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In the march into the twenty-first century, time-space compression has become a routine part of our lives as a result of modern communicative devices and transportation. Migrational flows have beco...

Within the Chinese Diaspora, ancestor worship is an important cultural element that binds a group of people together and provides them with a sense of comfort, kinship and communal identity as they sink their cultural roots in a new country, luodi shenggen. Thus, ancestor worship is widely reproduced and practised by the Chinese in the Diaspora, as it is central to the Chinese understanding of the continuation of family and lineage. However, in Mainland Chinese villages, the practice of ancestor worship, which is still considered important by the villagers, was not allowed until the Open Door Policy in 1978. With this policy, emigrant villages, (qiaoxiang) embarked on an aggressive campaign to woo the Chinese in overseas communities to return to their native villages to help with economic development through various strategies. One of the strategies is to allow for the revival and practice of ancestor worship in the rural villages. This paper explores how ancestors continued to be regarded as important members of a transnational lineage in the Fujian Province in South China, and also in Singapore. Because of the central focus on ancestors and ancestor worship in the Chinese society, ancestors are moralised as a significant social capital by the Chinese State, local government and rural villagers, in an attempt to establish transnational guanxi linkages between the ancestral villages in rural China and their Diaspora members in Singapore. The Chinese State, with instrumental consideration, sees this transnational guanxi networks and the revival of ancestor worship as a strategy to encourage the Chinese Diaspora to visit their ancestral home and help with village development.

As a group of people migrated from one region to another and settled down in a new environment, they brought along their cultures and memories of the distant land that used to be their home. As they seek to reproduce their social values, customs and values in their new diasporic community, the process of reproduction is often governed by what they remember and the selective process of what they want to remember and reproduce for their new home. At the same time, through the recall of their collective memories, these migrants also re-explore their relationship with their home of ancestral origin, and establish transnational kinship ties and networks. The latter process was especially rapid after the 1978 Open Door Policy which allowed ease of movement of people between the Chinese diasporic communities and mainland China.