Chinatowns: Heterotopic Space, Urban Conflict, and Global Meanings

In Bernard Wong & Tan Chee-Beng, eds. Chinatowns around the World., 2013

Affective Geographies and Narratives of Chinese Diaspora, 2022

The study of Chinese diaspora has been focused on the themes of displacement, no-place, homesickness, and homelessness. This chapter re-addresses the meanings of place and space for contemporary Chinese immigrants in the United States after the 1990s. Through studying contemporary Chinese immigrant literature set in New York, including Eric Liu’s The Accidental Asian (1998) and Ha Jin’s A Good Fall (2009), this chapter examines how Chinatowns in Manhattan and Flushing are perceived, interpreted, and transformed in Chinese immigrant communities of the new millennium. New York, the site associated with the American Dream, is rewritten and reinterpreted as either heaven or hell, or neither heaven nor hell. The rewriting of New York and American dream in these two works further complicates the dynamics of Chinese migration in New York, rendering multilayered maps consisting of multiple overlapped, complicated locales, forming the topography of Chinese immigrants’ emotions and tensions.

2008

Sociologists claim that the ethnic Chinese community in the United Kingdom cannot be spatially defined. The first reason is that the widely scattered Chinese catering businesses–still the main source of employment for incoming Chinese migrants – makes the Chinese community too dispersed to form residential enclaves. Secondly, the evasive nature of the ethnic Chinese population towards government assistance and strong sense of ethnic solidarity also makes them an “invisible community”. The Confucian philosophy governing their way of life further reinforces patrilineal links oriented towards ancestral villages in China. Recent renewed interests in the future of London’s Chinatown as the result of a recent development plan has prompted this report to investigate whether a spatial pattern of occupation by the Chinese community exists in Chinatown, or if it is simply an intelligent urban artifice exploited for touristic and commercial purposes. Unlike its historical East End predecessor which has never been exclusively Chinese, present day London Chinatown can be qualified as a “persistent enclave”. Whilst it crucially accommodates co-ethnic businesses and facilities for the oriental population, it is not the sole centre for the Chinese community. At the outset, studies on the Chinese have been confounded by their lack of assimilation into host society, inconsistent methods of data representation from the population census and high levels of suspicion by the immigrant community when conducting fieldwork. By first understanding historical developments in London’s two Chinatowns and concepts pertaining to Chinese ethnography, this helps substantiate the demographic data, changing land use and household occupation by the Chinese community in Limehouse around 1890 and Soho today. The global and local relationship for these two areas are also analysed syntactically through spatial maps derived from Booth’s Map of Poverty of 1889 and a current axial map of London respectively. The spatially-oriented case study of Soho’s Chinatown identifies through a public survey a collective mental representation of its neighbourhood area that differs from its administrative designation. Pedestrian movement studies suggest that there is a distinct spatial and temporal pattern of occupation amongst the ethnic Chinese which differs from non-Chinese tourists and locals which can be syntactically measured. The findings support the view that a complex social and spatial relationship exists between the two disparate groups that utilise Chinatown. Whilst its commercial success is crucial to maintaining Chinatown’s public profile, it also allows it to continue to function as an important centre for the Chinese community.

Annals of Tourism Research, 2008

This study engages with interlocking socio-cultural intra-ethnic relationships from the on-the-job perspectives of ethnic social agents involved in selling ethnic goods and services to tourists. It focuses on the narratives provided by Chicago's Chinatown Chinese to justify their involvement in the tourism-related project of manipulating ethnic identity. In so doing, it reveals the role of social relationships and the discursive representations of those relationships, with special attention to the depictions and manipulation of ethnicity as a kind of cultural currency in the tourism exchange. By exposing these relationships, this study reveals intra-ethnic domination processes at work in an ethnic urban space of tourism; processes which, at times, serve to produce experiences of ethnic identity.

Racial categories are cultural ascriptions whose construction and transmission cannot be taken for granted. I focus here on the process by which racial categories are themselves constructed; in particular, I examine the presence of place and the role of state in the making of one such category, the “Chinese,” in a British settler society from the 1880s to the 1920s. I argue that “Chinatown,” like race, is an idea that belongs to the “white” European cultural tradition. The significance of government is that it has granted legitimacy to the ideas of Chinese and Chinatown, inscribing social definitions of identity and place in institutional practice and space. Indeed Chinatown has been a critical nexus through which the race definition process was structured. I examine this process in Vancouver, British Columbia, where the municipal authorities of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sanctioned the intellectual milieu of race. They did this, I argue, as part of the historical exercise of white European cultural domination. In short, I wish to uncover the dynamic between place, racial discourse, power, and institutional practice by way of contributing to the recent rediscovery of place in human geography.

