A review of Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Aihwa Ong, Duke University Press, 1999.
In Flexible Citizenship, Aihwa Ong describes how industrializing states in Southeast Asia and border-crossing citizens of Chinese descent respond differently to the challenge of globalization. Borrowing from the French philosopher Michel Foucault, she uses the term “regime” to refer to knowledge/power schemes that seek to normalize power relations. The three regimes that are considered are the regime of Chinese kinship and family, the regime of the nation-state, and the regime of the marketplace. These regimes and their associated logics of subject-making, of governmentality, and of capital accumulation, are characterized by the twin forces of flexibility and transnationality. The book explores the phenomena that are shaped by these two forces: mobile capital, business networks, migrations, media publics, zones of graduated sovereignty, and triumphant Asian discourses.
Flexibility and transnationality in the Chinese diaspora
According to Benedict Anderson, rephrasing a basic tenet of Foucaldian studies, “the dreams of racism actually have their origin in ideologies of class, rather than those of nation.” Not so in China: the embrace of the authoritarian Asian model of modernity, the crucial role of overseas Chinese in China’s development, and the encounter with global capitalism have reinvigorated racial consciousness and its implications for the integrity of the national territory. The resurgence of Chinese racial consciousness overseas, stimulated by the reemergence of China on the world stage and by the economic activities of diasporean Chinese, cannot be dissociated from the racial pride that feeds China’s imaginary community. Meanwhile, it is important that the term “Chinese” not be invoked in such ways as to become automatically and at all times the equivalent of the People’s Republic. There is an ever growing pluralization of Chinese identities, as illustrated by the figures of transnational subjects that form the focus of this study: the multiple-passport holder; the multicultural professional who is able to convert his social capital across borders; the business executive who can live anywhere in the world, provided it is near an airport; the “parachute kids” who are dropped in Southern California to acquire an American college education that is almost a requisite for global mobility.
These international managers and professionals adopt a market-driven view of citizenship: they seek legal residence and citizenship not necessarily in the states where they conduct their business but in places where their families can pursue their dreams. The art of flexibility, which is constrained by political and cultural boundaries, includes sending families and business abroad, as well as acquiring dual citizenship, second homes, overseas bank accounts, and new habits. Among overseas Chinese, cultural norms dictate the formation of translocal business networks, putting men in charge of mobility while women and children are the disciplinary subjects of familial regimes. These norms that generally valorize mobile masculinity and localized feminity shape strategies of flexible citizenship, gender division of labour, and relocation in different sites.
Sites of graduated sovereignty
Despite frequent assertions about the demise of the state, the issue of state action remains central when it comes to the rearrangements of global spaces and the restructuring of social and political relations. In Southeast Asia, governments seeking to accommodate corporate strategies of location have become flexible in their management of sovereignty, so that different production sites often become institutional domains that vary in their mix of legal protections, controls, and disciplinary regimes. As Asian postdevelopmental states seek to maintain their competitiveness and political stability, they are no longer interested in securing uniform regulatory authority over all their citizens. The low-wage export-processing zones, the illegal labour market, the aboriginal periphery, the refugee camp, the cyber corridor, and the growth triangle are the new sites of graduated sovereignty, whereby citizens in zones that are differently articulated to global production and financial circuits are subjected to different kinds of surveillance and in practice enjoy different sets of civil, political, and economic rights.
Aihwa Ong’s essay is historically dated: her narrative takes place between China’s repression of the Tiananmen mass protests of 1989 and the turbulence of the Asian financial crisis of 1997. It encompasses political milestones such as Hong Kong’s return to Chinese sovereignty and the demise of the Soeharto regime in Indonesia; cultural phenomena like the rise of Star TV and other pan-Asian medias or the birth of Asian studies in the curriculum of American universities; economic developments such as the burgeoning production networks of multinational firms in Southeast Asia or the increased visibility of Asian presence in California; and ideological debates such as Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations or the promotion of Asian values as an alternative to the West’s hegemony. The emergence of China as an economic superpower provides the background to all these trends.
But the book doesn’t take into account other developments that have transformed the region’s cultural and political fabric since its date of publication. The economic centre of gravity of East Asia has moved further from Southeast Asia to the Chinese mainland. China now complements its economic power with a new political assertiveness. Nationalist claims have been given a new virulence through the development of internet discussion forums. Issues of transnationality and border crossing have taken a new salience since September 11: once valorized as the emergence of a cosmopolitan class, they now tend to be associated with risk and threats to national security. And the politics of race in the USA has been transformed and redefined by the election of a president who claims roots on three continents.
Fault lines in a multi-sited ethnography
Against this background, we can now detect some fault line in Aihwa Ong’s analysis. History is left out of the picture, and the snapshots captured by her analysis are situated into a kind of undefined present. Because she considers that most historians entertain the “grand orientalist legacy,” she rejects the historical method of building truth claims through a patient investigation of archival materials. Instead, she builds her ethnographic analysis on the most transient of sources: articles in popular magazines, casual conversations with random informants, TV images watched in hotel rooms, and media coverage of political debates.
She rejects the notion of fieldwork that, until recently, formed the hallmark of anthropology as a discipline, and substitutes to it the standard approach of cultural studies: a blind reverence to Foucault and his concept of power; a fixation with issues of race, class, and gender; and a romantic denunciation of capitalism that comes plastered with the label of political economy. Compared to the sophistication of her theoretical apparatus, her ethnographic knowledge base is rather thin, and her descriptive narrative uses the clichés found in the popular literature. Judge by the following quote: “On a palm-fringed hillock stands the Kuala Lumpur Hilton, where attendants in white suits and batik sarongs rush forward to greet well-groomed Malay executives wielding cellular phones as they step out of limousines. Women in silk baju kurong (the loose Malay tunic and sarong), dripping jewelry from their ears and necks, saunter in on their way to fancy receptions.”
Anthropology is a constantly evolving social science. While I acknowledge the positive aspects brought by new theoretical perspectives and innovative notions of what counts as ethnographic material, I don’t fully subscribe to the new directions that the discipline has taken, as exemplified by this book.
The Duke Reader 