‘We need an Asian President,’ said stand-up comedian Ronny Chieng in his 2019 Netflix special Asian Comedian Destroys America. Chieng, who had spent his childhood in Malaysia and Singapore before emigrating to the US, went on to say, ‘Imagine harnessing the power of Asian people in government… all the Asians just going down the list of broken things, fixing it, one by one, with no agenda, just pure logic.’ He compared his hypothetical ‘Asian President’ favorably to the prevailing Congressional gridlock in the US, suggesting that ‘with Asian people in charge, we don’t shut down for anything!’ Chieng went on to compare Asian American politicians to restaurants in Chinatown, which were ‘Affordable, delicious and open!’ and would ‘work while you’re eating.’ If there was any doubt that his discourse on ‘Asians’ centred the Chinese, Chieng stoked controversy in 2022 by suggesting on The Daily Show that his ‘pals in Dim Sum Palace’ did not feel then-UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to be truly Asian.
Chieng’s remarks had uncanny parallels in a 1961 book written by Li Pusheng, Deputy Minister of Taiwan’s Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission (OCAC), titled A Brief History of Overseas Chinese Development (華僑發展簡史). Born in 1895 in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia), Li migrated to China in his teens. He later became a functionary of the Republic of China (ROC) government under the Kuomintang (KMT), which retreated to Taiwan after the Chinese Communist Party’s 1949 victory in the Civil War. Li explained that Chinese who lived overseas would not lose their identities after naturalising as citizens in their countries of residence, because ‘lower cultures cannot assimilate higher cultures’. Citing the accomplishments of Chinese American scientists and politicians, he suggested that Chinese had ‘outstanding administrative ability, and a responsible and loyal approach to their official positions’ and were ‘dominant’ in the sciences. Even more uncannily, he ended on the note that overseas Chinese must ‘promote Chinese philosophy and politics to the world much as they did Chinese cuisine’.
Two intersecting historical forces that shaped the post-World War Two experiences of overseas Chinese communities worldwide were anti-Chinese xenophobia and the Cold War. In Southeast Asia, Chinese business elites had often enjoyed close ties with colonial rulers, although the majority of ethnic Chinese were labourers in the urban and commodity sectors. Furthermore, the Chinese diaspora’s support for China’s revolutionary movements since the late-nineteenth century made them a convenient ‘Other’ for the nationalist movements of the region. Chinese communities across postcolonial Southeast Asia faced laws of expropriation, compulsory naturalisation, and assimilation in culture and education, with the partial exception of Malaysia (and Singapore, where the Chinese were in the majority). After the mid-1940s, both colonial and nationalist rulers increasingly associated Chineseness with Communist subversion. Although Communist parties in Southeast Asia often lacked widespread popular support among the Chinese, ethnic Chinese dominated the memberships of most Communist parties. With the 1949 Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, anti-Communist rulers further associated Communist subversion with China’s geopolitical expansion.
This intersection between Sinophobia and anti-Communism yielded both immediate consequences of political violence, and longer-term effects on the social and political identity of the ethnic Chinese. In Malaysia, around half a million first- and second-generation Malayan Chinese were interned in ‘New Villages’. The legacies of anti-Communism extended beyond short-term state coercion. Both colonial rulers and Chinese capitalist elites found it convenient to replace Communist promises of class-based liberation with race-centric political discourses. Issues of communal self-defense, in areas such as Chinese-language education, have dominated the Chinese community’s postcolonial politics. Anthropologists have suggested that such high-handed counterinsurgency measures produced an enduring culture of political apathy and preoccupation with economic gain.
By contrast, Chinese Americans in the early postwar years occupied a marginal position in the US racial order. Racist migration laws, notably the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and xenophobic narratives often typecast Chinese as the ‘Yellow Peril’, a perpetual alien and a source of cheap labour threatening white workers. The Cold War had twofold effects on their struggles for racial equality. On one hand, the Red Scare provided new reasons for anti-Communist officials and politicians to place Chinese under scrutiny. During the 1950s, the US government imposed restrictions on connections with China, such as a ban on remittances to the Mainland. Yet, Cold War superpower confrontation also provided opportunities for change in domestic racial politics. Racial liberalism, which advocated the integration and assimilation of racial minorities, strengthened with US efforts to counter Soviet and Chinese accusations of American racism. The integration of Chinese Americans was particularly intertwined with the Cold War struggle against the PRC.
