Min Zhou is Professor of Sociology and Asian American Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Her main research interests include immigration, race and ethnicity, Asian Americans, the community and urban sociology. She has done extensive work on immigrant adaptation, the new second generation, Asian American communities, ethnic entrepreneurship, ethnic language media, ethnic langauge schools, and ethnic systems of supplementary education.
Tsunami on the Horizon? China could be a Huge Labor-Export Country
[keywords: labor-export, diasporas, emigration]
China, with its largest population and the most expansive (and best developed) diasporic communities in the world, is potentially a huge labor-export country. As it has become increasingly integrated into the world system, as its marketization has continued to undermine the power of the state, and as the Chinese people have reconnected with their overseas diasporas, Chinese emigration, both legal and undocumented, may define a new "Chinese Century," which can be many times the scale of what the historian Anthony Reid once termed the "Chinese Century" of 1740 -1840.
Read more "Tsunami on the Horizon? China could be a Huge Labor-Export Country"
Chinese in America: "Honorary White" or "Forever Foreigner"?
[keywords: stereotype, globalization, yellow peril, Vincent Chin]
The stereotype of the "honorary white" goes hand-in-hand with that of the "forever foreigner." Today, globalization and U.S.-Asia relations, combined with continually high rates of immigration, affect how Asian Americans are perceived in American society. Most of the historical stereotypes, such as the "yellow peril" and "Fu Manchu" have found their way into contemporary American life, as revealed in such highly publicized incidents as the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American mistaken for Japanese and beaten to death by a disgruntled white auto worker in the 1980s; the trial of Wen Ho Lee, a nuclear scientist suspected of spying for the Chinese government in the mid-1990s; the 1996 presidential campaign finance scandal, which implicated Asian Americans in funneling foreign contributions to the Clinton campaign; and most recently, in 2001, the Abercrombie & Fitch tee-shirts that depicted Asian cartoon characters in stereotypically negative ways-slanted eyes, thick glasses, and heavy Asian accents. Ironically, the ambivalent, conditional nature of white acceptance of Asian Americans prompts them to organize pan-ethnically to fight back- which consequently heightens their racial distinctiveness.
Read more "Chinese in America: 'Honorary White' or 'Forever Foreigner'?"