Imperial Transits: Chinese Labor Networks on German Shipping Lines and the Glocalized Nature of Chinese Diasporas in Hamburg and Bremen/Bremerhaven, 1870–1940

The 19th and early 20th centuries saw an unprecedented boom in temporary work migration from China to the Americas and to Europe and gave rise to the expansion of diasporic communities beyond the traditional settlements in South East Asia. Migration and diaspora studies have focused on identifying and delineating coherent ‘national’ diaspora communities abroad without questioning in detail the local elements of constructed “Chineseness” abroad or analyzing the transformative effects of the transit situations. Recent historiography has in fact claimed that not only people in transit but the constellation of the transit itself – especially on board the ships – needs to be analyzed as independent agency. The paper hence argues that Chinese migrants – both sojourners and permanent migrants – used the German imperial shipping lines to the Far East to establish subaltern patterns of entrepreneurship on board the ships that turned the assumed hierarchies of labor and race relations upside down. The specialized jobs of washers and stewards were dominated by a closely knit local guanxi network from Zhejiang (Ningbo in particular) who in turn controlled the German Chinese clubs and associations in the port cities Hamburg and Bremen. By utilizing the conceptual ideas of rites of passage, the paper argues that the imperial transits on board the German ships transforms the identities and practices of the leading members of Chinese overseas communities. The different elements of transformation through entrepreneurial agency, diaspora community with strong local overtones and rivalries, and shifting orders of allegiance in their identities offer a more nuanced and empirical notion of the hybridity of Chinese diaspora communities in the cases of Hamburg and Bremen/Bremerhaven.