Transnationalism and Community Building

Abstract

An emergent literature on transnationalism has been burgeoning since the 1990s to examine new patterns of immigrant settlement. Research to date has emphasized the effects of transnationalism on the development in sending countries rather than receiving countries, focused on immigrant groups from Latin America rather than Asia, and examined individuals rather than immigrant organizations as units of analysis. As a consequence, we do not have reliable knowledge about the impacts of transnationalism on immigrant communities in the host society and the extent and sources of intergroup variations. To fill this gap and to supplement knowledge gained from Latin American experiences, this article offers a conceptual framework for analyzing the relationship between transnationalism and community building by examining Chinese ethnic organizations in the United States. We show that immigrants often engage their ancestral homelands via organizations and that organizational transnationalism contributes to strengthening the infrastructure and symbolic systems of the ethnic community and enhancing the community’s capacity to generate resources conducive to immigrant incorporation.

Keywords

Chinese immigrant organizations institutional completeness transnationalism community building immigrant incorporation

Immigrant organizations in the United States have proliferated because of rapid international migration, globalization, and the rise of new transportation and communication technologies that have facilitated long-distance and cross-border flows in recent years. The power and influence of these organizations have grown in tandem with both immigrants’ drive to make it in America and their obligations to support families and communities in sending countries. An emergent literature on transnationalism has burgeoned since the 1990s to examine new patterns of immigrant settlement. However, the existing research to date has emphasized the effects of transnationalism on the development in sending countries rather than receiving countries, focused on immigrant groups from Latin America rather than Asia, and examined individuals rather than immigrant organizations as units of analysis. As a consequence, we do not have reliable knowledge about the impacts of transnationalism on immigrant communities in the host society and the extent and sources of intergroup variations. Filling this void enhances our understanding of immigrant life in the contemporary United States and allows for an examination of whether immigrants’ organized activities across national borders impede or facilitate their incorporation into the host society.

In this article, we offer a conceptual framework for analyzing the relationship between transnationalism and community building in the case of Chinese American immigrant communities.¹ We explore three main questions: What is the organizational structure of the ethnic Chinese community in the United States and how has it changed over time? How do Chinese immigrant organizations engage the ancestral homeland? How does organizational transnationalism shape the ethnic community in the hostland? We show that immigrants often engage their ancestral homelands via organizations. Organizational transnationalism contributes to strengthening the infrastructure and symbolic systems of the ethnic community and enhancing the community’s capacity to generate resources conducive to immigrant incorporation.

Transnationalism and Community Building: An Analytic Framework

As a sociological construct, an ethnic community entails meaning making, interaction, and action among members of a group based on a common heritage (real or imagined); shared physical and social space; similar values, norms, and behavioral patterns; commonly accepted goals and expectations; embedded trust and a sense of belonging or “we-feeling”; and a considerable degree of cohesion and solidarity (Fennema 2004; Kaufman 1959; Portes and Zhou 1992). To understand differences in community building, we review three relevant concepts: ethnic enclaves, institutional completeness, and transnationalism.

Ethnic enclaves

Ethnic enclaves invoke common origins, referring to urban clusters of immigrants from the same sending country. Many ethnic enclaves are unambiguously identified by particular names associated with the country or place of origin, such as Chinatown, Little Italy, or Little Tokyo; while others are identified by generic names unrelated to ethnicity, such as Pico Union in Los Angeles (a Latino enclave) or Versailles Village in New Orleans (a Vietnamese enclave). Classical assimilation theories view ethnic enclaves as significant contexts for immigrant reception because they serve as temporary settling grounds to meet immigrants’ survival needs, reorganize their economic and social lives, and ease resettlement problems (Breton 1964; Warner and Srole 1945). These theories predict that ethnic enclaves will eventually decline and even disappear as coethnic members become socioeconomically and residentially assimilated, or as fewer coethnic immigrants arrive to replenish and support ethnic institutions. For instance, old Jewish, Polish, Italian, Irish, and Japanese enclaves in America’s major immigrant gateway cities have been gradually succeeded by native or immigrant minorities.

However, in the literature, ethnic enclaves are often conflated and used interchangeably with immigrant neighborhoods. We distinguish between the two, with the former specifically referring to a community with a distinct ethnic identity and infrastructure while the latter refers to a place where foreign-born and native-born racial minorities live (Zhou 2009b). An ethnic enclave may be located in an immigrant neighborhood with more than one ethnic group sharing the same physical space but leading separate ethnic lives. For instance, Koreatown in Los Angeles is a multiethnic urban neighborhood shared by Koreans, Mexicans, Central Americans, and other Asians (Zhou 2009b). It is uncommon for contemporary immigrant neighborhoods in the United States to contain only one ethnic enclave. Furthermore, the diverse influx of contemporary international migrants makes it unlikely that new immigrants will concentrate solely in their respective ethnic enclaves in the inner city. Instead, many immigrants have bypassed ethnic enclaves to settle in white middle-class suburbs or ethnoburbs—middle-class suburbs dominated by new immigrants of diverse ethnic origins (Li 1997). For our analysis, we consider the ethnic enclave (and its corresponding ethnoburbs) as an ethnic community that consists of a unique infrastructure—a system of values, norms, and practices, and patterns of social relations bounded by a shared cultural heritage, a common national origin, and ethnic organizations of varied density and diversity (Zhou 2009b).

Institutional completeness

To examine the infrastructure of the ethnic community and assess its strength, the concept of “institutional completeness” is useful (Breton 1964). Breton (1964) defined institutional completeness in terms of a range of neighborhood-based institutions that sufficiently satisfied members’ needs and measured the degree of institutional development in an ethnic community on a continuum. At one extreme, the community consisted of an informal network of interpersonal relations, such as kinship, friendship, companionship groups, or cliques, without formal organization. At the other extreme, the community consisted of both informal and formal organizations ranging from welfare and mutual aid societies to commercial, religious, educational, political, professional, and recreational organizations and ethnic media (radio or television stations and newspapers). Full institutional completeness refers to a community reaching the latter extreme. Ethnic communities vary widely in the density and diversity of neighborhood-based organizations, but none shows full institutional completeness.

Breton (1964) applied the concept to examine the conditions under which ethnic group members became interpersonally integrated into the host society. He hypothesized that a high level of institutional completeness, measured by organizational density and diversity, within a given ethnic community increased the formation of social ties within ethnic boundaries and minimized out-group contacts. Breton (1964) concluded that a high level of institutional completeness would slow down ethnic members’ eventual integration into the host society.

In our approach to the ethnic community, we borrow Breton’s concept but measure it not only by high levels of density and diversity of organizations in a given locale but also by patterned social relations among individuals and organizations based on coethnicity that cut across class lines (Zhou 2009b). A high degree of institutional completeness may intensify in-group interactions but may not necessarily lead to social isolation if such interactions involve middle-class coethnics who live in suburbs but maintain communal ties to the ethnic enclave or ethnoburb through routine exchanges as entrepreneurs, customers, and members of various organizations. Thus, an ethnic community’s institutional completeness, along with the presence of a significant coethnic middle class, positively influences immigrant incorporation through tangible resources provided by ethnic institutions and intangible resources formed by institutional involvement (Zhou 2009b). However, much of the ethnic community literature has focused on the relationships between immigrant involvement in ethnic networks and their incorporation into the host society and has ignored the relationship between immigrant engagement in the sending country and community development in the host country.

