ABSTRACT
Without discounting China’s contribution to modern world-making, this chapter examines the idea of “Sinicization” as a mainland state-centered and driven process of remaking the world in its own image. It proposes to understand “Sinicization” as a complex, historically contingent process entailing not just multiple actors and practices, but equally important, multiple sites from which they, over time, have created, reinvented, and transformed received meanings associated with “China,” “Chinese,” and “Chineseness.” The chapter identifies the broader historical patterns of hybridization and analyzes how these patterns, arising from multiple sites and sources of creating “differences” that are lived as “Chinese,” complicate the notion of Sinicization. State-driven attempts at de-Sinicizing the Chinese and more recent marketdriven re-Sinicization of the Chinese occurred with novel forms of hybridization. Ethnic Chinese were erstwhile subject to pressures to declare loyalty to their respective country of residence.
