ABSTRACT
What does it mean to be ‘Chinese’ today? Identity provides the frameworks within which individuals locate themselves within a community: as indivi - duals, we see ourselves as members of many overlapping communities – of nation or hometown, of gender and generation, of class or of profession, of recreation or consumption, of social or historical experience – and personal identities are therefore made up of changing combinations of these various collective identities. While a community may declare its collective identity to be fixed, essential, and timeless, scholarly understandings of identity have focused on the ways in which identities are socially constructed and subject to repeated negotiation, and on the interplay or tensions between multiple identities – between gender and class, between region, ethnicity and nation, and the variations in any of these adopted by different groups (Calhoun 1994).
