About CSCSD

Focus

The Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora is the only centre in the southern hemisphere for research on people of Chinese descent in Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific. The Centre seeks to stimulate and encourage scholarship that reflects the diversity of and intercourse among areas, cultures and political economies in the region, and contributes critically to the field of knowledge.

At the top of our research agenda is a scholarship which looks beyond the stereotyped masks of "Chinese" and "Chineseness", and focuses instead on exploring the fluid and multifaceted nature of Chinese diaspora experience in Southeast Asia, its various interfaces with indigenous people and states, its multiple positions in economies, societies and politics, and its global positioning.

As a center based in Australia, we are inevitably interested in the studies of the Australian Chinese Community, particularly in the location of their history within the larger narrative of the Chinese southern diaspora. The conventional narrative on Chinese diaspora has been filtered, consciously or unconsciously, so as to conform to a common story that tells the tale of a unique "Chineseness" manifesting at different times and places. A regional and geographical approach is one way to liberate the study of overseas Chinese from its nationalist straight jacket and to challenge the invented tradition of a unified essence of Chinese.

We see the CSCSD as a natural and logical venue to venture into this scholarship. The Centre hopes to add its Australian voice to the growing critique of this dominant scholarship,and to contribute to this important new current in studies of Chinese people outside China.

Research Priorities

We will focus our research on:

• the historical formation of Chinese identities.
  • Much writing on Chinese in Southeast Asia lacks a real historical dimension. Although we commonly use the term "Chinese", our understanding of what constituted Chinese identity or ethnicity for the individuals who came south from various parts of the China coast is a very complex issue. One special interest would be in the different dialect groups and their various business networks overseas and how these elements contribute to or distracted from their so-called "Chineseness" for themselves and how their distinctive sub-ethnic business networks and relationships to China, to Chinese nationalism and to the colonial powers operated at different times and in different places.
• The regional factors which contributed to the constructions of a range of Chinese sub-ethnicities and networks.
• The social, cultural and political gaps that traditionally separated the peoples to the north from those of the southern coasts.
• The meaning of Southeast Asian and Southwest Pacific Chinese identity, both in relation to the Chinese state as well as to the various peoples of Southeast Asia among whom they settled.
• Alternative versions of the histories of Southeast Asia and Southwest Pacific in which Chinese played an important part.
• The issues beyond the conventional division of "Chinese" and "non-Chinese" issues.
• The study of economic, social and business networks among various Chinese groups as well as with indigenous or local political and social elites

Structure

The Centre is guided by an ANU steering committee and an international advisory panel. Though located in the Research School of Pacific & Asian Studies, the Centre also embraces the Faculty of Asian Studies and other parts of the Australian National University (ANU).

Funding

The Centre owes its existence to the financial contributions of two important sources. First is the Jennifer Cushman Memorial Fund, established to honour the work of this pioneering Australian scholar on Chinese in Southeast Asia. Most important in this regard is the generous bequest of an outstanding scholar of Thailand, Ben Batson, to the Cushman Memorial Fund, which substantially assists in the scholarly operations of the Centre. Second is the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation of Taiwan, whose three year subvention provided the basis for establishing the Centre.