Tilburg University Chineseness as a Moving Target Li Jinling

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Introduction 9 resources by absence of choice – thus provokes non-random, culturally and socially scripted interpretations. In this case, identity work is seen as proceeding by means of intricate semiotic work in which even the smallest features of language or other semiotic resources – ‘accent’ – can acquire crucial value as an indexical identity diacritic (Agha, 2007; Rampton, 2006). Polycentric environments offer several such orders of indexicality, but they are rarely equivalent: the social and cultural ‘order’ is stratified and operates at different scale levels – different ranges of cultural and social recognizability and scopes of use. Again, the scale of formal institutions such as the school would typically be higher than that of an informal peer group, even if some subcultural groups – think of groups oriented towards hip-hop, or communities of online gamers – operate at extremely high, global scale levels. In the Chinese diasporic context, people organize complex identity work at multiple levels and in multiple domains in relation to a number of simultaneously occurring but context-specific ‘centers’ – Dutch, PRC, regional, age, gender, etc. identities. These different centers provoke differing orientations towards normative complexes – ‘being adequate’ as a Chinese-Dutch is a different thing in class from in the online forum environment, and in each of these spaces, different norms prevail and different openings for legitimate identity work exist. Examples can be found in the regimented complementary classroom data of Chapter 4, in which the Chinese-Dutch youth explicitly negotiated their identity and articulated their Dutchness. The dynamics of identity in the era of globalization and superdiversity have shifted from fairly stable identities with limited scope for acting out and developing alternative identities to more complex repertoires of identity, people can actively perform by making use of all the channels. People in the diasporic context perform complex identity work in the various social contexts they navigate. They orient to and negotiate complex, multi-layered identities and assert as well as denounce parts of their Chineseness and Dutchness in their everyday routines and practices, depending on the contexts in which and the audiences for which they stage their acts of identity. 1.4 The case of the Chinese diaspora in Eindhoven The fieldwork sites for this study had been chosen in Eindhoven, the largest city in the Dutch province of North Brabant, home to one of the biggest and most dynamic Chinese and other Asian populations in the Netherlands, with a total city and neighboring population of 440,000 in 2013 and together with its metropolitan regions, nearly 750,000 inhabitants (CBS, 2013). Eindhoven was once a small village, but it has grown to one of the biggest cities in the Netherlands, much of its growth is due to Philips and DAF Trucks. According to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), Eindhoven is the most inventive city in the world based on one of the most commonly used metrics for mapping the geography of innovation, and was named the world’s most intelligent community by Intelligent Community Forum in 2011 (OECD, 2013). Unlike the traditional Chinese communities in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, and The Hague that have concentrated Chinatowns, Eindhoven has an ‘unconcentrated China-
10 Chineseness as a Moving Target town’ due to the historical development of the city. 2 Eindhoven was a small village in an economically backward and mostly agricultural area. Cheap land, cheap labor and the existence of pre-industrial domestic industry made Eindhoven an attractive area for developing industries. Eindhoven has been a migrant city attracting internal and transnational migrants. During the 19 th century, Eindhoven grew into an industrial town with factories for textile weaving, cigar manufacturing, match making, and hat making. Most of these industries disappeared again after World War II. The major driver for growth of Eindhoven in the 21 st century has been the presence of the High Tech Campus. It attracted and spun off many high-tech companies. In 2005, a full third of the total amount of money spent on research in the Netherlands was spent in or around Eindhoven. A quarter of the jobs in the region are in technology and ICT, with companies such as FEI Company (once Philips Electron Optics), NXP Semiconductors (formerly Philips Semiconductors), ASML, Toolex, Simac, CIBER, Neways, Atos Origin, and the aforementioned Philips and DAF. The city therefore presents an interesting case in studying demographic changes as a result of more recent forms of globalization in the composition of the Chinese community. According to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics, the Chinese population counts 3,021 in 2012 and the number of Chinese rise to 3,422 in 2015 (CBS, 2015). Traditional and new Chinese immigrants are engaged with cultural transmission. As a consequence, changes in concepts of Chineseness are likely to be more visible in Eindhoven than in the older Dutch Chinatowns. The Eindhoven Chinese community is younger than the Chinese communities in Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hague and has a slightly different social-demographic make-up in the sense that many Eindhoven Chinese are students and knowledge migrants that are attracted to Eindhoven by the High Tech Campus, the Eindhoven University of Technology, and the various multinational hightech companies. 1.5 Outline of the book This book falls into seven main chapters. The current chapter has introduced the theme and approach of the study and has sketched its broader context and central theoretical notions. Chapter 2 sets out to describe the HERA project, which is the starting point of the current study, and the historic, demographic changes of Chinese migration worldwide and in particular Chinese diasporas in the Netherlands. Chapter 3 devotes to spell out the methodology this research deployed: what kind of online and offline data have been collected, and how these data have been analyzed and interpreted. The sociolinguistic ethnographic approach employed in the study adopts a range of methods including observation, interview, and collection of documents and discourses as well as linguistic landscaping. The blurring of the off-online dimension of data collection generates different and unexpected voices and insights, facilitating the collection of richer data. The chapter concludes by going into researcher reflexivity. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 devote to describe and analyze the empirical data collected in and around Eindhoven Chinese complementary school. The empirical Chapter 4 examines 2 See www.amazing-holland.nl/assets/eindhoven-english.pdf.
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Page 6 and 7: Table of content Preface 1 1 Introd
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CHAPTER 5 When school is out: Langu
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When school is out: Language ideolo
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CHAPTER 6 World Wide Web: Chinesene
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World Wide Web: Chineseness 2.0 93
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CHAPTER 7 Conclusions and implicati
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Conclusions and implications 117 Th
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Conclusions and implications 119 ne
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Conclusions and implications 121 Po
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References Agha, Asif (2007). Langu
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References 125 CCG (2013). Annual R
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References 127 HERA IDII4MES (2010)
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References 129 Ma, Laurence J.C. &
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References 131 Spolsky, Bernard (20
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Appendix bold : loud ××× : inaud
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136 Chineseness as a Moving Target
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Tilburg Dissertations in Culture St
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Tilburg University Chineseness as a Moving Target Li Jinling

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