ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on the identities and associated practices of four Asian diasporic academics – John Wong, Chung Tan, Samuel Kim, and Akira Iriye – who generally present their scholarship on China’s economy, politics, history, and culture in English. Sinicization in its various guises, involving Self and Other, is about influence and interaction among people as much as states; the Chinese and their self-understanding as much as China and its sphere of influence; and China and its diaspora conceived of beyond the category of territorial China. Sinicization presupposes agency and the appropriation and re-appropriation of Chinese phenomena by Chinese and non-Chinese agents, for their self- and group-interested use in an Anglo-Chinese world. Multidirectional Sinicization processes expand the China discourse in ways determined partly by individual biography and partly by individual choice. Sinicization would compel Suganami to think seriously about intervention in China’s human rights policy.