Yuk Wah Chan

Coming of age of the Chinese tourists: the emergence of non-Western tourism and host-guest interactions in Vietnam's border tourism.

Unlike most previous tourism research that has focused on Western tourists, this article investigates the interactions between Chinese tourists and Vietnamese hosts in border tourism in Vietnam. It proposes that a study of non-Western tourism between non-Western destinations is long overdue. The last decade has witnessed a massive influx of Chinese tourists into many Asian tourism landscapes. As a category of non-Western tourists, they are certainly producing immense economic and cultural impacts on the host societies. Conceptually, this article extends Urrys tourist gaze to the host, showing that the hosts, rather than being passive objects of the tourist gaze, are in fact active agents casting fierce gazes on the tourists. It also examines the Chinese tourist gaze, which serves as a point of departure of looking into Chinese moving desire and transnational modernity within the context of expanding Asian tourism.Unlike most previous tourism research that has focused on Western tourists, this article investigates the interactions between Chinese tourists and Vietnamese hosts in border tourism in Vietnam. It proposes that a study of non-Western tourism between non-Western destinations is long overdue. The last decade has witnessed a massive influx of Chinese tourists into many Asian tourism landscapes. As a category of non-Western tourists, they are certainly producing immense economic and cultural impacts on the host societies. Conceptually, this article extends Urrys tourist gaze to the host, showing that the hosts, rather than being passive objects of the tourist gaze, are in fact active agents casting fierce gazes on the tourists. It also examines the Chinese tourist gaze, which serves as a point of departure of looking into Chinese moving desire and transnational modernity within the context of expanding Asian tourism.

Recycling Migration and Changing Nationalisms: The Vietnamese Return Diaspora and Reconstruction of Vietnamese Nationhood

The Vietnamese diasporic population, largely constituted within international and regional political turbulences in the 1970s and early 1980s, has been swiftly recycled over the last decade. Many first- and second-generation overseas Vietnamese have been returning to Vietnam to live and work. This article examines the interactive dynamics between the homeland society and the returning migrants, and the impact of return migration on Vietnamese nationhood. Unlike most transnational studies that centre on the identity issues of transmigrants, this paper examines changes occurring both to the migrants and to the state and society of origin. It challenges the common perception that migrants are fluid and flexible, whereas the homeland state and society are fixed. While the homeland has been drawing up rhetorical strategies and policy to accommodate these once-discordant overseas subjects, the returning migrants continue their negotiations on history, identity and nationhood. The interactions between the Vietnamese state and the returning diaspora have created a dynamic transnational social field for the reconstruction of the Vietnamese past and present, which in turn poses new questions of boundary-making within the Vietnamese nation as a whole.

Vietnamese-Chinese relationships at the borderlands: Trade, tourism and cultural politics

1. Introduction 2. The Intriguing Vietnam-China Relationship and Border Encounters 3. Trade, Business and Borderland Cultural Economy 4. Chinese Tourists, Borderland Tourism and Joking Relationships 5. Smuggling, Gambling and Borderland Regulation 6. Sex Tourism, Gender Politics and Cross-border Marriage 7. Conclusion: Surfaces of Interaction and Inter-state Relations

Hybrid diaspora and identity-laundering: a study of the return overseas Chinese Vietnamese in Vietnam 1

Among the overseas Vietnamese around the world, many are Chinese Vietnamese. They fled from Vietnam for different political and economic reasons during the 1970s and the 1980s. Many of them have returned to Vietnam since the 1990s to work, invest or retire. What is interesting about these returned Chinese Vietnamese migrants is the fact that when they left Vietnam they were called by the Vietnamese the Hoa (華, Chinese) or Hoa kiều (華僑, overseas Chinese) by the Vietnamese. This identity was actually one of the reasons for their escape. When they returned, they were lumped together with all other returnees into the category of Việt kiều (越僑, overseas Vietnamese) and enjoyed the special rights offered by the Việt kiều policy of the Vietnamese government, which was aimed at boosting the national economy. Although their ‘Chinese’ identity had once made them to risk their lives by sailing out on the roaring sea, their ‘Vietnamese’ identity brought them back to Vietnam at other turning points in their lives. The shifting identity of these Hoa kiều-turned-Việt kiều has produced an interesting migration story and an intriguing category of ‘hybrid diaspora.’

‘Vietnam is my country land, China is my hometown’: Chinese communities in transition in the south of Vietnam

ABSTRACT Studies of Southeast Asian Chinese are voluminous; yet, those about the Chinese in Vietnam are comparatively few. This article provides an updated account of the Chinese Vietnamese with focuses on the Chinese associations in the South of Vietnam and the shifting Chinese identity. Many have discussed the Chinese Vietnamese who fled Vietnam in the 1970s and 1980s, however, little is known about the plights of the Chinese inside Vietnam during those decades. This article elaborates on their situations in the post-unification decade in Ho Chi Minh City and the subsequent changes after the doi moi reforms in the 1990s. It will show how a liberalized economy and accommodative ethnic policies have resulted in a more proactive relationship between the Chinese minority and the Vietnamese society, which consequentially led to changes in the relationship between the Chinese in Vietnam and China.

