any?’ That this anti-groupist provocation did notget much airplay during the conference is understandable, given that it struck so much atthe heart of the conference rationale itself. But it is this kind of questioning that will assistin breaking through the bounded notions of ‘ethnic community’ that have put discoursesof multiculturalism into crisis.

It is not just the naturalized integrity of the ‘ethnic group’ that such interrogation wouldunravel. More fundamentally, it would also unsettle the very reference to ‘the Chinese’ asa way of describing the categorical commonality of this ‘ethnic group’. As we have seen,there is no clarity or consensus on whom ‘the Chinese’ are: it is an ambiguous term withvery varied and contested meanings (Ang 2001). During the CCCA conference, severalparticipants I spoke with were keen to affirm their common Chineseness by referring to‘race’: whatever you are, they said, we will always be seen as Chinese because we lookChinese. Yet, as the divergent stories of Yang and Ouyang illustrate, this recourse to‘race’ is by no means sufficient to sustain the groupness of ‘the Chinese’. The internalfragmentation of the category propels us to question the usefulness of the category itself.Why is it that we keep talking about ‘the Chinese’ despite the fact that its reference has

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become so contested and elastic? Whose interests are served by the persistent, evenstubborn designation of ‘the Chinese’ as a distinct ethnic group?

At stake here are political considerations. The way we label people into distinct,seemingly homogenous groups is not an innocent act. Thus, John Fitzgerald (2007, 4)argues that constant talk of ‘the Chinese in Australia’ is ‘a lingering rhetorical strategy ofthe White Australia era’, where ‘the Chinese’ were constructed as perpetually differentand separate from ‘the Australians’ and vice versa. This insistence on separating out theethnic and the national is a discursive habit with exclusionary consequences, whichcontinues to be reproduced today. As Fitzgerald remarks: ‘Despite the brouhahasurrounding multiculturalism many whites still reserve the word “Australian” forthemselves and many Chinese Australians refer to whites as “Australians” and tothemselves as “Chinese” (4–5). Seen this way, ‘the Chinese’, in their insistence oncontinuing to call themselves ‘the Chinese’ and contrasting themselves from ‘Australians’(who can presumably only be ‘white’), are complicit with their own exclusion from theAustralian national imaginary. In other words, the label ‘Chinese’ itself, in its invocationof a discrete and solidly bounded group, contributes to the absolute divide between‘ethnic’ and ‘national’.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the relationship between ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’ identity cannot be easilycaptured through seemingly unambiguous concepts such as assimilation (the ethnic isabsorbed by the national), multiculturalism (the ethnic coexists with the national) anddiaspora (the ethnic transcends the national). Instead, each of these terms points toparticular difficulties, ambivalences and failures of identification and belonging thatcontinue to haunt people of Chinese ancestry around the world. Rather than taking thegroupness of ‘the Chinese’ for granted, more processual and flexible understandings ofidentity, ethnicity and nation in the contemporary world are needed, where neither‘ethnic’ nor ‘national’ are absolutely fixed or closed, but constantly evolving andmutually entangled. After all, it is the very closure of identity, where ‘ethnic’ or ‘national’are constructed as mutually exclusive, that has posed a central challenge for migrants andtheir descendants to ‘belong’.

Note1. http://www.ccca.net.au/MediaReleases/20110321%20CCCA%20MR%20National%20Confer-

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IEN ANG is Distinguished Professor of Cultural Studies and Director of the Institute forCulture and Society, University of Western Sydney.ADDRESS: Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, Penrith, NSW2751, Australia. Email: i.ang@uws.edu.au

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