Emigrants from Xi's China: The New Chinese Diaspora IdentityImperium vs. dominium, the new minjian emigrants, and the quest for a global Chinese identity
In July, Chang Che penned a fascinating piece for The New Yorker, “Reimagining China in Tokyo.” His article described a new wave of Chinese expats in Tokyo creating a community of bookstores, literary salons, and lecture spaces, reminiscent of the intellectual life they once somewhat enjoyed in China before Xi Jinping. This new exodus marks a shift from previous emigration waves. In the post-Tiananmen era, we saw a divide between the traditional dissidents — those who, in exile, openly sought regime change in the mainland — and the emigrants who eschewed politics altogether and were content to “make money and pursue happiness in the now.” Today, we’re seeing a different type of divide among the latest Chinese expats. ChinaTalk is running Che’s follow-up piece, which colorfully illustrates the anatomy of these new Chinese emigrant cohorts. “Neither ‘silent’ nor ‘dissident,’” these émigrés are less likely to echo the aspirations of figures like Liang Qichao, who sought to reform China from Japan in the early twentieth century. Instead, they represent two emerging visions:
Che introduces us to the proponents of both. What exactly are the goals of these cultural creators, and how might their visions play out in this climate of ideological competition? For future updates to Che’s work, subscribe to his Substack. A “Garbage Time”This August, I sat in on a strategy meeting at One-Way Space 单向空间, an independent bookstore nestled in an outdoor mall on the east side of Beijing. Founded in 2005, in a courtyard of Beijing’s Old Summer Palace, One-Way can sometimes feel like a relic of a bygone era. Walk into its three-story branch in Hangzhou, and you’ll be greeted by walls decorated with quotes from Kafka and Whitman and daring shelf categories like “Democracy & Freedom & Human Rights.” The bookstore is a major hit among educated young Chinese who have lived their formative years in an era of relative openness and transnational outreach. That the business has survived, even expanded, in an era of cynicism and insularity is no easy feat. One-Way’s founders are masterful brokers of culture. Over the years, as Beijing’s bookstores toppled like dominoes, these owners — many of them former journalists — braved the smartphone age by transforming their business into a glorified ad agency. Car companies and real estate developers have become gainful clientele. To boost their client’s cultural cache, the team hosts events and pop-up stores in places like newly built apartment complexes. And the founders have tried to squeeze everything from their brand. One-Way runs its own coffee label, a publishing house, a well-known in-depth interview series on Tencent, and a surprisingly lucrative line of merchandise, including T-shirts, whisky, refrigerator magnets, and slippers. Inside a studio with glossy wooden interiors sat Xu Zhiyuan 许知远 (one of the founders), the department heads, and two other executives who beamed in from a large monitor. A subdued worry hung in the air. One executive proposed a plan: marketing to China’s growing elderly demographic. What if they crafted narratives to challenge the stigmas around aging? Another department head considered selling merchandise on livestreams, which, in the world of Chinese business, is akin to a Hail Mary — potentially lucrative, but uninspired. Speaking last was Wu Qi 吴琦, the head of One-Way’s publishing division. Wu, a soft-spoken man in his early 30s, had just returned from Germany, where he’d enjoyed several conversations with emigrants who — of all the things they could do in a new country — wanted to start a Chinese-language publisher. It struck him as an opportunity. “Their vision has never been to build an Apple [ie. a huge global brand], but to manage something between China and the world,” Wu concluded. The new emigrants, better educated and culturally literate, seemed to be looking for something more than just a comfortable material life, and they were asking One-Way for guidance. “This is a clear trend in our industry.” Last December, a popular commentator named Hu Wenhui 胡文辉 published a screed on Weibo where he compared China’s present malaise to the waning years of the Soviet Union, when economic and cultural stagnation appeared, in retrospect, to prophesy its collapse. He dubbed it a “garbage time in history” 历史的垃圾时间, alluding to the last stretch of a basketball game when a blowout score has rendered all remaining plays useless. The phrase set off a torrent of discussion over the summer and forced Party-run papers into damage-control mode. As China has become less open in recent years, it has alienated a generation whose outlook on life has been moving in the opposite direction. And Hu suggests that the best coping mechanism to a “garbage time” is to “exit”:
