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While non-western Christianities have gained attention from scholars in global Christian studies, the conventional China/West binary has confined Chinese Christian studies within the nation-state context. The transnational and diasporic dynamics of indigenous Chinese Christianity remains under researched. Since China’s economic reform and opening-up, Christian groups from Mainland China have started to play an active role in expanding the diasporic religious space, religious structure, and religious networks overseas, especially in the western world. Drawing on extended anthropological fieldwork among Chinese Christians in Europe, this article discusses the condition, manifestations, and logic of this diasporic Chinese Christian development; highlighting the cultural and moral forces of diasporic Chinese Christianity, and the overlooked role of religion in China’s grassroots commercial engagement with the world. Unlike the usual approach in western-centric religious studies, this study highlights the indigenous cultural logic of Chinese Christian expansion, especially the differential mode of association as reflected in the reliance on the state, native-place belonging, and the formation of a moral discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last few decades, migrants’ past experiences and memories have become increasingly recognized as a heritage. While this can be seen as a positive shift towards a more inclusive evaluation of the past, migration heritage is still overwhelmingly portrayed through a binary between the country of origin and country of settlement. This tendency obscures the multiple transnational connections migrants sustain with different locations along the migration process. Drawing on examples of Chinese migration to Europe, this article argues in favour of forgoing the national(istic) approach to heritagization and instead focusing on the connections formed during a century of Chinese migration to Europe.

With fast globalization and large-scaled transnational population migration, different ethnic groups and cultures exchange, collide, and even conflict with one another, which has shown unprecedented trends in breadth and depth. Diaspora research has thus risen and proliferated. It has stepped into various areas of culturology, anthropology, ethnology, economics, politics, and literature, and all fields are interrelated; nevertheless, diaspora research has the characteristics of the sociology discipline and all branches are related to sociology as ethnic groups, immigration, emigration, refugees, ethnicity, and transnationalism are all major concepts of concern in sociology. Multicultural theories have greatly stimulated the development of diaspora studies and they have become the important theoretical basis for diaspora research. Being the major targets in diaspora studies, diaspora groups are classified into the classic group and the modern group. Distinguishing the two helps depicting the historical frame of diaspora issues and their developmental trends. Immi/Emigrants have a special position among the diaspora groups, with ethnicity being the core of diaspora studies. Transnationalism has become the realistic expression of diaspora as transnational mobility is now the reality that has attracted keen attention in current diaspora studies. Classic diaspora concepts have been changing along with rapid societal changes and diaspora studies are closely related to these changes. Concepts change in meaning, similarities and differences, and interconnections and transformations. Such conceptual changes directly reflect the change trends in reality. The current paper distinguishes the differences in diaspora conceptual changes; discusses the origin, developmental history, and characteristics of diaspora studies; and tries to speculate the future developmental trends in diaspora research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]