Transnationalism

Transnationalism is an old phenomenon, inherent to immigrant experiences in the United States and in many other migrant-receiving countries around the world (Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992). It is generally defined as “the processes by which immigrants forge and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (Basch, Glick-Schiller, and Blanc-Szanton 1994, 6). Portes (1994) delimits this general definition to occupations and activities that require regular and sustained social contacts across national borders for their implementation. What is new about contemporary transnationalism is the scale, diversity, density, and regularity of such movements and the socioeconomic consequences that these movements have brought about due to air travel, long-distance telephone and fax services, the Internet, other high-tech means of communication and transportation, and, most important, the restructuring of the world economy and the globalization of capital and labor (Glick-Schiller, Basch, and Blanc-Szanton 1992; Portes 1994; Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999). It is the intensity of exchanges, not just the occurrences themselves (trips, occasional contacts, or activities), that becomes a justifiable topic of investigation (Portes 1994).

Recent studies of transnationalism have focused on the role of the individual. The most salient example is monetary remittances to families and hometowns (Diaz-Briquets and Weintraub 1991; Grasmuck and Pessar 1991; Mahler 1995; Durand, Parrado, and Massey 1996; Goldring 2002; Guarnizo 1997; Itzigsohn 1995; Landolt 2001; Popkin 1999). Other forms of transnationalism include religious remittances (Levitt 2007); political remittances (the transfer of egalitarian ideology, leadership styles, and forms of activism [Piper 2009]); and social remittances, including ideas, behaviors, identities, and social capital that flow from receiving- to sending-country communities (Levitt 1998). Most studies have found direct economic and noneconomic benefits from transnationalism in terms of employment security, economic independence, favorable earnings, and social status recognition, while others have found that such transnational activities retard the process of immigrant incorporation and even compromise national security in the host country (Freeman 2004; Hollifield 2004).

There are two obvious oversights in the existing literature. At the macro level, more attention has been paid to the effects of transnationalism on development in sending countries than on immigrant incorporation in receiving countries. At the meso level, emphasis is almost exclusively on individuals and families, overlooking a third important actor—organizations (Portes and Zhou 2012). Portes and his associates argue that transnational activities conducted on an individual basis are exceptional, and many activities are channeled through organizations established by immigrants (Guarnizo, Portes, and Haller 2003; Portes, Escobar, and Radford 2007). Levitt and Lamba-Nieves (2011) indicate that individuals communicate ideas and practices to each other as friends, family members, or neighbors as well as organizational actors, which has important implications for organizational management and capacity building. However, even in studies that have focused on the salience of transnational organizations (Goldring 2002; Landolt 2001; Portes, Escobar, and Radford 2007; Waldinger, Popkin, and Magana 2008), little attention has been paid to community building in the hostland.

We agree that immigrant transnational flows are not merely driven by individual behavior but also by collective forces via organizations. This article contributes to the transnationalism and community literatures by examining the relationship between transnational organizations and ethnic communities in host societies. By focusing on organizations, it becomes possible to examine how transnationalism is affected by and in turn affects community development because organizations are tangible building blocks for ethnic communities. We argue that transnationalism affects the ethnic community in ways that are different than how it affects individuals or individual families. Figure 1 illustrates our analytic framework for our case study of Chinese immigrant organizations. At the institutional level, transnationalism contributes to the development of organizations by increasing levels of density and diversity and coethnic interactions across class lines. On one hand, organizational affiliations enable potential transnationals to claim authority and legitimacy in their cross-border endeavors. On the other hand, organizational transnationalism opens access to capital, labor, and consumer markets in the homeland, enabling the enclave economy to further diversify and maintain its competitiveness. At the community level, organizational development via transnationalism strengthens the ties among ethnic enclaves and ethnoburbs and, by implication, between the sending and receiving countries, thus expanding the ethnic community beyond geographic boundaries. An ethnic community with an increasing level of institutional completeness has the capacity to generate tangible and intangible resources conducive to immigrant incorporation.

Figure 1

Transnationalism, Organizational Development, and Community Building: An Analytic Framework

Methodology

We examine how transnationalism is channeled through immigrant organizations, which in turn strengthen the ethnic community. Our focus on the Chinese immigrant communities is significant in two respects. First, Chinese Americans are one of the oldest and largest Asian-origin groups in the United States. Changes in century-old Chinatowns and the development of new Chinese “ethnoburbs” as a result of post-1965 Chinese migration offer a unique opportunity to study new forms of immigrant organizations in comparative perspective.² Second, China (the People’s Republic of China, or PRC hereafter) is the largest homeland of any immigrant group in the United States. It is also an emerging “capitalist” nation with a rapidly globalized market economy, and is the most important trading partner with, and arguably the biggest political threat to (real or imagined), the United States. A more powerful homeland is bound to influence immigrant transnationalism, but its effects on diasporic communities are not well understood.

Data were collected both in the United States and China and were drawn from the compilation of an organizational inventory, a survey with organizational leaders, in-depth interviews, field observations, and focused group discussions. In the United States, we constructed an inventory of ethnic Chinese organizations through (1) Chinese language business directories and community newsletters in major U.S. cities, (2) organizational websites, (3) discussions with informants in the Chinese immigrant community, and (4) organizations listed with the Chinese consulates in the United States and government agencies in China. As of January 2010, we had compiled an inventory of 1,371 organizations, most registered as nonprofits located in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, the principal metropolitan areas in which Chinese are concentrated. Chinese American organizations aimed at domestic affairs are not the focus of this study, although some may be included in the inventory. The inventory is thus by no means exhaustive and represents only a fraction of all Chinese organizations in the United States. We are keenly aware of the nonrandom nature of such data collection methods. However, given the paucity of existing data and the lack of available and reliable sampling frames, we do not aim to generalize findings but rather to discern patterns of interorganizational, interpersonal, and person-organization relations, which add subtlety and nuance for theory building. One limitation of our methods is that they are focused primarily on the more visible and developed organizations. As such, our results may overstate the effects of smaller organizations. Despite this limitation, we believe that the inventory captures the density and diversity of Chinese immigrant organizations.³

From this inventory, we selected fifty-five large and relatively stable organizations. We conducted surveys and in-depth analyses of the organizational missions either by interviews or content analyses of organizational websites. We did not randomly select the organizations for the survey, site visit, or observations, but chose those that were “emblematic” of the principal types detected from our organizational inventory. We assume that larger and older organizations are more likely than the smaller ones to be anchored in the ethnic community; are recognized by the various levels of government in China; and have reputations, legitimacy, and the capability to establish dialogue with Chinese government officials and initiate development projects in China. Leaders of these organizations were also informed about other associations in their respective communities and the most knowledgeable about the histories and developments of their own organizations in comparison to other organizations in the community.