For several years now, but especially after the pandemic, this culture of escape or “lying flat” has been intensifying in Chinese cities. There was the popularity of “digital nomad” work, a boom in outdoor activities from hiking to rock climbing, the transformation of Dali 大理 into a burnout mecca, and a rise in activities involving spiritual contemplation. In June, I spent ten days in the Wudang Mountains 武当山 in Hubei Province 湖北省, one of the birthplaces of Daoism, where Chinese are reconnecting with their rich hermetic traditions that flourished during the Tang dynasty, another “garbage time” referenced in Hu’s essay. The monks in the temples told me that before the pandemic, Wudang was primarily a tourist site for foreigners because “Chinese were not interested in their own spiritual traditions.” Now, their classes on yǎngshēng 养生, the art of self-cultivation, and Taichi are booked out by young Chinese professionals from first-tier cities. Then there are those who have opted for the real exit: emigration. Lately, there have been a lot of reports about Chinese expats congregating in ways that might be vexing to the Communist Party. You can now go to a feminist stand-up comedy show in New York and hear women roast Xi Jinping in Mandarin. [Jordan: can confirm, these shows are excellent.] You can join civic groups in London that dedicate as much time to nature conservation and Palestinian rights as they do to the chained woman of Xuzhou (徐州铁链女事件). This April, I talked to a mainland comedian who had just finished performing a set for the Chinese diaspora community in Vancouver, Canada. He told me how freeing it was to not have to look over his shoulder for fear he might get reported by the audience. His second impression? “The sense of community,” he said. “There’s this feeling in the shows that you’re bringing Chinese together. Everybody was so emotional.” One-Way opened a branch in Tokyo last August, and it has since hosted a relentless stream of lectures by Japanese and Chinese scholars on history and culture (though no politics or current affairs). What’s interesting to me is that the same type of people who seem prone to “lying flat” in China — young, educated literati — also appear most energized abroad. Having “exited,” Chinese appear to be rediscovering their “voice.” I think the domestic stagnation in mainland China and the vitality of places like Tokyo are two halves of the same story. There is a reckoning, a recalibration unfolding both inside and outside China, where people are “adapting” themselves in accordance with a new world — xiūxíng 修行, the word I heard most in the Wudang Mountains, or zhuǎnxíng 转型, in the cities. I want to describe what I’m seeing and assess some of its contradictions and possibilities. The Post-Covid Cultural ExilesDuring a recent visit to Tokyo, I met many of the expats who are building these new Chinese public spaces. When you talk to them, you can hear their passion in every breath. What became clear to me in Japan was that, while Chinese civil society had been decimated over the past decade, its architects remain, and they are now building it elsewhere. Among them is Annie Zhang Jieping 张洁平, a mainland-born journalist now based in Taipei, who is planning to open a bookstore in Tokyo soon. After spending over a decade in Hong Kong, Zhang moved to Taipei in 2020 as part of a mass exodus following Beijing’s imposition of a new Hong Kong national-security law. Zhang seemed to have been aware at the time that she was part of a new chapter in the Chinese emigration story: “When I was in Taipei, I realized I was a part of this wave,” she told me. “We happened to be a couple years earlier than the mainlanders.” In 2022, Zhang opened a bookstore in Taipei called Feidi (飛地nowhere), or “enclave” in Chinese. Feidi is to cultural vagabonds what Howard Schultz’s Starbucks is to commuters shuttling between work and home: a “third place,” one that can stabilize lost souls stuck between two divergent cultures. That, she said, was the great sublimating act of Hong Kong. Though Feidi seats only about thirty people, it has been a hit among the émigré community in Taiwan. When Zhang invited a Hong Kong musician for a book signing last January, roughly two hundred people showed up: “We had to ask the police for a street permit, you know, the ones you use for parades.” It’s no accident that a mainland journalist who lived in Hong Kong is at the bleeding edge of this new cultural work, which is now sprouting up all over the world. It takes Chinese with a keen eye and receptivity to foreign cultures to create new pathways in this age of xenoskepticism. Luckily, China is full of them. One of the great ironies of this era is that the Chinese system is closing up at the same time that many of its inhabitants are hungrier for understanding and meaningful connections with the outer world. What are they to do in this “garbage time”? This is the arbitrage opportunity One-Way Space has seized upon, and it’s the reason why emigrants seek cultural activities