![Wired Tianxia, Wounded Borders: Ressentiment, Firewalls, Migrant Bodies, and Aesthetic Interventions [Part II]](https://cjdproject.web.nycu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/sites/167/2025/08/20151030_Syrians_and_Iraq_refugees_arrive_at_Skala_Sykamias_Lesvos_Greece_2.jpg "Wired Tianxia, Wounded Borders: Ressentiment, Firewalls, Migrant Bodies, and Aesthetic Interventions [Part II]")
Wired Tianxia, Wounded Borders: Ressentiment, Firewalls, Migrant Bodies, and Aesthetic Interventions [Part II]
Lectures by Transit Asia Research Network
Abstract: What unfolds when Tianxia— “All-Under-Heaven”—is digitally interwoven into a global Großraum? Can such a wired realm nurture harmony as kin within a planetary household? Unlikely. Ressentiment festers beneath the surface, shaped by geo-historical legacies and geopolitical anxieties. Apparatuses like Germany’s proposed digital Brandmauer or China’s Great Firewall are merely the architectural facades of deeper affective fortifications. These sentiments, displaced onto racialized others, migrants, and outsiders, manifest as localized xenophobia and structural precarity, and echo through contemporary artistic expression. This panel examines these entanglements across Europe and Asia while envisioning ethical and intellectual interventions against the repressive currents of our digital zeitgeist.
Keywords: ressentiment, digital governance, migration, tianxia
Header image: Syrians and Iraq refugees arrive at Skala Sykamias Lesvos Greece, Wikimedia Commons, 2015
The lectures are divided into part 1 and part 2. This article, part 2, contains three out of five lectures.
[3] Contestations over Migration
The title of my lecture is ‘Contestation over Migration’. Migration is a highly controversial topic. If you followed the German federal election campaign, the title may not come as a surprise. The migration debate strongly influenced the election campaign. Furthermore, the rise of authoritarianism and the strengthening of right-wing extremist forces — not only at the parliamentary level and not only in Germany, but also in other European countries — seems to be closely linked to the issue of migration. In recent years, right-wing discourse on migration has taken on a quasi-centripetal function, pulling broad sections of previously moderate parties and movements in an anti-migration direction and bringing them closer to what many regard as fascism.
As migration researchers, we tend to adopt a more relaxed approach. On the one hand, our findings show that migration is often given too much prominence in election campaigns. On the other hand, migration is happening anyway. Nevertheless, debates on migration take place in a highly politicised field, so a reliable compass is essential if we want to stop the current forces and regain ground. It is therefore crucial that we shape our concepts and research in such a way that we understand how, in the context of current structural crises and geopolitical shifts, the migration debate has become a terrain on which the far right has succeeded in redefining the points of contention.
To understand and potentially counteract the current challenges posed by the authoritarian turn, we must renew our critical perspectives. To this end, I will briefly review the key concepts that have been developed in critical migration research over the past 25 years, which have also gained traction within social movements.
- The limits of methodological nationalism and the concept of citizenship
A fundamental problem in migration research has always been ‘methodological nationalism’, also known as ‘container thinking’, which is currently experiencing a resurgence in popularity. When nationalism is criticised as a methodology, our understanding of social action and our political horizon are limited to the nation state. This has been described by Immanuel Wallerstein, among many others, as the ‘disciplining of thought in national categories’. This has long prevented us from understanding migration properly.
Wallerstein and others also sharply criticised the concept of citizenship. He noted that citizenship is ‘by its very nature both inclusive and exclusive’. The term ‘citizen’ refers to a combination of duties and inalienable, inherited rights. However, the problem with the concept of citizenship is that it is meaningless unless some are excluded, and these ‘some’ must ultimately be an arbitrarily selected group.
The national construction of the concept of citizenship is therefore always a central arena of ‘contestation over migration’, precisely because ‘migrants’ are associated with different civilisations, religions, cultures, ethnicities and races.
The difficulties in dealing with migration therefore lie in the concept of citizenship itself. However, the debates surrounding this issue remain largely unresolved.
- Autonomy of migration and resistance
The concept of ‘autonomy of migration’ highlights the inherent capacity and potential of migrants to traverse borders and pursue a better life, despite efforts to isolate them. Migration can also be viewed as a social movement that shapes the world. However, this concept does not romanticise the exercise of freedom of movement as a purely subversive or emancipatory act. Rather, it recognises historically specific social formations of human mobility as a constitutive force in the relationship between capital, labour, and the nation state. Throughout history, attempts to close borders have largely been unsuccessful, as human mobility can never be completely stopped. Nevertheless, attempts at border control naturally lead to terrible human and social costs. They have also given rise to a new logic of migration management.
- Migration in the context of logistics: the control mechanisms of the authoritarian turn
The authoritarian turn is currently manifesting itself in a different way of management and control of migration. Anthropologist Xiang Biao has observed that the government’s focus on migration has shifted from considering ‘how migrants move and explore’ to ‘how they can be moved’.
The language of contemporary migration management is logistical. This reorients the border regime, turning roads into corridors and creating platforms and hotspots for the swift identification, registration, and processing of migrants. The control architecture increasingly reveals the intention to organise people’s mobility according to the logic of goods (‘just in time and to the point’). The concept of the logistification of migration enables a more nuanced understanding of contemporary migration management, which is based on innovations in media technology (digital surveillance and the use of AI), as well as staggered transport and data infrastructures. This includes software for geomatching and automated decision-making, as well as sophisticated forecasting tools, which are already being promoted in research.
This development has far-reaching epistemological consequences as it alters the categories and classification systems of migration. Previous distinctions, such as between sedentary and mobile population groups, voluntary and forced migration, and reasons for entry (asylum, work or family reunification), are being called into question and adapted to the needs of host countries and their labour markets.
These changes manifest in campaigns that are often racist and sexist, fuelling social conflict around migration while systematically and discursively undermining previously valid legal structures such as the Geneva Refugee Convention and global support organisations such as the UNHCR. A recent example of this is the debate about ‘essential workers’ during the pandemic, in which migrants were disproportionately represented in systemically important professions such as care, logistics and agriculture. This demonstrates the selective nature of migration: those who are economically useful and culturally assimilable are desirable, while all others are to be kept away and removed.
The increasingly precise logic of logistics is becoming the dominant factor in making this distinction and in decision-making, as well as in the associated path dependencies.
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This brief review of critical concepts suggests that social debates on migration are a heuristic tool that enables us to understand a wide range of social conflicts, including those in which migration does not play a direct role. The aforementioned concepts have been shaped by a variety of influences. Anti-racist and migration policy work, artistic and activist forms of expression, and interdisciplinary research have developed them. These influences have taught us to constantly reanalyse migration in the context of the interplay between economic, political and cultural dynamics.
One could say that many conflicts related to migration revolve around the infamous concept of integration. But integration means nothing more than the ability of society to reproduce itself as it is. We are all familiar with discussions about the inability of migrants to integrate. They have become so widespread, so intrusive and so stereotyped that they have become a litany of recurring variations on the sexism of migrant men, their homophobia, youth violence, the democratic path of integration, the limited educational skills and cultural distance of migrants, and so on.
However, we continue to fall into the trap of questioning the ability of new arrivals to integrate, rather than questioning why states are unable to integrate them and accept new arrivals, and how they can organise this acceptance.
In view of the ‘mortal crisis’ of our modern world system and the rise of figures such as Trump, who are exploiting centuries-old ethnic, linguistic, cultural and political affiliations to create a ‘new monstrous mix’, we must take the current rearticulation of the nation seriously.
