In the face of growing government repression, many residents of Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and various provinces of China have fled abroad to seek refuge. This fateful decision to uproot one’s life splits identity between a native homeland and a new diaspora, thereby complicating the relationship to oneself and to one’s community. Recent pieces on this theme demonstrate various individuals’ attempts to nonetheless forge new lives in ways that fuse past values with present realities. In an essay published this Wednesday by New Bloom, Kris Cheng reflected on his journey of exile from Hong Kong to the U.K. and Canada, and how old friends are building new homes:
The giant protests in 2019 drastically altered my life and the lives of many people like me forever. I became part of a 200,000-strong diaspora in the UK, where I have been living since mid-2021. In the past three years, I have been uprooted and had to start again. And I have learned so much about what home is, what home can be, and what we should do for our home.
[…] I hope they succeed. I hope everyone who is having to figure out how to make a new start in a new place and find a way to make a locale that is not Hong Kong feel truly like a new home, not just a place of exile. I hope they will be happy in their new lives even if, like me, they keep time by two clocks and still follow the often sad news from their old home. [Source]
As Amy Hawkins wrote in The Guardian, the migrant path towards freedom is much harder for those who do not already have a foothold in their host countries. Hawkins reported on Chinese migrants pursuing entry into the E.U. via the Balkans, a growing runxue waypoint after other more popular routes have been cut off. One of the men she profiled was accused of inciting subversion of state power in China for his political speech; he later participated in the A4 anti-government protests of November 2022. His decision to leave, like many other middle-class migrants, has put him in a precarious position:
“Staying here is not a very good option,” Zhang [a pseudonym] says, as his son and daughter chase after each other in the courtyard. But “if I go back to China, what awaits me is either being sent to a mental hospital or a prison.”
[…] “Going into other countries in this way is not very honourable for me, to be honest,” Zhang says. “We know that there are many countries where people hate people like us … but no one wants to leave his country if they are safe”. He says he only made the journey because of his family. “My children are very young,” Zhang says, referring to his 10-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter. “I couldn’t explain to them what’s really happening. I just told the children that I wanted to give them a better life … they have no future [in China] at all”.
[…] Some are using student or work visas to relocate to places where they can live and talk more freely, with new diaspora communities emerging in cities such as Bangkok, Tokyo, and Amsterdam. But others, often lower middle class people who don’t have the funds or the qualifications to emigrate by official means, are choosing more dangerous escape routes. […] Exact numbers are hard to come by [….] But in 2023, there were 137,143 asylum seekers from China, according to the UN’s refugee agency. That is more than five times the number registered a decade earlier, when Xi’s rule had just started. [Source]
Many migrants have fled China to avoid persecution for their speech and to seek countries where they can express their opinions more freely. Speech, and specifically language, thus becomes both a target of repression and a tool to fight against it, particularly in exile. Yangyang Cheng’s latest piece in China Books Review reflected on the role of language in connecting collective identities to home, even as they evolve over time and across borders:
Language threads through generations and binds one to a place — not necessarily to a physical location but to an idea of home. To suppress a language is to break that bond — as the Chinese government has been doing in Tibet and Xinjiang, where [Edward] Wong reported from. For those on the margins of empire, to hold onto one’s native tongue is to refuse the center’s hegemonic power.
[…] To write about one’s homeland from a foreign land and through a foreign tongue involves an act of translation. In the words of the English novelist and art critic John Berger: “[…] True translation demands a return to the pre-verbal.”
Language forms rules as well as their transgression. A return to the pre-verbal is a return to a place before the map, before edges were defined and borders were drawn. When the powers of statehood alienate language from the body and ossify words into political monuments, to return to the pre-verbal is to refuse the status quo, forgoing claims of sovereignty and braving a life in exile. To return to the pre-verbal is to go back to the river. Where there is water, one can make a home. [Source]
For persecuted ethnic groups forced into exile, such as Uyghurs and Tibetans, language is especially integral to their respective identities and cultures. In the latest issue of the Made in China Journal, Mirshad Ghalip examined the role of language attitudes and ideologies in Uyghur heritage language maintenance through the stories of Uyghurs in diaspora:
[T]he language ideologies of the Uyghur diaspora significantly influence their language maintenance practices—for instance, by leading them to form social connections with like-minded individuals and enforce rules in the home for heritage language maintenance. Additionally, the ongoing settler-colonial process of eliminating Uyghur identity in the Uyghur homeland is fostering a transnational language ideology that views the Uyghur language as integral to Uyghur identity and speaking Uyghur as a form of resistance.
[…] By placing these four differently positioned Uyghur diaspora members in conversation with each other, this essay has begun to sketch the contours of a transnational Uyghur language ideology. In each case it is clear that language ideology, particularly in relation to moral and political interests, plays a significant role in language maintenance. Muhtar and Bilig have rather strong language ideologies that place the Uyghur language at the centre of their Uyghur identity. On the other hand, Nisa’s and Makan’s language ideologies, which do not place the Uyghur language at the centre of their identity, contribute to a different outcome when it comes to language maintenance efforts [….] [Source]
