China in Argentina: Ethnographies of a Global Expansion (Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia) 3030924211, 9783030924218

Table of contents :
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Contents
Contributors
List of Figures
Chapter 1: Introduction: China in Argentina—Ethnographic Perspectives of a Global Expansion
Argentina–China: A Brief Overview of Political and Migratory Relations
China in Latin America
China in Africa
Contributions to This Volume
Beyond Orientalism: Markets, Cultures, and Power
References
Chapter 2: “Today we are all Chinatown”: Identity Struggle and Strategic Uses of Culture in Buenos Aires Chinatown
Introduction
Exploring Encounters
The History of Taiwan and Its Relationship with China
Encounters in Chinatown
Chinese Migration in Argentina
Bureaucracies and Identifications in the Urban Setting
Bureaucracies and Identifications in the Chinese New Year Ritual
Conclusion
References
Chapter 3: “The Language of the Future”: Mandarin Chinese as Cultural Identity and Merchandise in an Argentine-Chinese Bilingual School in Buenos Aires
Identities in the Classroom
National Symbolism
The Knowledge of Putonghua and Identity
Institutional Decisions
BACG School: Constitution and Tensions
Conclusion
References
Legal Documents
Chapter 4: “This Is Not Chinese Food”: Relocation, Authenticity, and Global Cuisines in Chinese Restaurants in Buenos Aires
Introduction
Chinese Restaurants in the Americas and in Buenos Aires
Performances of the Nation Through Gastro-Politics and Cultural Diversity Management Policies
China, Its Gastronomic Heritage, Global and Local Policies
Gastronomy, Multiculturalism, and the Marketing of Cities
Multiple Mobilities of a Gastronomic Tradition
Kitchens and Cooks: Knowing, Learning, Working
Space, Design, and Decoration
The Menu: Food Plates, Menu Design, and Language
Conclusion
References
Chapter 5: “Chinese Medicine Is Not Just Acupuncture”: The Experience of Chinese Immigrants in the Argentinian Healthcare System
Encounters Between Two Medical Models in China
Genealogy of “Chinese Medicine” and its Encounter with “Western Medicine”
Contemporary Encounters: Uses and Appropriations in Today’s China
Knowledge and Health Practices in China–Argentina Encounters
Migrant Itineraries: Between the Domestic and Public Spheres
Conclusions
References
Chapter 6: Avoiding Encounters: An Ethnographic Analysis of Sino-Argentine Business Relationships in Argentina’s Oil Industry
The Arrival of “Chinese Companies” in Argentine Patagonia
Chinese Investments in Argentina
Encounters in the Business World
The Dimensions of the Encounter: Imagination, Rationalization, and Results
Rationalize and Respond
Conclusion
References
Chapter 7: “Now Is All About China”: Recent Developments in Chinese Studies in Argentina
Introduction: Chinese Studies in Latin American Academia
Argentine Sinology in the Making: Individuals and Institutions
University of Buenos Aires (UBA)
National University of La Plata (UNLP)
National University of San Martin (UNSAM)
National University of Lanus (UNLa)
National University of Rosario (UNR)
National University of Córdoba (UNC)
International Joint-Research Center-National Scientific and Technical Research Council/Shanghai University (CIMI-CEIL-CONICET/SHU)
Universidad del Salvador (USAL)
Catholic University of Argentina (UCA)
Catholic University of Salta (UCASAL)
University of Congress (UC)
Catholic University of Córdoba (UCC)
Concluding Remarks: Argentine Sinology and Sinologists Within and Beyond Academia
References
Index

Citation preview

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL INTERCONNECTIONS BETWEEN LATIN AMERICA AND ASIA

China in Argentina Ethnographies of a Global Expansion

Edited by Máximo Badaró

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia

Series Editors Ignacio López-Calvo University of California, Merced Merced, CA, USA Kathleen López Rutgers University New Brunswick, NJ, USA

This series is devoted to the diversity of encounters between Latin America and Asia through multiple points of contact across time and space. It welcomes different theoretical and disciplinary approaches to define, describe, and explore the histories and cultural production of people of Asian descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. It also welcomes research on Hispano-Filipino history and cultural production. Themes may include Asian immigration and geopolitics, the influence and/or representation of the Hispanic world in Asian cultures, Orientalism and Occidentalism in the Hispanic world and Asia, and other transpacific and southsouth exchanges that disrupt the boundaries of traditional academic fields and singular notions of identity. The geographical scope of the series incorporates the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the Pacific Rim and the Caribbean region. We welcome single-author monographs and volumes of essays from experts in the field from different academic backgrounds. About the series editors: Ignacio López-Calvo is Professor of Latin American Literature at the University of California, Merced, USA and director of the UC Merced Center for the Humanities. He is author of several books on Latin American and US Latino literature. He is coexecutive director of the academic journal Transmodernity: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World. Kathleen López is Associate Professor in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and Department of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, USA. She is author of Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History (2013) and a contributor to Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought (2015), Immigration and National Identities in Latin America (2016), and Imagining Asia in the Americas (2016). Advisory Board: Koichi Hagimoto, Wellesley College, USA Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Brown University, USA Junyoung Verónica Kim, University of Pittsburgh, USA Ana Paulina Lee, Columbia University, USA Debbie Lee-DiStefano, Southeast Missouri State University, USA Shigeko Mato, Waseda University, Japan Zelideth María Rivas, Marshall University, USA Robert Chao Romero, University of California, Los Angeles, USA Lok Siu, University of California, Berkeley, USA Araceli Tinajero, City College of New York, USA Laura Torres-Rodríguez, New York University, USA

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15129

Máximo Badaró Editor

China in Argentina Ethnographies of a Global Expansion

Editor Máximo Badaró CONICET/Escuela IDAES-Universidad Nacional de San Martín Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina

Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia ISBN 978-3-030-92421-8    ISBN 978-3-030-92422-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92422-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword

The rush to judgment by scholars, pundits, and journalists prognosticating what China’s so-called rising presence in the global capitalist economy presages—often for North America and Europe—has created an echo chamber that, by its sheer repetitiveness, has made these assertions seem transparently true. Pulling one’s way out from under these speculative declarations is vital in order to gain more nuanced understandings that allow us to see the full complexity of the range of people and practices involved in China’s transformed global initiatives, especially in the Global South. Fortunately, China in Argentina offers us exactly the lifeline we need to breathe the air of new insights. Refusing to offer reductive and monolithic representations, these essays instead provide rich empirically based research about the wide range of actors, situations, investments, and socio-­­ cultural negotiations among Chinese and Argentinians. This research enables a scholarly examination of social, cultural, and economic life that shows their systematicity as well as their contingencies. We come to understand the dynamic yet non-deterministic processes of China’s more visible presence in Argentina. The authors featured here capture one of the central characteristics of China’s varied political and economic endeavors over the last century and a half: their experimental nature. China’s goals have historically been clear—strengthening the nation in the face of Western colonial powers— and the political discourse is quite well-defined today—to create a vital economy in China. Yet the means of attaining those goals have always been a process of provisional experimentation. Indeed, as these essays v

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reflect, the search for profit and resources has historically never been linear or based in certainty. These essays demonstrate exactly how ambivalent courses of action and deep misunderstandings in the “contact zones” lie at the heart of China’s endeavors in Argentina, as elsewhere in the Global South. At this moment of deep transformation (not merely “rise”) in China’s worlding projects, it is more important than ever to look beyond official government pronouncements, anxious prognostications, and one-sided research approaches. These richly empirical essays enable us to understand China’s ongoing experiments in engaging with the global capitalist economy by focusing on how the dynamic forces at work in Chinese-Argentine interactions arise through their encounters with one another rather than being solely imposed on them by a structural outside. They reveal the breadth and diversity of actors and types of enterprises, the multiplicity of those who make claims about the “way things are done” by Chinese; and the economic inequalities in which Argentinians are not mere passive recipients. Anyone who seeks to gain a richer appreciation of China’s heterogeneous global activities in the twenty-first century will need to read this book. Santa Cruz, CA, USA 

Lisa Rofel

Acknowledgments

We are very grateful to the people who shared their life experiences and their ideas with us during our fieldwork. Many thanks to the Palgrave Macmillan editors for their careful work with our book, and to the series editor and the reviewers for their insightful comments and suggestions. We also thank Lisa Ubelaker for her excellent work in revising the English language of some chapters of this book.

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Contents

1 Introduction: China in Argentina—Ethnographic Perspectives of a Global Expansion  1 Máximo Badaró 2 “Today we are all Chinatown”: Identity Struggle and Strategic Uses of Culture in Buenos Aires Chinatown 19 Luciana Denardi 3 “The Language of the Future”: Mandarin Chinese as Cultural Identity and Merchandise in an Argentine-Chinese Bilingual School in Buenos Aires 45 María Florencia Sartori 4 “This Is Not Chinese Food”: Relocation, Authenticity, and Global Cuisines in Chinese Restaurants in Buenos Aires 67 Romina Delmonte 5 “Chinese Medicine Is Not Just Acupuncture”: The Experience of Chinese Immigrants in the Argentinian Healthcare System 95 María Florencia Incaurgarat

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6 Avoiding Encounters: An Ethnographic Analysis of Sino-Argentine Business Relationships in Argentina’s Oil Industry121 Alejandra Conconi 7 “Now Is All About China”: Recent Developments in Chinese Studies in Argentina143 Ignacio Villagrán Index169

Contributors

Máximo  Badaró  is researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET, Argentina), and Professor of Social Anthropology at the Escuela Interdisciplinaria de Altos Estudios Sociales (Escuela IDAES) of the Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM, Argentina) where he is also the director of the Bachelor Degree Program in Social Anthropology and the “Global China Studies Program.” He holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS-France). He was research fellow of the “Understanding China” Fellowship Program of the Confucius Institute in China and visiting fellow at the Institute for Social Development at ECNU-NYU Shanghai. He has published three books and numerous articles in English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Alejandra  Conconi is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires. She holds a Master in Social Anthropology at the same university and a BA in Oriental Studies from Salvador University. Since 2010 she has worked for the main Chinese SOE in Argentina. Her research interests are the labor relations in the Chinese companies based in Argentina. Romina Delmonte  is a PhD candidate in Social Sciences at Universidad de Buenos Aires. She holds a BA in Sociology and a MA in Social Sciences Research at the same university. She is also an instructor in courses on Korean history and international migrations in the School of Social Sciences of the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Her research focus is on xi

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food, ethnicity, and Asian migrations in Latin America. In her doctoral ­dissertation, she examines how cuisines are part of national narratives, the ways Korean and Chinese cuisines are recreated in Buenos Aires, and how they relate to the performance of identities. Luciana  Denardi is a PhD Social Anthropologist, professor, and researcher at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Since 2012 she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork to explore different aspects of Chinese migration in Buenos Aires. Her main research interests are based on identities, associations, rituals, gender, and educational issues. She has published several book chapters and articles in scientific journals in Asia, Latin America, and Europe. María  Florencia  Incaurgarat  is a regular professor at the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (UNMdP, Argentina), a researcher at the Center of Social and Health Studies (CESyS-UNMdP), and holds a PhD in Social Anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín. She was twice granted scholarships by the Chinese government, one in 2018 to participate in the Young Sinologists Visiting Program in the city of Hangzhou, and the other in 2020–2021 for a Master’s Degree in Public Health at Tsinghua University, Beijing. Since 2012, she has been conducting ethnographic research with Chinese migrants in Argentina mainly addressing health-related issues, such as their health practices and representations, and their bond with the local health system. Lisa  Rofel  is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC, United States). She has published numerous books and articles on China, including Other Modernities (University of California Press, 1999), Desiring China (Duke University Press, 2007), and Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion, with Sylvia Yanagisako (Duke University Press, 2019). She is co-director of the Center for Emerging Worlds at the UCSC. María Florencia Sartori  holds a PhD in Linguistics, and is a professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Argentina. She is postdoctoral fellow at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET)/ Centro de Estudios del Lenguaje en Sociedad (CELES), Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina. Her research focus is on linguistic identities, language policies, and learning of heritage languages. In her doctoral thesis, she examines language policies towards the teaching

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of Putonghua to heritage speakers. She has published articles in scientific journals in Asia and Latin América. Ignacio Villagrán  is Director of the Argentina–China Studies Center of the School of Social Sciences of the Universidad de Buenos Aires and Coordinator of the East Asian Studies Group of the “Gino Germani” Research Institute. He is a professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento (UNGS). He holds a PhD in Asian Languages and Cultures from the University of Michigan, an MA degree in Asian and African Studies (Chinese Studies) from El Colegio de Mexico, and a BA in Political science from the University of Buenos Aires. His research interests concentrate on classical and early imperial political thought and administrative institutions in early and imperial China. He has recently started to survey the development of Chinese Studies Programs in Latin American universities.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4

The Arch at Chinatown Buenos Aires. (PH: Florencia Sartori) Screenshot of Mauricio Macri’s Facebook page. (Source: Florencia Sartori) Blackboard in the classroom. (Source: Florencia Sartori) “Faroles” dining area A porcelain vase in the corner of a dining area “Faroles” menu “Fuego’s” menu

33 48 54 85 86 87 88

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: China in Argentina— Ethnographic Perspectives of a Global Expansion Máximo Badaró

The phrase “China in Argentina” can have multiple meanings. In this book, it refers to the circulation, encounters, tensions, and negotiations between people, capital, objects, and images of Chinese origin or associated to China with other people, institutions, and representations in Argentina. Although it is evident that China and Argentina have defined territorial, normative, and political contours, they are also heterogeneous and changing social, economic, and cultural entities. The category “China” also designates a mobile entity whose social, cultural, and economic boundaries are constantly expanding globally. In this sense, Argentina and China represent both a delimited analytical starting point as well as an open analytical question.

M. Badaró (*) CONICET/Escuela IDAES-Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Badaró (ed.), China in Argentina, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92422-5_1

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The “China in Argentina” that we present in this book is not focused on providing a detailed or updated list of the bilateral trade figures and diplomatic agreements between the two countries. The commercial relationship between Argentina and China is an unequal relationship on many levels. For Argentina, the trade balance with China is largely in deficit: what China sells to Argentina is always greater than what it purchases. Argentina exports mostly raw materials to China, while China exports manufactured products to Argentina. This asymmetry in trade exchanges can also be found in China’s relationship with the rest of Latin America. Much has been written and speculated about China’s global expansion and its projects in Latin America (Dussel Peters & Armony, 2015; Hearn & Manriquez-León, 2011; Jenkins, 2019). In the case of Argentina, some observers consider that relations with China, based on the exportation of minerals and agricultural commodities, foster a primarization of the economy and produce new forms of economic and political dependence (Bolinaga, 2015a; Oviedo, 2015; Slipak, 2014;). Other studies focus on the economic complementarities of these relations and the opportunities that they present for Argentina in terms of diversification of the sources of external financing and the expansion of the international markets for its products (Moneta & Cesarin, 2012). In this book we do not subscribe to the dependency/complementarity dichotomy that prevails in most analyses of the trade and political relations between Argentina (or Latin America) and China; nor do we regard the Chinese presence and interests in Argentina (or Latin America) as univocal and uniform. We adopt a different analytical perspective. First, we conceive the global expansion of China as a heterogeneous and changing assemblage of political, social, and cultural projects that involve actors of different national origins (Armony & Strauss, 2012; Klinger & Muldavin, 2019; Oliveira & Myers, 2020). Second, far from assuming the internal coherence that many academic, political, and journalistic analyses tend to assign to China’s global expansion, we highlight its inconsistencies, improvisations, and tensions. China is learning to play a leading global role. This may not be evident if we only direct our gaze towards the documents and official discourses of the Chinese state; nor is it completely apparent in the global ubiquity of Chinese companies and products. However, if we pay attention to the daily interactions of actors and institutions of Chinese origin in different countries of the world (civil servants, expatriates, businessmen,

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immigrants), we find experiences, professional careers and corporate projects marked by uncertainty and tensions with local societies and states. In the same way, the Chinese diaspora in the world is also discovering its global role. In Latin America, immigrant communities from mainland China and Taiwan, which, until a few decades ago were ignored by the Chinese state and discriminated against by states and local societies, have recently begun to make their national origins and cultural practices more visible; moreover, local political and economic actors have started to court these immigrant communities in search of support and connections for their commercial projects with China. For many Chinese immigrants and their descendants in Latin America, their cultural and national origin has become a tool for gaining economic and political status, even if many of them continue to be objects of discrimination and segregation. The rest of the world is also learning to deal with China’s global prominence. A proliferation of manuals, courses, and experts have emerged that promise to provide the keys to deciphering the cultural codes for doing business in China; there is also a growing global interest in the Chinese language and “Chinese culture.” Until just a few decades ago, the attraction that China awakened in the world was limited to specific groups: Sinologists, enthusiasts of oriental cultures and languages, tourists, chroniclers, adventurous businessmen, some transnational corporations, and political officials. But today, as we enter the third decade of the twenty-­ first century, this situation has radically changed. China is no longer synonymous with exoticism and alterity or a promise of future growth that only the visionaries, the risk-takers, and the big players in global economics could decipher. On the contrary, China has risen on a list of privileged destinations to study, work, do business, incubate new companies, or explore new life experiences. Chinese universities, for example, are full of young foreign students; Chinese cities receive professionals, entrepreneurs, and workers from all nationalities, ages, and disciplines seeking professional, economic, and personal development. In Argentina, the drastic economic and social transformations and global expansion of China awakes admiration and attraction as well as concerns and doubts. In the media and social digital networks, for instance, it is not unusual to find xenophobic comments about Chinese immigrants. At the same time, news related to Chinese investment projects in Argentina arouses all kinds of fears as well as fantasies of economic salvation. In this book, we avoid the demonization or the idealization of Argentina’s relations with China. Instead, we focus on the analysis of the

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concrete practices and ideas of the people and institutions that embody the daily presence of China in Argentina. The book explores “encounters” (Faier & Rofel, 2014) among differences, that is, situations in which some cultural, social, and national dimensions of people and groups become relevant to establish differences, comparisons, conflicts, and alliances with other people and other groups. The chapters of the book show that people’s differences (cultural, national, professional, gender, etc.) are not completely prefigured before the encounters but become particularly salient in specific contexts of interaction.

Argentina–China: A Brief Overview of Political and Migratory Relations Bolinaga (2015b) identifies three major stages in Sino-Argentine diplomatic relations. The first stage began in June 1945, when the Argentine state “established diplomatic relations” with the Republic of China, and lasted until 1972. During this stage, Argentina and China maintained cordial relations but these were not particularly relevant, either politically or commercially. The second stage began in 1972, when the Argentine government and the People’s Republic of China decided to “normalize diplomatic relations,” which led to an increase in political and commercial exchanges between the two countries. It should be noted that in 1980, during a military dictatorship in Argentina, the country’s de facto president, General Jorge R. Videla, made an official visit to China, a first for a Latin America head of state. In the following decades, the two countries intensified their political and trade relations as China deepened its process of openness and reform and accentuated its global role. The last stage, which continues to the present day, began in 2003 with the election of Nestor Kirchner to the presidency. Kirchner gave a strong impetus to Argentina’s political and commercial relations with China. In November 2004, during Hu Jintao’s visit to Buenos Aires, the Argentine and Chinese governments signed a “Memorandum of Understanding on Trade and Investments.” This agreement established a strategic association between the two countries which implied an increase in the value of Argentine exports to China, Argentine recognition of China as a “market economy,” and an increase in Argentine diplomatic representation in China. Since then, bilateral relations between the two countries have not

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stopped growing and diversifying, transforming China into Argentina’s second largest trade partner. The development in the relations between the two countries has a correlation in the migration flows from China to Argentina. Although Argentina began to receive Chinese immigrants from the end of the nineteenth century, they were small groups of single men who occasionally settled in the country (Bogado Bordázar, 2002). The largest presence of persons of Chinese origin arrived from Taiwan at the end of the 1970s. These Taiwanese families founded the first Chinese community institutions in Argentina, including schools, temples, and civil associations; they were able to achieve some economic prosperity (Bogado Bordázar, 2002). Throughout the 1990s the number of Chinese immigrants arriving in Argentina, especially from mainland China, continued to rise. At the end of this decade, unofficial data estimations indicated that there were between 40,000 and 45,000 Chinese immigrants in Argentina, half of them of Taiwanese origin (Bogado Bordázar, 2002). The severe economic, social, and political crisis that Argentina experienced at the end of 2001 and the first semester of 2002 reduced the flow of Chinese immigrants to the country. Moreover, a significant number of Chinese immigrants living in Argentina returned to China and Taiwan or migrated to other countries (Bogado Bordázar, 2012). However, the economic recovery that took place since 2004 and the signing of a strategic partnership between the governments of Argentina and China fostered a new wave of Chinese immigration to Argentina, mainly from the Chinese province of Fujian. Since then, immigrants from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have far exceeded those of Taiwanese origin. Calculations of how many Chinese immigrants have entered the country differ according to the source consulted. The Argentine Immigration Department indicates that 60,000 Chinese immigrants have settled in Argentina since 2005 (Oviedo, 2017). Almost a decade later, in 2016, sources from the Chinese Embassy in Argentina stated that 180,000 immigrants of Chinese origin were living in the country (Ng & Restivo, 2018). In terms of labor and employment, most immigrants who arrived in the 1990s worked as owners of small supermarkets, restaurants, and workshops that sold cheap products imported from China. In the last decade, the working activities of Chinese immigrants have expanded into a diverse range of commercial and professional fields.

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China in Latin America One premise guiding this book is that the study of “China in Argentina” implies the study of a global process (Armony & Strauss, 2012). We engage in a dialogue with researchers that appeals to the notion of “global China” as a form of “pushing the empirical boundary of China studies beyond China’s territorial borders” (Lee, 2017), to study the “outside shadow” that China has “cast on many different arenas of world development.” This perspective also implies considering China not only as a container of global processes but also as a central source of their production (Hubbert, 2019). In the so-called “insertion” of China into global capitalism, China became the “factory of the world” through the massive export of cheap and low-quality goods, while opening its doors to the images, goods, and knowledge linked to the market economy and the Western capitalist world. These outside elements were represented as an external force breaking into the closed economic, social, and cultural landscapes of China. But this dynamic changed radically in just a few decades. China is no longer a setting where Western capitalism deploys its forces but rather a global actor shaping contemporary capitalism. While until very recently the research on China’s transformations tended to focus on the study of the effects of Western global capitalism in this country, the question arising now is which forms of globalization produce China’s growth and global expansion. In public debates and media in Latin America, the “Chinese presence” always appears as associated with the Chinese state. Whether talking about the networks of Chinese immigrants in the region, private or state-owned Chinese companies, or the sources of investment of Chinese capital in different sectors of the Latin American economy, the Chinese state is portrayed as the great helmsman of a strong Chinese outpost in the region. The growth of China’s global leadership is certainly linked to the “internationalization of the Chinese state.” The Chinese state both promoted and regulated the flows of capital, people, enterprises, and goods from China to the world. But this does not mean that the global expansion of financial resources, actors, and goods of Chinese origin follow the dictates of a monolithic, univocal, and all-powerful Chinese state that manages to impose itself unilaterally and uniformly all around the world. In fact, this portrayal of China’s global expansion provides little

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information about the actual implementation of the internationalization of the Chinese state in practical terms. Other approaches present a more dynamic and contextual view of China’s global expansion. Gonzalez Vicente argues that “framing the internationalization of the Chinese state as the mere reproduction of Chinese politics in international settings is not adequate” (2011: 407). This author combines studies of international relations and socio-cultural perspective on global processes to show that the internationalized Chinese state is a decentralized, heterogeneous, and hybrid entity in terms of its agents, projects, and interests. In some cases, the boards of Chinese state-­ owned companies operating abroad include only members of Chinese origin who respond directly to the Chinese state. In other cases, the boards of Chinese overseas state-owned or private companies also include CEOs of different nationalities. While the internationalization of Chinese private and state-owned companies in the mining, energy, agribusiness, and oil sectors in Latin America mainly respond to the needs of China’s domestic economic growth, the global operations of tech companies follow a market capitalist logic that seeks to produce economic gains. In many cases, when Chinese state-owned companies expand internationally, they go through internal restructuring processes that transform them into corporations that are similar to other private transnational companies, while making them less controllable by the central Chinese government, although they remain strategic branches of the Chinese state (Gonzalez-Vicente, 2011: 405). The competition with other local and transnational companies, the contacts with different national and subnational governments, the operation under multiples regulatory systems, and political and business cultures in different parts of the world affect the visions, objectives, and ideological perspectives of these companies. It is important to note that the internationalization of the Chinese state in Latin America also takes the form of “going local” through subnational agreements between Chinese provinces, cities, and companies with Latin American provinces and cities. Chinese companies and other private and state agencies have developed a great capacity to navigate different administrative levels in Latin America in order to offer technology, products, and services to local economic and political actors. This dynamic requires analytically disaggregating the figure of the “Chinese state” among different actors, objectives, and spheres of intervention.

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In a recent study, Mayer argues that “China’s local-level engagement in Latin America is a tangled web of overlapping interactions and a kaleidoscopic cast of characters” (Myers, 2020: 2). The promotion of China’s relations at the local level in Latin America responds to the objectives of Chinese companies and state agencies as well as to the individual initiatives of officials from different levels of government who seek to create links and business opportunities with China in order to reinforce their political position. In Argentina, different actors take part in this dynamic of subnational relations with their counterparts in China: business chambers, companies, civil associations, universities, municipal and provincial governments, institutions of the scientific and technological sector (Hidalgo, 2021). Many of these cooperative initiatives are part of “twinning” programs between cities or provinces. The bulk of Argentina’s economic transactions with China are concentrated in the Argentine provinces of Jujuy, Neuquén, and Santa Cruz. Jujuy, for example, is an emblematic case of subnational relations between Argentina and China in which a wide range of actors, interests, and economic sectors intervene. This province is “twinned” with the Chinese province of Guizhou. Between 2015 and 2020 Chinese business officials “made upwards of thirteen trips to Jujuy province, and Jujuy and Argentine national government officials made at least eleven visits to China” (Myers, 2020: 19). In most cases, subnational economic agreements and “twinning” between Argentine and Chinese cities, provinces, and companies are the result of personal relationships and trust built over time between Argentine and Chinese individuals who occupy positions of power in public and private sectors, as governors, mayors, businessmen, presidents of companies and universities, and scientists. Chinese immigrant associations in Latin America also play a key role in creating networks with China. According to Portes and Armony (2016), the Chinese diaspora in Latin America provides information, contacts, and intercultural and linguistic knowledge to diplomatic representations and to different political and economic actors involved in the relations between Latin America and China. These authors consider that most of the cultural activities of Chinese diasporic associations seek to preserve a “good image” of China abroad and promote the revitalization of Confucian values, in tune with the Chinese state: “Chinese immigrant transnationalism in Latin America is, to a large extent, the result of initiatives from above, that is, by

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the sending State rather than by the internal dynamics of the immigrant communities” (2016: 14). In line with this argument, Denardi (2019) shows that Chinese immigrant associations in Argentina take the form of a “diasporic bureaucracy” charged with promoting the political, economic, and cultural agendas of the Chinese government. This author also shows that political relations with the Chinese state creates tensions and conflicts inside these Chinese immigrant communities, mainly between Taiwanese associations and those with religious and political profiles that are not aligned with the Chinese government (see also Grimson et al., 2016). In his study on the Chinese diaspora in Cuba and Mexico, Hearn (2016) shows that the main catalyst for the convergence of the state and social interests between Latin America and China is the building of mutual trust. This author argues that Chinese migrants are accustomed to “brokering trust” on a transnational level, which implies combining social and political ties to their country of origin, family loyalties, and community ties to other migrant groups, with relations with the host country (2016: 10). Hearn considers that the associations, small businesses, and social and cultural activities of the Chinese diaspora are the human face of China in the world as well as a key resource for the creation of relations of trust between China and Latin American countries. The studies of the Chinese diaspora in Latin America also show that China’s economic and political growth has fueled a resurgence of ethnic and cultural identifications among Chinese descendants throughout the revitalization of the use or the learning of Chinese Mandarin, the recovery of cultural practices and traditions, and the reinforcement of the economic transactions and emotional ties with family and social networks in China. Their Chinese social and cultural background can also serve as a pathway of access to job opportunities in Chinese state and private companies based in Latin America. Müller and Colloredo-Mansfeld (2018) have drawn attention to the importance of relations with China for Latin American popular economies. For these authors, “whereas large-scale development projects can consolidate the power of corporate interests with state connections, the influx of Chinese manufactured goods has enlivened multiclass and multiethnic trading spaces—urban markets, transfer trading networks, and remote free trade zones” (2018: 2). These researchers explore the circulation of goods from China to Latin America as a “globalization from below” (Mathews et  al., 2012) mobilized by ethnic and territorial

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networks of popular sectors and indigenous groups (Colloredo-Mansefeld, 2018; Müller, 2018), and the transnational networks of the Chinese diaspora (DeHart, 2018). Chinese and Taiwanese immigrants and their descendants in Latin America make a flexible use of their cultural, ethnic, and national identities for building their reputation and gaining a power position in the trading relations with China (Chan, 2018; DeHart, 2018; Denardi, 2015, 2016; Pinhero-Machado, 2011).

China in Africa For many analysts, the presence of China in Africa is a mirror of the Chinese presence in Latin America. In the last two decades, both continents have registered a strong increase in their economic and political relations with China, which is expressed in the exports of raw materials, the receipt of financial loans, the expansion of investments in mining, agriculture, and infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams, factories, ports), the flow immigrants and workers, and the import of Chinese products, technologies, and services. However, there are significant differences in China’s engagement in Africa and Latin America. In one of the few comparative studies on China’s economic and political expansion in these two continents, Jenkins argues that beyond the specific objectives of China in each region, the main differences reside in the relations that the countries of these continents maintain with China. The main drive of China’s relations with both continents is to gain access to raw materials that fuel the country’s industrial growth and the consumption of its population. Although both continents are key sources of minerals for China, Latin America is more important than Africa as a supplier of agricultural commodities. Chinese investments in both continents also aim to open up new markets for Chinese manufactured goods. For some Latin American countries with important levels of technological and industrial development and domestic production, the massive imports of Chinese products pose a significant risk of deindustrialization. In Africa, where most of the countries lack a solid industrial development, Chinese investments and imported Chinese manufactured goods can represent benefits in terms of transfer of technology, and access to equipment and low-cost consumer products. In many cases, Chinese investments abroad also involve the migration of Chinese workers. In 2014, 63 percent of Chinese labor exports were concentrated in Asian countries, followed by Africa (23 percent) and Latin

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America and the Caribbean (6 percent). In 2019, the top five countries with Chinese workers were Algeria, Angola, Nigeria, Zambia, and Kenya. These countries accounted for 50 percent of all Chinese workers in Africa where most Chinese labor migrants work in private and state-owned Chinese companies contracted to build large infrastructure projects (CARI, 2020). Brautigam (2010, 2011) observes that the presence of Chinese migrant laborers has led to the creation of a myth: that Chinese companies in Africa bring their own native workers and do not hire local workforces. Although the number of Chinese workers in Chinese subcontractors in Africa is important, Chinese company operations largely depend on the massive hiring of local workers. For Brautigam, the comparative advantage for Chinese companies abroad is not related to hiring cheap unskilled Chinese workers but rather their expatriate managers that are paid low salaries. According to a recent report, “the number of Chinese workers in Africa by the end of 2019 was 182,745 […] From 2018 to 2019, the total number of Chinese workers in Africa has declined by 10%. This continues the trend of declining numbers of Chinese workers in Africa, down from a peak of 263,659 in 2015” (CARI, 2020). These figures differ significantly from the number of Chinese workers in Chinese companies operating in Latin America. According to official Chinese figures, at the end of 2015 there were around 26,000 Chinese workers employed in these companies’ projects in Latin America (Jenkins, 2019). Although most Chinese companies seek to increase the quotas of Chinese employees in their international operations (Dussel Peters & Armony, 2017), they have to follow the labor regulations of each country and diplomatic agreements that in many cases oblige them to hire local workers. In more industrialized countries such as Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, unions exert an important pressure on foreign company operations. In the last decade, Chinese companies that employed a majority of Chinese workers (or that tried to do so) in Latin America, including cases in Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru, aroused extensive media coverage and strong criticism. The use of low-skilled Chinese workers has been more common in Caribbean countries like Costa Rica, Honduras, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Antigua, and particularly for large construction projects: sports stadiums, highways, hydroelectric dams, and public buildings (Mazza, 2016).

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The brief comparison between the presence of China in Africa and Latin America shows that China’s global expansion is not a uniform and one-dimensional process. There is no doubt that the operations of Chinese companies in Africa and Latin America respond to commercial, political, and diplomatic needs and goals of the Chinese government and private Chinese actors. But what these public and private actors can actually do at the national or subnational level in Africa and Latin America also responds to the economic, social, political, and cultural realities of the different states and societies of these continents.

Contributions to This Volume Chapter 2 in this volume, by Luciana Denardi, analyzes the impact of China’s global rise through the cultural identification of immigrants from the People’s Republic of China and Taiwan in the City of Buenos Aires. The chapter explores the identity struggles among these immigrant groups when the local government started to promote this city’s “Chinatown” as an emblematic district of cultural diversity, which included an important project of urban revaluation and the installation of the emblematic Chinese Arch. In analyzing the processes of commodification and spectacularization of “Chinese culture” in Buenos Aires’s Chinatown, this chapter shows how actors negotiate and make strategic uses of cultural, national, and religious identifications in order to secure economic and political positions in Argentine society. In Chap. 3 María Florencia Sartori analyzes the Bilingual Argentine-­ Chinese Dual Immersion School (la Escuela de Inmersión Dual Bilingüe Argentino-China) in Buenos Aires. At this public school, Chinese descendants study alongside students who do not have this cultural background. This institution is the first and only school with these characteristics in Argentina. The chapter reveals a tension in the purpose of this school: teaching Chinese as the first foreign language or teaching it as a heritage language. What this discrepancy shows are the tensions between two ways of understanding the language itself: whether it is an inherited element of identity, or it is something that can be commodified, particularly given China’s present (and future) relevance. Romina Delmonte’s contribution, Chap. 4 in this volume, presents an ethnographic analysis of Chinese restaurants in the city of Buenos Aires. Chinese restaurants have risen in number and diversity over the last several decades. The chapter shows how Chinese identities in general, and Chinese

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cuisine specifically, are recreated and performed through the interaction between restaurant owners, employees, and consumers. In these interactions, the various actors negotiate ideas about cultural authenticity, culinary traditions, taste, and economic profit. In Chap. 5, María Florencia Incaurgarat explores the encounters between Argentina and China in terms of health care practices and bodily representation and knowledge. Incaurgarat examines Chinese immigrants’ health practices and how they navigate the Argentine health system; she illustrates how Chinese immigrants display and negotiate their knowledge and practices about the body, health, and disease when they seek health care attention in Argentina. In Chap. 6, Alejandra Conconi analyzes labor relations between Argentine professionals and expatriate Chinese managers in Chinese state-­ owned companies operating in the oil industry in Argentina. The opacity and ambiguity of the roles and power of the Chinese expatriates mark the labor relations in these companies. Under Chinese management, local employees are confronted with new ways of leadership and labor relations. The chapter shows that professionals deal with frictions, conflicts, and cultural misunderstandings by avoiding encounters in their work. In Chap. 7 Ignacio Villagrán presents a detailed institutional analysis of the development of the field of China Studies in Argentina. The chapter describes the recent contributions by scholars and research institutions that produce expert knowledge on China in Argentina, the creation of academic networks, and their impact on policymaking.

Beyond Orientalism: Markets, Cultures, and Power The actors studied in this book employ images and stereotypes of China and Chinese people that have a much longer historical trajectory in Latin America. One key antecedent is the image of the Chinese as a “yellow peril” that appeared in Europe in the late nineteenth century, and spread to the Americas. The discourse of Asians as the yellow peril is connected to the resistance of people of Chinese origin to the European imperial expansion in Southeast Asia as well as to the socio-cultural legacies of the cruel “coolie trade” system of trafficking of Asian workers—mainly Chinese—to Cuba, Peru, and the British colonies in the Caribbean in the nineteenth century (Beltrán Antolín, 2016). After the end of the coolie trade system, Chinese immigrants were depicted as a danger to public health, morality, and the labor market in the United States and many Latin

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American countries. In her analysis of Chinese immigration in Cuba, Peru, and México—three countries with traditionally large Chinese populations—López argues that well into the middle of the twentieth century, “anti-Chinese discourse portrayed them as ‘aliens’ to be expunged rather than incorporated into the national body” (2014: 199). During the Cold War, the narrative of China as a “peril” included a new ingredient: the risk of the expansion of the communist threat. At the same time, many Latin American left-wing movements looked with admiration at communist China, viewing it as a model society and a political alternative to Western capitalism. In a similar vein, during the first half of the twentieth century, some Latin American intellectuals imagined a pristine cultural Orient as a radical counterpoint to the materialism and Western scientific paradigms that they criticized (Gasquet, 2015). Nowadays, in many Latin American societies, China and Chinese people are still linked to images of the exotic, threatening, and enigmatic alterity, and to orientalist representations of “the Orient”  (Zelideth & Lee-DiStefano, 2011). Some of these images appear in this book. For example, Conconi’s chapter shows how the image of Chinese citizens as radical Others appears in the way that Argentine workers describe their encounters with Chinese employees in oil companies, referring to them using terms like “aliens” or “the shadows.” Demonte’s chapter shows how essentialized images about China and “oriental culture” permeate the aesthetic organization of “Chinese restaurants” in Buenos Aires. Despite the diversity of topics covered, the chapters of this book converge in the analysis of three central axes for understanding the place of China in Argentina and in regard to China’s global expansion: market, culture, and power. Most of the chapters show that in Argentina, China appears first and foremost as an economic actor. We can find ideas, representations, and expectations about the current economic power of China in public celebrations of the Chinese New Year, in the redefinition of the cultural and national identities of immigrants, in the aesthetic, culinary, and labor organization of restaurants, in the value attributed to language learning, “Chinese medicine,” or in shaping the field of Chinese studies. The chapters also show that the economic and commercial interests that drive the relations with people, knowledge, goods, and images of Chinese origin in Argentina are embedded in social relations and cultural representations about China. In the presence of China in Argentina, the economic, cultural, religious, political, family, media, and diplomatic spheres appear intertwined. Moreover, for many social actors, an

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understanding of the “Chinese culture” is perceived as a condition for establishing economic relations with China. In fact, for many people in Argentina, everything that has to do with China refers directly to “Chinese culture,” whether it is business, social relations, or Chinese immigrant health practices. The perspectives that focus on “culture” as the almost exclusive prism to interpret anything related to China in Argentina run the risk of reinforcing an essentialist vision of China’s cultural alterity, while also making invisible the cultural dimensions of the economic and political practices of people of other national origins in Argentina. The reference to “Chinese culture” is also used as a source of power. Since the impressive growth of China’s global economic power, many Chinese immigrants and their descendants found that their national and cultural identities and their family ties to China could provide them access to job opportunities, business networks, and a new social status in Argentina. In a similar vein, many Argentine actors seek to create relations with China as a way to reinforce their political and economic power at the domestic level. In this sense, China is a source of power that many actors use for all kinds of projects. Finally, this book attempts to move away from the Orientalist perspectives that presuppose a radical difference between East and West. This classical orientalism is still alive in many academic, political, and journalistic views of China, but it is also a discourse that different sectors of the Chinese elites use to legitimize their political and economic practices. This “Orientalism of the Orientals” (Dirlik, 1996) uses essentialist ideas of Chinese culture and history to control society, promote nationalist sentiments, attract global capital, or monopolize positions in commercial networks (Ong, 1999). While “auto-orientalism” acquires greater force in China, Vukovich (2012) argues that some Anglo-Saxon academic studies have developed a new form of “Sinological orientalism” that has gone from the logic of the “essential difference” to the logic of “similarity” or equivalence between China and the West: the drastic growth of cities, the impressive economic and technological development and its leading role in the global economy would be indicators that China is becoming one of “us,” that is, very similar to the West. This author argues that this “orientalism of the similarity” consecrates and naturalizes Western liberal modernity and market economy as the triumphant model of the current world. Beyond the old and new forms of orientalism, the chapters in this book show the problematic and flexible nature of the analytical categories on

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which many of the studies of China are based: East, West, China, Chinese culture, tradition, guanxi, etc. From an ethnographical perspective, these categories are open questions whose answers are linked to specific historical contexts. These categories do not define stable and permanent objects of knowledge, places, practices, or cultures. Its boundaries and meanings are mobile, blurry, and highly contextual. For this reason, it is no longer a question of transforming China into an exotic and clearly identifiable object of study; rather, this book proposes to explore the practices, ideas, places, and actors involved in the production of the multiple dimensions of China as a global actor.

