The bulk of this essay was originally written during November and December 2022, contextualized by the backdrop of the A4 Movement in China, as well as record numbers of Chinese asylees entering the United States (mid-way through the Biden administration). The political environment has no doubt shifted: asylees (and non-asylees) are being targetted, surveilled, deported, trafficked to different corners of the world as the United States embarks on a path towards a new kind of “nation.”

As Deleuze famously wrote: "to flee is to produce the real, to create life, to find a weapon."

One of the foundational truths of East Asian Studies and Chinese Studies in particular is that every so-called “China scholar” disagrees about what China is. While this may be true for other fields as well, at times it’s as if none feel as volatile and divisive as this one. We disagree about what it is, what it has been, what it can be, and every emerging question complicates everything just a little bit further: it is a nation, a state, a regime, a dream, a hope, a homeland, and a panopticon; it is also a revolutionary wasteland, while for others the mere idea of a grand country out there to call home acts as a diasporic lifeline. This essay seeks not to define China itself — doing so would take an entire lifetime of work, constantly writing and rewriting, redefining and redefining yet again — but instead to engage closely with patterns, representations, and narratives around immigration from China, with particular attention to sinodiaspora in the United States. It is as much a study on sociocultural production as it is a study of the immigration patterns and trends themselves. Instead of asking what China or Chineseness is, this essay focuses on who gets to define it, who is subjected to it, and how diaspora is often lost in the overlap, focusing primarily on the entity of the Chinese asylum-seeker. In other words, this essay seeks to understand how the sinodiaspora is shaped through asylum-seeking, contrasting discourses that occur both in the United States and in China — or “China” — itself.

In this essay, I argue that it isn’t solely the Chinese asylum-seeker that is so instrumental to the shaping of the diaspora and its surrounding discourse, but the asylum-seeking process as well. Of course, the definition of the Chinese asylum-seeker, too, is to be debated both internally and externally. There are refugees and asylees in China, who are neither claimed nor unclaimed, and there are refugees and asylees from China — both are simultaneously stateless and belonging to the state, their mere existence in either place punishable. The space(s) they occupy are liminal, undefined, yet constantly redefined. Concepts of race, class, citizenship, and the nation, are all unsettled through and by the existence of the asylee.

Racemaking is an epistemological dilemma, and for the Chinese, it is one deeply rooted in logics of Orientalism. As Chinese-Australian scholar Gao Mobo 高默波 points out in “Constructing China: Clashing Views of the People’s Republic,” there is no “knowledge of China that is accepted by both the Chinese and the West.”1 Gao goes on to argue that the West has a hegemonic right to knowledge, which does not mean that knowledge is created through acts of censorship or restrictions of freedoms, but rather that it is what may be called a virtual cycle — the wealthy, strong, and powerful will profit from knowledge production so long as it continues to weaken the weak. By offering symbolic rights, those in power maintain illusion of freedom, which serves to benefit the liberal image and nation-building of the West just on premise alone, even if individuals may choose to exercise their rights by criticizing the nation-state(s).

Asylum-Seeking by the Numbers: How the Threat of China Reinforces Its Diasporic Making

As an asylum-seeker, there is simply no turning back. Many become stateless at the whim of an immigration officer who denies a green card application or a change of immigration status. Others, who may be so desperate for citizenship, rarely ever think about the consequences of officially becoming an asylee. For individuals from nation-states in tumultuous relationships with the U.S., asylee status may as well be a form of severance to a familiar culture and nation. Peter Nyers, in “Abject Cosmopolitanism: the politics of protection in the anti-deportation movement,” writes that in the case of asylum seekers, “the ability to decide who will and will not be provided with protection is [...] a focal point where the state (re)founds its claim to [monopolize] the political.”2 In other words, the nation-state reproduces the political making of any group of people through such practices. If the diaspora is to be regarded as a representation of another people — or perhaps, an abstract alien or threat — defining an asylee, or even a refugee, inevitably creates a series of epistemological dilemmas. We ask: who is worthy of protection? And then: what does it mean to prioritize certain victims over others?

In many ways, the politics of victimhood are a site of racemaking, perhaps most glaringly obvious when looking at the Middle East: Arab women and children, for example, are seen as perfect and helpless victims, whilst Arab men are racialized as terrorist, violent, militant. Japanese girls disfigured by the atomic bomb, for example, are innocent victims of war, but nothing is said about the men who are dragged into warfare. In this view of Western humanitarianism, civilians are not always innocent — some have it coming for them. In other words, the racialization of the Chinese asylee begins and is part of a cyclical process, wherein China as a country is identified as a problem that its own people must be saved from, thereby justifying large numbers of Chinese asylees, which in turn propels xenophobic and chauvinistic discourses, which then is used to justify increased military and propaganda funding against China.

