Embodied by state borders: citizenship negotiations of children in Chinese–foreign families in the People’s Republic of China

ABSTRACT

The citizenship of Chinese–foreign children who have been brought up in China is an area of increasing political relevance because of their growing numbers and public visibility, as well as the high status accorded to children in the political agenda of the Communist Party, and wider debates on Chinese citizenship, identity and belonging. In this article we examine how decisions about children’s citizenship are made across national and generational divides in different family contexts in China, namely in Chinese–Vietnamese, Chinese–Russian, Chinese-Ukrainian, and Chinese–Cameroonian families. We tease out contestations between foreign and Chinese parents and grandparents and discuss how gender, socioeconomic, and racial dimensions affect children's citizenship negotiations in these multigenerational households. We argue that the bodies of the Chinese-foreign children occupy a prominent place in the territorialising practices of Chinese citizenship that are shaped by gendered, racial, and socioeconomic inequalities.

KEYWORDS:

• Citizenship
• children
• national body
• China
• Chinese-foreign families

Introduction

During the 2022 Beijing winter Olympics teenage freestyle skier Eileen Gu rose to global stardom and won national admiration in China by securing three Olympic medals for the Chinese national team. The medals were particularly important to China, because Eileen is a US citizen by birth, with a Chinese mother and an American father. In 2019 Eileen publicly announced that she had applied for a Chinese passport and would compete in the Chinese team in the winter Olympics three years later. Her decision was wholeheartedly supported across China, where she became a candidate for Chinese and international brands alike. Eileen Gu’s public announcements do not clarify whether she had forfeited her US citizenship, as acquiring Chinese nationality would require in accordance with the 1980 Chinese nationality law.¹ The choices of Chinese–foreign personalities, like Eileen Gu, are important in showing that China’s ambitions to become a global power are reflected in the changing perceptions and practices of Chinese citizenship, national identity, and belonging. While Eileen Gu’s global prominence as an elite athlete was key to her naturalisation and to her welcome by the Chinese public, the same does not apply to all children born to Chinese–foreign families.²

The citizenship of Chinese–foreign children who are brought up in China is an area of increasing research interest due to their growing numbers, the role that children play in the political agenda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the effects of nationality and immigration laws, and wider debates on Chinese identity and belonging. The status of the children, whose identity straddles territorial, legal, and cultural differences, is negotiated at the family level, which in turn cannot be easily detached from national discourses and practices of citizenship.

Although in the studies of citizenship and migration, much attention has been paid to the politicisation of marriage migration around the world (Charsley 2012; D’Aoust 2022; Moret, Andrikopoulos, and Dahinden 2021) and the citizenship strategies of a foreign spouse in transnational households (Bonjour and Block 2016; Bonjour and de Hart 2021), negotiations of children’s citizenship in transnational families have not been closely examined. Moreover, the effects of globalisation of intimacy on citizenship issues in China has been under-researched. The Chinese state exercises a strict single-citizenship policy, which limits the choice of citizenship for children of mixed families. Thus, insights into the micro-politics of citizenship decisions made for Chinese–foreign children can broaden our understanding of Chinese sovereignty and its intersections with population governance. How Chinese–foreign families living in China decide on their children’s citizenship, what is at stake, who has the final say, with what implications, and how this differs between and across different family constellations, are the main questions raised in this article. By looking at the negotiations of children’s citizenship we show that children’s bodies occupy a prominent place in the Chinese state’s territorialising practices that are shaped by gendered, racial, and socioeconomic inequalities. We argue that paying attention to how children’s citizenship is decided on at the level of the multigenerational households illuminates the embodied practices of Chinese territorial sovereignty, where the bodies of children are contested by the state through the family.

