TPCS 19: Chineseness as a moving target. Intermediate report for the HERA Project, Tilburg Case Study

By Jinling Li, Kasper Juffermans, Sjaak Kroon and Jan Blommaert

Introduction

The Chinese are one of the oldest established immigrant communities in the Netherlands, and they form one of the largest overseas Chinese populations in continental Europe. In July 2011 the Chinese community celebrated its centennial: one hundred years of Chinese in the Netherlands (Wolf 2011). The first Chinese immigrants were seamen who settled in harbor cities like Rotterdam, Amsterdam where they built Chinatowns. Later, Chinese immigrants and their children spread all over the county. Figures of the number of Chinese residing in the Netherlands vary a lot depending on the source and on the definition of ‘Chinese’. According to the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics, there were around 78,500 Chinese, (i.e. persons who were born or one of whose parents were born in mainland China, Hong Kong) in the Netherlands in 2011. Among them, 51,000 are first generation. In official statistics third and subsequent generation migrants are invisible and are registered only in terms of citizenship and country of birth).

Until 1990, Hong Kong people were the largest group within the Chinese community. However, this has been changed since the 1990 because of the political and economic changes in China. In the period of 1991-2000, people from mainland China, especially from Zhejiang province has increased dramatically to over 50 percent (CBS, 2011:4). After 2000, more and more Chinese students came to the Netherlands to study. From this period onwards, Chinese immigrants originated from all over China. This increase of diversity in the Chinese diasporic population meant a dramatic change of the status of Cantonese from main language of the diaspora, to only one of the dialects. The Chinese variety of the north, Mandarin or Putonghua steadily gained importance, both in China itself (see Dong 2009; Dong 2010) as well as in the diaspora (J. Li & Juffermans 2011).

The history of Chinese immigration to the Netherlands happened grosso modo in three stages. The first stage took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when Chinese pioneers began to immigrate to the Netherlands for a variety of reasons. As a push factor, there was the Taiping Rebellion against the ruling Qing dynasty between 1850 and 1864, a civil war that cost the lives of 20 million people. As a pull factor, there was the economic opportunity of being hired by Dutch shipping companies to break the Dutch seamen’s strike of 1911 (Pieke 1992). The Chinese pioneers who came directly from mainland China to the Netherlands were mainly from the provinces of Guangdong and Zheijiang. More precisely, the majority of them came from the Wenzhou and Qingtian districts in Zhejiang and the Bao On district in Guangdong (Pieke 1988; Pieke 1992; M. Li 1999).

This initial flow was followed in a second stage in the 1950s to 1970s by Chinese of various ethnic and regional backgrounds that had previously migrated to Java, Sumatra, Suriname, Vietnam, Singapore, Taiwan and Hong Kong. These double-migrants were mostly engaged in the catering business, i.e. in running Chinese restaurants thereby introducing Chinese-Indonesian (Chinees-Indisch) cuisine to the Netherlands. After the Second World War, there was an economic rebirth in the Netherlands. In 1947, there were only 23 Chinese restaurants in the whole of the Netherlands (Chen 1991). Towards the end of the 1970s, the total number had reached about 2000. Business was excellent for almost everyone. They were so popular that there were shortages of cooks and workers. During that time, China was undergoing political and cultural turbulences. i.e. the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, and had strict control of emigration. So it became very difficult for the Chinese settled in the Netherlands to bring over worker directly from their hometowns in mainland China. So in order to augment their manpower, the restaurateurs had to look for workers in areas outside mainland China. As a result, the Hongkongnese became the largest Chinese immigrant group in the Chinese immigrant community in the Netherlands. Until the 1990s therefore, Cantonese was the dominant language of the Dutch Chinese diaspora. The Hong Kong people became the largest group of Chinese immigrants in the Netherlands, representing 70 percent of the Dutch Chinese until the 1990s (CBS, 2010:6). Some Zhejiang restaurateurs commented that, because the only workers they could recruit were Hon Kong people, the Zhejiang restaurateurs had to learn Cantonese to be able to communicate with their employees. Li (1999) documented that in the same period, the Chinese immigrants who re-emigrated from Southeast Asia, like Singapore and Malaysia formed another labour source for the Chinese catering business in the Netherlands. Aslo in the same period, another re-emigrated group included Peranakan Chinese from Indonesia and political refugees from Indochina. Also between 1975 and 1982, the Dutch government accepted about 6,500 Vietnamese as political refugees. Among them, about one-fourth were ethnic Chinese (Li, 1998).

A third stage in the history of Chinese migration to the Netherlands is marked by a sudden rise of immigration from Mainland China after 1976 and more distinctly since the 1990s. The reason behind this third wave was the political and economic transformation in mainland China, of the People's Republic of China (PRC) where the social position of emigrants had shifted from being “betrayers of the motherland” to one of admiration (Li, 1999). Since the pursuit of material wellbeing was no longer considered taboo in mainland China and since the Chinese government had softened its severely defined emigration policies in the late 1970s. Many mainland Chinese migrated to western countries. As a result, in the final quarter of the twentieth century, the Chinese emigration was far greater than anything experienced during the first three-quarters of the century. This third stage is also characterized by the so-called liuxuesheng, i.e. Chinese students abroad and their dependants. 

In short, the flow of Chinese migration to the Netherlands is multi-layered and highly diverse in terms of the place of their origin, individual motivations and personal or family trajectories. And the demographic changes in the constitution of Chinese diaspora and their linguistic changes have far-reaching consequences for people’s language and identity repertoires, which is the theme of this research project.

How to quote: Jinling, L., Juffermans, K., Kroon, S., & Blommaert, J. M. E. (2012). Chineseness as a moving target: Intermediate report for the HERA Project, Tilburg Case Study. (Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies; No. 19).

Read the full working paper here: Chineseness as a moving target. Intermediate report for the HERA Project, Tilburg Case Study.