ABSTRACT
As part of the upsurge in ethnic and migration studies in the 1990s, two -isms became popular, one new in its present applications, the other already well entrenched. Transnationalism became familiar in business studies in the third quarter of the twentieth century as a rough synonym of multinationalism (by then a dirty word for some) and the transcending of borders. More recently, social and political scientists and others have appropriated the term to signal the trampling of borders and the practice of diaspora. Today, transnational perspectives feature widely in studies on Chinese international migration. Cosmopolitanism is also new as a vogue word, but it dates back to the philosophes and, in English, to the nineteenth century. In his recent book, Carsten Holbraad defines cosmopolitanism as the proclamation of a worldwide but atomistic society of individuals.1 Chinese migrants are increasingly portrayed in new writing as ‘the very paradigm’ of the global citizen.2 Somewhat out of fashion has gone internationalism, the ideology of the bonding of nations, states, and groups, the subject of this book.3
