Sylvia Ang

The literature on ‘middling transnationals’ is growing although studies on Asian middling migrants are still relatively lacking. Current understandings on middling migrants are also frequently fixed on migrants' mid-level skills and their middle-class status. Drawing on interviews with Nepali migrants living in Melbourne, Australia and mainland Chinese migrants living in Singapore respectively, this paper considers how their middling visa status and imaginaries interact with anxious desires. This paper argues firstly that migrants from the Global South experience heightened anxious desires due to imaginaries oscillating between the Global North and South. Second and relatedly, it argues that migration regimes keep migrants compliant through managing their anxious desires. By detailing the experiences of different groups of Asian migrants in separate migration regimes, this paper aims to highlight the heterogeneous experiences among migrants originating from the Global South, and the techniques used by different states to produce temporary and compliant migrants.

This article argues that the intersection of ethnicity, class and gender foregrounds the contestation of Chinese-ness in a context of migration in Singapore. I argue that the presence of co-ethnic mainland Chinese migrant women has heightened Chinese-Singaporean women’s anxieties. In lieu of ‘convenient markers’ of language and ethnicity, Chinese-Singaporean women have had to look elsewhere for the production of difference. This article argues that the Chinese-Singaporean woman favourably contrasts herself with the newly arrived mainland Chinese migrant woman in regards to the notion of respectable femininity – the latter being a key marker of middle-classness. Specifically, Chinese migrant women are perceived as unrespectable through charges of excessive materialism and of transgressing the Asian/Chinese family. By emphasising Chinese migrant women’s perceived lack of respectability, Chinese-Singaporean women can (re)establish their own respectable femininity, middle-classness and ...

Studies of racism against migrants have recently attempted to move away from
the presumed dichotomy between whites and “Others”, yet the focus is still on
white people racialising others: whether Black, Asian or Muslim. Attending only
to white versus Others homogenizes select groups of non-whites including
Asians. Racialization and racism by Asians and among Asians have also been
ignored. Consequently, there is a dearth of studies on issues of race in nonwhite settings. Through engaging the themes of co-ethnicity, intersectionality
and postcoloniality, this special issue contributes to extant studies in three
ways through 1) examining new geographical sites of racialization and
racism; 2) illuminating racialization and racism beyond the white/Other
binary; and 3) introducing new dynamics in racialization and racist discourses,
including intersectional factors such as nationality, class, gender, language,
religion, temporal framings and postcoloniality.

At my academic presentations in various international settings, I have offended many Chinese nationals. Angry faces have told me my sample is ‘not representative’ and questioned if I have ever been to China. My research data (based on the study of co-ethnic politics between Chinese migrants and Chinese-Singaporeans in Singapore) have been viewed as an affront to their nationalist sentiment. Often, however, the attempts to discredit my research can, in my opinion, be roughly summed up by the following assumption: I am not Chinese (enough); accordingly, I am not qualified to discuss Chinese nationals. My experience relates closely to Allen Chun’s book Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification. As a diasporic Chinese(-Singaporean) scholar, my experience of Chinese nationalism and of
(Chinese) identity politics is at the heart of Chun’s concerns.

Studies of racism tend to rely on a presumed dichotomy between whites and ‘Others,’ whether Black or Asian. Even as many scholars have established that whiteness is manufactured, ethnographic studies of racism still have not escaped the color paradigm, basing their studies on the enactment of racism by white people on Others. Using the case study of Singapore, this article challenges the color paradigm by exploring racism between co-ethnic Chinese. I show that Singapore’s modernity is highly tied to place and that the ‘new Chinatown’ is used to ‘place’ and racialize newly arrived Chinese migrants. The racialization discourse, in this case, is subtle, and renders it a form of new racism - one that is reinforced by the media as well as state structures inherited from the nation’s colonial past. The aims of the article are two-fold: first, the paper aims to show parallels between the racialization of Chinese migrants in Singapore and colonial racism. However, this is not to say that locals are merely emulating colonial discourse which leads to the second aim of the paper: to locate this particular racialization process as a product of the intersection of global capital with Singapore’s local modernity. I conclude that although Singaporean-Chinese may enact racism against Chinese migrants, they do not hold unimpeded power. Rather, Singaporean-Chinese’ construction of a ‘new Chinatown’ ironically acts to displace them.

