The institutions of the developmental states set up in the postwar period began to crumble in the 1980s as liberalisation took hold. Isolationist approaches were on the back foot. However, this did not mark the end of economic nationalism. Nation-states were now recast as agents shaping competitiveness and therefore growth. This process is visible in the Baltic states breaking free from the Soviet Union, in Malaysia of the 1990s, and most importantly in reform-era China. Beyond these similarities, the differences are equally enlightening. China’s reforms as conceived by Deng Xiaoping saw an initially cautious, but increasingly rapid, dismantling of Maoist autarky, with the ‘rejuvenation’ of the nation becoming the principal aim. Malaysia under Mahathir Mohamad only slowly moved towards a developmental policy, because policy also tried to achieve the economic advancement of ethnic Malays over the country’s ethnic Chinese minority. Finally, not all independent states born from the Soviet dissolution could turn to the West. Ukraine in the early 1990s remained caught between internal divisions and increasingly aggressive Russian policy.

The Chinese diaspora comprises sizeable ethnic Chinese populations spread across the globe. Although Chinese diasporic communities share a common heritage and, by definition, a common heritage language, their sociolinguistic backgrounds and identities are diverse, complex, and multifaceted. Members of the diaspora speak one or more, or indeed none, of several mutually unintelligible Chinese varieties and dialects. Recent changes in the demographics of the overseas Chinese communities have, moreover, led to new patterns of multilingualism. This chapter discusses key sociolinguistic aspects of language contact relevant to this group at large, including language maintenance versus language loss, the trends and challenges of heritage language learning, the role of Chinese community schools, differences in attitudes towards Chinese dialects, and the dynamics of multilingual identities and multilingual practices such as translanguaging and language brokering. The review focuses on the diasporic communities in Anglophone and other Western settings, as it is mainly the rising numbers of ethnic Chinese in those parts of the world that have fuelled the growing interest in Chinese heritage language learning and research in recent decades.

What makes the chapters on Monsoon Asia unique is the analysis of the Dutch Empire from the point of view of Asian societies. First of all, it is stressed that, from a global point of view, the rise of the Dutch seaborne empire is part of a much wider and earlier coastal turn, which in Asia has been described as an Age of Commerce. It is not only European, but also Chinese and Islamic, expansion that characterises this phase of increasing maritime globalisation. Those Eurasian empires that continued to exploit the nomadic horsepower of the Eurasian Arid Zone were soon able to incorporate this maritime dynamic. In these empires, the Dutch retained a marginal presence as meek merchants subject to the whims of indigenous brokers and local governments. In other, more tropical parts of Asia, the aggressive operations of the Dutch prevented indigenous states such as Mataram and Kandy from incorporating the booming coastal regions of Java and Ceylon, respectively. In these insular areas, the Dutch were able to create territorial power and impose their monopoly on the production and sale of cloves, nutmeg, mace and cinnamon. In Maluku we can even speak of a Dutch ‘heart of darkness’ as much of its population was decimated, to be replaced by colonists and slaves. In almost all cases, the Dutch could sustain territorial power only with the help of overseas Chinese communities which offered both a vital urban middle class (primarily in the Dutch colonial headquarters of Batavia) and access to extensive commercial networks. So far completely ignored is the case of Ceylon. In this early-modern laboratory of colonial rule, the reformist policies of enlightened Dutch governors had a deep impact on the local society through mapping, law and education. One of the first revolutionaries in the late eighteenth-century Netherlands was a Tamil intellectual raised in Dutch schools in Ceylon.

The Introduction starts off by drawing attention to the “memory boom” in contemporary Taiwan among the “mainlanders” – the elderly Chinese civil war exiles and their Taiwan-born children. The mainlander “memory boom” revolves around their traumatic expulsion from China in the mid-twentieth century, which had been suppressed for nearly half a century. It then introduces the book’s main argument – the great exodus serves as the collective “cultural trauma” for the mainlanders to reinvent themselves as deserving citizens of a democratized Taiwan. Next, the chapter provides a brief history of Taiwan. This is followed by an overview of Chinese civil war historiography. The historiographical discussion segues into a theoretical discussion that problematizes the “single event” model of both the psychoanalytic approach and the sociological approach to trauma and memory. The theoretical discussion offers an alternative model based on the multi-event trajectory of mainlander trauma. It makes a categorical distinction between the mnemonic “cultural trauma” and the substantive “social trauma.” The chapter then connects this new understanding of trauma and memory to theorizing diaspora, which underscores dispossessed people’s temporal displacement. The chapter ends with an assessment of the research and debate on mainlander identity formation in present-day Taiwan.

The introduction surveys the main conceptual approaches that scholars take to study Chinese migration: diaspora, overseas Chinese (and Chinese overseas), ethnic studies, and Sinophone studies. It then describes common explanations for migration, including push and pull factors, migrant networks, and cultures of migration, in the process showing that very particular diasporic trajectories from specific emigrant communities in China to specific destinations both within and outside China constitute “the Chinese diaspora.” Finally, the introduction makes a case for considering internal and external Chinese migration as linked phenomena, and argues that migration was usually part of a broader family strategy for socioeconomic maintenance.