today. This wave of emigration — marked by exiled cultural production — is different from emigration waves of the past. My parents, for example, were part of the mass emigration wave of the 1990s, when some of the country’s best and brightest went abroad, many of them headed for the US and Canada. Over 870,000 people left China in 1992, catalyzed by Deng Xiaoping’s renewed commitment to market reforms in the wake of the crackdowns on student protestors in Tiananmen Square. Tiananmen polarized this wave of emigrants. My parents, which represented one pole, emigrated to Japan in 1990, and forsook politics altogether. In Roman legal terminology, they retreated from the imperium toward the dominium, seeking to build wealth and meaning through pre-existing economic ladders and structures. Many in this group had technical backgrounds — in Tokyo, my parents got their PhDs in physics and chemistry — which were coveted in the 2000s thanks to expanding industries like IT. These Chinese emigrants siloed themselves in universities and corporations, accenting the Asian stereotype of the “silent” or “model minority.” On the other end of the spectrum were the Tiananmen student leaders like Zhou Fengsuo 周锋锁 and Wang Dan 王丹. After Tiananmen, they joined dissident communities and continued to pursue their political activism. Shaped by the period of heady political experimentation that was the 1980s, they were full-blooded creatures of the imperium. They talked in the language of “isms,” universality, power, and sovereignty. After exile, if China didn’t change, they would consider their mission incomplete, if not a failure. “When we left China, everyone still imagined we would return,” Wang told me. “The reason my English is still not great is because I’ve been steeped in Chinese communities” ever since. One way to refer to these new cultural architects might be the “minjian emigrants,” in the vein of sinologist Sebastian Veg’s term for “grassroots” intellectuals 民间知识分子 who chose to operate outside government institutions in the aftermath of Tiananmen. While the events of the square extinguished the vita activa of Chinese like my parents, it transfigured that of others. For instance, after Liu Suli 刘苏里, a former Tiananmen student leader, was released from prison, he opened All Sages Bookstore 万圣书园 in Beijing in 1993. Liu was part of a generation of thwarted idealists who traded their romanticism for humanism, their liberal proclamations for projects and professions. Several other independent bookstores opened across the country after Liu’s. “China is not a liberal society,” Liu once told a journalist, so bookstores “express our longing for freedom.” In his seminal work on the Chinese diaspora, the historian Philip Kuhn traces Chinese emigration back to the family, the exporters of labor and remittances. “We are looking at a system of labor distribution,” Kuhn concludes, where the essence “is not the separation but the connection.” I grew up in Japan in the 1990s, when this connection largely still held. My parents worked in Japanese restaurants and sent their savings back to China — not too different from the nineteenth-century Chinese merchants who moved to Southeast Asia, or the contract laborers that made up America’s Chinatowns. Among the minjian emigrants, benefactors as they are of market reform and globalization, the flow of money has reversed. And unlike the stereotypical fùèrdài 富二代, or “rich second generation,” their money seems to be going toward cultural projects rather than Porsches and high-rise condos. The minjian emigrants are neither “silent” nor “dissident.” In central Tokyo, there is a bookstore run by a former human-rights lawyer named Li Jinxing 李金星. On the week I visited him, he had organized a book club comparing Chinese and Japanese paths to modernization (the implication was that China had failed); a documentary screening of Alexei Navalny, the late Russian opposition leader; and a discussion of Liang Qichao 梁启超, a former exile and father of modern China. Is this “dissident” work? I don’t think so. Part of what is appealing about Li’s lectures is that they offer a bridge to the younger generation, who tend to absorb ideas through culture — music, books, films, podcasts — as opposed to, say, rallies and political-activist groups. This is why the Liang Qichao lectures are titled, “Rebuilding China in Tokyo,” not “What we can learn from Liang Qichao so we can change China (again).” Liang Qichao, Kang Youwei, and Sun Yat-senLiang came up frequently among exile discussions in Tokyo, often with a tinge of sentimentality. In 1898, Liang settled in Yokohama after a failed attempt to overhaul China’s imperial system earned him a death sentence. He arrived in a Japan that felt decades ahead of his homeland, replete with a universal education system, railways, a constitution, and political parties. There, he founded a reform-minded school and wrote prolifically about the nature of modernity, Western civilization, and