New directions for overseas Chinese and migration studies: Migrants, state-diaspora relations and transborder governance

New Chinese migrations entail diversified migration paths and myriad migration geographies. It includes millions of emigrants from mainland China since the 1980s. It also refers to the recent migration of the diaspora groups in other Chinese communities beyond China, including those in Southeast Asia, Hong Kong (HK) and Taiwan. The ongoing movements of the Chinese descendants of the ‘old’ Chinese diasporas – those who migrated out from China from the nineteenth century to the late twentieth century – have bred an agile mobility paradigm amidst the overseas Chinese communities. Many of these people, as highlighted in Part III of this volume by Ong, Koh, and Cheong, have complicated the migration geographies of the Southeast Asian Chinese. A large number of them continue to move to cosmopolitan city centres inhabited largely by the ethnic Chinese. On the other hand, quite a number of those who migrated to the West in their 20s and 30s have returned to Asia. The movements of Taiwanese, mainland Chinese and HK Chinese also contributes to an evolving subregional and global migration landscape, with many of them moving within Greater China and to many other places in and beyond Asia (see various chapters in Parts I and II). New Chinese migrations as a whole also complicate the old Chinese diaspora hubs (such as the Chinatowns), as pointed out by Wong and Ang in the volume.