Researching Chinese–foreign families in China

While Chinese–foreign, inter-racial, and cross-border marriages and intimacies have attracted academic interest (e.g. Farrer 2008, 2010; Nehring and Wang 2016; Sha 2019; Qiu 2016; Zhou 2017), there has been considerably less research on the situation of Chinese–foreign children.³ In this article, we focus on the family negotiations of Chinese–foreign children’s citizenship status. Unlike their foreign parents, who do not have access to full citizenship in China and can only hope, at best, to achieve the status of long-term residents (Barabantseva and Grillot 2018), children born to Chinese–foreign couples are automatically entitled to Chinese citizenship through their Chinese national parent. However, adopting Chinese citizenship means forfeiting the right to the foreign parent’s citizenship after the child turns 18. The Chinese nationality law does not allow dual citizenship nor has it provisions for permanent residency, and is further complicated by the domestic regime of household registration that regulates access to schooling and social provision (Habicht and Richter 2022). Consequently, parents are compelled to regularise their child’s citizenship before the age of 18. Deciding on which citizenship to choose and which administrative procedures to follow is neither easy nor straightforward in the context of unknown possibilities and an uncertain future.

In our analysis of this multilayered decision-making process, we consider the power dynamics in multigenerational family negotiations in the context of China’s national and transnational policies and socio-political history. We draw attention to the manifestation of national territory embodied in children’s citizenship, which functions as an extension of national borders to be claimed and fought for through the multigenerational family on behalf of the Chinese state.

The three types of Chinese–foreign families that we discuss here have attracted considerable attention in Chinese public and media debates: Chinese–Vietnamese, Chinese–Russian/Ukrainian, and Chinese–Cameroonian families. In the first two cases, the foreign spouse is generally the wife, whereas in the Chinese–Cameroonian case the foreign spouse is generally the husband. We categorise these three as historical, favoured, and unexpected marriages. Chinese–Vietnamese marriages are historical because China’s long-standing relationship with Vietnam as a tributary state led to complex cross-border networks and kinship ties. Chinese–Russian and Chinese-Ukrainian families are favoured and are represented in an overwhelmingly positive light in China’s popular discourses and visual narratives because they are associated with Whiteness, which is a symbol of racial superiority and development. The Chinese–Cameroonian families are unexpected, as they emerged as a result of China’s growing links with Africa and came as a surprise to most Chinese, who look down on Africans as uncultured and racially inferior.

Our aim here is to juxtapose what is at stake in these differentcontexts of familial citizenship negotiations. We argue that the bodies of children of Chinese–foreign couples occupy a prominent place in the territorialising practices of Chinese citizenship. Our contribution is to highlight how Chinese sovereignty is exercised through body politics rather than territorial claims alone. The children’s citizenship choices are shaped by the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic boundaries and intergenerational power dynamics in Chinese households. The decision-making processes are also informed by the foreign parents’ experiences and norms in their home countries, which they try to reconcile with their limited agency in the context of China’s legal and socio-cultural frameworks.

Research methods

Our analysis is based on research data collected as part of a larger research initiative on immigration and the transformation of Chinese society that brought together partners in Europe and China (Pieke et al. 2019). This article is the fruit of a collaboration between three researchers in two projects. Elena Barabantseva and Caroline Grillot studied cross-border marriage migration from Vietnam and post-Soviet areas (Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) and Michaela Pelican focused on African migrants in Guangzhou and Yiwu while participating in a project on lawmakers’, administrators’, and migrants’ views of Chinese immigration law and policy.⁴ Examining these cases of Chinese-foreign marriages in relation to each other illuminates how the interplay of class, race, and gender norms shape citizenship negotiations in China and how the territorialisation of children's belonging plays out across different family settings.

Original fieldwork for this article was conducted independently and covered different locations and periods in time. Elena undertook fieldwork between 2015 and 2018, which entailed short field trips twice a year to the China-Russia border areas and to Beijing. Caroline conducted ethnographic fieldwork for over a decade (2006–2016), realising several long and short-term stays in the rural border region between China and Vietnam. Michaela conducted yearly field trips to Guangzhou, Beijing, and Jinhua between 2013 and 2017, and made follow-up interviews in 2018.⁵ In terms of research methods, we used qualitative approaches, such as participant observation, conversations, and semi-structured interviews with foreign parents, whom we identified mainly through snowball sampling. Our sample included 48 Chinese–Ukrainian and Chinese-Russian families, 55 Chinese–Vietnamese families and seven Chinese–Cameroonian families. In addition to face-to-face encounters, we also made use of social media networks to engage with research participants and online information platforms to observe public discussions on Chinese–foreign families. The fieldwork was complemented by an analysis of administrative procedures and media representations, including legal documents, administrative regulations, popular discourses, and historical narratives.

