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Building the Chinese Diaspora across Canada: Chinese Diasporic Discourse and the Case of Peterborough, Ontario

It has become a vogue for scholars to describe and analyze Chinese migration and migrants under the term ‘‘diaspora.’’ However, most previous studies have focused on the Chinese diaspora in a global, national, or metropolitan context and neglected the diasporic phenomenon as manifested in towns and small cities. A major purpose of this essay, therefore, is to fill the gap in the diasporic scholarship concerning small, localized communities by examining Chinese migration and networks around Peterborough, Ontario, which is about 110 km to the northeast of Toronto. Peterborough developed as an incorporated town from 1850 and then as an incorporated city from 1905, and it has long attracted migrants from China. It is typical of the many small urban communities of eastern Canada whose Chinese communities have rarely received scholarly attention. While this essay mainly reports the results of empirical research on the Peterborough case, it also offers a theoretical critique of cultural, ethnic, and especially diasporic studies of the Chinese overseas. Research on Chinese migration and migrants in the West has long been conducted under the influence of two major lines of scholarship: cultural and ethnic studies. The dominant approach of cultural studies usually discusses Chinese migrants and their descendants in the context of cultural traditions originating in China. It focuses on the continuity, transmission, and influence of Chinese cultural traditions and institutions among Chinese migrants and their descendants. In contrast, ethnic studies emerged from sociological research on races and racial relations, and this school naturally emphasizes Chinese migrants and their posterity as an ethnic minority of the receiving country and spotlights their relations with the state and majority group of the latter. Both cultural and ethnic studies have provided valuable but still limited insights into the experience of Chinese migrants, whether within the cultural boundary of China or within