We administered the survey between July 2009 and December 2010 by phone or in face-to-face interviews.⁴ We paid specific attention to the density and diversity of immigrant organizations by observing organizational activities and social relations emerging from interactions among these organizations and between organizations and their individual members. Site visits to organizational activities included, for example, organizational luncheons of alumni associations in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York; annual conventions of professional organizations held in Southern California; fundraising luncheons and dinners held by various Chinese organizations in Los Angeles’s Chinatown and Monterey Park; traditional holiday celebrations in Los Angeles’s Chinatown; welcoming banquets for Chinese officials visiting Los Angeles sponsored by various Chinese organizations; and the PRC’s National Day (October 1) party sponsored by the Chinese Consulate General in Los Angeles.

Chinese Immigration and Changing Patterns of Chinese Settlements

Chinese immigration to the United States occurred several decades before the massive waves of “new migration” from Southern and Eastern Europe. As a result of Western colonization, geopolitical expansion, and active labor recruitment, Chinese immigrants started to arrive in America’s western frontier in the late 1840s as laborers in mining, railroad construction, and agriculture. They were found in large numbers in these activities until the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 put an end to the flow (Saxton 1971). The nineteenth-century Chinese immigrants were predominantly men from just a few counties in Guangdong Province.⁵ They sojourned in America for indefinite periods of time even though they did not intend to stay permanently. Unlike their European counterparts who were expected to quickly assimilate into mainstream society, the earliest waves of Chinese immigrants were legally barred from naturalization and assimilation. Subjected to racial discrimination and legal exclusion, they performed the lowest kinds of menial jobs but banded together in urban enclaves (Nee and Nee 1973; Saxton 1971). These tightly knit bachelor societies were the forerunners of the contemporary Chinatowns in many American cities, particularly in cities in California and New York (Nee and Nee 1973; Zhou 1992).

The repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act during World War II opened up some opportunities for incorporation. For example, many of those from younger generations entered the military, the shipyards, and the civil service. Others engaged in wholesale trade or operated grocery stores and other small businesses that were left vacant by the forced removal of the Japanese to internment camps (Waldinger and Tseng 1992). However, the Chinese ethnic community remained relatively small and isolated with split households, in which men sojourned to America to support their families in China (Glenn 1983).

Chinese immigrants who have migrated since the late 1960s have brought about drastic changes in patterns of international migration and settlement. This is partly due to U.S. immigration policy reform and the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 and China’s open-door market reform in the late 1970s. The 2010 U.S. Census showed that the Chinese American population reached 3.8 million, from 435,062 in 1970. Much of the exponential growth is due to international migration. More than 60 percent of the Chinese ethnic population has been foreign-born since 1980.⁶ Unlike the nineteenth-century immigrants who were uniformly unskilled laborers from the southern region of Guangdong Province, contemporary Chinese immigrants have diverse origins and socioeconomic backgrounds. The three main sources of Chinese immigrants are mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. In recent years, Chinese immigrants from Southeast Asia and the Americas have also been prevalent (Zhou 2009a).

Contemporary Chinese immigrants have been disproportionately drawn from highly educated and professional segments of the sending societies. The 2009 American Community Survey (ACS) showed that 50.8 percent of Chinese Americans (aged 25 and older) had four or more years of college education, 23 percentage points higher than the general U.S. adult population (27.9 percent). Additionally, employed Chinese American workers were also more likely to hold managerial and professional positions than the general U.S. labor force (52.8 percent vs. 35.7 percent).⁷ There is also a highly selective group of entrepreneurs among contemporary Chinese immigrants who are not only highly educated but also have extensive ties to the homeland (Zhou 2009a). Some of these ties were established through their business activities in the homeland prior to their arrival to the United States, while others were formed through transnational activities. These ties are further strengthened through their transnational businesses and their frequent visits to the homeland.

Contemporary Chinese immigrants are also more dispersed than their earlier counterparts. However, regional concentration remains common. As of 2010, California and New York have the lion’s share of the ethnic Chinese population (37.4 percent and 17.3 percent, respectively). The greater Los Angeles, San Jose–San Francisco–Oakland, and greater New York (including part of New Jersey and Connecticut) areas continue to hold significant shares of the U.S. Chinese population (13 percent, 15 percent, and 19 percent, respectively).⁸ Other metropolitan areas with large Chinese American populations include Boston, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Houston, and Seattle. In these metropolises, there are often multiple Chinatowns: an older one, developed from earlier waves of Chinese immigration, in the inner city; and newer ones in the outer city or suburbs populated by contemporary Chinese immigrants. The best-known Chinese ethnoburbs are in the San Gabriel Valley (Los Angeles) and the Silicon Valley (south of the San Francisco Bay). The emergent demographic characteristics of Chinese immigration have contributed to a drastic transformation of the ethnic community.

Organizational Development across Time and Space

What is the organizational structure of the ethnic Chinese community in the United States, and how has it changed over time? Historically, Chinese diasporic communities were supported by the ethnic economy and three pillars—Chinese schools, Chinese language media, and ethnic organizations (i.e., guilds, associations, and nongovernmental civic organizations) (Liu 1998). The ethnic Chinese community in the United States has followed a similar organizational pattern as that of other disaporic Chinese communities, with ethnic businesses serving as the foundation for the development of other ethnic organizations. During Chinese exclusion prior to World War II, the ethnic Chinese community displayed several distinctive features: (1) a small merchant class that had established a firm foothold at the outset of Chinatowns’ formation; (2) interpersonal relations that were based primarily on blood, kin, or place of origin; (3) ethnic businesses that were connected to a range of other ethnic institutions that guided and controlled interpersonal and interorganizational relations; and (4) the ethnic enclave was a function of both ethnic solidarity and social exclusion (Zhou 2009a).

There were three main types of traditional organizations: family/clan associations based on kinship, district or hometown associations based on place of origin, and merchant guilds or tongs based on common interests or sworn brotherhood. All were rooted in the Chinatowns of major urban centers and operated as mutual aid societies (Kuo 1977; Wong 1988). By the turn of the twenty-first century, Chinese immigrant organizations in the United States had evolved and developed in a variety of ways, beyond the three traditional types, to include modern organizations that range from civic-cultural organizations to alumni associations. Table 1 presents a summary of the organizational inventory that we compiled mainly from Chinese language phone directories in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York. The inventory is by no means exhaustive, but it offers a glimpse into the high levels of organizational density and diversity in the Chinese immigrant community. The development of immigrant organizations is paralleled by the development of the Chinese enclave economy. As a partial reflection of this trend, the 2010 Chinese Consumer Yellow Pages of Southern California, a 3.5-inch-thick bilingual telephone directory of firms and organizations, runs 2,790 pages.

Table 1

Chinese Immigrant Organizations in the United Sates

Type	Subtotal	Total	Percentage
Traditional organizations
Family/clan associations		102	7.4
Hometown associations		279	20.4
Village	44
District	127
Provincial	65
Federation	43
Merchant guilds/tongs		165	12.0
Modern organizations
Civic organizations		130	9.5
Cultural organizations		53	3.9
Educational organizations		17	1.2
Music/arts organizations		48	3.5
Sports organizations		19	1.4
Health organizations		12	0.9
Social service organizations		38	2.8
Religious organizations		63	4.6
Political organizations		83	6.1
Economic/business organizations		74	5.4
Alumni associations		142	10.4
High school	28
College	114
Professional associations		146	10.6
Total		1,371	100.0

SOURCE: Compiled by the authors from telephone directories, organizational newsletters, official listings, and Internet searches in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, 2010.

