Re-territorializing transnationalism: Chinese Americans and the Chinese motherland

A youth festival sponsored by the Chinese (P.R.C.) government for overseas Chinese youth (hua yi) who visit China represents a political ritual of the Chinese state that draws upon a long history of invoking discourses of Chinese culture to create connections to the Chinese abroad. Though framed in a context of continuity, the festival ironically produces new knowledges about different ways of being Chinese, exposing the fissures within the assumed nexus of race, culture, and nation, and thus complicating notions of what constitutes a transnational community.