the path to reform. These writings found their way into China, reaching an audience of up to 200,000 people, even though they were technically banned. Beyond his writings, Liang was also involved in political activism. He helped his mentor, Kang Youwei 康有為, raise funds from the overseas Chinese community for his Protect the Emperor Society 保皇会, which continued to fight for the reform policies that led to Kang and Liang’s exile. By the time Liang visited the United States in 1903, the society had a chapter in Japan, Hong Kong, Macao, Canada, the United States, and Australia. It was from these same communities that much of the funds to supply Sun Yat-sen’s revolution would come. Sun founded the Tóngménghùi 同盟会, a secret society and predecessor to the Kuomintang 国民党, in Tokyo in 1905; six years later, that society helped topple the Qing dynasty. In gratitude, Sun dubbed the overseas Chinese “the mother of revolution.” What’s striking about the Liang era is the cohesion between a few influential leaders and their diaspora constituents. Discriminatory laws helped Chinese coalesce around a shared national identity, making it easier for leaders like Kang to link their destiny to a nation struggling against foreign powers. Such “hub-and-spokes” dynamics are weaker today. Modernity has given subsequent Chinese emigrants greater freedom to choose where to live and what to do. These new “spokes” for self-actualization have weakened the sense of national unity that supplied reformists and revolutionary movements. When Li Jinxing arrived in Tokyo in the fall of 2022, his first impression was that the Chinese community was not congregating the way he would have imagined. “I thought, ‘This is a free country!’ — but it turns out even in a free society, Chinese are still not interested in Chinese affairs,” Li told me. Even with the new bookstores, the diaspora community that the minjian emigrants hope to foster doesn’t have the revolutionary fervor of their pre-modern antecedents. The Liang era still feels worlds apart. Nor are the “hubs” so clearly defined. After their exile, the overseas reputations of Kang, a former advisor to Emperor Guangxu 光绪帝, and Liang only grew. Reports of Liang’s visit to the United States bore stately titles like “Oriental Mark Anthony Tells Chinamen How They Have Only Been Slaves.” When Kang’s society building burned down in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, he recouped the money through donations in a matter of months. I can’t think of anyone who commands China’s public sphere as powerfully as these turn-of-century exiles. (The closest might be the master con artist Guo Wengui 郭文贵.) These were big fish in a smaller pond. I wonder also if this era may be uniquely difficult for Chinese to imagine alternatives. At the turn of the century, it was not a stretch for reformists like Liang to think China could learn from Japan, a state that shocked the world in 1905 by defeating the Russians in Manchuria and Korea. With China’s opening to the world in the late 1970s, this enchantment, or “beaconism,” turned to America, giving rise to expressions like “the moon is rounder abroad” 外国的月亮比较圆. Many non-dissident Chinese liberals today are disillusioned by the West, and their search for new beacons seems haplessly elusive. After a decade writing about Western philosophy and history for China’s premier media outlets, Xu Zhiyuan has turned to historical biographies of Chinese intellectuals. And even though Li Jinxing has been eagerly following in Liang’s footsteps — he is taking a Japanese language intensive and studying the Meiji restoration — he admitted to me that he hasn’t found anything useful yet. The Liang lectures in March, delivered by the mainland scholar Fu Guoyong 傅国涌, brought up the tension between the power of the state and the resilience of individual will. After the talk, one elderly Chinese emigrant, who had lived in Japan for decades, stood up to give the young listeners in the room something of a pep talk. “I hope there are young people here who can inherit these stories,” he said. “Your generation shouldn’t underestimate yourselves. Everyone should think of themselves as agents of history.” This is easier said than done, of course. One soft-spoken engineer in his thirties asked Fu for advice on how to combat his passivity to historical events. Fu assured him that it was not his fault. “Environment matters,” he said, referring to the Party’s technologies of censorship and repression. “If a society suppresses free thinking too aggressively, it cannot produce [Liang Qichaos]. Freedom is their oxygen.” In a review of a recent book on Liang’s exile — written by none other than Xu Zhiyuan — the historian Li Li 李礼 observed the following:
