by Alan A. Lew
Published with Alan Wong (2005) In Cartier, C. and Lew, A.A., eds., Seductions of Place: Geographical perspectives on globalization and touristed landscapes, pp. 286-300 (Chapter 18), Abingdon, UK: Routledge. (pre-publication version)
This chapter explores conditions of existential tourism among overseas Chinese, focusing on relations with their... more
This chapter explores conditions of existential tourism among overseas Chinese, focusing on relations with their ancestral homeland areas in China. Like other disaporic ethnic groups, overseas Chinese migrants, in both historic and contemporary times, have followed long established paths, bound by ‘networks of ethnicity’, which “extend the group’s identity spatially, and are an important facet of social and economic organization, particularly within migrant communities” (Mitchell 2000: 392). Highly structured ethnic networks support existential tourism to China and several major fields of influence shape this structuration process, overlapping in different ways. Overseas Chinese institutional structures support ideas about traditional Chinese values, thereby working to enable and maintain a sense of ‘Chineseness’. ‘Traditional values’, however, have also adapted to meet the special conditions of the migrant/diasporic community, as migration creates both ‘outsider’ and ‘home out there’ experiences, the evolution of multiple homes, and the need for mechanisms to overcome geographic spaces between old, new and transitory homes (Leung 2003). The influence of space-shrinking technologies and globalizing modernity provide further realms of influence, shaping the form and experience of both migration and ‘Chineseness, by, for example, enabling closer relationships and easing the strain of return visits.
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