Drawing on the burgeoning literature on globalization, international migration and the deterritorialization of social identity in transcultural contexts, we examine the diasporic designs of the Singapore state in its ‘goregional’ push and compare this with individual (re)negotiations of social identity as a result of relocation in China. While the state has exhorted the value of configuring a Singaporean diasporic identity which facilitates cultural penetration of the Chinese nation through network capitalism and ethnic entrepreneurship and by projecting Singapore's brand name on foreign shores, identity negotiations of individual citizens across transnational space appears to be both ‘strategic’ and ‘sticky’.
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