As the use of ‘diaspora’ has proliferated in the last decade, its meaning has been stretched in various directions. This article traces the dispersion of the term in semantic, conceptual and disciplinary space; analyses three core elements that continue to be understood as constitutive of diaspora; assesses claims made by theorists of diaspora about a radical shift in perspective and a fundamental change in the social world; and proposes to treat diaspora not as a bounded entity but as an idiom, stance and claim.

http://prodiasporaromana.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Blubaker-2005-The-diaspora-diaspora.pdf

The ‘diaspora’ diaspora

Presents a story of two Chinas – an entrepreneurial rural China and a state-controlled urban China. In the 1980s, rural China gained the upper hand. In the 1990s, urban China triumphed. In the 1990s, the Chinese state reversed many of its rural experiments, with long-lasting damage to the economy and society. A weak financial sector, income disparity, rising illiteracy, productivity slowdowns, and reduced personal income growth are the product of the capitalism with Chinese characteristics of the 1990s and beyond. While GDP grew quickly in both decades, the welfare implications of growth differed substantially. The book uses the emerging Indian miracle to debunk the widespread notion that democracy is automatically anti-growth. As the country marked its 30th anniversary of reforms in 2008, China faces some of its toughest economic challenges and substantial vulnerabilities that require fundamental institutional reforms.

Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State

There is weak conceptualization of the differentiation between migration and tourism, which has contributed to relative neglect of the relationships between these. This paper examines some of the major influences on these relationships, dividing them into two general but inter-linked categories: broad economic and social trajectories, and tourism factors. A number of specific forms of tourism-related migration are then examined in the context of these social and economic trajectories. The paper explores labour migration, return migration, entrepreneurial migration, retirement migration, and the special feature of second homes. It concludes by emphasizing the need to place studies of the links between tourism and migration more firmly into wider social science debates, and by setting out some fruitful lines of future research.

Tourism and migration : new relationships between production and consumption

We construct a simple model where political elites may block technological and institutional development, because of a ‘political replacement effect.’ Innovations often erode elites’ incumbency advantage, increasing the likelihood that they will be replaced. Fearing replacement, political elites are unwilling to initiate change, and may even block economic development. We show that elites are unlikely to block development when there is a high degree of political competition, or when they are highly entrenched. It is only when political competition is limited and also their power is threatened that elites will block development. We also show that such blocking is more likely to arise when political stakes are higher, and that external threats may reduce the incentives to block. We argue that this model provides an interpretation for why Britain, Germany and the US industrialized during the nineteenth century, while the landed aristocracy in Russia and Austria-Hungary blocked development.

Economic Backwardness in Political Perspective

People have hunted mammals in tropical Asian forests for at least 40,000 yr. This period has seen one confirmed global extinction (the giant pangolin, Manis palaeojavanica) and range restrictions for several large mammals, but there is no strong evidence for unsustainable hunting pressure until the last 2000‐3000 yr, when elephants, rhinoceroses, and several other species were progressively eliminated from the large parts of their ranges. Regional declines in most species have occurred largely within the last 50 yr. Recent subsistence hunting has typically focused on pigs and deer (hunted with dogs and spears or with snares), monkeys and other arboreal mammals (often caught with blowpipes), and porcupines and other rodents (smoked or dug out of burrows). Over the last 50 yr, the importance of hunting for subsistence has been increasingly outweighed by hunting for the market. The hunted biomass is dominated by the same species as before, sold mostly for local consumption, but numerous additional species are targeted for the colossal regional trade in wild animals and their parts for food, medicines, raw materials, and pets. Many populations of mammalian dispersers of large seeds and understory browsers have been depleted or eliminated, while seed predators have had a more variable fate. Most of this hunting is now illegal, but the law enforcement is generally weak. However, examples of successful enforcement show that hunting impacts can be greatly reduced where there is sufficient political will. Ending the trade in wild animals and their parts should have the highest regional conservation priority. HABITAT LOSS AND DEGRADATION are such massive and visible threats to biodiversity in tropical Asia that the impact of hunting is sometimes considered secondary, at least in comparison with Africa and the Neotropics (Primack & Corlett 2005, Sodhi & Brook 2006). However, hunting impacts almost all remaining forest in the region and few areas now support the vertebrate fauna that they potentially could if hunting were prevented. This reduction in vertebrate populations may, in turn, slow vegetation recovery through its impact on seed dispersal, particularly since hunters favor the large vertebrate species that disperse large fruits with large seeds (Corlett 1998, 2002). Hunting, moreover, is potentially more easily controlled than most other conservation problems in tropical Asian forests. In most areas it is a relatively marginal economic activity, involving relatively few people. Hunting has become a massive problem because of high human population densities and a generally well-developed infrastructure that not only makes most forest areas easily accessible, but also gives access to distant urban markets for luxury (often medicinal) products. This review covers the hunting (including trapping) of mammals in closed-canopy forest habitats of tropical and subtropical Asia west of Wallace’s line, i.e., the Oriental or Indomalayan region. This region excludes eastern Indonesia, with its very different forest fauna, and much of the more arid western part of the Oriental region. The area covered has a relatively uniform mammalian fauna at the genus and family level, with many widespread species. Information on hunting impacts was obtained from several sources, including: archaeological data; studies of contemporary hunters; observations of the wildlife trade and markets; and changes in forest faunas over time. Mammalian nomenclature follows Wilson and

The Impact of Hunting on the Mammalian Fauna of Tropical Asian Forests

The Cambridge History of China.

China and the Chinese Overseas

Some of the most important developments of the last quarter of the century have taken place in the Asia-Pacific region. Of these, the Chinese shift from Communist ideology and central planning to a commitment to build a market economy has had extensive ramifications. These have led to much speculation about the re-emergence of China as a powerful actor in world politics. The idea of Greater China is one of the products of that speculation. The lack of precision in the term “Greater China” – whether it should cover Hong Kong-Macao (hereafter Hong Kong), Taiwan and all of the People's Republic of China (PRC) or only parts of it – should not prevent it being used to explore some current and future developments. In this article, which examines the impact the concept of Greater China has on the Chinese overseas, the term would obviously not include those Chinese who live outside. Nevertheless, depending on which aspect is emphasized, the actual area covered can be significant.

Wang Gungwu

Papers

The Cambridge History of China.

China and the Chinese Overseas

Greater China and the Chinese Overseas

The Nanhai Trade : a study of the early history of Chinese Trade in the South China sea

Early ming relations with southeast asia: a background essay