ABSTRACT
This chapter is about new Chinese immigrants (xinyimin) and their varied patterns of diasporic development, economic incorporation, and identity formation in the context of accelerating Chinese immigration. The key question to be addressed is: how do new diasporas, formed and transformed in the globalized world, affect migrants’ socioeconomic integration? Based on our recent work on xinyimin in the United States and Singapore, we examine the relationship between diasporic development and modes of economic incorporation among new Chinese migrants in different contexts of reception. We discuss the identity issue among new Chinese migrants in a host society in which they are a part of, but to which they have not yet fully belonged and draw some broad lessons for understanding Chinese identify formation in a globalized world. We argue that macro forces of globalization and international migration interact with meso-institutional and micro-individual factors to shape diasporic formation and transformation, producing divergent patterns of economic incorporation and identity formation.