At the time of our research, most Chinese-foreign children in our sample were relatively young (mostly in pre- or early schooling age) and generally below the age of 18 when the citizenship choice becomes exigent. Most families were in the process of collecting information, exploring the administrative procedures and negotiating different citizenship options with the goal of making informed decisions that would benefit their children’s future. While the parents’ final citizenship choices were not always evident, our research centred on the very process of negotiating the children’s citizenship. Our focus is specifically on the foreign parents and how they viewed and chose their children’s citizenship options. Less attention is paid to the perspectives of the Chinese spouses or the children themselves.⁶ Given the children’s young age at the time and the sensitivity of the subject, we refrained from interviewing them about their own citizenship preferences.

We emphasise the decision-making process and negotiations concerning children’s citizenship rather than the outcome of those negotiations. We use comparison as a heuristic tool to make sense of the foreign parents’ experiences and strategies in different family settings. This approach allowed us to identify similarities and differences in the challenges faced by the foreign parents and to analyse the effects of power relations on the positions adopted by them. Furthermore, we drew our attention to the lasting effects of the foreign parents’ previous experiences and cultural references that influenced their views on citizenship choices for their children.

Children, the nation, and citizenship

Chinese national discourses depict children as future citizens who will contribute to the collective body of the nation. The question of the Chinese–foreign child’s citizenship is closely related to the role of nationalism and the place of the multigenerational family in it. Since Xi Jinping’s ascent to power in 2012, nationalism has become a key legitimising tool in the ideological campaign of China’s national rejuvenation (Zhao 2016). In August 2018 a People’s Daily editorial identified having children as a national concern, and in December 2021 calls for CCP members to have three children have caused uproar among Chinese netizens (People’s Daily 2018). These events indicate the development of a new political effort to steer fertility towards the party’s ideal of a ‘civilized, harmonious family’ that will cultivate the human resources needed for China’s global rise (Alpermann and Zhan 2018). Having children has become one of citizens’ top duties to the Chinese nation.

The scholarship on the geopolitical and biopolitical aspects of the Chinese nation has examined corporeal analogies between individual and national bodies and explored the constructions of national geo-body through maps and territorial disputes (Billé 2014; Callahan 2009). While these studies emphasise the territorial demarcations of the national body, we focus on how the biopolitical aspects of the nation enter into dialogue with the geography of national territory through the issue of citizenship. We are particularly concerned with how the bodies of children born across Chinese-foreign borders are territorialised and what tensions are exposed in the process of their status negotiations by foreign parents. We build on the work by feminist geographers who have described the role that bodies play in territorial claims and the construction of borders (Jackman et al. 2020; Jackson 2016; Smith, Swanson, and Gökariksel 2016). Among these varied practices, the birth of a child is a complex ‘space of geopolitics’ where multiple, overlapping identity claims and power struggles meet and clash (McKinnon 2016). This territorialisation of the newborn baby continues when the birth is registered and documented in the form of citizenship papers.

Regulating family and migration is a key component of the construction of citizenship and is informed by underlying assumptions about what constitutes a good family. One of the notable aspects of the socio-political landscape in China during the reform period has been the coupling of technocratic population control with the revival of Confucian values seen as the foundation of an ideal multigenerational household. Stringent family planning policies had been in place for over 35 years and led to a significant decrease of China’s population growth on the one hand, and a skewed gender and age ratio, on the other (Wang et al. 2021). Furthermore, urbanisation, internal migration, the property boom and the socioeconomic transformations brought about in the reform era have led to important changes to the living arrangements of Chinese families. It is now more common for paternal grandparents to live separately from their son’s family, but grandparents still play an important, often decisive, role in family decisions about their grandchildren.

