A Virtual Chinatown

What role does diasporic Chinese media play in the process of Chinese migrants' adaptation to their new home country? With China's rise, to what extent has the expansion of its "soft power" swayed the changing identities of the Chinese overseas? A Virtual Chinatown provides a timely and original analysis to answer such questions.

Using a media and communication studies approach to investigate the reciprocal relationship between Chinese-language media and the Chinese migrant community in New Zealand, Phoebe Li goes beyond conventional scholarship on the Chinese Diaspora as practised by social historians, anthropologists and demographers. Written in an accessible and reader-friendly manner, this book will also appeal to academics and students with interests in other transnational communities, alternative media, and minority politics.

Phoebe H. Li received her Ph.D in 2010 from the University of Auckland, and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She has published articles in both English and Chinese on the Chinese migrants in New Zealand.

"Part sociology, part history, and part media studies, Li’s book offers a fascinating window into modern migration and integration.[...] This is a book for anyone interested in the dynamics of contemporary Chinese migration and in many of the social impacts throughout the world of China’s economic and geopolitical rise."
– Howard Duncan, Metropolis Project, Carleton University, in Journal of Chinese Overseas 10.1 (2014).