How China talks to the diaspora. An interdisciplinary approach to the digital governance of the Chinese diaspora

Abstract

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in the understanding of China from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, sparking lively debates and interrelations between different disciplinary domains. Yet, the legitimation of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of China is unsettled by the persistence of disciplinary boundaries, often putting a bar on collaborations between scholars trained in different disciplines. Taking an ongoing research project on the digital governance of the Chinese diaspora as a case study, this paper looks at the study of Chinese extraterritorial power and digital platforms as an illustration of the need of adopting a perspective to the study of China attentive to different concepts, vocabularies, and methodological tools. Drawing from the fields of sociology, anthropology, critical geography, mobility studies and digital humanities, the paper suggests the need for engaging China across intellectual traditions as a way for incorporating insights emerging from the study of China for the understanding of broader global processes and from the study of global processes for the understanding of China.