Getting Lost

In some ways, the goal of this book, drawing subversive inspiration from the epigraph from famous world historian Patrick Manning above, is to become lost. Not in a vain or vein effort to find mastery, mind you, but in an effort to uncover new veins of inquiry and contact as well as new vanes that might point the way.Footnote ³ This book mostly takes place in the spaces now widely considered China and the Philippines in the era now widely recognized as the early twentieth century under the Gregorian calendar, but when historians or historical figures wander elsewhere, it follows them for a spell.Footnote ⁴ However, as much as possible, this monograph observes Pio Duran’s prescriptions by privileging interactions within and actors from Asia.

This book explores an understudied nexus of interaction. It shows how, in the first half of the twentieth century, leading Chinese educators toured the Philippines to learn about and replicate its vocational education system, Chinese pundits debated the ideal feminine form at Manila Carnival pageants, and Chinese merchants navigated innovative exclusionist legislation in the Philippines. At the same time, it shows how Filipino musicians populated jazz cabarets and exemplified classical music in Shanghai, Chinese from the Philippines fashioned themselves as superheroes destined to save their ailing hometowns and China, and Filipino athletes put their bodies on display, competing with Chinese peers in regional athletic competitions. These intrepid travelers and thinkers weaved extensive and durable connections across Asia, exemplifying a rich but nearly unknown history of Sino–Philippine entanglement.

Yet this history has largely lived in obscurity despite its depth and significance. The aim of this book, therefore, is twofold. In addition to uncovering and restoring the entangled history of an important subregion of Asia, this book explores how methodological and disciplinary blinders have limited such research in the past, and how new ideas and approaches can help readjust research agendas for the future. The title of the introduction, “Before a Vast Ocean (曾经沧海),” which comes from a liberal translation of a famous Tang dynasty poem-turned-idiom by Yuan Zhen (元稹), invokes a nostalgic vision of a past trip to the “blue sea,” or vast ocean. In the same way that Filipinos and Chinese stood before and navigated this literal vast ocean, creating improbable new lives for themselves and their families in the early twentieth century, this monograph stands before the metaphorical vast ocean of historiography, charting a course through the seas of world, global, and transnational history to craft a connected history of the Philippines and China.

This introduction starts with a brief visit to the historical ocean in an introductory scene-setting anecdote and a walk-through of the Sino–Philippine link. It then steers toward the oceans of historiography, first observing world, global, and transnational methodologies from a distance before approaching and untangling those methodologies. It concludes by casting a new framework that helps brings the Sino–Philippine link into focus.

Act 1, Scene 1

The following is a brief introductory anecdote designed to bring our attention to key themes in this monograph. It is the year 1936 and we find ourselves in the middle of two commemorative volumes celebrating the anniversaries of important Chinese institutions in the Philippines. Standing at center stage is a statement from the former Chinese Consul General to the Philippines, K. L. Kwong (Kuang Guanglin 鄺光林). In the background stands a contrasting statement from Lin Yu (Lin You 林幽), lead editor for the China Critic, who carries a grim look on his face.

Visibly flustered, the short statement of the Consul General to the Philippines exits on the left as a new, extended statement by Dr. Candido M. Africa, head of the Department of Parasitology at the University of the Philippines, flips onto the stage from the right. Lin Yu remains behind Dr. Africa. The lights focus on the third-person anecdote of the spectacled professor, as his words leap off the page, but Lin Yu’s remarks remain on guard.

The professor pauses before striking a different tone.

The lights fade as the narrator closes the two commemorative volumes and turns to his keyboard in quiet contemplation. End scene.

Some documents read like the scene of a play. The drama seeps through the letters from the past, bringing to life the animosities, anxieties, and anticipations of historical actors.Footnote ¹¹ In this instance, the passages come from two commemorative volumes published in 1936. The first, which featured Consul General K. L. Kwong and Dr. Candido M. Africa, commemorated the thirtieth anniversary of the Philippine Chinese Chamber of Commerce – a critical organizational and advocatory institution for Chinese in the Philippines. The latter, which featured Shanghai-based editor Lin Yu, who stood in the background to represent his distance from Manila, commemorated the tenth anniversary of the Fookien Times – a leading Chinese newspaper in the Philippines.