Speaking in terms of migration, 2015 and what was called the ‘summer of migration’ has been blamed for this development. As a sort of retaliation of older forces. Today, ten years later, we are faced with this scenario. It is becoming increasingly clear that the number of refugees in the world is growing every year. We have now passed the 100 million mark. Migrants are categorised and counted in many different ways. Their origins are processed, predictive tools for future mobility are developed, and social questions are answered with demographic platitudes. Walls and prisons are built, tools and weapons are programmed, databases are organised and networked, and the military and police are armed to control migration. People are killed, taken to waters and countries from which they never came. Billions are spent and ‘invested’ to keep migration out of Europe.
Given the extent to which the nation, or better: the form of the nation of states, determines our thinking and our understanding of the world, it is important to argue that the rearticulation we are currently experiencing, in the midst of the mortal crisis, cannot be taken lightly. I think that the election of Trump, with all the consequences of a coup d’état, has made this clear even to those who did not want to see it before.
Within these politics, they are appropriating the centuries-old history in which ethnic, linguistic, cultural, racial and political affiliations were interwoven in the form of the nation, and creating a new monstrous mix out of them.
The terms and concepts used in the migration debate do not ‘originate’ from migration theory alone. Conceptualising migration in order to intervene into contestations over migration involves to not simply discuss their own normative content and then wait for the world to act accordingly.
They cannot be reduced to purely descriptive, empirically verifiable categories.
Instead, conceptual work on migration navigates the intersection of the normative and the descriptive, the ‘should’ and the ‘is’, drawing its vision for improvement from the existing struggles, tensions, and possibilities of the present.
In my opinion, we must bring this controversy to the debates about migration.
Image: Syrians and Iraq refugees arrive at Skala Sykamias Lesvos Greece, Wikimedia Commons, 2015
[4] Tactical Resistance of Minority Gig Workers
Image: Hong Kong Labour Relations Division Office, Wikimedia Commons, 2010
My presentation will speak about the added precarities facing migrant/minority gig workers in the face of encroaching surveillances in neoliberalist contexts, but also their tactical yet liminal agencies to resist and navigate the exploitative platform management. The struggles and precarities facing migrant gig workers have been much researched in recent years, because their increasing precariousness exposes how platformed economy induces structural inequalities on migrant workers worldwide. In Hong Kong, 3 south Asian ethnic groups, the Indians, Pakistanis and Nepalese, have had a long history in Hong Kong since British colonisation. Despite generations of settlement, South Asian descendants still remain in the lower ebb of society, being confined in ‘menial jobs’ such as construction, logistics, cleaning, and are subject to low employment opportunities. The rise of platformed businesses such as food delivery lured many into working as deliverer, especially during COVID. The South Asian ‘gig’ workers were not only subjected to the harsh and exploitative management of food platforms, but also racist behaviour from restauranteurs, food servers, customers or even passersby on the lock-downed streets. The Hong Kong case could shed light on how the various forms and layers of racial discrimination against minority gig workers could be deeply entrenched in areas with a colonial past and are contemporized through platformed management and labour. Furthermore, Hong Kong shares with certain Asian polities in terms of having a dominant ethnic majority (ethnic Chinese in the case of Hong Kong). While conditions of migrant gig workers vary across the many job types within the wide spectrum, they also vary across different political, economic and cultural, AND demographic contexts. Hence, this calls for thicker qualitative and more longitudinal methods to delve into more nuanced forms of racialized aggression in the workplace and in the everyday, and how they interplay in the lives of migrant worker-selves. It also calls for more historical, and intersectional perspectives, especially in Asian economies, in order to unravel the layers of micro-aggression against minority gig workers that are afforded, manipulated, and induced, by algorithmic platform management.
Second, racial minority migrant workers are capable of engaging in forms and layers of tactical and organized resistance against platform hegemony and state surveillance, albeit temporary. in Hong Kong, the successful strikes that managed to paralyse food delivery platform service on November 13 and 14, 2021, were organized by Pakistani migrant workers. In an article, I argued that the migrant gig workers’ agencies for the tactical ‘visibilization’/ resistance come down to the following: i) social media affordances to coordinate online mobilization with offline, cross-district organization; ii) role of local Chinese NGO, who played the essential role of liaising with local media, strategic organization and logistics. Perhaps more importantly, it could also be the ethno-cultural and political ‘capital’, from kinship fraternal bonding to a belief in protests as proper democratic expression. As the ‘foreignized’ other, these migrant workers assumed they would somehow be ‘beyond’ police surveillance, both online and offline.
Third, the role of organized labour unions is worth re-examining, which also necessitates a rethinking of forms and extent of ‘solidarity’ employer and commercial surveillance through algorithmic manipulation. The example of the Foodpanda strike already signalled the gradual decentralization of formal labour unions, in place for spontaneous, self-organized, ‘amateur’ labour solidarity.
Fast forward to what’s happening recently, there are still sporadic, spontaneous and localised ‘strikes’ organized by a dozen of food runners, mostly migrant/ minority workers, which are confined to particular districts, and in any case far from causing significant threats to the platform’s business in general. One reason why migrant/minority workers are again the strike leaders is of course that they have higher stakes in the gig labourforce. As global economy continues to worsen and becoming more unpredictable, gig workers are increasingly at the mercy of even more extreme forms of neoliberalist platform exploitation, and new layers of precarity. Here the algorithmic management of platform business enables further hoarding of data, lowering workers’ wages without notice, and further disintegrating any possibility of clear wage calculation. Workers have no way of knowing how much they actually earn each month, not to mention compare monthly income. On the other hand, workers’ life is increasingly data-fied, turned into commodity for the food platforms.
Under these circumstances, individual migrant workers resorted to tactical ‘visibilisation’ by making use of social media platforms. For example, some Pakistani descendant workers produce and release videos on Youtube, in which they discuss job related problems, relevant labour laws, and even offer information about visa applications to their compatriots who are considering seeking employment in Hong Kong. Another prominent case involves an Indonesian domestic helper, who ‘rose to fame’ by making YouTube videos complaining about employers’ exploitative practices. These youtubers suffice as ‘migrant worker advocate’ as they also benefit fellow workers with information about labour laws in Hong Kong. They also serve to raise public awareness towards racial discrimination in Hong Kong. The business of asserting this role also incurs a set of risks which the advocate entrepreneur must negotiate. For the migrant worker advocate, the perceived risks and costs are higher given her migration status (as a domestic helper). Migrant helpers may also become the target of surveillance from their home governments. Yet, as James Scott deems as ‘weapons of the weak’ of subjugated groups which might undermine the power of both conservative and progressive orders at work, through ‘everyday resistance’.
Fourth, in the AI and plaformized era, human labour value – and virtually footprints of all aspects of our life – will be datafied and turned into commodities for further commercial exploitation and political surveillance. The hoarding of these data creates double ‘firewalls’ that would also cripple different means and effort of intervention and activism, including research. Their intersection, in the meantime, is bound to oppress human agency, except through consumerism. In the face of mounting technological surveillance (eg. Biotechnological metrics, policing social media content criticizing delivery platforms for exploitative practices or revealing algorithmic loopholes) by the government and neoliberalist capitalist economy, The Ethno-Cultural / Technological Affordances Of Migrant Workers, albeit micro- and fragmented, may offer Insights on, and outlet for, Ressentiment of our times. Our tasks as researchers and advocates are to devise more creative tactics to combat platform injustices by collecting alternative and nuanced ‘data’ through qualitative and longitudinal (n)ethnographic methods through working with workers across job sectors. We need to join hands with grassroot labour groups to connect and share resources through various ‘commons’, devising small-scale resistances and strengthening synergistic convivialities from below. With these collaborative efforts, we need to trace and network with initiatives at different levels of micro-solidarity, including groups of disgruntled workers who stage guerrilla protests in local areas to voice out and shame platform businesses. Or, individual migrant workers who adopt micro-resistances in everyday interactions, with whom we share resources to raise public awareness of platform evils, and more importantly, in a bid to shake the public off their overriding consumerist values.
[5] Subnationals and Transmigrants: Exploring Ressentiment in Modern and Contemporary Asian Art
I propose to think through some of the issues of resentment and ressentiment by tracing figurative art in Asia in the 20th century, starting with an early inversion of ressentiment through the celebration of non-dominant (or at least non-economically-dominant) ethnic groups through the lens of cosmopolitan emigré or transmigrant artists in early to mid 20th century Southeast Asia.
In 1940s Singapore, then part of British Malaya, exiled, expatriate, and displaced painters including Liu Kang became known as “Nanyang” artists – embracing the term frequently applied to ethnic Chinese organizations and artistic output in Malaya from the 1920s to the 1950s. Liu and his fellow Nanyang artists had trained elsewhere in the 1920s and 30s – in Shanghai, Xiamen, New York, and Paris. In Republican China, art academies had been founded in the early 20th century as part of that nation’s efforts to create infrastructure to train the nation’s art teachers, who would in turn contribute to educating a modern and well-rounded citizenry. These academies had been founded by artists who themselves had studied abroad in Japan and Europe, mostly in France. As political turmoil continued in China, artists and many other intellectuals migrated to Malaya in the 1940s and 50s, including Cheong Soo Pieng (1948), Chen Wen Hsi (1946), and the aforementioned Liu Kang (1946). Georgette Chen arrived in Penang in 1951 and moved to Singapore in 1953. Her journey had included Paris, New York, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Lim Hak Tai, shown here in a 1940 portrait by Chong Pai Mu using muted, almost muddy hues and an impressionistic style, had left China and moved to Singapore a decade earlier. An artistic leader who co-founded the Xiamen Academy of Fine Art in 1923 and subsequently founded the Nanyang Academy of Fine Art (NAFA) in1938, advocated transposing the values explored in Chinese modern art in the 1920s and 30s to the artists’ new environment in Nanyang, the Chinese term used for Southeast Asia (literally “Southern Seas”).
In the cases of Lim, Chong, Liu, and Chen, we can see the assortment of aesthetic preferences that these modern Chinese painters brought with them and further adapted in the context of their new surroundings in Southeast Asia, following trails blazed by earlier Chinese transmigrants of their generation and earlier.
Liu Kang, like many of his fellow Shanghai- and Paris-trained contemporaries was part of the larger “School of Paris.” His work Painting Kampong (1954) retains his interest in Henri Matisse’s early 20th century Fauvist color palette while incorporating the aesthetics of the wax-resist batik dye techniques of the region, synthesised local visual cultures with his legibly modern vocabulary. As an ode to batik compositions, the “harsh” white outlines in this idyllic scene of the tropical plein-air painter seem aesthetically more harmonious than those used by post-Impressionist painters in Europe prior to World War I, despite the relatively violent and traumatic conditions of wartime China that precipitated the migration of Liu and his colleagues. Looking at the assemblage of local architecture, houses, and figures in Painting Kampong (1954), we see a neighborly arrangement: a central figure of a painter, presumably a recent female transplant from China with art academy training, like himself; a small, presumably local but otherwise unidentifiable child; two women wearing Malay sarong and kebaya, whose patterns are rendered in simplified geometric shapes; and a male figure also in baju Melayu including a selandang shoulder sash and songkok hat – perhaps formalising or elevating the attire that might realistically have resembled the less ethnically-specific garments worn by the male figure in one of Liu’s sketches of the same scene from 1952.
