UC San Diego

Over the past two decades, Chinese diasporas have become increasingly important in China’s strategies for global ascendancy. Beijing designates diaspora elites as “grassroots ambassadors” to promote China’s national interests abroad, enhance Chinese ethnic communities, and suppress émigré dissidents. These homeland-diaspora ties, however, push Chinese migrants to the center of Sino-West tensions and become victims of rising Sinophobic sentiment and anti-China discrimination. Between Chinese politicization and Western suspicions, what is missing are the lived experiences and agential practices of Chinese migrants and ethnographic insights into the actual effectiveness of China’s diaspora governance. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic data, collected in two years of fieldwork in China and Europe, this dissertation argues that China’s diaspora politics do not lead to unidirectional domination by the homeland but rather produce dynamic state-diaspora interactions and negotiations across borders. I conceptualize this process as transborder state-building, defined as the bureaucratic, technological, and discursive mechanisms of extending and challenging the state’s institutional capacity and symbolic legitimacy beyond state boundaries. Following the neo-Weberian institutional approach in political sociology, I expand the scope of research on state-building to cross-border domains and delves into the making and remaking of transborder states and how they interact with emigrant citizens in foreign soil. I argue that a relational political ethnography, which pays closer attention to the mundane struggles of grassroots actors than the macro-level high politics, holds the key to understanding the real-world impacts of Global China. Transborder state-building is a complex process that involves a plethora of actors, including the central Chinese leadership, local officials, diaspora leaders, and rank-and-file migrants, whose cross-border interplay and contestations produce complex outcomes of Global China. To transcend superficial knowledge of China’s overseas outreach based on oft-exaggerated policy data, I uncover its operational specificities and everyday workings by identifying three channels through which China generates and sustains transborder state-building: diaspora associations, digital technologies, and political discourses. I demonstrate that far from being a uniform or absolute expansionist project, China's transborder state-building is shaped by the robust agency of grassroots actors and fraught with internal inconsistencies within the Chinese bureaucracy and Western host societies.