During the past decade or so, when speaking of Chinese outside China, the words “Chinese” and “diaspora” in Anglophone literature have been linked like conjoined twins, coexisting by necessity and hard to separate without risking injury to the other. Another way of looking at it is that the process of “Chinese immigration” has practically given way to a seemingly open-ended, circulatory movement called the “Chinese diaspora,” the “Chinese immigrant” and even the “ethnic Chinese” rendered as “diasporic Chinese” or as “Chinese in the diaspora,” while the well-worn term “overseas Chinese” seems hopelessly old-fashioned. When exactly the notion of the Chinese...

The Chinese Association of Johor Bahru (Xinshan Zhonghua Gonghui, referred to as Gonghui hereafter) is one of many Chinese social organizations in Malaysia. However, it has a unique history in that it was founded as the successor to a secret society.¹ Although it is deeply rooted in tradition, the Gonghui also represents the interests of the Chinese community, with the local and state government on local issues, and with the federal government on larger issues. The Gonghui therefore has dual roles, serves dual objectives and maintains an ongoing dialogue between past and present, between tradition and modernity. By studying one...

Chinese voluntary associations (CVAs) have played an important role in Singapore since early nineteenth-century colonial times. Today, many of these voluntary associations continue to play dominant roles in the Singapore Chinese community. While many of the clan associations continue to play a localized role and cater to the needs of their members, the Singapore Federation of Clan Associations, the umbrella body of all Chinese clan associations, has attempted to globalize by integrating with the wider Singapore polity and the larger world. This chapter examines the roles of the clan associations and the Singapore Federation of Clan Associations.¹ Conceptually, it explores...

In the years after World War II, Chinese voluntary associations in Indonesia developed freely and in a variety of ways to meet the needs and interests of the community. This was, however, a brief interlude between a colonial period, when Dutch rule enforced special organizational structures, and the post-1965 “New Order” government of Suharto, which, because of its desire to repress Chinese cultural life in general, on the one hand suppressed political, cultural, and social organizations and, on the other, instituted new forms of dealing with the Chinese minority. At the same time, the authorities not only permitted some traditional...

The voluntary association has been an important object for understanding the local Chinese society outside and inside of China through history. However, the study of voluntary associations may bring a feeling of obsoleteness to us today, partly because it has been emphasizing its function for helping new immigrants to adapt to the local community of their country of destination. As we can see in the important review article of J. N. Kerri in 1976, anthropological studies in 1960s and 1970s contributed to clarifying the function of the voluntary association as an adaptive mechanism (Kerri 1976). At that time, anthropologists were...

By attending to the economic and political inequalities and internal divisions of migrant voluntary associations, this chapter paints a complex picture of the social organization among overseas Chinese, in which inclusion and exclusion often represent two sides of the same coin, philanthropy and exploitation are intertwined, and cohesion and fragmentation appear in tandem. Different from earlier scholarship that focuses mainly on the role of such associations as welfare providers and their functions in promoting social cohesion (Sinn 1998), we conceptualize these associations as manifested social organizations that are conditioned by the survival needs, social pursuits, and cultural identities of migrants,...

Although there is good evidence that some Chinese had arrived in Mexico and set up small businesses as early as the mid-seventeenth century, the result of regular traffic between the Spanish colonies of New Spain (Mexico) and the Philippines during the long Manila Galleon trade, Chinese did not migrate to or settle in Mexico in any significant numbers until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Their migration coincided with the triumph of the Liberals over the Conservatives in a protracted civil war in Mexico, and with the ascendance to power in 1876 of General Porfirio Díaz, who proceeded to...

Continuous Chinese settlement in Australia over a century and a half was a very complex process and has had an intense impact on the urban environment. The early Chinese settlers established and maintained community roots in Chinatown that became the centre of Chinese social and business life in Sydney. This paper identifies the development of diverse communal places by various Chinese immigrant groups since 1955, that is, of Chinese community capital¹ in Sydney. New immigrants have established religious and secular communal places mostly outside of Chinatown, all over the metropolitan area, like all other post-war settlers. A conservative estimate indicates...

The voluntary role of Chinese women in community organizations has not been recognized in Australian literature. Neither are there many international studies on the subject. This chapter attempts to throw some light on the subject and is part of a wider research effort that focuses not on Chinese community associations but on eighty Asian-born women entrepreneurs (ABWEs) in Sydney with a research question about their contributions to Australia. The data sets had been segregated to account for sixty-seven women entrepreneurs of Chinese descent or heritage, to examine the roles these Chinese women entrepreneurs (CWEs) play in their leadership initiatives and...

The Chinese immigrant community has gone through several significant historical periods since the late 1840s: unrestricted immigration (1848–81), Chinese exclusion (1882–1943), immigration on restricted quotas (1944–67), and immigration on equal basis (1968–present). During each historical period, unique patterns of socio-economic adaptation and community development have affected the preservation of Chineseness and the construction of Chinese-American ethnicity. This chapter aims to illuminate the processes of ethnicization and assimilation through the story of immigrant community development in the United States.¹ We specifically examine (1) how broad structural forces shape the formation and development of ethnic organizations in each historical period of Chinese...

Like immigrants to the US, described in Zhou and Lee’s chapter about recent American immigration patterns, immigrants from non-European countries have dominated the immigration flow to Canada for the last few decades (Jasso and Rosenzweig 1990). The population of these new immigrants in major North American cities has reached the point of critical mass needed to support various ethnic activities and diverse institutions. Ethnic churches are among the ethnic institutions that have seen considerable growth in recent decades (Warner 1998). If one drives around the North American cities that have a large number of Chinese immigrants, it will not be...

Only little is known about the first Chinese who settled in Czechoslovakia prior to World War II. The first Chinese community disintegrated soon after the war erupted, and once Communism came to power in 1948, memories of earlier Chinese migrants in the territory gradually fell victim to collective amnesia. A linear continuity of a Chinese presence was interrupted and the members of the new Chinese community, which has started to emerge since the early 1990s, had negligible knowledge of their predecessors (Moore, forthcoming). They could not rely on any previous community structures, such as voluntary associations, nor could they take...