Abstract
Edited by Wanning Sun and John Sinclair, Media and Communication in the Chinese Diaspora: Rethinking Transnationalism is part of the Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia series, and to some extent could be considered as a sequel to a prior volume, Media and the Chinese Diaspora: Community, Communications and Commerce, also edited by Wanning Sun, in 2006. Wanning Sun is professor of media and communication studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, and John Sinclair is an honorary professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Given the background of China’s soft power push and more specifically the “‘media going global’ initiative,” this volume aims to depict the updated Chinese media landscape and to examine the all-sided relationships between the Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC) state media and the ethnic Chinese media in host countries, both empirically and conceptually. It is also intended to fill some geographical gaps, since “the history and current formation of the Chinese presence in Europe, Africa, Latin America, and many parts of Southeast Asia” was missing in the 2006 volume. Not least it also focuses on the impacts of the digital media and online technologies upon translocal practice by ethnic Chinese, including diasporic identity construction and their sense of belonging.
Aside from its conciseness and meticulousness, the volume has a series of strengths. First and foremost, it offers a wide geographical coverage, including Cambodia, South Africa, Brazil, Italy, Spain, France, the Netherlands, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and Trinidad, representing a broadly expanded Chinese-language mediasphere as well as regional diversities of communication for Chinese migrants and communities in host countries. Second, to a greater or lesser extent, it provides concrete and useful background information in each chapter, such as the history of migration, the changes in demographic composition, the cultural values of migration, and the relations and dynamics between Chinese communities and their host countries, which enables readers to have a better and relatively systemic understanding in political, economic, cultural, and historical terms. Empirical materials in some chapters are highly valuable, provided perhaps for the first time in the English language. Third, because authors in this volume hail from a variety of disciplines, covering history, anthropology, sociology, and media and communication studies, different perspectives and approaches are applied to their specific cases, which makes them more comprehensive and convincing. Finally, it contains rich content and covers a variety of media forms and communication practices, ranging from traditional print media to social media, including newspapers, radio, television, websites and new media.
Among these case studies, Chapter 7, by Jingrong Tong, “The Chinese Diaspora, Motherland and ‘June Fourth’: A Discourse Analysis of the BBC Chinese ‘Have Your Say’ forum, 2009-13,” is quite different from most studies of Chinese-language diasporic media. It chooses not to target minority media programs restricted by locality, focusing on media originating within Chinese diasporic communities, but focuses instead on the BBC Chinese HYS forum, which benefits from the mainstream media BBC’s global prominence and influence. Moreover, it uses the qualitative data analysis software package NVivo to do the detailed analysis of the 2,674 posts collected. Chapters 8, “Geo-Ethnic Storytelling: Chinese-Language Television in Canada,” and 9, “Cyber China and Evolving Transnational Identities: The Case of New Zealand,” both adopt a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Also worth noting is Chapter 11, “Xin Yimin: ‘New’ Chinese migration and new media in a Trinidadian town,” in which Jolynna Sinanan draws on twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork to discuss the intersection of new Chinese migrants and new media.
Nevertheless, there are some weaknesses in the volume. Despite the coverage of multiple media forms and communication practices throughout the volume, each chapter mainly focuses on one certain kind in its specific location. It would have been more useful and comprehensive if more types of traditional as well new media that may be used by particular Chinese communities could have been explored in each host country, which could not only have enriched the existing diasporic Chinese-language mediasphere, but also enabled readers to compare with other Chinese communities or host countries. Since the diasporic Chinese-language newspapers bear an ever-changing publication history, it would also have been more coherent and distinct if those newspapers’ names and years of publication could also have been enumerated as an illustration in those chapters.
On the whole, Media and Communication in the Chinese Diaspora is a rather impressive and useful book with unique and multiple perspectives toward specific cases in a wide range of locations across the world. I would highly recommend this book to scholars, researchers, students, policy makers, and media workers who are interested in media and communication studies as well as historical–cultural studies, especially in Chinese diaspora and transnationalism.