An Axios article titled “Why so many Chinese asylum seekers are stuck in the U.S.” by Stef W. Kight and Erica Pandey lays out the numbers rather explicitly.3 It is quite difficult, even for those who aren’t looking, to notice the stark differences between Chinese asylum-seekers and asylum-seekers from elsewhere. Between the years of 2012 and 2017, 80 percent of Chinese defensive asylum claims were approved, whilst only 12 percent of claims from Mexican asylum-seekers were approved.4 An article from the Taipei Times published in 2022, claims that the amount of Chinese asylum-seekers has increased 700 percent from 2012 to 2020.5 Whether or not these numbers and figures are necessarily true seems almost irrelevant — in fact it is the extremity of these reported figures that reinforce narratives about the Chinese diaspora and the Chinese asylum-seeker: if there are so many Chinese asylees, then China must be what the state department has made it out to be; if so many of the asylees are claiming Christianity, then religious persecution in the country must be unparalleled to any other; if China is the threat, then we must turn its people to look towards the United States as their savior.

Rich Asylees, Poor Asylees, and the Representation of Capital

Amongst China’s most prominent asylees, there are business tycoons, central government critics with millions — or billions — of dollars to their name. Among them, Miles Kwok, Guo Wengui, and Guo Haoyun. The twist? These names all belong to the former 73rd wealthiest businessman in China. That is, until he fled China and claimed political asylum in the United States after what he claims is a political campaign against him by the Chinese government.6 Figures like Miles Kwok are not unique, but they do draw attention to the classed nature of asylees from China. Whilst visible and wealthy critics of the Chinese government like Guo are able to successfully and easily declare asylum, and are treated with fanfare from Western news media, the majority of asylum seekers from China are laborers, often forced to declare asylum in order to gain legal presence and working ability. Because of the discrepancy between these two archetypal asylee figures, I identify the asylum-seeking process and the legal industry built around it as a place where race and class are troubled, where state politics interfere in the intimate lives of individual immigrants and their families.

The Chinese asylee is often a figure surrounded by fraud, either because accusations or accumulation of fraud are the reason they leave China, or because asylum fraud is the only way to guarantee legal presence in the United States. In 2014, the New York Times reported on an asylum fraud case in New York’s Chinatown that entangled over 30 separate individuals — lawyers, paralegals, church employees, and interpreters — who were accused of and charged with assisting hundreds of Chinese immigrants in “using false tales of persecution” to apply for asylum.7 New York Times reporters Kirk Semple, Joseph Goldstein and Jeffrey E. Singer write that “narratives and documents are recycled from client to client, with the names and dates changed — though sometimes the lawyers forget to do even that.”8 Asylum fraud cases such as this not only contribute to racial narratives about the Chinese in the United States (and the West at large), they also expose cracks in the political and legal processes themselves: the dramatized stories of forced abortions, falsified accounts of religious persecution from individuals who have never once practiced religion, and the tales of suffering under regime work because that’s what the United States wants to hear.

“By identifying the Orient as a bounded object of discourse where none had existed, Orientalism was in the first instance an imaginative, if not exaggerated, fiction of those societies,” writes Allen Chun in “Forget Chineseness: On the Geopolitics of Cultural Identification.”9 What Chun articulates here is the foundational argument: the racial making of the Chinese hinges entirely upon the fictative Orient, propelled forward by transnational and national interests of both Americans and those who seek to fall amongst them. By reproducing these narratives, Chinese immigrants, and particularly those who claim religious persecution, inadvertently affirm the racial hierarchy, such as defined by Robert E. Park in “Human Migration and the Marginal Man”: “The Christian convert in Asia or in Africa exhibits many if not most of the characteristics of the marginal man.”10

These individuals become the immigrants who are charged with stealing jobs from hardworking Americans, leading to heightened racial tensions as well as forms of racial pity. Semple, Goldstein, and Singer write that most of the applicants are restaurant and construction workers, nannies and manicurists — work that most Americans are unwilling to do, and, for the most part, would be paid double or even triple to do. Because they are working without license to do so, they are unable to demand for better working conditions, and even immigrants working with visas are unlikely to advocate for better pay and conditions, because their legal presence in the country is tied directly to their having a job.

On the other hand, wealthy asylum seekers who speak against the Chinese government are also often tied to corrupt politicians in the United States — Miles Kwok, for example, had his application for political asylum personally supported by Donald Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon,11 and has been seen lounging around Mar-a-Lago.12 According to the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, this Chinese asylee shares drinks with the wealthy and corrupt in the United States whilst other conservatives accuse him of espionage. He is simultaneously a symbol of corruption and wealth from China and a symbol of the politically-oppressed Chinese person, and the American humanitarian is allowed to identify and racialize him based on what is most politically convenient at any given time. In truth, Miles Kwok’s story complicates and unsettles everything: how is one supposed to be a threat to Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China (CPC) whilst also being sent to the United States by the CPC as a spy? How is it that one is simultaneously corrupt enough to be able to play ball with Trump but innocent enough to have to be saved by the United States? In truth, the heart of the dilemma is quite simple: the role of the Chinese asylee in the West is to contribute to the narrative building and the racialization of the nation. In other words, Chinese asylees are always perfect and innocent victims, because the problem will always be with their country of origin, and they will be used as agents against a place they have once called home irregardless of their own beliefs.

The dichotomy between wealthy and rich asylees exists in all states and nations, and does not apply solely to asylum-seekers from China. In fact, it might be beneficial for us to take a deeper look at how citizen activists and asylum-seekers in China may contribute to the building of a nation and a race, too.

