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    The Structure of Dual Domination: 
    Toward a Paradigm for the Study of the Chinese Diaspora in the United States. 
    L. Ling-chi Wang (University of California, Berkeley) 
     
    The primary purpose of this paper is to critique the existing dominant paradigms for the study of the Chinese in the United States and to develop an alternative one. My other intention is to demonstrate both the importance and limit of transnational approaches in Chinese American studies within the framework of Asian American and ethnic studies.
    My interest in Asian and Chinese American studies began in 1966 when I moved from Chicago to the San Francisco area as a graduate student in ancient Semitic languages and literature. For the first time since I came to the U.S. in 1957, I lived and studied in a multiracial social environment with Chinese Americans as a significant part. What I understood intellectually of the civil rights struggle of African Americans and of the student protest against the Vietnam War suddenly assumed new and real meanings for me when I moved to the San Francisco area. The experience of segregation and discrimination based on race was everywhere in the Chinese American community and the racial implications of the war in Vietnam were beginning to dawn on me. I found myself searching for books and periodicals that would help me understand the role of racism in the Chinese American experience and why Chinatown existed as a ghetto. I also found myself driven by an irresistible urge to right the wrongs I saw. I tried to read everything that had been written about Chinese America in both Chinese and English, even as I immersed myself progressively in youth problems and bilingual education in Chinatown and racism in the media and job market. It did not take long for me to discover both the inadequacy and inaccuracy of published Chinese and English sources, their conflicting interpretations of the Chinese American experience, and the huge chasm between the Chinese-speaking and the English-speaking Chinese American worlds.
    When the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) at San Francisco State University and the University of California, Berkeley, demanded the establishment of Asian American Studies within the context of ethnic studies respectively in fall 1968 and winter 1969, I immediately found a convergence for my political and intellectual interest in the movement. I participated in the teaching of the first course on Asian American history at Berkeley in the winter quarter of 1969. Professor Paul Takagi was the faculty sponsor of the "experimental course," then called Asian Studies 100X, and the mentor for most of us involved in that struggle. Eventually, like many of my peers, I too abandoned my original career plan to teach and conduct research in Semitic languages and literature and plunged deeper into community activism in 1970. I eventually returned to the emerging field of Asian American ethnic studies in 1972. Since then, I have been involved in frequent debates over the nature and mission of Asian American and ethnic studies in relations to the racist academic mainstream on the one hand, and over its relations with the Asian American communities in whose service the field of study was established to begin with, on the other hand.
    The end of the Cold War in 1989 and the rise of a rapidly shrinking, but disorderly, world presented a unique opportunity to reexamine the history of the Chinese in the U.S. in a global context. The proliferation of demands for courses and programs in Asian American Studies among the top research universities and colleges in the past ten years, many of which have little to do with the kind of program originally conceived, likewise raises questions as to where Asian American Studies is heading and whether it is still considered a vital component of ethnic studies. To what extent is the Chinese experience in the U.S. similar to and different from the experiences of the Chinese in the other one hundred and thirty countries? How does the rapid transnational movement of labor and capital affect the structure and welfare of longtime Chinese communities throughout the U.S.? How has the reduction of hostility between China and Taiwan affected the political alignments in Chinese America? In what ways have issues of Chinese American identity, life-style, and politics been affected by instant global communication and convenient access to popular culture from China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong? What are the relations between Asian American Studies and proliferating fields of studies, like multicultural education, cultural studies, and diaspora studies? What is the relevance of these questions to Chinese American and ultimately, Asian American Studies?
    In late 1990, I began to plan the first international conference of the Chinese diaspora in an effort to bring about a better understanding of the Chinese communities overseas which had been separated for decades by the East-West conflict and by the hostility between Mainland China and Taiwan. The conference, held in San Francisco in November 1992, was attended by nearly three hundred scholars from throughout the world. The gathering afforded me and others the first opportunity to share and compare the experiences of Chinese in different countries under very different cultural, political, and economic settings. Out of the conference emerged the International Society for the Study of Chinese Overseas (ISSCO), based in Berkeley, which now coordinates and promotes transnational scholarly exchange. My involvement in ISSCO raises questions regarding the study of Chinese America and Asian America within the current national and transnational contexts on the one hand and compels me to revisit the original vision of Asian American Studies within the context of ethnic studies. It is for this purpose I write this essay.

    1. Assimilationist and Loyalty Paradigms

    Two major concepts have dominated and guided the study of the Chinese diaspora in the U.S. and in most countries with significant ethnic Chinese presence. In the U.S., on the one hand, the concept of assimilation or Anglo-conformity has shaped public discourse and dictated government policies toward the Chinese minority and guided both historians and social scientists in their studies of the Chinese in the U.S. 

