Training for transnationalism: Chinese children in Hungary

Abstract

Based on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted in the mid-2000s, this article discusses the educational strategies and emerging trajectories of Chinese children born or raised locally in Hungary. Born to small entrepreneurs who migrated to Hungary in the 1990s, these children exemplify a second generation issuing from a migration taking place in conditions sharply different from earlier migrant flows to Western Europe, North America and Southeast Asia. This first migrant generation came of age in the post-reform People's Republic of China (PRC) and generally maintains both Chinese citizenship and a political and emotional identification with the PRC. Based on findings in Hungary, this article argues that this cohort of migrants' children is being trained for a sustained transnationalism rather than for a minority position in the society of residence, and that, at least in countries that are semi-peripheral for global capitalism, this training appears to be largely effective.

Keywords:

• China
• Hungary
• transnationalism
• migration
• education
• childhood

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Greg Benton for his help, going well beyond his duties as editor, in the last phase of editing this article.

Notes

1. For ethnographic examples, see Nyíri (2007) on Eastern Europe; Ceccagno (2007) and Nieto (2007) on Southern Europe; Bourdarias (2010), Dobler (2009) and Kernen (2010) on Africa; and Lausent-Herrera (2010) and Tjon Sie Fat (2010) on South America.

2. This section draws on Nyíri (2006). The study, reported more fully in Nyíri and Feischmidt (2006), included a questionnaire administered to seventy-one schools with a total of over 2,000 foreign students; one school year of fieldwork in thirty schools and three refugee reception stations; focus group discussions with forty migrant children; and sixty interviews with children, thirty with parents and forty with teachers. The survey covered nearly all schools with more than four foreign pupils in Budapest and three cities and towns close to the southern border of Hungary – selected on the basis of the presence of migrant populations and differing total population sizes – at the time of the study.

3. ‘Migrant children’ refers to children born in China. In the secondary-school cohorts that we studied, none of the children were born in Hungary.

4. Official data on the Chinese population are unreliable because of statistical definitions and data registration problems. The estimate of 10,000–15,000 is based on the number of businesses and accords with estimates by Chinese organization leaders. For an explanation of the method of estimation, as well as more sociodemographic data, see Nyíri (2007).

5. This section is based on Nyíri (2006).

6. Pedone (2011, 500–501) notes similar fantasies of success among Chinese children in Italy, noting that ‘the values embraced’ by them ‘basically do not seem to differ from those of their parents’.

7. http://www.magyar-kinai.hu/cimlap.html – figures hereunder are from the same website.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pál Nyíri

PÁL NYÍRI is the Professor of Global History from an Anthropological Perspective at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam.