Every time I see this, it somehow strikes me as strange. Perhaps it's just usage. Maybe I'm not used to employing the word outside of its narrow meaning. Perhaps the world has moved on while I and my language have not.

This essay therefore asks: Why do we speak of Chinese migrant communities as a diaspora? What happens when we begin applying the word?

The first stop is the dictionary. The word comes from Greek. The "Dia" part means 'far apart' and the "spora" part comes from a Greek root that means 'to scatter'. The dictionary provides two entries for the word. The primary entry is with a capital 'D', and 'The Diaspora' is very specific to the Jews. The second entry has a lower-case 'd' and means any people that is scattered geographically. The second permissible use of the word is apparently rather new; Microsoft Word's spellcheck function, for example, keeps insisting that to type "diaspora" with a small 'd' is a mistake.

Nonetheless, it appears that these academics who enquire into the Chinese, Indian or Filipino diaspora are not misusing the word.

Yet I still have my reservations. I will argue here that the second meaning of 'diaspora' is loaded with many of the connotations from the first meaning of 'Diaspora'. When we use the word, we may inadvertently read into Chinese or other migrant communities the concerns that were central to the Jewish experience. We are easily led into probing what the parallels are, thereby skewing the questions that we ask. This risks finding what we set out to find, rather than seeing what's really there, or not there.

At this point, many will dispute my contention that the word is loaded. No, it simply means communities spread far and wide, they might say, and nowadays it is used in a very neutral way.

But this claim is undermined when we observe the times we use the word and the times we don't. Why is the word applied only to certain kinds of people? Why don't we speak of the British or English diaspora? Or the German diaspora? And when we speak of the West African diaspora (or don't we?) who exactly does that encompass?

What makes the dispersal of one people a diaspora and the dispersal of another, not?

When someone speaks of the Chinese in Singapore as a diasporic community, I ask, do you also speak of the White New Zealanders as a diasporic community? Does research into New Zealand culture proceed under this rubric? Then, looking to the Caribbean, do we speak of Black Jamaicans as a diasporic community?

In all three examples, they are the majority in their respective island states today, but of the three, New Zealand is the most recently settled.

I suspect that we use the word when only certain conditions apply, and these conditions are drawn from the features of the Jewish Diaspora. That is to say, the second meaning of the word is not cleanly divorced from the first.

My question then is: Do those Jewish Diaspora-like conditions really apply, or are we imagining that they do? How did we select certain migrant groups as deserving of the word 'diaspora' and others as inappropriate?

For example, if minority status and being victims of discrimination are somehow implied when we go out in search of diasporas, how does that match what we see in Singapore? Here the Chinese are the majority and, according to some, the oppressors, not the oppressed.

Before we go further, it may be useful at this point to take a look at the Jewish experience

One of the earliest disasters to befall the Jewish people was when the Babylonian Empire destroyed their tiny little kingdom centred around Jerusalem in 587 or 586 BCE.

The victors sacked the city and took a number of its inhabitants away to their capital, the much grander metropolis of Babylon, near present-day Baghdad. The exiled community however maintained its traditions and as the empire changed hands and crumbled -- the Persians took over at some point -- many went back to the area they called Judea to reestablish an autonomous Jewish state. Interestingly, the returned émigrés are said to have considered themselves the real Jews, believing themselves to have kept the culture alive, while the inhabitants who didn't suffer deportation were described as deculturised, even in the ancestral land. These non-deportees were termed the Samaritans, a label loaded with some contempt.

So, from the earliest experience of defeat, an association may have been made between exile, isolation and the purification of identity.

Even before the Jews fully escaped from Mesopotamian and Persian subjugation, the Roman Empire made its appearance, and the Jewish kings had to submit to a foreign power once again.

The Jews rebelled against the Romans in 70 CE and 132 CE, after which the latter banished the Jews from their original homeland. Exiles went off in all directions into the countries of Asia, Africa and Europe. For nearly 2,000 years, these exiled communities strived to maintain faith, identity, language and traditions. Much was lost, no doubt, but despite much pressure against them, core identity was preserved.

This history points to the associations that come with the word 'Diaspora'. There is suffering, oppression and a sense of loss. They were not just far and isolated from their home country, but they lost a reference metropolitan country altogether. That being the case, the burden of sustaining identity and culture fell entirely upon the exile communities.