Traditional organizations

As Table 1 shows, traditional organizations, which have been historically anchored in Chinatowns, are the most common in the ethnic Chinese community, making up 40 percent of all organizations in our inventory. Family/clan associations, hometown associations, and merchant guilds have given American Chinatowns a distinct structure, discerned by the buildings that they owned there. The ethnic merchant elite rose to power as organizational leaders. And these organizations exerted profound influences on all aspects of community affairs.

Family/clan associations encompassed not only close kin but the entire clan, whose members were not related by blood but had the same surname or descent from common ancestors. Some family/clan associations were more inclusive than others, based on a combination of common surname, ancestral descent, and village of origin. For example, there were single-surname clan associations, such as the Lee On Dong Benevolent Association and the Eng Family Benevolent Association; or multiple-surname clan associations, such as the Fong Lun Association (Sit, Seto), the Soo Yen Fraternal Association (Lui, Fong, Kwong), the Lung Kong Tin Yee Association (Lau, Kwan, Cheung, Chiu), and the Gee Tuck Sam Tuck Association (Choi, Ng, Chow, Yung, Tau). Family/clan associations were patriarchal and varied in size, ranging from twenty to one hundred members (small, single-surname) to larger multifamily associations with one hundred to one thousand members (Kuo 1977; Wong 1988). There are few family/clan-based associations among other Asian or Latin American groups in the United States.

Hometown associations (also known as hui guan or tongxiang hui) were organized around a common place of birth or origin, similar to hometown associations among Latin American immigrants. These associations were usually named after a village or a district (e.g., township, county, or several counties) in the homeland, and members were recruited based on their specific places of origin. Examples include the Yeong Wo Benevolent Association, the Ning Yeung Hui Guan, and the Hainan Hui Guan.⁹ Members also spoke the same dialect. The village-based associations resemble some features of the Latin American hometown committees and associations.

Unlike family or hometown associations, merchant guilds, also known as tongs, were organized as merchant-labor associations; many were operated as “brotherhoods” or “secret societies.” Tong members were not related by blood, surname, ancestral descent, or village of origin. Instead, they pledged their allegiance to one another as “brothers in blood oath.” Each tong had a highly unified military force, as violence was accepted as necessary for self-defense (Chin 1996; Wong 1988). With intricate ties to family and hometown associations, tongs had greater finances, a larger membership, and more menacing soldiers than other associations, and they operated within both the legitimate and illegitimate spheres of social order (Chin 1996). Through secret languages and mythical religious rituals, the bonds of tong members were solidified. Members committed to a code of loyalty and a pledge to retaliate any offense committed by outsiders against one of their own members. The tongs controlled a substantial part of economic life in old Chinatowns and were involved in homeland politics as well. Some of the best-known tongs include the Suey Sing Association, the Hop Sing Tong, the On Leong Chinese Merchants Association, and the Chee Kung Tong.

Most of the traditional organizations mentioned above were established in the late nineteenth century with chapters in Chinatowns in immigrant gateway cities across America, such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. At the early stage of organizational development, ethnic organizations were conflict-prone, and turf wars between organizations within Chinatown were common. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA) was established in the late nineteenth century as an ethnic federation. It acted as the only legitimate government in Chinatown and maintained social order there. Initially established as the Six Companies in San Francisco’s Chinatown, this overarching “inner government” federated existing family, hometown, and merchant associations under a unifying leadership; monopolized key businesses in the community; mediated internal conflicts; controlled the social behavior of its members; and negotiated with the outside world in the best interest of the community. For example, the CCBA in New York was established in 1883 to represent a cross-section of the Chinese community there. It was made up of sixty member organizations, including hometown associations, such as the Ning Yeung Association; family associations, such as the Lee Family Association; political organizations, such as the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party) Eastern Region Office; professional and trade organizations, such as the Chinese Chamber of Commerce and the Chinese American Restaurant Association; and religious, cultural, and women’s organizations.¹⁰ Los Angeles’s CCBA was established in 1889, made up of twenty-seven member organizations, including family/clan, hometown, and merchant associations, and other civic organizations.¹¹

To a large extent, Chinese exclusion created opportunities for organizations and gave rise to an ethnic infrastructure in which the enclave economy and ethnic organizations were interconnected and where the relations among coethnics and between individuals and organizations were interdependent. Such interconnectedness and interdependence, in turn, allowed for capital accumulation; reinvestment; and the production of social resources by virtue of symbolic systems of shared experiences of exclusion (bounded solidarity) and common heritage, values, norms, and obligations (enforceable trust). Bounded solidarity and enforceable trust, however, did not inhere in the moral conviction of the individual or the culture of origin; rather, they interacted with structural factors in the host society to help immigrants organize their social and economic lives in disadvantaged or adverse situations (Portes and Zhou 1992).

Modern organizations

The development of ethnic organizations and the enclave economy resulted in a high level of institutional completeness in old Chinatowns (Nee and Nee 1973; Wong 1988). Since the 1980s, traditional organizations have continued to exert influence in the ethnic life of the Chinese community, but their authority and functions have been weakened for four reasons. First, there are more opportunities for mobility in a host society, allowing those with higher socioeconomic status (SES) to move out of urban enclaves and resettle in other urban neighborhoods with a higher socioeconomic standing, in white middle-class suburbs, or in ethnoburbs. Second, new immigrants are no longer low-skilled sojourners from the same village who depend entirely on ethnic organizations. Rather, they have migrated with their families and can access a wide variety of services in and out of the ethnic community. Third, new immigrants, especially the highly skilled, arrive from major metropolitan areas outside of traditional sending regions in China, creating tremendous diversity in place of origin and SES. Fourth, rapid urbanization in China has transformed the notion of “hometown” to include areas beyond a village or township. Nonetheless, traditional organizations are stable, economically resourceful, and are anchored in Chinatowns with legitimacy.

“Extended” hometown associations have emerged from the Chinese immigrant community in the past few decades. In the past, a hometown association was usually named after a family or a migrant sending place. The Chinese refer to migrant sending places as qiao-xiang, literally “overseas Chinese sending villages.” Today, the hometown is likely extended beyond traditional sending villages.¹² Newly established hometown associations are often named after a town (e.g., Guantou Association), a county (e.g., Lianjiang Association), a city (e.g., Changle Association), a region (e.g., Wuyi Association), a major metropolis (e.g., Beijing Tongxiang Hui), or a province (e.g., Sichuan Tongxiang Hui). Many sending places are not rural but newly urbanized areas or regions marked by parallel trends of internal and international migration, reflecting the rapid industrialization, urbanization, and globalization of China. These organizations are relatively large with memberships ranging from one hundred to thousands. However, members may not necessarily be born or raised in these sending places, let alone share the same dialect. For example, Beijing calls itself a new qiao-xiang, because many new immigrants arrive from there. However, among members of Beijing Tongxiang Hui, most are not even native Beijingnese. Many went to Beijing to attend college and worked there after completing their education. These extended hometown associations are often recognized by the central and local governments in China and have maintained both formal and informal relationships with the Chinese government (Zhou 2011).