Dr. Africa adopted an optimistic tone, overlooking recent violent events and discriminatory legislation targeting Chinese residents in the Philippines, as well as the underlying racial tensions, while Lin Yu kept those issues front and center. Together, they help us set the scene for the “drama of the Far East,” as the Consul General called it, that unfolds in the chapters that follow. They channel the complicated relationship between China and the Philippines, which was fraught with racialized animosities and legislative gatekeeping, yet filled with camaraderie, modeling, collaborations, and even romances. These figures help open our eyes to the complexity of and contradictions within the Sino–Philippine link.

A Walk-Through of the Sino–Philippine Link

This book started from a simplistic notion that geographical proximity implied close collaboration and intense interaction, but it became clear in the early stages of research that histories of Asia tended to point in a different direction. It is a common adage in Southeast Asian studies, for instance, that colonialism disrupted many long-standing local networks as imperial imperatives redirected the economic, educational, and religious routes of Southeast Asians away from close neighbors toward the imperial metropole and other colonies of the empire.Footnote ¹² In other words, according to the standard formula, this era of international business conglomerations and global empires featured connections mostly between and within those businesses and empires.

This formulation only tells part of the story, however, as it turns out that empires, in the end, “were never fully self-contained or hermetically sealed systems.”Footnote ¹³ New steamship networks might have encouraged intraimperial travel, but unexpected connections also formed between close neighbors.Footnote ¹⁴ In other words, despite changing historical circumstances and a historiography that suggests otherwise, China and the Philippines remained intertwined in the twentieth century. This book takes us to this rich and largely unexplored theater of interaction that starred athletes and educators, carnival queens and pundits, jazz musicians and lawyers, and politicians and poets. It brings to life a colorful and dynamic world full of passion and hubris, engagement and disintegration, and cooperation and catastrophe.

The Sino–Philippine link of the twentieth century built on a long history. Some of the islands now collectively recognized as the Philippines appeared in Chinese written records as early as the Tang dynasty (618–907).Footnote ¹⁵ Later, during the Spanish colonial period (1571–1898), traders from southeastern China, leveraging kinship, hometown, and business networks, began to move to the Philippines in large numbers, filling crucial roles in the colonial society. The Chinese population in the Philippines blossomed from an estimated 150 people in 1570, when Spaniards first established an outpost in Manila, to as many as 30,000 by 1603.Footnote ¹⁶ The population fluctuated through most of the Spanish colonial era as colonial officials alternatively encouraged migration and choreographed pogroms, but turmoil in China beginning in the 1850s and Spanish need for labor led to steadier migration patterns in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In the American colonial period, which began in the early 1900s, the Chinese community in the Philippines remained relatively stable despite the extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act to the islands.

China, for its part, had welcomed delegates from what is now considered the Philippines as early as the Song dynasty (960–1279).Footnote ¹⁷ Most early travelers from the archipelago came as merchants or diplomatic representatives who performed their parts in the tributary “system.”Footnote ¹⁸ Because “Filipino” is a recent term forged by sojourning Propagandists in the crucible of early Bourbon–Restoration-era Spain, however, it is hard to speak of a parallel “Filipino” population in China before the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁹ However, by the midway point of that century, people from the archipelago had found work around the world, including China, in seafaring industries, which helped them form a sense of shared identity and affinity for the home islands.Footnote ²⁰

Two episodes have garnered outsized attention in the history of Sino–Philippine entanglement: the Manila galleon trade and the revolutionary era of the Philippines. In the galleon trade, Spanish ships labored across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila and back, while Chinese junks completed the circuit by meeting them in Manila.Footnote ²¹ Years later, Filipino revolutionaries launched three successive but ultimately unsuccessful revolutions at the turn of the twentieth century, restructuring the Sino–Philippine relationship by “teaching China the meaning and viability of revolution as a solution to its national problems.”Footnote ²² However, while these episodes are important, they have commanded outsized attention in our history books, obscuring equally important episodes and actors.