    1. The sole focus of the Assimilationist paradigm is on the racial difference and conflict between the dominant Euro-Americans and the Chinese minority, how Chinese immigrants have become Americanized or failed to do so over time, and how the society, through laws and policies, has treated the Chinese immigrants.

    In China, on the other hand, the dominant idea used by both scholars and government officials to study the Chinese diaspora in general and Chinese in the U.S. in particular is loyalty or how well the Chinese in the U.S. and in other countries have remained loyal or faithful, over time, to their loved ones at home (xiaoshun), to their native villages (loosely, xiangyue), to the Chinese culture (baoliu or weihu), or to the nation-state (xiaozhong) in China or Taiwan. 

    2. Two distinctive types of loyalty may be identified. Loyalty towards one's clan, village and Chinese culture is intensely personal and cultural and decidedly apolitical. It is to be distinguished from the more formal and institutionalized loyalty one may or may not have toward the Chinese culture, nation, or a particular Chinese government or a political faction or party in the government. Retaining the Chinese cultural identity, if not political and economic loyalty, of the Chinese overseas has been the primary preoccupation, if not the sole obsession, of both government policies and scholarly inquiries under the Nationalist government in Nanjing (1911-49) and in Taiwan (1949-present), and, to a lesser degree, in China since 1956, even though both governments have very different policies toward the Chinese diaspora.

    Aside from the fact that both notions of assimilation and loyalty are socially defined and historically conditioned subject to periodical change and redefinition, there is virtually no common ground between the two paradigms. Each mirrors the view and interest of the respective state and dominant ideology. In general, books and articles using the loyalty paradigm are written in Chinese and published in China and Taiwan while books utilizing the assimilationist paradigm are written in English and published in the U.S. At the theoretical and public policy levels, they stand on opposite poles, separated by linguistic, ideological, political, and cultural divides. Rarely do they cite, interact or engage each other in intellectual dialogue or debate. Within Chinese America, a similar gap exists, complicated by difference in nativity, language, and class.
    Beneath these two conflicting paradigms, as in the construction of any paradigm, are two entirely different visions of culture, society and nation upon which the agenda for thought are set, dominant ideologies constructed, theories built, public policies formulated, and program for action initiated. While there are many variations and even conflicting theories within each of the two paradigms over time, the difference in no way alters the basic premises, perspectives, and theoretical objectives of each. The resiliency of each can be attributed to the respective enduring vision and ideology upon which the theoretical variations and differences occur. Falling between these two conflicting ideologies and opposing paradigms are Chinese American s whose own individual and collective visions, identities, struggles, and destinies in the U.S. have been largely ignored and whose aspirations and voices have remained buried or suppressed until early 1970s. The emergence of Asian American Studies has partially filled in the void. Its scholarship, however, has yet to reflect, even less challenge, the works based on the loyalty paradigm and its theoretical relations with the assimilationist paradigm remains unquestioned, if not vague or confused. With rare exceptions, the voices, aspirations, and activities of the non-English-speaking worlds of Asian America, both old and new, remain marginalized, if not neglected in the scholarship and creative expressions of Asian America.
    3. This essay, therefore, begins with a critique of the two dominant paradigms. Three separated, but interrelated levels of analysis for each paradigm can be identified: ideological, theoretical, and public policy. At the ideological level, the assimilationist paradigm is based on a widely accepted, though never fully articulated, vision in which the U.S. is seen as a nation peopled by successive waves of immigrants and guided by a set of principles articulated in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. This vision is reinforced by a widely held belief that the U.S., by virtue of its superior constitution and democratic institutions, is capable of assimilating the immigrants equally and harmoniously into a great melting pot. This belief or dominant ideology is not just a national myth but also a national obsession. The myth is further linked to a promise of freedom, equality, and democracy for all. Upon this myth and promise is formed the American identity and forged the national destiny at home and abroad. It is upon this dominant ideology that the U.S. government formulates its public policies and historians and social scientists interpret the U.S. history and society.
    From generation to generation, intellectuals and political leaders alike reaffirm the national myth and celebrate the U.S.'s generosity and capacity to unite and assimilate immigrants, from St. Jean Crevecoeur and Thomas Jefferson in the eighteenth century to historians like Oscar Handlin and Arthur Schlessinger, Jr. in the twentieth century. However, neither the myth nor the promise is what it implicitly claims to be: united and color-blind. Divided and excluded from this national vision and promise are the racial minorities: American Indians, African Americans, Mexican and Latino Americans, and Asian Americans. In the American experience, race defines both one's rights and status and determines one's inclusion or exclusion from democracy and national wealth and income. "United States for whites only" is well understood and deeply imbedded in our national consciousness and dominant ideology and institutionalized in both our intellectual traditions and public policies. Racial minorities were to be used only for the sole benefit and advancement of Euro-Americans and to be excluded from democracy by military, democratic, or legal means when they ceased to be useful or were perceived to be a threat to the privileged whites. Neither compassion nor generosity, neither freedom nor equality was to be extended to them. Instead, they were to be treated with intolerance, exploitation, exclusion, subordination, and extermination, if necessary. So thorough has been their exclusion that even their experiences and contributions were rendered, in a vital service of the dominant ideology of assimilation, either nonexistent or insignificant in the mainstream of scholarship and history-writing and excluded from the curriculum in schools and teaching and research in institutions of high education.
    It is against this ideological and intellectual background we now examine the Chinese encounter with American democracy at the public policy level. Since Chinese immigrants were neither indigenous to North America, like the Native Americans, nor were they brought into the U.S. and kept in chains like African Americans, the ideology of white supremacy justified a new form of cheap labor, contract labor, and prescribed a new idea or third category, i.e., racial exclusion: Chinese presence, as young, able-body contract laborers, was deemed "indispensable" to the Euro-American "builders" of the West, but their arrival was considered "unwelcome" by the Euro-American working class and politicians. 

    4. The ideological foundation of exclusion is the presumed non-assimilability of the Chinese. By race, culture, and religion, Chinese were seen and defined differently from Euro-Americans and therefore, not assimilable into the vision and society of the U.S. Before 1965, elaborate laws and policies were enacted by the U.S. Congress and local jurisdictions to institutionalize exclusion and both the executive and judiciary branches of the government were mobilized to maintain exclusion.

    Significant civil rights gains and social and economic progress for Chinese Americans did not begin until the Second Reconstruction in 1960s. Even then, the racist vision and ideology of assimilation persisted. While Chinese Americans, unlike African Americans, were seen as having successfully achieved assimilation in selective social indicators, such as education, occupation, income, and residence, they were still treated as useful aliens, untrustworthy, therefore, to be kept powerless, subordinated, and at a distance. They became the indispensable technicians and technocrats in the emerging high-tech industries. The notion of assimilation, now reconceptualized for a new racial discourse in the post-civil rights era, came to be used as a political tool for pitting Chinese Americans and African Americans against each other. Chinese Americans were celebrated as a "model minority" while African Americans were equated to urban blight, crime and welfare dependency. Yet, Chinese Americans remained excluded and powerless, and not infrequently the target of racist incidents. The persistence of exclusion can be seen readily in the economic and political conflicts between the dominant Euro-Americans and Chinese Americans in cities like San Francisco and New York and in middle-class suburbs like Monterey Park and the Silicon Valley in California. 

    5. Overt racism may have subsided under the new legal and political climate, covert racism manifests itself in new and refined discriminatory forms in college admissions, glass-ceiling, immigrant bashing, zoning restrictions, English-only movement, backlash against affirmative action and bilingual education, etc.

