“Middling” Chinese Returnees or Immigrants from Canada? The Ambiguity of Return Migration and Claims to Modernity

Abstract:

This paper investigates the conceptual overlaps between transnational return migration and immigration by drawing on a qualitative study of Mainland Chinese return migration from Canada. The paper argues that reframing return migration as a distinct type of immigration draws attention to the citizenship vulnerabilities experienced by “middling” returnees who are not privy to the preferential treatment given to highly skilled returnees. They come to be considered as “foreigners” in their homeland because they have naturalised elsewhere. The paper also explores the double diasporic identifications of Mainland Chinese returnees from Canada; it highlights the tensions and fissures manifested in secondary diasporas, particularly in light of China’s growing prominence in international business, foreign diplomacy and cultural exchanges. The paper suggests that social encounters that marginalise such migrants in Canada are reproduced in China. The returnees navigate such encounters by mobilising their transnational affiliations to different national contexts.

本文探讨了从中国大陆移民到加拿大之后由于融入加拿大面对困难而决定回到自己祖国的一群人。这些人属于“中等“层次的移民，因此他们无法得到像高技术归国人员得到的优先待遇。同时他们在他们自己的家乡被当作“外国人”，因为他们取得了外国国籍。本文认为如果将他们作为一种特殊类型的移民者将会让人们开始关注公民身份与现实经验之间的差异。本文也讨论了这些人对中国和加拿大的双重意识，同时强调了中等移民归国后表现出的冲突和分歧，特别是在考虑到中国在国际商业，外交和文化交流方面日益突出的重要性。本文认为这类中等移民在加拿大经历过的被边缘化的社会地位在他们回到中国后又再次经历。但这些归国移民通过调动他们在不同国家的跨国联系来改善这种被边缘化的社会地位。

Keywords:

• immigration
• return migration
• diaspora
• modernity
• China
• Canada

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by Metropolis British Columbia and the Asia Pacific Foundation. We would like to thank the Social and Cultural Research Group (NUS Department of Geography), the anonymous reviewers and journal editors for their feedback on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The hukou, or household registration system, in China can be likened to a domestic passport system that confers rights at the local level, such as housing and educational subsidies or jobs in government that are reserved for those with local hukou status. Giving up Chinese citizenship is tantamount to relinquishing one’s hukou.

2. The label “new Canadians” refers to immigrants who arrived in Canada in the last ten to fifteen years and took up Canadian permanent residency or citizenship status.

3. These range from political philosophy such as tianxia (all-under-heaven) to purportedly distinctively Chinese norms such as xiao (filial piety), mianzi (“face”) and guanxi (personal connections).

4. The overall study included a discourse analysis of Chinese and English language policy documents and news reports but this will not be addressed in detail here.

5. The criteria include migrants’ educational qualifications, professional and business experience, English language proficiency, investment capital and age.

6. Xiang (2003), however, cautions against portraying the Chinese state as a coherent apparatus because of a diversity of Chinese emigration cohorts and the multiple government actors involved in mediating migration.

7. Apart from the xinyimin, the Chinese diaspora also refers controversially to historical waves of ethnic Chinese dispersed abroad such as the huaren (overseas Chinese of foreign nationalities by descent); see Suryadinati (1997).

8. Immigrants entering Canada under the skills scheme now need to receive a job offer prior to entry or show evidence of at least one year’s continuous employment in a list of selected industries (CIC, 2012b and 2012c).

9. ‘Shiye! Jianada huaren xinyimin chujing kanyou’, Nanfei Huaren Bao, 22 December 2006, no page; ‘Sancheng jiannada zhongguo xinyimin zao qishi’, Mei Qiaobao, 16 January 2007, no page.

10. These family traumas are experienced by astronaut households from Taiwan and Hong Kong too (Waters, 2002; Ley, 2010).

11. The respondents use the label “local” to differentiate those born and bred in Canada from first-generation immigrants. The former category refers not only to Caucasian-Canadians but also to 1.5- and later-generation descendants of other immigrant groups including earlier cohorts of Chinese migrants.

12. ‘Jiahuaren huiguo chuangye jianzeng’, Dongfang Shibao, 15 June 2006, no page.

13. For example, Ip (2011) estimates that more than 300,000 former emigrants had returned to Hong Kong by 2007, of whom 35 per cent came from Canada, 24 per cent from Australia and New Zealand, 12 per cent from the UK and 11 per cent from the US. These statistics are suggestive of a broader trend of Chinese return migration to Mainland China as well, in view of the similar challenges to settlement and integration they face abroad like their Hong Kong counterparts. A more thorough household survey in Hong Kong identified at least 300,000 returnees from Canada alone (Zhang and DeGolyer, 2011).

14. ‘Meng xing shifen: yazhou “rencai” huiliu de zhongguo jihui’, Jingji Cankao Bao, 6 January 2011, no page.

15. This is so as not to jeopardise their chances of future return to Canada; if they remained as permanent residents they would need to renew this status every five years by residing for at least two years in Canada.