Weeping Qingdao Tears Abroad: Locating Chinese Publics in Colonial Malaya, circa 1919

Abstract

This article suggests that conditions of coloniality produce a sui generis public sphere, one which contains multiple, plurilingual collective audiences, rather than a single “bourgeois public sphere” (Habermas), or a single “imagined community” (Anderson). By way of illustration, it locates diasporic Chinese publics in the colonial public sphere of British Malaya, and argues for a more analytically differentiated understanding of their constituent collectivities, or what it refers to as “we” publics. It analyses a Chinese-language newspaper, the Yik Khuan Poh, elaborating the different “we” publics convened within its pages, and emphasising the regional and translocal geographies of collective belonging that exist within the “transnational we,” which models of diaspora tend to overdetermine. In situating the Yik Khuan Poh in its temporal and spatial contexts in the early twentieth century, this article also raises questions about the character of colonial public spheres in an era of significant globality.

Afterword: Newsprint Worlds and Reading Publics in Colonial Contexts

“…As Rachel Leow shows in her examples from British-controlled Malaya, while the state asserted a "monopoly of public articulation" through the installation of "speaking officials" as expert commentators on news and public affairs, local newspapers published the state-sanctioned statements side by side with their own correspondents' material, reducing the hierarchy to a set of dialogues and critiques. 30 In form as much as content, therefore, newspapers could flatten official discourse into a relationship of equivalence simply by juxtaposing contributions on the printed page.…”