Exploring Community Festivals in the Context of the Chinese Diaspora

Abstract

This exploratory case study investigated the organizers' rationale for hosting a community festival for the Chinese diaspora and takes as its context the 2018 Brisbane Chinese Festival held in Queensland, Australia. Diaspora groups are in a paradoxical situation as they hold a dual identity, with a sense of belonging to their homeland and host land simultaneously, and thus festivals aimed at diasporic communities are culturally complex. Data were collected from semistructured interviews with 15 Chinese community leaders living in Queensland who were festival organizers. The results show that organizers had reasons for both community internal and external development. The internal focused reasons include reinforcing Chinese community identities and increasing community solidarity and cohesiveness among different individuals and groups. The externally focused reasons include building a united image of the Chinese community, along with fostering social harmony between the minority diaspora groups and the dominant populations in a multicultural society. The research also demonstrated that defining and characterizing the Chinese diaspora, which is acknowledged to be super-diverse, was highly complex, but that cultural identity was the key way in which members of the Chinese diaspora define themselves. Suggestions for future research using social capital as a potential theoretical framework are provided.