This paper explores public discourses of race and nation in Australia and Singapore, focusing on their historical and contemporary relationship with China and the Chinese. Both countries are governed by a multicultural ideology but are experiencing evolving tensions rooted in their (post)colonial and settler histories, dominated by respective Anglo-Australian and Singaporean-Chinese majorities. To illuminate these issues, we analyse public discourses by politicians and other opinion leaders, as reported in influential media. We discuss how the two nation-states accommodate their rapidly growing mainland Chinese minorities in the context of a rising China as a global power, and in conjunction with their cultural-spatial dislocations. We found a renewed Sinophobia in both countries, but with different historic and contemporary origins and manifestations: in Australia a historically grounded fear of the Chinese as “Yellow Peril”; in Singapore, a co-ethnic anxiety about the incoming mainland Chinese who are construed as “other” to the Singaporean-Chinese.

This paper highlights the politics of mobility through investigating
Singaporean-Chinese imaginaries of mobility which are tied to the racialization of mainland Chinese migrants in Singapore. Host societies imbue (im)mobility with meanings; in the case of Singapore, mobility is imagined as transience and even immorality. The myth of migrants’ transience, both in time and in space, posits them as simultaneously marginal and threatening, and is pertinent in the case of Singapore where 29% of the population is recorded as transient labour. As a state whose population growth owes more to immigration than natural increase, Singapore must maintain its mobile labour to fulfill its aspirations to keep moving forward as a mobile city. Its high-wage mobile labour also provides a pool from which Singapore sources its potential citizens, to make up for low birthrates and to maintain an ethnic Chinese dominance in the state. As such, a substantial number of migrants including the mainland Chinese have attained permanent residence or citizenship in Singapore, to the discontent of its Singaporean-Chinese majority. Imagined as embodiments of mobility and of a lesser Chineseness, Chinese migrants are racialized as
more transient than other groups of migrants and made ‘stranger than
other others.’

2013至2018年间，笔者在新加坡进行田野，通过60多名21至59岁的受访对象，研究新加坡华人和刚到新加坡的中国移民的社会想象，期间对低收入中国劳工的男性气质产生兴趣，并进行深入了解。结果表明，在新加坡的中国男工在寻求有偿服务以外的亲密关系时会遇到困境。这一困境通过男性气质和节俭的话语所传达，并在与新加坡男性的对比中得以延伸。 我在线上和线下的调研经历还显示，我的受访者，由于缺乏与当地人，特别是与当地女性的接触，渴望与当地女性见面，尽管他们知道我的意图与他们的不一致。事实上，对于许多的受访者来说，我是第一个也是唯一一个与他们深入交谈的新加坡女性。这清楚地反映了受访者在新加坡社会中的边缘化状态。

While work on gender and migration has grown significantly, it has mostly addressed the experiences of female migrants; the experiences of male migrants are still understudied. Even less attention has been paid to male migrants and their heterosexuality. This paper is interested in Chinese masculinities, which in the migration literature have been discussed largely in relation to migration to the West. Discussions of low-wage Chinese masculinities have similarly been limited, with a focus on rural-urban migration within China. Empirically, this paper aims to contribute by investigating Chinese masculinities outside of China but in a non-Western setting. The arrival of low-wage migrants from China into Singapore’s majority-‘Chinese’ population not only enables an investigation of the hierarchies of Chinese masculinities but also unsettles the ‘Chinese’ ethnic category. I consider low-wage mainland Chinese migrant men’s raced, gendered and classed subjectivities and show that low-wage mainland Chinese migrant men in Singapore encounter dilemmas in their desires to seek intimacies beyond paid sex. I show that their dilemmas are informed by the discourse of respectable manhood and thrift, a discourse that is extended through a juxtaposition against Singaporean men.

DESPITE THERE BEING a growing body of research
focusing on male migration – especially low-wage
migrant men – it still shows a certain bias in which work
(and economics) is seen as central to the men’s lives.
Yet migrant men are not just workers, but also fathers,
husbands, lovers, boyfriends. A small field of research is
now emerging, among it my own work, which is looking
at migrant men’s various positionalities and specifically,
heterosexuality. Focussing on the heterosexuality and
sexual desires of migrant men can bring some clarity
to how masculinities transform with migration.