Through many centuries, the Jews in Europe faced regular pogroms. Much of Christian Europe blamed the Jews for the crucifixion of Christ, and this justified all sorts of discriminatory laws. Hitler's holocaust, while singularly terrible, was not unique.

(The Jews in the Muslim lands had a generally easier time. Muslim rulers were usually more tolerant towards minorities than Christian ones.)

That the Jews maintained identity through 2,000 years of exile is a feat of human will. The scattered communities displayed remarkable determination to sustain culture and identity.

To me, these are the elements that come with the concept of Diaspora, and they naturally lead me to ask whether to speak of a Chinese diaspora is to suggest that their experience is in any way parallel to the Jewish.

But before I move on, let me make one very important note about the Jewish Diaspora which I notice many people seem to overlook. It is not a racial or ethnic Diaspora, barely even a cultural one. It is primarily a religious Diaspora. What has been sustained through the centuries was identity built around a faith. Over the years there has been considerable inter-marriage (in biological terms) such that Jewish communities are racially quite different from one exile country to another, the most notable being the Ethiopian Jews who are quite black in skin colour. There has also been language assimilation or bastardisation. Most Central European Jews until the 20th century spoke not Hebrew but Yiddish, and certainly today, communities in the US, France or Argentina speak their countries' languages.

Isolated religious communities clinging on to identity for generations are, in human experience, not uncommon. In this part of the world, we can think of the Hindu Balinese amidst a mainly Muslim archipelago, the isolated Muslim Cham communities of Vietnam and Cambodia, or the Hui of northern China, keeping their faith in a sea of Buddhism, Taoism and latterly, communist Atheism. Further afield, the Coptic Christians in Egypt come to mind.

The reason may be that religion, unlike race, language or cultural habits, is structured in a way that specifically seeks to distinguish a community from the rest of the world. It is religion that actively gets a community to cohere, through teaching and ritual, and to see itself in opposition to the outside. In contrast, the sharing and continuity of language, food preferences, dress and even genes tend to be much more contingent, since they are often left to circumstances and individuals, or at least to family heads.

Hence, should we be speaking of a Diaspora of Jews, or of Judaism?

Now you have an idea where I am coming from. How is Chinese emigration comparable?

The dispersal of Jewish communities came about from the shattering of the homeland. Chinese, on the other hand, mostly emigrated voluntarily, although one might say, economic hunger left individuals with little alternative. But the homeland remained extant, and throughout has loomed large. The emigrant Chinese do not have the same obligation of carrying on culture and identity that the Jews had prior to the foundation of modern Israel.

The corollary is that the emigrant can never claim to be fully Chinese when there are always the more numerous true-blue Chinese in China. And then, after a while, when the best you can do is to lay claim to second-grade Chineseness, why bother to be Chinese at all? In contrast, the Diasporic Jew was the only Jew there was (which may explain why guilt features so strongly in Jewish humour?).

Another question that comes up from the fact that China continues to exist is whether what we see as continuity of an offshore community, is less continuity than refreshment. By this I mean to ask: Is the culture, language and identity being maintained because the members of the community strive to maintain them, or because new members keep arriving?

This is a crucial difference. Are we speaking of a diaspora, striving to maintain identity, always interrogating ourselves about who we are and what we are, or are we speaking of migrant communities, which, benefitting from recent arrivals, remain, with little effort, culturally similar to the homeland?

The Chinese have been emigrating for a long time -- perhaps 1,000 years -- from when the Tang and Song empires expanded to the southern coastline of China. The reliefs of Angkor Wat, carved in the 1100's and 1200's, provide the evidence. On them, migrant communities of Chinese are depicted, distinguished from the Khmers by a different style of dress. The Khmer capital would not be alone in receiving Chinese. For the last 800 years or more, the Chinese have traded with Southeast Asian states, and migrant trading communities would have been part of the landscape.

Also among the reliefs of Angkor Wat are battle scenes, depicting expeditionary armies from China, again distinguished by dress and weaponry, and horses too, which are not indigenous to tropical Indochina. The Chinese interfered politically with other Southeast Asian states too, and one can expect that armies would leave stragglers behind after each war.

In the 1400's Malacca became the leading trading port of the East Indies, and history records that it included a significant Chinese community.

