ABSTRACT
The cyclical nature of the Chinese government’s attitude toward overseas Chinese has been noted by many authors and sometimes exaggerated. The last two decades of Qing rule saw a major turnaround in official policy toward overseas Chinese, as the court discovered the financial resources of the diaspora and attempted to put them to use in its belated and half-hearted modernisation program. By now, in just over two decades, nature of emigration has turned from treacherous to tolerated but ideologically suspect to patriotic. Even some tabloid-style stories of Chinese women abroad marrying foreigners portray them as self-sacrificing patriots rather than as traitors of national dignity or just victims of ignorance. The fact that migrants go abroad with the sense that their project is in line with values of dominant discourse of Chineseness, rather than violating it and having to make up for it later by proving their patriotism otherwise, is probably important in shaping their discourse of belonging and political organisation.
