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Diasporic parallaxes: viewing China from its peripheries
by Angelina Chin, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Pomona College

This project begins with a proposal to reclaim the concept of “diaspora” as a political strategy for the people on the southeastern peripheries of the PRC, in particular Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau. In this context, “diasporic Chinese” functions not just as a descriptive term referring to Chinese people living “outside of China proper”; instead, it is deployed to evoke new subjectivities in a transnational solidarity alliance confronting an expansive PRC state. I also attempt to acquire Slavoj Zizek’s articulation of “the parallax view” to understand the cultural implications of such an alliance. Parallax is generally defined as “the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position.” Interestingly, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, until recently, were always being referred to by Western popular media as “windows” into China or China’s “windows” to the world. Although the original meaning of the metaphor refers to the opportunities and spectacles that were provided by these places, the metaphor is also useful in my analyses of the “diasporic parallaxes”. The concept of “parallax” reminds us that the position of the outside observer (or the window from which one is viewing) not only shapes the observer’s point of view about China, but also constitutes the meanings of the viewed object – “China”—as well. This framework might help to transcend the current political fixations on the polarities between the oppositional “local” identities/ territories and mainland China, and to rethink the positionalities of these peripheral territories as vantage points. My paper explores some of the historical conditionings that have produced the “parallax gaps” – namely, the experience of alternative modernities under foreign colonialisms and the traumatic memories of escaping from an oppressive state in the late 1940s-1970s.

‘Mind Your Own Business!’: The Hong Kong Government Confronts the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) over Chinese Refugees in Hong Kong
by Glen Peterson, Professor, Department of History, University of British Columbia

This paper examines the series of manoeuvres performed by Hong Kong’s colonial government to deflect, thwart, contain and shape the activities of the UNHCR’s Hong Kong Survey Mission, which was created for the purpose of investigating the situation and fate of the more than 700,000 mainland Chinese who fled China for the perceived sanctuary of Hong Kong in the years immediately preceding and following the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949. Lest it be thought that this is essentially the story of a stubborn and conservative colonial state resisting the actions of a forward-looking and progressive international institution of the postwar world, this paper also pays close attention to the motivations and assumptions of the early UNHCR in order to show that it, too, was, in certain critical respects, a colonial era institution.

Hoping they will go back: Hong Kong Government attitudes to Chinese migrants, 1950 and 1999
by Alan Smart, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of Calgary

Worries about “floods” of mainlanders entering Hong Kong have been pervasive in the post World War II era. Its Executive Council decided on July 13, 1948 to clear all squatters from the urban districts “with the hope that at least some would thereby be sufficiently discouraged and decide to return to China”. In May 1999, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa asked the National People’s Congress to reinterpret the clause on right of abode in the Basic Law, arguing that Hong Kong could not afford the influx of mainlanders that would otherwise flood into the SAR. In this paper, I discuss these two periods in which both colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong governments have acted to discourage migrants from the mainland of China. Drawing on my past research on both situations, I attempt to draw out similarities in the attitudes and practices, despite the great differences in the contexts, and to make some suggestions about the implications for our understanding of the governance of migrants and refugees in the Hong Kong context.