Asia Colloquia Papers
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YCAR’s Asia Colloquia Papers Series aims to make available to wider audiences the content of selected lectures, seminars and other talks presented at YCAR.
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Browsing Asia Colloquia Papers by Subject "China studies"
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Item Open Access Floating Points: From Diasporic Spaces to Multicultural Places(09-01-2011) Pao, Angela C.In the study of Asian immigrant communities and culture in North America, particularly in arts and literature, two intellectual approaches have emerged: the transnational which focuses on country and culture of origin regardless of the location of the diaspora community; and, the national which de-emphasizes diaspora in favour of a racial character distinct to the new generations of Asians born and residing in the U.S. and Canada today. In her talk, Angela Pao engages both approaches by presenting the benefits and drawbacks of examining social and cultural institutions, artistic products, and processes through a transnational and consequently de-territorialized perspective, as opposed to a domestic one that continues to emphasize Asian histories specific to a destination country or territory. Race and the context of uneven social and power relations between immigrant and local communities, more specifically, are the primary bases on which Pao examines the development of Asian immigrant culture, in particular, Chinese literature in North America, and its usefulness in helping interpret the local and global Asian immigrant experiences.Item Open Access The Intermediary Trap: International Labour Recruitment, Transnational Governance and State-Citizen Relations in China(01-01-2013) Xiang, BiaoDelivering the 2012 York Centre for Asian Research (YCAR) Asia Lecture on the occasion of YCAR’s 10th anniversary, Dr. XIANG Biao explores the high cost of legal transnational labour migration for unskilled Chinese labourers. Although legal labour migration from China has become more effective, efficient and streamlined, the costs of finding and securing work overseas have been on the rise. In his exploration of the reasons why, Xiang points to intermediaries—commercial labour recruiters— as the key. He argues that intermediaries’ dominant position in cultivating, facilitating and controlling legal migration allow them to charge high fees to potential migrants. This results in the “intermediary trap”, where both the state and the migrants depend on intermediaries to manage and facilitate labour migration overseas. In this text based on his lecture, Xiang examines China’s hierarchical chains of migration intermediaries, from Beijing to rural villages, arguing that they constitute a transnational labour disciplinary system and point to new state-citizen relations.