Yep.

And thank you so much, Dominic, and for this very kind very kind introduction, and it's

too generous and I'm still very green and I think I'm still a very junior scholar, and

that long time ago we were still chatting about this and, as you said, three years ago

I was still finishing my PhD at Berkeley and we didn't expect what would happen to the

world, like the pandemic's totally unexpected, but I'm happy that I have this great opportunity

to speak to colleagues and students at the SDAC program, and also it's really nice to

give this talk. It's midnight in China now, but it's a very rare kind of feeling that

I don't have for a very long time. It's like traveling abroad when you have jet lag, but

still this is exciting, and also the topic that I chose for this lecture series is kind

of deliberate, because as I mentioned to Dominic, in one week there will be the celebration

for the 100-year anniversary of the Communist Party of China, so it's kind of ironic and

also interesting timing for doing this, and I know students in the SDAC program are coming

from very different backgrounds, and also I also pay attention to other talks in the

lecture series. It's really interdisciplinary and also very interesting. Most of the scholars

deal with very contemporary issues, but hopefully my talk will take you all to 100 years ago,

around 100 years ago, and talk about the Chinese influence in South Asia, and also I think

that also sheds light on contemporary politics, because now I think the G7 summit just concluded

and also China was seen as a strategic rival. I don't know what that means, but of course

the discussion is going on, but I think the history really gave us a lot of lessons, so

I'm trying to use an unusual perspective to talk about this, and also like Dominic said,

I am at Peking University and I really hope that the pandemic will be over soon so that

students in SDAC and also colleagues working for SDAC can come over and have more in-person

exchanges. So thank you very much for organizing this, and also I want to thank Henny and Julia

for coordinating this and for making this happen. So let me just share my screen, and

hopefully you can see it now. Yes. Okay, so I will start. So the talk today

is entitled Various Forms of Chineseness and the Origins of the South Asian Communism,

and also I think every word is simple enough except the word Chineseness, but this is exactly

what I want to grapple with in this talk, and also to present the multifaceted nature

of the term Chineseness in the South East Asian context. And so as we all know, at the

beginning of the 20th century, the majority of South East Asia was colonized by different

European powers, as we can see from the map, the yellow parts were British colonies, British

Burma and British Malaya, and the orange one is a Dutch colony, which is the current day

Indonesia, and the pink one is the Philippines, which was colonized by the Spanish in the

19th century, but after the Spanish-American War in 1895, the Philippines became a U.S.

colony, and also the yellow part, also into China, was colonized by the French. So what

we can see from this map is actually the current day South Asian nation states are pretty much

the same. They still share very similar boundaries as those colonial states. So by studying the

colonial, like the history of the late colonial South Asian states, we can also understand

what's going on and what happened later. And this is just a very brief introduction. This

is the part of the world we are focusing on today. And also South East Asia is very close

to China, as all we know. And also, Chinese emigration to South East Asia has been going

on for 100 years. The majority of the South East Asian Chinese community share the connection

with southern part of China, especially the southern provinces like Guangdong and Fujian,

and then they start to migrate to South East Asia, especially the coastal areas in the

late Ming and Qing dynasty. And also in the beginning of the 20th century, there are even

bigger flow of Chinese immigrants to South East Asia, and they move to major South East

Asian cities like Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Batavia, current day Jakarta, and Manila.

So the Chinese have very significant presence in South East Asia for a very long time. And

also, if we are familiar with South East Asian studies, I think overseas Chinese is probably