Chinese Diaspora and Transnationality: Envisioning Global Citizen/ship

Abstract

The precariousness of diasporas’ political and cultural condition’ poses, probably, the greatest challenge in the reshaping of cultural identity. The national model of identity may not work for geopolitically displaced persons trapped as they are between native and foreign, home and the host country, and memory of the past and prospect of the future; they will have to consider transnational or multiple cultural identities and political affiliations. Riva Kastoryano proposes that “[t]ransnational networks linking the country of origin to the country of residence and promoting participation in both spaces bring to light multiple membership and multiple loyalties. Furthermore, transnational participation appears as the institutional expression of multiple belonging, where the country of origin becomes a source of identity and the country of residence a source of rights, and the emerging transnational space a space of political action combining two or more countries.”² What Kastoryano proposes here is of course appealing; however, when applied to émigrés or political dissidents who reject or are rejected by their native country, the disjunction between the country of origin and the country of residence directly challenges Kastoryano’s theorization of a transnational identity. A case in point is Gao Xingjian, a political dissident who has been blacklisted by the Chinese government since he fled to Europe and became a French citizen.