ABSTRACT
For the Singapore Chinese, visiting their qiaoxiang is a journey in search of ancestral and cultural roots. The period after 1978 witnessed an increasing number of Singapore-born Chinese making their way to their ancestral villages. The Chinese lineage has gone through various stages, transforming itself from a parochial social institution into a transnational network. The level of negotiation between the Singapore Chinese and the villagers on cultural issues shows the extent to which each group must compromise its understanding of what the culture should be. As China continues its economic ascendance and political liberalization, it is possible to predict that the traffic between the Mainland and the Chinese Diaspora will increase in the years to come and this will inevitably impact on the relationship between the source and the nodes.