    Like the assimilation paradigm in the U.S., the loyalty paradigm used in both Taiwan and China in the formulation of public policies and in the study of the Chinese in the U.S. and other countries is just as chauvinistic and ethnocentric. Historically, loyalty appeared in different forms and carried different meanings over time. It can be understood in cultural, economic and political terms. Historically, both government and scholars played a crucial role in defining and redefining the terms of loyalty. Since 1949, the civil war in China divided the Chinese government into two camps, the Mainland and Taiwan, each claiming to represent the legitimate government of China and each having very different policies toward Chinese overseas. From a theoretical standpoint, it is important to differentiate the types and levels of loyalty that surfaced overtime and to contrast China's and Taiwan's policies toward Chinese overseas, even as they adjust to changes in the global environment and their respective bilateral relations withdifferent countries.
    Loyalty, like assimilation, manifests itself in ideology, theory, and public policy in China and Taiwan. It also exists on two levels: formal and informal. Unlike Western society, the social and economic structure of the traditional Chinese society is based on the family or clan and strong social ethics rather than on the individual liberty and elaborate legal system. Before the advent of modern Chinese nationalism at the turn of the century, loyalty for Chinese abroad, xiao (filial piety) and shun (obedience), meant simply obligations to one's family (aijia) and ancestral village (aixiang) or not forsaking or forgetting one's family and village. At the informal or personal level, it was one's obligation to remain faithful to one's family (jia), clan (jiazu, zongzu, shizu based on xueyuan, consanguinity), and village (jiaxiang, xiang, xiangcun, xiangxia) by being obedient to one's parents, sending regular remittance, remembering the living and the dead, and supporting charity and public works in the village. At the next level, still informal, loyalty also meant not forgetting one's cultural roots in China and the need to retain Chinese outlooks, values and life style. Racial and cultural superiority is assumed. At the collective or communal level cultural loyalty was maintained through community-based Chinese schools, temples, newspapers, public festival and rituals, social institutions, like district associations (huiguan) and family or clan associations (gongsuo). These reproduced institutions were deemed indispensable for mutual aid and cultural maintenance on alien or hostile soil, especially for those who stayed overseas for a long time and for those Chinese born abroad. Loyalty at the cultural level originally carried no political connotation before the rise of Chinese nationalism toward the end of the nineteenth century. This nonpolitical notion of loyalty exerted profound influence over the self-perception and development of the Chinese communities in diverse settings and different countries.
    However, with the advent of Chinese nationalism, traditional loyalty to the country (guojia) and emperor (junzhu, tianzi, wangdi) quickly acquired new meanings with strong political and legal connotations (zhong, zhongzheng, zhong xin, xiaozho ng, aiguo). China's military and political defeats in the hands of Western powers and Japanese militarism resulted in numerous unequal treaties, foreign domination, and national humiliation (guochi). Modern Chinese nationalism first emerged among the in telligentsia and Chinese overseas. To Chinese overseas, in particular, China's national sovereignty and honor had to be defended and, indeed, many attributed their mistreatment abroad to China's weakness. 

    6. To be loyal or patriotic for Chinese overseas was to support China's resistance which can be both economic and political. Investing in China's modernization was a form of economic loyalty; sharing knowledge in science and technology is a contemporary counterpart. But the most controversial expression of loyalty was the support of various political movements, since late nineteenth century, aimed at strengthening, reforming, modernizing or revolutionizing China. 

    7. Political reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao and revolutionaries like Sun Yatsen at the turn of the century, and Chinese American critics of the Nationalist government in Taiwan like professor Wenchen Chen and journalist Henry Liu (Jiang Nan) in 1980s, were considered disloyal and seditious, therefore, subject to political harassment, intimidation, kidnapping, and assassination, if necessary.

    8. Anchored, therefore, in the new notion of loyalty were the government's attitudes and policies toward Chinese abroad. Since the turn of the century, elaborate laws and policies were enacted and government agencies established to instill cultural, economic and political loyalty and to exercise its extra territorial rule over the Chinese diaspora. 

    9. Since 1949, the Nationalist regime in Taiwan has been most aggressive in its intervention abroad and insistence on treating the Chinese diaspora as "external colonies" and its scholars dutifully wrote books from the same perspective. Its primary objective was to demonstrate the political loyalty of Chinese overseas to the Taiwan regime which claimed to represent Mainland China. Since late nineteenth century, the Chinese government's policies can be divided roughly into four periods: 
     

    1. Strict prohibition of emigration, known as haijin, until 1868 to suppress Ming loyalists and political dissidents;
    2. Regulated emigration (1868-1911) and dual citizenship (shuangchong-guoji) based on the principle of jus sanguinis (xuetong-zhuyi);
    3. Progressive tightening of extra territorial control under the Nationalist (Guomindang) government in Nanjing (1911-1949) and in Taipei (1949-1989); and 
    4. Policies of decolonization, self-determination, and integration into host countries under the Beijing government, 1957-1989. 
    These policies exerted profound impact on Chinese America and Chinese overseas, yet scholars in Asian American Studies have largely ignored this transnational dimension.
    The East-West conflict throughout the Cold War politically divided the Chinese overseas into two opposing camps (pro-Beijing and pro-Taiwan) and compelled those in the Western bloc to sever their personal, cultural, economic, or political ties with China. Many sojourning Chinese were forced to abandon their plan to retire in their villages (luoye-guigen), instead, they had to plant their roots permanently in the countries they lived (luodi-shenggen), if they were permitted to do so. 

    10. In the U.S., pro-China sentiment was suppressed and monthly remittances to loved ones in China prohibited. The Nationalist government in Taiwan was granted political favors and unrestricted access to the Chinese communities in many countries to mobilize anti-China campaigns. Taiwan's Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission (OCAC) initiated a global network to maintain a tight reign over the cultural, economic, and political life of Chinese overseas to insure their loyalty. In some countries, most notably, Indonesia, Burma, and Vietnam, Chinese were subjected to forced assimilation; Chinese language, newspapers, schools, and customs were banned. In extreme cases, ethnic cleansing or pogrom, in massive violation of basic human rights, was carried out even with implied consent, if not covert support, of the Western proponents of human rights. 