While many new hometown organizations have extended beyond sending villages and towns, there are still a number of associations that follow the old organizational pattern—village-based. This type of organization is particularly prevalent among rural immigrants from the Fuzhou metropolitan region, such as the American Houyu Association and American Yangyu Association. One reason for this is because many of the Fujianese immigrants were undocumented and relied heavily on kinship networks to migrate and to survive harsh circumstances after migration.

Among modern organizations shown in Table 1, civic and cultural organizations compose 13 percent in our sample and are generally based on ethnicity and location (often in Chinatowns or Chinese ethnoburbs). Many civic-cultural organizations share similar characteristics to hometown associations, except they de-emphasize the importance of place of origin and focus their attention on meeting various settlement demands for members beyond economic needs. Educational, music/arts, sports, health, and social service organizations, composing 10 percent of our sample (Table 1), primarily serve families by addressing their specific needs associated with immigrant adaptation.

Two emerging trends in post-1980 organizational development are particularly noteworthy here: one type is more domestically oriented, as in the case of political and religious organizations; and the other more transnationally oriented, as in the case of economic, alumni, and professional organizations. Chinese immigrant political organizations were barely visible in old Chinatowns prior to World War II. Of the few that existed, most were oriented toward homeland politics. For example, the Revive China Society (the Hsing-Chung Hui), established in 1894, played a key role in raising funds for revolutionary activities.¹³ In contrast, political organizations established by new Chinese Americans are more directly engaged in domestic politics than in transnational or ancestral homeland politics (Toyota 2009). The Chinese government prohibits most overseas Chinese political organizations to engage in Chinese politics, but recognizes a few, such as the Chee Kung Party and the Association for the Promotion of China’s Peaceful Reunification.¹⁴ Religious organizations, mostly nondenominational Christian groups, serve important social functions similar to those of professional and alumni associations. Some specify secular goals, such as networking and information exchange, to enhance the mobility prospects of Chinese immigrants. A number of these organizations attempt to be transnational but face barriers to conduct religious activities in China (Yang 2005).

There has been a proliferation of economic/business, professional, and alumni organizations, most of which have emerged after 1980. Together, they make up more than a quarter of the organizations, as shown in Table 1. These organizations promote ethnic identity not only for cultural maintenance and social networking, but also for transnational engagement. Unlike merchant guilds in old Chinatowns, new economic organizations and business associations depend heavily on transnational networks to operate and expand their businesses. These organizations express a strong desire to integrate into the American economy while promoting coethnic solidarity for economic purposes and cultural maintenance in the ethnic community. They also position themselves at the forefront of the global economy, acting as transnational agents at the “Gateway to the Pacific Rim” on U.S. shores.

Few alumni associations existed in old Chinatowns since inhabitants overwhelmingly lacked a secondary education. Unlike traditional Chinese organizations, alumni associations are formed on the basis of shared colleges and universities and, to a lesser extent, high schools that immigrants graduated from in China. The main mission of alumni associations is networking and information exchange among members. Their transnational activities are mainly oriented toward supporting their respective alma maters. Members of these organizations are also commonly members of professional and civic associations whose scope of activity in China is much broader.

Chinese professional organizations generally maintain bilingual websites. Because of the skilled migration from China in the past three decades, these professional organizations are well represented in various fields of science, engineering, medicine, and finance. Organizational membership ranges from a few dozen to several thousand. Some examples include the Chinese Association for Science and Technology USA (New York–based with fifteen regional chapters), Silicon Valley Chinese Engineers Association, and Chinese Scholar Association (Southern California).

Many Chinese immigrant professional organizations have been recognized and pursued by the Chinese government with the hope of importing new technology and human capital into China. These professional organizations serve multiple purposes. First and foremost, they provide network building among professionals, for both social support and information exchange on employment and entrepreneurship opportunities in the United States and China. Other important goals include bridging U.S.-China economic relations, fostering greater Chinese diasporic economic exchanges, raising relief funds in the event of natural disasters in the homeland, and protecting the interests of Chinese immigrants in American society. The activities of professional organizations range from annual galas and monthly or quarterly meetings to irregular seminars on special topics, informal socials on a semiregular basis, and organized hometown visits. Their chief means of communication are email and the Internet; hence, they have overcome geographical constraints.

Differences between traditional and modern organizations

Modern Chinese immigrant organizations have proliferated and diversified since the 1980s. They differ from the traditional organizations based in Chinatowns in three remarkable ways. First, family, kinship, and rural hometown no longer provide the basis for organization. New hometown associations do emerge, but they are based on a broader concept of the place of origin, such as cities or provinces, and have more diverse memberships. Merchant associations take the form of economic or business associations that are more specialized and globalized than traditional organizations and are structurally linked to various network hosts among the Chinese both within and outside the ethnic enclave and in the homeland. Second, the level of organizational density in new urban enclaves and ethnoburbs is high, but the organizational structure is horizontal rather than hierarchical, and interorganizational relations are not interdependent. There is no equivalent overarching ethnic federation, such as the CCBA, to act as a quasi-government. Social control is thus relatively weak. Third, new ethnic organizations are oriented more toward incorporation in the host society than toward homeland development. For example, these organizations make special efforts to register naturalized U.S. citizens to vote, mobilize noncitizens to become naturalized, and support pan-Asian political representation.

Traversing the Ancestral Homeland and the “New” Homeland

Telephone and face-to-face interviews with the leaders of fifty-five well-established Chinese immigrant organizations cast substantial insight into the phenomenon of transnationalism. Nearly one-quarter of those interviewed were founded prior to 1980 (the oldest one dating back to 1867), 27 percent in the 1980s, and the rest after 1990. As Table 2 shows, those that reported being entirely U.S.-oriented, or having little to no engagement with China, compose less than one-third (31 percent), while the majority reported being either entirely China-oriented (24 percent) or transnationally oriented (44 percent). Among the organizations that are entirely China-oriented, none are traditional associations.¹⁵ How do Chinese immigrant organizations engage with the ancestral homeland? We examine the structural conditions for organizational transnationalism and describe the specific ways that immigrant organizations participate in the transnational area.

Table 2

Select Chinese Immigrant Organizations by Orientations

Organizations	N	U.S.-oriented	China-oriented	Mixed
Family/clan or district associations (traditional)	4	0	0	4
Professional organizations	13	6	2	5
Alumni associations	3	0	2	1
Civic-cultural organizations	17	6	8	3
Social service organizations	4	3	1	0
Other	14	2	1	11
Total (percentage)	55 (100)	17 (31)	14 (25)	24 (44)

SOURCE: Phone or face-to-face interviews, conducted by the authors, with fifty-five large and well-established organizations, 2010.