Activist Citizens, Asylees in China, and the Future of the Nation

Engin Isin’s “Citizenship in Flux: The Figure of the Activist Citizen” unsettles definitions and notions around citizenship, identifying two distinct ways in which citizenship exists — as status, and as practice.13 Isin identifies actors in citizenship discourse (distinct from active citizenship) as activist citizens, but one might be inclined to ask: who are the citizens? And who are the activists?

Within the sinophone discourse, the term “activist citizen” may bring up political and cultural dissidents both inside and outside of the People’s Republic of China. Many of these locations of contestation may be defined as either Chinese or not-Chinese, or perhaps simultaneously both. These locations, too, contribute to the making of a Chinese asylee, which in turn shape the discourse within the diaspora at large. Primary locations of contestation include Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan. The protestors in Hong Kong, for example, are simultaneously Chinese and not. Taiwan is simultaneously Chinese and not. When protests happen in Xinjiang, it is China’s business to handle, until it’s not. In this way, it is the West that acts as the knowledge production base. Nationalistic responses in defiance of Western definitions, too, run the risk of self-Orientalizing and falling into cyclical discourses. In many ways, these places and their people are simultaneously Chinese and not, though some may even go as far to argue that their not-Chineseness is what makes them all the more Chinese.

In a collection of essays by diasporic Chinese scholars collected by Julia Kuehn, Kam Louie, and David Pomfret, Ien Ang writes of identifying themselves as Chinese precisely because of the nature of being Othered: “Thus, for me, ‘being Chinese’ was always linked to a history and experience of minoritization and marginalization, of being ‘Other.’”14 Ang later goes on to question whether or not we should stop calling certain groups Chinese at all, a strain of thought also echoed by Chun in his final chapters. I’m inclined to ask: does identity matter? Further, does this Chinese identity still matter?

I bring these questions up not as a way to hash out all of the various definitions of Chinese and Chineseness, but to juxtapose the asylee in China against the asylee from China. Both are used in the making of a singular race, but they contribute to nation-building projects in separate and distinct ways. I have no interest in engaging with nationalistic or anti-nationalist debates regarding the status of belonging to or from or not, I am only interested in what discourse can happen in the space that mixed race, transnational, diasporic, Chinese-and-not individuals do occupy now.

Gordon Mathews, in interviews with Hong Kongers, makes the case for asylum seekers in Hong Kong as symbols for Hong Kong’s non-Chineseness. Hong Kong’s legal policies around asylum seekers, which reflect both Western and Chinese models of immigration, are quite similar to the United States’15: though many places and people treat asylum seekers well, life is difficult. Though it’s illegal for asylum seekers to work, it’s also impossible for them not to. Hong Kong’s asylees come from all over the world, and they live and work in one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the entire world.16 The poverty they face, too, is heightened by the largest wealth gap and disparity in the world.17 They live lives incredibly similar to asylum seekers and urban poor in the United States. Their non-Chineseness, too, is questioned just as often as the non-Americanness of any immigrant in the United States.

“If Hong Kong is only Chinese, it’s dead,” says one of the Hong Kong youth that Mathews interviews.18

But Mainland China boasts up to 56 ethnic minorities, and this doesn’t include the nuanced subgroups and overlaps, nevermind children who come from mixed-ethnicity backgrounds, so fixating Hong Kong (and Taiwan) as more diverse peripheries of sinographic culture isn’t necessarily correct or consistent. Using Gao’s words, “if the Tibetans and Uyghurs are not Chinese, why are the Manchu, Mongolians, Koreans, Zhuang, Naxi and so on called Chinese?”19 If Chineseness is not to be claimed by a diverse and ever-growing transnational, what is to become of Chineseness as China’s diaspora spreads, planting roots elsewhere? In other words, is there still a way to engage in discourse about Chinese identity without approaching Chineseness as futility?

Conclusion(s)

During December 2022, Chinese citizens took part in what was later named the white paper revolution (or a4 revolution, or 白纸运动). Despite the diaspora’s relative lack of involvement in this protest, the Chineseness of protestors stood to be questioned by online activists in the West. Nationalist diaspora, eager to defend their homeland from afar, jumped to conclusions about protestors being influenced by the West. Any response and change from governance, too, was labeled as modeling or copying the West.

Even when Chineseness is taken into hands of Chinese, it is questioned. So long as Chineseness diverges from any predetermined belief about what it should be, it is rejected. Asylum seekers, both from China and within China, are subjects of racial discourse. Someone from China contributes to the racialization of China to the outside world, someone from outside of China contributes to national discourses about race and nation. In both and all capacities, the asylum seeker stands in the way of clear-cut and easy narratives about nation and race.

Gao refers to China as “a nationless state, or a state of nations,”20 and Chun calls China a “cultural state of mind.”21 Ang writes of China as a “metaphor for the impossibility of ‘home’.”22 It feels almost nonsensical, to approach defining China and its diaspora as something so intangible and unfixed, considering our arrival at the so-called Chinese century, but perhaps that’s the point.