As outlined earlier, the proliferation of empires and the rapid expansion of transportation networks in the nineteenth century enhanced existing Sino–Philippine ties and fostered new connections by the twentieth century. These connections led Filipino musicians, veterinarians, and clerks to move to China’s booming port cities to carve out new lives for themselves while Chinese businesspeople, students, and lawyers traveled to the Philippines to live and learn. Meanwhile, wealthy Chinese entrepreneurs and self-styled heroes from the Philippines leveraged their significant assets and networks of powerful acquaintances to fund infrastructure projects and steer political organizations in the archipelago and China. At the same time, Chinese and Filipino athletes and diplomats turned basketball courts and banquet halls into proxies for progress, while pundits transformed their columns into arenas for politicking.

Chinese people lived in the Philippines and married Filipinos, they discussed the archipelago and its people in the pages of popular newspapers and journals, and they copied Philippine innovations in governance and education. For many Chinese people, the Philippines represented progress and opportunity, while for many others it represented tyranny, especially after Filipino lawmakers legislated limits on Chinese freedoms. Either way, the Philippines loomed large. And China filled the same role for Filipinos who moved north for work, wrote about China in dailies and reviews, or traced their heritage there. In many ways, China became a crucial benchmark and strawperson that Filipinos used to measure themselves in all facets of life and governance.

This monograph argues that in the early twentieth century the Philippines and Filipinos played a significant role in Chinese history, and China and Chinese people likewise played a significant role in Philippine history. Their histories were connected. This straightforward argument, however, sails against the flow of existing scholarship, which largely overlooks the depth and significance of Sino–Philippine contact and mutual influence during this period. So, before we can move on to the connected history of China and the Philippines itself, we must first explore the web of historiography to devise strategies to tease out and recover lost voices, which will lead us to the second argument of this book. The next section asks why histories such as this one have remained hidden, and it experiments with ways to leverage global, world, and transnational history approaches to bring them to light.

Observing and Untangling the Human Web

World history is a metaphor. Or, rather, one of its most significant contributions to the study of history comes in its metaphors.Footnote ²³ Practitioners of global, transnational, and world history regularly employ vivid and imaginative terms such as circulations, flows, links, circuits, and networks to compel readers to think critically and see and know in new ways.Footnote ²⁴ In his call for researchers to explore “connected histories,” for instance, Sanjay Subrahmanyam touts the use of “intrepid analytical machetes.”Footnote ²⁵ Transnational historian Pierre-Yves Saunier, meanwhile, asks us to set “our historical butterfly net” to “transnational mode.”Footnote ²⁶ Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way, opting for a different but equally incisive metaphor, describe transnationalism as “the conceptual acid that denaturalizes” the nation.Footnote ²⁷ Whether it is with machetes, butterfly nets, or acid, historians of the global have a way of cutting through complex topics, burning through old paradigms, and capturing historical butterflies with potent metaphors.

One metaphor that has successfully ensnared many world, global, and transnational historians is the web. The web captures the complexity and breadth of global interactions, the longevity and stickiness of its exchanges, and the interconnectedness of it all.Footnote ²⁸ This metaphor has also proven helpful because it hints at the difficulty historians face should they desire to untangle, chart, or even just observe the overlapping strings of global history. If researchers bypass the web and focus solely on the aciniform silk cocoon that happens to contain an embalmed national history, to extend the metaphor, they will likely miss much of the story of human history contained in the broader web, such as the extensive contacts between China and the Philippines in the early twentieth century that are the subject of this book.

This book leverages transnational methods to observe, untangle, and rebuild the web of Sino–Philippine connectivity in the early twentieth century, with implications for exploring other such webs around the world. In her book on the connected histories of Rangoon, Penang, and Bangkok, historian Su Lin Lewis begins by plotting the routes of the “inter-connected web of mobility and exchange,” and this monograph starts much the same way with the previous section.Footnote ²⁹ The current section, in turn, conducts an audit of global, transnational, and world histories, exposing their limitations and blinders with the goal of designing a path toward renewal.

