Transnationalism & Boundary Making
Xu, AM. (2025) Neoliberal multiculturalism and ethnic entrepreneurial self: a transnational perspective on ethnicity in China. The Sociological Review.
This article contributes to a transnational perspective on ethnic identity construction. China Studies have predominantly focused on how power dynamics within the national boundary shape ethnic identity construction, China's increasing integration into the global capitalist system calls for a transnational approach to the study of ethnicity in the country. This article responds to this call by examining how Chinese Muslims negotiate ethnic identity and status hierarchies through transnational economic engagement. I argue that China’s ambition to establish itself as a global power has led to the emergence of a new official discourse of neoliberal multiculturalism, which redefines minoritized ethnicity as a global market asset. I show that Chinese Muslims have mobilized this neoliberal multiculturalism state discourse as a cultural repertoire to reimagine symbolic hierarchies of class, ethnicity and nation, and to negotiate authoritarian state power.
This article challenges the pitfall of methodological nationalism in research on refugee representation in the Western context. This project provides a comparative analysis of news coverage on the Syrian refugee crisis in the UK and Canada, showing how racialized discourses about refugees travel across national contexts to contribute to divergent nation-building projects. It demonstrates how media reports in both countries adopt a ‘victim-pariah couplet’ framework to unsettle refugee rights. While they emphasize distinctive discursive elements to construct different imaginaries about “the nation”, the construction of refugees as threats and passive victims both erase refugee’s own voice and reproduce their racialized image in the Western media.
Xu, AM. (2022) “Diasporic before the move: China’s Hui Muslims’ trade and ties with Iran and Muslimness.” In Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Diasporas, edited by Abdelhady, Dalia, and Ramy Aly, 262-273. Taylor & Francis.
This book chapter theorizes how migration and transnational connections shape Chinese Muslims' identity formation. Contrary to the prevalent notion that diasporic consciousness arises from transnational mobility, this study demonstrates how Hui Muslims cultivate a diasporic identity within China through integration into a transnational Islamic network.