The family in China operates as a microcosm of the nation-state. Grandparents continue to play an important role as the guardians of traditional and state values. Furthermore, grandparents often become the primary caretakers of their only grandchild, who embodies the future life of the nation. In line with the Confucian value of filial piety, grandparents often exercise the ultimate authority in family matters. Traditionally the well-being of the family elders has been a key concern of families. This has been reversed, and now the grandchildren are the centre of attention and the ‘existential meanings of life’ (Yan 2016, 245). As such, family negotiations of the Chinese-foreign child's citizenship are related not only of the continuation of the family line, but also to China's national rejuvenation concerns.

Furthermore,, the practices of Chinese citizenship are closely related to the discourses on human quality or suzhi (Jacka 2009). The notion of suzhi developed and expanded along the biopolitical aspects of citizenship that persisted since they gained prominence with the late-1970s family-planning campaigns (Greenhalgh 2010). The valorisation of high quality as a ubiquitous and essential part of an ideal modern citizen in China prompted families to invest all the resources to cultivate their children’s quality (Fong 2007, 93). Family background, upbringing, and education are important parts of how suzhi is perceived, but prevalent racial hierarchies also determine the children’s social status and inform citizenship negotiations taking place in Chinese–foreign households. In our discussion of the family contestations of citizenship of Chinese-foreign children we thus show not only how families are implicated in the matters of state sovereignty, but also how Chinese national territory is fought for through the bodies of the children. In the process the tensions produced by the interplay of racial, gender, and social class disparities determine the bargaining position of the negotiating foreign parents.

Having laid out the conceptual framework, we next present ethnographic vignettes of the different Chinese–foreign family settings under study here. We first introduce the three constellations of Chinese–foreign families and then discuss the role that gender, class, and race play in the negotiations of f thechildren’s citizenship. The remaining part addresses the topics of foreign parents’ agency and their prespectives on the role of multigenerational households in children's citizenship choices.

Marriage migration trajectories

Historical: Chinese–Vietnamese marriages

Chinese–Vietnamese marriages have long been part of the social landscape but they have not been noticed until recently because of the constant political ups and downs between the two nations, including military conflicts between them and the consequent strengthening of border monitoring and migration restrictions. Since the 1980s, peace slowly made it possible for border trade and social interaction to increase. In the early 2000s, however, discourses on illegal migration and criminality emerged in China and have informed public perceptions of marriages between Chinese men and Vietnamese women. They have conveniently and constantly ignored their historical roots and neglected the commodification of marriage arrangements. In recent decades, Chinese-Vietnamese marriages have increased due to large scale population movements and commercial exchanges across the border that engendered private alliances related to business partnerships (Grillot 2012). Accurate official data on the number of Chinese–Vietnamese marriages remain difficult to obtain. Due to the complex administrative procedure for registering an international marriage and the lack of information available to the mostly rural population concerned, many Chinese–Vietnamese families do not enjoy a fully legal status.

Vietnamese women are favoured as a wife choice for rural Chinese bachelors on account of their widely perceived family-oriented attitude, acceptance of patriarchal norms, and undemanding, humble, and hard-working nature. They bear values that are increasingly difficult to find among young Chinese women who move from their rural homes in search of a better life in the city. Vietnamese women are perceived to be content with the family role: to provide heirs for the Chinese family, stay at home, do the domestic chores, and remain invisible in Chinese society. For Vietnamese women, marriage to a Chinese man can constitute an opportunity for upward social and economic mobility. They often experience their own society as authoritarian and oppressive, and thus look for opportunities to be free, to survive economically, or simply to have a better personal life. Against this background, marriage to a Chinese partner is a promising alternative to the impoverished life in Vietnam, as Chinese men are seen as culturally similar to Vietnamese men but more open-minded due to the influence of the early economic reforms and resulting social transformations in China. However, many Vietnamese women subsequently find themselves in a precarious position, as they are economically and legally dependent on their Chinese husbands and are exposed to stigmatisation and social isolation (Grillot 2012).