This section focuses on two major issues that weigh on the approaches: disciplinary and methodological siloing, which is caused in part by the vastness of the fields themselves, and Eurocentrism and coloniality, which are lingering legacies of two centuries of imperial historiography and the funnel web of the archives. The section after recasts a more open and expansive orb web by highlighting and expanding upon key innovations of global historians that inform and inspire this book. It focuses on sub-global regions and scales in history, interactions among people of the Global South, selective silences, and disintegration in transnational inquiry.

World historians have long embraced new approaches to enhance their research. For example, proponents of what some have called “new world history,” “new global history,” and the “transnational turn,” among many other things, have, over the past couple of decades, weaved a more balanced and interdisciplinary approach to history that takes seriously “peripheral” influence on the “metropole” rather than just the other way around, cultural and material cultural flows in addition to capital flows, global feminisms and subaltern studies in addition to elite machinations, and public health and environmental histories and their place in the human web.Footnote ³⁰ These scholars cast transnational history as a way of seeing that embraces “methodological diversity,” and many of them have inspired this research on the Philippines and China.Footnote ³¹

However, while the critical and necessary adjustments these scholars have made have breathed new life into world, global, and transnational history, the scholars making those changes, myself included, remain consciously or unconsciously influenced by universalist and stadialist baggage that continues to shape agendas, steer funding, and damage the reputation and utility of the approaches.Footnote ³² Leading world historians have admitted that the field can be prescriptive and totalizing and that it often privileges the perspective of its loudest and most endowed acolytes, who happen to mostly hail from North America and Europe for the time being.Footnote ³³ Ultimately, historians of the global have reached a point where, while we can name the problems of the approach and recognize the impact of historical baggage, actually applying research to counterbalance or offset those issues remains difficult.Footnote ³⁴

This book and this introduction are designed to address some of the questions surrounding global, transnational, and world history while highlighting ways to leverage the strengths of these approaches. But what are global, transnational, and world history? After fumbling through several formulas, Patrick Manning flippantly writes, “At the most expansive level, I could claim that all historical studies have now become world history.”Footnote ³⁵ In a similar vein, when describing global history, Sebastian Conrad writes, “Once it is established that global history is everything, everything can become global history.”Footnote ³⁶ In other words, definitions vary so much that even the most seasoned practitioners find it difficult to isolate common strands. They eventually do cobble together more concrete definitions, of course, but their frank admissions can lead to confusion.

Transnational, global, and world history are also caught in theorization and citation cycles.Footnote ³⁷ Because the approaches are so expansive as to include nearly everything, entry into them is taxing. Scholars often venture in with distinct linguistic backgrounds, regional specializations, and even global lenses.Footnote ³⁸ As responsible academics, they either get lost in efforts to understand and rationalize the fields like I am doing here, cite the citation magnets of one of the meta-approaches, or engage in digital search aided “side-glancing,” as historian Laura Putnam calls it.Footnote ³⁹ At the same time, many scholars have been swept away by terms like “transnationalism,” which, according to C. A. Bayly, has become “merely a buzzword among historians.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Critics and confused advocates then lump this scholarship together. As Laura Briggs, Gladys McCormick, and J. T. Way, who are all affiliated with the Tepoztlán Institute for Transnational History, put it, “one can say a great many contradictory things about what is wrong with transnationalism and they will all be true about someone’s transnationalism.”Footnote ⁴¹

In theory, global approaches should open new spaces for interdisciplinary collaboration, and indeed they have on many occasions, but the very size and ambition of those approaches sometimes ironically serve as an impediment.Footnote ⁴² Many scholars of migration studies, imperial history, sports history, critical race and gender studies, New Qing history, diplomatic history, and other subfields, many of whom inspire this book, still tend to look past one another and over some forms and spaces of interaction even amidst history’s transnational turn. In many ways, global history has become an unwieldy and unnavigable tangled web, feeding the laments of critics who watch as world history scholars struggle to remember the paths through their own theoretical structures. Histories, especially ones that breach the borders of nation-states, are inherently messy, but world history methodology should not rival those histories in complexity and messiness.

