Chinese diasporas in the Pacific Islands: a bilingual comparative interpretive review

This article presents a bilingual interpretive synthesis of 55 English- and Chinese-language studies on ethnic Chinese communities in the Pacific Islands published between 2000 and 2025. Although Chinese diaspora scholarship has flourished elsewhere, the Pacific Islands remain theoretically underexplored and are too often treated as a uniform regional backdrop. Using qualitative thematic coding and epistemic comparison, the article analyzes how different scholarly communities conceptualize Chinese diasporas across a region marked by substantial variation among Melanesian, Polynesian, and Micronesian contexts. The synthesis identifies three analytical axes—corridors, hybridity, and governance—but treats them as heuristic dimensions rather than fixed categories. It argues that Pacific Chinese communities are best understood as micro-diasporic formations that both illuminate and complicate diaspora theory by foregrounding small-scale, relational, and multi-scalar forms of mobility, belonging, and political negotiation. The article further shows that differences between Anglophone and Chinese-language scholarship reflect not only thematic emphasis but also distinct disciplinary traditions, institutional settings, and policy-research linkages that shape the production of diaspora knowledge.