This book is the first to study the language and politics of identity of recent mainland Chinese migrants to Malaysia. Drawing on a variety of fieldwork data, the volume provides an accessible and succinct view of this ‘new’ transnational migrant community in multilingual Malaysia. Unlike earlier Chinese migrants (the ‘old’ Chinese communities) who migrated to Malaysia (previously British Malaya) due to experiencing poverty in China, the ‘new’ Chinese community in Malaysia comprises mainly...

This book moves beyond the stereotyped approaches adopted in earlier works on ‘Chinatowns’ and introduces instead the Chinese spaces in the metropolitan city of Kuala Lumpur (KL), Malaysia. Seeing beyond the ‘Chinatown’, this book puts forward the historical, political, linguistic, educational, economic, sociocultural, religious, and architectural perspectives of the Chinese spaces, in local and global contexts, thus offering critical insights into the complex intertwining of historical im...