The second major factor constraining global history research is the two centuries of imperial Eurocentric historiography that have rummaged through the webs of the past like a three-ton elephant. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s observation three decades ago that legacies do “not disappear simply because some of us have now attained a critical awareness” of them still rings true.Footnote ⁴³ Global histories, as Jeremy Adelman observes, sometimes feel like “another Anglospheric invention to integrate the Other into a cosmopolitan narrative on our terms, in our tongues.”Footnote ⁴⁴ So, while many Latin Americanists and subaltern studies scholars have cast innovative transnational webs, many Africanists and Southeast Asianists have weaved compelling world histories, and many East Asianists and Europeanists have knit pioneering global histories of economic entanglement, the approaches remain bound to a European historiographical tradition and its continued “epistemic privilege of classifying.”Footnote ⁴⁵

The nature of archives and digitized databases has only amplified the obstacles global historians face. In his unique study of the Indian Ocean world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Thomas Metcalf confesses that archival limitations have relegated a flourishing and well-connected Indian Ocean world to historiographical obscurity.Footnote ⁴⁶ Historians are still often bound to, and as a result privilege the voices from, European, Japanese, and American metropolitan and colonial archives and digital databases.Footnote ⁴⁷ These source bases and the studies they feed funnel readers to and from the colonial metropole, rather than exposing them to a range of histories. As a result, historical actors from the so-called West still dominate our world histories, acting as either key agents of, or major impediments to, change and dynamism.

So, after recognizing the limitations of global, world, and transnational history, and after trudging through decades of other trendy methodological turns, should historians still embrace the transnational?Footnote ⁴⁸ I would argue that we should, but, as with everything, with a healthy dose of humility. Untangling the human web is a tiring endeavor, but the process allows us to see and appreciate a more nuanced, representative, and ultimately accurate vision of world history. Hopefully, the untangling act in this introduction can make it easier for future scholars to work their way through their own historical and historiographical webs. As you will see from the footnotes, I have benefited greatly from reading the scholarship of many inspiring individuals. The next section highlights some critical interventions by them, as well as this book’s own contributions.

Casting a New Human Web

While global, transnational, and world history have weathered their fair share of critiques, the approaches remain valuable, and with some adjustment, will continue to reveal new insights. As highlighted earlier, the complexity of the theoretical frameworks used, and the volume of scholarship adopting the frameworks, has sometimes prevented collaborations, leading many global historians to speak over or past one another. This monograph attempts to cut through some of this complexity and disciplinary and methodological siloing by engaging with and combining three distinct but related transnational history approaches in each part. Then, by combining those parts, it shows both the unique and vibrant connected history of the Philippines and China and a connected interdisciplinary methodological web that can be applied to study other peoples and places around the world.

Historian Engseng Ho, noting that “in the enthusiasm for globalization, scholarly practice surged ahead of theory,” has attempted to bring order to transnational research agendas by encouraging scholars to follow “mobile societies” and explore transregional connections across intermediate scales.Footnote ⁴⁹ This book responds to Ho’s first point by following Filipino and Chinese actors as they crisscrossed the globe. Part I, for instance, highlights how the same forces that lured Chinese to the Philippines and aided in their transplant – the prospect of improved livelihood, supportive kinship networks, and overlapping imperial circuits – fostered the reverse flow of Filipinos to China. The section thereby bridges a major rift in migration studies, which is an important world history subfield, juxtaposing the mirrored diasporas of Chinese in the Philippines and Filipinos in China. This framing provides balance and a fresh perspective on a topic that often veers into discussions on state control, native-place and business networks, and acclimation and assimilation.

All the chapters in this book also pay close attention to Ho’s second point on scale, following both the global itineraries of Chinese and Filipinos and their local meanderings. This book is indebted to world historians who have made compelling arguments to incorporate a variety of scales, large and small, vast and narrow, in research.Footnote ⁵⁰ Part IV of this book, which pivots from a Shanghai sporting event in 1921, to classrooms in Springfield, Massachusetts, in the ensuing years, to the boardrooms in Manila in 1934, challenges the boundaries established by area studies while recognizing and paying homage to the interdisciplinarity at the heart of the area studies mission. These chapters, as well as the other chapters of this book, spin a supranational but still navigable web.