Favoured: Chinese–Russian and Chinese–Ukrainian marriages

Chinese–Russian marriages started attracting media attention in the late 1990s and early 2000s and have received overwhelmingly positive coverage in Chinese official and popular publications.⁷ Economic and educational mobility has been an important factor in enabling these encounters. In the early days of China’s reforms, most of these families were formed as a result of an increasing number of Chinese men doing business or studying in Russia or Ukraine. In the 2000s similar opportunities became available for Russians and Ukrainians with the expansion of funded Chinese language and degree programmes at Chinese universities amid restrictive immigration policies and decreased funding opportunities in Europe and North America. Furthermore, in the mid-2000s a small but vibrant industry of commercial matchmaking started targeting marriage markets in Russia, Ukraine, and China. However, our research shows that only a small number of Russian and Ukrainian women met their husbands through online dating websites or agencies. Most got to know each other through personal encounters, especially in the context of studies, work, trade, or leisure activities.

Most women who took part in our research had a university or college degree and, at the time of the interview, had been in China for between one and twenty years. Initially, many did not plan to marry or stay in China, but followed their heart or were inspired by a combination of socioeconomic and personal factors. Those who met their husbands in China believed that China was more dynamic and offered better prospects for their own and their children’s future than their home country. Some argued that their university degrees would not translate into well-paid jobs back home, and that opportunities in China seemed promising and offered them better security in the future. A small number who had been previously married and divorced perceived China as a place to start their life anew, away from the abuse and violence that they had experienced in their first marriage.

Unlike the Chinese–Vietnamese families, most marriages between Chinese men and Russian or Ukrainian women had been registered and legalised, either in China or in the women’s place of origin. Even though some women were on a student or business visa, most aspired to get a family visa (Q), which would allow them, after five years of marriage, to apply for a 10-year residence card and grant them the right to work in China.⁸ Many women relied economically on their husbands’ earnings, though some tried out their entrepreneurial skills in the buoyant e-commerce sphere. For most of them, their life in China was an improvement economically on their life in their home country. Yet, the linguistic and cultural differences that permeated their family lives and social interactions were seen as very challenging and influenced their life choices for their children, including citizenship.

Unexpected: Chinese–Cameroonian marriages

China’s economic growth and engagement in Africa – formalised in the first meeting of the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation in 2000 – have laid the ground for the increasing presence of African men and women in China. Many are of middle-class backgrounds and have been attracted by funded education or business opportunities (see e.g. Castillo 2021; Kaji 2022; Mathews et al. 2017; Zhou 2017). The growing visibility of Chinese–African families in trading communities in cities like Guangzhou and Yiwu became an unexpected and frowned upon phenomenon in a society that favours racial purity (Dikötter 2015; Lan 2017).

Much research on Africans in China centres on Nigerians who reportedly constitute the largest group of African residents and feature prominently in the existing studies on Chinese-African families (e.g. Adebayo and Omololu 2020; Lan 2015; Zhou 2017). Our focus on Chinese-Cameroonian families complements the existing literature as it draws attention to a sub-section of African migrants largely under studied so far. While Cameroonians and Nigerians in China face similar legal and social constraints, we wish to emphasise that their experiences and practices cannot be representative of Africans in general. More generally, we argue that the foreign parents’ socialisation, cultural norms and experiences with bureaucracy in their home countries also influence their children’s citizenship negotiations in China.

Unlike Chinese–Russian, Chinese-Ukrainian and Chinese–Vietnamese families, there is a different gender dynamic in the Chinese–Cameroonian case. The majority of Chinese–African couples and families, including in the Chinese-Cameroonian case, consist of Chinese women and African men who have met in a business-related context in China.⁹ As Zhou has shown in her study on Chinese–African families, romance often goes hand in hand with business partnership, as the spouses join forces to realise their economic and family endeavours (Zhou 2017). Many Chinese wives are rural migrant women who aspire to a life in the city, and for whom marriage to an educated or well-to-do foreigner may constitute an opportunity for upward social mobility. For the African husbands, having a Chinese partner may help them navigate economic and legal challenges, as they are often granted only short-term visas (valid from three to six months) that need to be renewed regularly. Moreover, with the implementation of the new Exit and Entry Law of 2013,¹⁰ maintaining legal status became more difficult and forced many Africans to overstay their visa or return to their country (see also Haugen 2012; Haugen and Speelman 2022; Lan 2017).