References Armony, A., & Strauss, J. (2012). From going out (Zou chuqu) to arriving in (desembarco): Constructing a new field of inquiry in China–Latin America interactions. The China Quarterly, 209, 1–17. Beltrán Antolín, J., Haro, F.J, & Sáiz López, A. (eds.) (2016), Representaciones de China en las Américas y la Península Ibérica, . Bogado Bordázar, L. (2002). Migraciones internacionales. Influencia de la Migración China en el Río de la Plata. Tesis de maestría en Relaciones Internacionales. UNLP. Bogado Bordázar, L. (2012). Los chinos de ultramar en el Siglo XXI: características de la emigración china en la Argentina. In C. Moneta & S. Cesarín (Eds.), La Tentación Pragmática. China-Argentina/América Latina: Lo actual, lo próximo y lo distante (pp. 337–362). EDUNTREF. Bolinaga, L. (2015a). Política china en el Río de la Plata ¿Asociación estratégica o nueva dependencia? Nueva Sociedad, 259, 69–80. Bolinaga, L. (2015b). Del socio inglés a la asociación estratégica con China: Argentina y el realismo periférico. Si Somos Americanos, 15(1), 83–113. Brautigam, D. (2010). The Dragon’s gift: The real story of China in Africa. Oxford University Press. Brautigam, D. (2011). China in Africa: Seven myths, ARI 23/20011, Elcano Royal Institute. CARI-China-Africa Research Initiative. (2020). Chinese workers in Africa. Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. http://www.sais-­cari.org/ data-­chinese-­workers-­in-­africa Chan, C. (2018). Imagining and linking Latin America: Chinese regional mobilities and social networks in Chile. Journal of Latin American Geography, 17(2), 23–45. Colloredo-Mansefeld, R. (2018). The rise and fall of cheap Chinese goods in Ecuadorian popular markets: The limits of post-neoliberal development in

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Correa’s Ecuador. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 23(1), 37–55. DeHart, M. (2018). Chino Tico routes and repertoires: Cultivating Chineseness and entrepreneurism for a new era of trans-Pacific relations. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 23(1), 74–93. Denardi, L. (2015). Ser chino en Buenos Aires: historia, moralidades y cambios en la diáspora china en Argentina. Horizontes antropológicos, 21(43), 79–103. Denardi, L. (2016). Cassettes, redes y banquetes. Prácticas comerciales de chinos, taiwaneses y argentinos desde Buenos Aires. Etnografías Contemporáneas, 2(2), 134–160. Denardi, L. (2019). Las relaciones y políticas del estado chino con su diáspora. Apuntes sobre la burocracia diaspórica desde Argentina. Journal de Ciencias Sociales, 7(13), 49–64. Dirlik, A. (1996). Chinese history and the question of orientalism. History and Theory, 35(4), 96–118. Dussel Peters, E., & Armony, A. (Eds.). (2015). Beyond raw materials. Who are the actors in the Latin America and Caribbean-China relationship? Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Dussel Peters, E., & Armony, A. (2017). Efectos de China en la cantidad y calidad del empleo en América Latina y el Caribe. OIT Informe Técnico, 6, 1–103. Faier, L., & Rofel, L. (2014). Ethnographies of encounter. Annual Review of Anthropology, 43, 363–377. Gasquet, A. (2015). El llamado de Oriente. Historia cultural del orientalismo argentino (1900–1950). Eudeba. Gonzalez-Vicente, R. (2011). The internationalization of the Chinese state. Political Geography, 30(7), 402–411. Grimson, A., Ng, G., & Denardi, L. (2016). Las organizaciones de inmigrantes chinos en la Argentina. Migración y Desarrollo, 26(14), 25–73. Hearn, A. (2016). Diaspora and trust: Cuba, Mexico and the rise of China. Duke University Press. Hearn, A., & Manriquez-León, J. L. (Eds.). (2011). China engages Latin America: Tracing the trajectory. Lynne Rienner Publishers. Hidalgo, E. (2021). La cooperación subnacional entre Argentina y China. Pagina, 12, 11. de abril de 2021. Hubbert, J. (2019). China in the world: An anthropology of Confucius institutes, soft power, and globalization. University of Hawaii Press. Jenkins, R. (2019). How China is reshaping the global economy: Development impacts in Africa and Latin America. Oxford University Press. Klinger, J., & Muldavin, J. (2019). New geographies of development: Grounding China’s global integration. Territory, Politics, Governance, 7(1), 1–21. Lee, C. K. (2017). The specter of global China: Politics, labor, and foreign Investment in Africa. University of Chicago Press.

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López, K. (2014). In search of legitimacy: Chinese immigrants and Latin American nation building. In N. Foote & M. Goebel (Eds.), Immigration and National Identities in Latin America 1850–1950 (pp.  182–204). The University Press of Florida. Mathews, G., Lins Ribeiro, G., & Vega, C. A. (Eds.). (2012). Globalization from below: The world’s other economy. Routledge. Mazza, J. (2016). Chinese migration to Latin America and the Caribbean. The Dialogue, Inter-American Dialogue. Moneta, C., & Cesarin, S. (2012). Tejiendo redes: estrategias de las empresas transnacionales asiáticas en América Latina. UNTREF. Müller, J. (2018). Andean-Pacific commerce and credit: Bolivian traders, Asian migrant businesses, and international manufacturers in the regional economy. Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 23(1), 18–36. Müller, J., & Colloredo-Mansfeld, R. (2018). Introduction: Popular economies and the remaking of China-Latin America relations. Journal of Latin America and Caribbean Anthropology, 23(1), 1–9. Myers, M. (2020). An assessment of China’s administrative-level activity in Latin America and the Caribbean. The Dialogue, Inter-American Dialogue. Ng, G., & Restivo, Ne. (2018). Comunidad china: vivir en Argentina. Una aproximación a la experiencia de los inmigrantes chinos. Revista de la Red China & América Latina. REDCAEM.  Retrieved March 20, 2018. https://chinayamericalatina.com/comunidad-­china-­vivir-­en-­argentina/ Oliveira, G., & Myers, M. (2020). The tenuous co-production of China’s belt and road initiative in Brazil and Latin America. Journal of Contemporary China, 30(129), 481–499. Ong, A. (1999). Flexible citizenship. The cultural logics of transnationality. Duke University Press. Oviedo, E. (2015). El ascenso de China y sus efectos en la relación con Argentina. Estudios Internacionales, 47(180), 67–90. Oviedo, E. (2017). Introducción a la Migración China en Argentina. JSapiens, 1(1), 1–41. Pinhero-Machado, R. (2011). Made in China: (in)Formalidade, pirataria e redes sociais na rota China-Paraguai-Brasil. Hucitec. Portes, A., & Armony, A. (2016). Rescatando valores ancestrales y creando nuevos lazos: el transnacionalismo chino en América Latina. Migración y desarrollo, 14(26), 3–23. Slipak, A. (2014). América Latina y China: ¿Cooperación Sur-Sur o Consenso de Beijing? Nueva Sociedad, 250, 102–113. Vukovich, D. (2012). China and orientalism. Western knowledge production and the P.R.C. Routledge. Zelideth, M., & Lee-DiStefano, D. (Eds.). (2011). Imagining Asia in the Americas. Rutgers University Press.

CHAPTER 2

“Today we are all Chinatown”: Identity Struggle and Strategic Uses of Culture in Buenos Aires Chinatown Luciana Denardi

Introduction Vesak is the celebration that commemorates the Birth of the Buddha1 which took place in the year 2557 BC in India. In Buenos Aires, along with the Chinese New Year and the Mid-Autumn Festival, it is one of the rituals organized by the Asociación Barrio Chino (Chinatown Association) every 1  In this article, the words in italics correspond to those expressed by the interlocutors in an ethnographic fieldwork situation. Names of institutions and interlocutors has been changed to preserve confidentiality.

L. Denardi (*) Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET)/ Escuela IDAES-Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Badaró (ed.), China in Argentina, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92422-5_2

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year. The celebration has two features: the first one implies the realization of the Buddhist cult2 with sutras, mantras,3 songs, and offerings. The second consists of letting water run over a small statue of Buddha as a symbol of inner cleansing and to recall that we must have a pure mind. Due to this the event is also known as the bath of the Buddha.4 In the year 2013, the celebration of Vesak was led by Alberto and Claudio5 along with the Chinatown Association and the Templo Budista (Buddhist Temple) located in the area of Belgrano neighborhood. Migrants and descendants of Chinese and Taiwanese migrants are invited to participate. Like the other events mentioned above that were being held in Barrio Chino (Chinatown), the stage is located on the corner of Olazábal and Arribeños streets. On the Arribeños street, occupying the whole block between Olazabal and Mendoza, the pools (three or four of them, each about 2 meters long, with a few little Buddha figures inside) are placed to perform the Buda’s Bath. Assistants are located on the sidewalks, behind the fences. Across Mendoza street, on Arribeños street there are stands of associations, food, and typical Chinese articles. A large white and gold Buddha statue is placed on the stage. Around it, wooden instruments, incense, pyramid-shaped fruit trays, and many flowers are arranged. It is a kind of reproduction of the Temple on the stage, not only by the Buddha but also by the two rows of four rectangular tables on each side, with pink tablecloths of shiny silk. Before the ceremony itself, some artistic and martial arts demonstrations took place. Afterwards Claudio began to summon the authorities to formally start the event. First, the president of the Belgrano’s neighborhood commune gave a short speech, in which he stated that the neighborhood is open to the Chinese community and respects all religions. He was followed by the General Director of Communities of the Buenos Aires City Government, who thanked China and Taiwan’s communities for the  Buddhist religious ceremonies are called cult.  Both mantras and sutras are defined as a ritual formula chanted or recited in Sanskrit. The difference, according to some interlocutors, is that the mantra is the repetition of sounds that aim to calm the mind, while the sutra is also a repetition but has a meaning. Many sutras originate from the sacred teachings of the Buddha, his sermons, and his discourses. Some are very well known, and there are usually versions with music for some of them. 4  To read an anthropological analysis about the ways in which this celebration is adopted and resignified by multiple Chinese actors and converts in Buenos Aires, see Carini & Gracia (2016). 5  Alberto, approximately 50 years old, was born in Taiwan and arrived in Argentina as a 10-year-old boy. Claudio is in his 40s and his parents moved to Argentina when he was a baby. 2 3

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invitation, pointing out that water is a symbol of purity and represents community values, that the communities are a reservoir of values such as “love of family, work,” and that “the desire to progress are common values to all communities” and those are their contributions to the city. Then the organizer of the event, the president of the Buddhist Association, said some words in Chinese, which Alberto translated with some difficulty. He greeted the Mayor Master6 of Latin America, as well all the assisting Masters and the Taipei Cultural Office. He comments that the Buddhist Association is an international religious organization “whose function is culture, education, charity and the practice.” While the authorities continue giving speeches on the stage, Claudio answers some questions for a TV show interview. Then he runs to the stage to give a short explanation of what is being celebrated, and in what way, to the attendees. Meanwhile the Masters start to go onto the stage carrying offerings, while Claudio explains the symbolism of each one. The first offering is the incense that helps to obtain peace of mind and the purification of the body and karma. It helps people to hear the teachings of the Buddha, and to reach mental serenity. Two rows of Chinese and Taiwanese authorities go up on stage, placing a golden lion containing the incense on each table. The second offering is taken to the stage by female disciples from the monastery. They carry flowers “to resolve issues with delicacy, to inspire joy in others, to have a clean and perfumed body. The flowers have decency and purity, because they grow upward and are freed from the earth pollution. Our impurities become qualities of the flower,” says Claudio. The disciples are middle-aged women, who wear black dresses and fuchsia jackets and have their hair tied up.7 The third offerings were lamps carried by the young people of the monastery, wrapped in cellophane paper, to sharpen the six sensory organs: eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, and mind. By sharpening the senses, wisdom is perfected and work success is obtained. Once the offerings are made, the public is invited to bathe the Buddha, guided by the temple disciples so that it is carried out with order and correctness. The instrument for collecting the water—a bamboo rod with a 6  This is the category used to designate the Buddhist spiritual leader or guide. In this Buddhist Association both the Major Master and all the disciples are women. 7  As a general criteria, Buddhist temples cannot be entered with loose hair or bare shoulders.

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small cup at the end—must be taken and the water poured over the left shoulder of the Buddha and then over the right one. In my prowling around, while I listened to what Claudio said into the microphone, I saw Rosa8 very busy, carrying and bringing centerpieces with water and a red rose to tables that were outside her teahouse. I approach Claudio, greet him, and congratulate him on the event. I tell him that I am doing a note for the blog.9 Claudio is pleased and says: “It’s very important for all of us [the blog post, the broadcast of the event],” “please come and meet the lady who opens the door [of Rosa’s Tea house] so she can see your face and let you in. I’m going to tell her that you’re working with us.”

A little puzzled to see authorities from Chinese and Taiwanese associations, representatives of the Jewish community, and city government officials gathered together, I asked him what does we mean. “Chinatown, today we are all Chinatown”, he answered.

Exploring Encounters The category “encounter” refers to the socio-cultural dynamics that bring together different actors and that produces new meanings, categories, objects, and identities (Faier & Rofel, 2014). This chapter explores the encounters between Chinese and Taiwanese migrants, who are culturally very close but who—in terms of identity—seek at the same time to approach and differentiate themselves in the city of Buenos Aires. As a result of this encounter, I will describe the power relations reconfiguration between both groups. I analyze the way global processes derived from the rise and prevalence of China in the world are evidenced in the local context, at the identifications of migrants, the uses and appropriations of urban spaces, and the 8  Rosa is a Taiwanese woman in her 70s. She dresses fashionably, usually has colored hair, and at the time she owned a tea house that closed in early 2019. 9  The blog is an online platform where people post texts. During some years in which I developed my ethnographic field work, I generated publications for an association blog. The president of this association was looking for someone to give “the Argentinean touch” to the writing of topics related to the Chinese culture in Buenos Aires and to the activities of the association and the community. This blog gave me access to spaces, information, and translations that by my own means would have been difficult to obtain.

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ritual meanings and symbols. These processes take place in Buenos Aires Chinatown, here considered as a scenario of tensions and disputes not only among migrant groups, but also among diverse actors of local society: neighbors, the State, and the general public. Chinatown is the scene where the commercialization of Chinese identity is most evident. As John Comaroff and Jean Comaroff (2011) state, this process implies transforming culture into merchandise while objectifying it in order to simplify its communication and consumption. For the collectives, far from undermining their identity, it is an opportunity to pop up and use it as an object of political struggle. In other words, commodified culture becomes a means of self-construction and material sustenance for groups. The methodology used for the realization of this chapter is qualitative. Intensive ethnographic fieldwork was carried out mainly between 2012 and 2015. Since then, although the focus of my research has shifted to other issues related to Chinese migration in Buenos Aires, I have maintained contact with informants and collected data from interviews and informal talks that allow me to trace a continuity to the present. The History of Taiwan and Its Relationship with China The history of Taiwan and its link with mainland China has several chapters of rapprochement and distancing. Also known as Formosa Island, the official name is Republic of China. Currently, less than twenty countries recognize it as an independent state, and therefore do not maintain diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China. In the sixteenth century, Dutch pirates arrived and introduced new capitalist ways of labor, literacy, and Christianity. In 1660 the Ming dynasty expelled the Dutch with the aim of sinicizing the population and imposed in Taiwan a centralized government and an education based on Confucius’s teachings. Twenty-five years later, the island would be annexed to China as part of Fujian Province. After several failed invasion attempts by Japan and France, in 1895 a weakened Qing dynasty ceded Taiwan to Japan through the Shimonoseki Treaty. That year, independence movements began to emerge on the island, creating the Democratic Republic of Taiwan, which was dissolved in late 1895. Fifty years of Japanese domination followed. In 1919 the process of assimilating the Taiwanese into Japanese culture began. The

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end of World War II would mean the end of the cession treaty and the Niponization process. In 1949, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) led by Mao Zedong (毛泽东) was established on the mainland, and two million Chinese anti-­communist and nationalist refugees were moved to Taiwan, to be led by Jiang Jieshi (蒋介石) of the Guomindang10 (中国国民党) party. Both sectors of the island’s population were fighting for reunification, although they gave it very different meanings. For the Taiwanese it was a return to China, for the Guomindang it was a reconquest of Chinese territory that was in enemy hands (Lu, 2010: 71). The initiative of the Guomindang was to extirpate the Japanese heritage and turn Taiwan into the “spiritual reserve of China.” The differences between Chinese and Taiwanese did not take long to grow. They were divided into two groups: the people from this province (bensheng ren, 本省人), and people from outside this province (waisheng ren, 外省人). The Taiwanese government created a repressive system that cost many lives—it is estimated there were between 8000 and 20,000 deaths. The obligation to speak Mandarin Chinese was imposed, with a prohibition on the Taiwanese dialect, and the social prestige of everything related to Chinese was raised. In the following decades repression and persecution increased. In the 1980s, with the aim of gaining the sympathy of Western countries, a political transition began promoting the legalization of political parties and the lifting of the ban on newspapers. Currently, the People’s Republic of China does not accept the independence of Taiwan but considers it another province with a different political and economic regime.11 Taiwan proclaims itself an autonomous province in which a democratic political system governs, with party pluralism. There is also a linguistic break: simplified Chinese script began to be use in mainland China, while traditional script continued in Taiwan.12 Reunification, independence, or sustaining the current situation, are the three strongest positions among which the Taiwanese population is divided. The Pan-Blue Alliance or Reunification Faction includes the Guomindang in its ranks and advocates for reunification. The Pan-Green 10  Chinese Nationalist Party founded after the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, also known as Kuomintang. 11  Mainland Chinese use the phrase “One Country, Two Systems” to refer to this issue. To expand on this topic, see: Pinheiro-Machado (2010). 12  The differences between simplified and traditional Putonghua is explained in Sartori’s chapter.

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Alliance or Independence Faction promotes the construction of its own identity for the Taiwanese State and the independence of the island (Lu 2010: 100). Encounters in Chinatown Several actors are encountered in Chinatown: first, Taiwanese migrants and Chinese migrants living in Buenos Aires. There are many similarities and differences between them.13 One of the most relevant elements for analyzing these diasporic groups are the acts of identification (Frigerio, 2009) that are in tension with the cultural negotiations that must take place in Chinatown, one of the urban spaces where they converge to meet other actors. The presence of the last migration from the People’s Republic of China in Argentina generates in some of the Taiwanese migrants a need to somehow strengthen their identity borders to increase the cultural distance. However, among other Taiwanese migrants, another phenomenon occurs: they try to erase cultural distances taking refuge in new categories that unify them. The most recurrent are Chinatown and argenchino.14 Another actor is the formal Chinese diasporic bureaucracy.15 As a result of the greater number of Chinese migrants who arrived in Argentina from 13  To read more about the different Chinese and Taiwanese migratory waves to Argentina see Denardi, 2013. 14  A kind of mix: half Argentine, half Chinese. 15  The “processes of diasporization” (Olsson, 2009) are defined as the ways in which a group that perceives itself and is perceived as a “community” is produced and reproduced (Merenson, 2015: 212). In the case of the diasporization process carried out by the Chinese State, it is one “from above,” that is, one that has a “diasporic bureaucracy” made up of administrative staff, institutions, and policies specifically dedicated to generating practices of agency and extraterritorial recognition, linkage programs, meeting the demands of migrants, appointing honorary positions of “diaspora ambassadors,” and so on (Merenson, 2015: 214; Smith, 2008). However, the Chinese State made use of the associations and practices that were being developed “from below” (Abélès, 2012: 164), that is, from the practices of local actors that may be mere citizens, but that are nationalized, serving the Chinese state despite not strictly being part of it. This is why we will call them non-formal diasporic bureaucracy, because despite not being invested with a formal role in the diasporic bureaucracy, they function as such because they tune up with what they consider that the Chinese state is requiring from its overseas communities: to be “supporters, pioneers and promoters” of China’s economic reform (Portes & Zhou, 2013) and national modernization by being a bridge between the place of origin and the place of residence, here and there (Zhang, 2006: 5; Zamponi Guerra, 2010).

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2004 onwards, the policies of the Chinese State on the overseas16 from Buenos Aires were deepened. A process of diasporization was carried out (Merenson, 2015; Smith, 2008) that implied the tendency of Chinese from the PRC to occupy spaces that had previously been created by Taiwanese migrants who had arrived thirty years earlier and formed the non-formal diasporic bureaucracy. They professionalized themselves on cultural issues by creating associations, establishing connections with local officials, with the Chinese embassy in Argentina, and with companies for the development of urban requalification projects in Chinatown proposed to the Buenos Aires city government (Laborde, 2017; Lacarrieu et al., 2011). These projects generated reluctance from another of the actors involved: some of the inhabitants of Belgrano neighborhood resist the traditional upper-class residential neighborhood losing its calm and tranquility due to the stores and visitors to the Chinatown. Through an association, they conduct investigations and file complaints against businesses owned by migrants in the judicial system and the media. This whole process found a favorable context for its development in the policies of the City Government, since the assumption of Mauricio Macri as Head of Government in 2007, which continues until the present with Horacio Rodriguez Larreta as Head of Government. Throughout this period, the city’s brand has been consolidated, based on culture, interwoven with a way of diversity agency through urban multiculturalism (Laborde, 2017). This multiculturalism has several edges. On the one hand, the spectacularization of Otherness (Lacarrieu, 2008) through the Buenos Aires Celebra17 (Buenos Aires Celebrates). On the other hand, with 16  Overseas is the category used by interlocutors and specialized bibliography and by the Chinese State to refer to Chinese citizens residing outside their place of origin. 17  The description of the project, on the website of the Secretariat of Human Rights of the Government of the City of Buenos Aires states: “BA Celebra” – “Buenos Aires celebrates” – has been carried out since 2009 with the aim of positioning the City of Buenos Aires as a reference in the promotion and protection of human rights, focusing on coexistence, dialogue, encounter, inclusion, and cultural pluralism. Over the years, it has consolidated itself as a Buenos Aires brand and an icon of multiculturalism. Within the framework of this project, the communities celebrate their national dates sharing their culture, history, and identity with their neighbors. The place chosen as the setting is the traditional Av. De Mayo, the backbone of the historic and civic center of our city. The public can enjoy dances, choirs, parades, typical gastronomy, art, and much more from a long list of communities. Among them are: Greek, Jewish, Russian, Bolivian, Chilean, Chinese, Korean, Bulgarian, Spanish, Lithuanian, Italian, Slovenian, Scottish, Ukrainian,

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a process of requalification and gentrification18 through the aestheticization of urban spaces. Although the local government seeks to encourage “the recognition and appreciation of cultural diversity,” emphasizing the legacy of the different cultures in the city, it is understood as a “mosaic of identities.”19 This implies considering cultures as archipelagos, homogeneous within themselves, with clear borders and their own identities. The rigidity of the limits implies the reification of human groups, which tends to consider that there is a cultural essence. That is, identity is derived from culture (Grimson, 2011: 20). With the increase in the intensity of migratory movements, the independence processes in Africa and Asia, coupled with technological and communicational changes, the tendency to think of the world as divided into harmonious and stable cultures became impossible (Grimson, 2011: 59; Wright, 1998). This tendency of local government, which responds to the global trend of applying public policies with multiculturalist approaches, takes us back to the term “ethnic group” criticized by Barth (1976). The collectivities that participate in the events of Buenos Aires Celebrates are only conceived as such if they perceive themselves as groups with clear boundaries that originated in characteristics such as a territory of origin, race, culture, and language barriers. The specificity of the participating migrant groups becomes simple differences in the inventory of traits. The concept of culture understood as a set of symbolic elements, or as customs and values of a community settled in a territory, is problematic for many reasons. On the Japanese, Armenian, Irish, Croatian, Uruguayan, Dominican, Paraguayan, Portuguese, Brazilian, Polish, Lebanese, Colombian, Peruvian and Basque. https://www.buenosaires. gob.ar/derechoshumanos/colectividades/buenosairescelebra [12/16/19] 18  Laborde (2017: 10) establishes that “the notions linked to requalification are continued with those of gentrification and refer in general terms to the processes of socio-economic revaluation of certain areas—particularly central areas of the city—through changes in the economic ordering of the price of land, in the supply of services and consumption linked to ‘global consumption’, in the modes of residence, in the cultural resource in terms of patrimonial rehabilitation and recycling of old buildings, proposing aesthetic changes in the neighborhoods, with attractions for entertainment and pleasure, and impacting—for gentrification—on the resident population that is gradually displaced and replaced” (Herzer, 2008; Lacarrieu et al., 2011). 19  The reification of Chinese cultural attributes is a theme that is also reiterated in the analyses of the Chinatown of Buenos Aires. In this regard, Sassone and Mera (2007) and Laborde (2011, 2017) made an excellent analysis of this process, which also has the City Government as a great driver.

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one hand, it does not allow us to see the flows of relationships that migrants establish with others, conceiving it as an isolated and closed agent in their community (Laborde, 2011). Moreover, this conception limits the recognition of heterogeneities within each community and does not notice that symbols, values, and practices are recreated and disputed depending on the contexts. However, this dispute and recreation of meanings and symbols tends to be hidden by members of the diasporic bureaucracies under the category of Chinatown in what we could call strategic essentialism. The urban requalification and the spectacularization of culture allows for the location Chinatown as a tourist point of great importance in the city, with which it is expected to increase the income of Chinese stores on behalf of the greater affluence of visitors. In this way, it is possible to evidence that the Chinese and Taiwanese diasporic bureaucracies take advantage and usufruct the essentialist conception of the “collectivities” of the Government of the City, and try to hide the symbolic and identity diversity towards the interior of the community presenting an image of a supposed homogeneity and harmony between the diverse actors that are in Chinatown. Chinese Migration in Argentina The Chinese migration to Argentina, although it dates back almost one hundred  years, has two preponderant moments in the formation of the diaspora: on the one hand, the arrival of Taiwanese families in the 1980s, and on the other, the arrival of Fujian migrants since 2004. Chinatown is a meeting place of different identifications20 even within a cultural and national configuration. Among the migrants from the People’s Republic of China, those coming from big cities like Shanghai or Beijing mark a certain distance from other Chinese, mainly those coming from Fujian or other more impoverished regions. Among the Taiwanese we find those who define themselves as Taiwanese, understanding that the seventy years 20  According to Weigert et al. (1986) each individual has a variable amount of identities that are attributed by others or the persons attribute to themselves according to the context. That is to say, at a certain moment, the actor can choose an identity from among multiple identities to attribute to him/herself and thus negotiate control of that situation. It is possible for a person to have a main identity, vindicated in the greatest number of situations they face, and also other subordinate ones. Due to the situated and performative nature of identities, Frigerio opts for the category “acts of identification” punctual and momentary (Frigerio, 2009: 7).

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of separation between the Island and the continent has already generated a different Taiwanese culture, and that only the language, Mandarin Chinese, is what is shared. However, there are other Taiwanese who argue that there is no difference between China and Taiwan because “the culture is the same, and only politics separated them from the Chinese.”21 Some of these migrants prefer to identify themselves as argenchino. This category refers to a new identification in which even some Taiwanese perceive themselves as Chinese and at the same time Argentinean. In their words, there would be an unconscious decision in which, depending on the situation, one or another norm or behavior attributed to the Argentine or Chinese way of handling it is displayed, while their identities are made up of what they consider to be the most valuable from one and/or another culture. To make it explicit I quote an informal conversation with a Taiwanese speaker, about 45 years old. It depends, the question you are asking… for example the social relations, and familiar mandates, that is mandates of the culture, I prefer the Argentinean. That is, I am more with the Argentine thing, it is more … mandates, the mandates are what you have been told to do… I like very much to transmit what is long term, it is a concept that is more Chinese than Argentine, the concept of doing things, building things in the long term interests me, to transmit something in the long term.

These discourses allow us to analyze not only of the situationality of the identifications but also the ways in which borders are constructed between groups and within each one of them. Chinatown, a place where Chinese and Taiwanese live together, is a key place for the construction of identity because it is necessary to reinforce the borders to avoid confusion and to ensure convenient assignments. But at the same time it is the entity under which those who have diverse identifications but a common motivation could cooperate and collaborate: promoting spaces for the transmission of culture even at the risk of commodifying it and turning it into a public spectacle. In the following section I will analyze how the identifications just described are found in different processes linked to the urban.

21  To broaden the notions of acts of identification in the Chinese and Taiwanese cultural configurations in Buenos Aires, see Denardi, 2019.

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Bureaucracies and Identifications in the Urban Setting According to various specialists, it is not possible to find or build a clear definition of Chinatown or Chinatowns, as there is no single distinguishing characteristic that can be attributed to all the Chinatowns in the world (Wong & Tan, 2013). There are commercial and residential ones, traditional and thematic, with or without a Chinese Arch, Chinese associations or institutions, and Chinese inhabitants; they can be located in peripheral or central areas of cities. The characteristics of each Chinatown will depend on the type of Chinese migration received, the historical moment in which it occurred and the links with the larger society. The Buenos Aires Chinatown presents as particular characteristics the fact of being a reduced space, of a few blocks, where the migrants do not reside, but it is there where some of them (who are far from being the majority), develop social and labor activities. Chinatown’s history can be divided into three stages. The first stage was characterized by the installation of Taiwanese businesses and institutions in the 1970s and fundamentally in the 1980s. The first Taiwanese who arrived in this area of the Buenos Aires Belgrano neighborhood were attracted by its multiple transportation possibilities (Pappier, 2011). Close to the train station and the arrival point of many bus lines, it was a residential area a few blocks away from a busy commercial area on Cabildo Avenue. There, mutual aid associations, Presbyterian churches, Buddhist temples, some restaurants, and Chinese schools were founded. At that time, the area was known by migrants as Taiwan Street. Some families went to buy Asian products and to participate in the celebrations in the associations. They used do some theatrical performances in the Temple and then continue the celebrations in the Taiwanese Association where prizes related to the trade of the participants were raffled, for example, large quantities of toilet paper.22 The second stage began with the installation of stores owned by Chinese migrants from the PRC in the 2001 to 2004 period. After the Argentinean economic and political crisis of 2001, many Taiwanese merchants were forced to close their stores and decided to migrate to the United States and Canada or return to Taiwan. Shortly after the migration from mainland China stores reopened selling imported items: umbrellas and qipaos,23 22  Story told by a migrant woman in the documentary film Arribeños, directed by Marcos Rodríguez. 23  Chinese traditional costumes, women’s dresses.

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small statues of Buddha and zodiac animals, Chinese decorative elements, such as fans, knots, incense, paper lamps, bookstore products and Chinese paintings, toys, makeup, lingerie, etc. Beginning in 2003-2004, times of change began to loom in the country which revitalized movements aimed at creating a tourist space in Chinatown. In 2003 Rosa (see footnote 7) renovated a mansion on Arribeños Street where she opened a tea house and art gallery. She was the promoter of the association which started to undertake projects to include the neighborhood in the tourist circuit of Belgrano (Pappier, 2011). During the third stage, which begins in 2006 and ends in 2019, the Chinatown requalification took place. During this period, the Arch was installed, reforms were made tending to pedestrianization, restaurants and businesses were oriented towards a more “gourmet” aesthetic and finally, the Mitre train viaduct was inaugurated, eliminating the surface railway barrier and generating a new commercial space underneath it. These urban improvements would not have been possible without the City Government, which has pursued the objective of creating a multicultural city through a process of ethnicization and urban requalification (Laborde, 2008). This process consists of attributing certain public spaces to a migrant group. Under the chief of government Jorge Telerman (2006–2007) and then Mauricio Macri (2007–2015) Chinatown was privileged over other neighborhoods that were ethnicized (as for example Charrúa, Koreatown, Armenian quarters) and included on tourist routes. Chinatown and its main activity, the Chinese New Year’s celebration, are the only migrant activities promoted, together with the French Gastronomy Fair and the Japanese Garden24 on the City Government’s websites. The Arch was installed in 2009. There are several versions about the origin of the money needed for its construction (300,000 US dollars). Some of them indicate that it was donated by the Government of China as part of the celebrations for the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic.25 However, in two of the most important newspapers in Buenos Aires, others point out that the money was collected among local Chinese merchants and businessmen. According to Página12 newspaper, on October 24  Anonymous. (2016, October 24). Buenos Aires City tourism website https://turismo. buenosaires.gob.ar/es/article/a%C3%B1o-nuevo-chino 25  Anonymous. (2009, May 12). El Barrio Chino tendrá su arco de ingreso en Belgrano. La Nación. http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1126997-el-barrio-chino-tendra-su-arco-deingreso-en-belgrano.

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6, 2008 the president of the Federation for the Pacific Reunification of China in Argentina, Jian Ping Yuan,26 sent a letter to the General Director of Public Space in Buenos Aires, Sebastián Espino. He asked in the text for the authorization of “the location of an arcade donated by our community to your government” and signed at the bottom as president of that entity. He also did it as a representative of an association with a similar name which, like the previous one, was not registered with the Inspección General de Justicia (General Inspection of Justice, GIJ).27 In the newspaper Clarín it was published that: “The structure was brought from China and the estimated investment of 300 thousand dollars (between the transfer and the construction) was made with donations from the eastern community and the contribution of all the merchants of Chinatown.”28 The objective of the installation of the Arch on Arribeños Street, eleven meters high and eight meters wide, flanked by two carved stone lions, was to demonstrate the gratitude of the migrants towards the City (Fig. 2.1). Clarín newspaper quotes Antonio Chang, president of the Chinatown Association: “It is a gift for the City for the good reception of the Argentineans to the Chinese community, it is a symbol of friendship.” The Arch was assembled in two and a half days. The pieces were transported by boat from China and in Buenos Aires it only had to be assembled.29 As with the origin of the funds, the number of workers needed to assemble the Arch is also not precise. Some newspaper articles mention that there were one hundred men, while only twelve people are seen in the video uploaded to YouTube by the construction company (“Armado del Arco Chino—Barrio de Belgrano—Ciudad de Buenos Aires,” “Assembly of the Chinese Arch—Belgrano neighborhood, Buenos Aires City”). The installation of the Arch generated disputes and conflicts with the residents of Belgrano neighborhood who opposed those blocks becoming a commercial space, losing the tranquility of a residential area (Laborde, 26  Jian Ping Yuan is the first legislator with Chinese origin in Argentina. He was born in Fujian and naturalized Argentine in 2003. He is part of the ruling party of the city. 27  The GIJ is the General Inspection of Justice (Inspección General de Justicia), a public office where civil associations are registered. Veiga, G. (2016, October 12) La farsa del vendedor chino. Página 12. http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-283639-201510-12.html 28  Anonymous. (2009, June 2) Ya está terminado el arco de entrada al Barrio Chino. Clarín, http://edant.clarin.com/diario/2009/06/02/laciudad/h-01930950.htm 29  To see how this installation was carried out, watch the video in the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQK1BmF0WtY [Accessed: October 24, 2016].

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Fig. 2.1  The Arch at Chinatown Buenos Aires. (PH: Florencia Sartori)

2011; Lacarrieu, 2013). These non-Chinese neighbors claim that the Arch “is a symbol of a foreign power”30 and that there are various situations of illegality—sale of expired food, placement of garbage next to gastronomic supplies—that the City Government inspectors are not addressing.31 Other tensions arose within the community in relation to the Arch and allow for a deeper understanding of the positions and configurations mentioned above. The inscription of the Arch indicates 中 (center) 國 30  Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N_OU-3D6kE [Accessed: October 24, 2016]. 31  Regarding the inspections, some interlocutors mention that inspectors take advantage of the ignorance of the laws by migrants. They claim that many are victims of bribery requests to avoid the closure of the premises. On one occasion, having lunch with an interlocutor in a neighborhood restaurant, he pointed out the owner of the place, a woman around 65 years old, and proudly told me that she was one of the leaders of a group of Chinese merchants who were organizing to inform people about avoiding falling into these situations.

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(country) 城 (city), which could be translated as City of the Country of the Center, that is, City of China. Other sources indicate that “中國城 (Zhong guo cheng)”32 was inscribed on the Arch to indicate “Chinatown,” but that the “historical way” of saying it is “the street of the Tang men” (tang ren jie, 唐人街) because that dynasty was the most powerful and glorious in Chinese history. According to the consulted migrants, Taiwanese saw it as an invasion to the territory they had occupied: “Chinese came and put an arch and called it ‘China Town’, (town, city) which is bigger than Taiwan Street,” as originally Taiwanese migrants called the area of Arribeños and Mendoza streets. This rivalry is increased by some Taiwanese who believe that the Chinese “came to take advantage of what the Taiwanese took 30 years to build.” Other interlocutors indicated that the Taiwanese were invited to the meeting to decide which legend to put on the arch. However, the internal divisions in the Taiwanese community meant that very few people attended to give their opinion and vote, so the Chinese easily outnumbered them. The installation of the Arch increased the differences between Chinese and Taiwanese, but not for all of them. Many Taiwanese not only received the Arch with joy, but accompanied the management of the traditional arcade. They see in this location the possibility of equalizing themselves with other Chinatowns of the great capitals of the world and thus enter the plan of the construction of the Buenos Aires city brand (Laborde, 2011) through the officialization of an ethnic neighborhood. The Arch would allow for more visibility and would be a tourist point promoted by the City Government, which would result on more public attendance and therefore, more income for the merchants. Although it didn’t take long for voices to be raised against the increase in rents and the money that the merchants had to spend on repairs, the numbers of the public that visits Chinatown on weekends has been increasing, so the profits have been greater than the investments. While on weekdays Chinatown seems to be a favorite place for Orientals to shop and do various activities, during the weekends the public that visits it is mostly composed of non-oriental residents of Buenos Aires. In this sense, a mercantilization of culture is evident.

