The Encyclopedia of the Chinese Overseas

Rating:
Summary: concise AND gripping!
Review: It's an excellent book for anyone who is ethnically part or full-blooded Chinese, interested in their place in the extended Chinese diaspora. In this age of easy global travel/change of abode, it gave me, a woman who is half-Chinese, half-Japanese who has lived in HK, NY, CA, Jpn and now London, a good sense of having roots and belonging. It's well researched, covering every imaginable part of the world and is not just a dry academic book, but includes info from pop culture to major historical events that involve Chinese people -- a very well-organised, hard-to-put-down, easy read. I have recommended this book to friends, and intend to give a few copies away as birthday and X'mas presents.

Rating:
Summary: Celebration of Heritage or Ethnic Triumphalism?
Review: This is a good first reference book for those who wish for a single-volume overview of the Chinese Diaspora. However, there are a number of disturbing issues about this book which need to be brought up if the spirit of enquiry is to be preserved.

First the good points: This is the only volume which summarizes the huge diversity of experience of the Chinese diaspora, and while the volume refuses to use the term (something I will come to later), most of us outside the rabid cultural nationalist camp see very little wrong with using it (it's certainly more convenient then "The Chinese Overseas" - overseas from where? one might ask, are Taiwan and Hongkong somehow magically connected to the mainland by invisible strips of earth that only Pan and her collaborators can see?).

The introductory material presents a solid treatment of "traditional" Chinese culture at the turn of the 20th century and gives a useful overview of some of the important ideas in thinking about or studying the diaspora. There are also some good individual chapters on the various "Overseas Chinese" communities. As a non-specialist in Southeast Asia, I was most impressed with the coverage there, but there were useful contributions on Europe, Australasia and North America too. The treatment of Chinese in the Pacific Islands was a little brief, as were the sections on the Caribbean and Latin America. Had Evelyn Hu-DeHart been given a little more space, she would have been able to do her subject matter much more justice.

Now to the problems: Pan's volume begins with the premise that each of these Diasporan Chinese communities shares something called a Chinese Identity. This is in turn related to a model of Chineseness that is dominated by historical (and genetic) factors. No serious attention (with a small number of individual exceptions) is really paid to the ways in which Chinese communities and in particular, the post-World War 2 generations in these places have changed except to invoke "assimilation" in a thoroughly simplistic fashion.

No mention is made of the roles played by Asian Americans (and Chinese Americans in particular) as gate keepers in maintaining North American systems of racial privilege. Nor are the difficult relationships between Chinese and Malays or Chinese-Jamaicans and Afro-Jamaicans given much attention.

The definitional boundaries utilized by dominant interests within ethnic Chinese communities are often unproblematized so that (for example) the Chinese men who married Maori women in New Zealand and the descendants of those marriages disappear from the "Chinese" community as do many of those who married white people.

Rather than examining these points of fragmentation and conflict, the volume instead focusses on the increasing prosperity of certain segments of Diasporan communities. This coupled with the absence of much in the way of critical analysis tends to produce an overall effect of triumphalism and simple-minded praising of the self-made man ideology which is so dear to the hearts of capitalists and model minorities everywhere.

Such an emphasis is to be expected perhaps in a volume commissioned by the Chinese Heritage Center in Singapore, a body set up to promote Lee Kwan Yew's idolization of Confucian family values as the corner-stone of Singaporean Chinese identity and prosperity. This is one reason perhaps why the editors shied away from using the word "Diaspora" with its intimations of permanent rupture, preferring instead a title which asserts the centrality of "China" as a location and as an idea despite the increasingly disputed and diverse nature of the communities it claims to represent.

In summary, I would say "Buy this book but be aware of its limitations." It's not a book I would rely on for anything more than an introduction to a very complex and dynamic situation.

Rating:
Summary: A good book, but poor coverage of Asian business
Review: This meticulously researched book is a must read for understanding the Overseas Chinese community in Asia. But despite their economic dominance of the region, the role of the Overseas Chinese in business is very poorly covered in this encyclopedia and almost leaves you feeling that this role has never been analyzed. I recommend that readers supplement this book with a balanced book on the Overseas Chinese in business: Having just finished "New Asian Emperors: The Overseas Chinese, their Strategies and Competitive Advantages" by George T. Haley et al., I see both books as essential to understanding the role of the Overseas Chinese community as both cover the same area from different, though extremely well-researched perspectives.