Postcolonial cultural governance: a study of heritage management in post-1997 Hong Kong

Abstract This paper seeks to unpack the politics of heritage preservation in post-1997 Hong Kong. Referring to international frameworks on heritage preservation, it seeks to position Hong Kong’s cultural resource management on par with international discourses for the advancement of heritage governance. Debates surrounding heritage are indeed a part of the wider picture of Hong Kong’s cultural and identity politics and the Hong Kong-China relationship. By examining various contested cases of heritage conservation, and by linking those debates back to the government’s responses within the context of cultural governance, we suggest that heritage management has become a hot stove for cultural politics in post-colonial Hong Kong with deep repercussions in the political, social and economic spheres. The paper examines the rising social debates concerning the removal and conservation of built heritage, and the various government attempts to address these debates. It argues that the current heritage governance mechanism has failed to meet social needs and provide an articulated heritage policy. We propose that a coherent organisational structure is required to better accommodate diverse and contradictory views and discourses surrounding heritage and cultural governance and to tackle the various cultural challenges in postcolonial Hong Kong.

A tale of two borderlands: material lucidity and deep play in the transborder tourism space in Hong Kong and Macao

This article examines post-colonial “development” of cross-border tourism at two border cities of China, Hong Kong and Macao, which returned their sovereignty to China in 1997 and 1999 respectively. Instead of considering such development merely a tourism feature, the author argues that the abundance of Chinese tourists to Hong Kong and Macao has resulted from the problematic growth of China. Transborder tourism space and relations between the two cities and China have signaled developmental flaws in China. While Hong Kong has become a remedy for China’s “fake goods” market and has provided the opportunity for millions to seek “material lucidity,” Macao has come to the rescue of China’s outflow of renminibi, and acted as a space for the deep play of the risk-taking psyche of many mainland Chinese. The author concludes that these two border cities will continue to be “frontier thermometers” measuring the warm and cold “weathers” of China’s transitional political economy.

Not merely a border: borderland governance, development and transborder relations in Asia

Borderlands are geographical places demarcated and defined by state-designed boundaries. Borderland communities, lying on the margin of more than one state, are thus existing in different development modes and terms of governance. Often, they are (physically) closer to a foreign regime and farther away from the central power of their own governments. People living in the borderlands are acquainted with different regimes of power, and may be skillful users of more than one language and currency for daily interaction and exchange. Anthropologists have been actively studying borders and borderlands, not only because many borderlands have been neglected in research, but also because they are where anthropologists find concentrated marginalized groups (such as refugees) and minorities, intriguing cross-border state relations and human interactions and mixed and blurred identities. Borderland ethnographies also often provide interesting stories of alternative voices and views of state relations, history, culture, and identity that deviate from what has been defined by the state (Chang 2014; Chan 2013; Harris 2013; van Schendel 2005). The borderland is indeed a spatial variance of international relations (Chan 2013, 123). While borders are themselves defining and delimiting state power and sovereignty, they are at the same time sites that constantly challenge and negotiate such power. Borders and boundaries are often imagined as hard and enclosing frontiers, yet many of them are, in reality, porous (Horstmann and Wadley 2006; Tagliacozzo 2005; Walker 1999; Wilson and Donnan 1999, 1998). Borderlanders can be active “border-crossers” who make use of such skills to challenge state control and discourses on “boundaries” in order to work on the improvement of life chances and livelihoods. In the unstable war-torn border zone in northern Myanmar, for example, borderlanders are quick to exploit short-term peace and transborder differences. Even in the worst cases of hostile and militarized borders, such as the island of Quemoy in the Taiwan Strait during the Cold War, daily reality is defined by being on the edge of the state and residents are suspect because of their transborder ties (Szonyi 2008). The anthropology of borderlands

Consoling ghosts: Stories of medicine and mourning from Southeast Asians in exile

unknown Denisovans, who lived long after Peking Man disappeared. These chapters focus on archeological finds from Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains by Russian colleagues of Pääbo. In Chapter 22, Pääbo discusses a girl’s finger bone 60,000 years in age that provided enough DNA to sequence her mitochondrial genome and then her nuclear genome by methods newly developed in Leipzig. (She had brown eyes, hair, and skin color.) These findings showed that Denisovans were older than Neanderthals in the human line of descent. They branched off about a million years ago, compared to less than half a million years ago for Neanderthals. These surprising results led to more surprises about our extinct human relatives. A large tooth from the same cave proved to be another Denisovan individual by DNA analysis. In Chapter 23, further work showed that Denisovan DNA was closer to Neanderthals than to modern humans, but a little of it does exist in some of today’s people in China, the Philippines, and Melanesia, although not in Cambodians or Andamanese (Onge). But most of our genes are identical to those of Neanderthals and Denisovans, and also to chimpanzees. Only a few changes in our DNA set us apart from them, leading to changes in body form, behavior, and brain function. Pääbo’s group first extracted and analyzed mitochondrial DNA from a Neanderthal in 1996. Later his group did the same for Neanderthal nuclear DNA and both kinds of Denisovan DNA. Eighteen years later, in 2014, after this book was published, the Leipzig group was able to analyze the DNA of a 45,000-year-old bone of a modern human, the oldest known person of our species to yield DNA. This western Siberian person has Neanderthal DNA in a different pattern from that of today’s people, which may indicate that the time of interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans was shortly after the latter arrived in Eurasia from Africa. This Siberian genome shows that today’s people have several genes inherited from Neanderthals, including one for curvature of the spine (Ann Gibbons. “Oldest Homo sapiens genome pinpoints Neanderthal’s input.” Science 343: 1417, 2014). Pääbo’s group has revealed more about two of our extinct relatives than we know so far about the community history of modern humans. As a follow-up to this book, we need a book on the human experience during the past 50,000 or 60,000 years, when people colonized the entire world: migration paths, genetic changes, and cultural history.