32  Although the interlocutors did not mention it, is important to notice that the inscription in the Arch was made in traditional script. To read more about writing and signage in Chinatown, see Sartori (2019)

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In this same stage, the young upcoming generations began to take charge of their parents’ businesses or opened new stores with a very different image, responding to complaints of Belgrano’s neighborhood associations, and accompanying the pedestrianization and requalification process promoted by the City’s Government. Since 2013 and 2014, supermarkets and restaurants have adopted a gourmet style, trying to differentiate themselves from those that were the target of complaints in the media towards the end of 2013. This is recorded in an article in the 2014 Maleva Magazine: It is not a supermarket like any other. Its specialty is organic products and healthy food. “That’s why it’s called Bio Market and we also give out paper bags instead of plastic ones, to take care of the environment,” explains Yi Feng, who is in charge of the store. She tells us that the owners are Taiwanese and that they opened this business at the end of last year with the idea of bringing together in the same place the best and most varied national and imported products, focused on a healthy lifestyle and environmental awareness “but without the smells of the other supermarkets, and in a nice and caring environment.”33 As a synthesis, we can see how, at the urban level, both the formal and informal diasporic bureaucracy took advantage of the possibilities offered by the Buenos Aires city government policy, not only for the urban requalification of Chinatown but also for the location of one of the most important symbols of the Chinatowns of the world capitals: the Arch. The presence of Chinese people from the PRC not only changed the physiognomy of Chinatown but also generated tensions with the Taiwanese and with the neighbors of Belgrano.

Bureaucracies and Identifications in the Chinese New Year Ritual “I’m going to go with the Taiwanese shirt. Because if I go with the flag, they can take it off from me, but if I go with the shirt, they can’t.” These were Alberto’s words when I visited him in his store a few days before the Chinese New Year 2015. Visibly distressed, he made jokes to ease the anguish. After years of efforts, of hard work, for the first time he was no longer in charge of the organization of the event. The formal Chinese diasporic bureaucracy had taken over the celebration. According to 33  Schirinian, V. (2014, March 28) El novedoso lado gourmet (y chic) del Barrio Chino. Maleva Linda Vida.

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Alberto, he was expected to attend the VIP box, but the invitation had never arrived. If it arrived, he would attend with a T-shirt with the Taiwanese flag. The New Year ritual is celebrated on the occasion of the arrival of spring in China. It is the most important holiday in the country where large numbers of people try to spend the festivities with their loved ones in the family home. As it is guided by the lunar calendar, the date is not fixed, so it can be celebrated in late January or early February. An animal from the Chinese zodiac rules the ritual each year. Although there are many traditions around this celebration, the ones most frequently mentioned among migrants are: the family gathering around a big banquet, putting up posters on the doors and windows, cleaning the home in the days before, handing out red envelopes with money especially to the children, and going out into the streets to celebrate with the dragon dance. The festivities end fifteen days later with the Lantern Festival. For more than thirty years, those who celebrated the Chinese New Year were the Taiwanese who met in the Asociación Civil de los Taiwaneses en Argentina (Civil Association of the Taiwanese in Argentina) on Arribeños Street. They did it indoors, only for the families of the institution, who enjoyed themselves with games, improvised performances, raffles, and food to share. In 2003 Rosa and Alberto decided to take the event to the streets, a proposal that was not accompanied by the Taiwanese authorities, who continued to celebrate inside. This was the first break in the diaspora. Since then, the celebrations for the New Year have been two-fold: on the one hand, those carried out by the Taiwanese in the Association of Taiwanese and on the other, those organized by the younger Taiwanese that became a massive event. In 2005 a stage was set up on Arribeños Street at the corner of Olazábal. There, not only the dragon and lion dance were performed, but also Kung Fu schools were invited to make martial arts demonstrations. The impulse for a bigger event came with the 2008 Olympic Games, which were held in the city of Beijing. On that occasion, the sportswear brand Nike contacted Rosa to use her teahouse for a publicity event that lasted until midnight and included performances by well-known music bands and the presentation of a new clothing line. Since then, the Chinese New Year festival attracts more people in each edition. In 2009, the stage was accompanied by numerous stands offering different kind of products for sale, from food to merchandise of the

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surrounding businesses. By that time, a certain police presence was already required and some authorities from the diaspora attended. The beginnings were thus told by Claudio: C: I go on stage, year 2010, 4x4 the stage,34 Alberto tells me “there are four schools of Kung Fu and a Dragon, see what you can do, eight hours.” I go up, I was already an announcer, I speak, and we start shaping it. What used to be only and image started to have a voice… In that way, a year later, Carolina joins us as a designer. She designs the graphics. With graphics, with a communicator who can also develop and writes it, plus Alberto who always does the logistics, we worked as a team. In that team we started to move forward. Rosa supported, she did not get involved in the organization, she backed up when she had to with some Chinese diplomatic authority. L: And economic support? C: Zero. We only financed ourselves with contributions from the stands and at the beginning from some of the main businesses. The following year we looked for a group of volunteers who came from the institute of Carolina and Juana,35 and who were interested in the project, but we did not have the funds to pay for it.36 As every year the event was attracting more people, and with the arrival of the Year of the Dragon, of special significance for the Chinese, the organizers decided to move the stage to the Barrancas de Belgrano, a large nearby park, taking advantage of a foreign contribution that the organizers had received. As its name indicates, the square has a ravine that is used as a natural tribune to appreciate what is being performed on the stage. A giant screen was installed next to the stage, in which demonstrations of the different schools of martial arts and Chinese musical numbers were shown, presented by the announcer Claudio. In 2013, or 4711 year of the Water Snake, the event was supported by the City Government through the program Buenos Aires Celebrates and

 It refers to meters, the width and large of the stage.  It is a Chinese language teaching institute; it also performs activities to promote Chinese culture. 36  Interview with Claudio. Buenos Aires, March 2013. 34 35

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the sponsorship of the Chinese association Linternas Rojas (Red Lanterns).37 We looked for Red Lanterns, it is the same treasurer of last year, there is nothing new, the same people of last year, with the interest of spreading a future enterprise of Chinese cultural diffusion, but it is not in action yet. I convinced them to come, to contribute money, and in exchange we gave them publicity, and we make an event like this. Through concrete action, Culture, Tourism [City Government offices], the Belgrano community and the three of us [Alberto, Claudio and Carolina] support it.38

Under the name of Chinatown, the possibility of gathering Chinese and Taiwanese people in the same event was based. Although the Taiwanese refused to share their celebration, this new generation, expecting to promote Chinatown, involved Chinese and Taiwanese who were willing to participate. Perhaps influenced by Rosa, they agreed not to “betray” Taiwanese sovereignty, taking care that there were no flags or authorities from either side. However, for economic, political, and logistical reasons, they were forced to accept or seek the support of the Chinese Embassy. Claudio once confided in me that they needed the Chinese authorities for the event to grow and for the Buenos Aires officials to be present. The fundamental break was in 2014 when Red Lanterns presented itself as the sole organizer of the New Year’s event in Las Barrancas. Of the group of three young Taiwanese mentioned above, only one, Claudio, remained as organizer.39 The presence40 and participation of this 37  The Association is made up of Chinese migrants, some of them nationalized Argentines. Its objective is to promote Chinese culture through the production and organization of artistic and cultural numbers, for several of which it receives donations from the Chinese Embassy in Buenos Aires. On its website it is presented as “created in 2012, and is dedicated to the media and foreign trade. Financed entirely with Chinese investments, it is focused on the planning, investment, production, and distribution of television programs and events related to the dissemination of Chinese culture in Argentina and Argentine culture in China on the one hand, and also to facilitate commercial trade agreements between China and Argentina. Its objective is to strengthen ties that bind both countries and spread the perspective of a modern and influential China at the international level”. 38  Interview with Claudio. Buenos Aires, March 2013. 39  Alter several editions, the third member returned to participate in the organization as a“volunteer.” 40  The “pinning of pupils” is part of the ritual of the dragon dance. The person with the greatest authority is the one who paints the dragon’s pupils to “wake him up” and thus start the festival.

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­ rganization and of the authorities of the Buenos Aires government is o evident both in the infrastructure of the event, which has more light and sound equipment, a much larger and covered stage, even in the role played by the invited personalities. For example, in 2012, before the coming in of Red Lanterns in the ritual, the one who performed the pupil pinning was the Master of the Buddhist Temple. In 2013 the authorities of the City Government performed it. In 2014, representatives of the Chinese Embassy were in charge of starting the ritual of “awakening the dragon.” In the park near Chinatown where the stage is located, Chinese and Argentine flags were interspersed. Alberto decided in 2014 not to participate in the event. I passed by his shop in Chinatown before the beginning of the ritual, and although he didn’t want to recognize it, he was very sad. He received messages from former collaborators and friends who made him feel their support. He, who had started with a small celebration and made it grow, now has nothing. Gradually, Red Lanterns took charge of organizing the events on behalf of the Chinese community. Among the Taiwanese organizers a concern and a certain resentment for the irruption of Red Lanterns began to emerge. “Those who have been working before must be respected. When the sun rises, everything you do comes back,41” said a Taiwanese girl who worked in several editions of the festival. “Many times it happens that you go to ask for support from the Embassy, and when you leave you realize that they put Red Lanterns,”42 said another. But there is also a power struggle in which culture is both a battlefield and a war trophy. With the arrival of the Chinese migrants and the action of the formal and informal diasporic bureaucracy, the stage in which the Taiwanese were the main representatives of Chinese culture in Buenos Aires ends. But fundamentally, a period of dispute opens between these who claim to be the holders of pure or legitimate Chinese culture and the Chinese of the PRC who, although they have suffered processes of simplification of writing, destruction of symbols, and prohibition of practices, hold nationality as a legitimizing element of “Chineseness.” The dispute for the imposition of certain symbols and meanings in events involves a struggle for its organization, and at the same time responds to a commodification and transformation of Chinese culture into a spectacle.  Telephone talk with Violeta. Buenos Aires, March 2015.  Informal chat with Juana. Buenos Aires, February 2015.

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However, Alberto and his collaborators have been able to read the situation and act accordingly to the reconfiguration of power relations. Faced with an economically and symbolically powerful actor, with whom he could not carry out his objectives, Alberto decided to set up a new Chinatown at Tigre, a city 35 kilometers far from Buenos Aires City. It is a commercial venture that also has a space to organize events that do not give an account of a national identity but a Chinese cultural identity. On the other hand, in 2019 Alberto’s association, several years after he was set aside, reorganized a celebration for the Chinese New Year in Buenos Aires Chinatown which takes place the same day as the one organized by the Red Lanterns in the other location nearby.

Conclusion In this chapter I have analyzed different situations of encounter, with Chinatown as a stage, between diverse actors and institutions that exceed the Chinese and Taiwanese migrants. On the one hand, we analyze the tensions between Chinese and Taiwanese migrants in relation to the urban setting, the installation of the Arch, and the urban requalification of the neighborhood. In this process there were not only conflicts between migrants but also with non-oriental inhabitants of Belgrano. On the other hand, we immersed in the ruptures generated in relation to the celebration of the Chinese New Year, which led to the multiplication of events in different parts of the city. These encounters allow me to analyze various processes related to the cultural identifications, religions, and practices that are highly dynamic and strategic. What can be observed as a constant element is the tension between China and Taiwan, around which the different actors establish their own strategies according to the current situation. I show how in Chinatown, through the celebrations and the processes of urban requalification and commodification of Chinese culture, at least two simultaneous processes are revealed among Taiwanese migrants. On the one hand, there is, as Carini and Gracia point out, a “strategic use of Buddhism where Chinese-Taiwanese interests are combined in the relationship they maintain with the national society” (2016, 13). On the other hand, there is a cultural essentialism capable of strategically reconfiguring itself in relation to changing power relations. That is, with the advance of a Chinese formal diasporic bureaucracy with which it was very difficult to negotiate symbols, identity categories, and practices, Alberto and the

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Taiwanese non-formal diasporic bureaucracy withdrew from the events and only organized them again when they could gather the symbolic, economic, and cultural capital necessary to carry out the events with the characteristics they decided to give it. Thus, in the Chinese New Year 2019 edition, two simultaneous celebrations were held, each one with its own particularities, one with Red Lanterns and the Chinese Embassy and another with Alberto in Belgrano’s Chinatown. In other words, identification, policy management, the commodification of identity, the spectacularization and essentialization of culture, and the use of resources are also strategic. The actors adapt and accompany processes that change and are modified with the evolution of social power relations.

References Abélès, M. (2012) Antropología de la globalización.. Ediciones del Sol. Anonymous. (2009a, May 12). El Barrio Chino tendrá su arco de ingreso en Belgrano. La Nación. http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1126997-el-barrio-chinotendra-­su-­arco-­de-­ingreso-­en-­belgrano. Anonymous. (2009b, June 2) Ya está terminado el arco de entrada al Barrio Chino. Clarín, http://edant.clarin.com/diario/2009/06/02/laciudad/h01930950.htm Anonymous. (2016, October 24). Buenos Aires City tourism website https://turismo.buenosaires.gob.ar/es/article/a%C3%B1o-­nuevo-­chino Barth, F. (1976). Los grupos étnicos y sus fronteras.. Fondo de Cultura Económica. Carini, C., & Gracia, A. (2016). Ritual, identidad y transnacionalización en una celebración budista: el Vesak en la Argentina. Runa, 37(1). Comaroff, J. L., & Comaroff, J. (2011). Etnicidad SA. Katz Editores. Denardi, L. E. (2013). Categorías morales y trayectorias de inmigrantes taiwaneses en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Ser chino –en sentido amplio- y ser taiwanés. Actas de las Jornadas interdisciplinarias de jóvenes investigadores en Ciencias Sociales, 1. Denardi, L. E. (2019). Las relaciones y políticas del estado chino con su diáspora. Apuntes sobre la burocracia diaspórica desde Argentina. Journal de Ciencias Sociales, 7(13), 49–64. Faier, L., & Rofel, L. (2014). Ethnographies of encounter. Annual Review of Anthropology, 43, 363–377. Frigerio, A. (2009/10). Luis D’Elia y los negros: identificaciones raciales y de clase en sectores populares. Claroscuro. Revista del Centro de Estudios sobre Diversidad Cultural de la Universidad Nacional de Rosario, 8, 13–43. Grimson, A. (2011). Los límites de la cultura. Siglo XXI.

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Guerra Zamponi, C. (2010). La Diáspora china. Consejo Argentino para las Relaciones Internacionales, N°6. Retrieved July 2014, from http://www.cari. org.ar/pdf/mcsrt6.pdf Herzer, H. (Ed.). 2008. Acerca de la gentrificación. Con el corazón mirando al sur. Transformaciones en el sur de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires: Espacio Editorial. Laborde, M. (2008). Apropiación y disputa en la conformación del “Barrio Chino” en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires: el patrimonio inmaterial como estrategia. IX Congreso Argentino de Antropología Social. Facultad de Humanidades yCiencias Sociales - Universidad Nacional de Misiones, Posadas. Laborde, M. (2011). El Barrio Chino: un estudio desde la perspectiva antropológica sobre la producción y la negociación de la alteridad inmigrante en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Thesis to obtain Bachelor degree. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Laborde, M. (2017). Negociaciones socioculturales en torno a “lo afro”, “lo chino” y “lo boliviano” en los procesos de recualificación y relegación urbana de la ciudad de Buenos Aires. PhD Thesis. Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Buenos Aires. Lacarrieu, M. (2008). Tensiones entre los procesos de recualificación cultural urbana y la gestión de la diversidad cultural. La Biblioteca. Biblioteca Nacional, Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación. Lacarrieu, M. B. (2013). Ciudades Contemporáneas: Tensiones entre microterritorialidades y lugares negociadosy/o disputados en contextos de “inter-­ territorialización”. Cidades, 10(17), 107–141. Lacarrieu, M., Girola, M., Thomasz, A., Yacovino, M., Lekerman, V.  Y., & Crovara, M. (2011). Procesos de recualificación y relegación en la ciudad de Buenos Aires. Repensando la noción de ciudad-fragmento y la despolitización de lo urbano. Argumentos, 24(66), 15–35. Lu, Y.  T. (2010). Taiwán, Historia política e identidad. Barcelona, Ediciones Bellaterra, SA. Merenson, S. (2015). Del ‘exilio’ a ‘la diáspora’. Lenguajes y mediaciones en el proceso de diasporización uruguayo. Horizontes Antropológicos, 21(43), 211–238. Olsson, E. (2009). From exile to post-exile: The diasporisation of Swedish Chileans in historical contexts. Social Identities, 15(5), 659–679. Pappier, A. (2011). Inmigración china en Argentina. El Barrio Chino de Buenos Aires como caso de estudio intercultural. Actas del XIII Congreso de la ALADAA. Retrieved July 2014 from http://ceaa.colmex.mx/aladaa/memoria_xiii_congreso_internacional/images/pappier.pdf Pinheiro-Machado, R. (2010). Uma ou duas Chinas? A “questão de Taiwan” sob o ponto de vista de uma comunidade chinesa ultramar (Ciudad del Este, Paraguai). Civitas-Revista de CiênciasSociais, 10(3), 468–489.

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Portes, A., & Zhou, M. (2013). El águila y el dragón: el papel de las organizaciones transnacionales de inmigrantes en China y México. Migración y desarrollo, 11(20), 106–154. Sartori, M. F. (2019). Bajo la Mirada de Cangjie: Lengua y Escritura China en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Signo y seña, 35, 27–48. Sassone, S. & Mera, C. (2007). Barrios de migrantes en Buenos Aires: Identidad, cultura y cohesión socioterritorial. VV.AA (eds) V Congreso Europeo CEISAL de Latinoamericanistas. Schirinian, V. (2014, March 28) El novedoso lado gourmet (y chic) del Barrio Chino. Maleva Linda Vida. https://malevamag.com/el-­novedoso-­lado-­ gourmet-­y-­chicdel-­barrio-­chino/ Smith, R. (2008). Contradictions of diasporic institutionalization in Mexican politics: The 2006 migrant vote and other forms of inclusion and control. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 31(4), 708–741. Veiga, G. (2016, October 12). La farsa del vendedor chino. Página 12. http:// www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elpais/1-­283639-­2015-­10-­12.html Weigert, A. J., Teitge, S., & Teitge, D. (1986). Society and identity. Cambridge University Press. Wong, B. P., & Tan, C. B. (Eds.) (2013). Chinatowns around the world: Gilded ghetto, Ethnopolis, and cultural diaspora.. Brill. Wright, S. (1998). The politicization of ‘culture’. Anthropology Today, 14(1), 7–15. Zhang, B. (2006). Of non limits locality/identity: Chinese diaspora poetry in America. Journal of American Studies, 40(1), 133–153.

CHAPTER 3

“The Language of the Future”: Mandarin Chinese as Cultural Identity and Merchandise in an Argentine-Chinese Bilingual School in Buenos Aires María Florencia Sartori

This chapter analyzes a “contact zone” (Pratt, 1991): the Bilingual Argentine-Chinese Dual Immersion School (la Escuela de Inmersión Dual Bilingüe Argentino-China). In this school, Chinese descendants study alongside with students who do not have these roots. In each classroom, there are two teachers at the same time: one of them speaks Putonghua1 and the other speaks Spanish. Classes are conducted in Spanish or in

1  In this article we will call the official language of the PRC “Putonghua,” which is translated as “common tongue” or “common language.” We have chosen this name.

M. F. Sartori (*) National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET)/ Centro de Estudios del Lenguaje en Sociedad (CELES)-Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Badaró (ed.), China in Argentina, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92422-5_3

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Putonghua, that is to say, both are teaching languages. Up to the present day, this school is the only one in Argentina that has these characteristics.2 During the last part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, Argentina received migrants mostly from Europe. Most of them did not speak Spanish but other European languages, especially Italian dialects, but also German, Yiddish, and many of those who came from Spain spoke Galician. Those communities opened their own private schools in which the migration languages were taught or were the language of instruction. Just to set an example, Italian migrant associations established schools—that did not follow the Argentine curriculum but the Italian one—and by the year 1895 about 3000 students were studying there (Bein, 2012; Di Tullio, 2010). The educational policy of these foreign communities in general was similar: the opening of community schools with the guidelines of the immigrants’ country of origin, to later adapt to the Argentine curriculum (in some cases compulsively, in others, voluntarily). Public schools in Argentina only use Spanish as the teaching language, and when a foreign language was taught it was done as a second language. The language diversity (not only consequence of the migration but also of the indigenous languages) was considered as a problem the school must solve by teaching Spanish. Migrants from Asia, especially from South Korea and Japan to our country are less numerous. These two groups also opened schools in which the language of the place of origin was taught. Korean migrants established Christian churches in which Korean was taught and are, according to Mera (1998), responsible for Spanish-Korean bilingualism in young people. Beyond those religious centers, the establishment of the Korean School is of special importance in the community. In 1927 the first Japanese school was opened with the purpose of “preserving and transmitting to their descendants the language, customs and other aspects of the cultural heritage of Japan” (Terasawa, 2011: 62). It is currently a trilingual school (Spanish, English, and Japanese) and most of their students are not of Japanese descent. None of the aforementioned educational initiatives were carried out by the Argentine State. It is in this sense that the school this chapter focusses 2  The Argentinian National Constitution on its 17th article guarantee to the indigenous people the respect to their identity and the right to have a bilingual and intercultural education. Besides, Buenos Aires province Educational Law recognizes that this intercultural and bilingual education can also be used for migrant populations. However, until this experience, all the existing initiatives in the country were carried out for the indigenous population (Unamuno & Raiter, 2012) not for the migrants.

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on represents an important change in the linguistic and educational policy of our country. This school was established with the purpose of teaching the migration language to migrants and migrants’ descendants. In 2014, when the school was established, the Head of Government of the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires wrote on his Facebook page the following message (Fig. 3.1): Yesterday I was at School No. 11, it is the first Argentine-Chinese bilingual public school. It is in the southern part of the City, in the Parque Patricios neighborhood. This year we opened there a special annex for Chinese and Argentine children with 2 integrated rooms for students of 4 and 5 years old. The good news is that children will learn Chinese as their first foreign language and add up the subjects that are typical of the schools of that country. In the past, French was learnt to read literature and English to do business. What will be the language of the future? Maybe Chinese.

A first topic to be highlighted on this post is that, according to his words, this “special annex” is projected for Chinese and Argentinian kids to whom Chinese is taught as the “first foreign language.” One question is to what extent will “Chinese” be a foreign language for students who are classified as Chinese by the school? The title of the publication “第一 外 – 中文/Chinese as the first foreign language” reaffirms that, at least in his message, the school’s main objective is to teach a foreign language. A second important issue of this fragment is the representations about languages that the Head of Government shows at the end of the text: French is a language associated to culture, English, one that would lead to commercial success and, finally, Chinese: the language of the future. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) has become the second largest world economy in the last thirty years. Moreover, in the Argentinian case, it is an important business partner. In this context, it is not surprising that representations on the Chinese language associate it with the possibility of getting a good job in the future. What does it mean to be the language of the future? How is the teaching of this language linked to the place that the PRC has occupied in the world in recent years? Contrary to what the Head of Government published on his social network, many other public legal documents justify the creation of the school in the increasing number of Chinese migrant population and consider that this school is going to help them by including them in the

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Fig. 3.1  Screenshot of Mauricio Macri’s Facebook page. (Source: Florencia Sartori)

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Argentine educational system, and assisting them on developing the language of the country of origin of their family. For example, the resolution of the Ministry of Education of the City number 1221 from 2015 that creates this school states on its first consideration: Thus, students whose mother tongue is Chinese are allowed to have it in school, while Argentines are allowed to handle an additional language as if it were native.3

This extract shows the two facets of teaching Chinese in the school. On the one hand, “school it,” that is use it as a language of instruction for those who descend from migrants. The resolution proposes that this language that migrants already speak at home should also be the subject of school reflection, thus academic discursive genres and vocabulary related to the different school disciplines are learned in it. On the other hand, learning it as a second language for those who do not have contact with Chinese as a first language. This resolution also affirms that this population is not properly schooled: due to linguistic differences, in the quoted passage, and due to “origin and culture” issues in the following paragraph: That the proposed initiative solves this problem by allowing children of Chinese origin or descent a schooling more in line with their origin and culture.4

In this chapter, we understand that the discrepancy—that the purpose of the school is teaching Chinese as first foreign language in the Government Chief Facebook post and teaching it as heritage language as the resolution states—is not an error or a deviation of meaning. What this discrepancy shows is the tensions that underlie the creation of the school between two ways of understanding the language itself: whether the language is an inherited element and, in this sense, an identity element, or if it is an object that can be traded, especially taking into account the 3  Original in Spanish: “Que así, a los alumnos cuya lengua materna es el chino se les posibilita escolarizarla, mientras que a los argentinos les permite manejar una lengua adicional como si fuera nativa.” 4  Original in Spanish: “Que la iniciativa propuesta viene a resolver esta problemática permitiendo a los niños de origen o ascendencia china una escolarización más acorde a su origen y cultura.”

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upcoming role that the PRC has obtained in recent years. It is for this reason that, in this chapter, I reconstruct two different types of encounters: the first one in which the focus is placed on the students and the ways in which identities are renegotiated in the classroom; the second will emphasize on institutional decisions and how they are linked to the processes of commoditization (Heller, 1996, 2010) of language. The ethnography I carried out on the schools between October 2015 and December 2016 is one of the main sources for this chapter, but also I will take into account different discourses and administrative regulations. Regarding the fieldwork, before entering the school, it was necessary to request authorization from the BACG (Buenos Aires City Government). The original idea was to audio-record the classes. However, this was not allowed. Therefore, the observations were made using two tools: an ethnographic notebook, where what happened in each class was recorded in detail, and for those observational moments in which the use of languages in the classroom was focussed a table was designed in which the language used in the different exchanges between the teachers and the students was registered. Every classroom had between twenty and thirty students, of which half were of Chinese descent and the other half were not. In the school, the denomination used to differentiate the pupils is “Sino-speaking” for descendants of Chinese citizens, and “Spanish-speaking,”5 for non-­ descendants. The school, then, distinguishes two types of students according to the language, that is, a linguistic classification and not a national one. It is interesting to note that not all the students that the school labels as Spanish speakers speak Spanish at home: many students told me that they spoke Guaraní at home, and even a student whose father is from the United States speaks English at home. The students classified as Sino-­ speaking are descendants of Chinese citizens; many are children of mixed families and Spanish is spoken at home. Sino-speaking students generally come from merchant families: they own supermarkets, gift shops, or other businesses. Almost all students attend Chinese schools on Saturdays where they learn Chinese writing.

5  In this chapter, those names are used to refer to the teachers and to the students. Although it is a category that can be discussed (because many of them speak more than one language) we take it as a native category.

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Identities in the Classroom In this section, I will analyze some issues concerning identities that arose in the classroom; on the one hand, those discourses in which national identity is highlighted or discussed and, on the other, the moments in which identity (national or ethnic) is linked to a particular language. Regarding the first axis, I will analyze how the national dimension enters the classroom through national symbols and the place of birth as a factor of identification or questioning of identity. Regarding the second axis, I will show representations about each of the languages, Spanish and Putonghua mainly, and how the students identify themselves with one or the other languages, or even with both linguistic identifications. Before describing what was found in the fieldwork, I would like to mention that regarding this topic, the resolution I already mentioned above has this paragraph in which identity and nationality is put under discussion: That, as is publicly known, in recent years there has been a large flow of Chinese immigration to the Argentine Republic, which has generated that there are native Argentine Chinese children at the school stage who do not have a school that allows them to carry out an adequate schooling due to the large differences between languages.6

This paragraph of the resolution builds a category that, in principle, is against the migratory legislation of the country: “native Argentine Chinese children.” According to Argentinean legislation, if a baby is born on the country’s soil it therefore has Argentinean nationality. This strange denomination can be interpreted as an extension of the huayi category that the PRC uses to indicate who is a Chinese descendant, no matter what nationality the person has.

6  Original in Spanish: “Que, como es de público conocimiento, en los últimos años ha existido en la República Argentina un gran flujo de inmigración china, lo que ha generado que existan niños chinos nativos argentinos en etapa escolar que no tienen una escuela que les permita llevar a cabo una escolarización adecuada debido a las grandes diferencias entre los idiomas.”

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National Symbolism Symbols and national dates are constantly present in the school, linking practices with the National State. For example, in kindergarten, before beginning the classes, the students stand in line facing the Argentine flag. Then, while two children raise it, they sing “The flags of the Earth, all together, how many are they? They are not white or blue, like the one I want. Some have a shield, others have a lion, others have stars and mine has a sun. Hurrah, hurrah, mine has a sun!”. In the highlighted fragment, the flags with stars, for example, the Chinese flag, are indicated as the “others” that are opposed to the one that has a sun, the Argentine flag. In many dialogues between Sino-speaking students, the students question the national identification related to one of the two states. For example, in a first-grade class, conducted in Putonghua, in which the task was to draw a ship on the sea at night, two Sino-speaking boys had added flags to the ship; one had drawn the Argentine flag, and the other had drawn the Chinese flag. The boy who had drawn the Chinese flag asked the other boy why he had drawn the Argentine flag; was it because his mother was of that nationality? The student who had drawn the Argentine flag did not respond and continued to paint his drawing. The student who had drawn Chinese flags on the ship had drawn not only one ship but two. The other ship had a yellow flag and when I asked about the origin of that ship, the answer was “riben,” that is, Japan. The student continued to draw people with weapons on each of the boats and a diver going from the Japanese flagged boat to the Chinese flagged boat. Asked why they were fighting. he replied “these [the Japanese] are the bad guys and these are the good guys.” In this exchange it can be seen how the history of the occupation of China by Japan emerges as a constitutive part of the child’s play, that can only be explained regarding a Chinese cultural and identity relation. Nationality, understood as the place of birth, is an issue that has emerged many times in the school. In one kindergarten class, there was a conflict because, according to one Spanish-speaking student, “Chinese students don’t want to sit with A because he is not Chinese and he’s black.” To deal with this conflict, the teacher replied that in the classroom there were no Chinese people because all the students were born in Argentina, and to reaffirm her position she took the attendance register in which the nationality of the students appears, and clarified: “there are only two children who were not born in Argentina, one was born in Bolivia, A, and another in Peru.” One of the children raised his voice and replied:

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“Well, from the Chinese community” and another claimed that the Sino-­ speaking teacher was Chinese. This teacher replied “No, I’m from Taiwan.” This scene shows a contrast between the place of birth and the identification that children make with each other. The teacher’s reaction and her phrase contradict the paragraph I have already quoted which speaks of “Argentine native Chinese children” but is consistent with Argentine legislation. In her speech there are no Chinese children in the classroom, since to associate the children with an identity she focusses only on the place of birth. The intervention of the Sino-speaking teacher, clarifying her Taiwanese origin, brings to the classroom a conflict that is present in the city, although I have not registered it among the students. The reference to Taiwan was also observed in December 2015 when a musician visited the school. The instrumentalist was playing the guzheng (Chinese musical instrument) and when she introduced the second song she was going to play, she said that it was a Korean song. A boy asked her if she was Chinese and she answered “no”; a few seconds later she added “from Taiwan.” In August 2016, in second grade, they were studying the seasons of the year. The Sino-speaking teacher tried to explain that when it was winter in one country, it was summer in the other. To do this, she wrote the seasons and the months in which they occurred on each of the countries (she ordered the seasons beginning with spring, as is done in Chinese). To make the explanation clearer, next to the names of each of the countries she drew the corresponding flag. On my field notebook, I copied what was written on the blackboard. One of the Sino-speaking students came closer to me and, seeing that I had drawn the Chinese flag wrongly, he got angry and stomped on the floor. I asked him to draw it correctly but he didn’t accept, instead, he stood there watching me correcting the mistakes I had made on the distribution of the stars on the flag.7 After this, the teacher continued her class, writing under the flags the following phrase: 阿根廷今天是八月, 中国也是八月。这里是冬天, 哪里 7  The stars on the flag have an exact arrangement that I had not respected: “The red color in the background symbolizes the revolution; above it are five five-pointed stars; the four small stars direct one of their points towards the center of the fifth, the largest, an arrangement that represents the close unity of the revolutionary people under the leadership of the Communist Party of China.” (Cri, http://espanol.cri.cn/chinaabc/chapter1/chapter10102.htm)

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Fig. 3.2  Blackboard in the classroom. (Source: Florencia Sartori)

是夏天 (In Argentina today we are in August, in China too. Here it is winter, there it is summer) (Fig. 3.2). By circling the words related to China using a red marker, and using a blue marker for Argentina, the teacher clearly showed which was the “here” (zheli, 这里) marked in blue, and the “there” (nali, 那里) marked in red. The teacher then asked the students to read the two sentences aloud and she also clarified: “Argentines also have to read.” With this phrase, not only were Sino-speaking students excluded from the group of Argentines (the use of the adverb also implies that someone, who is not Argentine, is going to read) but at the same time all Spanish-speakers were considered under the same nationality: Argentina. A boy raised his voice and replied, “I’m not Argentine, I’m Peruvian.” The child, who identifies as Peruvian, shows that he does not recognize himself as Argentinean and, therefore, places himself outside the group of those who must read. In the teacher’s phrase and in the way in which the student tries to evade his task, it is evident that the policy of the school and of the City Government to identify the students as Sino and as Spanish speakers does not correspond to the representations that circulate in school. In this sentence, the person who speaks Spanish is necessarily Argentinean, that is, it is a monolingual ideology that is updated in teaching practices. By recognizing himself as Peruvian, the child highlights the national identification which he does not relate to the possible linguistic identification. A few minutes later, the teacher asked a Spanish-speaker something using putonghua and the student’s response was: “I don’t understand Chinese, I’m from here.” Again “here”—Argentina—appears linked to the possibility of speaking only one language: Spanish. In this sense, it is possible to rethink the name of this school following this line of thought: “Argentina” in the name is especially linked to Spanish, just as “Chinese” is essentially linked to Putonghua.

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The Knowledge of Putonghua and Identity In April 2016, in first grade in a class in Putonghua, the task that the children had to do was to match a picture with the word. One of the Spanish-­ speaking boys did not understand the task and tried to copy from the girl who was his desk-mate. The student told me that he always tried to copy from her; he then justified himself by saying that he did not know Chinese. The girl student then clarified: “I understand because I am Chinese” (in Spanish she made a grammatical concordance mistake and uses the “o” instead of the “a” that corresponds to a feminine adjective). Another girl student who was sitting nearby also said “I’m Chinese too.” Finally, the boy student who had tried to copy, pointing to a Spanish-speaking girl, said “she knows Chinese and Argentine.” In all these exchanges, knowledge of the language is associated with nationality. The second point to highlight is that in this exchange the child insists on knowing a language— which is not Spanish but Argentine—while the girls link the knowledge of a language to identity. The boy uses the verb “to know” twice: the first time to indicate his ignorance of Chinese and the second time when he says that a girl knows both languages. In the previous exchanges, the two students also made a gender concordance error in the adjective. This same expression “I am Chinese [chino],” said by a girl,8 reappeared several times in different exchanges that I had with the students. In September 2016, two students came over to chat with me. They looked at my ethnographic notebook and noticed my writing in Putonghua. They were surprised and talked to each other about whether I spoke “good or bad.” I asked them in Spanish if they spoke and how they spoke it. The student answered me then that yes, “I am Chinese.” In May 2016, in second grade a girl addressed me to explain the reason why she was helping her classmates with their Chinese homework: “I am Chinese, they are Castilian [castellano].” Unlike the previous situation in which “Argentine” as a language name appeared linked to knowledge, in this case “Castilian” functions as an identity marker. This same phrase, being + Castilian (“ser + castellano/a”), was observed on other occasions and not only used by students but also by adult speakers. The first day I entered the classrooms in kindergarten, the teachers introduced me to the students. One of the students, born in Argentina but who 8  Spanish concordance needs that the gender of the adjective is the same as the gender of the subject. In this utterance, the girl should have said “soy china,” instead of “soy chino.”

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had lived in Peru for several years and whose family comes from that country said, “she is Chinese, and I am Castilian.” There are no gender concordance errors in this sentence, but she uses “to be + Castilian” as a mark of linguistic identity opposite to “being Chinese” and, in this case, probably also different from being Argentine. The previously described exchange shows how the reference to the knowledge of Putonghua is linked to the identity. The “to be + Castillian” syntagma, that points not to national but linguistic identity, arose in the school not only in the Putonghua speakers’ discourse but also in the one non-Putonghua speaker’s. In the following scenes I will describe how it is Chinese writing that motivates these discourses and questions about identity. Regarding this topic, Li Wei and Zhu Hua (2010) provide elements that allow us to think what we have found in its relationship with other experiences of Chinese migrants in different regions. The authors analyzed the relationship between language, script, and identity through interviews with Chinese and descendants living in Great Britain, Australia, and Singapore. The interviews allowed them to acknowledge representations about the relationship between speaking Putonghua or another Chinese language and being Chinese, as well as the strong relationship between knowledge of Chinese writing and identity. The conclusions they reached can be summarized in four points. First, for most of those interviewed, the standard Chinese spoken is “Mandarin,” based on the dialects of North China. Second, no matter what Chinese language is spoken, the script is common to all and is, according to the interviewees, what contributes to creating a linguistic community beyond the differences. Third, the Chinese language, especially in its written form, is a cultural product with symbolic value, as an example the authors mention the importance given to calligraphy. The last, and which is of special interest in relation to what is being discussed here, is that to be a Chinese “properly speaking” one must know the Chinese language—especially in its written form. Most of the older interviewees recognize that if someone does not know how to read and write, they will not be considered Chinese, since they do not have access to literature written in this language, and at the same time that they cannot belong to the linguistic community since they will only be able to speak the dialect which relates to family or friends from the same geographic region. The same idea has arisen many times in the school by the students themselves, that is, in general the idea that is reaffirmed is that whoever writes better and more fully is “more Chinese.”

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On several occasions I saw Sino-speaker students correcting the Chinese writing to their schoolmates, to me, or even to the teacher. The last was less frequent and was always done by a student who has studied in China. Instead, it was very frequent that when a Spanish-speaker student came to the blackboard to do an exercise his Sino-speaker classmates helped him from their benches, by telling him how to write the characters; some have even gotten up to go to the blackboard to write it with the Spanish-speaker student. In 2015, one of the first-grade students wrote her name in my ethnographic notebook. When she finished, two classmates asked her about the third sinogram. She explained what it was and one of the boys, the same one who also corrected the teacher, told her that it was miswritten and traced it correctly. The girl accepted this correction without arguing. In that moment, I asked them who had taught them to write their names: the girls said that it was their mother and father; the boy, on the other hand, said no one. The girl whose writing had been corrected said “he is Chinese” to explain the reason why no one had taught him. By indicating that the other one, the one who knows how to write, is Chinese, this girl moves away from that possible identification. Li Wei and Zhu Hua (2010) also found divergences between the younger and older generations on this issue. In interviews with adolescents who recognize themselves as Chinese despite not knowing how to read or write, what was highlighted as most important to be Chinese was the appropriation of cultural guidelines. The girl whose name was corrected— whose mother is Argentine and father Chinese—at many other times, will invoke the recognition of cultural guidelines to identify herself as Chinese. So, in one class, she put a headband on her hair that had a veil that she dropped over her face, looked back, and said “in China, people wear this when they get married. In Chinese it is called ‘头纱 [tóushā, veil]’.”