This article discusses Chinese migrants’ incorporation in European cities and the relevance of the urban space. In particular, it focuses on the Chinatowns of London and Milan, beginning from two recent cases where their space has been contested. Alongside the different histories and contemporary patterns of Chinese migration and settlement and the varying policies and politics of immigration and integration in Britain and Italy, we bring the urban factor in our analysis. More specifically, we look at the political economy of the urban space and the role of Chinatown in the dynamics of urban restructuring in the two cities. We conclude by summarizing the key dimensions of comparison and by highlighting additional elements that are important in order to understand the multiple processes conditioning Chinese migrants’ incorporation in Europe, the peculiarities of Chinatown as a specific urban locale and the politics of contestation and protest involving immigrants in urban contexts. In that sense, the article examines different layers of explanation and builds a comparative analytical framework that goes beyond the limits of migration studies.

2020

Los Angeles Chinatown is one of the oldest North American urban Chinatowns and experiencing changes that are redefining the neighborhood. Yet, not all community leaders label these changes as gentrification that directly displaces the community. This article examines how community leaders representing business, residential, and cultural interests engage in the politics of placemaking through their narratives of a new development, Blossom Plaza. Community leaders do not always view gentrification as a primary direct displacement, and instead emphasize how a secondary and symbolic displacement is happening historically, physically, economically, and politically in Chinatown. However, they also vary in whether they see these changes as ultimately reshaping the neighborhood to maintain its unique identity, which is linked to how they envision Chinatown as an ethnic space. The findings highlight the importance of considering symbolic displacement in gentrification studies about historic ethnic enclaves.

Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2000

2007

A bachelor society, men brought in by the shipload to labour in harsh, slave-like conditions, often for decades. Aliens despised and feared by their hosts. The hope: to return home as rich men. Thi ...

As a frontier for many immigrants of diverse ethnicities or nationalities, San Francisco has long been a space that witnesses or even inspires many identity-based social movements, including Asian American struggles rooted in Chinatown. In contrast to what outsiders may imagine, however, these ethnic movements have never been coherent, and the term “Chinese American,” along with the “imagined community” it conjures up, becomes highly indefinable when put under different contexts. In fact, as my article points out, the tension of racial politics within Chinatown itself rises and falls as the relationship between the U.S., PRC, and ROC changes. In order to explore this split of identification of Asian, especially Chinese, American people, the article examines the seminal film Chan is Missing, directed by Wayne Wang, a story featuring two Chinese American taxi drivers as they roam around San Francisco in search of their acquaintance Chan.

2013

This work is an investigation into Shanghai’s role in the twenty-first century as it attempts to rejoin the global city network. It also examines the effects this move is having on the city, its people, and its public spaces. Shanghai’s intention to turn itself into the New York of Asia is not succeeding, in fact the city might be better trying to become the Chicago of Asia instead. As one of Saskia Sassen’s ‘global cities’ Shanghai functions as part of a network that requires face-to-face contact, but it has also been able to benefit from links that were forged during the colonial era (1842 to c.1949). In fact, the new global elites who have made cities like Shanghai their home have ended up living much like former ones; with the result that their needs are pushing out the very people who used to call this city ‘home’. These are the people who inhabit what Manuel Castells calls the ‘Fourth World’ (what this research refers to as the ‘analogue archipelago’). Manuel Castells’s notion...

American Journal of Sociology, 1993

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The Journal of Asian Studies, 2020

CELA 2002: GroundWork, 2002

"This paper examines the reciprocity of identity and spatial politics in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District. The paper argues that the issue of cultural identity is critical to the continued social, cultural and political construction of this multiethnic neighborhood. It further argues that the ongoing urban design and planning process presents an important opportunity for ethnic communities to continuously articulate their identities and build social ties and political capacity in the face of external and internal challenges. By enabling social mobilization and renegotiating identities and representation, urban design can play a critical role in the transformation of urban ethnic communities."

Vis a Vis Explorations in Anthropology, 2009

U rban cities, such as Guangzhou, hold a unique place in the Chinese imaginary since more than half the majority of China's 1.3 billion population do not have the privilege of living there. Cities and the promises represented by urban life are complex and intricate. The draw of economic and cultural vibrancy is oftentimes coupled with images of alienation, fear and danger. This paper explores the experiences of urban Chinese bodies and how the physical body is inscribed by and with specific practices that implicate Chinese urbanites' struggle to come to terms with "modern" meanings of being Chinese, both within a localized national context as well as within a context of cosmopolitanism. The spatial intersections of activities found within the local and transnational spaces in Guangzhou, formerly known as Canton, are particularly interesting when examined in conjunction with globalization literature which highlights temporal and spatial "deterritorialization" of culture, individuals, and nation-states (cf.