Recently, innovative scholars of the comparative have realigned their research, exploring the “connected histories” of two locales and casting “reciprocal comparisons,” especially between countries of the so-called Global South.Footnote ⁵¹ This has helped grow our understanding of global connectivity beyond the dusty cobwebs of American, European, and Japanese empires and business networks.Footnote ⁵² Adopting this geographical and methodological orientation helps us recover critical extra-imperial connections such as those forged by educators in China and the Philippines.Footnote ⁵³ Recovering such connections, in turn, reveals novel insights. Part II of this book, for instance, argues that Chinese educators and students viewed the Philippines as a unique educational model that offered a non-militaristic path to “modernity,” rather than an American colonial laboratory.

Connected and reciprocal histories have also illuminated ways to challenge coloniality, Eurocentrism, and other blinders that stick to many world histories. Global historians increasingly recognize and make central in their mission the necessity of “looking from the bottom up at globalization.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Self-described adherents of transnational history especially have inspired myself and others by introducing subaltern, decolonial, and feminist studies methodologies to the writing of global history, calling for the application of “epistemologies of the South.”Footnote ⁵⁵ China and the Philippines weaves what some have called a “translocal,” “transcolonial,” or “pluriversal” historical narrative of world history that foregrounds actors from the Global South who co-opted, utilized, and shaped imperial and economic systems of power to spin their own webs and advance their own agendas.Footnote ⁵⁶ This book makes room for such actors from the Global South to answer Hamid Dabashi’s wearied question, “can Non-Europeans think?,” with their decisive actions.Footnote ⁵⁷

Like the scholarship that inspires it, this book aims to subvert the power dynamics that continue to reinforce the strands of Euro-American agency while discarding the connections formed by other agents in world histories. Adopting a decolonial approach that moves past the diagnosis phase of postcolonial research to a stage that proactively challenges the continued influence of coloniality is a critical element in this endeavor.Footnote ⁵⁸ This book, therefore, as highlighted in the note on what is missing, implements a form of selective silence that shifts who dominates the dialogues and who appears on screen. It centers Filipino and Chinese actors who have largely been overlooked in global histories, such as Honorio Evangelista, Albino Z. Sycip (Xue Minlao 薛敏老), Regino Ylanan, Dee C. Chuan (Li Qingquan 李清泉), Huang Yanpei (黃炎培), Encarnacion Alzona, Thomas H. Suvoong (Shu Hong 舒鴻), and Gan Bun Cho (Yan Wenchu 顏文初).

To restore these voices and circumvent the world historians’ archive dilemma, this book uses rare archival and published material in Chinese, English, and Spanish, much of which has not been used in historical research. For instance, this monograph taps into a trove of Chinese-language publications from the Philippines that were largely destroyed in Philippine collections during World War II but survived in far-flung libraries across the People’s Republic of China, Australia, Japan, and the United States. These unique journals and letters, which are only now being digitized, reveal a complicated and sometimes contradictory position for Chinese in the Philippines, which scholars of the community have only partially captured. This is one of the topics covered in Part III. This book also uses unique archival material, such as Shanghai Municipal Orchestra band committee notes and private reservation requests from the Shanghai Municipal Archives, which provide a window into the lives of Filipinos in Shanghai, as seen in Part I.

In their push to analyze border crossings and transnational flows, some world historians have romanticized human mobility and interconnectivity, leading others to call for “narratives of global life that reckon with disintegration as well as integration.”Footnote ⁵⁹ If global histories are to be honest to the past, they must recognize that historical webs were torn asunder just as often as they were spun. The final chapter of this book, which is titled “Disintegration,” heeds this call by exploring how many of the transnational strings established by Chinese and Filipinos began to unravel in the build-up to World War II. Of course, many actors formed new ones in the years after, but that is a topic for another book. Many sections of this book, meanwhile, circumvent the romanticization of human mobility by following the lead of scholars who substitute the movement of humans for the mobility of ideas.Footnote ⁶⁰ The final part in particular explores discursive flows and media debates, adding an important element to a monograph otherwise dominated by humans and their institutions.