To stay with the interest of Nanyang painters in portraying their neighbors, we can look at the more formal portraiture of Chong Pai Mu and Georgette Chen, each depicting a Malay woman in batik sarong and kebaya in an otherwise nondescript interior environment. The portrayal of these female subjects seems comparable to the previously-shown portrait of Lim Tai Hak, with the major difference in the attention to the batik, the iconic defining cultural feature of the supra- and sub-national affiliations of the diverse communities of Malaya and Indonesia.
Shifting our gaze to an earlier contemporary of the Nanyang painters in the entrepot environments of Malaya and Singapore, Alix Aymé was a French painter, a student and collaborator of Maurice Denis, who spent time in China and then Indochina when her husband’s military career brought him to the region. A faculty member at the Ecole des Beaux Arts d’Indochine in Hanoi from 1934-39, she studied and learned the technique of lacquer painting with the help of Japanese lacquer artisans, thereafter teaching the technique to her Vietnamese students with the hope of reviving a pre-modern decorative painting technique and encouraging a more localised extension of the French curriculum. In this landscape scene, we see a similar aesthetic treatment of the rural inhabitants of a lush tropical landscape as we saw in Liu Kang’s work from about 20 years later – the figures’ faces are abstracted while the environment itself is as much a character in the scene as the people. The hills, architecture, banana trees and ao dai garments worn by the female figures each tell part of the story – perhaps, as in the case of Liu in Singapore, an artistic effort to chronicle, celebrate, and study the local environment and culture. Perhaps this is not entirely distinct from the post-Impressionist primitivist fantasies that Aymé and Liu had encountered and incorporated into their work in Paris, but it does seem to be tempered by their own semi-permanent placement within Southeast Asia.
Shifting from the overall positive impressions of Southeast Asia and local art mediums that these French-educated foreign artists employed in British Malaya and French Indochina, the artistic production of postwar Japan, Korea, and Taiwan engaged with the concept of both the foreign and indigenous “other” in a less direct and also less celebratory manner. I can offer a few examples that I think productively invert the logic of political ressentiment. Taiwanese painter Li Shih-chiao’s Market Entrance from 1945 serves as an interesting bridge from the context of foreign painters observing Southeast Asian landscapes and people, to a local artist, similarly trained in an academic context, chronicling his home city’s chaotic transition following the period of Japanese colonial rule. In the case of Yamashita Kikuji’s The Tale of Akebono Village, considered the most iconic artwork of Japan’s reportage movement, we see the vivid and gruesome portrayal of the fallout from class struggles between landlords and tenant farmers in a remote mountain village and the precariousness of life for farmers portrayed. The artist’s interpretation of these real incidents were researched not through news coverage, but through the social networks of worker-poets in South Tokyo – a context of cross-class solidarity in the 1950s. In Korea, Oh Yoon was one of the founders of Reality and Utterance – part of the Minjung (people’s) movement that attempted to portray the lives of ordinary people, in contrast to the abstract monochrome, minimalist postwar art of dansaekwa as well as the competing top-down logic of emergent capitalism and military rule in the 1960s and 70s. In Vindictive Spirits, Oh uses the East Asian painting format of the handscroll to present ghosts who died with a grudge as a history of tragic deaths in Korean history – connected to the Donghak Peasant Revolution, the Korean War, and the Gwangju Democratization Struggle.
Image: Yamashita Kikuji’s The Tale of Akebono Village, MIT Visualizing Cultures.
Shifting to a look at figuration in the context of New Media Art in contemporary Asia, I have a few examples to share here that might seed further conversations: examples of the continuation of mining class struggles, both explicit and implicit, and local vernacular methods of storytelling and image-making from Cao Fei (China), the House of Natural Fibre (Indonesia), Chris Chong Chan Fui (Malaysia), Jeanne Penjan Lassus (Thailand), Ngoc Nau (Vietnam), and Yeo Siew Hua (Singapore). Perhaps a far cry from the School of Paris where I began, these artists deal with the figure as a mode of surfacing populations otherwise misrepresented, unseen or unappreciated.
