Introduction
The People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) diaspora engagement policies have been amongst the government’s top decision-makers’ priorities since the opening-up reforms in the 1970s. They have been pushed into an even more prominent position in the Xi Jinping 習近平 era with his “Chinese Dream” strategy and Belt and Road Initiative (Liu and van Dongen 2016). This stimulus has not only impacted the reorganisation of diaspora structures and the implementation of strategies at the PRC central-government level but has also reached the lower levels of China’s bureaucratic apparatus. Recently, scholars have highlighted the most recent transformations of the diaspora engagement policies in China by examining policy priorities (Thunø 2018), specific mechanisms (Ding 2015), diaspora governance structures (Liu and van Dongen 2016), or interplay with Chinese communities abroad (Schäfer 2019; Ren and Liu 2022). Still, there is a lack of understanding of how most recent reformulations of the...