Unlike Russian and Ukrainian women, Cameroonian men generally preferred a business or student visa to a familyvisa, as they were focused on doing business and generating a stable income to support themselves and their families. As noted by several authors (Lan 2015; Mathews, Lin, and Yang 2017; Qiu 2016; Zhou 2017), many Chinese–African families have forgone legalising their marriage, because ultimately, marriage cannot guarantee the foreign spouse citizenship in China and does not guarantee further rights. Although most of the Chinese–Cameroonian couples in this sample were formally married, they still preferred a business or student visa to be legally and economically independent. This strategy also helped to counter the structural dependency and the experience of disempowerment that several of our female interlocutors noted, which differed considerably from Cameroonian men.¹¹

In addition, anti-Black sentiments are widespread in China, and marriages between Chinese women and Black – and more generally, foreign men – are viewed negatively by the Chinese media and public.¹² Anxieties about Chinese women dating black men started to surface in the 1980s in the context of the Nanjing student protests against African students (Sautman 1994; Sullivan 1994). These public feelings intensified in recent years because foreign husbands are perceived as competitors in the demographically skewed marriage market, and widespread anti-black prejudice in China (see also Barabantseva and Grillot 2019). The Chinese–Cameroonian couples were well aware of these legal and social impediments and recognised their destabilising impact on their family life (see also Jordan et al. 2021).

Discussion: the role of gender, class, and race

We discuss in this section important gender, class, and race dimensions of Chinese–foreign marriages. Among all our cases, gender norms in home countries and in China produce particular migration dynamics. For the foreign wives (Vietnamese, Russian, and Ukrainian) relying on their Chinese husbands in economic and legal terms was somewhat acceptable. Conversely, for Cameroonian men economic and legal dependence on their wives contradicted their cultural norms and business ambitions in China. This also affected their stance on the citizenship choice for their children, as we explain below.

The class differences that played out across our cases were often based on social capital. While Vietnamese wives came from poor rural backgrounds and often had only basic education, Russian and Ukrainian women and Cameroonian men were mostly from urban areas and had a college or university degree. These qualities placed the foreign parents in our sample at opposite ends in terms of China’s measure of suzhi: i.e. the valorisation of people in terms of their proximity to China’s vision of modernity and development. Suzhi has many dimensions, including a distinction between rural and urban origins, levels of education, and income. In addition, ethnicity, gender, and race are relevant suzhi determinants that play into defining the degree of social status in China. Those who score higher in suzhi markers can exercise more agency and negotiating power. For example, Vietnamese women are associated with Chinese ethnic minorities (shaoshu minzu) and are part of the Chinese cultural periphery synonymous with low quality. Conversely, both Cameroonian men and Russian and Ukrainian women are viewed as culturally foreign and as outsiders; yet they are placed differently in terms of their gender and race on the Chinese scale of modernity and desirability.

While African men are seen as low-quality competitors in the marriage market and spurned for their Blackness, Ukrainian and Russian spouses are admired for their Whiteness and valued as high-quality mothers of future Chinese citizens. The same logic applies to the children of Chinese–foreign parents and is reflected in the Chinese terms used to refer to them. While Chinese–Vietnamese children are labelled Chinese, Chinese–African children are simply termed Black (hei ren) and Chinese–European children are called mixed-blood (hunxue). Thus, while Chinese–Vietnamese children are automatically incorporated into the Chinese nation, Chinese–African children are excluded, and Chinese–European are elevated to a preferred status in the widely accepted racial hierarchy in China. These dimensions also play into the way that foreign parents view and navigate citizenship choices for their children.

Foreign parents’ choices of their children’s citizenship

In Chinese–Vietnamese family

The similarities between Vietnamese and Chinese cultural backgrounds constitute the basis for shared family standards and values: exogamy and patrilocal residence rules, the importance of family ancestry lines, the ideology of patriarchy, the marginal position of women within the family, and so forth. Just as they would if they had married in their natal societies, new Vietnamese mothers did not discuss the family name of their children or question their implicit membership in their father’s family line. When they left their community and country to marry out, it was taken for granted that they would follow the rules of their husband’s culture.