I suspect the causes of demotivated youth run deeper than free _expression_, mainly because the problem is not unique to China. Alienation, loneliness, a numbness to politics, an ennui around online relationships — these are symptoms prevalent in the US and Europe as well. Li Jinxing’s hypothesis is that this well-heeled, smartphone-addicted era might require new solutions. “Before, it might have been a violent revolution,” he told me. “But they didn’t have any other choice!” I asked what the new approach looks like: “I haven’t figured that out yet.” Of course, there is another interpretation: someone like Liang simply hasn’t emerged yet. Before the lecture concluded, Fu reminded us that history is replete with instances of men who overcame what seemed like impossible odds. “Such is the definition of greatness,” he averred. “I believe that, within these 1.4 billion people, there are already many people out there. We may just not know who they are.” Two Visions of Diasporic Identity in the Xi Jinping EraOne simple way to differentiate between the minjian emigrants and the dissidents is to ask them about their views of Donald Trump. For many reasons, Chinese dissidents have frequently grafted their antipathy of the Communist Party to the “woke” politics of the American left — which is why The Epoch Times, a media outlet affiliated with the Falun Gong, is one of the most powerful right-wing publishers in the United States. You don’t see this brand of Trumpian activism among the bookstore owners in Tokyo. Their approach to politics is as observers, not actors. The mindsets of those like Annie Zhang Jieping and Li Jinxing remind me of the Central European intellectuals during the Cold War. People like Václav Havel and Adam Michnik shared a skepticism toward the binary political categories of left and right. Instead, they advocated for what Geroge Konrád calls “anti-politics” — a focus on civil society and moral integrity over traditional power struggles. They were meliorists, not dogmatists; their work did not involve scheming their surrogates into state power, but the gritty work of altering societal attitudes and beliefs through grassroots associations. In doing so, they offer more practical guidelines for how to imagine a freer life under totalitarian rule. That such gradualists like Zhang and Li have had to leave China is a serious indictment of how intolerant the regime has become. The historian Timothy Garton Ash once equated the central European strategy of building a civil society to “tree roots gradually undermining a house.” Now that the Communist Party has razed its understory, does their work overseas even matter? What is accomplished by having the roots grow around the house rather than beneath it? In an important respect, Zhang’s and Li’s work no longer bears this activist flair. In particular, they see cultivating the gardens of culture around China as an end in itself, not just a means. In April, I talked to Wu Guoguang 吴国光, a post-Tiananmen exile and scholar on Chinese politics at Stanford. He framed the new emigrants’ work as the creation of “an overseas public sphere” (per the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas), where Chinese can discuss matters that are pertinent to them as overseas Chinese, rather than as fully assimilated immigrants or uprooted mainlanders. Wu finds the diaspora’s tendency to polarize in this manner to be symptomatic of China’s historical misapprehensions of the West:
Wu held up the Jewish people as an exemplar of this middle path: a community that has cultivated a distinct overseas identity, while also maintaining their traditional ties to their motherland. He hoped the new cultural emigrants could follow suit, teaching the diaspora how to relate “to each other,” not just “to China.” Such a sphere, he said, may include NGOs that help the overseas community deal with the widespread problem of intergenerational conflict over politics and culture. The seeds of this public sphere have already sprouted. Zhang Shizhi, a former vice president at a major state publisher in Beijing, started his own publishing company in Tokyo last year. “In recent years, we exiled publishers have been talking amongst ourselves about making a sort of publishing consortium,” Zhang told me. The consortium would publish uncensored works by Chinese writers and deliver it to readers overseas. Such publishers already exist in Taiwan, but Zhang’s would be one of the first in simplified Chinese to do so. When I talked to Li in March, I asked him, from every possible angle, whether any of the things he was doing were aimed at changing China. He demurred, often trying to play down his bookstore space as a mutual-support system for the Tokyo community. Li told me, for instance, about a recent visitor: a teary-eyed entrepreneur who was on the lam from the Chinese police and was worried about what might happen to his wife and kids. “A lot of Chinese people today feel unsafe,” Li told me. “Everybody is thinking, for instance, ‘When can I return safely?’ Just that issue alone brings up a host of other questions.” Still, I think Li hopes his community work will find its way back into China. He publishes videos of his lectures on Weibo, and they have yet to be censored. That reminded me of Liang, whose writings managed to re-enter China through written correspondences and periodicals. “Any societal transformation must begin with a transformation in thought,” Li told me. There were two distinct visions of overseas Chinese identity taking shape in Tokyo. The first harks back to the civil society of the 2000s, when the space for free _expression_ was more expansive. You can see this identity in Li’s lectures as well as the groups that Chinese international students have created after the “Bridge Man” incident 四通桥事件 and the white paper protests 白纸运动. Perhaps the best representative of this kind of identity right now is the Bumingbai podcast 不明白播客, hosted by Yuan Li 袁莉 of The New York Times. The podcast speaks boldly and directly about current affairs, and platforms a diverse range of Chinese perspectives on everything from covid lockdowns to China’s mental health crisis, from the Netflix adaption of The Three-Body Problem to the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. In short, the first version of overseas Chinese identity draws its strength from its extrication from censorship controls — but unlike dissident activism, its primary purpose is not to change the regime, but to exercise independent thought. The second vision is the one adopted by the founders of One-Way Space. If you visit their Ginza branch, you will not find material that is censored in China. (Having such material would endanger their employees and businesses on the mainland.) But even so, they are still able to find an endless supply of collaborations with Japanese scholars and intellectuals who are willing to deliver lectures on literature, art, and history, just not politics. The bookstore’s feat is that it has managed to create an attractive cosmopolitan brand while managing to steer clear of the Party’s expansive content controls. The founder Xu Zhiyuan has said he plans to expand his store to places like Vancouver, Amsterdam, and Singapore, among others. Xu’s vision is for One-Way to represent a “global Chinese identity,” as opposed to just an overseas one. And, as his sly phrasing implies, this will be safer and likely more inclusive to Chinese, who already carry a built-in filter when they go abroad. Wu, the scholar, called their unfinished status that of “sub-exiles” 亚流亡: “A lot of Chinese overseas can talk about French politics but still can’t bring themselves to talk about Chinese politics.” The challenge to this approach is that the cost of self-censorship also gets passed onto the local culture, which can generate awkwardness and outrage (see the Hugo Awards controversy). A bookstore might, say, refuse to host certain Japanese speakers over something that they wrote or said. A Chinese publisher collaborating with a Japanese outfit on an essay collection might request some redactions from the other side. Such friction is an inevitable byproduct of this collision of cultures in the Xi Jinping era. To be sure, the first vision also has challenges. Participants of this identity may not seek to be subversive, but it will occasionally be construed as such. Its media will be censored, creators will be criticized and de-legitimized on Chinese social media, and those who engage with it will do so at their own peril. When I was in Tokyo, the community that enjoyed the Bumingbai podcast seemed to act as though they had taken a “red pill”: they were afraid of mentioning it publicly for fear of alienating other Chinese who may not share their worldview. But this identity can also credibly challenge the Party’s narratives on global and domestic events. When tragedy inevitably strikes in China again, people in this group will not remain silent. Chat groups will buzz, lectures will be convened, donations will be sent forth, and rallies will erupt in London, Tokyo, and New York, just as they did during the covid lockdowns. I think we know which identity Liang would have preferred. Whether these two visions can reconcile remains unclear — but it is the elephant in the emigrant’s creative studio. What they share is an abiding interest in using space, conversation, and culture to stimulate energy and thought and to break out of China’s cultural stagnation. And it is already influencing the wider Chinese diaspora. Wang Dan, the Tiananmen dissident, told me that he had recently started his own “public salons” at his home in Los Angeles: “When we first arrived in America, thirty years ago, we were poor students struggling with our own lives”; bookstores and lectures were out of sight and mind. Now, as more middle-class Chinese emigrate and bring their wealth abroad, he is hoping to use lectures to rebuild his dissident network. “I think these ideas are just starting to percolate,” Wang said, because “the conditions have changed.” For future updates to Che’s work, subscribe to his Substack. ChinaTalk is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. |