    11. The Chinese communities are now slowly emerging from the legacy of the divided China during the Cold War. 
     

    II. Structure of Dual Domination

    From the above discussion of the two competing paradigms in the study of the Chinese diaspora in the U.S., it is clear that both are simplistic, unidimensional, biased, and incomplete. Both erroneously assume Chinese America to be homogeneous and monolithic. Each begins with a vision that excludes the perspectives, interests, rights, and well being of the Chinese American community and each also ignores the issues and findings raised by the opposite side. As informative and useful as they are, very little is known about the real Chinese Americans about whom and on whose behalf these studies are made. Worse yet, both paradigms neglect three crucial factors in the development of the Chinese diaspora in the U.S.: (1) the resistance against racial oppression and extra territorial domination; (2) the impact of U.S.-China relations on the formation and development of Chinese America; and (3) the segmentation and conflict within the community by class, gender and nativity over time and the sentiment, perspective, and voice of each segment.
    The structure is therefore not static; instead, it is dynamic, constantly undergoing change, driven by the respective domestic politics and bilateral relations between the U.S. and China. This is why not even periodical changes in respective governments and specific policies can substantively alter their hegemonic roles in the Chinese American community. To put it in another way, the structure of domination is supported by two pillars: one is domestic and racial and the other is extra territorial and racial as well. Liberation from the structure of dual domination occurs only when there is a fundamental change in the exclusionary vision and ideology in either or both countries and in the self-perception and assertion of self-determination by Chinese Americans. Its goal is the full realization of the vision outlined in the four presuppositions.
    Within the structure of dual domination, the extra territorial domination is grounded in the ideology of loyalty and is pervasive, extending into the political, economic and cultural life of Chinese America. Ideally, the laws, institutions, customs, values, and life-style of China, not of the U.S., are to be reproduced and if necessary, enforced within the Chinese American community to the extent possible. Reproduction is achieved by indoctrination through the use of community media, schools, arts and culture on the one hand and by political surveillance, social and economic intimation, and if necessary, physical harassment in the community and in the home villages in China on the other. However, differences in physical environments, legal, political, and economic systems, and social and cultural values between the U.S. and China necessitate occasional negotiations and modifications by the Chinese in the U.S. Violations of the constitutional rights of Chinese in the U.S. have frequently occurred, but are ignored by the U.S. government. Racism and racial exclusion, in fact, condone and reinforce extra territorial domination and social and cultural reproduction, as long as the practice is confined to Chinatowns and non-Chinese are not involved, threatened, or hurt.
    To construct an alternative paradigm for the Chinese diaspora in the U.S., we begin with a vision of Chinese America which can be roughly represented by four methodological presuppositions. First, Chinese immigrants, like immigrants of all races and nationalities, came to the U.S. with cultural, social, and economic assets and with legitimate personal interests and aspirations. Secondly, we assume Chinese Americans to be an integral part of the vision of the U.S. as a nation peopled by Native Americans and immigrants, both voluntary and involuntary, in a great historic process in which they built not only their own communities but also the U.S. Thirdly, we further assume that Chinese Americans, like all Americans, are entitled to the same rights and privileges promised in the Declaration of Independence and in the U.S. Constitution. Lastly, China, by virtue of its size, history, culture, and by virtue of its rising influence on the global economy and politics, has been and will continue to have a profound influence over the identity formation of Chinese Americans and Chinese overseas in the shrinking world and in an age of instant global communication and transnational migration of capital and labor. All four presuppositions have been excluded from or only minimally considered by the two major paradigms discussed above.
    The four methodological presuppositions necessitate the reconceptualization of assimilation and loyalty: the conditions for Chinese assimilation are preconceived as racial exclusion or oppression and the demand for loyalty to the homeland as extra territorial domination. Both are seen as omnipresent and omnipotent powers or forces dominating all aspects of Chinese American life. Racial exclusion is driven by the ideology of white supremacy and notions of Chinese non-assimilability and alienation; extra territorial domination is sustained by the loyalty imperative. Both are highly institutionalized and structurally integrated into the legal, political, economic, and cultural systems of their respective countries, sustained by their respective dominant ideologies, and reinforced by public policies and dominant scholarship. Under the new paradigm, racial exclusion or oppression and extra territorial domination converge and interact in the Chinese American community, establishing a permanent structure of dual domination and creating its own internal dynamics and unique institutions.