Changing structural conditions for Chinese transnationalism

Chinatowns, along with their ethnic institutions, were largely a product of Chinese exclusion (Chan 1989; Zhou 1992). Historically, Chinese immigrant organizations were intertwined with a Chinatown’s enclave economy. Leaders of the traditional organizations were wealthy merchants and businessmen, who formed the ethnic elite, also referred to as qiao-ling (leaders of Chinese expatriate communities) (Kuo 1977; Wong 1988). Ethnic organizations functioned as mutual aid societies. Some of them were expanded to offer credit and financing through informal rotating credit associations, or hui. These organizations provided fellow countrymen with housing, employment-related or business-related services (e.g., finding jobs, translating and filling in paperwork for business licenses, settling business disputes, etc.), or support with emotional, cultural, and economic issues. Most important, these organizations preserved cultural values and rituals that protected their members from threats from different groups in Chinatown and the larger host society.

At the outset, Chinatowns’ organizations had a natural transnational orientation, aiming to help Chinese immigrants fulfill their “gold mountain dream” —to return home with gold and glory (Zhou 1992). Because of legal exclusion, organization leaders had to carve out an economic niche and invest and reinvest in the Chinatown’s enclave economy. To keep their businesses afloat, they had to tap into global supply chains and look to their ancestral homeland for consumer products and merchandise imports even though the homeland was poor and underdeveloped. Out of forced choice, the ethnic elite conducted their businesses across the Pacific Ocean while serving as transnational liaisons to bring news about China to those in a foreign land and news about America to the relatives left behind. Ordinary organization members were also engaged in transnational activities. Many left their families behind to come to America with a clear intention to return, and exclusion reinforced that intention. Even though circumstances did not allow them to travel back and forth frequently like the ethnic elite, their transnational engagement took the form of remittance sending. They remitted to their families and sent letters home on a regular basis but had to do so through their family/clan or hometown associations as they could not access the formal banking system in mainstream American society.

For reasons associated with exclusion, traditional organizations prior to World War II were contained and grew roots in Chinatowns. Most of these organizations have invested in real estate properties in Chinatowns, which are now worth millions of dollars and conspicuously stand at the heart of any old Chinatown. The organizations usually keep a main hall; an altar; and some space for rituals, meetings, and other organizational activities (as well as for temporary lodging in the past), and rent space on the ground floor or basement to ethnic businesses to generate a constant flow of income. The rental income, now ranging from $200,000 to $800,000 annually, is used for various activities. These kinds of economic resources are unavailable in modern organizations, including alumni and professional organizations that are rich in individual human capital and family economic resources. What is more important is that real estate holdings anchor and stabilize organizations, giving the ethnic community a solid physical infrastructure.

This ethnic infrastructure has undergone a drastic transformation because of the broader structural changes in the United States and China. In the United States, the removal of legal barriers to immigrant incorporation, the passage of civil rights legislation, and the liberalized immigration policy reform have created new opportunities for social mobility in mainstream American society, allowing immigrants to shift their orientation toward permanent settlement in the United States and making their full participation in American life possible.

In China, the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution has ushered in market reforms and social transformation nationwide, while the end of the Cold War has opened up China’s national door to the outside world. Since the early 1980s, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has shifted its policy away from viewing overseas Chinese as potential spies and traitors to welcoming them as “supporters, pioneers, and promoters” of China’s economic reform.¹⁶ The emerging Chinese market has attracted investment from overseas Chinese and has encouraged a significant return migration of highly skilled immigrants (Thunø 2001; Zweig, Chen, and Rosen 2004).

Renewed ties to the homeland

Broader structural changes in the United States and China have made traversing the ancestral homeland and the new homeland easier. Traditional organizations have renewed their missions to respond to these changes, and modern immigrant organizations have emerged to meet the varied demands of immigrants with diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. The Chinatown-based elite are better positioned than other immigrants to engage in transnationalism and are at the forefront of the homeland development because of their long-standing institutional basis in Chinatown and social ties to China. For example, San Francisco’s Suey Sing Association (founded in 1867) was one of the few traditional organizations in a Chinatown that supported the PRC despite strong opposition from the ethnic community prior to 1970. It played a crucial role in promoting the entry of the PRC into the United Nations and the normalization of Sino-U.S. diplomatic relations in the 1970s. It was the very first organization in the Chinese community in the United States to fly the flag of the PRC in 1994. Mr. Honghu Chi made the following remark about the associations’ renewed mission at the 13th annual Suey Sing Association Convention in Guangzhou in 2007:

The American Suey Sing Association is moving in tandem with changing times. We continue to foster stronger fellowship and mutual assistance among our members, to cultivate stronger coalition with other ethnic organizations in and out of the Chinese American community, to help build stronger ties between China and the U.S., to promote a more balanced Sino-U.S. trade, and to unequivocally oppose the notion of “two Chinas” and support a peaceful reunification.¹⁷

Many traditional organizations that were formerly anti-PRC have abandoned their political missions to overthrow the Communist government and reestablished relations with China. For example, the CCBA, which has remained loyal to the government of the Republic of China (Taiwan), no longer prohibits its leaders and members from renewing contact with China. Leaders of the CCBA have been frequently invited on official visits to China by the Chinese state.¹⁸ There are several reasons for traditional organizations to engage the homeland: (1) to help members locate disconnected family members and reclaim lost land and properties due to past government policies against overseas Chinese; (2) to seek economic opportunities for their members, to renew old social ties, and to build new ones; and (3) to contribute to hometown development. For example, the president of the Ng Family Association, whom we interviewed, made half a dozen trips to China on behalf of the association to negotiate with the local government to reclaim ownership of a family ancestral hall in one of the villages in the Wuyi region.

Modern Chinese immigrant organizations, mostly established after 1990, operate in a more open and favorable context, vastly different from that encountered by their traditional counterparts. Many new immigrant organizations, such as professional organizations and alumni associations, have members that are highly educated, skilled, and assimilated. The main goals of these organizations are to facilitate member socializing and networking, to help members establish themselves, and to advance the ranks of their members. They also engage the homeland, but do so as a viable option rather than a forced choice. The transnational practices of the new organizations vary depending on the enthusiasm and self-interested agendas of individual leaders. Modern organizations share similar goals with their traditional counterparts, but their engagement with China tends to be at the regional (municipal or provincial) or national level rather than at the village, township, or county level, because their members come from different hometowns. Professional and alumni associations are recognized by higher levels of government in China and well represented at conventions held in state-level or provincial-level science parks, or high-tech industrial parks, which were established by the Chinese government to attract investment by and the return of highly skilled immigrants.

Main types of transnational activities

Chinese immigrant organizations have engaged their ancestral homeland through five main types of transnational activities: (1) hometown development projects, (2) philanthropic work, (3) conventions and conferences, (4) community events and holiday celebrations, and (5) business partnerships. The first two types are oriented mainly toward the homeland, and the other three are transnational.

