Strategic noncitizenship: Mainland Chinese immigrants as noncitizens in Australia

ABSTRACT

This research aims to provide a bottom-up view of how immigrants approach, navigate, and act upon their statuses as citizens and noncitizens in their countries of residence. For this purpose, this paper presents an empirical case study of Mainland Chinese immigrants (MCIs) in Australia by integrating data sourced from Australia’s 2016 National Census as well as online and offline fieldwork. This paper develops the concept of strategic noncitizenship to understand MCIs’ responses to not only the constraining citizenship framework in China that prohibits dual citizenship, but also the changing framework in Australia that has sought to tighten its arrangements. This research argues that, just like citizenship, noncitizenship can also be a strategic self-chosen way of being; one that still allows room for agentic practices, claims-making, and political empowerment. Therefore, noncitizenship is not necessarily precarious and powerless as often claimed. This paper has two discussion sections. The first identifies and explains the distinctively low naturalisation rate among MCIs in Australia. The second part demonstrates how noncitizen MCIs have tactically responded to and even contested Australia’s initiatives to tighten its citizenship framework, and reflects upon their conditional political empowerment. The article concludes with future directions for research.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese immigrants
• strategic citizenship
• naturalisation
• noncitizenship
• Australia

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to all the participants who generously shared their opinions and experiences during the fieldwork. Particular thanks also go to Professor Jia Gao, Professor Pookong Kee, Professor Mark Wang, Dr. Lewis Mayo, Dr. Simon Gogh, and Ms. Asako Saito, as well as the two anonymous reviewers, who provided insightful and helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The term Mainland Chinese immigrants is used in this paper to underline the differences among Chinese immigrants with regard to sending countries and regions. It does this to explore how different Chinese immigrant groups may perceive and experience citizenship and noncitizenship differently. ‘Ethnic Chinese’, and ‘(ethnic) Chinese immigrants’ are more inclusive terms used to refer to people of Chinese descent living outside of mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, regardless of their birthplace, country of origin, or immigration status. The concept ‘Chinese diaspora’ and ‘overseas Chinese’ are avoided here for their connotations of Jewish diaspora and China-centredness, as discussed in prior research (Pan 2018, 28–29).

2 Other rights reserved to Australian citizens include freely leaving and entering Australia, seeking help from Australian consulates, voting in a Constitutional referendum or plebiscite, seeking election to parliament, and registering their children in another country as an Australian citizen.

3 The skilled stream, which consists four main categories: general skilled migration, employer nomination, business skills migration, and distinguished talent, has overtaken family reunification as the most important component of Australia’s Migration Program since the mid-1990s.

4 WeChat, with 938 million active users globally by April 2017, is currently the most important and widely used social media used among mainland Chinese (Novet 2017).

5 This is based on the ranking of source countries that have more than a population of 10,000 in Australia.

Additional information

Funding

Portions of this research were drawn from the author’s doctoral research which was funded by the China Scholarship Council.