The experiences of the Chinese communities of Southeast Asia and North America can be seen as comparable effects of the same historical forces interacting in different societies. Li Pusheng’s writing demonstrates how ROC officials constructed anti-Communist diasporic Chineseness within this context to serve Taiwan’s diplomatic interests. Their propaganda about overseas Chinese issues balanced two imperatives. The first was to emphasise diasporic loyalty as a symbol of legitimacy, particularly as the KMT had lost the Mainland. The second was to encourage the overseas Chinese to cooperate with local governments out of both intra-Asian and patron-client diplomatic interests. Not only were their regional allies in Southeast Asia frequently Sinophobic, declassified US documents show that Washington generally preferred Chinese to be loyal to local states, with pro-Taipei sentiment an acceptable alternative.
Two facets of these efforts are particularly noteworthy; the first was their increasingly flexible definition of overseas Chinese citizenship and identity. Li Pusheng opined in his Brief History that the loyalty of ‘15 million overseas compatriots’ was as important to the ROC as the similarly-populated society of Taiwan. Yet, Li also called on the diaspora to naturalise as Taipei ‘did not differentiate between huaqiao [overseas ROC citizens] and huaren [naturalised ethnic Chinese]’. Li Shizeng 李石曾 (no relation), a pioneer in Republican Chinese museology and a friend of OCAC Minister Zheng Yanfen, espoused a similar message in a 1957 speech to academics associated with the OCAC. Li suggested that the Chinese character ‘qiao 僑’, a term denoting ‘diaspora’, connoted ‘virtue’, ‘culture’, and ‘progress’. It was preferable to terms like diaspora and immigrant (yimin 移民) that allegedly denoted ‘denigration and exile’. Unmentioned by Li Shizeng was whether to be a huaqiao implied one’s possession of ROC nationality or similar overt displays of pro-Taipei loyalty.
Taipei’s production of knowledge and propaganda around the Chinese diaspora ranged from children’s booklets to annals and academic publications. Images author’s own.
The second was the instrumentalisation of racist discourses to coax their presumed audience into cooperating with local governments. Apart from Li’s reference to ‘higher’ Chinese versus ‘lower’ local cultures, ROC officials also deployed stereotypes of Chinese as morally superior pioneers in contrast to local ‘lazy natives’. The General Annal of Overseas Chinese, produced by the OCAC, suggested that the Chinese were ‘innately intelligent, honest, thrifty and good savers, nothing like the local people and could do what the natives could not’. Yet, this racialised portrayal of Chinese success was followed by exhortations to ‘win the support of local people rather than arouse conflict’, and ‘respond to local needs and transfer commercial capital into industries in accordance with local laws’.
The ‘model minority’ narrative of Asian American identity strengthened in the same years as ROC officials produced knowledge and propaganda on diaspora issues. In responding to the Red Scare, Chinese American business leaders initially emphasised their community’s dual loyalties to the ROC and the US. By the mid-1950s, however, Asian American elites increasingly depicted themselves as integrating successfully into the social establishment, rather than perpetual outsiders connected with Republican China. Asian American journalists, academics, and politicians stressed the complementarities between traditional values such as thrift, diligence and filial piety, and their economic success and support for the American social order. Sometimes explicit and other times unspoken was their efforts to portray the Asian American ‘model minority’ as distinct from the burgeoning African American Civil Rights Movement. After the 1960s, immigration laws increasingly favoured students and professionals from Asian countries rather than blue-collar labourers, giving these narratives enduring relevance. These ideas remain significant in the US today, as we can see from their simultaneous endorsement and satirisation in Ronny Chieng’s comedy.
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The history of the twentieth-century Sinophone world, which cultural scholar Shih Shu-Mei identifies as Chinese-speaking communities beyond Mainland China, has been marked by two principal ironies. First, while 1950s-60s conservative state and social elites imagined Communism as spreading from the Mainland through Sinophone circuits, their responses to these threats often made conservative, anti-radical politics hegemonic. This Cold War in the Sinophone world was shaped by the agency of small states and Chinese communal elites, and had enduring effects not only in the political sphere but in cultural, intellectual, and social life. Secondly, the PRC’s contemporary clout in the Chinese diaspora has often benefited from the hierarchical, illiberal features of these structures constructed to defeat Communism. For example, the ethnic Chinese business elites of Southeast Asia, whose communal status was consolidated with the defeat of Cold War-era radical challenges, have often formed close ties with China today due to the latter’s economic prowess and growing diplomatic footprint. China’s diaspora policy has often been described as blurring the line between racial, cultural, and political identity in efforts to bolster diasporic political support, much like Taipei’s propaganda at the peak of the Cold War. As they critique these developments, today’s counter-hegemonic movements in the Sinophone world would do well to consider their historical role in these often repressive and exclusionary structures that have now emboldened their foes.