在《离散的故土》一书中，陈雪莉对超过两千万华人大规模移民海外对中国政治、经济和文化的影响进行了广泛的历史研究。陈雪莉提出了“侨民时刻”的概念——一系列反复出现的脱节，移民时间与地方、国家和全球时间发生冲突——以描绘华人故乡和侨民出现的多个历史地理。陈雪莉描述了几个不同的时刻，包括 1893 年清朝移民禁令的解除、20 世纪 20 年代和 30 年代关于华人移民是否构成殖民以及儒家思想是否应该成为现代中国身份基础的知识分子辩论，以及 20 世纪 50 年代和 60 年代性别、回归和共产主义运动的交汇。陈雪莉采用跨国框架，通过对侨民的重新概念化来叙述中国历史，以展示大规模移民如何帮助中国在全球体系中确立为一个民族国家。 In Diaspora’s Homeland Shelly Chan provides a broad historical study of how the mass migration of more than twenty million Chinese overseas influenced China’s politics, economics, and culture. Chan develops the concept of “diaspora moments”—a series of recurring disjunctions in which migrant temporalities come into tension with local, national, and global ones—to map the multiple historical geographies in which the Chinese homeland and diaspora emerge. Chan describes several distinct moments, including the lifting of the Qing emigration ban in 1893, intellectual debates in the 1920s and 1930s about whether Chinese emigration constituted colonization and whether Confucianism should be the basis for a modern Chinese identity, as well as the intersection of gender, returns, and Communist campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s. Adopting a transnational frame, Chan narrates Chinese history through a reconceptualization of diaspora to show how mass migration helped establish China as a nation-state within a global system.
