BOOK REVIEWS

Pierre Gentelle, Chine et “Chinois” outre-mer à l’orée du XXIe siècle [China and the “Chinese” overseas at the dawn of the twenty-first century]

Over the past academic year, the syllabus for France’s competitive examinations for high-school teachers and university professors, the CAPES and the Agrégation, required candidates in geography to prepare for a subject that was “China and the Chinese diaspora”. Several publications strove to respond both to the subject matter and to the market represented on a national scale by a not inconsiderable number of candidates. Gentelle’s book is distinguished by having appeared before all the others, in record time after the subject was officially set, and by offering the best as well as, in some respects, the most surprising content. The book is made up as follows: “Suggestions on the Geography of China” (12 pages), “China and Internationalisation” (50 pages, 12 of these on “The ‘Chinese’ Overseas”), “China within its Frontiers” (80 pages), “China at the Regional Level” (100 pages) and “Taiwan” (by André Gamblin, 30 pages). The book is rounded off by a generous and up-to-date bibliography, and contains 51 maps and sketches.

The text opens then with “Suggestions on the Geography of China”: the chapter is appropriately named, comprising a kaleidoscopic series of approaches that are brief, very brief even, but bold and designed to get the candidates into condition for an experience of China that they will find quite unfamiliar. As a whole the chapter is a little disjointed at times, but should have proved very useful for the students.

This form of introduction is rather curiously numbered Chapter One, while Part One, which follows this is opened by Chapter Two, entitled “China and Internationalisation”. This falls exactly in line with the examination syllabus and is therefore valuable to the candidates. It offers a rich source of information about most aspects of China’s relations with the rest of the world, and about the impact that the world has had on China: such subjects as “Asian Values and Human Rights”, “China and the Asian Crisis”, and “World and Regional Geopolitics” are particularly helpful, each of the many chapters being accompanied by advice on further reading. A profusion that might amount elsewhere to a patchwork, seems here to be the proper response to the requirements of an examination textbook, knowledge of China and things Chinese being less widespread than they might be.

The second part, “China within its Frontiers” moves us fairly and squarely into geography: chapters are headed “Population and Countryside” (with numerous maps), “Social Discord and Resolution”, “Nature and Society”, “The Practice of Places and Spaces”, “The Archipelago of Cities”. The stress is on facts pertaining to population and society that are, in effect, fundamental. Some pages are excellent but perhaps too compressed (seeking to say too much within the space available). One example would be the information given on China’s demographic transition, prodigious and dramatic as it has been, and which is dealt with in 22 lines; another would be the 15 lines intended to offer “several possible definitions of China”.

By contrast, Chapter Eight, “Nature and Society”, paints a good picture of how people relate to their environment—though the absence of maps, which elsewhere in the book figure so abundantly is unfortunate. Similarly, Chapter Ten, “The Archipelago of Cities”, which is so interesting, has no fewer than four maps all of them referring to ancient times! Where is the archipelago of cities of which any geographer may be justified in expecting some illustration by the use of maps?

The third part, “China at the Regional Level”, is certainly the best part in the book. Unlike most regional geographies of China, which present the official administrative organisation of China as perfectly reasonable, Gentelle at once sets out the “Problems of Regionalisation”, and emphasises “that which makes sense of the present spaces”. This is excellent teaching practice, and is particularly welcome in this book. This regional study, which it is in a strict sense, leads on to “Northern China”, “Peking”, “Fiery Shanghai and the Axis of the Yangzi”, “The Loess Plateau” (an odd name for a region!), “Karst, Rice and Monsoons” (the only region in China that experiences monsoons?), “China South-eastern Coastal Region”, “China’s Waterways, Rivers and Lakes”, and “China’s Deserts”, all of which are accompanied by maps and bibliographic references. There are surprises: whereas one would hardly expect to find, in the middle of a regional geography, a chapter on “China’s Waterways, Rivers and Lakes” that properly belongs in the preceding part, it is even more surprising to find an absence of a section on “North-east China, and former Manchuria”, which is of an historical, geographic and geopolitical importance of the first order. Oversight? Unlikely. A whim of the writer? Most probably, as he has been known to indulge himself occasionally. Most shocking however is the lack of any explanation for this decision, which could be taken in some ways to indicate a certain contempt for the reader. It is all the more unfortunate considering that the treatment of the regions that are included is of a high quality and throws some new light on approaches that might be made to seeing China’s regions. The book is completed by a fourth part, contributed by André Gamblin, and devoted to Taiwan. It is very classical in style, and thus a sharp contrast with the flair and fantasy of Pierre Gentelle’s style of writing and presentation.

