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Within the Chinese Diaspora, ancestor worship is an important cultural element that binds a group of people together and provides them with a sense of comfort, kinship and communal identity as they sink their cultural roots in a new country, luodi shenggen. Thus, ancestor worship is widely reproduced and practised by the Chinese in the Diaspora, as it is central to the Chinese understanding of the continuation of family and lineage. However, in Mainland Chinese villages, the practice of ancestor worship, which is still considered important by the villagers, was not allowed until the Open Door Policy in 1978. With this policy, emigrant villages, (qiaoxiang) embarked on an aggressive campaign to woo the Chinese in overseas communities to return to their native villages to help with economic development through various strategies. One of the strategies is to allow for the revival and practice of ancestor worship in the rural villages. This paper explores how ancestors continued to be regarded as important members of a transnational lineage in the Fujian Province in South China, and also in Singapore. Because of the central focus on ancestors and ancestor worship in the Chinese society, ancestors are moralised as a significant social capital by the Chinese State, local government and rural villagers, in an attempt to establish transnational guanxi linkages between the ancestral villages in rural China and their Diaspora members in Singapore. The Chinese State, with instrumental consideration, sees this transnational guanxi networks and the revival of ancestor worship as a strategy to encourage the Chinese Diaspora to visit their ancestral home and help with village development.

As a group of people migrated from one region to another and settled down in a new environment, they brought along their cultures and memories of the distant land that used to be their home. As they seek to reproduce their social values, customs and values in their new diasporic community, the process of reproduction is often governed by what they remember and the selective process of what they want to remember and reproduce for their new home. At the same time, through the recall of their collective memories, these migrants also re-explore their relationship with their home of ancestral origin, and establish transnational kinship ties and networks. The latter process was especially rapid after the 1978 Open Door Policy which allowed ease of movement of people between the Chinese diasporic communities and mainland China.

As the Chinese diasporic communities expanded throughout the world with the settling down of migrants as permanent residents or citizens of the nation state, a sojourner’s mentality soon gives way to a sense of permanence, marking the transition from migrant to becoming a fully fledged member of the host society. In this sense, Georg Simmel’s stranger finds home, fashioned from two worlds, similar yet disparate. As such, the diasporic communities take root in a land away from the original home. The extent to which the diasporic communities become fully integrated into the host society will allow us to understand the process — and success — of nation-building and citizenship development in a world where nation states are becoming increasingly multicultural and pluralistic in orientation. It is also a world where multiculturalism is becoming progressively more problematic as cultural identities confront the dictates of the nation state and dominant social groups. The presence of diasporic communities thus reveals the intense interchange of community and nation.

This is an extremely interesting and detailed collection of essays on how femininities and masculinities have been defined from the Qing era to present-day China. It attempts to look at how gender has been defined from a variety of angles: from the legal perspective to the lens of literary critics and ethnographic case studies. This collection is divided into eight parts; each part contains two chapters dealing with one theme, one on Chinese women and the other on Chinese men, thus forming a ...

Cette série d’essais extrêmement intéressants et détaillés, est consacrée à la définition des féminités et des masculinités en Chine, depuis les Qing jusqu’à aujourd’hui. Les définitions du sexe sont envisagées selon différentes perspectives, allant d’un point de vue légal à une approche littéraire ou à des études de cas ethnographiques. L’ouvrage est divisé en huit parties, comprenant chacune deux chapitres sur un même thème, l’un consacré aux femmes, l’autre aux hommes. La première partie s...