And now, it is almost time to move to the main content of the book, but, before we proceed to the cases themselves, let us return to the elusive definition of global, world, and transnational history. After all, we never did define it. Sorry to disappoint, but we are not going to here either. That is because these approaches can indeed be everything. They inspire and frustrate specialists from around the world, guaranteeing definitional ambiguity, but that is not a bad thing.Footnote ⁶¹ Scholars will only settle on a definition when enough of them have abandoned the project, clearing space for land grabs and the ramblings of purists who attempt to implement their orthodoxies, but I hope this day never arrives. This book attempts to appreciate the complexity of and bring some order to the webs of world history, but ultimately, it thrives in and celebrates ambiguity and getting lost.

This book offers an interdisciplinary, decolonial, connected history of China and the Philippines that pays attention to disintegration as well as creation, implements selective silences, centers cultural and discursive flows between peoples of the Global South, and explores unencumbered articulations of race, modernity, and gender. This approach itself makes up the second thesis of the book. But there are many equally compelling ways to write world history. It is hard to analyze a web, let alone untangle and weave one. So, let us remain humbled by our ignorance, knowing that any attempt at a world history is guaranteed to be a novice’s attempt. And now, it is time to get lost.

Chapter Descriptions

Part I, Mirrored Diasporas, leverages imperial history, migration studies, and urban history to explore parallels and differences between the Chinese community in Manila and Filipino community in Shanghai. The chapters in this section argue that, while many Filipinos and Chinese mostly secured reliable jobs in these modern cities, they occupied an uncertain and evolving position in racial–imperial hierarchies as foreign Asians sans imperial protection, leaving them vulnerable to arbitrary political and legal regimes. To better understand these mirrored diasporas, this part follows their pioneers as they traversed overlapping imperial formations on hulking new passenger steamships.

Part II, The Philippine Model, incorporates research pioneered in Asia and the colonial world. Scholars of the tributary “system” and New Qing history have helped us reimagine the extent and form of inter-Asian interaction in the early modern period, and this chapter extends this critical perspective to the early twentieth century by following “cultural tributarists” who, like their cultural internationalist counterparts, sought to connect Asia through education, shared democratic ideals, and professional institutions. In so doing, it challenges a concept derived from the French colonial world known as the “laboratory of modernity,” which posits colonies as testing grounds for liberal colonial reformers. The chapters in this part argue that Chinese students, educators, and scholars viewed the Philippines as a unique model of modernity, not a colonial derivative.

Part III, Nationalisms of the Founders, explores the overlapping and congruent nationalisms of elite Chinese in the Philippines through a microhistorical account of “the Founders,” a group of wealthy self-styled heroes who founded the China Banking Corporation. The chapters in this part portray them as multifaceted yet conceited individuals who saw no contradiction in aligning with and spearheading various nationalistic visions simultaneously. The founders imagined themselves as saviors destined to rescue their hometowns, create an independent, bandit-free Fujian, and help China restore its sovereignty and achieve national salvation.

Part IV, The Pivot, uses sports history, area studies, and event history to explore Sino–Philippine interactions at the Far Eastern Championship Games – an early Asian Olympiad. The chapters in this part highlight three turning points: coalescence in Shanghai when athletes and journalists from around Asia gathered in the city in 1921, possibilities at Springfield College in the United States through the 1920s when young students from China and the Philippines undertook parallel journeys of discovery, and disintegration in Manila in 1934 when politics overshadowed the games and disagreement over Manchukuo led to the unceremonious end of the Far Eastern Championship Games. The chapters in this part show how the Games as an event linked the fortunes of Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese across rigid area studies boundaries into a “triangle offense.”

The Conclusion, The Ghosts of the Present, bucks the trend of earlier chapters by focusing on only one theoretical framework – historical memory. It positions the exploration of the connected history of China and the Philippines as a means to dispel the ghosts of the present.