Let’s go back to Chapter Five of Part One, “The ‘Chinese’ Overseas”, term that features in the book’s title. The inverted commas that Gentelle accords to the Chinese living outside China signify that the majority have now acquired the nationality of their host country; they are no longer Chinese without inverted commas—as everyone already knows; but what level of awareness with regard to their own identity authorises the inverted commas? Gentelle pushes ahead with his operation to set things straight, replacing “the overseas Chinese” with “the ‘Chinese’ overseas”, on the grounds that, unlike France, which has overseas territories, there are no “overseas Chinese territories”… well, no doubt, but this excessive eagerness to set the record straight, with the boomerang effect, renders “overseas” as inapt as the other terms that Gentelle condemns. Indeed, does that make the million and more Chinese emigrants—or “Chinese” emigrants—who have settled in far-eastern Russia, they “overseas”? Or overseas? Or, more precisely, perhaps even “over-rivers”!

In fact, I have just, in the middle of writing this review, received a new book by Pierre Gentelle (whom I thank) called Chine et “diaspora” (1); thus, having severely criticised and condemned the term diaspora and having taken us on a semantic detour, the writer rehabilitates what he once condemned—with inverted commas (so many inverted commas…).

But consider how the Anglo-Saxon terminology that Gentelle is translating has, over the same period, tended to be abandoned by writers in English—and not the least number of them—in favour of… diaspora (2). Is there no end to it! During the 1930s, the prodigious Louis Armstrong made popular a piece called “Chinatown, my Chinatown” that could now be replaced (though not by Satchmo himself, alas!) by “Diaspora, my diaspora”…

Even so, Gentelle is spot on (p. 65) when he picks up on the ambiguities of terminology (I did so myself four years earlier in L’Espace Géographique (Volume 3, No. 2, 1994, pp. 97-105), and he is accurate too (p. 64) when he ponders the Chinese experience overseas, which many writers have tended to over-inflate in terms of features and expressions of identity; he is more apt still (p. 73) when he points out:

“A CEA (Chinese Economic Area), that some people call “Greater China”, comprising mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao, Singapore, and the Huaqiao (overseas Chinese), is in the process of being constituted starting from a new kind of territorial concept, one that takes business and ethnicity as a basis and relegates to the background such concepts as State or customs area… The gradual economic integration of different States within the ill-defined entity of the CEA would make it, the way things are going, into the world’s third trading area (after North America and Europe), well ahead of Japan, by the start of the next century… but this would seem to be sheer utopianism”.

But why then does this same writer come round to hammering out vast falsehoods? Let readers judge for themselves: “There is no reason to build up these emigrants into a sort of International: the facts do not support it. There is no international Chinese bank, there is no international Chinese Mafia, and so on” (p. 64).

Should we not recall the existence of the Overseas Chinese Banking Corporation, and how it was launched in 1919 from Singapore and is now active in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Shanghai, Xiamen, Tokyo, Osaka, New York and Sydney? And what of the Overseas Union Bank (OUB), founded in 1949 and operating now in Hong Kong, Brunei, Tokyo, Osaka, London, New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Peking, Shenzhen and other cities? Looking only at these two examples, one can recognise the essential geography of the diaspora. As for the international Chinese Mafia, may I simply refer to the words of Thierry Cretin, an international judge, in his book Mafias du monde (3), in which he details the spread throughout the diaspora of the “main Triads” (pp. 55-70)? Cretin says their “history is conjugated in the migratory mood” (p. 66) and their geography is that of the diaspora (pp. 66-69).

But this book is not mentioned in Gentelle’s bibliography. Besides, this is a false debate: since when did banks and gangs (what a striking connection!) become the main criteria for the existence of the diaspora? And to crown this chapter off (pp. 73-74), we find these lines: “If it is absolutely necessary to speak of a diaspora in the case of China, there is an obvious one: the forced emigration of Tibetans. […] Does that add up to a diaspora?” Having recalled in a few lines the Sino-Tibetan conflict, Gentelle gives the dimensions of the resulting Tibetan “diaspora” (it is my turn to use inverted commas!): “120,000 exiles have dispersed across the world and a group of 7,000 are still living in Dharamsala in India”. Now, the Chinese census of 1990, as Gentelle reminds us, records 4,593,072 Tibetans (do we need inverted commas?) in China (and 6 million for the Dalaï Lama), that is, a “diaspora” of the same proportions as the Chinese diaspora taking the original population into account (120,000 from 5 million, rounded up, and some 30 million from 1.3 billion…). But, unlike the Chinese diaspora, which is present everywhere in the world, the Tibetan “diaspora” is mainly concentrated in India, Nepal, Sikkim and Ladakh (on the borders of Tibet). Gentelle says otherwise, seeming to confuse the Tibetans’ few settlements in Switzerland and Canada with their being “dispersed across the world”. So whatever happened to the diaspora? Such wayward thinking, by such a writer, in a book that on all other counts is so interesting, can be explained only by its having been written in haste. And such haste can be explained only by the editorial constraints specific to the market that these great national examinations have created.

Translated from French original by Philip Liddell