Aihwa Ong is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Donald Nonini is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

"This collection of essays is very coherent..." -- AsianThought and Society"This fascinating and thought-provoking book explores Chinese identity in a wide range of national and regional settings and among a variety of people, from businessmen to consumers to women factory workers. All the chapters are excellent and...well written..." -- Journal of AsianStudies"This extraodinarily coherent volume of superb papers not only completely revises and reframes the considerable tradition of scholarship on overseas Chinese and the source of Chinese nationalism, but it stands also as a much needed model of how recent largely theoretical discussions of transnationalism, diaspora and the formulation of identities might give substantive new contours to older regimes of culture area studies." -- George E. Marcus, Rice University"The historical depth and interdisciplinary perspectives are significant contributions to the study of the complexity of Chinese transnational experiences." -- American Journal of Sociology"Theoretically sophisticated and politically sensitive, Ungrounded Empires offers much that is original and thought-provoking, and is a welcome addition to an important new area of inquiry. Of interest not only for East/Southeast Asian and Pacific studies, but also to those interested in cultural studies and the contemporary political economy." -- Arif Dirlik, Duke University

• Introduction Chinese Transnationalism as an Alternative Modernity Part 1 Transiting to Modernity: The Wildness and Power of Early Chinese Transnationalism 1 Nationalists Among Transnationals: Overseas Chinese and the Idea of China, 1900–1911 2 Boundaries and Transgressions: Chinese Enterprise in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Southeast Asia Part 2 Family, Guanxi, and Space: Discourses and Practices in the Age of Flexibility 3 Space, Mobility, and Flexibility: Chinese Villagers and Scholars Negotiate Power at Home and Abroad 4 Factory Regimes of Chinese Capitalism: Different Cultural Logics in Labor Control Guanxi Across the Straits: Taiwanese Capital and Local Chinese Bureaucrats Part 3 Transnational Identities and Nation-State Regimes of Truth and Power 6 Chinese Modernities: Narratives of Nation and of Capitalism 7 Shifting Identities, Positioned Imaginaries: Transnational Traversals and Reversals by Malaysian Chinese 8 Transnational Subjects: Constituting the Cultural Citizen in the Era of Pacific Rim Capital Part 4 The Self-Making and Being-Made of Transnational Subjectivities 9 The Thoroughly Modern “Asian”: Capital, Culture, and Nation in Thailand and the Philippines 10 Mass Media and Transnational Subjectivity in Shanghai: Notes on (Re) Cosmopolitanism in a Chinese Metropolis Afterword Toward a Cultural Politics of Diaspora and Transnationalism