Sydney's Chinatown has emerged from an ethnic enclave of internal exclusion to become a major hub mediating Australia-Asia relations. We learn in fascinating detail how state racialization of Chinese identity is giving way to a flexible deployment of all things Chinese in a transnational milieu of trade, culture, and politics. China Unbound explodes old models of Asian urbanism.

- Aihwa Ong, Professor of Socio-Cultural Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley; author of Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life,

Instead of dwelling on the simplistic dichotomy between majority and minority, East and West, sameness and difference, and viewing Chinatowns as fixed and essentialized, authors in Chinatown Unbound have done an admirable job in unpacking the layers of tensions, complexity, and ongoing socioeconomic changes in Sydney’s Chinatown as a case study. The work is particularly relevant today with the rise of racial and ethnic tensions around the world and contestations over identities, migration, and belonging.

- Jeffrey Hou, Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington, Seattle,

As China races to become the world’s largest economy, the view of western Chinatowns as inward-looking ethnic enclaves, decimated by poverty and pervasive racism, has become anachronistic. In this superb interpretation of Sydney’s Chinatown, a team of top scholars of China overseas provide a sophisticated view of the identities of the new Chinatown, a view where diversity and transnational mobility provide the new normal, provoking substantial theoretical and empirical recalibration.

- David Ley, Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia,