New theoretical dialogues on migration in China: introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT

This special issue emerges from the observation that the current literatures on migration in China are constrained by a series of shortfalls, including a relative topical homogeneity centred on domestic labour migration, relatively narrowly conceived and institutionalist conceptions of migration and migrants, and a lack of engagement with theoretical models and paradigms in the broad discipline of migration studies. Assembling eight fine-grained research papers engaging with a broad variety of migratory trajectories and experiences, this special issues addresses these shortfalls by: (1) investigating diverse forms of domestic and transnational migration in and to China; (2) problematising and innovating well-established analytical tools and categories in the studies on migration in China; and (3) underscoring the centrality of identity, subjectivity and everyday experiences to theoretical understandings of migration in China. Claims to such contributions are based on a concise but pointed review of the status quo of knowledge on migration in and to China.

KEYWORDS:

• Internal migration
• transnational migration
• theoretical innovation
• China

The landscapes of migration in China are currently caught up in a multitude of movements and counter-movements. On 18 November 2017, 19 people died and 8 were injured in an outburst of fire in Xinjian Village, an urban village with a high concentration of rural-to-urban migrant workers. Right after the tragedy, the Beijing municipal authority started a 40-day cleansing of informal settlements with ‘potential safety hazards’ to remove the ‘low-end population’ (diduan renkou 低端人口). As large stocks of self-help housing were relentlessly demolished, hundreds of thousands of migrants were displaced; in some neighbourhoods, coercive removal was completed within 48 h.¹ Such outright denial of the very existence of migrant workers came, paradoxically, at a time when the Chinese state and mass media had begun to portray rural migrants in a more positive light, praising and even glorifying the latter as industrious and docile social bodies who willingly contribute to reform-era development of China (Qian and Guo 2019). Contradictions of this sort challenge us to constantly interrogate how far migrants’ citizenship reaches and where its boundaries lie.

In parallel, as an emerging global power, China is making the transition from a predominantly sending to a sending-cum-receiving country of transnational immigrants (Centre for China & Globalization 2018). In this context, attracting international immigrants is targeted by Chinese cities as a strategy of ‘worlding’ (Ong 2011) and building a global, cosmopolitan city profile, not to mention the fact that making China a desirable destination for foreign immigrants, especially those from Global South countries, makes part and parcel of China’s geopolitical ambitions. More recently, however, domestic voices have proliferated, criticising the ‘supra-citizen preferential treatment’ (chao guomin daiyu 超国民待遇) enjoyed by foreigners, inter alia overseas students in Chinese universities.² Media coverages, often in enraged tones, have abounded, depicting how students from Global South countries perform poorly in academic areas but are treated with generous allowances, decent housing conditions and excessive welfare. Censorious scrutiny has also been cast onto how expatriates from the West carry with them a colonial mentality of being superior, and demonstrate laxation and indiscretion in behaviour and morality. For the first time in history, issues around otherness, multiculturality and difference have been brought to the fore of the Chinese society, which has long been portrayed as largely monocultural and homogenous.

As empirical realities have quickly mutated and ramified, scholarships on migration in China have embarked on a quick process of proliferation and subject-matter diversification. This special issue builds on the achievements already made in the field but, with the collective efforts of eight fine-grained research papers, further advances it. First, we observe that the extant scholarship has focused predominantly on domestic rural-to-urban migration in China but failed to adequately appreciate transnational migration (for example, traders from Africa, the Middle East and South Asia, labour migrants from Southeast Asian, or elite expatriates from South Korea, Japan, Europe and North America, see Bodomo 2010; Skeldon 2011; Zheng 2016). The establishment of the National Immigration Administration in 2019 indicates that transnational migration has already become an important and practical issue faced by the Chinese authority and society. Even the landscapes of internal migration have been quickly and profoundly diversified. This special issue accounts for this increasing diversity by combining domestic and transnational migration and by partaking in issues as diverse as labour migrants (Qian and Florence 2021 this issue; Gao 2021, this issue), African traders (Carling and Haugen 2021, this issue; Jordan et al. 2021, this issue), intellectual and highly-skilled migration (Li et al. 2021, this issue), elite expatriates (Cai and Su 2021, this issue), forced migration due to development projects (Feng, Zhu, and Wang 2021, this issue) and lifestyle migration (Chen and Bao 2021, this issue).

Second, the scholarship on migration in China has long been dominated by investigation of the institutional parameters that shape the motives, processes and consequences of migration. A search on Web of Science indicates that the most cited articles are lopsided on the hukou system, the resulting differentiations in occupations and wages between rural migrants and local urban citizens, the discriminated housing situations of migrants, and the formation of migrant enclaves such as urban villages (Chan and Zhang 1999; Meng and Zhang 2001; Fan 2002; Wang, Wang, and Wu 2009). More recently, the scope of the scholarship has been broadened to include inquiries such as migrant communities and social lives, migrants’ sense of place and sense of community, migrants’ family strategies, migrant children’s education and human capital, return migration and entrepreneurship, left-behind children and elders, etc. But these studies still couch largely in institutional terms and analyses. Resultantly, these studies are aligned with rigid conceptions of place, social network, community and family, associated with fixed attributes and implications. Much less attention has been dedicated to migrants’ agency in experimenting with the institutional turfs to advance specific purposes, their fluid identities and subjectivities, everyday experiences and practices, and their multiple, evolving relations to broader cultural and ideological systems (but see Sun 2014; Liu et al. 2015; Pun 2016; Gao, Qian, and Yuan 2018 for notable exceptions). The current special issue casts these problems into sharp relief by bringing migration to bear on theoretical perspectives as diverse as power/knowledge of governmentality (Qian and Florence 2020, this issue), the hybrid subjectivities of migrants (Gao 2020, this issue), the new mobility paradigm (Feng, Zhu, and Wang 2020, this issue), intergenerationality (Chen and Bao 2020, this issue), mediated and brokered circumstance of migration (Carling and Haugen 2020, this issue), precarity (Jordan et al. 2020, this issue), and home-making and dwelling (Cai and Su 2020, this issue).

Finally, a broad ambition of this special issue is to enrich theoretical models and perspectives in migration studies. For example, both Qian and Florence’s (2020, this issue) and Gao’s (2020, this issue) contributions suggest that migration alone may not constitute an adequate category of governance and governmentality. Instead, migration and migrants are enmeshed within broader discursive and ideological systems that the state and society co-produce to create spaces of citizenship and ‘civic governmentality’ (Roy 2009). Here, the convergence between a ‘hard’ edge of power, i.e. a disciplinary political economic structure and ‘soft’ edge, i.e. technologies of the self, provides new opportunities of theoretical reflection (De Jong 2016).

Meanwhile, this special issue aims to highlight the fluid, transient and circumstantial aspects embedded in different types of migration flows. This theoretical take resonates with emerging paradigms in migration studies, inter alia the so-called ‘temporal turn’ (Griffiths, Rogers, and Anderson 2013; Baas and Yeoh 2019). From these debates, we may infer that in the contemporary global world, temporalities engineered by institutions, economic structures and the nation-state often offer little prospect for migrants to settle firmly and permanently in the host society, regardless of how long they have actually resided there (Çağlar 2016). Migration experiences are infused with feelings of flux, provisionality, uncertainty and precarity, which force migrants to keep with circular paths of lives (Griffiths 2014; Robertson 2016; Boersma 2019). As Robertson (2019) points out, the spatial–temporal boundaries that migrants encounter perpetually is contingent on the intersection of three different timescales: (1) the institutional time associated with state governance and employment regimes; (2) biographic time associated with life events and the (imagined) relations between past, present and future; and (3) everyday time associated with rhythms of everyday work and life. These complex intersections produce uneven implications for class, gender, welfare and the citizenship regime (Koh 2015; Seo 2019). These theoretical insights speak powerfully to the current special issue. For example, Qian and Florence’s (2020, this issue) and Gao’s (2020, this issue) papers both demonstrate that domestic migrant workers’ experiences are not only translocal but also transtemporal – the perpetual precarity created by the hukou system and the imposition of industrial time (e.g. long and repetitive working hours) are central to migrants’ identities and subjectivities. Also, while the state regulation of transnational migration is an important component of contemporary geopolitics, such a regime is at best incomplete and fragmented in China. The institutional labyrinth that sits at the nexus of the visa regime, international relations, local police rationality, cultural norms, attitudes towards multiculturality, etc. entails that the simple question of how long an African trader can stay in China is imbued with much uncertainty. Hence, migration decision-making is necessarily circumstantial, uncertain, volatile and ongoing. Carling and Haugen’s (2020, this issue) contribution epitomises this point vividly. Moreover, while mainstream accounts on intellectual and highly-skilled migration have examined extensively flows from Global South to Global North, Li et al.’s (2020, this issue) contribution unpacks processes of a reversed direction, i.e. from Global North to China as an emerging power in the form of return migration. This process, nonetheless, draws heavily on the earlier processes of China-to-the-West, education-oriented immigration. Such a circulatory view of talent migration enables us to appreciate the complex entanglement of global economic changes, individual aspirations, human capital accruement, and lifecycles. Furthermore, while family has always figured prominently in migration studies, it is often presumed that family moves from a fixed status in the place of origin to another fixed status in the place of destination. In contrast to this view of mechanical locational change, both Jordan et al.’s (2020, this issue) and Chen and Bao’s (2020, this issue) contributions rework family as a mobile, unstable and evolving category, which is constantly reconstructed as it traverses multiple spatial–temporal frames and coordinates.

The main body of this introductory essay is organised into four sections. The first three provide a brief review of existing studies on migration in China, structured as three parallel themes: (1) rural-to-urban migration, settlement intention and the hukou system; (2) social networks and communities; and (3) mobility, identity and migrants’ everyday practices. Our purpose is not to provide an exhaustive retrospection of existing works; nor do we claim that the current special issue can dialogue with or even advance a good number of theoretical perspectives and insights contained in this quickly enlarging literature. Our objective is simply to give readers a sense of how far this area has gone and what is the broader intellectual context in which this special issue is situated (note that we draw on works published both in Anglophone and Sinophone journals), particularly given that many studies reviewed in this introductory essay resonate with contributions in the special issue, at least on a topical basis.

The final section contemplates over some shortfalls and oversights in this scholarship, and points to a number of ways in which this special issue addresses them. The same section briefly introduces the topics and arguments covered by contributions in this special issue. Because this special issue addresses a geohistorical setting, i.e. China, rather than a specific topic of research, the logical connections between the papers included here may appear to be looser than we usually see in JEMS special issues. This is an unavoidable consequence of the breadth of social, cultural and spatial experiences effectuated by migration, not to mention the sheer scales and diversities of migration in China. Mindful of the fact that this special issue is not able to advance systematically specific theoretical or conceptual debates, we nonetheless hope to showcase how migration in China can be theorised and conceptualised in more flexible, open-ended and relational ways than they have been thus far, and in so doing set an agenda for new lines of inquiries to further innovate this already vibrant area of research.

One clarification needs to be in place before we proceed to the next sections. In this special issue, the notion of migration in China refers to domestic migration in China and international immigration (including the return migration of diasporic Chinese who no longer hold Chinese citizenship) arriving in China, excluding outbound immigration from China. This may look problematic at the first sight, but we hope to give the special issue a certain degree of internal coherence by focusing on the territorial space of China as the primary context that migrants, internal and international alike, encounter and negotiate. We acknowledge that outbound migration from China is equally contingent on China as a geohistorical context, but to fully appreciate those migration trajectories and experiences would entail extensive treatments of conditions in the places of destination. Due to constraints in space, such inquiries would not fall into the scope of this special issue.

Individual and family migration: settlement intention and the hukou system

The corpus on migration in China has long been and is still dominated by concerns with rural-to-urban migration. Due to institutional barriers that prevent rural-to-urban migrants from being fully integrated into the urban society (such as the hukou system), migratory life for this group is more often than not mobile, transitory and unsettled (see our earlier discussion on the precarity of migration). Eventually, the experiences and qualities of migration are highly contingent on changing relationships between destination cities and hometowns, measured through migrants’ willingness to settle in the city or keep a pendulum pattern of migration. In Western contexts, it has been argued that migration is increasingly a dynamic process rather than ending up with a static state. A new form of migration, termed circular migration, has become prominent, which refers to shuttling between destinations and hometowns. Scholars have seen circulation as a family-based and transitory condition that many migrants have to experience and negotiate (Zelinsky 1971; Skeldon 1977). As a result, decisions made along trajectories of migration are open-ended and difficult to anticipate. Rural-t0-urban migration in China is increasingly taking up circulatory patterns and needs to be analysed as a dynamic, ongoing process of decision-making, though contextual conditions that shape the parameters of such experiences are radically different from Western contexts.

The factors influencing migration decisions are always multi-dimensional and complicated. From the perspective of neoclassical migration theory, migration behaviour is deemed as the maximisation of utility and strongly related to human capital. Massey et al. (1993)’s ground-breaking article provides us a systematic review of how human capital including age, gender, martial statue, education attainment, working condition and other individual-related factors influence the decision-making of migration. But more recent theoretical advancements have also considered correlations between socio-cultural conditions and settlement intentions. Considering the massive scale of migration in China, empirical research of migrants’ decision-making has reported varying findings and results based on evidence from different regions and at different times. Some studies associate settlement intention to personal attributes of migrants. For instance, using data from Fujian Province, Zhu and Chen (2010) find out that these who are younger, female and single tend to settle down in the destination cities than these who are older, male and married. But Tan et al. (2017)’s research indicates that the married have a higher likelihood to settle than the single and the relationship between age and settlement decision shows a converse-U shape. But humans are more than an aggregate of human capital and personal attributes. Chen and Liu (2016), however, argues that both economic incentives and socio-cultural attachment are salient in determining settlement intentions. Tang and Feng’s (2015) study of younger generation migrants in Jiangsu Province shows that differences in attitudes and behaviours exist between different age cohorts. Meanwhile, factors at the individual level are in interactions with wider institutional contexts. As Zhu (2007) argues, the lack of settlement intention among migrant workers is caused by the joint effects of the hukou system, the intrinsic drive in the industrial society for producing precarious labour, and migrants’ strategy of spreading economic risks in a context of urban-rural duality in China. Also, the socio-cultural conditions of the destination cities may have major impacts on the settlement decision. For instance, migrant enclaves based on shared places of origin or kinship ties give migrants a more settled status of life (e.g. Liu et al. 2015). In some places in Norwest China, minority migrants tend to stay in the places where ethnic minority groups aggregate while Han migrants do not exhibit such a preference (Zhang, Druijven, and Strijker 2019).

Against neoclassical migration theory, the new economics of labour school stresses the significance of family as the unit of decision-making (Stark and Bloom 1985). Moreover, migration behaviour is not only based on the maximisation of individual utility but also the minimisation of family risk. In this sense, rural-urban migration can be seen as risk-aversion behaviour through the allocation of family members. However, in the case of China, it appears that family does not figure prominently in decision-making. Studies have shown that more family members moving to the destination does not necessarily lead to stronger intention for settling in the city, and couple migration is to maximise earnings by arranging divisions of labour rather than to preserve family relations and intimacies (Fan 2011; Fan, Sun, and Zheng 2011). In fact, many Chinese rural families use circulation as a strategy to increase family income rather than staying permanently in cities.

Migrant workers’ jobs are usually unstable because labour is of a low-skilled nature and highly substitutable. Economic and employment precariousness contributes to the transitory nature of urban sojourning. However, it is arguable that, with the emergence of the second-generation migrant workers, family relations and issues will play a more significant role in migration experiences and decision-making. Compared to the first-generation migrants, the second-generation migrants are more educated, have stronger aspiration for urban lifestyles, and concern more about children’s education and family member’s welfare. It is in this context that issues such as left-behind children and the education of migrant children have moved centre-stage in public and policy discussions. Scholars have begun to investigate the long-term impact of split households on migrant children’s human capital, social integration and psychological wellbeing, as well as the education outcome of children who do reside in cities (Liang and Chen 2007; Ye and Lu 2011).

Above all, institutional exclusion is an overriding condition that shapes migration decisions. As a special institutional arrangement, the hukou system was originally established to obstruct the free movement of people by tying social welfare to places where one was registered. The hukou is closely related to many social benefits such as pension, medical care, education, housing subsidies, etc. Since the Reform and Opening, the development of labour-intensive and export-oriented industries in China stimulated the demands for cheap labour. It became less rational to continue to control the flows of rural-urban migration. As a result, there has been decreasing influence of the hukou system on people who aspire to move from rural to urban areas. Although it is still unrealistic to envision the complete abolition of the hukou system, a variety of reforms have been introduced and experimented at different scales of the state to promote the ‘citizenisation’ (shiminhua 市民化) of rural-to-urban migrants (Chan 2014). Local policies have enabled migrants to access resources in labour training, education, medical care, social services, housing, etc. For example, the residence permit system (Juzhuzheng Zhidu 居住证制度) has been implemented as the replacement of the temporary permit system (Zanzhuzheng Zhidu 暂住证制度) to reduce barriers for migrants to access urban welfare, although the effects have been limited and uneven across different cities. As we are writing this introductory essay, it is announced by the Chinese state that restrictions to urban hukou in cities whose populations are no more than 3 million will be lifted completely.³ Above all, reforms of the hukou system endow the local authorities more flexibility to determine how the system will work at the local level.

However, it has been criticised that hukou is still used as a screening system (e.g. increasing the cost of housing affordability and the qualification of purchasing houses) to prevent those low-skilled labourers from sharing resources in cities, especially in first- and second-tier cities where changes in economic structures usher in policies biased towards highly-educated and high-skilled talents (Zhang and Tao 2012). For example, many Chinese cities have introduced one version or another of a scoring system for vetting migrants’ eligibility for acquiring a local urban hukou. This system calculates the ‘scores’ achieved by migrants via indicators such as educational attainment, housing purchase, investment, tax payment, duration of employment, etc. (Chan 2009). Such policy practices illustrate vividly the state’s preference for prosperous and economically established migrants, while the vast majority of migrants will never be qualified for urban integration. Hence, for migrants, the hukou system is still a discriminatory institution that increases both the cost of employment and unemployment (Zhang 2010). While the relaxation of the hukou system has reduced the institutional discrimination that migrants encounter, they still have to confront social exclusion and the compartmentalisation of resources available through market mechanisms, both of which are related to their hukou status (Huang, Guo, and Tang 2010). Besides, the extent to which hukou shapes migration is negatively correlated to social mobility; in other words, the hukou system has an abiding impact on the social status of rural-urban migrants, and marginality may be passed on throughout multiple generations (Lu 2008).

Social networks and communities

It is generally considered that social networks are essential for migrants to sustain their livelihoods in destination cities. As Massey and España (1987) argued, social networks create a social support system which helps migrants reduce the cost of social integration. Migration communities can be seen as the results of the growth of social networks. In China, when rural migrants move to and work in cities, they are excluded from many forms of public services because of the hukou system, and often rely on self-help housing in semi-urbanised spaces such as urban villages. This means that migration communities can be essential for the floating population, especially these who have a plan for long-term settlement. Community relations are important indicators to measure the accumulation of social capital (Du and Li 2010). Also, Wang, Zhang, and Wu (2017a) find out that the number of migrants is positively correlated to social trust in the communities – the more migrants in the communities, there would be more frequent contact between locals and migrants, which counteracts the stigmatisation towards migrants. Wu’s (2012) work similarly demonstrates that migrants generally are strongly reliant on the social fabrics in communities although they are not keen on community activities.

In China, although rural-to-urban migrants usually build their social networks with other migrants, especially those from the same hometowns or with kinship ties, relations between migrants and local residents are equally fundamental to their settlement in the destinations because such social connection has a strong influence on their life chances in destinations and adaptations to the new environment (Yue et al. 2013). It is noted that migrants are usually excluded from social networks of locals while this exclusion is mainly attributed to the rural-urban duality entrenched in the Chinese society (Zhao and Wang 2018). This special arrangement also leads to dual-track communities, perpetuating socio-spatial segregation between migrants and locals. As a result, migrants are more likely to build their networks with other migrants, while in-group solidarity procures more significance than social ties with out-group residents. But this general observation begs nuanced unpacking, because notable differences exist between fellow migrants who share the same hometowns and those who do not, and between migrants who live amidst in-group neighbours and those who mingle with local residents.

In the existing literature, issues related to social networks and communities of migrants have been approached mainly through three theoretical perspectives. The first sees social networks as a utilitarian asset – the keyword here is social capital. It is argued, for example, that intra-migrant networks may provide migrants with access to jobs and a sense of security; however, it tends to correlate negatively to incomes and job satisfaction – information circulated among migrants is usually restricted to low-end jobs, and it is social relations with local people that are more likely to promote life chances and migrant entrepreneurship (Li 2004). As Liu (2019) points out, in order to promote inter-group interaction, the scale of the neighbourhood is more important than that of the city. Liu, Li, and Breitung (2012) find that for new-generation migrants, social networks draw less on bonds based on hometowns and kinship ties but are increasingly cross-class, non-kin and beyond boundaries of specific neighbourhoods, despite that interactions with local people are still limited. In comparison to old-generation migrants, young migrants appear to concern more about extracting social capital and utility from social networks.

The second approach addresses the quality of social interactions and social life, partaking in issues such as neighbourly relations, trust and community cohesion. Liu et al. (2017a) point out that neighbourhood ties and neighbourly relations contribute to the subjective wellbeing of migrants, even though it may not ameliorate material deprivation. In fact, Wu and Logan (2016) find that migrants are more prone than local residents towards neighbouring practices. In particular, interactions with local residents are conducive to mutual feelings of care, trust and friendship within communities (Wang, Zhang, and Wu 2017b).

The third approach focuses on the affective and emotional dimension of community and social life, looking at issues such as place attachment, community attachment and sense of belonging. Without denying the actually existing socioeconomic inequality, it is suggested that migrants do find merit and hence instantiate favourable experiences in new urban conditions. Urban life not only generates communal ties and social contacts, but also in certain circumstances creates favourable conditions for migrants to access public services and undertake mundane activities (Qian, Zhu, and Liu 2011; Qian and Zhu 2014; Wu et al. 2019). These experiences foster a positive emotional bonding with neighbourhoods and enhances migrants’ will to stay in the city (Du and Li 2012). To sum up, in all the three approaches it seems that migrant-resident social ties, rather than intra-migrant social ties, play the most important role in the economic, cultural and psychological integration of migrants, leading to stronger intention to settle permanently in the city (Yue et al. 2013; Huang et al. 2018).

In parallel, if we look at the studies on transnational migrants in China, it is obvious that the majority focus on transnational communities as well. This body of research can be divided into two groups. The first group of studies examine the socio-spatial characteristics, economic practices and social impacts of African communities in Guangzhou (now crowned as ‘Capital of the Third World’ by Chinese media) and to a lesser extent Yiwu in Zhejiang Province (Bodomo 2010; Zhou, Xu, and Shenasi 2016). Since the 1990s, African communities began to emerge in Chinese cities. Taking advantage of China’s rise as the manufacturing base of the world, African immigrants are mainly engaged in the trade of Chinese manufactured goods to Africa (Bodomo 2010; Lyons, Brown, and Li 2012). Liang (2013, 2014) finds out that similar to international migrants in other contexts, social capital of African immigrants is accumulated at the beginning of migration and enhanced through the effect of cumulative causation. Li et al. (2008) find that there are strong differentiations between African communities in Guangzhou and in western countries, in terms of transnational business, the localisation of cultures and religions, the forms of the social exclusion, and the formation of ethnic enclave economy. The ways in which African communities take shape are contingent on mutual dislike between African traders and local Chinese residents, as local integration is frustrated by social and cultural differences (Li, Ma, and Xue 2009). Li and Du (2012) trace the African ethno-economy in Guangzhou and reveal the chains of commerce and entrepreneurship from Africa to Europe, North America, Central Asia, southeast Asia and finally to China. Within African communities, the structure of the ethno-economy is divided into three circles. The first circle (core circle) is taken up by African businesspeople, the second circle is comprised of African communities and the last circle is inhabited by Africans and local Chinese. Indeed, Cissé (2015) argues that, compared to the past when the transnational networks of African migrants were mainly based on kinship, religious, ethnic and social ties, today’s transnational networks of African migrants are established beyond these traditional ties. Instead, such networks are practice-based and business-oriented, involving African traders, Chinese manufacturers and wholesalers.

The second body of works have looked at ethnic economies and communities of transnational immigrants in China, inter alia Korean and Japanese. Reflecting over the increasing demands for housing among transnational immigrants, Wu and Webber (2004) illustrate how economic globalisation and local institution together contribute to the formation of transnational gated communities in Beijing, which adds another layer to socio-spatial stratification in this quickly globalising city. With regard to Korean immigrants, their noticeable concentrations around the Wangjing district in Beijing and Yuanjing Road in Guangzhou have drawn attention from academics and mass media (Liu et al. 2017b; Ma 2019). With regard to Japanese immigrants, Liu and Chen (2014) find that Japanese expatriates strongly rely on an ethno-economy because it not only serves their daily needs but also acts as a medium to maintain their identity. Liu, Tan, and Nakazawa’s (2011) study shows that there are eight ‘agglomeration spots’ of Japanese expatriates in Guangzhou. Elite Japanese expatriates congregate in high-quality housing with onsite amenities and services, and their everyday life unfolds within a limited territory and is relatively isolated from the local society. Through a case study of Gubei area in Shanghai, Zhou and Liu (2015) illustrate that the Japanese ethnic economy is largely anchored in the Japanese ethnic enclave and mainly serves Japanese immigrants. Still, ethnic economy involves both Japanese immigrants and local Chinese doing business and providing services. The formation of the Japanese ethnic economy in Gubei interestingly reflects the intersection between two migrant groups with radically divergent socioeconomic conditions: Chinese migrant workers with constrained socioeconomic status and highly privileged Japanese expatriates.

Mobility, identity and migrants’ everyday practices

Against the background of globalisation, it is increasingly difficult for migration research to account for the unprecedented dynamics of migration. Mobility, as a new epistemological and methodological approach, has been introduced to better theorise movements of people across different geographical scales. Mobilities involve not only physical movements but also the flow of things, ideas, emotions and connections that traverse across different geographical scales (Cresswell 2011). As Cresswell (2012, 2014) has argued, mobilities is objective and subjective, abstract and concrete; they are border-crossing and de-territorialising, so they are inherently socialised and politicised. In the new mobilities paradigm, migrants are not considered unitary subjects who pursue functional and utilitarian ends (e.g. income, social capital or community), or passive objects waiting to be assimilated or accepted. Instead, migrants are divided and dislocated subjects who participate in different forms of life politics and experiment with emergent possibilities of life (Nelson and Hiemstra 2008).

The literature on migration in China has so far demonstrated limited engagement with the new mobilities paradigm, or more generally a constructionist, feminist, post-modern or post-structural take on migrant identity and subjectivity. Still, four themes in a small but growing body of scholarship shed light on this special issue. The first investigates the social production of migrant labour and labouring subjects as embedded in industrial capitalism and state governmentality. The series of works of Pun Ngai (1999, 2004, 2005), for example, show that the construction of female migrant workers’ labour is a socially and politically mediated process which not only involves the agenda of the capitalist class to produce tamed and disciplined work force, but also female migrants’ pursuit of urban modernity and cultures. In particular, Pun reflects over the new identities and ethics of self as migrants enter new sets of production and labour relations. This process hinges on technologies of governmentality and the self-subjectification of migrants. In a similar vein, Sun Wanning (2012, 2014) points out that the class identity of migrants is partly constituted but also questioned and resisted within the realm of cultural politics, as people negotiate and contest value, representation, historic narration and literary writing. Meanwhile, the cultural politics of labour is also associated with state regulation of informal migrant labour such as street vending (Huang and Xue 2011; Huang, Xue, and Li 2014; Huang, Xue, and Wang 2019). In addition, scholars tend to concur that the politics of labour is inherently gendered, related to experiences and social encounters at the workplaces (Jacka 2006; Zhang 2014; Choi 2018).

The second strand of studies has focused on the multifaceted and fluid ways in which domestic migrants and transnational immigrants negotiate a sense of home. Kochan (2016) argues that the notion of home for domestic migrant workers must be understood in relation to their strong connection to mobility and flexibility, and their efforts to create a space of subjective transformation within a disempowering institutional environment. Qian, Qian, and Zhu (2012) point out that during the 2010 language conflict in Guangzhou, local people defended Cantonese, the local language, largely by enshrining it as the hallmark of an authentic place identity which obliterated migrants’ experiences of living in the city and denied their claim to the place. Yet, this essentialist construction of place identity did not go undebated and in fact aroused critical reflections even within the local society.

With regard to transnational migrants, Castillo (2014) argues that place-making practices of African communities are derived from the assemblage of dwelling, community and religious aggregation. In particular, Castillo (2016) illustrates how socially and geographically made uncertainty influences African immigrants’ identity and everyday life in Guangzhou. Beyond the notion of precarity, uncertainty is utilised by African immigrants to establish solidarity and promote support to each other. Kong’s (1999) work on Singaporeans in Beijing shows that they employ a multitude of ways, including the distribution of publications that connect expatriates to what happens at home and the renewal of home cultures and traditions, to re-assert a Singaporean identity and consolidate the symbolic boundaries of a nation-state. In relation to Kong’s observation, a strong tendency towards self-isolation appears to be widely applicable to expatriate communities in China (also see our discussions above on Korean and Japanese communities). But Farrer’s (2010) study on expatriates in Shanghai suggests that they do aspire for local integration, albeit not necessarily living up to this ideal. As Cai and Zhu (2012) observe in the context of Guangzhou, expatriates who refrain from living in enclave-like social niches tend to integrate better to the local society.

For a third theme, the axes of race and gender figure prominently as transnational immigrants are re-embedded into new socio-spatial milieus. The influx of African traders, for example, bring the daily experiences of Chinese people into frictions with issues of race and cultural difference. Rather than based on pre-existing racial stereotypes, the construction of blackness and the racial category of African traders needs to be contextualised within the unequal economic and geopolitical relations between China and Africa, the intersection of internal and international migration, and the media construction of African people as sexually aggressive and cultural threatening (Lan 2016). Interestingly, domestic Chinese migrant workers and African traders would stereotype and racialise each other, but such constructions are often fluid, decentred and beyond rigid binaries (Lan 2019). For local residents, while negative perceptions about African people are discernibly played out, they are also open to economic transactions and social interactions with African people. The interplay between these two types of contact determines actual encounters and fluid dynamics of inclusion and exclusion (Zhou, Shenasi, and Xu 2016). Above all, African immigrants in China offer specific openings for theorising racial ideas and formations beyond the white–black paradigms in Western contexts. Attention to racial formations and multicultural encounters has become more necessary than ever, in a context where inter-marriage between Africans and local Chinese is increasing, giving rise to transnational families (see also Jordan et al. 2020, this issue), and where ethnic and racial profiling conditions Africans’ access to services such as education and health care.

As to gendered identities of transnational immigrants, Brenda Yeoh and Katie Willis’s works on immigrant women in China are exemplary. On the one hand, the creation and maintenance of transnational communities involve highly gendered work and practices, with women and women’s everyday practices playing more central roles (Willis and Yeoh 2002). On the other hand, Yeoh and Willis (2005) argue that for Singaporean women who migrated to China with their spouses, their subordination to patriarchal norms was reinforced as their roles were largely re-domesticated due to the lack of access to paid domestic services and institutional barriers. Apparently, participation in processes of economic transnationalisation which was usually associated with ‘elite’ women gave rise to more constrained, rather than liberated, gender identities and roles. Needless to say, there are specific and complex intersections between race and gender, as performances of masculinities and femininities are often invoked to defend boundaries of national identity and cultural difference (Lehmann 2014).

To conclude this section, we visit a fourth theme, namely Chinese immigrants who return to China from overseas destinations. Return migration to China consists mainly of returning professionals, academics and their families, who have usually naturalised into the citizenship of a Western country. This group is characterised by hybridised forms of cultural identification; in many circumstances, their liminality between Western intellectual training and knowledge of Chinese culture generates particular benefits for highly skilled and trained returnees (Teo 2011; Wang 2016). Yet, a focus on privilege hardly does justice to the complexity of returnees’ experiences. As Ho (2011, 2016) has pointed out, China’s restrictions on dual citizenship and the practice of hukou create barriers to returnees’ welfare and social rights. As a result, specific difficulties exist for them to re-belong to their homeland, which perpetuates ambiguities and uncertainties betwixt and between dual identities and compel them to engage in circular migration to maintain social ties in China and the countries to which they have naturalised. The intricate dialectic of privilege and marginality is vividly evident in state-led resettlement of overseas Chinese who were forced to leave their places of abode in Southeast Asian countries during the Maoist era (Ho 2013). During the Maoist era, returnees’ resettlement in state-endorsed farms served the geopolitical agendas of the Chinese state and gave them obvious privilege. After the Reform and Opening, however, such privilege has been eroded, as the farms are re-invented by the local state as economic zones and tourism sites, and as second-generation returnees become subject to trends of internal migration in China.

New theoretical dialogues

Brief and inexhaustive notwithstanding, our review of exiting works on migration in and to China enables us to identify at least three shortfalls which will be addressed collectively by this special issue. First, this special issue challenges the relative topical homogeneity in the existing literature by combining diverse types of migration and diverse groups of people on the move. This topical diversity, however, is not an end in itself, but a means to situate our collective works within the emergent discussions on alternative forms of internal migration in China⁴ and proliferating transnational migration to China. As such, the special issue brings together two papers on domestic labour migrants (Qian and Florence 2020, this issue; Gao 2020, this issue), one paper on domestic migration induced by development projects (Feng, Zhu, and Wang 2020, this issue), one paper on domestic lifestyle migration (Chen and Bao 2020, this issue), two papers on African immigrants (Carling and Haugen 2020, this issue; Jordan et al. 2020, this issue), one paper on elite expatriates (Cai and Su 2020, this issue), and finally one paper on intellectual and highly-skilled migration (Li et al. 2020, this issue).

Second, while the extant literature has engaged with multi-faceted experiences associated with migration, such as settlement intention, social capital, network and community, these aspects are usually approached with functionalist terms and analysed as fixed end-states, rather than dynamic and ongoing processes. However, settlement, network or community does not always signify the end of fluidity, mobility and transiency; neither do all migrants necessarily regard settlement, community or integration as the only or ultimate end of movement. This special issue, therefore, problematises and relativises academic categories such as community, family, labour and identity, and understands them as social processes that are assembled, negotiated and performed in situated, relational and performative ways, rather than end-states with rigid, pre-determined social, economic and cultural connotations. In this issue, the contributions of Gao (2020, this issue), Feng, Zhu, and Wang (2020, this issue), Chen and Bao (2020, this issue), Jordan et al. (2020, this issue), Cai and Su (2020, this issue), and Li et al. (2020, this issue) are each illustrative of such theoretical orientations. Ultimately, to borrow the thought-provoking phrase used by Carling and Haugen (2020, this issue) in their contribution to the special issue, an important theoretical objective of this special issue is to conceptualise migration as a fluid, transient and circumstantial unfolding, in which various migrants groups experiment with fluidity and uncertainty to develop new modes of social relatedness, re-invent meanings of multiple domains and spaces of life (e.g. place, community, family and home), and configure new possibilities of individual or collective survival, even flourishing (Simone 2010).

Finally, this special issue advances the status quo of knowledge about migration in China by underscoring the centrality of identity, subjectivity and everyday experiences. In contrast to the analytical angles that see migrant identity as an unproblematic, unambivalent and stable variable to be inserted into equations describing social realities, or measured and explained by socio-demographic factors, we argue that identity and subjectivity are constantly evolving and reconstructed, a process overdetermined by (1) the broader ideological systems and power geometries across the different scales and spaces of contextuality and contingency; and (2) the actual encounters, interactions and practices that unfold on an everyday basis. Such a take on identity and subjectivity is evident in various contributions in this special issue, notably Qian and Florence (2020, this issue), Gao (2020, this issue), Jordan et al. (2020, this issue) and Cai and Su (2020, this issue).

As to everyday experiences, the purpose of highlighting banality and everydayness is beyond merely providing thick descriptions of migratory experiences but to demonstrate that proper conceptualisations of migration must exceed pure economic reason or a singular rationality. Migration is always complicated by needs, aspirations, interests and pursuits that are situated, unpredictable and contingent on the immediate milieus of movement and encounter. Whether migrants have resources and abilities to adapt to such contingencies affect their wellbeing in profound ways. While such processual, open-ended notions of migration are well-established in migration studies, they are relatively new to studies on migration in China, many of which approach specific types of migration in narrowly conceived terms and downplay the multi-dimensional, constantly evolving nature of migratory processes and experiences. This special issue serves as a manifesto for the need to be attentive to everyday experiences and practices of migration, with many contributions – inter alia Gao (2020, this issue), Feng, Zhu, and Wang (2020, this issue), Chen and Bao (2020, this issue), Jordan et al. (2020, this issue), and Cai and Su (2020, this issue) – expressing strongly this orientation.

The substantive body of the special issue contains four papers investigating domestic migration in China and another four focusing on transnational migration to China. The first half starts with Qian and Florence’s (2020, this issue) interrogation of the construction of migrant worker identity in contemporary China, from the perspective of representation and discursive construction. Contemplating over the state-sponsored Migrant Worker Museum in Shenzhen, Qian and Florence (2020, this issue) argue that migrant worker identity in state discourses is much richer than the stigmatisation and marginalisation of rural migrants as uncivilised, disorderly, even criminal, but enmeshed in broader neoliberal discourses that celebrates the self-enterprising and self-responsibilisation of Chinese citizens. As a result, the museum has underscored a development-centred conception of migrant citizenship calculated foremost by migrants’ contributions to urban construction and economic development. But migrant workers cannot be completely assimilated by state discourses. In the Migrant Workers’ Culture and Arts Museum in Beijing, exhibitions curated by migrant workers themselves provide powerful counter-discourses that expose exploitation and curtailed citizenship, and appeal for ‘fair evaluation of migrant labour, welfare protection from the state, dignity of labouring bodies, and paramount of all, collective voice and identity’.

Engaging similarly with cultural politics of labour, Gao’s (2020, this issue) study of migrant workers in Shenzhen concurs with Qian and Florence’s (2020, this issue) argument about the imposition of a neoliberal regime of governance upon migrant workers, giving rise to oppressive labour discipline and hyper-exploitation. However, he also takes a detour into a largely unexamined aspect of migrant experiences, namely the rising Christian belief among migrant workers in Shenzhen. Employing theoretical optics proffered by the geography and sociology of religion, Gao (2020, this issue) argues that Christian theo-ethics steers migrant workers to reflect upon alienation and oppression, and re-institute humanistic ethos to enable collaborative work. It has even justified forms of entrepreneurship that goes against a militarised factory regime. In this vein, the author argues that theo-ethics creates spaces of hope and hybrid subjectivities beyond secular industrialism and neoliberal governance logics.

The following two papers take alternative forms of domestic migration to problematise notions of place, attachment and family. Feng, Zhu, and Wang’s (2020, this issue) paper unravels how migration induced by the Three-Gorges Project effectuated resettlement experiences that differentiated alongside the axis of age. While young people encountered places of destination with aspirations for new life and keep alive emotional attachment to hometowns via occasional return visits, older people were stranded in a state of relative mooring. For the latter, attachment and ideas of roots are not so much about going back and encountering ‘real’ places, but short-distanced movements between resettlement sites and close community ties with other relocatees. Chen and Bao’s (2020, this issue) paper shows how seasonal lifestyle migration of retirees heralded the reconstruction of other domains of everyday life such as intergenerational relations and spousal relations. In doing so, they argue that family is a dynamic category that exceeds locatedness in fixed space-times, and constantly negotiated in the continuum of spatial–temporal mobilities.

The second half of the substantive papers, which offer inquiries into transnational migration, starts with Carling and Haugen’s (2020, this issue) re-conceptualisation of migration as circumstantial dealing with uncertainty and unpredicted conditions, which is influenced by micr0-level contexts and coincidences. Developing the concept of circumstantial migration, the authors argue that the interplay of structure and agency oftentimes produces consequences that defy both sovereign agency and structural determination but are largely coincidental and full of uncertain twists and turns. Applying such theoretical insights to Gambian immigrants in China, an important theoretical appeal of the paper is that transnational migration between Global South contexts should not be cast as empirical cases reaffirming Anglo-American theoretical models but a productive starting point for novel endeavours of theorisation. Engaging also with African immigration to China, Jordan et al.’s (2020, this issue) paper investigates how institutional barriers to African migrants’ integration creates multi-faceted experiences of precarity for African-Chinese families, usually composed of African immigrant men, Chinese domestic migrant women and their children. Questioning precarity as a stable and all-encompassing subjective experience, the authors argue that precarity can also be a productive and activating condition for homing practices which produce or strengthen agency, solidarity and resilience.

The focus of the special issue then moves to more elite, better-off and better-educated sections of transnational immigrants. Cai and Su’s (2020, this issue) study on Western expatriates in Guangzhou reveals that experiences of mobility are partly constituted by efforts of regaining a sense of stability and rootedness. Balance between dwelling and travelling requires heavy investment of both physical and emotional labour so that home can be made and practiced at different scales from the home to the city. Yet, homeliness is constantly deferred by feelings of uprootedness and temporariness, because expatriates tend to dwell in a bubble-like social existence that pushes away the perplexing otherness of local people. Finally, Li et al.’s (2020, this issue) paper on intellectual and highly-skilled migration within and to China resists the concept of migration as a one-off switch between fixed statuses of life but a continuum along which migration stages intersect with life transitions and socioeconomic contingencies. Relative settlement may be the prior step for subsequent move, while mobility and fixity are relational and contextual, produced across scales and networks of places, and ‘by time, space, boundaries, contextual environments in origin and destination countries and beyond, as well as personal identities and experiences’. Intellectual migration, conceived of in this way, is a circulatory process underlain by ‘an array of individual, institutional and structural forces that include transnational/trans-local activities conducted by migrants and/or their families’.

Acknowledgement

The special issue project and an international workshop held in November 2018 and involving contributors to the special issue have received financial sponsorship from National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC grant number 41630635, 41671146, 41901170). The guest editors would like to thank Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies for providing a platform that makes these dialogues known to a broader audience. We are also profoundly grateful to all the authors involved in this project and all the anonymous reviewers who provided constructive and critical assessments of the papers. Finally, we thank Dr Zhang Bo of South China Normal University who provided invaluable insights that helped us complete this review of literatures on migration in China.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The special issue project and an international workshop held in November 2018 and involving contributors to the special issue have received financial sponsorship from National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) [grant numbers 41630635, 41671146, 41901170].

Notes

1 See e.g. New York Times, Chinese edition, 01 December 2017, https://cn.nytimes.com/china/20171201/china-beijing-migrants/zh-hant/.

2 See, for example, Australia Broadcasting Corporation, Chinese edition, https://www.abc.net.au/chinese/2019-07-17/recruit-buddies-for-foreign-students-in-china-raise-concerns/11314694.

3 Source: http://www.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2019-12/26/c_1125388390.htm.

4 For example, state-encouraged resettlement as a poverty alleviation strategy, see Lo, Xue, and Wang 2016; resettlement of incumbent residents from ecologically vulnerable areas, see Du 2012; migration induced by major projects such as dams, see Galipeau, Ingman, and Tilt 2013; and lifestyle migration, see Qian and Zhu 2016.