Beyond spatial liminality

Abstract

During the 1950s and 1960s, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Chinese, mostly from Southeast Asia, returned to the newly founded People’s Republic of China (PRC). Their return was prompted not only by socialist propaganda but by soaring maltreatment in their countries of residence. This chapter discusses one subgroup of these returnees, namely, the “student returnees” (guiqiao xuesheng), in relation to the re-founding of Jinan University in Guangzhou as a “special” university for returned overseas Chinese and returnees from Hong Kong and Macao. The chapter argues that the concept of liminality (van Gennep) is applicable to the plight of the student returnees in the 1950s’ Guangzhou in three ways. Firstly, analogous to other Cold War “frontier zones;” Guangzhou was a liminal space where two worlds met and collided. Secondly, however, the status of the returnees was also liminal in that they were to undergo a transition from “capitalists” to “socialists” through education as a “rite of passage.” Finally, their situation was liminal in that they were always “in-waiting” for the next ritual, with no true end date to their transition. Hence, for the “Chinese” student returnees, liminality went beyond the spatial – it also contained ideological, moral, ritual, and temporal aspects. The chapter hence reveals the regional dimensions of the Cold War, the fluidity of Cold War borders, and how the ordering of space contained elements that transcended the physical. The main primary sources for this chapter include publications by Jinan University and archival documents from the Guangdong Provincial Archives in Guangzhou.