Yet, Chinese communities that trace their lineage as far back as Angkor, Malacca or even Ayutthaya of the 1600's have disappeared. The Straits Chinese do claim descent from those early Malaccan traders, but they don't claim to be Chinese. They claim to be a separate, hybrid ethnic group.

A lot of those in Southeast Asia who express certainty that they are, identity-wise, hyphenated Chinese, would tell you that their families came to this part of the world 2, 3 or 4 generations ago. More than that, and you'd see considerable ambiguity whether to identify as Chinese at all. This is why I say, contrary to the favoured dogma of Chinese chauvinists, the Chinese are as adaptable a people as any, and if it's more practical to assimilate, they will.

A quirk of history illustrates what happens when a Chinese community receives no new migrants to refresh it. Emigration to South East Asia was interrupted when the communists took over China in 1949. Fifty years later -- barely 2 generations -- the Chinese communities in Thailand and the Philippines are on their way to full assimilation. There has been a lot of intermarriage as well as linguistic, religious and cultural change.

Even the Chinese in Indonesia, while not assimilating (more for religious reasons than anything else) have culturally evolved. They are mostly Christian and speak Indonesian as their first language. They call themselves Chinese not so much because they identify with China, but merely to distinguish themselves from the Javanese or other Indonesians.

They same, I think, may be said of migrant communities in the West. The cultural and linguistic shift proceeds quite rapidly. Only skin colour and phenotype take longer because gene-mixing can only happen once each generation.

The Chinese don't hold a candle to the Jews when it comes to preserving culture and identity. Certainly not faith either, since the Chinese don't really define themselves by faith. In most cases, without being refreshed by new immigration, the offshore communities disappear after 3 or 4 generations.

The Chinese communities that we recognise in most countries are there because the 1st or 2nd generation are still alive, and because new migrants keep refreshing the pool.

Given such a poor track record, maybe we should ask: Do these communities therefore display as much angst about preserving culture and identity as the word 'diaspora' leads us to expect? Or is an entire body of academics looking for something that, beyond the 1st or 2nd generation, does not really exist?

I'm not disputing that Chinese communities are present in many countries, and while they last, they have to address various issues of preservation and accommodation. But they seem as ready as most other people to reconcile themselves, to lose themselves even, to their host countries. Therefore, if at all we call it a diaspora, we have to remember it is a very transient one, especially when measured against the feat of Jewish persistence. I would assert that the Chinese don't make much effort at remaining Chinese.

When we go around asking people, how do you maintain or negotiate your identity, when your community is to some extent cut off from 'home-base' (for want of a better word)?, we imply a certain purity of identity as ideal. We seem to be positing a distinction between the authentic and the contaminated.

Is that a relevant question anymore? Does that smack of romanticisation?

Not just in this age, but for the last few hundred years, humans have been migrating here, there and everywhere on a grand scale. We have also been absorbing cultural and technological innovations from each other. Hundreds of millions of people do not speak the same language as their grandparents -- ask the children of the

• Moroccans who went to France, 
• Koreans who went to China, 
• Italians who went to Argentina, 
• Turks who went to Germany, 
• Lebanese who went to Ghana, 
• Japanese and Germans who went to Brazil, 
• Greeks and Vietnamese who went to Australia, 
• Indians and Pakistanis who went to Britain, 
• Russians and Ukrainians who went to the US and Canada.

...and so on.

Cultural and technological influences even get into the deepest parts of continental countries, affecting those who haven't migrated. Nothing remains pure. Hybridity is the norm.

Who are Australians? Which communities in Australia are 'migrant' or 'diasporic' and which are not? Britain is still the largest source of migrants to Australia today, so do we speak of diasporic English, Scottish and Welsh communities in Australia, compared to the "indigenous" Chinese of that country, descended from the Ballarat gold-rush generation?

Much of the discourse about diasporas seems to be founded on an unspoken notion that certain countries belong to certain races. The enquiry about social change, focussed on how "other" communities fit in, suggests an attitude of a good host trying to find out how comfortable his guest is. But the status of host and guest is assumed. The superior and inferior is assumed.

So you see, there is much by way of baggage with the term 'diaspora'.

There is nothing wrong with research and enquiry. And of all people, I can hardly deny that social change is a fascinating subject, since I myself tend to write about it. But I'd like to caution framing one's enquiry with terms that pre-ordain a certain way of looking at the world.

© Yawning Bread