Tilburg University Chineseness as a Moving Target Li Jinling

The changing nature of Chinese diasporas 21
mainland China in order to augment their manpower. Therefore the Hong Kong people
became the largest Chinese immigrant group (see Figure 2.3). Chinese immigration in
this period could be characterized by thousands of Chinese, in pursuit of work in
Chinese restaurants, migrating or emigrating from outside mainland China into the
Netherlands.
Figure 2.3: Chinese immigrants by place of origin (source: the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics
(CBS), last access in April 2014)
Lin (2003) reports that like the diasporic Chinese in general, the majority of the Hong
Kong citizens originated from southern China, particularly Guangdong and Fujian
Provinces. Geographically, this region known as Lingnan or south of the Nanling
Mountains, separates the Pearl River Delta from the Yangzi Delta region. The Lingnan
people maintained their own spoken languages and a way of life significantly different
from the population in the north. The marginal cultural and ethnic identity, combined
with the peripheral location of the region, has given rise to a great sensitivity to social
and political change in the heartland of the nation and a tradition of sojourning or
‘refugee mentality’ (Lin, 2003:148). This special ethno-linguistic identity of the southern
Chinese explains why the diaspora Chinese including in Hong Kong have often
demonstrated a strong emotional attachment and identity more to their native place or
their ancestral home in southern China than to a vague and apathetic national entity
like ‘China’ (Lin, 2003). Figure 2.3 describes the changing origin of Chinese settlers in
the Netherlands. Until 1990, Hong Kong people were the largest group within the
Chinese community (CBS, 2010:6). Some Zhejiang restaurateurs commented that,
because the only workers they could recruit were Hong Kong people, they themselves
had to learn Cantonese to be able to communicate with their employees. Linguistically,
until the 1990s, therefore, Cantonese was the dominant language of the Dutch Chinese
diaspora. Li Minghuan (1999) documented that in the same period, the Chinese
immigrants who re-emigrated from Southeast Asia, like Singapore and Malaysia,