This book examines Chinese transnationalism as a distinctive domain within the new 'flexible' capitalism emerging in the Asia-Pacific region. It is based on new ethnographic research and interweaves anthropology, culture and politics.

This book addresses the historical and contemporary involvement of Chinese Americans from diverse walks of life in U.S.-China relations. The contributors present new evidence and fresh perspectives on familiar and unfamiliar national and transnational networks - including families, businesspersons, community newspapers, students, lobbyists, philanthropists, and scientists - and consider the likely future impact of such contacts on the most important bilateral relationship at the start of the new millennium. The volume makes a multidisciplinary contribution to understanding the extensive and vital roles and promise of Chinese Americans at this critical juncture in U.S.-China relations, and to revealing the importance of migrants as actors in contemporary global politics. The assessments shared by the contributors suggest that the nature and scope of the Chinese American involvement, particularly in global civil society networks, increasingly will determine the outcome of state-to-state relations between the United States and the PRC.

The first Okinawan immigrants arrived in Honolulu in January 1900 to work as contract laborers on Hawai'i's sugar plantations. Over time Okinawans would continue migrating east to the continental U.S., Canada, Brazil, Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Cuba, Paraguay, New Caledonia, and the islands of Micronesia. The essays in this volume commemorate these diasporic experiences within the geopolitical context of East Asia. Using primary sources and oral history, individual contributors examine how Okinawan identity was constructed in the various countries to which Okinawans migrated, and how their experiences were shaped by the Japanese nation-building project and by globalization. Essays explore the return to Okinawan sovereignty, or what Nobel Laureate Oe Kenzaburo called an "impossible possibility," and the role of the Okinawan labor diaspora in Japan's imperial expansion into the Philippines and Micronesia. Contributors: Arakaki Makoto, Robert K. Arakaki, Hokama Shuzen, Edith M. Kaneshiro, Ronald Y. Nakasone, Nomura Koya, Shirota Chika, Tomiyama Ichiro, Wesley Ueunten.

This book examines contemporary Chinese transnational mobile practices with special focuses on the ethnographic exploration of the lives, experiences, views, and narratives of the Chinese mobile subjects in three ASEAN countries: Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, and their interactions with the ethnic Chinese communities in these countries. This book is based on recent and updated original ethnographic research carried out by leading scholars in China and Southeast Asia. The work addresses questions of integration and social embeddedness, interrogating the possibility of whether the transnational Chinese diaspora can be simultaneously embedded into two or more nation-states and geopolitical spheres. It contends that in moving in the transnational space, the Chinese diaspora may experience a strong yearning for a cultural home that may not be in one space for bicultural or multicultural diaspora. It also asks whether the transnational Chinese diaspora is motivated to negotiate cultural membership and social belonging in a new country. Shedding new light on the ways in which the transnational diaspora negotiates cultural membership to adapt to situational requirements, this volume is relevant to scholars researching in China studies, anthropology, international relations, and in Asian, Southeast and East Asian regional studies.

Bringing together historians, sociologists, and political scientists, this volume documents persistent prejudices against consistently marginal groups in China, and the moral claims they have mustered in response.