Internal Exile and Industrial Modernity: Rethinking Diaspora in Anchee Min’s Pearl of China and Leslie T. Chang’s Factory Girls

Abstract

Diaspora has traditionally been theorized through the lens of transnational displacement and exile. This paper argues that internal displacement within modern nation-states can generate structural conditions indistinguishable from classical diaspora, thereby requiring a theoretical redefinition of diaspora beyond geography. Through a comparative reading of Anchee Min’s Pearl of China and Leslie T. Chang’s Factory Girls, the study demonstrates how Maoist ideological persecution and post-reform rural-to-urban labour migration produce forms of diasporic consciousness shaped by estrangement, hybridity, and fractured belonging. In Pearl of China, political legitimacy is revoked through ideological surveillance, rendering subjects symbolically expelled within their homeland. In Factory Girls, economic mobility is structurally constrained by class and gender hierarchies, producing alienated yet aspirational identities. By extending diaspora theory to encompass internal migration and political estrangement, this study reconceptualizes diaspora as a condition of negotiated belonging produced by power rather than border crossing alone.