Institutional Decisions The first encounter I described refers to different identifications. Specifically, I focus on how these encounters between Chinese descendants and national symbols, on the one hand, and between these kids and the literacy, on the other, allow them to rethink their identities. This chapter focusses on Chinese migrants, but it could also be analyzed how this school and the encounter with the Chinese students allow the others to ask themselves about their identity as Argentinean or migrants.

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In this second encounter, instead, the focus is on institutional dimensions. This section is structured into two parts: the first part in which I show the political dimension of the school’s creation, and a second part in which the school and the pedagogical couple is the main subject. BACG9 School: Constitution and Tensions As I have already mentioned, the main declared object of the school is that a migration language enters the school and become a language of instruction. In order to do this, children should not only know how to talk, and how to talk about their daily life, but also learn how to use the migration language in their scholarly life and to learn the vocabulary for sciences, for example, in this language. In this direction, the regulation proposes that Chinese migrants and descendants will be included in the Argentine educational system. Taking into consideration what I have already mentioned about how this idea is in tension with another conception around the teaching of Putonghua not to migrants but to Spanish speakers, the question that arises is why is there not a school with similar characteristics with Guarani-speaking migrants if, in fact, the same school has many students who speak that tongue? I not only ask myself this as researcher, but also hear this from teachers at school. To get closer to an answer to this question, we will refer to another BACG program in which the focus is on teaching Spanish to speakers of other migrant languages: the “Spanish second language for inclusion [Español lengua segunda para la inclusión]” program. It was launched on February 21, 2017 (that exact day was chosen because it is International Mother Language Day). Its main purpose is to “To advise and accompany the schools of initial, primary and secondary levels in their task of offering equitable and inclusive educational opportunities to all their students” (BACG, website10). This program is based on the idea that it is necessary that the student who speaks a different language at his home should also learn Spanish as a second language, without losing the relation to the other language. The tools that were developed in this program and which are published on their web page are: a handbook for teachers and school administrators, an action protocol in the event that a non-Spanish-speaking student is detected in a

9

 BACG: Buenos Aires City Government.  https://www.buenosaires.gob.ar/educacion/idiomas/elsi

10

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school, and, up to date, a video in different languages addressed to families. I will briefly discuss these two instruments below. The Guide towards the Inclusion of Students Speaking of Languages Other than Spanish in City Schools [Guía para la Inclusión de Alumnos Hablantes de Lenguas Distintas del Español en las Escuelas de la Ciudad] (GCBA, 2017a), focusses on how to promote the acquisition of a second language by proposing activities to the teacher to carry out during classes in which there are speakers of languages other than Spanish. The text starts telling three migratory trajectories narrated in the third person and with the focus on school experiences: a child from China, another from Paraguay, and the third from Pakistan. In this way, the guide begins by focussing on the variety of languages in the educational system as well as its frequency. The guide, however, insists that the same guidelines would be useful for indigenous populations or deaf and hard-of-hearing children. One of the main concerns of the guide is that teachers can acknowledge the difference between knowing Spanish and being able to use it in everyday situations, and what the school life and education requires as a command of that language. Finally, this guide recommends actions that principals, teachers, and assistants can take to help these children be “included” in school. First, it focusses on what can be done from school as an institution, and then what teachers can do in the classroom to help them improve their use of language in academic activities. The Spanish as a Second Language for inclusion Protocol [Protocolo Español Lengua Segunda para la Inclusión] (GCBA, 2017b) instead, establishes a plan of action that should be carried out by those schools where there is a population that does not speak Spanish. It constitutes an action framework to those schools that have students who speak languages different from Spanish. Four steps are established: identification, establishment of a reference and consultation team, diagnosis, and follow-up. For the first step, two procedures are proposed: the school can notice if there are any student that don’t speak Spanish either “by communication with the families” or “by observation of the student’s performance.” In the first case, a list of questions is proposed by the protocol to be asked in a meeting with parents. This questionnaire appears in Spanish in the body of the protocol, but the annex offers translated versions into Arabic, Aymara, Chinese, Guaraní, English, and Quechua. These are questions that seek to account for the use of Spanish and other languages ​​at home. For example, “What language is spoken in your home most of the time?” or “Do you watch television? In what language?” The authors of the protocol state

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that in many cases families may not want to admit to the school the use of another language or that, in the case of a bilingual family, it is likely that they cannot distinguish the use of one or the other languages. In these cases, the authors do not provide a solution, but only say that it is necessary to make sure that families understand that the questions are intended to help the child and not to stigmatize him. The protocol advocates the maintenance of the first language in parallel with the acquisition of Spanish. The first language (L1) and the culture of origin are valued as identity pillars of the students and as reference points for the acquisition process, both of the second language (L2) and of the corresponding school contents (GCBA, 2017b, p. 6). Through this program, the BACG acknowledges the multiplicity of languages ​​and cultures present in the city and develops strategies so that this does not become an impediment to schooling. However, the asymmetry between some migrants and others is clear: while the “Chinese” pupils are offered areas that allow the schooling of the language, the other pupils are only offered teaching strategies that respect their language, that is to say, their language is not to be taught. To try to get closer to an explanation of the reason for this asymmetry, it is important to remember what was presented in the introduction to this chapter: in the framework of the new global economies and by virtue of the place that the PRC occupies in that space, Putonghua is a language to be sold and commercialized, a merchandise that can be acquired for the realization of certain communicative repertoires in a way that benefits commercial exchanges. That is to say, the language becomes a commodity. When speaking of language commoditization, we think of a process by which a language stops only being considered a skill or a characteristic of people that belong to a certain group, and to understand it as a quantifiable skill (Heller, 2003). In this process, it is the linguistic object that is traded, that which is offered in the market as another kind of merchandise. A clear example of this process is the rise of the service industry (call centers, tourism) and, in recent years, information technology industry (the development of artificial intelligence and automatic translators), for example. The target language of this school, and of this chapter, has undergone commoditization processes in recent years. Gao (2017) analyzes how Putonghua began to be a merchandise within the framework of the development of neoliberalism, together with a growth of nationalism in the PRC. At the beginning of the year 2000, the PRC government began to invest in promoting the teaching of their official language around the

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world (just bear in mind that the first Confucius Institute11 was established in 2004 in Seoul, Korea, and there are currently 529 around the world, including Institutes and Confucius Classrooms). The authors of the article conclude by stating that “the disclosure of Mandarin becomes both a neoliberal enterprise and political propaganda.” In Sartori (2019) I analyze how the bilingual street signal of the Chinatown of CABA (Buenos Aires) allows setting up a scenario in which the exotic and the different is given prominence to show the porteño12 who visits the neighborhood that he can be a “tourist” in his own city.13 Writing, then, becomes an ethno-national marker that serves the commercial purposes of selling more merchandise and selling the City of Buenos Aires as a “mosaic of cultures” (Laborde, 2017). The fact that a single script is chosen (the simplified one) that is associated with the PRC (and that flags of that State are placed in events organized together with the CGBA) refers to a single cultural conformation and leaves out of any discussion the heterogeneity and conflicts between the different immigrants (Chinese and Taiwanese). Thus, the Chinese culture that is offered as merchandise through this writing is uniquely related to a state. Carlos Regazzoni, who was in 2015 Undersecretary of Financial Economic Management and Resource Administration of the Ministry of Education of the CGBA and the ideologue of the school, in an interview given to El Tribuno14 was asked about how to change the reality of life for many poor children. As a response to this question he affirmed that one way is to improve education, and regarding the school that concerns us here, he says: The kids who finish their studies in that school will not be poor, because they will have a guaranteed job. Chinese is a differential language because it brings many advantages in the labor market. By simply speaking in Mandarin, students are assured of a good job. In this sense, the teaching of the language is linked to a labor advantage that, from the public administration, is

11  Confucius Institutes are non-profit institutions whose aim is to promote Putonghua and Chinese culture. These institutes are established through an agreement between the Chinese Ministry of Education and a local university. 12  “Porteño” refers to the inhabitants of the City of Buenos Aires. 13  In this same volume, you can also read Denardi’s chapter on this volume. 14  https://www.eltribuno.com/salta/nota/2014-8-25-1-40-0-carlos-regazzoniel-70-de-las-chicas-pobres-no-termina-la-escuela

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oriented towards the most disadvantaged groups: for this reason, the school is located in the southern part of the city.

Finally, we will turn to some notes from the fieldwork that also show the tension between the two poles I have been discussing in this article: Putonghua as a migration language and as a commodity. I will focus especially on the question of the pedagogical couple and how it works. The Curriculur Bases (2016) for this kind of schools states that there should be two teachers per classroom. Teachers generally also represent both language communities in a balanced way, either because there are equal numbers of teachers who teach in each language or because teachers are bilingual; The teaching of classes can be organized in a pedagogical pair with a representative of each language, or with alternate teachers, so that students receive teaching of disciplinary content in both languages. In this school, it was chosen that two teachers work together in each course: one who speaks Putonghua and, the other, Spanish. In all the classes that I observed, the Sino-speaking teacher can also speak Spanish; while the Spanish-speaking teacher had no knowledge of the other language. The fact that teachers who teach Spanish only speak this language is not necessarily a decision but responds to the difficulty of finding schoolteachers who speak Putonghua. However, as I mentioned earlier, the searches for teachers are only made to fill the vacancies of a Putonghua teacher or a teacher of a special subject who speaks this language and not to fill the other positions. In addition, by speaking with many “Spanish-­ speaking” teachers at the school, I got to know that many of them would like to study Putonghua, but that the school does not offer classes in this language. This way, an asymmetry is generated in the knowledge of the two languages involved, which does not translate into greater prestige for those teachers who speak both languages. I will refer to this point below. The two pre-school sections have two teachers, a Sino-speaking and a Spanish-speaking one.15 In the classrooms, both teachers work together almost all the time and, although one of the two was leading the class, the other participates and helps the students. In the case of the Sino-speaking teacher, this help often consists of the translation of unknown words in Spanish. 15  During the first year of my fieldwork, the special subjects (art, gym, and music) did not have a pedagogical partner, this work modality was gradually put into practice.

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At the primary level, there are two Sino-speaking teachers per class: one is the teacher on the morning shift and the other on the afternoon shift; the Spanish-speaking teacher is a full-time teacher. When I asked the principal the reason for this difference, they told me that, in many cases, the Sino-speaking teachers did not want to work full time. Another difference is that the teachers who speak Spanish are grade level teachers, that is, they have an enabling title for this role and, they all have had teaching experience in other schools before taking this position. In the case of the Putonghua teachers, some are psychopedagogues, others are English language teachers, one has a degree in mathematics, that is to say, most of them do not have teaching degrees for primary level. Also, most of them had no experience in elementary schools. For this reason, the first year that I made observations, I saw Sino-speaking teachers asking the Spanish-­ speaking teachers how to develop certain procedures. In turn, in many situations when there were conflicts with a student or some bureaucratic issue to resolve, the teacher who was called from the principal office was the Spanish-speaking one. On the other hand, when it was sought to have a particular message translated or to speak with Sino-speaking parents, the Sino-speaking teacher was called. The fact that Spanish-speaking teachers are monolingual implies that during classes in  Putonghua they do not understand the subject being taught and, therefore, cannot help Spanish-speaking students to follow the class. For this reason, during class in Putonghua the other teacher dedicates her time to correcting homework, preparing material for her next classes, or helping to maintain discipline in the classroom. In some classes, the Spanish-speaking teacher even went out to perform an administrative task, leaving the Sino-speaking teacher alone in the classroom for the entire class. When classes are in the Spanish language, the Sino-­ speaking teachers sometimes help the children who do not speak Spanish so well, explaining the instruction again, sometimes in Chinese and sometimes in Spanish. For example, in one of the classes observed in second grade, while one teacher led the class in Spanish, the Sino-speaking teacher approached the students to help them understand the instructions for the task they had to do or guide them in solving it. All these asymmetries crystallized in a first-grade class. Schoolteachers sometimes use recess, or rather a shortened recess, as a disciplinary measure. Sometimes, there are students who lose all recess for bad behavior during class and other times, they have a few minutes deducted. In first-­ grade class I am referring to, the Putonghua teacher who was leading the

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class, indicated that only students from two tables could go out for the recess. The Spanish-speaking teacher, seeing this, said no, that some of those that the Sino-speaking teacher was allowing to leave were punished by her. Finally, the Sino-speaking teacher accepted the decision of the other and those children could not go out to the break.

Conclusion In this work we approach, from a specific contact zone—the Argentine-­ Chinese bilingual initial and primary school—the way in which the encounters between the descendants of migrants and the discourse of the Argentine nation-state, on one hand, and between the descendants and the reading and writing practices on the other hand, modify and build identities. In this sense, Chinese migrations make the city state think of new categories that allow them to label new identities (“native Argentine Chinese children”); the school also develops new labels that are constructed according to the language that the State assumes the children speak according to their origin: they would be Chinese speakers if their family is from PRC and Spanish speakers if they do not have Chinese relatives. It’s not arbitrary that the name of the school is the Bilingual Argentine-Chinese Dual Immersion School. With the use of this name, what is being highlighted is the State and not the language itself: being part of a country is equivalent to being able to speak its language. This same contact zone allowed us to account for another role associated with the language, that is, no longer thinking of language as linked exclusively to identity processes but also and maybe rather to processes of language commodification. For non-Chinese descendants, the Asian language and its learning entail advantages on economic and labor insertion. What happens in the case of the descendants of migrants? For them, the situation is more complex because the two ways of understanding the language come into tension. Knowing this language, and in particular its writing, allows them to be part of Chinese culture and recognize themselves as such. However, Putonghua as the official language of the state of origin of their parents, but not necessarily the language of their family, is also a commodity. In Argentina this shift is not so evident, but in countries such as the United States, the Netherlands, and Great Britain, many Chinese schools that taught Cantonese have abandoned the teaching of that language to turn to the official language and script of the PRC, mainly due to pressure from the families. This asset, Putonghua, will allow them

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to enter the Argentine labor market by being the “authentic” speakers of this language while it will also enable them to be the authorized intermediaries between the two “cultures.” As Heller (2003) affirms, not only languages become commodities but also the identities.

References Bein, R. (2012). La política lingüística respecto de las lenguas extranjeras en la Argentina (doctorado). Universität Wien. Di Tullio, A. (2010). Políticas Lingüísticas e Inmigración. El Caso Argentino. EUDEBA. El Tribuno. (2014, August 25). Carlos Regazzoni: El 70% de las chicas pobres no termina la escuela, Diario El Tribuno https://www.eltribuno.com/salta/ nota/2014-­8 -­2 5-­1 -­4 0-­0 -­c arlos-­r egazzoni-­e l-­7 0-­d e-­l as-­c hicas-­p obres-­n o-­ termina-­la-­escuela Gao, Shuang (2017). The commodification of language in neoliberalizing China: The cases of English and Chinese. In Flubacher, Mi-Cha y del Percio, Alfonso (Eds.), Language, education and neoliberalism. Critical studies in sociolinguistics. Multilingual Matters: Bristol. Heller, M. (1996). Legitimate language in a multilingual school. Linguistics and Education, 8, 139–157. Heller, M. (2003). Globalization, the new economy and the commodification of language and identity. Journal of SocioLinguistics, 7(4), 473–492. Heller, M. (2010). The commodification of language. Annual Review of Anthropology, 39, 101–114. Laborde, S. (2017). La ciudad a través de la etnicidad habitada. Negociaciones socioculturales en torno a «lo afro», «lo chino» y «lo boliviano» en los procesos de recualificación y relegación urbana de la ciudad de Buenos Aires (tesis de doctorado). Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires. Mera, C. (1998). La inmigración coreana en Buenos Aires. Multiculturalismo en el espacio urbano. EUDEBA. Pratt, M. L. (1991). Arts of the contact zone. Profession, 91, 33–40. Sartori, M. F. (2019). Bajo la mirada de CangJie: lengua y escritura china en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Revista Signo y Seña, 35, 27–48. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Terasawa, C. K. (2011). The Japanese immigration to Argentina and the use of two languages in Japanese community. Journal of the Faculty of International Studies Bunkyo University, 21(2), 51–65.

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Unamuno, V., & Raiter, A. (2012). La educación intercultural bilingüe: discursos sobre los otros y nosotros. In I. J. Zullo & A. Raiter (Coords.). (Eds.), Slaves of words (pp. 125–160). EUDEBA. Wei, L., & Hua, Z. (2010). Voices from the diaspora: Changing hierarchies and dynamics of Chinese multilingualism. International Journal of Sociology of Language, 205, 155–171.

Legal Documents The Curricular Bases for the Bilingual Argentine-Chinese Dual Immersion School. Experimental project of bilingual education by means of dual or reciprocal immersion [Bases curriculares de la Escuela bilingüe argentino-china. Proyecto experimental de educación bilingüe por inmersión dual o recíproca] (2016). GCBA. (2017a). Guía para la Inclusión de Alumnos Hablantes de Lenguas Distintas del Español en las Escuelas de la Ciudad. Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. GCBA. (2017b). Protocolo Español Lengua Segunda para la Inclusión. Gobierno de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Resolution of the Ministry of Education of the City number 1221 from 2015.

CHAPTER 4

“This Is Not Chinese Food”: Relocation, Authenticity, and Global Cuisines in Chinese Restaurants in Buenos Aires Romina Delmonte

Introduction Chinese restaurants began to appear in Buenos Aires in the 1960s. At the time, there was no Chinatown in the city, and significant migratory flows from China had yet to arrive. It was not until the 1970s that the first wave of Chinese migrants from Taiwan began to settle in the capital city. Sources offer conflicting dates on when the first Chinese restaurant opened its doors: Allan Chen (2019) suggests it was 1972, but a 2006 documentary on “Chinese restaurants” states that, in fact, “Casa China” opened in 1967. The restaurant’s owner, Foo-Ching Chiang, arrived in Buenos Aires in 1964 from Taiwan, where he had lived in exile as a teenager. Either way, one can safely say that prior to the mid-1960s it was very improbable, if not impossible, to find a Chinese restaurant in Buenos Aires.

R. Delmonte (*) Instituto Gino Germani. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Badaró (ed.), China in Argentina, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92422-5_4

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In the 1990s, “all-you-can-eat” Chinese restaurants blossomed in the city and established the setting for culinary encounters between newly arrived migrants and the rest of porteño society. The restaurants were an affordable—both economically and in terms of cultural distance—version of otherness. The establishments were generally large and offered dishes from different gastronomic traditions. One could find Chinese dishes popular in the West such as “spring rolls” and “chou fan,” as well as typical Argentine “asado,” salads, pasta, and desserts. Independent movies shot during the period used the restaurants as a backdrop, but as Rud (2020) notes, in these films, the restaurants serve as scenographic settings where the movies’ main characters—white porteños—interact; Chinese restaurant owners or employees are not represented. According to the President of the Asociación de restaurantes chinos en Argentina (Association of Chinese Restaurants in Argentina (henceforth ACRA)1 (Chen, 2019) the 2001 crisis accelerated the decline of this kind of establishments. In a context of economic deterioration, the devaluation of the Argentinian peso, and rising poverty, the business design of a big “all-you-can-eat” buffet with a wide array of dishes targeting the middle and lower-middle classes, resulted in food waste and low profits. Today, according to ACRA, there are 600–700 Chinese restaurants in Argentina. They are mainly located in big cities, and most are in Buenos Aires. When I interviewed the Association president, he organized them into three main categories: “a la carte”, “bufé” (“all-you-can-eat”), and “a domicilio” (only for take-out and delivery). In Buenos Aires, most restaurants are “a la carte.” The total number of establishments fluctuates as restaurant ventures are often opening and closing; this is particularly the case for family-run establishments, which is the case of most Chinese restaurants in Buenos Aires. Like Farrer (2015), I consider restaurants to be contact zones of gastronomic traditions, cultural identities, people, objects, and representations. Through these contacts, Chinese culture and cuisine are recreated and performed in diverse and heterogeneous ways. But restaurants are also 1  The association was created in 1987 in response to the publication of press reports alleging the sale of rat meat in a Chinese restaurant in the city. The association, along with a team of lawyers, managed to debunk the news, but as Chen (2019) describes, the damage had already been done. This same negative representation of Chinese cuisine, which associates it with the consumption of taboo animals and practices linked to “dirtiness,” circulates globally in the West: “If rice was a marker of Chinese ethnicity, rat eating has been a century-long racial profile imposed to the Chinese” (Liu, 2015: 37).

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part of a culinary field; a social field that, as such, is shaped by its own social logics and relevant actors, where capitals—social, cultural, ethnic— are differentially valued, and where actors have different positions in the social space, which is characterized by an unequal distribution of power. The culinary field is, therefore, the result of relationships. Similarly, García (2021) proposes the concept of a gastro-political complex to analyze the multiple actors, agencies, hierarchies, and conflicts that delineate a cuisine.2 This chapter examines how Chinese cuisine is recreated in Buenos Aires and how it relates to the performance of identities. Considering it to be a culinary field, I examine how ethnic and culinary capitals are valued in this context, an inquiry that also seeks to identify the relevant actors and their agency in the field. My argument is that both state and civil society actors shape Chinese cuisine in Buenos Aires. State policies place several narratives about what Chinese food is or is not in the public arena. These narratives play a role in the valuation of cultural commodities—such as cuisines. At the same time, actors from civil society—such as Chinese migrants in Buenos Aires—make use of these discourses in dynamic and changing ways that are enhanced in everyday encounters. What is Chinese food? Who can eat it? How should it be translated to a distant other? How should distances be increased or shortened? I consider cuisines to be the result of—and the culmination of—previous encounters, mobilities, and exchanges. Scholars studying food and its related practices have contested the essentialization of national cuisines and shown them to be the result of multiple historic processes (Appadurai, 1988; Mintz, 1996; Ray, 2015). From this perspective, national cuisines are historical creations that, like other national symbols, function as invented traditions (Hobsbawm & Ranger, 2002). At the same time, being historical, processual, and heterogeneous does not prevent culinary traditions from being powerful symbols of national identity. King (2019) proposes to replace the concept of national cuisine with culinary nationalism,3 a term that recognizes the influx of cuisines in national narratives, but also emphasizes its dynamism, creativity, and contestation. As King states, “food may indeed reinforce essentialized notions 2  “A network of bodies, institutions, economic relations, knowledge production, and discourses that represents both a hegemonic project and a terrain of struggle wherein alternative stories and political projects can emerge through the cracks and fissures” (García, 2021: 5). 3  Ferguson (2010) used this term to understand several empirical cases. King (2019) recaps it and deepens its definition.

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of national identity, yet also simultaneously contest these ideas through the assertion of heterogeneous differences” (2019: 2). In different contexts, this identification—in this case, a Chinese restaurant, or Chinese cuisine—is performed by diverse practices, objects, and representations. This chapter first examines Chinese gastro-diplomacy and policies of gastronomic patrimonialization, of both global and local scope. Second, it details the policies of “cultural diversity management” deployed by the government of the City of Buenos Aires. Finally, it takes a closer look at place, and the interactions between restaurant owners, employees, and clients. Other relevant actors who are not analyzed here but play an important role include food suppliers, food criticism (and the publications where these are printed), cooking schools and festivals, cookbooks, and social media.

Chinese Restaurants in the Americas and in Buenos Aires To categorize a restaurant as Chinese implies ideas about ethnicity, otherness, and identity. What does it mean for a restaurant to be considered “ethnic”? What does a restaurant need to be considered “Chinese”? Ray (2016) shows that the presence of “ethnic” cuisines in the United States— their peculiarities and valuation—accounts for historical articulations between class, the location of the country of origin in the global hierarchy of nations, and the dynamics of migratory processes. Ethnicity is always related to a notion of otherness. Ray shows the influence of certain reformulations of racism, in which the ethnic/cultural replaces the racial/biological, placing individuals and cultural practices in different hierarchical positions in relation to taste. Such a configuration would explain why Chinese cuisine in the United States has been a cheap option associated with fast food throughout the twentieth century. But migrants are also active agents that make use of, and relate to, ethnicity and ethnic capital in diverse ways. As Lu and Fine (1995) argue, “many of the transactions by which ethnicity is made ‘real’ are economically grounded: festivals, restaurants, art galleries, clothing outlets, and musical venues. Ethnicity often becomes a marketing tool, part of an entrepreneurial market” (1995: 535). As a fundamental dimension of the capitalist experience, the market is also the ground where broad social phenomena take place. They describe the mercantile strategies deployed

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by Chinese restaurateurs in Athens, Georgia (USA), categorizing them into two groups: “consumption oriented” and “connoisseur oriented,” according to the strategies the entrepreneurs adopt in order to fit Chinese food into market niches. I also witnessed traces of these strategies in restaurants in Buenos Aires, but as will be elaborated here, in many cases, both coexist in the same restaurant. Coe (2009), Chen (2014), and Liu (2015) deploy a historical evolution of Chinese cuisine in the United States, related to migration processes. Chen (2014) argues that the dominant place and global influence of the United States largely shaped “Chinese American” cuisine throughout the twentieth century. However, in pace with the economic development that China began to undergo in the last decades of the twentieth century, the social processes associated with this development, the changes and shifts in US–China political-economic relations, and China’s place in the world, Chinese cuisine in the United States is also changing. Iconic dishes of “Chinese American” cuisine are being replaced by secondary ones. Regional cuisines are more visible, and there is an increased presence of Chinese restaurants in non-Chinese neighborhoods and more restaurants that propose fusions and hybrids with other cuisines. “The continually improving Chinese economy will further shorten the economic distance between the United States and China. In doing so, it will significantly change the image and reality of the Chinese as a source of cheap labor. Such a change, in turn, will alter the century-long trajectory of American Chinese restaurants which have relied on Chinese labor” (Chen, 2014: 375). Chinese restaurants in Buenos Aires also reflect the rise of China in recent decades, but the bilateral relations between the two countries have been historically different, and in the last decade the asymmetry that places Argentina in a weaker position has become more entrenched. Liu (2015) traces the characteristics historically acquired by Chinese restaurants in the United States, proposing food as an arena where racist rhetoric is expressed. Chan and Strabucchi (2020) also put the spotlight on racial politics, but in a different context: Santiago, Chile. They describe Chinese food and restaurants and how they relate to racialized representations about Chinese people and culture in Chile, showing how Chinese-­ ness is negotiated in diverse ways. As we will see below, the cultural diversity management policies of the last decades in Argentina propose changes in the national ethnic articulation. Asian-ness and Chinese-ness in Buenos Aires represent the exotic, a measure of cosmopolitan diversity, but also the foreign and other.

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In the Latin American context, several works that analyze Chifa cuisine and restaurants are noteworthy (Lausent-Herrera, 2011; Rodriguez Pastor, 1993; Yuan, 2018). Chifas originated in Peruvian coastal cities, especially in Lima, in the 1920s—even more since the 1960s decade—as part of a migratory process that began in the 19th century by bringing Chinese men as indentured laborers. In many cases, at the end of their contracts, Chinese migrants worked in culinary occupations, both in fondas and private households. This gave rise to the construction of a particular culinary tradition in which elements of Cantonese and Peruvian Criolla cuisines were intertwined. Capella Miternique (2014) describes the re-­ creation of Chifa in different Spanish-speaking countries in the last decades of the twentieth century—including Argentina—along with the settlement of Peruvian migrants. These re-creations speak to the multiple mobilities of practices, ingredients, and people associated with China in the Americas. These new cuisines, as is also the case with Chinese-Cuban restaurants in New York (López, 2018; Siu, 2008) further strain representations about authenticity. As Appadurai (1986) proposes, authenticity measures the degree to which something is to a greater or lesser extent what it “ought to be,” hence is a norm of some sort. But if change characterizes social life, how are these criteria established? Are they contested? Who can do what with Chinese cuisine? New studies, like Campos Rico and Martínez Esquivel (2020) and Banh and Liu (2020) describe and analyze Chinese cuisines in America from historical and ethnographic approaches in North and Latin America. Examples from Argentina are scarce (Brauer, 2020). While most of these reflections focus on what happens in restaurants, I seek to understand restaurants, and those who work and consume there, as part of a culinary field delineated by diverse actors. Here I focus on two groups. First, I describe the public policies related to gastronomy carried out by state actors, analyzing how global and local phenomena are articulated in the city of Buenos Aires. Second, I examine the contacts that take place in Chinese restaurants in Buenos Aires in three dimensions: in the kitchens, in the dining area, and on the menus. The chapter is based on ethnographic observations in these restaurants, as well as interviews and informal conversations with owners and employees. In some cases, my role as a researcher was intertwined with my role as a patron. A translator occasionally helped me conduct interviews in Mandarin Chinese. The restaurants chosen were located in different neighborhoods and city areas, and they have diverse price points. In order

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to investigate the domain of state policy, I also attended events organized by the Buenos Aires City Government. Names of restaurants and interviewees are replaced with pseudonyms.

Performances of the Nation Through Gastro-­Politics and Cultural Diversity Management Policies China, Its Gastronomic Heritage, Global and Local Policies What is Chinese cuisine? King (2020) illustrates that the construction of a Chinese culinary identity emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century, in the last years of the Qing dynasty and as a reaction to the incursions of Western imperialist powers. As a cultural defense, Chinese cuisine was presented as something different—and superior—to foreign habits. When this identity was established, it was necessary to organize the various culinary regions into a single, systematic, and harmonious regional scheme of four (or eight or more) parts. While in previous periods there were individual mentions of regional plates and ingredients, the author identifies that it was not until the post-Mao period that this idea of a series of regional cuisines was systematically used as the organizing principle of Chinese cuisine. This concept would be reproduced in government’s speeches, in media, and in academic studies, both inside and outside China. Decades later and when this discourse of regional cuisines was already widely circulating, beginning in the 2010s, ethnic minority cuisines also began to be included. Thus: “Mapping the rich and delicious tapestry of China’s regional cuisines becomes a non-threatening and tasty way to both celebrate and possess all of China’s culinary diversity at one and the same time” (2020: 102). Among the various initiatives that promoted Chinese cuisine, we can differentiate those identified by UNESCO, the institution par excellence that legitimizes the heritage status of an object or practice, and other policies within the framework of gastro-diplomacy (Rockower, 2014). China has been expanding its interest and involvement in heritage issues over the last two decades. The quantitative leap in heritage assets and practices that China has been proposing to UNESCO’s lists has coincided with political, social, and economic changes that the country has undertaken since the 1980s and policies related to its “Reform and

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Opening-up.” There has been a particular push over the last two decades. As Svensson and Maags argue “[t]he starting point for the ‘heritage turn’ in the 1990s is to be found in ideological shifts and the CCP’s search for a new form of legitimacy beyond communism developments” (2018: 14). Chinese heritage management’s first stage occurred amid the revolution and the Mao period; then, beginning in the mid-1980s, the heritage narrative began to include the imperial past; in the following decade, practices of everyday life were included, a process that culminated with the adoption of the concept of intangible heritage in 2003 (Svensson & Maags, 2018). Since the 2010s, cuisines began to have more prominence in heritage discourses globally. Chinese gastronomic practices have not yet been included in UNESCO’s Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage. However, in 2010, Chengdu was chosen as the second UNESCO “City of Gastronomy” and then in 2014 it was followed by Shunde. “Gastronomic Cities” are part of the Creative Cities Network that UNESCO created in 2004, with the aim of promoting creativity as a strategic factor for sustainable urban development. Therefore, in both of these cases, it is not the practices themselves that are the focus of patrimonialization, but gastronomy as a strategy for urban development. Among other initiatives that I recognize as part of a comprehensive project aimed at showcasing Chinese culture to the world is the documentary series “A Bite of China,” produced by CCTV (China Central Television). The three-season series aired in 2012, 2014, and 2018, and shows food preparations in mostly rural surroundings, with an emphasis on traditional cooking techniques. Yang states that “it offers a glimpse into the possibilities and limits for negotiating an alternative national imaginary in the changing media environment of post socialist China. As such, it enacts the tension between homogenization and heterogenization” (2015: 410). In addition to being broadcast on CCTV and digital media in Chinese territories, the episodes are subtitled in English on YouTube, and rights were sold to be broadcasted in other countries. A printed series (DVDs) was also released. I received the DVD version when a colleague went to an event at the Chinese Embassy in Argentina and received it as a gift. Knowing my interest in the field, he asked for one for me. Another gastro-diplomacy initiative that shows the visibility that ethnic minorities have acquired in heritage discourses since the 2010s was the Shanxi cuisine festival organized at the United Nations Headquarters in New York in May 2014. The choice of Shanxi, a lesser-known province,

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and its cuisine, which is not one of four- or eight-most promoted cuisines, shows, as King (2020) has stated, that since 2010, the Chinese national discourse around food has begun to include foods from peripheral regions, as well as ethnic minority cuisines.4 In Argentina, the Confucius Institute—the institution of cultural diffusion of the Chinese State and a fundamental tool of its cultural diplomacy—offered virtual cooking classes in 2020. Participants were taught to prepare “aromatic pork,” “chao fang,” “leek tofu,” and “kung pao chicken.” The description of the course, which was emailed to me along with the Institute’s monthly course offerings, includes references to Confucius and the millenary nature of this gastronomic tradition. It reads: Did you know that in Confucius’s time gastronomy had already become a high art? Confucius emphasized the artistic and social aspects of cooking and eating. He instituted the rules of kitchen and table etiquette, most of which still apply to this day. Food is a fundamental part of life, which is why Chinese society over the centuries has placed so much value on gastronomy. It is part of their culture, philosophy and traditional medicine of the country; an indispensable element in the daily life of the Chinese beyond the natural and basic need to nourish themselves. In this course you will learn how to cook basic but classic dishes of Chinese cuisine, with accessible ingredients and the best tips for how to get started in the world of this millenary cuisine.

Taken together, these initiatives illustrate the important role of the Chinese state in constructing the narrative of Chinese national cuisine, a historical construction that has articulated, in diverse ways and across different periods, contact with foreignness, and heterogeneity within the territory. As we will see, the Argentine state also uses gastronomy as a way of formulating ideas around citizenship and otherness. Gastronomy, Multiculturalism, and the Marketing of Cities Since the mid-2000s, the ways in which ethnicity, cultural diversity, and national identity have been perceived and represented in Argentina, and especially the Buenos Aires metropolitan region, have undergone a change. 4  For a deeper insight into the rise of Shanxi cuisine both in China and globally, see Wank (2015).

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This change can be observed in public policies, legislations, state discourses, and civil society initiatives, for example in the field of culture (Melella, 2020). This process reflects both local and global phenomena. Since the 1980s, the promotion of diversity and dialogue among cultures has been increasingly valued by various actors in the global agenda (Hale, 2005; Sensoy et  al., 2010). Focussing on Buenos Aires, Laborde (2011) states that recent City Governments worked with the aim of consolidating the “city brand” through tourism and culture and in order to position Buenos Aires in the network of cities. In this context, multiculturalism, as an attribute of a cosmopolitan city, took on value. Since 2009, the City Government has organized “BA Celebra,” a program that aims “to share with the immigrant communities living in the city, the celebrations of their national holidays.” In these events, traditional music, dances, clothing, and food are at the center of an experience of encounter with otherness. The idea of the “colectividad” reproduces the barriers that make immigrants intruders or strangers, erasing the multiple exchanges and heterogeneities that constitute migrant groups and ethnic minorities, and even ignoring their role in the formulations of the narratives on the Argentine national identity (Ko, 2016). Foreignness is embodied in the dualism “colectividades” (migrant communities)/“neighbors,” and is present in many City Government communications. With a focus on Asian migrants, Ko argues that these groups and their cultural productions are presented in essentialized and exoticizing terms. They serve to mark the emerging multiculturalism in Buenos Aires as an oscillating process, which includes and excludes at the same time. It “recognize[s] minorities, on the one hand, but preserv[es] racial hierarchies on the other” (2016: 276). Within these policies of multiculturalism, gastronomy—also often presented in an essentialized and exoticized way—occupies a prominent place, configuring a scenario in which one of the validated forms of being “Chinese” in Buenos Aires is as a producer of a cultural resource, like food. Another City Government initiative with a culinary focus, is the digital book “La cocina de las colectividades,” published in 2018 by the Subsecretaría de Derechos Humanos y Pluralismo Cultural (Undersecretariat of Human Rights and Cultural Pluralism). The book presents a selection of recipes organized according to “colectividad” and for each of the forty-­ seven communities presented, a starter, a main dish, and a dessert are

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detailed. All the dishes are illustrated with a photo, though no descriptions of migratory processes nor characteristics of the migrants are provided. There are also two short essays, one of them on Chinese cuisine, written by a food writer of Taiwanese origin who has been living in Buenos Aires for thirty years. The central ideas of the essay refer to the millenary character of Chinese cuisine: In addition to having built the largest building in the world, invented gunpowder and spread their famous proverbs, the Chinese are also known for their millenary gastronomic culture, part of one of the four great millenary cultures of the world.

The text also refers to the lack of authenticity in many expressions of this gastronomy in the city, differentiating “authentic Chinese” from “Chinese-American” versions: Chinese-American plates are cooked in record time: none of them take hours of preparation, they are easy to eat, they are not too oily nor spicy and, in general, they are a harmonious combination of few ingredients. The vast majority are wok stir-fried, with a lot of sweet and sour—because the Western public likes it—with little frying and uncomplicated flavours. If you have never tried Chinese food, this cuisine is for beginners. On the other hand, traditional Chinese food can be more difficult for untrained palates. In addition, many of its dishes have a particularity: they are not created by chefs, but by renowned writers and artists, such as Tong Po beef, one of the most emblematic dishes of Chinese cuisine.

Finally, the text ends by establishing hierarchies within the different constructions of Chinese cuisine and encouraging a wider public to embrace more authentic dishes. It also mentions the need to be, or to go with, a Chinese person in order to access that cuisine. Despite being a commercial product sold in the market, food is not only a monetary transaction: What is your proficiency in Chinese food? If you are still eating the same take-out or all-you-can-eat, it’s time to upgrade: go to a real Chinese restaurant with a Chinese friend, order the dishes suggested on the menu “for Chinese people,” and begin to discover the true flavors of this millenary cuisine.

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The City Government’s second initiative is implemented by the Ente de Turismo de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires (Tourism Department of the City of Buenos Aires), which, on its website, proposes various tours around the city. One of them is (explicitly) titled “Present in tours. Day two | Multicultural Buenos Aires”.5 After visiting Liniers to learn about “Latin America in Buenos Aires,” the site proposes a Korean lunch in Flores, to continue with a 3 p.m. visit to Barrio Chino (Chinatown), and then a stroll in Palermo to get to know about Middle Eastern cuisines. The tour ends with an Irish pint in Retiro. The Barrio Chino chapter of the tour points out that “There are accessories shops, the Chinese Association, a Buddhist temple, restaurants, and supermarkets” and it suggests three restaurants for dinner. These are restaurants that were established more than twenty years ago by Taiwanese and Hongkongese owners. In this way, the Ente de Turismo places Chinatown as one of the hallmarks of multiculturalism in the city and, within it, identifies the restaurants as its main attraction. They are the only locations described with their name, address, and operating hours. The City Government’s policies reveal a broader change in the way ethnicity and cultural diversity are represented. Multiculturalism becomes a value expressed in certain definitions of citizenship, as well as in tourism and city marketing. Within this “multiculturalization” of Buenos Aires, Asian cultures occupy a central place, as do certain representations of Chinese-ness. Within Chinese cultural products, cuisine is particularly emphasized, not only in the City Government’s organization of events in public spaces, where Chinese food is sold and discourses on what is (and is not) Chinese cuisine are produced and circulated, but also by restaurant advertisements on state platforms.

Multiple Mobilities of a Gastronomic Tradition As I have mentioned before, Chinese restaurants in Buenos Aires are heterogeneous, offering varied menus, in environments that also reconstruct Chinese-ness in diverse ways. In this section I describe some of my findings, organizing the encounters (Faier & Rofel, 2014) and contacts (Farrer, 2015; Pratt, 1992) that occur in restaurants into three analytical axes: the kitchens, the dining rooms, and the menus.

5

 https://turismo.buenosaires.gob.ar/en/recorrido/day-two-multicultural-buenos-aires

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Kitchens and Cooks: Knowing, Learning, Working Notwithstanding the heterogeneity of the restaurants, their kitchens, and the labor relations that take place there, I found two characteristics that cut across various cases. First, that at least one Latin American migrant works in most kitchens, and often these migrants are persons of Peruvian origin. Second, the majority of Chinese cooks acquired their skills as amateurs and were not trained in cooking schools. In upscale restaurants that offer more sophisticated plates, it is common to find a Chinese chef and a higher proportion of Chinese employees working in the kitchen. However, in some cases, all kitchen staff, despite position in the kitchen hierarchy, are migrants. In others, particularly smaller restaurants, there are no employees at all and all tasks are taken care of by the owners. Carlos is the owner of one of the most prestigious Chinese restaurants in the city. They offer classic Westernized Chinese dishes, as well as more sophisticated dishes such as Peking Duck, or Mei cai kou rou (Pork Belly with Pickled Vegetables). Unlike other restaurant owners and managers who learned to cook as amateurs, Carlos came to Argentina after working for more than a decade in restaurants in different Chinese cities. When I ask him about his kitchen staff, he tells me: “The restaurant also encourages local cooks, Argentines and persons from neighboring countries. They make the simple Chinese dishes because complex dishes are difficult to prepare. But they are mostly cooks coming from China who cook dishes from their hometown.” His account presents a relationship between ethnic and culinary capital, wherein an ethnic Chinese person is more prepared to execute more sophisticated plates. This place of higher hierarchy in the kitchen is accompanied by better pay and working conditions, and ultimately higher social status within the kitchen. Alfredo is 36 years old and arrived with his family from Taiwan at the age of twelve. Since arriving in Buenos Aires, the family has made a living in the restaurant industry. His mother, who became a professional cook in Argentina, taught him the basics of cooking and operating a restaurant. When I ask him about Chinese cuisine in Buenos Aires, he explains: “Mm … well, but incomplete, because if we talk about oriental food or cuisine, each one has its own … Each province has its own cooking culture. They are very different. And here they don’t differentiate them clearly. Chinese food is organized in different groups, and here in Argentina, I don’t find each province’s cuisine … It’s a mixture … And besides that, there are many Chinese restaurants where there are no

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Chinese cooks, it is Peruvians cooking.” He not only claims a lack of authenticity related to a poor representation of regional cuisines, but also that authenticity is embodied and related to ethnicity. The mention of non-Chinese cooks implies a devaluation of authenticity. Tensions related to the ethnicity-authenticity complex also appear in relation to ideas of cultural appropriation, an issue that I found among my younger interviewees: “Since there are more people wanting to eat Chinese food, you can find, for example, Argentine Chinese bao restaurants, with a cool ambiance … in other words, there are no Asians inside. It’s like they pick a trend and turn it into something for the local palate. In London we went to a place called ‘Bao’ that sold westernized baos, but they were not Argentin-ized, like the ones here. And the people who run it certainly were Chinese.” I ask her if she had any different feelings and sensations in that case. “Yes, I feel they are more entitled to do so. They’re not profiting from another culture. In fact, it makes you proud … I don’t know why. An Asian was able to carve out that niche in a Western country and it’s doing well and it’s great, and it’s very inspiring.” These tensions about what is or is not Chinese cuisine, and who can make Chinese cuisine a source of income, begin to appear when Chinese cuisine becomes a more valued resource. Alberto came to Buenos Aires from Lima in 1995. In Peru he worked in a large and renowned Chifa restaurant in downtown Lima, run by its Chinese owners. At an event organized at the restaurant he met Chang, a Chinese immigrant who had been living in Buenos Aires since the 1960s and ran one of the first Chinese restaurants in the city. As he could not find any experienced Chinese cooks in Buenos Aires, he offered Alberto a job at his place. Alberto decided to move to Buenos Aires and after working for ten years in Chang’s restaurant, he decided to open his own Chifa restaurant, which he still manages today. In his case, a job offer, resulting from the networks of Chinese transnationalism, initiated his migratory project and, years later, allowed him a path to ownership of his own restaurant. In her thesis on Chinese restaurants in Johannesburg, South Africa, Liu (2018) also finds that, in many venues, the staff are migrants (in this case, from Zimbabwe). On the one hand, migrant groups are vulnerable to accepting lower wages and more precarious positions than the local population or other Chinese migrants. However, Liu also finds that owners feel more trust and less fear of being robbed or cheated than with the local South African population. We should also take into account that the

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restaurant industry—globally as well as locally in Buenos Aires—is characterized by precarious labor relations and the employment of migrant laborers (Ray, 2016). Chan, Ramirez, and Stefoni (2019) found some similarities in the relations and interactions between Chinese shop owners and restaurant owners and their Latin American migrant employees in Santiago, Chile. They state that both Chinese and Latin American migrants face uncertainty, risk, and scrutiny related to their racialized migrant status. Yet, at the same time, they are differently situated through race, gender, class, and citizenship regimes. Among these differences they create a kind of reciprocity through their employer–employee relation. In Chinese restaurant kitchens in Buenos Aires, I found a similar situation as described for the Chilean and South African cases, but in this case, hierarchies are also expressed, constructed, and shaped throughout culinary knowledge. Cooks describe contact in the kitchens as marked by tensions, frictions, and conflicts. These kitchens are places of encounter between people with different culinary knowledge, who speak different languages, who have different labor hierarchies. As Carlos explains, non-­ Chinese cooks are in charge of the easiest and least skilled tasks in the kitchen. In some cases, it is their first job in a restaurant kitchen, in others—especially among Peruvian migrant cooks—they have previous professional experience in the restaurant industry. But the process of learning new tasks and culinary techniques is described by non-Chinese cooks as especially conflictive. One first barrier is the language. As many Chinese cooks in Buenos Aires do not speak Spanish, the learning process described by employees is mostly observational. Mastering the wok technique is mentioned as a key, but challenging, task, it is a central cooking technique and difficult to explain when there are language barriers. Learning the technique is practical and bodily, it involves observation, practice, to let the body understand the movement it must be felt, to be corrected, and tried again. Regarding the cooks’ professionalization, as I mentioned above, my interviewees often made a point to mention that many Chinese cooks in Buenos Aires lacked formal education. “Here we don’t have traditional chefs. Or cooks that have learned as kids or in formal classes. Most of them are like me, my mother taught me, I never took cooking classes. It is not very professional, they learned in a self-taught way, more like family home cooking.” In the migratory context, cooking becomes a way of making a living, and in the shortage of formal qualifications, ethnic and culinary capitals are more valued. Ray (2016) argues that this shortage of formal

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education is a common feature of ethnic cooks, which places them in a position of reduced power within the broader culinary field. In the case of other Asian cuisines in Buenos Aires, such as Korean (Delmonte & Lee, 2020) this is changing along with the presence of migrants’ siblings in spaces of accreditation such as cooking schools. Space, Design, and Decoration Chinese restaurants in Buenos Aires are situated across the city map, unlike other Asian restaurants (Delmonte, 2015; Delmonte & Lee, 2020). I argue that this distribution is related to the dispersed way Chinese migrants have themselves taken up residence in the city (Marcos & Mera, 2015: 273). Despite being spread out, there also exists a certain degree of concentration of Chinese restaurants in the few blocks that comprise Barrio Chino; there, approximately thirty restaurants are located. As I have noted, Chinese restaurants in Buenos Aires are heterogeneous and the same could be said of their decor, furnishings, storefronts, and the spatial design of their dining areas. Space is imbued with cultural and political implications (Massey, 1994) and is a framework for situated action and the result of such situated action; it is a social construct and also entails the possibility of new and creative interactions. Given this, it is worth taking a closer look at the spatial design, aesthetic, and objects that are part of Chinese restaurants in Buenos Aires. One of the first issues that attracted my attention when I started fieldwork was that in some Chinese restaurants, waiters placed clients according to their visible ethnicity. If someone looked Asian or was in Asian company, they were placed near the kitchen and the cashier’s office. If this was not the case, the group would be placed closer to the door. Alfredo, a restaurant owner, unfolds his expectations about non-­ Chinese customers and the representations they may have about proper behavior in a restaurant: “Maybe the Argentine is intimidated if there are round tables. There is also the issue of the table, Argentines tend to sit much more at square or rectangular tables, and Chinese clients come in big groups, they sit on round tables with the spinning plate, they talk a lot, they smoke a lot. That intimidates Argentines and creates a barrier.” One solution found by restaurants that cater to both Chinese and non-Chinese, is to avoid that contact—represented as conflictive—or to lessen its intensity.

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In the interactions related to service, I found that the difference between Chinese and non-Chinese is not the only relevant one. Among Taiwanese interviewees, they distinguish a Chinese and Taiwanese way of service. As analyzed in other cases (Denardi’s contribution to this volume), tensions and conflicts between the PRC and Taiwan delineate daily practices in Buenos Aires, as well as the identifications that are enacted and reconfigured through those practices. Alfredo describes his perception of difference: “Attitude. Service. The attitude in the way they serve you is different. You can notice that Taiwanese people are nicer. They greet you, they chat with you, but Chinese don’t. If you are not close to them, they take your order and bye-bye. You leave. That’s the difference between Chinese and Taiwanese. The Chinese is more: you want to eat, I take your order so you can eat and goodbye. And the Taiwanese, most of us want to maintain a relationship. It doesn’t matter if you come today just to chat, you are welcome.” In his account, the difference has also a moral value. The exchange of food in the restaurant is not just a monetary issue, the restaurateur should offer something of himself—his time? His kindness?— which one might call a gift, in terms of Tsing (2013: 25). As for the decor, as I have noted for other aspects, Chinese-ness is reconstructed in diverse ways in these spaces. In small family restaurants, as is the case of Chinese restaurants in Buenos Aires, the owners generally choose and design the decor of their premises themselves, with certain resource constraints. As Ray (2016) argues, resources are not only material, but also symbolic and bodily, in relation to skills and imagination. Li (2016) proposes that in this sense “[the owners] become ethnographers who ‘collect’ ethnographic artifacts or objects of ethnography elsewhere and ‘create’ ethnic atmosphere through restaurant renovations (or decorations). During renovation, Chinese restaurant designers detach Chinese cultural motifs from the Chinese cultural context and relocate them in a foreign context. In the process of detachment, cultural fragments are produced and used to illustrate the designers’ ideas” (2016: 61–62). In Buenos Aires, a major difference can be found between those restaurants that stage typical Orientalist objects, and those that place images and symbols that relate to China in an alternative way. “Faroles” is located in Barrio Chino, an epicenter in the circulation of objects associated with China and the “oriental” in general. The restaurant’s Taiwanese owners opened Faroles in the early 2000s. Both its interior and exterior decor displays elements that refer to a millenary, ancient, and exotic China. The color red predominates on the walls and some

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elements of the decoration are gilded. In the dining area, teapots, vases, bamboo objects, red lanterns, and traditional paintings are on display. In addition, a scarce light, natural and artificial, reinforces the sensation of entering a distant space. We can argue that this is the hegemonic strategy of both State actors and various associations of overseas Chinese. Moreover, since it is located in Barrio Chino, a tourist area of the city, it services a largely non-Chinese public whose knowledge about China and the “oriental” are strongly associated to those hegemonic symbols of the commodification of Chinese culture. Restaurant owners also encode knowledge in the form of certain expectations. What takes places is similar to what Lu and Fine found in the state of Georgia in the United States in the 1990s: “They put on ‘staged authenticity’ in their establishments, which is based on their understandings of the customers’ needs” (1995: 173). In addition, “Faroles” was opened more than twenty years ago when these references to millenary and traditional China circulated more widely, and the narratives that include ethnic minorities and the regional particularities in national discourses and heritage valuation had not yet gained strength. Moreover, in this case, the emphasis is on a millenary China, where there are still no divisions between the PRC and Taiwan. There are no images referring to the Nation-State, but on one of its walls there is a large image of bamboo canes painted with traditional characters in a script still in use in Taiwan and Hong Kong but not in the PRC (Fig. 4.1). “Fuego” offers a different case. The atmosphere is much more austere. Here, rather than dragons, teapots, and red lanterns, there are photographs of wheat fields and natural landscapes. The images are low quality copies with simple frames. Fuego opened in 2015 and is located in the geographical center of the city, near several avenues. The walls are painted in orange, and in its upper half there are glazed windows facing the street. Tables and chairs are made of wood with a “neutral” and “modern” design that have been typically used in mid-range gastronomic establishments since the beginning of the 2000s. The menu offers dishes from the cuisine of northwest China, where the owners come from. The regional aspect in this case is highlighted both in the menu and in the visuals of China it displays. We can also consider that the presence of the Chinese State in that area of the territory has been historically different, thus articulating different identities. In this case, moreover, the owners settled in Buenos Aires in the context of a more recent migratory wave and with less economic capital. As Liu (2016) argues in her analysis of the changes experienced by Chinese restaurants in the United States in the first half and

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Fig. 4.1  “Faroles” dining area

those in the last years of the twentieth century: “As one of the external manifestations of ethnicity, décor in ethnic restaurants reflects changes of ethnicity. The new Chinese restaurant décor after the 1960s helped represent a new Chinese ethnicity, whose contents were different from before. In order to make itself visible, ethnicity needs to be expressed externally” (2016: 179). What Liu sees as a historical change taking place over decades, is a simultaneous multiplicity in the case of Buenos Aires (Fig. 4.2). The Menu: Food Plates, Menu Design, and Language How do Chinese restaurants offer and represent the food they sell? Within the multiplicity of forms, I identified two major approaches. In the first, a single menu is offered, usually bilingual. In the second, the Chinese and Spanish versions are different.

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Fig. 4.2  A porcelain vase in the corner of a dining area

A particular feature of Chinese cuisine dishes is that in many cases they do not describe ingredients or ways of cooking, but instead express ideas in a more metaphorical way. Metaphor in some cases refers to the shape or appearance of the dish. Thus, translation involves several problems and decisions. I found that generally, the Chinese name of the dish refers to these more rhetorical forms, while their Spanish translations are more attached to ingredients and cooking methods. The menu at “Faroles,” in addition to being lengthy, offers around 250 dishes—much more than the average offered in most restaurants. It is written in both Spanish and in traditional characters. The titles of each section are also written in English. It is worth noting that it includes many clarifications, in most cases with a certain intention of “disciplining customers.” For example: “Minimum consumption per diner is $200”—“All dishes do not come with eggs. If you want with eggs, add an additional $40”—In the “rice” section: “In typical Chinese cuisine we only use ‘Double fortune’ rice”—In the section of stir-fried noodles: “The imported

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‘sha tie’ sauce + $60. With ginger $30”—In the section on Chop suey: “hot grilled + additional $60.” These warnings are only written in Spanish, so the Chinese public does not seem to need to be informed of these additional charges. Also significant is a certain claim of authenticity in describing the rice, alleging “typical Chinese cuisine.” What might Chinese mean in this case (Fig. 4.3)? Fuego’s menu is more limited, with around fifty-five dishes. Each dish is labeled with a number, the name in Putonhua and Pinying, the ingredients in Spanish, its price and an illustrative photo. It is organized into the following categories: “Specialty,” “Appetizers,” “Hot dishes,” “Rice,”

Fig. 4.3  “Faroles” menu

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and “Chinese ravioli.” Then, soups and noodles are listed, but without an explicitly separate category. The use of a photo allows a consumer less versed and experienced in this cuisine to make a more informed decision (Fig. 4.4). The bilingual character of both menus is related to the objective of reaching both Chinese and non-Chinese clients. Bak Geller (2006), in her analysis of Chinese restaurants in Mexico, argues that menus involve coding. The menus in Buenos Aires encode expectations about potential

Fig. 4.4  “Fuego’s” menu

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customers, in regard to their knowledge on Chinese cuisine and language, their tastes, and the way they interact and consume in a restaurant. Other Chinese restaurants in the city deal with this issue in a different way. As in the case of the location of the customers in the dining room I described above, this distinction is administered by the waiter. With my White porteña face, I found that I was always given a menu in Spanish and with less dishes, while I saw that at other tables, Chinese customers were offered a more extensive menu written in Chinese. I asked Diego why he has two menus in his restaurant: “There are things that Argentines do not eat, but the Chinese do, for example, chicken feet. You don’t.” I tell him that maybe there are people who would like to try it. And he answers me: “Yes, maybe, some of them do, but most of them don’t. That is why there is a difference between the Chinese menu with more dishes, and the Argentine menu with fewer. In restaurants we already capture what you don’t like.” As with the location of the tables, the decision to offer different menus within the same restaurant expresses expectation and representations about the practices and tastes of the other, and a way of dealing with an encounter that is seen as conflictive. Unlike the menu I described above in which the comments in Spanish evidenced those expectations, in this case, it is the absence. There are dishes that the restaurant prepares but that are invisible to some clients, related to their ethnicity. Carlos also has two menus in his restaurant and offers them according to the client’s face. If the customer looks Asian, he or she is placed in a certain area of the dining room and is served by a Chinese waiter. “The Chinese menu is very complete, while the Argentine menu is simpler, with typical Chinese dishes to try.” This menu also reflects an Argentine diner with different tastes and evaluations of Chinese cuisine. The dialogue or translation between his culinary capital and the representations of the non-Chinese clients, materialized in the menu, does not occur in these cases. On the day I interview him (with a translator who mediates between his Chinese and my Spanish), a cook serves us four dishes that arrive successively; it is a large quantity of food for just two people. When we finish and say goodbye, he invites us to take the leftovers and then corrects himself “well, I don’t know, maybe you don’t like it very much, but you can take some,” referring to the translator.

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Conclusion In recent decades, the presence of people, objects, practices, and images related to China have increased their circulation both globally and regionally. Likewise, gastronomy has undergone a process of revaluation. Cuisines and food practices, subjects previously neglected in the fields of social research, have garnered more attention over the last thirty years. In the field of heritage, gastronomy has become recognized as a relevant issue in the public agenda, as a practice linked to the construction of national identities, a vehicle for cultural diplomacy, and a resource in city marketing and urban gentrification processes. In this chapter, I described some policies put in place by the government of the City of Buenos Aires that take into account the growing value placed on multiculturalism at a global level, but that also reflect local particularities. This multiculturalist approach to cultural diversity has an impact on how ideas of citizenship and national identity are articulated, but also on how Chinese-ness is used in the commodification of the city in terms of tourism, and its marketing strategies, in a dual process that includes and excludes at the same time. In this context, some sectors of Chinese migrants assume a legitimate way of being Chinese in Buenos Aires, which is as cultural producers. Over the last two decades, Chinese cuisine in Buenos Aires has consolidated its position; it has also diversified. This has taken place alongside a rise of Chinese migration in Argentina. Chinese cuisine has become a culinary field in which State and migrant actors intervene. It is a field that is also informed by previous encounters between China and the Americas. The “Chinese-American” and “Chifa” cuisines, products of the indentured laborers of the nineteenth century, are part of Chinese cuisine in Buenos Aires in the twenty-first century. This is not only in regard to symbolic aspects and representations of Chineseness, such as those that reproduce orientalist and self-exoticizing images in the decoration of restaurants, but also in very concrete aspects such as certain dishes and their ingredients, or the mobility of people, whose migratory trajectory is modified by the contacts between the owners of Chinese restaurants in Lima and Buenos Aires. In China, the articulation of ideas about national cuisine has also undergone modifications and reflected changes in relation to China’s place in the world and its inner social, economic, and political processes. The Chinese state has sought to define what Chinese cuisine is through various

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historical periods. But as observed in Chinese restaurants in Buenos Aires, the different representations, emerging at distant moments in time, continue to be taken up by other actors within the field. Chinese cuisine in Buenos Aires is intertwined with various hierarchies, including those pertaining to race, nationality, and class. In this case, we saw that being ethnic Chinese is a characteristic valued in a cook and associated with ideas of authenticity. Although this is a category under construction and dispute, it is intimately related to value. Ethnic capital and culinary capital entangle in the valuation of Chinese cuisine in Buenos Aires. Yet, at the same time, Latin-American migrant workers have an important presence in the kitchens, so these ideas of authenticity are not the only ones that regulate how the restaurants function. Representations of authenticity generate friction with economic profit and expectations about clients and their tastes. Expectations are encoded in menus and spatial settings, which somehow present appropriate versions for the expected customers. In many cases, these settings amplify distances among people perceived as different, and narrow them among those identified as part of a common group. Chinese cuisine is a cultural resource and a global commodity, but it is also an area in which disputes and conflicts among Chinese people and their identities are performed. In Buenos Aires, one of these conflicts is related to the differences between the PRC and Taiwan, as shown by judgments on the quality of the restaurant service, which includes moral categories that go beyond the monetary transaction of selling and buying food. Likewise, while in other spaces the circulation of Chinese culture flags assume a significant role (see Denardi’s chapter), in restaurants, the characters used on menus also perform and contest identities.

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Rodriguez Pastor, H. (1993). Del Kon Hei fat choy al Chifa peruano. In R. Olivas Weston (Ed.), Cultura, Identidad y Cocina en el Perú. Universidad de San Martín de Porres. Rud, L. (2020). Representaciones de las migraciones y diásporas de Asia del Este en el audiovisual argentino. Nuevo Mundo Mundos Nuevos [En ligne], Images, mémoires et sons. https://doi.org/10.4000/nuevomundo.80888. Sensoy, O. S. R., & Parmar, G. (2010). Moving beyond dance, dress, and dining in multicultural Canada. International Journal of Multicultural Education, 12(1), 1–15. Siu, L. (2008). Chino Latino restaurants: Converging communities, identities, and cultures. Afro-Hispanic Review, 27(1), 161–171. Svensson, M., & Maags, C. (2018). Chinese heritage in the making. Amsterdam University Press. Tsing, A. (2013). Sorting out commodities. How capitalist value is made through gifts. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3(1), 21–43. Wank, D. (2015). Knife-shaved noodles go global: Provincial culinary politics and the improbable rise of a minor Chinese cuisine. In J. Farrer (Ed.), The globalization of Asian cuisines. Transnational networks and culinary contact zones. Palgrave Macmillan. Yang, F. (2015). A bite of China: Food, media, and the televisual negotiation of national difference. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 32, 409–425. Yuan, Y. (2018). La comida china en el Perú: una nueva identidad multiétnica. Religación. Revista de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades, 3(19), 128–138.

CHAPTER 5

“Chinese Medicine Is Not Just Acupuncture”: The Experience of Chinese Immigrants in the Argentinian Healthcare System María Florencia Incaurgarat

A Chinese couple and their nine-month-old son enter a Primary Health Care Center in the city of Mar del Plata, Province of Buenos Aires, in the morning. They do not come for an emergency or for a specific consultation, but for a periodic check-up known as a Primary Prevention Action in the municipal and provincial “Programa de Desarrollo Infantil” (“Child Development Program”). Before being received by a pediatrician they must check in with the secretary and wait in the waiting room. Then, they are summoned by the nurse in the anteroom of the pediatrician’s office. The parents undress the baby and the nurse weighs and measures him. She

M. F. Incaurgarat (*) Centro de Estudios Sociales y de la Salud (CESyS), Facultad de Ciencias de la Salud y Trabajo Social (FCSyTS), Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata (UNMdP), Mar del Plata, Argentina e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Badaró (ed.), China in Argentina, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92422-5_5

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indicates that the growth parameters are those expected for the baby’s chronological age, to which the parents respond with a relaxed and smiling expression on their faces. The appointment, which should have taken thirty minutes in total, is already taking more than forty-five minutes, and the pediatrician, who is in his office with another family, has not yet seen them. The father looks at his watch impatiently. He repeatedly asks how much longer they will have to wait before they are attended by the doctor. He receives a phone call. After answering in accelerated Mandarin, he talks to his spouse and asks the nurse if they can come back another day because he must resolve a work issue. The nurse, who had had been friendly and cordial with the family, replies with a serious “no” and explains they are already being seen and were they to leave, they would not be able to weigh and measure him the next time he came. The only option is to wait. The father snorts and comments on how efficient the health service is in his country, that there in a single scheduled day all the corresponding studies and controls are carried out in a brief visit to the health establishment. He exchanges a few words with his wife again in Mandarin, and when the brief conversation is over, the father leaves, excusing himself for work, and the mother is left alone with her son. A few minutes later, the consulting room is available, and the mother is called in with her child. The pediatrician, while performing different maneuvers and psychomotor evaluation tests on the child, asks the mother about different daily habits, mainly referring to the child’s diet, sleep, and play. Having great difficulty in achieving fluid communication between both parties, the pediatrician disapproves of different types of behavior such as: fish intake, the use of infant formula instead of natural breastfeeding, long hours in the stroller, and co-sleeping, to name but a few. She complains about the mother’s low level of Spanish and makes comments such as “they have been in the country for years and they don’t speak Spanish, but with figures… they learn fast.” With this comment she seems to disapprove of the usually commercial-oriented Chinese migration to the country. She implies that they do not conform to the desired image of the “good immigrant,” which, paraphrasing Rousseau, is a migrant that “integrates” into the receiving society and learns the local language and customs. On the other hand, without fully understanding these types of comments or the indications provided, the mother agrees to everything that is indicated; however, when she returns to the next medical check-up, she will have complied with few of the pediatrician’s guidelines.

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This is an ethnographic scene reconstructed from my field experience, which I often saw repeated, with a few nuances, and with major or minor conflicts and tensions.1 Many questions and frames of analysis might be derived from this moving photograph, including: what prejudices are displayed on both sides? What moral, aesthetic, and health care criteria are at stake? What power relationships are operating? What other encounters does the present presuppose? What global dimensions are operating in this local context? The aim of this chapter is to reflect on the global encounters and global networks displayed between Argentina and China in terms of knowledge, representations, and practices related to health care and the body. For this purpose, it will become necessary to first define a more global perspective, tracing the forms taken by this type of encounters in Chinese territory. Then it will examine the “contact zones” (Pratt, 1992) that have been occurring between the so-called “Western”2 or biomedical health system and the so-called “Chinese medicine” in retrospective. Taking the dawn of the Opium Wars as a point of departure, it will reconstruct the ways in which these encounters have since produced new configurations in health care as product of tensions and negotiations between sectors marked by hierarchies and power relations. In order to better understand the encounters between migrants of Chinese origin and the local health system in Argentina, which are highly inflected by biomedical logics, it will be essential to be aware of the “new geography” (Faier & Rofel, 2014) configured in Chinese territory in terms of health care. In the same way, the local– global interactions that occur around this issue and the new configurations of health-disease-care processes (Menéndez, 2003) that such interactions make possible will be made visible. 1  The theoretical category of “encounter” here is taken up not from a lens that sees the contact between two or more groups as deprived of conflicts and in apparent harmony, but rather, encounters that involve a constant dispute and renegotiation of identities and status positions on the field. Following Faier & Rofel (2014), then, the notion of “encounter” does not refer to its most conventional sense. 2  Although one can refer to a Western scientific medicine, in the field of Anthropology of Health the use of the term “Biomedicine” or “Hegemonic Medical Model” is preferred since under the conceptualization of “West” the specificities of various ways of treating and conceiving health and disease are homogenized and diluted. Thus, this term will be used here it when referring to the native classification between “Chinese medicine” (“中医 zhōng yı ̄”) and “Western medicine” (“西医 xı ̄ yı ̄”), which is widely disseminated both in the specialized medical literature and in the daily discourses of Chinese people.

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This analysis is constructed using ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the city of Mar del Plata from 2013 to 2020. To think about a wider variety of health issues from the migrants’ perspective, I have conducted additional fieldwork in the city of Buenos Aires with Chinese interlocutors who made helpful contributions. Finally, a one-month stay in the People’s Republic of China in 2018 gave me the opportunity to experience the dynamics of encounters with the biomedical and Chinese health systems first-hand. It also made visible the complex web of encounters that arise around health and how these previous experiences are articulated in subsequent encounters that take place in Argentina. During my stay, I visited two of the most prestigious traditional pharmacies and clinics in Hangzhou (Zhejiang Province), specifically “方回春堂 fang huí chūn táng,” and “胡 庆余堂 hú qìng yú tang” (and its Museum of Traditional Chinese Medicine). I also visited two hospitals, as well as the Zhejiang Chinese Medical University and the provincial Chinese Medicine History Museum. In sum, these experiences provide the context necessary to understand global flows that move from the centers and reach peripheral places, such as the coastal city in Argentina, Mar del Plata. In this chapter, then, two different but intertwined sets of encounters will be described: the first one, set in a more global scale, will address the encounters between “Chinese” and “Western medicine” in Chinese territory; the second one, set in a local scale, will portray the encounters between Chinese migrants and the Argentinian health system.

Encounters Between Two Medical Models in China Perhaps one of the most widespread preconceptions within the Argentine health field in relation to Chinese migrants is that migrants encounter the so-called “Western medicine” for the first time when they arrive in the country. Health professionals often express surprise when they hear the opposite, or when they discover that China often has more advanced technologies than the local health system. This section begins with this misconception about the health realities of the “other” in order to account for the relevance of preceding encounters, and thus, provide a richer understanding of the migrant experiences portrayed in the second part of this chapter. Based on my experiences in the People’s Republic of China, along with the stories of migrants and in dialogue with secondary sources, I will address how two different models of health care are utilized and

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appropriated in the society of origin. To do this, it will be necessary to look back at encounters between what has been termed “Western medicine” and “Chinese medicine” and the ways in which they are interrelated today. On the one hand, then, first understanding encounters in the Chinese setting will allow us to more thoroughly understand those that take place in Argentina between Chinese migrants and the local health system. On the other hand, tracing this history will make the dynamic and dialogical character of each of these types of encounters visible, as well as the unpredictability of the “global” and the ways in which hegemonies operate and power relations unfold. Genealogy of “Chinese Medicine” and its Encounter with “Western Medicine” Although the first written record of a disease dates back to the Shang Dinasty (BC 1600–1100), the precise origin of what has been termed “Traditional Chinese Medicine” (TCM)3 is considered by many historians to have taken place during the Han Dynasty (206 BC–AD 220), when clear records of medical techniques can be found. During this period, one of the most important classical texts in “Chinese Medicine” first appeared: The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Medicine (“黄帝内经 huángdì nèijı ̄ng”). This book has been an influential treatise for more than two thousand years and still remains an important reference book, representing “a valuable source of theoretical inspiration and practical knowledge in modern clinical settings” (Unschuld, 2003: ix). After thousands of years of clinical experience, the application of “Chinese medicine” has formed a special theoretical and therapeutic system that constitutes a “precious cultural heritage with a long history and practical value” (Liao, 2017: 17). In fact, of the four developed areas of knowledge in Ancient China (with their own systems of knowledge and techniques) i.e., astronomy, arithmetic, agronomy, and “Chinese medicine,” the latter is the only one that has endured as a practice in modern China, not having been replaced by Western science, and that still plays an important role in most Chinese people’s lives (Liao, 2017).

3  Since my interlocutors mostly used the term “Chinese Medicine,” I will maintain the term “Traditional Chinese Medicine” only when the cited interlocutors or secondary source specify the adjective.

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The first recorded exchanges with the West began during the times of the Silk Road. However, it was not until the Opium Wars in the nineteenth century that “Western medicine” settled in Chinese territory, bringing about profound changes in local society and in the ways of providing and receiving medical care. In this period, evangelizing missions began to consolidate and expand. Thus, at the turn of the nineteenth century, most cities had a Christian mission and “mission clinic” that progressively brought in Western medical education programs. Gaining more and more influence, in 1881 the government founded the Tianjin School of Medicine for the teaching of “Western medicine” (Jackson, 2011). When the Republic was founded and the last dynasty abolished, the first president, San Yat-Sen (doctor by training, trained in the West) led a political movement that tried to push for a modernization of health care that prioritized “Western medicine.” According to Lei (2000), until the 1920s, practitioners of the two medicines had already coexisted for decades without directly competing with each other. At the beginning of the nationalist period, however, the two systems entered a long struggle that would change the course of “Chinese medicine” forever. While the Nationalist Party (“国民党 guómíndǎng”) was trying to pursue a generalized modernization agenda, the Ministry of Health in Nanjing was established. For the first time in the history of the country, China had a national administrative center to deal with health care issues. However, this Ministry, dominated by Western-trained doctors, set out to abolish “old-style” medicine, as it was considered superstitious and ineffective as compared to modern “Western medicine.” It is interesting to see how this adverse situation for “Chinese medicine” is reconstructed as a milestone, a conflict resolved with heroism and conviction. Thus, surprisingly, the Chinese medical community took up the challenge and defended its position. Instead of discouraging traditional Chinese doctors, the threat mobilized them into a massive National Medicine Movement which resulted in a historical milestone for the discipline (Farquhar, 1994). Advocates of the traditional practice organized a national association (Institute for National Medicine) to fight against these legal and ideological challenges. This confrontation “also constituted an epistemological event which led many Chinese doctors both to embrace the discourse of Modernity and to reform Chinese medicine on the basis of this discourse” (Lei, 2000: 5), leading to the progressive “scientization” and modernization of the Chinese medical system. The debate towards the suppression of “Chinese medicine” catalyzed self-­introspection

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within the discipline community and inspiring practitioners to systematize literature, discuss basic theories, and research into different schools of thought. This antagonistic political movement, then, beyond all expectations, laid the foundation for standardization and further improvement and development of “Chinese medicine” (Liao, 2017). With the foundation of the People’s Republic of China a new chapter would begin for native medicine. Chairman Mao supported “Chinese medicine” and underlined its cultural value, promoting a resurgence of interest by the State. He also believed in the progress made by “Western medicine.” Thus, the integration of both medical models was one of the health guidelines that was established at the First National Health Congress in 1950. Following this and other initiatives (among them, the improvement in socioeconomic conditions and the emphasis on preventative care), the State also proposed to work towards universal health care, constituting one of the factors that explains the reductions in mortality and morbidity observed during the 1950s and 1960s. As noted in the remarkable research led by the anthropologist Farquhar, “the field of Traditional Chinese Medicine came into existence in its modern institutional form only after the 1949 foundation of the People’s Republic of China. Contemporary TCM organizations locate their inception as fully legitimate entities with Mao Zedong’s 1955 proclamation that our motherland’s medicine is a great treasure house” (Farquhar, 1994: 11). In this context, in the mid-to-late 1950s, the first “Chinese medicine” universities were founded, previous professional associations were revitalized, broadening their public support. The Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine4 was first published in 1955 as the oldest, most authoritative, and widely distributed “Chinese medicine” magazine in the country. In the decades that followed, institutions of higher education began to teach the discipline throughout China, a situation which led to the creation of unified theory textbooks and a standard system of subjects, drugs, and techniques (Liao, 2017). “Chinese medicine” finally emerged as an

4  Furthermore, it is during this period that the concept of “Traditional Chinese Medicine” arises to give cohesion and unity to these previously dispersed groups. Before the foundation of the PRCh there was a debate to establish the most appropriate term to refer to “Chinese medicine.” This debate included the concepts of “Chinese medicine” (“中医 Zhōngyı ̄”), “ancient medicine” (“旧 医 jiùyı ̄”) and “national medicine” (“国 医 guóyı ̄”).

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established system, marking this period of time as the consolidation of the discipline as more or less as it is known today (Taylor, 2011). During the 1960s, in the context of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), many urban doctors worked in rural areas and trained locals to become “Barefoot doctors.”5 Besides becoming key actors in the integration of native and “Western” medicine (Xu & Hu 2017), these doctors played a key role in a broader health system called the “Rural Cooperative Medical Scheme,” which was operational between 1968 and 1981 and consisted in the first national primary health insurance system in the country. Through the barefoot doctors, this system provided primary health care to farmers and eradicated many infectious and endemic diseases, substantially improving the health of people in rural areas. By the end of this period, more than a million villagers (both men and women) were trained in the cultivation of medicinal herbs and provision of care to the community at a very low cost.6 The health initiative was considered an example of excellence worldwide and became a global model. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), “Barefoot doctors” have dramatically improved access to health care in China’s rural communities and have been a major inspiration to the primary health care movement which led to the conference in Alma-Ata, in the former Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan in 1978. After Mao’s death and with the advent of Deng Xiaoping’s “reform and opening-up” policy, “Chinese medicine” received a new boost. The new initiative was catalyzed by “The Four Modernizations” policy, which focused on the realms of industry, agriculture, science and technology, and the military. The dynamic period characterized by this national policy shift benefited Chinese medical institutions along with other academic and scientific units (Farquhar, 1994). Within this context, in 1982, the formal role of “Chinese medicine” in the local health system was recognized at a national and constitutional level. An equal status of the two medical systems was emphasized in 1985 and the policy of integration was continued albeit with a different emphasis. Three distinct categories of clinicians were created: Traditional Chinese Medical Practitioners (TCMP), Western Medical Doctors (WMD), and integrated TCMP–WMD (Griffiths et al.,  “赤脚医生 chìjiǎo yı ̄shēng.”  Despite these advances, it is also true that the great academic centers that had been forged and consolidated during the previous period were decimated during the Cultural Revolution. See Farquhar (1994). 5 6

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2010). In this context, the interaction between Chinese and Western physicians started to increase significantly to the present, both at the national and international scale. Contemporary Encounters: Uses and Appropriations in Today’s China Beyond the often-successful attempts at integrating the two systems, it is undeniable that “Western medicine” has gained much more prominence in therapeutic itineraries (Menéndez, 2003), especially among younger people. It also constitutes the medical system mostly covered by medical insurance. Nonetheless, in daily life, adults, and older adults in particular, often practice techniques related to “Chinese medicine.” Among them, the consumption of herbal medicines or medicinal beverages, the intake of food according to Yin–Yang balance, and exercises such as “太极拳 Tàijíquán” or “气功 Qìgōng” are common. In the same way, many people approach “Chinese medicine” facilities seeking solutions to treat their health problems, either by going to clinical consultations or buying natural remedies. In this sense, the case of 胡庆余 堂 Húqìngyútáng  and 方回春堂  Fānghuíchūntáng  is paradigmatic, and also reflects the vital role that Hangzhou has played in the development of “Chinese medicine.” Both were founded during the Qing dynasty (in 1874 and 1649, respectively), and constitute two traditional pharmacies and clinics that have their own medicine manufacturing workshop, a medicine store, and several offices where herbal treatments and acupuncture are offered, among other techniques. The coexistence of both medical systems can also be seen within a single health institution, as “in most health centers and clinics, Traditional Chinese Medicine and Western Medicine are practiced alongside each other” (Griffiths et al., 2010: 387). This fact contradicts the widespread Western belief that in China, these systems exist like discrete entities, with scarce or no contact between each other. On the contrary, as can be seen in the Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, all doctors are trained in both systems: those who studied “Western medicine” were required to take a number of theoretical and practical courses in “Chinese medicine,” and vice versa. In the same way, the referral between professionals is similar to that between biomedical specialists (e.g., neurologists and traumatologists), who make decisions or consult the patient on which kind of medicine they prefer for the treatment of a specific disease.

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This dialogical coexistence could also be seen at the Zhejiang Provincial Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Founded in 1931, this hospital is a Grade Three Class A comprehensive facility which offers medical treatment, medical education, scientific research, rehabilitation, and health care with a striking “Traditional Chinese Medicine” character, as it they put it on the institutional website. The hospital is well known nationwide for its long history, for having the best technical capability in Zhejiang Province (it is considered one of the most well-equipped hospitals in the province), as well as its valuable combination of “Chinese” and “Western medicine.” After extensive clinical practice, the hospital has formed three strong technical forces in the fields of “Traditional Chinese medicine,” “Western medicine,” and the combination of both. In the same way, the hospital has two types of pharmacies: Western and Chinese, one next to the other. It should be noted that the latter is the largest pharmacy of its kind in the province, with a daily production of more than 1000 formulas (around 4000 kg). Regarding the choice in the use of Chinese and/or Western services, the interlocutors consulted both in China and Argentina, as well as the bibliography of reference, reveal that Western medicine is good at finding quick solutions, and that Chinese medicine, on the other hand, is slower but more effective (Kleinman, 1980). In this way, there is broad consensus that “Western medicine” is not suitable for the treatment of certain diseases. On the contrary, it is believed to be more effective when treating acute-stage diseases such as coronary heart disease, tuberculosis, hepatitis, cancer, fractures, severe digestive problems, among others. In contrast, it is considered that “Chinese medicine” is best suited for the recovery/ rehabilitation phase and as a method of prevention and health promotion, as well as for the treatment of chronic diseases. In this sense, it would produce improvements in the immune system, antiviral and anti-­ inflammatory effects, balance between body and mind, pain relief, cholesterol reduction, among others (Green et al., 2006). A preference for “Chinese medicine” is also based on the belief that, although “Western medicine” is more prompt to treat acute diseases, it generates adverse effects. Thus, while Western medicine is deemed preferable when a quick response is required, it is not seen by Chinese people or authorities as a menace to Chinese medical tradition, given that, and beyond the uses already cited, Chinese medicine treatments are prioritized when “Western medicine” cannot find a proper solution.

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Regarding the combination of these two medical systems, there is an increasing number of studies examining the physiological and biological application of both to the same treatment or disease (Dong, 2013; Griffiths et al., 2010; Li et al., 2016). Some interesting results show a reduction in the side effects of Western medication and interventions. The integration of both systems is a vital part of current research and clinical practice and is considered by some interlocutors as “21st century medicine”. Moreover, the Chinese Health System has promoted integration of both medicinal systems in prevention and treatment of Covid-19, a public health measure that was conducted in coordination with the Chinese medicine pharmaceutical industry. At the same time, “Chinese medicine” has increased its prominence in ever more globalized scenarios.7 In these contexts, and in view of the recent Chinese socioeconomic growth, this medical model is seen as a commodity and a source of soft power within large-scale economic and international cooperation projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). As we will see, the global expansion of “Chinese medicine” challenges the view that understands it as a discrete entity with defined limits. On the contrary, we will see that it is in unceasing reformation, its definition is constantly renegotiated as is its status, nationally and globally speaking. Considered as part of the national “quintessence” (along with Daoism and Confucianism), official media recognize that “Chinese medicine” has enjoyed great popularity in Western countries, becoming a service mainly consumed by middle-class people and as an alternative to biomedical practices. In fact, over the last decades, “Chinese medicine” has reached more than 170 countries, and the Chinese government has signed approximately 180 intergovernmental cooperation treaties with other countries in order to extend this field of knowledge to a wider scale. In the context of the BRI, “Chinese medicine” is seen as a means of cooperation with developing countries and their health care systems, as well as a source of soft power. China’s official newspaper, China Daily, put 7  In order to visualize how these global networks are inscribed in real actors and local contexts, the multi-site ethnography carried out by Zhan (2009) in Shanghai and California, shows the encounter of Chinese medicine with forces such as Western science, globalization, and capitalism, and the ways in which people respond to them in unexpected ways. It also shows the difficulty of treating “Chinese medicine” as an “essence” or applying criteria of “authenticity.” Inversely, it demonstrates its fluidity as a body of knowledge and a system of practices, with constantly changing discourses.

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it thus: “as the Chinese economy continuously develops at a comparatively high speed and China’s overall national strength steadily grows, the soft power of Chinese culture is attracting stronger interest and wider attention at home and abroad.”8 The Chinese government also recognizes the existence of “cognitive and legal obstacles” in host societies, presenting cases in which the BRI could be a means to overcome these barriers and spread “Chinese medicine” more widely. In fact, “Chinese medicine” is most visible in the countries associated with this economic agreement. For the countries involved in the BRI, the Chinese Government: “has offered a cooperative framework for intergovernmental cooperation, which will definitely help remove the largest barrier, the legal barrier in TCM qualification, TCM education accreditation, drug access and medical insurance.”9 Similarly, this widespread expansion of the discipline on a global scale is also leading to the growth of the “Chinese medicine” industry, since large, medium, and small companies can now also participate in international trade. According to the China Daily: “there are more than 2,500 companies specializing in Chinese patent medicine, with a total output value of more than 600 billion yuan, which accounts for about one third of the entire medical industry.” Likewise, “Chinese medicine” is also viewed from an economistic logic in terms of exportation considering that its “simple, convenient, easy and inexpensive characteristics enjoy huge market potential and wide acceptance and support from the public in these countries.”10 In sum, “Chinese Medicine” is dynamic in character and, therefore, should not be conceived as a static ideal. On the contrary, new global scenarios catalyze and reveal new forms, uses and appropriations of this knowledge broadly conceived as “millenary.”

8  “One Belt and One Road Strategy: Opportunities for International Communication of Traditional Chinese Medical Culture” (2015). China Daily. 9  “Boosted by Belt and Road Initiative, spread of TCM speeds up” (2018). China Daily. 10  Ídem.

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Knowledge and Health Practices in China– Argentina Encounters Unlike what has been described about the global expansion of “Chinese medicine,” the Argentine case presents certain peculiarities compared to other countries in the region. These factors influence the possibility of accessing Chinese medical services, for both migrants and locals, and, consequently, the construction of the migrants’ therapeutic itineraries is very different than it is in their homeland or even other Latin American countries. In fact, in contrast with countries such as Cuba or Peru which began to receive Chinese migration in the mid-nineteenth century with the massive arrival of the so-called “coolies” (workers hired in semi-slavery conditions), Chinese migration in Argentina is a much more recent phenomenon. Earlier migratory movements to the American continent also entailed the arrival of Chinese doctors, many of whom became famous in their time both among migrants and locals. At the same time, Havana and Lima’s Chinatowns began to consolidate, spaces that today continue to provide access to health care products and services of “Chinese medicine” (Eng Menéndez, 2013; Palma, 2017, Palma & Ragas, 2018). The Cuban case is also peculiar. Its public health system is a pioneer in the integration of different medical models of health care, giving a transcendental place to the so-called traditional medicines, both native and Chinese (Calduch Farnós, 2017). In addition to these differences, Argentina is one of the few Latin American countries that is not yet part of the BRI, remaining outside the circuits where the knowledge and products of “Chinese medicine” circulate with greater fluidity and on a larger scale. In the case of the capital city, Buenos Aires, most of the private clinics offering “Chinese medicine” services are located in Chinatown. They mainly offer treatments such as acupressure, acupuncture, moxibustion, and, occasionally, chiromancy. Other stores (mostly in gift shops) sell some medicinal products (mainly balms, pain-relieving patches, and industrialized ginseng), which can also occasionally be seen in Chinese-owned supermarkets scattered around the city. Outside Chinatown, there are not many clinics or institutes, only a scattering of sites that offer “Chinese medicine.” An example of one of these is the institute run by Violeta and her family (both her father and her brother are doctors in this field). In an interview held at their institute, Violeta informed me that most of her patients today are Argentinians, but they also receive many fellow

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“countrymen.”11 Regarding her arrival in the country in the late 1980s, she expressed: There is a Chinese doctor, there is a Chinese doctor”, the word begins to spread among our fellow countrymen. And many fathers and mothers, moms who don’t speak Spanish, who don’t like going to the hospital, who don’t want a foreigner to see them… So many came here because they found out that there is a Chinese doctor, so my father began to treat countrymen as a courtesy, not at a professional level. By word-of-mouth, to friends. And then, some Argentine friends from the neighborhood who also learned of our existence, began to come.

In the city of Mar del Plata, in the Province of Buenos Aires, migrants’ therapeutic itineraries are not only unlike those in their society of origin but are also unlike those in the capital city of Buenos Aires. This is mainly because there is no access to Chinese medical products and there is only one Chinese doctor in the entire city.12 According to some interlocutors, in fact, he is actually “not a doctor, but an acupuncturist.” They usually add that he “doesn’t know everything,” just acupuncture. He does not have enough knowledge to engage in preventative medicine since he “does not know” about herbs or other techniques, but rather provides treatment for chronic conditions, predominantly those that produce painful conditions (arthritis, osteoarthritis, low back pain, etc.). Given this, Chinese migrants do not see this doctor as an option when constructing their therapeutic itineraries. I was able to speak to two migrants about this distinction in greater detail, which gave me the chance to access its underlying rationale. First, I held a conversation with a young migrant from Guangzhou, an employee of an important Chinese company in Puerto Madero, a neighborhood in the capital city of Buenos Aires. On one occasion during my fieldwork, we discussed the fact that, in Argentina, it is common to hear about “acupuncturists,” (whether of Chinese origin or not). He looked at me in awe when I told him that the only doctor of Chinese origin that I knew about in Mar del Plata, just practiced acupuncture. With wide open eyes and a determined voice, he said to me: “don’t go there.” He explained that  “Paisano” is the Spanish native concept.  According to the information provided by some interlocutors, up until the year 2000, there was another acupuncturist offering his services in Mar del Plata, of Taiwanese origin, but he emigrated to the United States with his family after the Argentinian economic crisis of 2001. 11 12

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acupuncture is just one technique among many others (such as moxibustion, acupressure, etc.) and that it is not possible to do only one as the therapeutic choice will depend on the type of ailment. During the interview at her institute, Violeta also explained: There are many doctors who work on anatomical acupuncture, only apply acupuncture for cases of pain. Rather acupuncture … better said, Chinese medicine, is not only acupuncture. Chinese medicine is made up of diverse techniques in which acupuncture is just one of several. So limiting Chinese medicine … is not good, and limiting the practice of Chinese medicine to only certain pathologies is not good either, because it can work in many more cases.

Mar del Plata also offers other “Chinese medicine” services, but these are not run by Chinese, rather Argentines trained in  local institutions. Many times, migrants are not aware of these options. In any case, even when they are made aware of these services, migrants still do not make use of them, as they believe that “Chinese medicine” requires an expertise gained with years of practice and the guidance of a qualified “mentor,” which it does not seem to be the case of the Argentinian services, from their perspective. Migrant Itineraries: Between the Domestic and Public Spheres Upon arriving in Argentina, as anticipated, migrants must reconfigure the ways in which they respond to their health problems. Here, we will describe two types of encounters that unfold in the migratory context in relation to health care. The first deals with the encounters produced in the local health field, and the second, with the reconfiguration of knowledge and practices related to “Chinese medicine” that are produced specifically in the domestic sphere. Through fieldwork in the local public health system and tracking Chinese migrants’ therapeutic itineraries, it was found that migrants mostly make use of public health services, particularly the Primary Health Care Centers (“CAPS”). Chinese migrants do not usually have private health insurance, so they avoid private health services where they must pay out-of-pocket.13 Nevertheless, it should be clarified that in general they 13  It is worth mentioning that receiving medical services in the public health system in Argentina is free of charge.

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prefer not to go to local health services (whether public or private), except in emergency situations, carrying out self-care practices at home, which are closely interrelated to the knowledge and practices of “Chinese medicine.” Regarding the use of Primary Health Care services, medical check-ups, particularly as related to pregnancy and child development, are the most widely utilized among Chinese migrants. In these controls, health professionals from various disciplines are involved (pediatricians, nurses, occupational therapists, social workers, among others). In all cases, the difficulties raised in interactions between health workers and migrants (for example, misunderstandings, poor adherence to treatments, non-compliance with the indications, etc.) are usually explained by the professionals as “cultural” causes that hinder the provision of their services. Thus, the health practices carried out by migrants are usually classified as “wrong”, and “culture” is usually seen as something to be circumvented instead of being understood as a network wherein what is experienced as problematic acquires significance. At the same tune, one of the most widespread prejudices within the local health field is that when Chinese migrants arrive in Argentina, they encounter so-called “Western medicine” for the first time, or that they are not entirely familiar with medical technology. On the contrary, Chinese migrants are no strangers to medical technology. Indeed, those who have lived in urban centers in China have significant experience with these medical practices, and in some cases, exposure to more advanced technologies than is commonly in place at Argentine public health institutions (for example, the use of infrared thermometers or high-tech automatic blood pressure monitors long before the Covid-19 pandemic). It was also found that communication barriers were not the only obstacles that arise in the health field. According to Goldberg and Oliveira, such a problem “does not consist solely of a fact of linguistic misunderstanding, with the consequent lack of communication between the parties. On the contrary, in a conflictive way, it is caused by the polarization between cultural traditions that often express conceptions and ways of practicing health care that are very different from the predominant technical-­scientific conceptions in the structure of health services” (2013: 293). Nonetheless, it is clear that language barriers play a very important role in the configuration of new encounters and disagreements. On the one hand, families often choose not to make use of health services unless they face serious health issues (acute pain, an accident, etc.) that cannot be resolved or tolerated at home. On the other hand, health professionals usually complain

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if a family does not speak Spanish or is not accompanied by someone who acts as a translator (a family member, a friend or a “nana”14). One such situation came up during my fieldwork, during the pediatric control of a four-month-old baby. The mother experienced enormous difficulties understanding Spanish, being able to pronounce only a few words, which were insufficient to communicate effectively with the pediatrician. The latter, extremely annoyed by this situation (generating a tense climate within the office), requested that the institution’s social worker intervene. On previous occasions the family had been informed that the mother should be accompanied by someone who could speak Spanish. Indeed, in the baby’s notebook (where all important indications or brief reports of each visit are recorded), this request repeatedly appeared in capital letters and underlined. The next day, the social worker finally went to the family home and reported the situation. This intervention did not lead to the expected result (that someone who spoke Spanish accompany the mother on visits), rather, the mother and her baby stopped using the services at the Health Center. Another case, to some extent an opposite situation, shows the variability in the encounters, and, above all, the lack of either institutional or state policy in regard to the management of these problems. The dearth of policy in this respect leaves the treatment supplied to patients and the effectiveness of professionals subject to factors such as the family’s level of Spanish, or health workers’ empathy. At the same health center, another pediatrician had a health-specific Chinese-Spanish dictionary, which she had once bought in Buenos Aires’s Chinatown. When a Chinese family came to the institution, the other pediatricians used to say: “you take care of them, since you like it,” or comments like “I’m can’t do this anymore.” The reality is that the dictionary itself did not provide much help (at least in the idiomatic aspect), because it is written by and for Chinese. For a Spanish speaker to find it useful, they would have to have an advanced knowledge of Mandarin Chinese. However, the positive predisposition of the pediatrician and the patience that she showed during the consultation despite misunderstandings, generated a climate that was far more relaxed and pleasant and modified the quality of the care. Thanks to my initial forays into Mandarin Chinese with a teacher from Beijing in Mar del Plata and sustained language learning for the next four 14  Argentinian ladies, often in their mid-fifties or sixties, who are hired by Chinese families as babysitters and caregivers.

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years, I was able to access the field in a more profound manner. When I carried out participant observations in the health centers, my participation became increasingly active, and on many occasions, I was summoned to serve as a “translator.” My appearance on the scene awakened a kind of relief in the professionals who expressed phrases such as: “so good you came” or “we are saved.” On those occasions, the climate I experienced inside the office, or even in the waiting room where I accompanied and spoke with families, was very different from my first forays into the field, when I did not have any knowledge of the language. Learning Mandarin also allowed me to establish deeper bonds with the families. Progressively, as they opened the doors of their homes to me, I was able to access certain native terms and logics that did not emerge in the social and health context. Perhaps the most paradigmatic case among all the health practices carried out at home is the one performed during the puerperium, called “坐 月子 zuò yuè zi,” since it condenses a set of practices, knowledge, and representations around the body, health, and disease. This practice, widely known and practiced by women not only from Fujian15 but from other provinces and regions of China, consists of one month of confinement at home following childbirth.16 It is characterized by a series of prescriptions and proscriptions around daily activities such as hygiene and food. Among them, women are to avoid all contact with elements such as water, “cold” (“寒 hán”) and “wind” (“风 fēng”), and follow a strict diet that prioritizes “hot” elements and avoids “cold” ones. Among other requirements, women must also minimize any physical effort. In order to understand “坐月子 zuò yuè zi,” it is necessary to know first the native cosmology that explains the human being as a microcosm, in connection with a macrocosm. That is, according to “Chinese medicine” and its principles, the organism is composed of a series of elements found in the environment and vice versa. These are: fire, air, metal, earth, and water (“the theory of the Five Elements” or “五行 wǔ xíng”). Likewise, based on the “阴-阳 yı ̄n–yáng” theory, there is a “fundamental force,” or “vital energy,” called “气  qì,” which flows between the two cosmoses and is a constitutive part of all the elements that configure them.

15  Most of Chinese migrants come from this southeast province of China, in general from rural areas, with low socioeconomic status. 16  In English, “坐月子 zuò yuè zi” is known as “Doing the month.”

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There are two types of “气 qì”: “气阴 qì yı ̄n” and “气阳 qì yang,” which coexist in harmony in the universe, as well as in the healthy human being. When one of these elements is in imbalance, disease comes into being. On the contrary, balance means health. The seasons of the year, organs, and even food, all have a predominant type of “气 qì.” In this cosmology, the woman is considered of “阴 yı ̄n” nature, and the man, of “阳 yáng” nature. Similarly, chains of signifiers are configured as complementary opposites: cold–heat, moisture–dryness, luminosity-darkness, etc. Indeed, “阴 yı ̄n” means: “the dark side of the mountain” and “阳 yáng,” “the bright side of the mountain.” One is the condition of the other, so they cannot be thought of as exclusive opposites, as the Cartesian dualism suggests (Incaurgarat, 2017). Based on this cosmology and the ontological characteristic of “Chinese medicine” recurrent in the migrants’ narratives, the mothers explain that after childbirth, the woman loses a lot of blood (“阳 yáng” component), breaking the balance with the already predominant component “阴 yı ̄n.” They also refer to the fact that, during pregnancy, the woman’s joints are separated and maintained in that state for approximately a month after birth. This is why the mother is expected to stay in bed, especially the first few days, and at home during the first month, where she is safer from risks, especially “wind” (“风 fēng”) and “cold” (“寒  hán”). This makes the domestic space a privileged environment for recovering from childbirth and the prevention of potential diseases. It is necessary not to overlook the fact that mothers often do not breastfeed, a practice that often generates frictions with the advice of local health system professionals. It should be clarified that, in Argentina, and in the biomedical world in general, breastfeeding is a highly valued practice, and often becomes the object of intervention by health programs leading to promote this practice and its benefits. For instance, when mothers bring their babies to pediatric control, some of the routine questions are always related to feeding and breastfeeding. In the case of Chinese mothers, most of the time (if not all) they answer “no,” while letting out a nervous giggle, as if anticipating the professional’s scolding. Even when some practitioners express their intention “to respect the culture of each patient” comments or disapproving expressions often arise. Faced with a persistent questioning of why they do not breastfeed (from the professional logic, knowing that breast milk has no cost, that it strengthens the baby immunologically, and that it even

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operates as a natural contraceptive, among other benefits), Chinese mothers simply answer “I do not have milk,” a statement that their husbands support when they are present. Pediatricians unfailingly answer that breastfeeding is produced by the baby’s oral stimulation, and that all mothers can produce milk. They add that the more the baby uses the baby bottle, the more they will reject breastfeeding, because this is much more difficult for their perioral muscles. The refusal, however, continues. Talking at their homes, outside the health field, many Chinese mothers have commented to me that breastfeeding is very “difficult” and “that they don’t have time,” “that they have a lot of work,” explanations that they omit in the health field. It is worth highlighting that, across the many narratives recorded by mothers throughout this fieldwork, rationales and behavior patterns related to the puerperium were practically the same regardless of the region of origin or the socioeconomic level. Yet, when describing the possibilities of carrying out this set of practices in the migratory context some differences appeared. This shows the ways in which practices considered “traditional” or unalterable by cosmological and ontological principles may be reconfigured in the “encounters.” Sometimes, Chinese mothers wondered when they arrived in the country how it could be possible that Argentinian women do not perform the “坐月子 zuò yuè zi” and do not develop the health problems that they so carefully learned, from generation to generation, to fend off. Facing this situation, some of them decide to relax the rules and perhaps go out dressed less warmly, or not follow such a strict diet. One of my interlocutors, for instance, who had recurring problems with her mother-in-law on different issues (including the care of her husband and her daughters) and whom she frequently referred to as “unbearable,”17 explained to me that she did not strongly believe in the strict realization of the “坐月子 zuò yuè zi.” One day, after having given birth to twins and despite the warnings of her mother-in-law (with whom she lived, along with her husband and her father-in-law) she said, “I went out with less clothes than I should have, and I got wind. Now my knees hurt.” She explained to me that this pain would already be chronic, because once the “wind” enters into the joints, it can no longer be removed unless you have a new child and the joints expand again (with the correct performance of the new “月子 yuè zi”).  She used a characteristic Argentinian Spanish insult: “hinchapelotas.”

17

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During the puerperium, the mother requires a lot of assistance from another person, not only to prepare the specific diet and take care for her, but also to care for the newborn. This person is usually either the mother-­ in-­law or the mother, but in the migratory context it is often the case that neither is present. In these cases, families who can afford the costs hire a caregiver (usually called “nana”) to handle these tasks while the husband is working. In other cases, when a caregiver is not hired, the mother performs the“坐月子 zuò yuè zi” to the extent possible. My interlocutors who found themselves in this situation did not report any discomfort associated with this period, but also could not assure that they will not suffer consequences in the future.18 Finally, in some isolated cases, the “坐月子 zuò yuè zi” may be practiced in the homeland. A married couple from Beijing that lived in Buenos Aires decided that the woman would travel back to China for the final trimester of her pregnancy so that she could do the “坐月子 zuò yuè zi” with her mother’s company. Meanwhile, the husband traveled intermittently between Argentina and China in order to fulfill both his work and marital responsibilities. Clearly, this case is atypical, at least in the cases of families from Fujian who generally do not have a socioeconomic status that would make that kind of travel plausible. When faced with the question of why Argentine women do not present complications associated with the puerperium despite not practicing the “ 坐月子 zuò yuè zi,” migrants often explained that their bodies are different due to the nutrition and care received since childhood. They suggested that it was for this reason that Chinese women would have a greater susceptibility to conditions associated with imbalances of “阴-阳 yı ̄n-yáng” or pathogenic elements such as “wind,” ailments from which their Argentine counterparts would be exempted. Finally, it is worth noting that these representations or narratives do not arise within the social health field. As a result, professionals are often unaware of these alterities in terms of health knowledge. Between consultations, I have participated in many team meetings with health professionals (including, but not exclusively, doctors). In these spaces, my presence always aroused curiosity and multiple questions about the population and the “findings” of my research. When I described practices such as the “坐 月子 zuò yuè zi” and its related conceptions, in addition to surprised faces 18  From the native rationality, the “wind” or “cold” not always manifests immediately. Their effects in the body may appear in later periods of life. As, Ling, a Fujianese migrant told me: “maybe you feel well now, but you do not know if, when you are old, bone aches will appear.”

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I have received comments such as: “and what do you do to get that out of their heads?” or other similar judgmental statements that reflect disapproval of these kinds of practices and conceptions, and a cataloguing of them as irrational, non-scientific, or ineffective. In the same way, by minimizing or excluding knowledge and understandings of the patients regarding the health-disease-attention process, these statements clearly reflect the role of moral judgements in these contexts. This type of thinking can also be read from an evolutionary perspective that sees “in biomedicine the point of arrival of a single and long evolutionary line, while all other medical systems seem to be stopped in previous stages” (Seppilli, 2000: 39).

Conclusions The case presented here, along with the previous encounters described, hopes to contribute to an understanding of the “new geographies” that are configured from the current global networks catalyzed by the global expansion of China and its increasingly consolidated role on the geopolitical map. Thus, from the problems concerning the health care of Chinese migrants in Argentina, we are able to see how meanings and new realities arise and are reinterpreted and negotiated through and within those encounters (not at all free of conflict or friction as we were also able to appreciate). In this same sense, the global dimension is inseparable and transversal to the local scenarios here portrayed. From the lens of the “ethnographies of encounters” proposed by Faier & Rofel (2014), at first, we saw the complex network of encounters that occurred between the West and China in terms of medical knowledge, its legitimation and institutionalization. The resulting frictions provoked a totally unexpected outcome, which casts aside the conceptions that imply both the passive or resigned reception of domination by the subaltern, and the inevitable homogenization of the peripheries, in the image and likeness of the centers. Thus, in the case of “Chinese medicine,” not only did it achieve consolidation thanks to the antagonism with biomedicine, but nowadays it operates as a source of soft power and as a good to be exchanged in increasingly global networks. Second, on a more local scale, the ethnographic work carried out in health centers and Chinese migrant families’ homes revealed encounters and disagreements, frictions, and reconfigurations of health practices. Similarly, representations about the body and even forms of family bonding were put in check in new ways, which were made possible by the

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migratory context. Thus, we analyzed a complex network of encounters produced in a peripheral “village” (Geertz, 1973) in relation to the Asian giant, with regard to medical knowledge and health practices deployed in those contexts but configured in a global–local interplay. It is in these networks, in fact, where the connection between the two encounters here described becomes visible. In other words, from a local perspective, the practices and knowledge unfolded in the migratory context show the interplay with a global order in terms of health and its care. Indeed, knowledge about how the health system of China is used illustrate that migrants reproduce and negotiate many logics related to the integration of medical knowledge as well as when and how they decide to make use of health services in Argentina. Finally, the encounters portrayed here not only illustrate the mobilities (Elliot & Urry, 2010) of the social actors, but also, the circulation of images, objects, values, and criteria (Badaró, 2019) linked to the health field. In this sense, in addition to the migration process itself and the therapeutic itineraries that migrants unfold in Argentina, the interference of decisions driven from remote places configuring different health practices are visible. Such is the case of large global projection initiatives, like the BRI.  Indeed, the promotion of “Chinese medicine” products and knowledge outside of China reflects an intertwining of national and international public policies that permits it to reach distant corners of the planet.

References Badaró, M. (2019). Pedagogies of value: Marketing luxury in China. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 10(1), 707–737. Calduch Farnós, R. (2017, June 26). Hacia una formación europea de la medicina china: su incorporación en el sistema universitario español. Universitat Abat Oliba. Retrieved July 29, 2021 from https://www.tdx.cat/bitstream/handle/10803/436905/Trcf.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y Dong, J. (2013). The relationship between traditional Chinese medicine and modern medicine. Evidence-based Complementary and Alternative Medicine, 2(13), 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1155/2013/153148 Elliott, A. & Urry, J. (2010). Mobile Lives. London: Routledge Eng Menéndez, Y. (2013). Proyecto de investigación: el chino latino como identidad en construcción por más de siglo y medio. Estudio de caso del chino-­ cubano. In VV.AA. (Ed.), América Latina y El Caribe  – China. Historia, Cultura y Aprendizaje del Chino (pp.  129–148) Red Académica de América Latina y el Caribe sobre China.

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Faier, L., & Rofel, L. (2014). Ethnographies of encounter. Annual Review of Anthropology, 43(1), 363–377. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro102313-­030210 Farquhar, J. (1994). Knowing practice. The clinical encounter of Chinese medicine. Westview Press. Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures. Basic Books. Goldberg, A., & Oliveira, C. (2013). Desigualdad social, condiciones de acceso a la salud pública y procesos de atención en inmigrantes bolivianos de Buenos Aires y São Paulo: una indagación comparativa. Saúde e Sociedad, 22(2), 283–297. Green, G., Bradby, H., Chan, A., & Lee, M. (2006). We are not completely westernized: Dual medical systems and pathways to health care among Chinese migrant women in England. Social Science & Medicine, 62(6), 1498–1509. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2005.08.014 Griffiths, S., Chung, V., & Jin, L. (2010). Integrating traditional Chinese medicine: Experiences from China. The Australasian Medical Journal, 3(7), 385–396. https://doi.org/10.4066/AMJ.2010.411 Incaurgarat, M.  F. (2017). El viento como agente generador de padecimiento. Reflexiones sobre el periodo de posparto en relación al pensamiento chino. Avá, 29, 175–197. Jackson, M. (2011). The Oxford handbook of the history of medicine. Oxford University Press. Kleinman, A. (1980). Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture. An Exploration of the Borderland between Anthropology, Medicine and Psychiatry. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lei, S. (2000, March 20). When Chinese medicine encountered the state, 1928–1937. Chicago University. Retrieved July 29, 2021, from http://www.ihp.sinica.edu. tw/~medicine/active/years/hl.PDF Li, D., Qiao, S., Shi, D., Zheng, S., Wang, T., & Wang, R. (2016). The combination of traditional Chinese medicine with Western medicine. Medicinal & Aromatic Plant, 5(6). https://doi.org/10.4172/2167-­0412.1000e179 Liao, Y. (2017). Traditional Chinese medicine: Understanding its principles and practices. China International Press. Menéndez, E. (2003). Modelos de atención de los padecimientos: de exclusiones teóricas y articulaciones prácticas. Ciencia & Saúde Coletiva, 8(1), 185–207. https://doi.org/10.1590/S1413-­81232003000100014 Palma, P. (2017). Sanadores inesperados: medicina china en la era de migración global (Lima y California, 1850-1930). História, Ciências, Saúde, 25(1), 13–31. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0104-­59702018000100002 Palma, P., & Ragas, J. (2018). Enclaves sanitarios: higiene, epidemias y salud en el Barrio chino de Lima, 1880–1910. Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura, 45(1), 159–190. Pratt, M. L. (1992). Imperial eyes. Travel writing and transculturation. Routledge.

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Seppilli, T. (2000). De qué hablamos cuando hablamos de factores culturales en salud. In E.  Perdiguero & J.  Comelles (Eds.), Medicina y Cultura. Estudios entre la antropología y la medicina (pp. 33–44). Bellaterra. Taylor, K. (2011). Chinese Medicine in Early Communist China, 1945-1963: A Medicine of Revolution. Cambridge: Needham Research Institute Series. Unschuld, P. (2003). Huang Di neijing su wen: Nature, Knowledge. In Imagery in an ancient Chinese medical text. University of California Press. Xu, S., & Hu, D. (2017). Barefoot doctors and the ‘Health Care Revolution’ in rural China: A study centered on Shandong Province. Endeavour, 41(3), 136–145. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2017.06.004 Zhan, M. (2009). Other-wordly. Making Chinese medicine through transnational frames. Duke University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Avoiding Encounters: An Ethnographic Analysis of Sino-Argentine Business Relationships in Argentina’s Oil Industry Alejandra Conconi The Arrival of “Chinese Companies” in Argentine Patagonia At the close of 2010 I began visiting the offices and work spaces of Chinese companies1 in Argentina as an interculturalist. In this role, I worked with Argentines and Chinese expatriates2 through training and consulting to raise awareness about the impact of cultures of communication on daily work. 1  In my thesis (Conconi, 2020: 27), I make a distinction between Chinese companies—the enterprises in the territory of the People’s Republic of China that are governed under the constitution and labor laws of that country—and their affiliates or subsidiaries abroad, where Chinese labor notions, discourses, and practices are mainly mediated by the legal framework of the host country, but also by diverse labor cultural configurations. 2  “Expatriate” or “expat” refers to corporate transfers or highly qualified migrants. I will use both terms interchangeably.

A. Conconi (*) Escuela IDAES-Universidad Nacional de San Martín (UNSAM), Buenos Aires, Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Badaró (ed.), China in Argentina, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92422-5_6

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In one of those opportunities, at the end of 2012, I met Marina, in the province of Santa Cruz.3 Marina is responsible for Human Resources in three fields at the National Star Oil Company (NSOC),4 an Argentine subsidiary of the Chinese state-run oil company. She is a native of Rosario, an industrial city in central Argentina, and moved to Santa Cruz when offered a new job that doubled her former salary; she previously worked at an oilseed plant. Marina introduced me to Pablo, a Buenos Aires petroleum engineer, who has been working at the company for eight years. Pablo reflects: “We feel a bit like furniture here. The company and nationality both changed. I went from being in a Brazilian to American and now Chinese [company]. They change the names, the posters, but we stay.” Marina refutes: “Not even the posters. Nine months have passed since the Chinese arrived and if you look at the shirts and the safety helmets, they still have the name of our predecessor.” Pablo adds: “There is a difference in that. When Eagle Oil bought us, they came and that same day they forced us to remove everything that had the logo of the previous company and change everything to its blue and red logo like the American flag. They changed all the posters, work clothes and brought in new directives for how to do things. When the Chinese arrived, it was much more austere – covering the logos or painting, the logo on the mug was enough. We were waiting to see what model they brought, the months passed and nothing, we felt a vacuum.” Marina and Pablo recall scenes from their first encounters with Chinese expatriates. Marina tells me she found out the company had been sold while reading the newspaper at breakfast. That day, when she arrived at the office, emails with paragraphs, letterheads, and signatures in Chinese characters began to arrive. “Imagine my face! Over time we got used to it,” she recalls. A few days after the company was sold, the first Chinese expatriates arrived. Pablo guided them through the company’s sites. “When I got home, I told my wife that [the Chinese] are aliens.” My interviewees5 regarded the first steps taken by their new Chinese bosses and colleagues as incomprehensible: they puzzled as their new  The names of companies and individuals were altered to protect their confidentiality  Hereinafter NSOC. 5  Although my first contacts with companies were for work purposes, I continued in contact with employees of Chinese and Argentine nationality with whom I conducted interviews and participant observation for the explicit purposes of conducting a master’s thesis research in Social Anthropology. 3 4

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colleagues asked for telephone numbers without the number four,6 moved all the furniture around while being guided by a compass, and began a process of “voracious” copying of the documentation, manuals, and information left by the previous owner. These actions, understood in context, were quite logical. Ma Xudin is a senior Chinese geologist who worked for years at the Institute of Geological Sciences at Nanjing University. When NSOC annexed the university institute, Ma went from being a professor to a manager in a state-owned company. Ma was the first Chinese expatriate that the company sent to the Argentine subsidiary, and was placed in charge of supervising the transition, together with two other colleagues. Upon arriving in his new office, Ma observed that the furniture in his office was not arranged according to fengshui, a practice and belief that links the harmony and destiny of people with the environment and spaces they inhabit, especially the “flow of energy” (qi, 气). “Feng shui is important for making good decisions and relating to people,” Ma explained to me. He uses a “compass” (罗盘, luopan) to identify the ideal configuration for his furniture and to organize spaces in the company office. Meanwhile, an Argentine legal manager contemplated what he calls a sense of vacío, or vacuum;7 many of the employees describe a similar feeling. “When [the Chinese] arrived, they brought an employee manual from China; it was quickly destroyed because it could bring us a lot of legal problems.” Chinese ownership came with new rules and models to follow but these were implemented with caution or were even neutralized by local senior management.

Chinese Investments in Argentina Argentina and China resumed diplomatic relations in 1972,8 but 2004 proved a key year in the bilateral relationship. Former president Hu Jintao went on a tour with official visits to Brazil, Chile, Cuba, and Argentina; Argentina recognized China as a “market economy.” Between 2003 and 2016, Argentina received an estimated five billion dollars in Chinese investments (Avendado, 2017 cited in Santa Cruz,  The number four is pronounced in Mandarin Chinese similar to the word death.  From the Spanish “vacío.” 8  Website of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Argentina http://ar.chineseembassy.org/esp/zagx/t171826.htm 6 7

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2018), a significant sum, though less than the amount invested in this same period in Brazil or Peru. Investments in Argentina were initially oriented to the extractive sector but expanded to transport, finance, information technology, alternative energy, and other industries (Santa Cruz, 2018). Among the most important investments in the oil and gas industry was China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC)‘s acquisition of a 50 percent stake in Bridas Energy Holdings Ltd., which owns 50 percent of Panamerican Energy (PAEG). The acquisition was made through an alliance strategy, a mechanism of global expansion (Sliwinsky, 2019). In 2011, Sinopec bought Occidental’s Argentine subsidiary for an estimated $2.45 billion, becoming the fourth largest oil and gas producer in Argentina. Sinopec is the second largest producer in the province of Santa Cruz with 20 percent oil and 8 percent of the gas market share (Sliwinsky, 2019). Later, two smaller investments took place: Sinopec International Petroleum Service (SIPSC), a subsidiary of Sinopec dedicated to the company’s global services (Sliwinsky, 2019), acquired operations in Santa Cruz and Neuquén, and PetroAP, a Chinese state-run company, had a brief tenure as owner of operations in the north of Argentina, eventually departing the country in 2017. China does not have a priority interest in Latin America. Its bilateral relationship with the various countries of the region relates to the various levels of asymmetry and the relative importance of each country at a political and economic level. Oviedo (2014) differentiates a center–center relationship with Brazil, given the size of scale and importance as an emerging economy and its political role at the global level, and a center–semi-periphery relationship with Mexico, due to its economy and bilateral relations with China. Finally, it has a center– periphery relationship with Argentina, a relationship marked by asymmetries of scale and power. In November 2018, Argentina hosted the G20 Summit. Within this framework, China and Argentina signed a renewal of the Action Plan (2019–2023) which had been in place since 2014. The plan marked out state policy between China and Argentina in the political, economic, commercial, cultural, educational, technological, and defense areas. The arrival of Chinese investments in Argentina has characteristics and nuances that are different from previous waves of English, Italian, or American investments in the country’s history. In the political sphere,

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reactions range from regarding it as a prophetic vision of salvation9 to complete disinterest. For those who work in Chinese companies, the investments generate uncertainty and estrangement, a sense of opportunity and, for some, feelings of rejection and discrimination. In July 2021, Sinopec sold its operation to Corporación América (CGC), an Argentine capital company. With the exception of CNOOC, all Chinese operating and service companies in the oil and gas business had by then left the country.

Encounters in the Business World To analyze contact between cultures, Faier and Rofel (2014) use the category of “encounter” and “encounter ethnographies” to question what happens when individuals or groups with different cultural backgrounds and unequal positioning come into contact. The meetings that I will analyze here correspond to my field notes on the oil industry in Argentina between 2012 and 2017; these encounters reflect China’s global political and economic progress. Using Faier and Rofel (2014)‘s understanding of encounters and taking the Argentine subsidiaries of Chinese state-owned companies as an empirical reference, I ask, what kind of encounters take place and what kinds of relationships result? Writing on various approaches to otherness in the context of inequality, Richard White (cited in Faier & Rofel, 2014), refers to the development of a standard of shared behavior in back-and-forth negotiations that he called the “middle ground” or neutral ground. This is the product of an accommodation on the part of both parties. Taking another approach, Tsing (2005) shows how the juxtaposition of multiple global and institutional synergies have an influence in a local case, the rubber or wood plantations in Indonesia. Through the contacts, interventions, and expectations of groups with different degrees of inequality, she observes that culture is produced in the “frictions” between them. In this way, global encounters produce emotions such as fear or uncertainty. In my fieldwork, I observe several nuances that I will highlight before addressing the frictions encountered. First, the contact between Chinese expatriates and Argentines occurs among a globalized elite. The managers, 9  https://www.lanacion.com.ar/652032-china-invertiria-en-el-pais-20000-millones-de-­ dolares [Consultation: 08/10/2018].

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operators, and collaborators in the field, mostly Argentine men, can make the choice to leave the business if they so choose. Unlike in other types of encounters, the two national groups occupy parallel status in terms of career. Despite differences in social status and origin, both Argentines and Chinese are empowered groups. Second, contact does not occur sporadically or remotely but within the company on a daily basis and over time. After the presentation of the person, the relationship must be sustained. Finally, both groups are part of the same company although there are legal distinctions. Although Chinese and Argentines attend work in the same space and “contact zone” (Pratt, 1992),10 Argentines are hired locally and work under local legal jurisdiction and Chinese receive their salary abroad and are governed by Chinese laws and regulations from their site of transfer. This has implications for workers’ imaginations, conflicts, and reactions. For all the aforementioned reasons, the ties and encounters occur in a complex and unequal power relationship. Despite the tensions and dependencies of the Chinese towards the Argentines, the Chinese have the power to decide where the relationship goes. As an interculturalist, I worked for many years to generate activities and meeting spaces for Argentine and Chinese employees in the oil and gas industries. However, over time I began to observe, in this industry and others, the practice of “encounter avoidance” which I will analyze in the following section.

The Dimensions of the Encounter: Imagination, Rationalization, and Results Many of the ideas about Asia that circulate in Latin America were built in the context of Western colonialism. Latin Americans inherited and processed imaginaries about Asia through devices and constructions created in more industrialized countries. Thus, the contact and encounter between China and Latin America is preceded by encounters that took place first through media, chronicles, and history books, through which the West built an orientalist view (Said, 1979) of China. Encounters between individuals or human groups are rationalized via prior information. As Todorov (1986) relates in his book The Conquest of America, the Spanish conquerors called the Aztec temples “mosques.” 10  Pratt (1992) used the term “contact zone” to refer to the territory where individuals or groups from different cultures coincide.

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The categories and imaginaries we construct are built upon other pre-­ existing categories. The encounter between Chinese and Argentine managers and workers in Argentina is preceded by Argentine encounters with Italian, English, and American companies. Firms in the United States, in particular, have made an impact; their corporations and business schools have inculcated practices and narratives that shape Argentina business culture. For many Argentine managers, the encounter with Chinese businesspersons means a new awareness of the world and their place in it; it generates a transformation in the imagination. In contrast to an American management style, which outlined frameworks, procedures, and “what needed to be done,” Chinese management and managers took their time to get to know the company’s and the country’s situation. This generated what many Argentine employees referred to as a “feeling of a vacuum.” This perception co-existed with what they referred to as a “radio corridor”—a chain of rumors—that led dozens of Argentine employees at NSOC to resign. Management styles, expressed in moral and practical discourses, are what Luci (2016) has called a “management grammar” or normative and moral support in the business world. A mutual grammar shared with their “American bosses” became blurry and opaque under Chinese management. Another dimension of analysis is the rationalization that is made of otherness in encounters. According to Pratt (1992), White (2001), and Tsing (2005), constructions are always framed in a context of a specific time and space. Within weeks of purchasing NSOC, changes appeared in the organization chart. Next to the highest positions such as vice president or senior managers appeared a new role: the deputy. In the oil and gas industry, where investments are high cost, it is common to have more than one partner, one with the role of operator and another, or others, serving the role of audit partner in the field. However, in this case, NSOC was a single company. Nevertheless, top Argentine executives were paired with an executive of Chinese nationality. Ma Xudin explained to me: “our people are sent so if they tell us that something is not right we can trust them because they are one of us.” Gai Liuxin, from finance department added, “For the Chinese it is difficult to think that a foreigner is our yijiaren (一家 人)”—a term that translates as “our family” and is related to the core of trust. An imaginary circle traces the atmosphere of familiarity. Formed by the family and closest circle of

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friends and work colleagues, it is closely related in the Han11 Chinese cultural configuration to an ethnic and racial identity, making it more difficult to build trust with foreigners. Many Argentine executives at the company viewed the changed relationship with headquarters as taking place from one day to another. “For all the years that I worked for Eagle Oil, I had a direct line with Houston, we were always on top of the decisions and we were clear about where the company was going. When NSOC bought us, it was as if they lowered a veil, one amplified by language barriers. We did not understand anything, neither who to contact in China if we needed to, nor where we were going; we felt totally relegated” noted Mauricio, a former Argentine vice president who recently left the company. In this regard, some authors reflected on the “racialization of affect” (Berg & Ramos, 2015; Wade, 2004) as a construction of essentialist imaginaries about ethnic and/or racial12 collectives or groups, which intersect with social class and/or gender. This affect emotions, bonds, and results in relationships. Most of my interviewees of Argentine nationality and some Chinese collaborators described a “lack of trust” as part of their experience. In one anecdote that was reminiscent of others told to me by his colleagues, Pablo described: “The first request I received from my boss was to make a report on the deposits and two days later I found out that a colleague had been asked for the same report. This happened in all areas of the company. Was the reason disorganization or distrust?” Guillermo is one of the top senior Argentines in the company and he worked for several multinationals before reaching this position. “When I worked with Americans they were not the owners of the company. However,

11  China is recognized in its constitution as a multi-ethnic country made up of the Han ethnic group, which represents approximately 88 percent of the population and fifty-five ethnic minorities that make up the remaining 12 percent. By cultural configuration (Grimson, 2011) we understand the processes and experiences that human groups have undertaken in a generational and historical context and that through symbols and practices shape the imaginations and borders of the possible. 12  Since World War II, the scientific community has agreed that what was called “race” is a social and cultural construction around certain ideas. Anthropology opts for the term raciality to imply the cultural and non-biological character of this category.

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here, even the lowest-level13 Chinese employee goes to see the number one.14 People are getting used to the fact that if the person is Chinese they have more power. There is always a cloak of confidentiality and you never understand what happens in the ping-pong between them.” The racialization of trust generates a bias of trust between Chinese collaborators; this can also be true for relations among first- and second-­ generation Chinese migrants. Managers’ construction of who is Chinese is based first on language proficiency, which equates being Chinese with speaking Mandarin Chinese, and second, on physical characteristics. In the most trusted circle of NSOC there is one non-Chinese Argentine employee who studied for years in China and, in addition to learning the language fluently, assimilated to Chinese colleagues’ culture. When I asked some Chinese interviewers about this, they tell me that some Westerners who have lived in China for many years begin to “move and have Chinese gestures” and are “less Latino.” Employees of Chinese origin, on the other hand, also experience the racialization of stereotypes. Ma Xudin remembers one of the first times that he took a taxi to return to his apartment. When he told the taxi driver the address, he answered “But there are no supermarkets in Puerto Madero.” Employees of Chinese origin learned that for many in the local population, encounters and knowledge of “the Chinese” came mainly from their experiences with migrants from Fujian province who own and work in supermarkets.15 Likewise, Chinese migrants to Argentina and their Argentine children (first-generation Argentines of Chinese descent) are exposed to their culture of origin. For these employees, most of them children of supermarkets owners, the encounter at the subsidiary of the Chinese company is mixed. Some are proud of China’s recent political and economic development. Many highlighted that their parents did not expect China to grow

13  Translated from the Spanish “El chino más pichi acá va a ver al número uno.” “Pichi” is a local category that refers to collaborators with little experience or the lowest rank in the company. 14  From the Spanish “número uno,” a native category with which Chinese employees refer to the highest authority in the company. 15  Over the last twenty years the phenomenon of Chinese supermarkets in Argentina grew at such a high rate in the metropolitan region of Buenos Aires and the interior of the country that residents began to say “I’m going to the Chinese,” when they talked about going to the neighborhood supermarket.

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to its current level when they decided to migrate in the 1990s.16 They also express the development of a flexible identity. The in-depth knowledge of both cultural configurations makes them adjust their behaviors and sense of humor in front of Chinese or Argentine interlocutors. Inhabiting a contact zone does not imply a similar understanding of certain situations or behaviors over time. Pablo, after four years working with Chinese colleagues, says that “I cannot tell you five things about them” because of the duality with which everything can be interpreted. At times, his speech rationalizes xenophobia and discrimination: “They are vicious, they share a lot of our worst qualities […] I prefer that Swedes come, if we have to receive something from outside that is not the same as us morally.” In everyday discourses, there is an essentialist construction of difference, between “them” and “us.” The encounter with “Chinese” is different from the encounters with waves of Western investment in the country. The aforementioned waves were related with a state-legitimized “other.” Garguin and Visacovsky (2009) have suggested that the idea of ​​the middle class in Argentina was constructed out of the idea of persons who​​ “descended from the boats.”17 This notion made the diversity of ethnic groups that contributed to the formation and development of the country invisible and enhanced the power of the immigrant of European origin by promoting racist and racializing discourses in the configuration of the “Argentine” identity. These ideas of race and nationality formed basis for the conformation of disqualifying and racist imaginations in relation to native peoples, descendants of enslaved persons from Africa, and migratory groups that would later arrive in the country. Many of my Argentine interlocutors, both managers and field workers, perceive the emergence of Chinese entrepreneurs and companies in the oil and gas industry as illegitimate. The surge of entrepreneurs and firms from China is interpreted in most of the research in the oil and gas industry in this light. They are devalued and, in some cases, xenophobia and discrimination appear under the guise of discourses of the rationalization of cultural differences. The arrival of people from China is read as invasion.

16  The interviewees from Chinese origin in this research come from Fujian and to a lesser extent from Taiwan. In the field, I found both what the literature calls generation 1.5 and generation 2.0, to refer to those born in China who arrived with their parents when they were very young and were educated in the country and those born in Argentina. 17  Translated from the Spanish “descendieron de los barcos.”

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From a gender dimension, many male employees questioned Chinese power because it does not respond to characteristics of Western hegemonic masculinity and because this new power put their own learned notions and practices in check. As Palermo (2012) has shown in an exhaustive thesis on work and masculinities in oil industry in Argentina, in extractive towns and cities of Patagonia, monuments and representations of the oil worker proliferate. In these depictions, the oil worker is usually bare-­ chested, in a working position, with exaggerated muscles, denoting their masculinity. These representations reinforce the identity construction of a type of masculinity, strongly associated with robust corporeity. This is different from other industries such as technology, where masculinity is more associated with attributes such as intelligence. The oil and gas industry is composed of mostly men worldwide. In an industry where power and masculinity go hand in hand, masculinity is constructed through hegemonic imaginations and discourses. “Hegemonic masculinity” (Connell, 1995; Donaldson, 1993) is a category that recognizes that diverse masculinities have existed across time. Despite the heterogeneity of groups and individuals, they share a notion of male domination that are sustained through discourses and practices that subordinate individuals or subordinate sectors and women under various forms of patriarchy. This concept is understood in conjunction with the category of “subordinate masculinity” (Connell, 1995), which are men who do not resemble the masculine ideal. In contemporary studies for the United States (Connell, 1995; Driessen 2018; Zhang, 2018), nerds, gays, and ethnic minorities, especially Asian men, are considered part of this group. These categories, with change over time, and across institutions and generations, are coupled with the notion of complicity, which suggests that, although the majority of men do not correspond to the masculine ideal, the benefits they receive from accompanying subordination encourages them to be complicit with this form of domination. As I advanced in my fieldwork, I observed how masculinities were built around perceptions and idealizations around corporeity and habitus, but also in relation to other characteristics of socio-political and cultural configurations. In speaking with a Chinese migrant interviewee, he mentioned his perception of Chinese expatriates as “quiet eunuchs” and contrasted with his experience in Argentina. “No one here respects you if you don’t take your place and the Chinese are not considered bosses because they only follow orders.”

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Some of my non-Chinese interlocutors regard the appearance of their Chinese expat colleagues as unmasculine, emphasizing their smaller bodies—and less “manly” greetings, a description I examine in more detail below. These comments led me to reflect on how the narratives of disqualification and delegitimization of Chinese power in the country and especially in these territories linked to the oil and gas industry reflected a culturally-specific construction of masculinities. In the context of a mediation in the city of Caleta Olivia18 in 2014, the Argentine employees who opposed the leadership of the Chinese bosses told me: “These (Chinese) who weigh fifty kilos19 less than us are they going to be our bosses?” Chinese constructions of Argentines also racializes the identity of their collaborators. After a training session, I asked a group of Chinese expats about their perceptions of Argentina. Ma Xudin contrasted Chinese and Argentines thus: “since we are children they teach us that we must contribute to our country, so it costs us less to make certain sacrifices for the company. We are used to dialoguing with all managers and between all of us orienting ourselves to the best possible solution. We see that Argentines not only find it more difficult to agree with each other, but also those different areas of the company work against each other.” Pablo noted that he came across the perception that Argentines and Latinos are lesser workers20 in formal comments and jokes often. At one point, he got so angry about such comments in a meeting that his colleagues had to pull him away so he did not hit his Chinese coworker. “I work overtime every day and just because I don’t do the pantomime of pretending to work like they do when the boss passes by, do I have to be called lazy?” The framework of moralities is usually another dimension where diversity is rationalized. “They are not polite, there are Chinese who come in the front door and pass reception without greeting anyone and only speaking to the other Chinese [employees] in our office,” said one Argentine employee. The ambiguity here is marked by the uses and customs of each country of origin. In relationship with this topic, a young Chinese interpreter, Fan, explains to me that there is no custom of greeting each other when entering or circulating through offices or locations of the company in China and even joked with me about certain issues of population scale: “Can you 18  Oil city located 78.2 kilometers from Comodoro Rivadavia in the province of Chubut, Argentine Patagonia. 19  Fifty kilos equals approximately one hundred and ten pounds. 20  The categories heard in Chinese were 懒散 (lǎnsǎn) and 懒惰 (lǎnduò), in English lazy.

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imagine with 1.4 billion people what it would be like if we greeted the bus driver or the receptionist one by one as they do here?… we would never get anywhere.” Lastly, encounters always have results in relationships. Although I found heterogeneous relations taking place in the “contact zones” in my fieldwork, there was a predominance of two effects: misinterpretation and avoided encounters.

Rationalize and Respond On its first anniversary in Argentina, NSOC brought its employees to a five-star hotel in Buenos Aires. At the huge reception, they brought all employees into a convention room with a large screen that projected a corporate video in Chinese, a language that most of the Argentine nationals could not understand. This made it all the more difficult for them to interpret the images projected—for example, when tanks or warplanes appeared on screen. The sophistication of the venue meant that employees were dressed elegantly. At one point the president of the company walked to an elevated podium. From above, he began to give a speech. It was translated into a broken Spanish: “The Company is not working well; we are a poor family and whoever leaves the family at this time will not be able to return to the company,” he said. The message puzzled the Argentine audience: they wondered: Is he being mistranslated or does he really mean to say this? This scene, which took place in 2012 and was relayed to me with bewilderment by several Argentine employees of the company, is dense in anthropological terms. When I went to live in China for the first time in 2009, the military images on television also caught my attention. Conversations with colleagues of various origins made me make broader observations about the different ways cultures think about the idea of “security” or of the military. After several experiences residing in China, I traveled to the United States in 2017, while pregnant. As a pregnant person, I had grown accustomed of expressions of care that I had experienced in Argentina; there I was always offered a seat in public transport, was allowed to skip the checkout line in shops, and was the first to get on the plane. By contrast, when boarding a plane in New York, the airline called the military and war veterans first, even before the first-class passengers; I began to pay attention to the abundance of images, symbols, and hierarchies linked to the military. The scene in the hotel in Buenos Aires, and

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others I could recall from my time in China, illustrate how military images strike us differently. In Argentina’s case, these are framed by the constructions and imaginations of a peripheral country, the recent history of military dictatorship, and changing perceptions about the moral power of the armed forces. President Chen expressed narratives about poverty and notions that were difficult for local employees to understand and relate to. In repeated speeches by Chinese presidents, I have heard the reproduction of narratives of austere morality and ties to an impoverished past. Despite the heterogeneities, most of my interlocutors of Chinese origin have agreed that the mark of poverty and scarcity runs through all their life trajectories and has a strong echo. The diverse cultural configurations generate a gap that, in discourses and practices, is at times immeasurable. Some Argentine collaborators saw this discourse as an absolute contradiction: the discourse of poverty was set against the symbols of opulence; for others, the speech was a corporate realism that helped them make a decision as to whether to leave the company or not. Another example of a lack of understanding in workspaces reported by NSOC employees was the firing of an Argentine vice president of the company. Upon arriving at the office, the vice president convened his entire team, made up of Argentines as well as one Chinese employee, to notify them of the news. Zhong Liubo, a Human Resources professional, worked for seven years at the company, his entire career. Amid a climate of caution and attention in the meeting room, the highest-ranking person in the sector was fired. His colleagues are attentive to his message. Meanwhile, Liubo takes the camera and begins to take photos to portray the moment. He took photos of the boss, the group, and changes position to have another angle. The Argentines became uncomfortable, asking themselves, why take photos? And why so many? He continued to take photos until the end of the meeting, always with a smile on his face. These apparent contradictions, in the key of Goffman (1956), show that, from the local Argentine perspective, various “rules of conduct” have been broken. For Goffman, these rules guide almost all the actions of our life in a mechanical way and only become evident when they are broken or we cannot act according to them. They guide not only our behavior, but they also govern our expectations about the behavior of others. The dismissal case exemplifies what Simmel (cited in Goffman, 1956) called the “ideal sphere” and includes both the physical and emotional personal space that people seek to respect as a form of deference, or as

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Goffman called the “avoidance ritual.” For Zhong Liubo, no rules were broken. He participates in a form of communication. As the firing was related to a high-ranking person, it was important to report it to Beijing in the corporate newsletter. Goffman (1956) has shown how in various groups, acts of deference can result in the opposite of the expected effect. I have observed how the habitual repetition of the breaking rules of behavior generates, in addition to misinterpretations, avoidance. In the aforementioned encounters, a contact area and a common situation are shared, but the way in which the experience is organized and interpreted by each person or group does not generate an encounter or the perception of it. Differences in cultural configurations can create the sensation of inhabiting two realities simultaneously. An experience I had with one of my NSOC interviewees, Manager Xu, illustrates this. When we met at the company for an interview he knew I was teaching at the Confucius Institute; he told me that he mentioned my name to the director, but the director did not recognize me. I paused and realized why: “Of course! He knows me by my name in Spanish.” For Xu I was never Alejandra but Kong Aili 孔爱莉, my Chinese name. Thus as a double identity, my Chinese alias worked at NSOC and my Argentine name at the Institute. When encountering opaque scenarios at Chinese companies, local workers created a category to talk about their Chinese colleagues, referring to them as “the shadows.” Jorge, a Venezuelan employee at Huawei described the idea thus: “Back in 2010 the movie Avatar came out and we found the perfect metaphor to describe our Chinese peers. It is like a reality just like yours, but in another dimension.” Latin American employees use these types of metaphors—pairs, shadows, mirrors, avatars, phantoms, Stranger Things—to express what it means to work with Chinese colleagues where there are great differences in lingual and cultural configurations and they feel they are in the same physical contact zone but not living in the same reality, nor observing the same things. The situations of ambiguity in relation to power and communications generate a variety of emotions and behavior: fear, uncertainty, anger, the sense of an opportunity to take advantage of, among others. Pablo summed it up in this sentence: “We were leaving a meeting and some people said ‘oh good, they approved us’ and others said ‘no, I understood that they did not approve the [million-dollar] project.’ It was terrible. However, this was taken advantage of. In my previous American company, I always had to

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work overtime. Here we told the Chinese that here we do not work after six and we all leave early.” This sense of opacity, which interviewees have described to me as a “black box,” is not just characteristic of employees of Argentine origin. The majority of Chinese collaborators also do not understand the underlying reasons for many processes, since many decisions came from company headquarters. On one occasion, I had to mediate between Chinese and Argentine employees. The perception of a “vacuum,” expressed by the majority of Argentines and diversity on communication styles generated constant uncertainty. For one Argentine lawyer, different imaginaries of professional life caused constant friction: “My Chinese boss never gives me feedback, he asks me every week for reports on local legislation, answers to questions from Headquarters and never tells me if what I deliver is right or wrong. I do not know if my work is good, if it is shit to him, if they are going to fire me. I live in a state of constant uncertainty.” Cognitive differences and differences in cultural configurations generate in Argentines a generalized impression of a lack of model or “vacuum.” This is due to practices and behaviors of the Chinese culture that are not understood or interpreted. According to Goffman (1974), the way people look has a situational perspective; our interest in understanding of what is happening around us provides frame of reference and a role from which we relate to others. Frames of reference organize our experiences and mark the limits of that which we are capable of identifying. In the context of this mediation, the Chinese boss does not understand the problem. He explains that the relationship with the bosses in China is one of proactive subordination: subordinates prepare orders, anticipate possible situations, and do not expect feedback or follow-up on their tasks on a day-to-day basis. Taking the idea of ​​the importance of roles in forms of perception, Goffman (1974) points out the difference with the situational perspective that a player and his caddy have on a golf course; for one it is a game and for the other a job, although the route is the same. Gai Liuxin told me that for him, it is the “boss/leader” who speaks and the roles that each person must occupy is clear. Marina, an Argentine leader from the Human Resources department is more blunt: “When the company was acquired by the Chinese, we sat down and waited to find out what to do, to be told what was going to happen, what

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things were going to change. Weeks passed and nobody announced anything. The sensation was of vacuum.” In my participant observation, I was able to see how this perception of a vacuum paralyzed and generated uncertainty in Argentine employees, but was perceived differently by my Chinese interviewees. For executives of Chinese origin, paternalism gives meaning and order to what they do, day to day, in their companies. This does not mean that there is no disagreement or dissatisfaction with those in charge, but that there their work objectives align. As several Chinese executives put it: “You don’t work for the company, you work for the boss.” Renli is a thirty-one year old hydrocarbon technician; he grew up in southern China, where his wife and three-year-old daughter still reside. His wife had just gotten a promotion when his company asked him to be responsible for a new operation in Santa Cruz, Argentina. They both needed to work to pay their mortgage. With her husband’s monthly expatriation bonus, they estimated that they would pay off the home in fifteen rather than thirty-five years if he stayed abroad for three years. They made the decision to live apart for the three years that Renli’s project lasted, seeing each other every five months. When he spoke to his wife via the Internet, his three-year-old daughter was usually asleep because of the time difference. He saw his daughter very little. This was the greatest downside of being away, though not the only one. The permanent perception of chaos in the new worksite overwhelmed him. He was promoted to supervisor because of his excellent performance in China, but in Santa Cruz, he struggled. He is in charge of two sites located sixty kilometers21 apart. One morning, a delegate from the union blocked the road and the entry to the company storage facility. His boss called him from Buenos Aires and says: “Renli, do something, call the embassy, call the governor.” Renli and his team became paralyzed. They had never faced a situation like this one before, but, at the request of their boss, they called the Chinese Embassy in Buenos Aires. Escalating phone calls led nowhere and Renli was held responsible as head of the site. He reflected: “How can we trust (the locals) if it is always difficult to do the job? I left my family for three years to come to work here and they can never do the work?” Language difficulties and diverse cultural configurations make the relationship “exhausting,” according to Argentine workers, due to the complexity of efforts to translate and be understood. Key information circulates  37.28 miles.

21

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in Mandarin Chinese; decisions are made in that language; manuals are in Mandarin, as are written reports sent to Beijing. Not having a command of Mandarin means being left out of information that, due to time constraints and as a strategy to protect information, is never translated. Spanish, on the other hand, is the everyday language onsite. Zhang Ouming is a Managing Director at China International Oil Company (CIOC), an oil service company that also has a branch in Santa Cruz province. Before training in finance and business, he began his international career with a degree in Hispanic Philology22—the significance of the language barrier was clear to him. Although he can communicate in Spanish well, he observes that for many Chinese managers lack of language competency is a major obstacle for mutual understanding: “If you don’t read, you don’t know and if you don’t know the rules, how do you play?” The language barriers and control of information generate a distance between employees. As weeks went by, Chinese expatriates began to eat in a restaurant while Argentines had their meals in the company dining room. A sense of opacity persisted among Argentines: “Years go by and the person you thought had power responded to another leader with less power in the organization chart but who is from the [Chinese Communist] Party. We have the feeling of never understanding most of the decisions or who made them” Conconi (2020). With Argentines and Chinese workers spending less time together and sharing fewer common spaces, the meeting rooms and dining rooms where information was shared and important decisions were made began to be exclusively Chinese. This ethnic segmentation in company spaces is forged by collaborators and management from both nationalities. An Argentine NSOC CFO put it this way: “If I bring a Chinese employee to the meeting [Argentines] give me a foul face because I am forcing them to speak English and they know the meeting will last twice as long. In some sectors of the company, there is the perception that they [Chinese colleagues] are not needed at all, because things here are very different from there, so [Argentine] directors pretend that we are not a Chinese company. They [Argentines] do not want any type of contact.”

22  In China, it is very common for the undergraduate career of many expatriate employees to be in languages. Then, they are trained in the trade or industry in the company empirically or through postgraduate studies.

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Conclusion In Argentina, encounters with “China” and “the Chinese” are no longer a distant idea; they are a part of life in neighborhoods, businesses, and political spaces. Nor are encounters isolated local phenomenon; rather, they are part of the global experience of millions of Chinese who have left the country as migrants, diplomats, or corporate transfers, as well as their merchandise and information, in the context of the expansion of Chinese capital. Through my interlocutors, I was able to observe how the encounters between diverse individuals or groups with different positions of power take on three major dimensions: imagination, rationalization, and results. The encounters put into action all the previous knowledge linked to the encounter presented to us: prior relationships with merchandise, situations, stories, people, and imaginaries. In the encounter between people from China and Argentina, the characteristics of the historical power balances are no longer relevant. Chinese managers fulfill an assigned mission of “going out” into the world with little global experience. In encountering an unknown, sometimes hostile, work context, they became paralyzed. They gain knowledge of the local culture, try to negotiate, and learn new strategies of adaptation to the local context. Encounters are heterogeneous. In many cases, they are marked by processes of racialization, essentialization, and homogenization of experience across national identities. The opportunity to engage in a long-term participant observation allowed me to see how colleagues can work together at an institution or enterprise but avoid sharing common physical places, and segregate according to ethnicity and language skills in spaces such as dining rooms or meeting rooms. Language is the main barrier in this encounter. In the field, I observed how the absence of a common language produced other situations over time: discomfort, voluntary withdrawal of individuals, segregation in work meetings, and the circulation of different perceptions of events. As the language of power in Chinese companies, Mandarin Chinese is the format of communication for confidential information, procedures, regulations, technical resources, and corporate speeches. It is also the language of decisions made by headquarters and the one used in communication with the local subsidiary.

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In my research, I observed how languages ​​are “inhabited.” Languages​​ are perhaps the greatest reflection of the cultural configurations of a group or a society. They are not just words and phrases to be translated, but universes of categories and meanings that guide my interlocutors. An encounter presupposes the relationship between individuals or groups with different backgrounds, but it is also there in the encounter that difference often occurs. It is through these moments that identities are reified and used in an instrumental way to mark differences, question, challenge, and negotiate. The encounter creates new meanings and makes new identities emerge.

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CHAPTER 7

“Now Is All About China”: Recent Developments in Chinese Studies in Argentina Ignacio Villagrán

Introduction: Chinese Studies in Latin American Academia1 “Modern Western Sinology” has a recent history, and it is linked closely to the establishment of “Area Studies” departments in the main universities in the US and Europe, and their growth during the decades of World War 1  An earlier and abridged version of this chapter was published in Chinese in the Journal of Latin American Studies (2019). See Bi Jiahong 毕嘉宏 [Villagrán, I.] / Zhang Jingting 张 婧亭 (trad.) (2019) 阿根廷的中国研究:机构变迁与研究现状 [Chinese Studies in Argentina: institutional developments and current situation] 拉丁美洲研究 [Journal of Latin American Studies], 41(4), 25.39.

I. Villagrán (*) Centro de Estudios Argentina-China, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina Instituto de Ciencias, Universidad Nacional de General Sarmiento, Buenos Aires, Argentina © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Badaró (ed.), China in Argentina, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92422-5_7

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II and the Cold War. These departments emphasized the acquisition of linguistic competence in the target languages as the distinctive trait of their students and graduates. The main objective in the promotion of these programs was to train men and, to a lesser extent, women, who would be able to provide translation services and crack communication codes during the war and post-war periods. Criticisms of the instrumentality of these programs associate them with the “Orientalist” intellectual heritage and colonial or neo-colonial projects of the central countries and their research institutions, which pervaded as the underpinnings of many studies about China in Western scholarship. It wasn’t until the late twentieth century that the works of Edward W. Said and others contributed to making the field of Asian Studies more self-­ reflective and conscientious about the practices of power involved in the production of academic knowledge. Since then, Western sinology has been implicated in many of the intellectual trends that questioned the methods and concerns of Social Sciences and Humanities during the second half of the twentieth century; from the positivistic faith in the collection of data to the linguistic analyses and the cultural turn of the 1970s and the deconstructivist perspectives of the 1980s, to the integration of the methods of classical philology with the critical perspectives of social history. While all of these trends were taking place in academic institutions in North America and Europe, we would like to turn our attention to the Latin American context. We begin by exploring the earliest attempts to develop a field of Chinese Studies in Latin American universities, especially in Argentina, during the second half of the twentieth century. Let us begin by saying that despite the long history of Chinese Studies in Western academic institutions, Latin American, and especially Argentine, universities showed little or no interest in the promotion of East Asian studies in their departmental structures or curricula until the latter decades of the past century. There is almost no evidence of any interest in Argentine national universities to promote East Asian studies before the latter decades of the twentieth century, and it also should be noted that all efforts in that sense were for the most part based on individual interests and had limited influence. In the past two decades, however, the situation changed significantly. Not only individual scholars who pioneered the field found growing interest in their academic institutions, both from students and administrators, to include China, and East Asia, in the study programs, but they were also able to establish connections beyond academia with advisors and decision-makers in the public and private spheres.

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In this chapter, we intend to examine some of the most significant institutional developments in the field of Chinese Studies in Argentina over the past two decades, with the objective of showing that, despite the relative tardiness and still limited interest in our universities for the study of China and the East Asian region, the institution-building efforts of the past decades have transformed the academic landscape in the Social Sciences and the Humanities. Also, this has brought Argentine sinologists into a dialogue with colleagues from other Latin American countries as well as Asian Studies specialists worldwide. These conversations have fostered more critical approaches to the study of China in the region and have had a significant impact in our societies through the participation of scholars not only in academic activities, but also in open media, government-­ sponsored talks, and consulting for the private sector. This dynamic is likely to continue and expand in the foreseeable future. In what follows, I would like to discuss the institutional efforts to promote Chinese Studies in Argentine universities and review the experiences of some of the most distinguished scholars associated with the field.

Argentine Sinology in the Making: Individuals and Institutions One of the peculiarities of the Argentine context with regards to Asian, and Chinese Studies is that few universities have considered Asian Studies as a field of academic inquiry of itself. Therefore, the greater part of Argentina’s Asia scholars had to complete their undergraduate and graduate formation in a traditional discipline in the Humanities and Social Sciences and incorporated Asian Studies as a sub-topic later in their careers. These scholars stem mostly from disciplines such as International Relations, Political Science, Sociology, History, Literature, Economics, and Anthropology. The most common topics of their research are international relations, economic relations and trade, migration and identity, cultural consumptions, visual arts, and Chinese language teaching and studies of language education. Since the start of the new millennium, the spread of the interest in Chinese Studies at National Universities, together with the increasing support of Chinese educational and cultural institutions, contributed to the development of the field in novel ways. As a result, more universities have begun to promote Chinese studies as part of their curricula at the

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undergraduate and graduate levels, especially in areas related to Social Sciences and Humanities. At present, several of the National Universities have established programs related to the study of China. These include the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), the National University of La Plata (UNLP), the National University of San Martin (UNSAM), the National University of Lanus (UNLa), the National University of Rosario (UNR), and the National University of Córdoba (UNC). We must also mention the International Joint-Research Center established at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CIMI-CEIL-CONICET/ SHU) which has facilitated Argentine graduate students to complete their degrees at Shanghai University and hosted Chinese graduate students to Argentina for research stays. These are arguably the leading national institutions in the research and teaching about China in Argentina. It must also be noted that in recent years, several private universities have advanced their academic cooperation and exchanges with counterparts in China and established China or East Asian Studies programs. Besides the USAL, the Catholic University of Argentina (UCA), the University of Congress (UC), the Catholic University of Córdoba (UCC), and the Catholic University of Salta (UCASAL) participate in the network of institutions and scholars doing research on China. The cases identified for this study do not represent an exhaustive account of all institutional developments in Chinese studies in Argentinean National Universities. There are, of course, more National Universities and a few private universities that contribute to the dissemination of knowledge about China in Argentina. In their article about the existing academic centers dedicated to the study of China and their cooperation with Chinese counterparts, Fortunato Mallimaci and Guo Changgan mention that the proliferation of China–Argentina relations on different spheres has enabled universities and research centers to multiply their areas of cooperation. Almost five years have passed since that article was published, in which the local field has seen significant growth, both quantitatively as qualitatively (Mallimaci & Changgan, 2017). In this sense, we should mention the National University of Tres de Febrero (UNTREF), where Carlos Moneta and Sergio Cesarin coordinate the MA in Business with Asia Pacific and India and have published two edited volumes on the development of the Chinese presence in Latin America. The National University of Mar del Plata (UNMdP), the National University of General Sarmiento (UNGS), the National University of Lomas de Zamora (UNLZ), and the National University “Arturo

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Jauretche” (UNAJ), to name only a few have begun to promote Chinese studies and/or exchanges with Chinese universities and research centers. However, considering their longer history and relative weight in the production of knowledge about China, as well as limitations of time and space, I have decided to concentrate on a more restricted sample of institutions.

University of Buenos Aires (UBA) I will begin with UBA, the largest national university of the Argentinean system, with over 300,000 students and an overall community of about half a million people. Also, as the highest-ranking university in the country and the region, it has attracted the attention of several Chinese universities that wish to begin cooperation and exchanges with Latin American counterparts. UBA has overall framework agreements with four Chinese universities; Tsinghua (Qinghua), Shanghai International Studies University, Jilin University, and, most recently, Beijing University. The partnership with Jilin University was significant since it allowed UBA to become the first national university to host a Confucius Institute in Argentina (ICUBA) in 2009. According to the official Confucius Institutes’ survey, approximately 1700 students participate in language and/or culture courses each year at ICUBA. About twenty-five to thirty of the most promising students go on to pursue further studies at Jilin University, ICUBA’s partner university. ICUBA also offers courses and events related to the promotion of Chinese language and culture that are aimed at the greater Buenos Aires community. In this way, ICUBA has contributed to the dissemination of knowledge about Chinese language and culture among a larger audience in Argentina, especially to an increasing number of university students. Before the establishment of ICUBA, one of the most successful experiences in the development of Chinese Studies at UBA was the establishment of the East Asian Studies Group (GEEA) at the “Gino Germani” Research Institute (IIGG) of the School of Social Sciences in 2001. Since its creation, GEEA has functioned as an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study group focussing on research projects related to various East Asian topics. In its initial stage, the GEEAs strategy centered on two objectives: the formation of highly qualified human resources in Asian Studies (MA and PhDs); and the transfer of academic interests into curricular teaching and the organization of conferences, seminars, and congresses. One significant step in this process was the creation of the first optional East Asian

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Studies survey course which was offered to Political Science majors for the first time with great success in the summer 2004. Beyond the undergraduate classroom environment, the GEEA has contributed to the field by organizing lectures, seminars, and other academic events that allowed for the consolidation of a network of China scholars in Argentina. From these early experiences to the present, the School of Social Sciences has contributed to the formation of specialists on diverse issues related to the contemporary economic and political development in China. In the past years, several graduates of the School of Social Sciences obtained fellowships to study language or to pursue graduate degrees in China. Moreover, the School of Social Sciences and the “Gino Germani” Research Institute were able to make significant progress in establishing cooperative relations and exchanges with several Chinese institutions. In 2016, the IIGG began to explore the possibility of establishing a framework for cooperation with the Institute of Latin American Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS). Both institutions jointly organized the International Seminar “Social development and governance in China, Argentina and Latin America. Experiences and challenges,” held in Buenos Aires in April 2017. The election of Carolina Mera as Dean of the School of Social Sciences gave a new boost to academic cooperation and exchanges with Chinese counterparts. In 2018, scholars affiliated with the school of Social Sciences contributed to an edited volume on China, Russia, and India, edited by Elsa Llenderrozas, director of the Political Science major at UBA, which considered the recent developments in Chinese studies in our universities in comparative perspective. The section on China of this volume deals with different aspects of the bilateral relations, such as commerce, space cooperation, academic and cultural exchanges, and people to people diplomacy among others (Llenderrozas, 2018). Also, Carolina Mera co-edited a volume on the Belt and Road Initiative with the Director of the Argentina Studies Center of ILAS-CASS, Guo Cunhai (Guo & Mera, 2018). Considering the need to integrate the efforts of individual graduates and further promote Chinese Studies at the School of Social Sciences, Dean Mera proposed the creation of the Argentina–China Studies Center (CEACh), which was established in June 2018 to provide an institutional setting for research and dissemination of knowledge about China in the School of Social Sciences. CEACh gathers scholars and graduates focussing on two broadly defined lines of research, to wit, the diverse issues related to the study of the history, culture, society, and economy in China,

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on the one hand; and the various lines of inquiry in Social Sciences and Humanities affecting both Argentina and China, such as studies on social development, demographic studies, rural and urban studies, studies on energy policies, studies on natural resources and environment, on the other. CEACh researchers participated in several academic events in Argentina and abroad. In 2019 cooperation between the School of Social Sciences and Chinese counterparts intensified. CEACh’s Coordinator of Institutional Relations, Nicolas Damin, a sociologist who leads research about Chinese investments in Argentina, visited several Chinese universities and designed exchange and cooperation programs. CEACh established a framework for cooperation with Sichuan University, which hosted two UBA students at the University Immersion Program, and has signed letters of intention with Changzhou University, and Fujian Normal University to promote exchanges for students and graduates of the School of Social Sciences to be able to travel to China to participate in academic programs and language studies. Despite the conditions imposed by the pandemic, CEACh continued to promote Chinese Studies through a series of panels co-organized with Fundación Meridiano and a second series co-organized with the Latin American Center for Economic and Political Studies of China (CLEPEC).2 These panels gathered local experts and government officials to discuss topics such as the treatment of the Covid-19 pandemic on local media, the situation of Asian immigrant communities and increasing racism, to bilateral cooperation at the subnational level or Argentina’s possible adherence to the Belt and Road Initiative. Besides the efforts of ICUBA and the School of Social Sciences, the University of Buenos Aires’ School of Philosophy and Literature (FFyL-­ UBA) has also advanced the studies of Chinese literature and philosophy. In the past years, there has been a marked increase in the number of activities related to China. The most significant are the courses on contemporary Chinese literature taught by Lelia Gandara and Maria Florencia Sartori, and the courses in Chinese Classical Philosophy by Maria Elena 2  Under the direction of Francisco Cafiero, a young political figure with a vision of fostering cultural ties between Argentina and China, CLEPEC was founded in 2013 and since then it has articulated several lines of work, including basic formation on the relationship with China for municipal government officials or the exchanges of national and provincial political figures through the “Bridge to the Future” program. The CLEPEC work plan is supervised by Diego Mazzoccone and Gerardo Giron, who coordinated the efforts of several China specialists who contribute to their overall project.

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Diaz. These developments have attracted the attention of several students who would otherwise have no possibility of learning about China, since the mandatory courses for majors in History, Philosophy, or Literature offer almost no China-related contents. In the course of two decades, UBA managed to establish itself as one of the key institutions in the promotion of Chinese Studies and the production of academic knowledge about China in Argentina and Latin America. An increasing number of UBA faculty, researchers, and students expressed their interest in understanding the social, political, and economic development of contemporary China, and many have participated in exchanges and joint projects with counterparts in Chinese universities.

National University of La Plata (UNLP) The Center for Chinese Studies (CeChino) of the National University of La Plata was established under the Asia and Pacific Department in 1996 after an initiative of Norberto Consani, Director of the International Relations Institute (IRI). Since its establishment, CeChino has contributed to the development of the Chinese Studies in Argentina through the publication of edited volumes, articles, and research projects, as well as the organization of academic activities of various kinds to stimulate the dissemination, debate, and mutual understanding in relations between China and Argentina. During its first decade, CeChino was under the direction of Andrea Pappier, a scholar specializing in the study of the architecture of the Buenos Aires Chinatown and the migratory currents that transformed the urban spaces. Pappier oversaw the initial impulse of the Center, when the conditions for the development of the field were less auspicious, and she is to be given credit for the consolidation of the lines of work that define its research activities within the International Relations Institute (IRI) and was later appointed to be the first director of the Confucius Institute at UNLP (CI-UNLP) in 2009. In the year 2000, CeChino created a Chinese language course, which was later incorporated to the Confucius Institute of the National University of La Plata. Since 2016, IC-UNLP has increased its reach by associating itself with other National and Private Universities in five different provinces of the country, as part of the “Federal Confucius” Program. Since 2014, CeChino has been under the direction of Francesca Staiano, an Italian scholar specialized in the Chinese legal system, who decided to

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establish herself in Argentina and found a welcoming environment at IRI-­ UNLP. Under her direction, the number of academic activities and publications of CeChino increased significantly, both because of the growing interest about China among UNLP students and graduates, as well as by the synergy of CeChino and CI-UNLP, which offered the possibility of recruiting students who were learning Chinese language and culture, who could later participate in research projects about issues such as geopolitics, international economy, and immigration. Maria Francesca Staiano also co-­ edited a volume on the Belt and Road Initiative which was published in 2019. This project involved several junior scholars of CeChino who had participated in the International Seminar in 2017. This volume offers a multidisciplinary approach that includes chapters on historical, economic, and political aspects of the “Silk Road” of the past and the contemporary Belt and Road Initiative. involved in the project. In recent years, CeChino has established academic cooperation with universities and research centers in the PRC, which has enabled the exchanges of teachers and students. For example, the signing of an agreement with Xi’an International Studies University (XISU), has allowed students and scholars associated with the Center to visit XISU. Furthermore, CeChino maintains permanent relations with the Academy of Social Sciences of China (CASS), with the University of Beijing, the Macao Association for the Promotion of the Relations between Asia and America, with Fudan University, the University of Macao, the University of Hong Kong, and other institutions, which makes it one of the leading institutions in Chinese studies in the country. Throughout the years, the IRI-UNLP and the faculty associated to CeChino has included several China-related courses in two of its flagship graduate programs; the MA and PhD in International Relations. These developments served as the foundation for the Specialization in Chinese Studies that the UNLP Board approved in 2016, after a joint initiative of IRI and CI-UNLP and was certified by the National Commission for University Evaluation and Accreditation (CONEAU) and opened to its first cohort in March 2018. The program gathers scholars from different universities and professionals related to China and provides comprehensive approach to Chinese history, society, and the growing Chinese presence in Latin America and the world, in order to prepare its graduates to participate in government and private initiatives. Moreover, the program offers its students the possibility of learning some basic Chinese language skills (two levels) and requires them to complete not only the regular

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twelve-course in-class study program, but also to participate in a shortterm internship in an institution related to Chinese studies, culture, or trade. As a final requirement, all students must submit a final research paper. Several graduates of this program have continued to collaborate with the CeChino and other departments of the UNLP.  Among the most active, we should mention Laura Bogado Bordazar, who specializes in Asian migrations to Argentina and Uruguay, Juan Cruz Margueliche, an Associate Professor of Asian and African geography at the School of Humanities and Education (FaHCE) of UNLP, Sebastián Schultz, a Sociologist and current Doctoral Fellow of Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Matias Caubet, who was one of the editors of the volume on the Belt and Road Initiative published by IRI, and Romina Manzo, an attorney based in Mar del Plata who has participated in several exchange programs in the PRC.  There are other young scholars who participate in the CeChino activities and publish their research in academic journals or in media.

National University of San Martin (UNSAM) The Center for the Study of the Slavic and Chinese Worlds (CEMECH) of the School of Humanities of the National University of San Martin (UNSAM) represented one of the most innovative institutional proposals in the field in these past decades. The CEMECH Project was initiated by the efforts of Claudio Nun Ingerflom, a specialist in pre-Soviet Russia who decided to expand the field of studies at UNSAM by incorporating young specialists in these cultures. The Center sought to consolidate four lines of research: (i) the Slavic world; (ii) the Chinese world, (iii) geostrategic studies; and (iv) conceptual history. As part of their academic projects, CEMECH organized a series of courses, lectures, seminars, and conferences. The first China-related activity was the graduate course on the activities and the translations effected by the Jesuit missionaries in China and Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, offered by Professor Ana C. Hosne in 2010. But perhaps the most important event in these early years of CEMECH was the presentations of Professor Anne Cheng, the renowned French sinologist, who offered two lectures on virtue and the concept of sovereignty in early China and on Confucius and his textual legacy in 2012. The CEMECH China section was consolidated by two young Argentinean specialists, Pablo Blitstein and Ana Hosne, who were selected

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as joint directors for a research project under the title: “Latin America and China: what readings can encompass them both?” This project sought to interrogate about the concept of modernity, and the place that both Latin America and China occupy in its construction. This project represented a significant first-step of a more ambitious project to raise the standard of Asian Studies at Argentinean National Universities, and was supported by the acquisition (mostly through donations) of a significant collection of bibliography about China, in English, French and Chinese, as well as several primary sources in Chinese. However, the activities of the China section of the CEMECH have waned in more recent years. This initial impulse of Chinese studies at UNSAM has also served to expand the interest in China among scholars in the field of social anthropology and sociology. Máximo Badaró, a social anthropologist who had specialized in the relations between the Argentine military and society, moved on to study the consumption patterns of the expanding upper middle-­income segment in contemporary China as part of his new research agenda (Badaró, 2019, 2020a, 2020b). Badaró visited China several times in the past years and has promoted Chinese studies at the Escuela Interdisciplinaria de Altos Estudios Sociales/Escuela IDAES (Interdisciplinary School of Higher Social Sciences) of UNSAM by incorporating China-related contents in undergraduate and graduate courses and directing graduate students interested in Chinese studies, such as Luciana Denardi, who completed her dissertation on the practices of Chinese migrants in Buenos Aires City in 2017. In 2021, Máximo Badaró created the “Global China Studies Program” at the Escuela IDAES/UNSAM.

National University of Lanus (UNLa) The National University of Lanus (UNLa), a smaller university located in a densely populated suburb of the Greater Buenos Aires Area, created the Program for Sino-Argentinean Cooperation and Engagement (ProSA) in 2015 to act as an academic unit that would articulate different lines of research and analysis related to various aspects of the bilateral China– Argentina relation and to design a strategic plan to integrate an agenda that includes Argentine government agencies, academic institutions, and the actors of the private sectors to increase and improve relations with relevant Chinese counterparts. ProSA’s director is Sabino Vaca Narvaja, the current Ambassador of Argentina to the PRC. Vaca Narvaja, a political

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scientist by training, had been a key figure in fostering relations with China and Russia during Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner’s administration, before the turn of the political tide in 2016 displaced him from his position in the Argentine Senate. Since its creation, ProSA fostered several cooperation agreements and joint academic programs with Chinese universities. UNLa is currently working together with Jiangsu Normal University and Southwest University of Science and Technology (SWUST), China University of Labor Relations, and Changzhou University, among other Chinese institutions that would help foster exchanges in the near future. One of the key elements of these programs is the focus on railroad technologies, an area in which China has shown an extraordinary capacity for innovation, and that intersects with the traditional identity of the suburb in which UNLa is located, which used to host the railway workshops for the lines connecting the city of Buenos Aires with its southern suburbs. Thanks to these efforts, in 2017 UNLa launched its Specialization in Studies of Contemporary China, after a proposition of the Department of Public Policy and Planning and associated with ProSA. The Specialization program gathers some of the most renowned local specialists in Chinese Studies, combining a faculty of research scholars and government officials and representatives of the private sector. Also, the program emphasizes the participation in lectures and seminars offered by active or former government decision-makers. One of the aims of the program is to contribute to the formation of specialists able to act or advise in public and private institutions in issues concerning the relationship between Argentina and China. The director of the Specialization is Gustavo Girado, an economist specialized in trade with East Asia and who has studied the participation of China in global value chains over the past two decades. Girado published his book How did the Chinese do it?, a work that explores the transformations of the Chinese productive structure and China’s growing participation in global value chains since 1990s, with an emphasis on the educational policies and the rapid technological development which allowed the PRC to reach unprecedented levels of competitiveness in world markets, while at the same time it achieved great success in the poverty alleviation policies implemented at different levels by the CCP leadership (Girado, 2017). In 2018, ProSA co-edited two volumes that discuss the Belt and Road Initiative and its implications for Latin America. The first volume was co-­ edited by Sabino Vaca Narvaja and Zou Zhan of China’s Southwest University of Science and Technology (SWUCT) as an attempt to explain

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the Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between both countries (Vaca Narvaja & Zou, 2018). The second volume was co-edited with Gustavo Girado, Liu Xuedong, and Feng Chun. This volume proposed to examine different perspectives about Latin America’s participation in the Belt and Road Initiative (Liu et al., 2018). Both volumes brought together scholars from both Argentina and China to express their views on these issues.

National University of Rosario (UNR) The National University of Rosario (UNR) has made notorious efforts to promote Chinese Studies in the past decades. For one, it has been the host institution of Eduardo Daniel Oviedo, arguably the most prominent sinologist in Argentine academia. He completed his dual BA in Political Science and International Relations from the National University of Rosario and was granted a fellowship to study Chinese language and pursue graduate studies in China, where he lived from 1988 to 1993. There Oviedo completed his MA in Law, with a concentration in International Relations and an orientation in Chinese foreign relations at the prestigious Beijing University, and returned to Argentina after that. He obtained his PhD in Political Science from the Catholic University of Córdoba in 2002 and became a full-time researcher at CONICET and tenured Professor of History of Contemporary International Relations of the School of Political Science and International Relations of his alma mater, the UNR. Oviedo has published three major books, edited or co-edited volumes on different topics, and written numerous academic articles, book chapters, and opinion notes in local media. His first book takes into consideration Argentina’s historical relations with the main East Asian countries (Oviedo, 2001). His second book, published in 2005 analyzes China’s expansion in the international system from the reestablishment of Sino-­ Soviet relations in 1989 to China’s entry to the WTO, considering the decision-making processes of the CCP leadership to maintain internal stability as it became a leading global manufacturing power (Oviedo, 2005). Oviedo’s third major book focussed on the bilateral relations between Argentina and China since 1945, and it stressed certain continuities in their foreign policies despite the significant changes in the recent history of both countries (Oviedo, 2010). This book includes a thorough examination of diplomatic archives in Beijing, Taipei, and Buenos Aires, which allowed for a deeper analysis of bilateral ties from an inter-state perspective. His chronological framework, which takes the successive presidential

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periods in Argentina, creates a suitable model to analyze the continuities and ruptures in the negotiation processes and the implementation of policies towards China. According to his thesis, both countries sought to find a common ground on specific strategic issues despite the transformations of their societies in the twentieth century. Besides his publication record, Oviedo is a clear example of a scholar who has been active within and beyond the university environments, both in Argentina and in China. He boasts a near-native fluency in modern Mandarin, which allowed him to serve as official interpreter for four presidents. He has also been a member of the Advisory Board of the National Museum of Oriental Art and served as consultant to other non-academic institutions. Considering the need to foster studies of contemporary China among students of political Science and International Relations, UNR created the China–Argentina Studies Group (GEChinA) coordinated by Carla Oliva, a scholar of International Relations whose research focuses on international trade and the rise of China. In the past few years, GEChinA has served to recruit advanced undergraduates and junior scholars interested in economic and geopolitical disputes between the US and the PRC, and the impact of these conflicts for Argentina and the region.

National University of Córdoba (UNC) The National University of Córdoba (UNC) was among the pioneering national institutions in East Asian studies. Since the 1980s the School of Philosophy and Humanities of UNC offers the course in “Contemporary History of Asia and Africa,” first under the direction of Jaime Silbert, a specialist in Korean economic development, and since 2010 by Jorge Santarrosa, a close associate of Silbert for many years. In 2005 UNC offered the Specialization in East Asian Studies at its Center of Advanced Studies, which gathered a team of faculty specializing in different aspects of the Eastern Asian countries, such as Cecilia Onaha, the most renowned Argentine historian of Japan, and sinologists Jorge Malena and Eduardo Oviedo. Gustavo Santillán, a leading sinologist based at the CONICET-UNC Research Center for the Study of Culture and Society has been promoting research in Chinese Studies at the graduate level for more than a decade. Santillan is advisor to José Resiale Viano, a doctoral candidate studying the impact of Chinese FDI in the auto industry in MERCOSUR countries

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and has also co-edited a volume on China’s International Relations with Federico Daniel Mina, a young sinologist specializing in classical political thought. Several young scholars participated in this project published in 2019, including a few who have decided to concentrate their research in Chinese history and classical philosophy. In the past years, the UNC has made significant progress in the promotion of Chinese studies, and it has launched its Degree in Business with the People’s Republic of China and opened the third Confucius Institute in an Argentine National University, partnering with China’s Jinan University.3 Finally, we must highlight the importance of UNC being included in a joint program by the Provincial government of Córdoba and the Catholic University to create a Council for the Strategic Relationship with the People’s Republic of China.

International Joint-Research Center-National Scientific and Technical Research Council/ Shanghai University (CIMI-CEIL-CONICET/SHU) CIMI was founded in 2017, following a series of negotiations between authorities from the National Scientific and Technical Research Council and Shanghai University to establish a dual-based center to follow issues related to globalization and society. This was made possible by the support of the vice-president for Social Sciences and Humanities of the CONICET Board, Dora Barrancos, who accompanied the project from its early stages since 2014. Currently, CIMI has two directors, Fortunato Mallimaci of CEIL-­ CONICET, and Guo Changgang of the Center for Global Studies of Shanghai University (CGS-SHU). Under their direction, CIMI has defined four main lines of work: (i) cultural and religious problems; (ii) work, labor relations, and trade unionism; (iii) international politics and economy; (iv) demography, labor, and food provision in the rural environments. In order to develop these lines of research, CIMI counts with several researchers and has organized a series of lectures and seminars with local and international scholars. 3  See the official announcement from the National University of Córdoba’s webpage (2019, April 29) La sede del Instituto Confucio en la UNC, cada vez más cerca. Retrieved August 1, 2021, from https://www.unc.edu.ar/internacionales/la-sede-del-institutoconfucio-en-la-unc-cada-vez-m%C3%A1s-cerca

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Also, the initial impulse of CIMI has allowed a number of young Argentinean scholars to obtain fellowships to pursue graduate studies at SHU. Some have completed their MAs and PhDs at SHU and have decided to stay in China as tenure-track faculty, while others have returned to Argentina. Salvador Marinaro, a scholar whose research focusses on the cultural exchanges between China and Argentina was hired by Fudan University as assistant professor in Latin American culture. Gonzalo Ghiggino specializes in trade relations and commercial flows between China and Latin American countries, and Martin Rozengardt, who studied the reform of the Chinese Social Security System between 1993 and 2017 for his MA Thesis at SHU. There were also several Chinese graduate students who came to Argentina to complete a research stay of six months to a year, such as Feng Li, Xia Tingting, Song Xudong, and Wang Di, who were able to make presentations about their research on Argentinean politics and society at CIMI. CIMI also contributed to the dialogue between scholars in Argentina and China on the BRI by publishing a work edited by Fortunato Mallimaci and Jiang Shixue (Mallimaci & Jiang, 2018). On December 21 2018, CIMI hosted the International Seminar “Beyond the G20 Summit. Perspectives for Development and Cooperation between Latin America and China,” co-organized by CEACh and GEEA-IIGG, which counted with four scholars from the Institute for World Economy and Politics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (IWEP-CASS). This activity allowed for the exchange of critical views on the effects of Chinese companies’ growing participation in global value chains and how the phenomenon affects the productive capacities of South American economies.

Universidad del Salvador (USAL) The earliest attempt to promote Chinese Studies in Argentina’s universities was that at the School of Oriental Studies of the Universidad del Salvador (USAL). This program was the result of the pioneer work of Father Ismael Quiles, a Spanish-born Jesuit priest and professor of Philosophy, who founded the Center of Oriental Studies at USAL in 1967. Since then, USAL’s School of Oriental Studies maintained a strong presence in Argentina’s Asian Studies field, and has remained to this day, the only academic institution to offer an undergraduate degree in Oriental Studies in Argentina. It is also worth mentioning that, to the present day, the Library of USAL hosts the largest specialized collection in East Asian Studies of any university library in Argentina.

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USAL was able to establish a graduate program in Chinese Studies in 2005, when the School of Oriental Studies launched its University Technical Degree in Studies in Contemporary China, under the direction of the renowned Argentine sinologist Jorge Malena and with the support of the Argentina–China Chamber of Commerce. The program emphasized both language learning and commercial and business interest. The degree was designed for professionals willing to increase their knowledge about China and offered a comprehensive overview of different aspects of Chinese society and culture. In 2010 Jorge Malena published his analysis of China’s own perception as a “great” country and its implications for a grand strategy of growth and development, which had great impact among the academic community (Malena, 2010).4 However, although the contribution of the School of Oriental Studies to the field of Chinese Studies in these past decades has been significant, its impact on the local academic community has been limited. Considering its long tradition in the promotion of Chinese Studies it is surprising that few of its graduates continued to pursue Masters or PhDs in this field, and even less have become full faculty at local academic institutions.

Catholic University of Argentina (UCA) UCA, for one, has established an Executive Program in Contemporary China, directed by Jorge Malena, who had left USAL after several years as the Director of the School of Oriental Studies of USAL. The Executive Program at UCA gathers a diverse array of scholars, such as sinologist Verónica Flores, a specialist in the history of Chinese art, and Juliana Gonzalez Jauregui and Santiago Ferrari, who concentrate in contemporary International Relations, and other faculty. The Executive Program also counts with the participation of government officials, such as Carola Ramon-Berjano, an economist in charge of multilateral economic negotiations in the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or Erika Imhoff, a young diplomat who oversees the bilateral relations with China, as well as Ernesto Fernandez Taboada, Executive Director of the Argentina–China Chamber of Commerce for many years and currently of the

4  This book was later translated into Chinese by the ILAS-CASS scholar Lin Hua and published by China Intercontinental Press in 2017.

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Argentina–China Council, as well as officials from Chinese companies in Argentina such as Guillermo Santa Cruz of ICBC.

Catholic University of Salta (UCASAL) UCASAL, for its part has been developing a comprehensive plan to promote Chinese studies among its students and graduates, which includes the establishment of a language program, an Advanced Degree in Socioeconomic Integration with the Asia Pacific region, student exchanges with different universities in China, and the recent inauguration of a Joint Research Institute for Mining and Sustainable Development in cooperation with the Chinese University of Mining and Technology of Xuzhou, Jiangsu province. The Advanced Degree in Socioeconomic Integration with the Asia Pacific region was launched in 2020 and it gathered a group of international experts in different aspects of bilateral and multilateral relations, including professors from universities in Chile, China, France, and Belgium, such as Esteban Zottele of Changzhou University, Andrés Borquez and Felipe Muñoz of the National University of Chile, Fernando Navarro Trinca, an expert in international security currently based in France who completed his MA in Law at Renmin University, and María Piñon, who completed her MA in Korea and is presently completing her PhD in Belgium. The faculty of the program was completed by local experts in production and trade with Asia such as Martin Rodriguez. The Research Institute was opened with a seminar on the biological technologies to recover soils that were affected by mining and agro-­ industrial activities focussing on the recovery of soil after mining activity, and a degree in socio-productive integration of regional economies with Asia Pacific. UCASAL has also contributed to the agreement to bond Salta City, in Northwest Argentina and Xuzhou city in Jiangsu province as “sister cities,” which will contribute to the development of their political, commercial, technological, and academic exchanges.

University of Congress (UC) The University of Congress (UC) pioneered Chinese Studies in Mendoza province, the main producer and exporter of wines in the country. The UC established its “Casa de la Cultura China” (Chinese Culture House) in 2015 and used it as a platform for the promotion of cultural and academic activities related to China. Although the main campus is in Mendoza,

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the bulk of the activities took place in Buenos Aires City, where the UC has a building that hosts the Casa de la Cultura China. Once a year, the UC organized its “China Week” in the Mendoza campus, and would invite some of the most renowned Argentine scholars to participate in a series of lectures and exchanges with local businesspeople and politicians with the aim of better understanding China and its growing importance for the country. In 2017 the UC established its Open Course on China and Latin America for undergraduate and graduate students and the general public. Also, UC signed a series of agreements with Chinese universities for the promotion of student exchanges and has already provided the opportunity for several undergraduate students to visit China. Also, in 2017 the UC merged with Dangdai magazine. Since 2011 Dangdai has become the main medium of information about the multiple aspects of the bilateral relationship and the hub for most Argentine scholars and cultural figures interested in China and Chinese counterparts interested in Argentina, thus providing a platform for the consolidation of a network of people related to various cultural pursuits, professional activities, and academic studies related to China. Nestor Restivo and Gustavo Ng have continued as the directors of the magazine, and the main editors of a recent publication on the People’s Republic of China’s eradication of extreme poverty in 2020 (Restivo & Ng, 2020).

Catholic University of Córdoba (UCC) In 2020 the Catholic University of Cordoba created the Center for Belt and Road Studies under the direction of Mariano Mosquera, an expert in business and international relations who completed research stays in Chinese universities. The UCC is a Jesuit University located in Cordoba city, the capital of the province by the same name. The UCC benefited from international cooperation agreements with counterparts in China. The first is with Saint Joseph University, a Macau-based Catholic university that seeks to maintain the intellectual legacy of the founding fathers of the Jesuit missions in China. The University of Saint Joseph hosts the “Matteo Ricci Institute” and has helped to bridge the cultural divide between Latin America and China. The other China-based partner of UCC is The Beijing Center (TBC) an institution dedicated to facilitating study and work experiences in China for students and faculty worldwide. The Center for Belt and Road Studies and the National University of Cordoba participate in the Council for Strategic Cooperation with China,

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which was created by Cordoba’s Provincial Government in 2020. According to its webpage this council aims to coordinate the research of both public and private universities in Cordoba through the Regional Integration Department of the Cordoba Provincial Government.

Concluding Remarks: Argentine Sinology and Sinologists Within and Beyond Academia The exchanges between Argentina and the People’s Republic of China have increased manifold in the past years, especially with regards to the volume of bilateral trade and financial transactions. The presence of China in our country has become more ubiquitous, from mining interests in the Andean provinces to the recent waves of immigration from China. These processes have led to new challenges and debates. Some have questioned the policy of prioritizing the bilateral relationship with China as an unwise move, focussing mostly on the economic aspects and highlighting the commercial deficit in our trade, the so-called process of re-primarization of the exports, and even the viability of the financial agreements that allowed for the funding of the much-needed infrastructure projects (Slipak, 2014). It is also evident from the previous survey that there has been a significant quantitative growth of Asian Studies in Argentine universities in the past decades, especially since 2010. This interest has been accompanied by an increase in the opportunities for exchanges for both students and faculty. This growth is visible in the number of higher learning institutions that have incorporated courses on Asia, as well as incorporated East Asia, and China in particular, as an aspect of their teaching, resulting in a qualitative development of Chinese Studies in Argentine academia. One example of this trend is the number of presentations that include some reference to China in national seminars and congresses across the disciplines in social sciences and humanities. Yet there has also been a significant qualitative transformation of the nature and reach of these bilateral exchanges in the cultural and academic spheres, which for the most part have remained absent from mainstream discussions. For example, it is important to note that in the joint declarations between the PRC and Argentina there has been a repeated interest in fostering cooperation in scientific areas, such as deep-space exploration, nuclear power plants, satellite technology, as well as in academic terms

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through the growing number of scholarships. In this sense, we note the active participation of the Chinese academic institutions in the promotion of Chinese Studies in Argentine universities, as well as in fostering networks of scholars and professionals during the past decade. One aspect of this cooperation is the publication of jointly edited volumes on China– Argentina and China–Latin American relations. We can identify several collective works, edited by Argentinean scholars oftentimes in collaboration with Chinese counterparts that take the form of a dialogue between colleagues in both parts of the world. It is worth noting that most of these works have been published by national university presses, at a very low cost, and oftentimes available online for free, and were able to reach a larger audience of undergraduate students. Returning to our initial digression about the development of our field, we can ask ourselves: What are the main concerns of Argentine scholars have in the present age to produce knowledge about China and about China’s relation with the region? How did the interest about China intersect the research agenda of what we have called “contingent sinologists” that is, scholars who have begun to study China due to its growing importance in their field of study? How has their research agenda intersected with the interests and objectives of decision-makers on different levels of the government structures and of the private sector? What institutions or mechanisms allow for the dialogue between scholars and decision-makers? If we consider the development of the field in the past decade, we can observe that the production of knowledge about China has become widespread among scholars in the humanities and social sciences, but the demand from areas of government or business sector are mostly for the knowledge produced by scholars in international relations, economy and international trade, and to a much lesser extent, from historians, especially those concentrating in recent history, or social anthropologists, studying migration or contemporary trends in social patterns of consumption in China. Non-­academic institutions, such as the Argentine Foreign Ministry, the Argentina–China Chamber of Commerce, or the Argentina Council for International Relations, organize regular activities to disseminate knowledge about China, in which scholars share the spotlight with former diplomats to China, businesspeople, and political actors who are engaged with China. The engagement with non-academic institutions in the past years has allowed scholars to cover a wider geographical and socioeconomical scope, which has, in turn, motivated them to revise their research

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agendas and contribute to contemporary discussions and debates, and to reach a broader public. Oftentimes these institutions would provide a platform for discussion among different perspectives about China’s contemporary development, its engagement with Argentina and the Latin American region. It is worth noting that these debates have helped to move beyond the simplistic dichotomy of China as an “opportunity or a threat,” which was so pervasive in the 2005–2015 publications and seminars. Another example of dissemination of knowledge about China beyond the university environment is the Center of Chinese and Korean Studies established in 2017 by Mercedes Giuffre, a leading scholar of cultural studies and an expert on cultural exchanges between Argentina and China. Giuffre has been an active promoter of Argentina–China relations in the past decades, both as a visiting scholar in China several times since her first visit in 1991, as well as from her position as secretary of culture in the local administration, where she managed the agreement that made Mar del Plata and Tianjin sister cities in 2001. Other recently created institutions, such as China-based CECLA (Community of Chinese-Latin American Studies) and ADEACh (Association of Argentineans Residing in China); as well as Buenos Aires-­ based ADEBAC (Association of Former Argentinean Fellows in China) are contributing to the consolidation of an institutional network of academics, journalists, businesspeople, political actors, and government officials that is changing the dynamics of the study of China from Argentina. ADEACh was established by Esteban Zottele, an Argentine scholar who completed his PhD at China’s Renmin University and has been working in China for the past sixteen years, with the objective of helping Argentines living in China adjust to daily life, provide information, and support cultural activities. ADEBAC, for its part, created a virtual and people-to-­ people platform that attempts to integrate former Argentine fellows to the PRC upon their return to the country. In this sense, ADEBAC functions in part as the counterpart of ADEACh. It is worth mentioning that many of these initiatives have received support from Chinese and Argentine government institutions and have found cooperative frameworks that allow for a virtuous scheme of mutual benefit. The number of students interested in Chinese Studies in Argentinean universities has grown exponentially, and although the resources available at national universities are still very limited, this lack has been somewhat compensated by the support of Chinese government

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institutions—especially through the Cultural Office of the Chinese Embassy, the China Scholarship Council (CSC), and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences—as well as direct exchanges with universities and research institutions in China. One good example of the potential of university-to-university initiatives is the creation of the Fudan–Latin America University Consortium (FLAUC), which has fostered not only bilateral relations between Latin American universities and Fudan but has promoted the establishment of more multilateral fora among Latin American universities themselves. Also, the greater accessibility of scholarships and fellowships offered to Argentinean students by the Chinese government through the CSC to study language and pursue graduate studies in China has allowed an increasing number of students to travel and experience the Chinese university environment and academic programs first-hand. Far from generating a self-contained space, it has fostered a dynamic and cooperative framework that allows for the inclusion of other universities and agents in the production and dissemination of this knowledge. There are, however, still some aspects that need to be improved if Chinese Studies in Argentina are to develop to their full potential. First, a vast majority of these are located in Buenos Aires city or the Greater Buenos Aires Area, which has facilitated contacts among scholars and students and fostered a cooperative spirit between institutions. However, it has also concentrated the spaces where knowledge about China circulated, which is a trend that needs to be reversed if Chinese Studies are to develop fully in our national universities. Second, universities and research units should be better able to incorporate decision-makers from the public and private sectors to the academic activities and discussions. There have been a few attempts in this sense, especially after a series of events that brought together specialists from different spheres of work. For example, during the World Forum on China Studies, scholars and researchers had an opportunity to share their visions and ideas with experts from the private sector, as well as government officials. In this sense, there is still a need to integrate research agendas and design lines of work of scholars and administrators in cooperative terms. This would enable scholars to act as consultants during the decision-making process, share the results of their work with private and public sector decision-makers, and follow up on the implementation on their recommendations and serve to compensate for one of the current shortcomings in Argentina’s relations with China, namely, the limited number of specialists in government institutions at different levels and private companies (Damin, 2018).

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Argentina can learn a few lessons from the recent Chinese experience in coordinating efforts between universities, think tanks, and government agencies. For example, the Chinese government has supported the development of Latin American and other area studies centers in the past decade, and although one of the main objectives of these centers is to serve as think tanks and contribute to China’s foreign policy decision-­ making processes, many have funded studies in linguistics, literature, dance, and other cultural expressions (Myers et al., 2018). Besides creating and strengthening existing centers of Latin American Studies at Chinese universities, Chinese government policies have aimed at forming bonds with Latin American academic counterparts for the establishment of a sustained dialogue and debate on shared concerns. Understanding this aspect of the bilateral relationship is a key to understanding China’s interests in the region and to think strategies that secure the national interests in a cooperative framework. If we analyze the trend, we can be hopeful that Chinese studies will continue to thrive in Argentina in the coming years. From an institutional perspective, we believe that it is necessary to strengthen the existing capabilities at each university and research center, by improving the qualification of human resources and the material resources available to them. It is also necessary to consolidate a network that goes beyond the closed circuits of academic production and that engages a larger community of knowledge that includes businesspeople, cultural agents, and government administrators with significant experience in and knowledge about China, in Argentina and in other Latin American countries. In this way we can consolidate the institutional framework to develop Chinese studies at a new level.

References Badaró, M. (2019). Pedagogies of value: Marketing luxury in China, HAU. Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 1(10), 85–98. Badaró, M. (2020a). “Los chinos no beben vino”: Mercados, intermediarios y valor del vino argentino en China. The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 25(3), 85–98. Badaró, M. (2020b). Nation branding for China: Global brokers in international real Estate in China. City & Society, 32(3), 85–98. Damin, N. (2018, May 28). La vinculación sino-argentina desde la perspectiva sociológica. De La triangulación con intereses de terceros países a los acuerdos en el

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nivel provincial. Retrieved August 1, 2021, from https://www.hanaqgroup. com/2018/05/la-vinculacion-sino-argentina-desde-la-perspectivasociologica-de-la-triangulacion-­c on-­i ntereses-­d e-­t erceros-­p aises-­a -­l os-­ acuerdos-­en-­el-­nivel-­provincial/ Girado, G. (2017). ¿Como lo hicieron los chinos? Algunas de las causas del gran desarrollo del gigante asiático. Astrea. Guo, C., & Mera, C. (Eds.). (2018). La Franja y la Ruta y América Latina. Nuevas oportunidades y nuevos desafios. China Intercontinental Press. Liu Xuedong, Girado, G., & Chun, F. (2018). Argentina: cooperación e intercambio en la Nueva Era de la reforma china. UNLa. Llenderrozas, E. (comp.). (2018). China, Rusia e India en América Latina. Un enfoque multidimensional. Undef. Malena, J. E. (2010). China: la construcción de un país grande. CEFIRO 2010. Mallimaci, F. and Guo Changgan (2017, June–July). El puente científico. Dangdai 18. https://issuu.com/dangdai/docs/dd18.compressed Mallimaci, F., & Jiang Shixue (comps.). (2018). La franja y la ruta. Iniciativa china de cooperación con América Latina y el Caribe. UNTDF. Myers, M., Barrios, R., & Guo Cunhai (2018). Learning Latin America: China’s strategy for area studies development. Retrieved August 1, 2021, from https:// www.thedialogue.org/wp-­c ontent/uploads/2018/06/Dialogue-­A rea-­ Studies-­Report.pdf?fbclid=IwAR1VOlwJa9Y7ePywNOzUmgK170D3FDGcp 7LWykiT7GzPoNu7uPWBq9hSr7o Oviedo, E.  D. (2001). Argentina y el este asiático: la política exterior de 1945 a 1999. Universidad Nacional de Rosario. Oviedo, E. D. (2005). China en expansión. La política exterior desde la normalización chino-soviética hasta la adhesión a la OMC (1989–2001). Editorial de la Universidad Católica de Córdoba. Oviedo, E. D. (2010). Historia de las Relaciones Internacionales entre Argentina y China. 1945–2010. Editorial Dunken. Restivo, N., & Ng, G. (comps). (2020). China. La superación de la pobreza. Universidad de Congreso. Slipak, A. (2014). América Latina y China: ¿cooperación Sur-Sur o “de Beijing”? Nueva Sociedad, 250, 102–113. Vaca Narvaja, S. (ed.) & Zou Zhan (Co-ed.). (2018). China, América Latina y la geopolítica de la Nueva Ruta de la Seda y China. UNLa.

Index

A Acts of identification, 25 Acupuncture, 108 American Chinese restaurants, 71 Anne Cheng, 152 Arch, 31 Argentina, Mar del Plata, 98 Asociación Barrio Chino (Chinatown Association), 20 Association of Chinese Restaurants in Argentina (ACRA), 68 Authenticity, 72, 77, 80, 84, 87 Avoiding encounters, 121–140 B Barefoot doctors, 102 Barrio Chino, 78 Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), 105 Body, 97 Buenos Aires, 107 Buenos Aires Chinatown, 30

C Chifa, 72, 80 China in Africa, 10–12 “China in Argentina,” 1 China’s global expansion, 2 Chinatown, 20, 107 Chinese-American, 77 Chinese cuisine, 73 Chinese culture, 3, 15 Chinese descendants, 45 Chinese diaspora, 9 Chinese diasporic bureaucracy, 25 Chinese government, 106 Chinese identity, 23 Chinese immigrants, 5 Chinese investment, 3, 123–125 Chinese language, 3 Chinese medicine, 97 Chinese migrants, 25, 98 Chinese migration to Argentina, 28 Chinese New Year, 36 Chinese restaurants, 67

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 M. Badaró (ed.), China in Argentina, Historical and Cultural Interconnections between Latin America and Asia, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92422-5

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INDEX

Chinese state, 6 City marketing, 78 Commercialization, 23 Commodification, 90 Commodified culture, 23 Commodity, 60, 105 Communication, 110 Complementarity, 2 Confucius Institute, 75 Contact zones, 68 Cooks’ professionalization, 81 Cuisine of northwest China, 84 Culinary field, 69 Culinary nationalism, 69 Cultural diversity, 27, 90 Culture, 27 D Decor, 83 Dependency, 2 Diasporic associations, 8 Diasporic bureaucracy, 9 Different menus, 89 E Educational policy, 46 Employer–employee relation, 81 Encounter(s), 4, 22, 97 Ethnic group, 27 Ethnicity, 70, 80 Ethnographic fieldwork, 23, 98 Exotic, 83 F Faier, L., 78 Foreign language, 47 Fujian, 5, 112

G Gastro-diplomacy, 74 Global China, 6 Global economies, 60 Global flows, 98 Going local, 7 H Health care, 97 Health professionals, 110 Health services, 110 Hegemonic masculinity, 131 Heritage, 73 Heritage language, 49 I Identification, 29 Identity(ies), 27, 50, 55–57 Immigrant associations, 8 Immigrant communities, 3 Institutional dimensions, 58 K Kitchens, 79 L Language commoditization, 60 Latin American migrant, 79 M Mandarin, 112 Medical technology, 110 Menu, 85–89 Mobilities, 117 Multiculturalism, 26, 75–78

 INDEX 

N Nationality, 52 National Symbolism, 52–54 New Year ritual, 36 Number one, 129 O Oil industry, 125 Opacity, 136 Orientalism, 13–16 P Patagonia, 121–123 People’s Republic of China, 98 Policies, 90 Popular economies, 9 Pratt, M. L., 78 Primary Health Care Centers (“CAPS”), 109 Primary Prevention Action, 95 Private health, 109 Process of diasporization, 26 Process of ethnicization, 31 Process of requalification, 27 Puerperium, 112 Putonghua, 46 R Racial politics, 71 Regional aspect, 84 Republic of China, 23 Rofel, L., 78 S Second language, 49 “The shadows,” 135

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Sino-Argentine diplomatic relations, 4 Sino-speaking, 50 Soft power, 105 Spanish, 45 Spanish second language for inclusion, 58 Spanish-speaking, 50 Spatial design, 82 Spectacularization of culture, 28 Spectacularization of Otherness, 26 State-owned companies, 7, 123 State policy, 111 Subnational economic agreements, 8 T Taiwan, 23, 83, 84 Taiwanese migrants, 25 Taiwanese origin, 5 Tastes, 89 Therapeutic itineraries, 108 Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), 99 Translation, 86, 89 Trust, 9 U Urban requalification, 28, 31 V Vacuum, 122 Vesak, 19 W Western medicine, 98

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Y “Yellow peril,” 13

气 气qì, 112

坐 坐月子 zuò yuè zi, 112

阴 阴-阳yı̄n–yáng, 112