Search

本文以“经济民族主义” （economic nationalism） 的概念，从台北国史馆、香港历史档案馆、新加坡国立大学图书馆和台湾中央研究院所收集的南京国民政府档案和星、港、粤三地国货运动的纪录，分析 1929 到 1936 年之间宁粤对立的政治背景对南京国民政府国货运动的影响。广东在陈济棠的治理下，工业资本家寻求与香港华资制造业合作、以新加坡为基地向南洋拓展市场，亦因此与上海制造业形成竞争关系。 1936 年夏，陈济棠下野后，南京政府推动以上海为中心的各省国货公司组织，试图把广东的消费整合到中央政府的产销规划里。这是南京方面的官式民族主义 “重沪轻粤” 的历史基础。如此，中国国货运动强化了中央政权对贸易活动的管控，却助长了国内各政治派系的倾轧，并分化了跨国商业网络形成自发性公共空间的潜力。

This article reviews Wang Gungwu, Home is Not Here (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2018) and Gregor Benton and Hong Liu’s Dear China: Emigrant Letters and Remittances, 1820–1980 (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018) in terms of how they reflect and revisit recent scholarship on China and the Chinese overseas published in English. Adopting different approaches, both books feature family correspondence within Chinese migrant families. This new focus unpacks concepts between ethnicity and language, and between family and homeland in migrants’ identity-making. Beginning from these studies, the article defends “Chinese overseas” as an intellectual concept and as a framework that allows an examination and comparison of the connections between China and its migrants as well as their descendants worldwide. In conclusion, the article argues that diasporas are made up of those who have left home but who miss that home, touching on the concept of nostalgia. Passing down the sense of nostalgia through successive generations via narrating, writing, and verifying, both in Sinophone and other languages, is a way by which Chinese diasporas construct their heritage. The process of retelling, rewriting, and reworking family heritage keeps the idea of home alive, wherever it might be, and whether or not it still exists.

In this book with Singapore in its title, the temporal framework seems quite conventional. It opens up its historical inquiry in 1819 when the Englishman Stamford Raffles kicked off British colonia...

In turning the vast and diverse territory of the Qing Empire into a singular nation-state, Beijing has kept redefining its conception and institution of nationhood in response to challenges from the recalcitrant or not-yet-incorporated peripheral regions including Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. Since 1949, Beijing has attempted to solve the Tibet and Taiwan questions with the institutional design of “one country, two systems.” This design, widely thought of as a 1980s invention, can in fact be dated back to the early 1950s with respect to Tibet. This design has been far from successful in Tibet and Taiwan. While the “one country, two systems” experiment in Tibet failed with the Lhasa uprising and the flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, the proposal of “one country, two systems” lost its appeal and had become a taboo among politicians of all strips in Taiwan by the 21st century. In this article, we argue that the success of “one country, two systems” requires a very delicate balance and virtuous interaction between the political center in Beijing and the elite, as well as popular classes, in the periphery concerned. It can easily be jeopardized if the center tilts too much to the left or right.

This article argues that the embeddedness of Chinese enterprises in Singapore society explains the limited success of the nationalist movement in Singapore. To respond to the economic crisis in the 1930s, Chinese business elites employed nationalist rhetoric to appeal to their compatriots in the British colony to support Chinese “national products.” With dual allegiance to both British rule and Chinese national identity, Chinese business nationalists took a transnational approach. Because Chinese business communities in Singapore were organized along subethnic lines, Chinese transnationalism failed to surmount these social divisions.

This article explains the diverse responses among the Chinese bourgeoisie in Hong Kong and Singapore to Chinese nationalist movements in the 1930s. In Singapore, the slogan of “Chinese buy Chinese goods” boosted the Chinese bourgeoisie in their business competition with Japan. The same slogan was used by the Chinese bourgeoisie in Hong Kong to emphasize increased sales of Chinese goods while Japanese imports were used by Chinese manufacturers in Hong Kong. I also interpret Chinese bourgeois nationalism in Hong Kong and Singapore as a move toward transnational economic citizenship. Emphasising their Chinese ethnicity, the bourgeoisie in Hong Kong and Singapore asked the Chinese government for favourable import tariffs. At the same time, the bourgeoisie requested the British for favourable tariffs, when they wished to export goods to markets in Britain and its colonies.