Studies of racism tend to rely on a presumed dichotomy between
whites and ‘Others,’ whether Black or Asian. Even as many
scholars have established that whiteness is manufactured,
ethnographic studies of racism still have not escaped the color
paradigm, basing their studies on the enactment of racism by
white people on Others. Using the case study of Singapore, this
article challenges the color paradigm by exploring racism
between co-ethnic Chinese. I show that Singapore’s modernity is
highly tied to place and that the ‘new Chinatown’ is used to
‘place’ and racialize newly arrived Chinese migrants. The
racialization discourse, in this case, is subtle, and renders it a form
of new racism - one that is reinforced by the media as well as
state structures inherited from the nation’s colonial past. The aims
of the article are two-fold: first, the paper aims to show parallels
between the racialization of Chinese migrants in Singapore and
colonial racism. However, this is not to say that locals are merely
emulating colonial discourse which leads to the second aim of the
paper: to locate this particular racialization process as a product of
the intersection of global capital with Singapore’s local modernity.
I conclude that although Singaporean-Chinese may enact racism
against Chinese migrants, they do not hold unimpeded power.
Rather, Singaporean-Chinese’ construction of a ‘new Chinatown’
ironically acts to displace them.

Migrants from mainland China now make up 700, 000 - 800, 000 of Singapore's total population of 5.4 million, an influx unprecedented since the nineteenth century. This has compelled both locals and migrants to (re)think their Chinese-ness. Simultaneously, the state produces its hegemonic version of Chinese-ness with Mandarin as an important signifier. This discourse has been increasingly challenged by residents with the advent of the internet as a platform for alternative views. This article suggests that by endorsing Singaporean state discourse that defines Chinese authenticity as Mandarin proficiency, Chinese migrants deride Chinese-Singaporeans as less Chinese, and therein less Singaporean. In defence, Chinese-Singaporeans appear to present a united front by deriding Chinese migrants' deficiency in the English language. I argue that, to the contrary, Chinese-Singaporeans' online narratives show fragmentation within the group.

This article argues that the intersection of ethnicity, class and gender
foregrounds the contestation of Chinese-ness in a context of migration in Singapore. I argue that the presence of co-ethnic mainland Chinese migrant women has heightened Chinese-Singaporean women’s anxieties. In lieu of ‘convenient markers’ of language and ethnicity, Chinese-Singaporean women have had to look elsewhere for the production of difference. This article argues that the Chinese-Singaporean woman favourably contrasts herself with the newly arrived mainland Chinese migrant woman in regards to the notion of respectable femininity – the latter being a key marker of middle-classness. Specifically, Chinese migrant women are perceived as unrespectable through charges of excessive materialism and
of transgressing the Asian/Chinese family. By emphasising Chinese migrant women’s perceived lack of respectability, Chinese-Singaporean women can (re)establish their own respectable femininity, middle-classness and Chinese-ness.

At my academic presentations in various international settings, I have offended many a Chinese national. Angry faces have told me my sample is ‘not representative’ and questioned if I have ever been to China. My research data (based on the study of co-ethnic politics between Chinese migrants and Chinese-Singaporeans in Singapore) has been viewed as an affront to their nationalist sentiment. Often, however, the attempts to discredit my research can, in my opinion, be roughly summed up by the following: I am not Chinese (enough); accordingly, I am not qualified to discuss Chinese nationals. My experience relates closely to Allen Chun’s book Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification. As a diasporic Chinese(-Singaporean) scholar, my experience of Chinese nationalism and of (Chinese) identity politics are at the heart of Chun’s concerns.

Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of
China. While many of these faces of China’s globalization
headed for the popular Western destinations of the
United States, Australia and Canada, others have been
lured by the booming Asian economies. Compared with
pre 1949 Chinese migrants, most are wealt hier,
motivated by a variety of concerns beyond economic
survival and loyal to the communist regime. The
reception of new Chinese migrants, however, has been
less than warm in some places. In Singapore, tensions
between Singaporean Chinese and new Chinese arrivals
present a puzzle: why are there tensions between ethnic
Chinese settlers and new Chinese arrivals despite
similarities in phenotype, ancestry and customs?
Drawing on rich empirical data from ethnography and
digital ethnography, Contesting Ch ineseness: Nationality,
Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants investigates this
puzzle and details how ethnic Chinese subjects negotiate
their identities in an age of contemporary Chinese
migration and China’s ascent.