“Chinatown is Chinatown; Flushing is China”: Defining Chinese Diasporic Urbanism in Emerging Chinatowns

“Chinatown is Chinatown; Flushing is China.” This social media meme, coined by a Chinese international student living in Long Island City, captures something real about Queens today. After the 1970s, Mandarin-speaking immigrants from Taiwan settled Flushing, distinguishing it from Manhattan’s Cantonese-speaking Chinatown. Decades of word-of-mouth transformed Flushing into a regional cuisine destination. More recently, developers have brought contemporary Chinese urban development models to the neighborhood—the new Tangram Mall, with its neon-lit food courts and trendy retail, mirrors the malls of today’s Chinese cities. Young Chinese immigrants recognize this landscape and find comfort in it.

Long Island City, meanwhile, has become something else: a dense, Shanghai-like skyline of luxury towers that attract young professionals and international students. Connected to Flushing by the No. 7 train—the International Express—residents can live in a modern city and reach a nostalgic hometown in a single subway ride. The trip is not only spatial but temporal. “When homesick, go to Flushing.”

This research documents, maps, and theorizes what we call Chinese diasporic urbanism: the process by which contemporary Chinese urbanization models are transported overseas through migration and urban imagination. Through fieldwork, interviews, architectural drawings, and mapping in Flushing and LIC, we ask how new generations of Chinese Millennials and Gen Z bring emerging spatial typologies with them—and how those imaginings reshape the built environment of Queens.

The project was supported by an Architectural League of New York Independent Projects Grant. Findings are disseminated through a bilingual online visual archive and the Chubby Cat Happy Chat podcast (co-hosted with Shurui Zhang).