All issues
Volume 43, Issue 4
Displaying 1-7 of 7 articles from this issue
- |<
- <
- 1
- >
- >|
Special Issue
Beyond Southeast Asia: New Perspectives on Overseas Chinese Studies through Historiographical Reflection
-
Junko Koizumi2006 Volume 43 Issue 4 Pages 327-331
Published: March 31, 2006
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSDownload PDF (25K) -
Takeshi Hamashita2006 Volume 43 Issue 4 Pages 332-345
Published: March 31, 2006
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSIn this essay I will introduce and examine recent important works on the history of overseas Chinese and through them I will reassess several major conclusions of scholarship on the regional relationship between Southeast Asia and East Asia. An overview of the field yields three salient characteristics. First, whether the unit of analysis was Southeast Asia or East Asia, groups of countries or nation-states, the scholarship subsumed the migration of overseas Chinese between regions under the country-to-country connection. Second, scholars tried to examine and to define overseas Chinese as those exhibiting so-called core values of Chinese traditional culture, but they did not include social voluntarily activities, inter-regional and global networks, and other vital aspects, especially multilateral local-local, region-region, and local-global networks. Third, the overseas Chinese were treated mainly as a political issue between governments and the migrant Chinese communities, notably as a factor in nation-state building.
Through a reexamination of these conclusions, I shall treat inter-regional relations between Southeast Asia and East Asia as regional networks of overseas Chinese surrounding the South and East China Sea, and I will raise several issues for further investigation in overseas Chinese history studies in Japan, particularly patterns of migration and networks between Southeast Asia and East Asia.View full abstractDownload PDF (60K) -
Towards a Re-examination of Regional Orders in 20th Century East AsiaHong Liu, Chiyang Liao2006 Volume 43 Issue 4 Pages 346-373
Published: March 31, 2006
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSThis article is concerned with changing approaches to understanding and conceptualizing some of the central themes confronting the study of East Asia and the Chinese diaspora. Making extensive references to the relevant works in Chinese, Japanese, and English and subjecting their findings to both spatial linkage and horizontal contextualization, the authors argue that the study of East Asia and the Chinese overseas should be taken beyond a rigid nation-state framework and that greater attention be directed to the important role of network and its interactions with the state and market in the transnational arena. After identifying a “revisionist turn” in the recent literature dealing with Asian Chinese business/social networks and discussing its shortfalls, the authors contend that four key issues should be critically tackled in an effort to construct a post-revisionist synthesis: the historicity, spatiality, institutionalization, and limitations of networks. The complex patterns of interplay between region, network, and ethnicity constitute a significant dynamic in the evolution of East Asia and Overseas Chinese societies in the 20th century and beyond.View full abstractDownload PDF (125K) -
The “Sangleyes,” the “Mestizos,” and the “Indios” in Historical Context and PerspectiveNariko Sugaya2006 Volume 43 Issue 4 Pages 374-396
Published: March 31, 2006
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSAbout forty years ago, Edgar Wickberg, in his pioneering and seminal work on the nineteenth-century Philippines, established how the Chinese had emerged as a commercially powerful foreign group in a Spanish colonial setting, while the Chinese mestizos had risen as a “special kind of Filipino” to support Philippine national awakening toward the turn of the century. Recently, scholars such as Richard T. Chu have questioned the identity of the Chinese mestizo as a “special kind of Filipino.” Chu argues that Chinese mestizos at the turn of the century had multiple, fluid, and ambiguous identities and cannot be said to have had a simple Filipino identity. He concludes that the Filipino identity as a nation was only established definitely after 1910.
This paper identifies some of the particular historical factors that brought about the social rise of the Chinese mestizo as an uniquely Spanish colonial being distinct from the “chhut-sì-á” or “tsut-sia” of later years. This paper also shows that the “Chinese mestizos” Wickberg had in mind were not the same “Chinese mestizos” that Chu deals in his recent works, and suggests that the study of overseas Chinese or Chinese overseas can be relevant to Southeast Asian Studies only when it is placed in a historical context and perspective.View full abstractDownload PDF (109K) -
Transition from the Soeharto Regime to the Reformasi EraYoko Aoki2006 Volume 43 Issue 4 Pages 397-418
Published: March 31, 2006
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSThree dominant changes have occurred in the study of the ethnic Chinese in Indonesia after the fall of Soeharto. First, the study of Indonesian Chinese was freed from the threat of SARA censorship (Suku, Agama, Ras, dan Antar Golongan, or ethnic, religious, racial, and class relations), which was removed after Soeharto. Second, ethnic Chinese studies have accelerated. Many seminars and discussions are now held and many books about the ethnic Chinese have been published in Indonesia. Some aim to abolish inequalities and discriminatory measures and claim justice. Although changes have been made in the law, anti-Chinese hostility still exists in society. Other studies analyze the discourses of Dutch colonialism and Indonesian nationalism and reconsider the Chinese role in nation building, so as to rewrite Indonesian history, which has largely ignored the ethnic Chinese. Third, foreign researchers are shifting their attention from political issues, such as assimilation, national integration, and political identity to subjects reflecting the changing role of the ethnic Chinese in East and Southeast Asia in an era of globalization and rapid economic growth.
In this paper I will focus on such changes by reviewing studies done during the New Order regime and the subsequent period of Reformasi.View full abstractDownload PDF (101K) -
Striving to Establish a History of Asian ImmigrantsSetsuko Sonoda2006 Volume 43 Issue 4 Pages 419-436
Published: March 31, 2006
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSThe field of Overseas Chinese studies is inextricably linked with the historical and social context of the nation-state in which the field was established. In discussing the development of historical studies of the Chinese in North America in the second half of the 20th century, this paper examines how Overseas Chinese studies was established as a specific research field and reveals the field's characteristics which are tied with the American context as a whole. From the early 1960s, Chinese immigrant intellectuals in the Canadian and American West Coast authored histories of the overseas Chinese in Chinese. These studies relied on the historical materials of Chinese immigrants and on Chinese secondary sources published under the Overseas Chinese policy of the Taiwanese KMT. From the 1970s, as part of the Asian-American movement, second generation and immigrant middle-class Chinese intellectuals established the new framework of Asian-American studies. This field proposed a scholarship which legitimated the historical experience and presence of the Asian in American society and was thus premised on Asians as American citizens. The most recent scholarship on the overseas Chinese has introduced the concept of transnationalism, which is premised on mobility, and several empirical historical studies have been produced in this field to overcome the nation-state paradigm.View full abstractDownload PDF (73K) -
Junko Koizumi2006 Volume 43 Issue 4 Pages 437-466
Published: March 31, 2006
Released on J-STAGE: October 31, 2017
JOURNAL FREE ACCESSThis essay examines the historiography of Chinese society in Thailand, focusing on the idea of “assimilation.” Post-WWII scholarship on the Chinese in Thailand has been strongly influenced by what Jennifer Cushman called the “Skinner ‛assimilation paradigm’.” G.W. Skinner, in his Leadership and Power in the Chinese Community of Thailand (1958), predicted a rapid assimilation of the entire Chinese community; subsequent scholarship, negatively or positively, made its arguments by referring to this paradigm. However, many scholars have found ethnicity to be tenacious or ethnic identity to be arbitrary, and various Chinese factors and elements have come to be manifested more openly in Thai society in response to the (re)emergence of China as an economic and political power since the 1990s. In recent years, therefore, there has been a growing tendency to question this paradigm. By re-reading Skinner's various works written from as early as 1950, tracing relevant works done by other contemporary scholars in the same field, and placing them in historical and geo-political contexts, this essay explores why such emphasis was given to the idea of assimilation and how it persisted in subsequent years. It argues that assimilation was a response to “political” needs in the era of Cold War and emergent nationalism in Southeast Asia and that studies of overseas Chinese societies in Thailand and Southeast Asia were created as an integral part of the “area studies” strongly advocated in the U.S. since the 1950s.View full abstractDownload PDF (138K)
- |<
- <
- 1
- >
- >|