In this article, we explore how Chinese scholars in the USA recount their transnational collaborations and linkages. Guided by post-colonial theories and cultural studies of transnational academic mobility, we utilise in-depth interviews to resituate the scholars' experiences within a discourse of diasporic intellectual networks. We argue that their movement is not simply a transfer from one physical location to another, but rather that the movement itself constitutes a new space of identification, of belonging and of global imagination. We conclude by considering the transnational implications of local agency for global connectivity and emergence of new subjectivities in a fluid global world. (Contains 1 note.)