First, hometown development projects are usually place-specific projects, based on a sending village or a township that an immigrant organization represents. Organizational fundraising is typically project-specific, such as building a new village gate, a roadside altar, a temple, a park, a library, or an elderly activity center; or upgrading a school, an ancestral hall, or a clinic; or paving or repairing a village road. Traditional family and hometown associations and new extended hometown associations play a central role in this type of activity. Some organizations work in tandem with local governments in China, such as proposing public works projects in cities or collaborating on project implementation. Modern immigrant organizations are unlikely to contribute to these types of development projects because they have no affiliation with a particular sending village or local hometown.

Second, philanthropic work includes fundraising for major disaster relief, such as severe floods and earthquakes. For example, immediately after the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan Province (measured at 8.0 M_s and claiming 68,000 lives), the CCBA in New York established the Sichuan Earthquake Relief Program and raised a total of $1.32 million (with the largest single donation being $50,000) in donations and delivered it to the American Red Cross within a four-month period.¹⁹ Regular donations also go to aid families living in poverty and to support educational funds and scholarships for children from poor families in the sending village and in the Chinese immigrant community in the United States. For example, the Baisha Village Association (from Lianjiang in Fujian Province) practices xi-juan (wedding donations) and le-juan (happiness donations) and raises funds for philanthropic work, scholarships, and to aid poor families. Xi-juan is for newlyweds who are members of the hometown association and includes a lump sum, usually $500; le-juan is a freewill donation, ranging from a small amount, such as $15 (100 yuan), to a much more substantial amount, such as $7,500 (50,000 yuan). Modern immigrant organizations are also active in fundraising activities for disaster relief and poverty reduction initiatives. These donations are made in the names of the organization.

Third, conventions and conferences are important organizational activities, which are held regularly in the United States, China, or somewhere in the greater Chinese diaspora. Traditional family, hometown, or merchant associations hold these conventions globally, reflecting their organizational efforts to connect with other Chinese communities in the diaspora. For example, worldwide clansman/hometown association conventions have become more and more prevalent in recent years (mostly since the early 1990s); some of these conventions are held in China with partial support from the Chinese government. These major events are published in commemorative volumes of convention proceedings, in Chinese or bilingually, that are circulated in the United States, China, and to the Chinese diaspora worldwide. In contrast, modern organizations usually hold annual conventions in the United States only. Professional organizations, for example, hold annual conventions with distinguished keynote speakers and relevant themes in the profession, such as “Semiconductor—Embracing Our Life, Leading Our Future” (the 2011 convention of the Silicon Valley Chinese Engineers Association). The chief purpose of these regular conventions, initiated and organized by both traditional and modern Chinese immigrant organizations, is information exchange, social networking, relationship building, and achievement recognition.

In recent years, the Chinese state has taken proactive measures to promote interactions among diasporic communities through immigrant organizations. The central government and provincial or local governments have also initiated and sponsored high-profile business fairs as well as science, technology, and innovation expositions and conventions to help overseas Chinese seek better economic opportunities and build partnerships with businesses in China or in the Chinese diaspora (Thunø 2001). Immigrant organizations send delegates to participate in these events in China. Calls for these conventions are widely advertised in the ethnic media in diasporic communities. Information and reports about these transnational events are detailed in various overseas Chinese journals and magazines, known as qiao-kan, which are published in China and circulated abroad.

Fourth, community events and holiday celebrations are an integral part of ethnic community life. Chinese immigrant organizations, especially those in Chinatowns or in Chinese ethnoburbs, organize parades, street fairs, or banquets. During major traditional Chinese holidays, such as the Chinese New Year (on the lunar calendar), the Lantern Festival (January 15 on the lunar calendar), and the Mid-Autumn Festival (the Chinese Thanksgiving Day in September when the moon is full), Chinatowns in major American cities hold parades, blending together typical American marching processions and the traditional ritual and festive celebrations of China. For instance, the Chinese New Year celebrations begin with controlled firecrackers and lion, dragon, or unicorn dances intended to ward off evil spirits. They are followed by beauty pageants with elaborate costumes, floats, and marching bands. Local politicians and community leaders appear in parades or on center stages at street fairs before cultural performances by traditional and contemporary Chinese singers and dancers. These cultural events and street fairs attract Chinese Americans who live elsewhere and other non-Chinese tourists. Some of the modern organizations, utilizing their transnational ties with various levels of government and top-notch cultural institutions in China, organize and sponsor professional artists and other cultural workers to tour and perform in Chinese immigrant communities around the United States. Many Chinese immigrant organizations also participate in major international and domestic cultural events in Beijing and elsewhere in China. For example, during the National Parade, a section in Tiananmen Square was reserved for distinguished guests and leaders of overseas Chinese organizations. The banners of overseas Chinese organizations from all over the world were displayed in the annual Charity Parade in Zhongshan, one of the main sending communities in Guangdong Province.

Last, both traditional and modern organizations are engaged in building transnational business partnerships or acting as “go-betweens” to better capitalize on economic opportunities in China and the United States. For many new immigrant organizations, business interests are one of the most important because they do not need to attend to the survival needs of members, as traditional organizations did in the past. Rather, the leaders are either successful entrepreneurs or established professionals, who aspire to be entrepreneurs and possess strong bilingual and bicultural skills. They voluntarily form nonprofit civic organizations and claim leadership positions to build up identity and credibility. They travel back and forth between China and the United States to establish guanxi with government officials and businesspeople in China and help to facilitate Chinese companies entering the U.S. market and vice versa. They also organize delegations to visit China, seeking economic cooperation and exploring potential business and investment opportunities. Leaders of these organizations are generally received warmly and treated as distinguished guests by the Chinese government and Chinese businesses. On the home front, these organizational leaders are actively involved in domestic politics and community affairs, supporting local politicians by making campaign donations and sponsoring community events, which, in turn, add more credibility to the organizations. Once they firmly establish a foothold or reputation in the community and earn the trust of Chinese government officials and entrepreneurs, they enter into partnerships with businesses on both shores or offer their services as consultants or brokers to promote transnational trade and investment. In some cases, they help Chinese companies to go public in the U.S. stock market.

Significant Implications for Community Building and Immigrant Incorporation

We have shown how Chinese immigrant organizations in the United States have developed over time and how some of these organizations engage the ancestral homeland. Our remaining question, though, is, How do organizational development and transnationalism shape the ethnic community in the hostland? As the existing literature suggests, organizational development in immigrant or native-minority communities enhances access to local and public resources and reduces the risk of neighborhood decline (Small, Jacobs, and Massengill 2008; Wilson 1987). We argue that organizational development is a key mechanism for strengthening the infrastructure of a community (an ethnic community in the case of an immigrant group) and contributes to the creation of tangible and intangible resources conducive to immigrant incorporation.

Our study of Chinese immigrant organizations suggests how this works (see Figure 1). First, ethnic organizations enrich community life, serving as physical sites for immigrants to meet and rebuild social ties through face-to-face interactions. Chinatowns and Chinese ethnoburbs are the physical or symbolic locations of the ethnic community; they allow for greater opportunities for member participation and relationship building. In our fieldwork in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, we found that modern Chinese organizations, especially professional and alumni organizations, often hold events in Chinatowns or Chinese ethnoburbs, even though members are dispersed in mixed-ethnic middle-class neighborhoods. Why in a Chinatown or Chinese ethnoburb? A professional association leader responded,

We can of course have our annual meeting in a nice Italian or French restaurant or a five-star hotel, and our members can afford it. But a nice Chinese restaurant in Chinatown would be a natural place that our members are least likely to object to. It is not just a matter of having round tables with shared food but also a matter of cultural affinity to the place.²⁰

When the Chinese government sends delegations to the United States, immigrant organizations in Chinatowns serve as local hosts. Again, they generally select a restaurant in a Chinatown or Chinese ethnoburb to hold welcoming banquets that draw organizations and their members from inside or outside the ethnic community. Organizational participation, as a result, not only reaffirms a sense of identity and symbolism among Chinese immigrants, who may or may not live in the enclave or ethnoburb, but also creates opportunities for them to be physically present in the community. Moreover, such participation builds or nurtures interorganizational, interpersonal, and person-to-organization relations.

Second, ethnic organizations function as a symbolic stage for individual immigrants to display their status in the community, gain social status recognition, or compensate for lost social status in the process of international migration. Organizational leaders, especially those who are, or aspire to become, entrepreneurs, use their organizational affiliations to assert their status in the community and in transnational practices. Our interviews with both organizational leaders and Chinese officials indicated such functionality. On one hand, organizational affiliations validate and legitimize transnational migrants’ identities and allow them to go beyond their closely knit family or friendship networks in China. On the other hand, an official position in an organization carries prestige and power in the ethnic community in the United States and in China. Mr. Wang, the president of an alumni association, explained,

The Chinese are very status-conscious. People’s ranks in their work unit or organizations are important status symbols. In business or in contact with government officials, you must use proper titles, never the first name, to address yourself and people you are interacting [with]. Mr. or Mrs., even Prof. or Dr., would sound too generic and anonymous to carry any weight. So you need to print business cards with your name and some sort of title in Chinese, such president, director. . . . This not only allows the Chinese to address you properly and comfortably but also shows that you are somebody worth meeting or doing business with. With an organizational title, you can get to meet high ranking Chinese officials, too. You will notice that a business card from a Chinese [person] would have multiple titles to signify the status of the individual.²¹

This quote points to the symbolic and functional importance of organizations in transnational practices, which are also highly relevant to the economic and social life in the Chinese immigrant community.

Third, and most important, immigrant organizations are well connected to the enclave economy. Most of the leaders of the organizations are entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs. Organizational transnationalism leads to better economic opportunities for immigrant entrepreneurs and contributes to local economic development by expanding existing businesses. It also facilitates the influx of Chinese capital in the enclave and mainstream economies, making the enclave economy both local (linking it to regional and national economies in the United States) and global (linking it to the Chinese economy and beyond). The thriving educational business is a case in point. In the Chinese immigrant community, an ethnic system of supplementary education (e.g., after-school tutoring, academic enrichment, and cram schools) has thrived since the 1990s to cater to the increasing demands of immigrant families (Zhou and Cho 2010). As part of the enclave economy, ethnic supplementary education has expanded to a profitable transnational business, offering summer camps or winter camps and academic travel programs to American Chinese youths visiting China and to Chinese youths visiting the United States. The entrepreneurs who have gained the upper hand in this new trade tend to be the ones who are officers in immigrant organizations known to the community and to the Chinese in China. In sum, the development of the enclave economy attracts middle-class coethnics living elsewhere (and non-coethnics as well) to support ethnic businesses and participate in community or organizational events. This, in turn, promotes cross-class relations and reduces the risk of social isolation (Zhou 2009b; Zhou and Cho 2010).

Conclusion

Immigrants often engage their ancestral homelands via organizations. We find that, for the Chinese in the Unites States, ethnic organizations are important building blocks of an ethnic community. The proliferation of organizations helps to strengthen the community’s infrastructure and enables Chinese immigrants to participate in transnational practices. Organizational transnationalism, in turn, contributes a higher level of institutional completeness, which results in the greater capacity of the ethnic community to generate material and symbolic resources conducive to immigrant incorporation. Several distinct characteristics of Chinese immigrants—such as belonging to a long-standing self-sufficient ethnic community, having a well-established enclave economy, having a substantial proportion of professionals, having a significant middle class with a strong ethnic affinity, and having a powerful homeland—limit the generalizability of our findings. However, our interviews with organizational leaders have confirmed several findings in the existing literature that may apply to other groups: (1) only a small fraction of the immigrant population routinely traverses national borders to conduct economic or sociocultural activities; (2) established and assimilated immigrants, naturalized U.S. citizens, or permanent residents, and leaders of ethnic organizations are more likely to be transnational; and (3) immigrants engage their ancestral homelands via organizations and do so primarily for self-interested goals (Portes, Guarnizo, and Haller 2002; Portes and Zhou 2012; Zhou 2011). Nonetheless, transnational organizations provide an important institutional mechanism that enables leaders and members to engage in transnational practices to seek out alternative paths to social mobility. In this sense, transnationalism contributes to the economic and social development of the ethnic community in the host society.

The existing literature on transnationalism shows that many immigrant groups have tapped the potential for organizational development via transnational practices in different ways. The Chinese case in the United States may be an exceptional one. It is clear that Chinese immigrants have an edge over Latin American immigrants in their transnational pursuits because of the overall higher socioeconomic status of the migrant population, the stronger entrepreneurial prowess, and the established preexisting ethnic community. Moreover, the Chinese state, while as proactive in transnational activities as are Latin American countries, has more material resources at its disposal to cultivate ties to expatriate communities, practically institutionalizing the transnational movement of its professionals and entrepreneurs (Portes and Zhou 2012).

Our study emphasizes how ethnic communities are organized differently under different structural conditions and how organizational transnationalism contributes to immigrant incorporation through community building. Future research may want to systematically compare transnational organizations across immigrant groups to examine how transnational organizations vary in type, size, and missions. Understanding these differences may also provide a better understanding of how transnational organizations shape immigrant incorporation.

Footnotes

NOTE:

This project was a new addition to the Comparative Immigrant Organizations Project (CIOP), spearheaded by Alejandro Portes at the Center for Migration and Development, Princeton University, and supported by the Russell Sage Foundation and MacArthur Foundation. It was also supported by a grant of the UCLA Academic Senate Council on Research and by funding from the Walter and Shirley Wang Endowed Chair in U.S.-China Relations and Communications, UCLA and the Chang Jiang Scholar Chair Professorship, Sun Yat-sen University, China. An earlier version of this article was presented at the conference “Organizational Interventions and Urban Poverty in the 21st Century,” University of Chicago, March 10–11, 2011. We thank Scott W. Allard, Alejandro Portes, Mario L. Small, and Roger Waldinger for their insightful comments. We also thank the invaluable research assistance of Junxiu Wang, Sallie Lin, and Lu Xu.

Notes

Min Zhou is a professor of sociology and Asian American studies and the Walter and Shirley Wang Endowed Chair in U.S.-China Relations and Communications at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also the Chang Jiang Scholar Chair Professor at Sun Yat-sen University in China.

Rennie Lee is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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