In Chinese–Vietnamese families, it was undisputed that children were registered as the descendants of their father. When the parents were not married – which was the case with many of the couples we studied – or if the husband had violated the state’s one-child policy at the time of our fieldwork, the Chinese father had to pay a fine in order to register his child’s birth. If he exceeded the number of children allowed under the one-child rule (e.g. when he already had other children from a previous marriage), bribe or personal connections helped to solve the issue, even though the price was high. In other cases, family arrangements provided a solution; for example, registering the child in a brother’s household. In the majority of these families, Vietnamese mothers did not have a Chinese ID card and household registration, and their children were registered in the Chinese single parent’s household.

Such arrangements were common for Chinese–Vietnamese couples who lived far from the border. However, when they lived in the borderlands, other solutions arose. If the child was a girl, or if the father did not want to be administratively identified as a lawbreaker, the couple could register their offspring in Vietnam. Although household registration systems (hukou) exist in both countries, Vietnam recognises children born out of wedlock and allows single mothers to register their children in their own household without paying a fine. However, by doing so, the father would acknowledge that his child will never be eligible to benefits in terms of education, health, or inheritance in China. This also meant that since no official affiliation was recognised, his wife could vanish with the couple’s child in case of a conflict or separation. If the hukou registration concerned a son, given the value attributed to a male heir in China, such a choice was generally a last resort, when all other possibilities had been ruled out.

In Chinese–Russian and Chinese–Ukrainian family

Throughout the 2000s, a series of prominent cases shook the Russian-speaking communities in China including when, during a family crisis, a Chinese husband had hidden the child from its mother deep in the Chinese countryside. As a result, many women became aware of the risks of registering their children in the hukou system. Their realisation that their children automatically assumed Chinese nationality through their citizen father generated in them an acute sense of vulnerability and a fear of being potentially forced to separate from their child. To prevent this, some women preferred to give birth in their home country, where they registered the child as a Russian or Ukrainian citizen born to a single mother. Others acknowledged the father in the birth certificate but insisted on arranging their home country's chitizenship for their child. For many women doing this was a matter of principle and a basic preventative way to ensure their maternal rights. Those who gave birth in China and were issued with a Chinese birth certificate, tried to register the birth in their home country’s consulate and maintain the option to claim their child’s nationality in Ukraine or Russia.

Russian and Ukrainian mothers with small children were surprised by the level of interest that their children attracted from ordinary Chinese people. Women often were unhappy when Chinese passers-by looked inside the pram and touched their baby’s face or hand, often without asking the mother’s permission. According to conventional wisdom in China, as one of the research participants observed, ‘Eurasian children are cleverer, and according to Chinese, are very beautiful’. The high esteem in which their Eurasian (hunxue) offspring was held sprang from a deep-seated, racially hierarchical view of the world (Dikötter 2015). In addition, the social value of hunxue children has a market application, which for some mothers was a good source of income. Chinese advertising agencies frequently circulate adverts on WeChat groups looking for Eurasian baby models, offering them a pay rate equivalent to that of adult models.

Some mothers thought that it would be easier for their children to live in China if they had Chinese citizenship due to the constant attention drawn to their Eurasian features. But even with Chinese legal documents in hand, Chinese–Russian and Chinese-Ukrainian children learned about their difference from an early age and some experienced prejudice. Those who did not have Chinese documents could not fully participate in society. For example, there were reports of children who could not take part in sports competitions and Olympiads outside of their school if they did not have a household registration. This shows that racial assumptions about higher quality are not sufficient for belonging and need to be supplemented by the documentary possession of Chinese hukou.

In Chinese–Cameroonian family

In an ideal world, most couples would prefer their children to have dual nationality, which neither Cameroon nor China accepts. Yet, faced with the need to choose one nationality, the Cameroonian fathers who took part in this research opted for their children to have Chinese citizenship. In two cases, the fathers briefly considered the option of Cameroonian nationality, but eventually gave up on the idea due to administrative hurdles.

The foreign parent’s choice was largely based on pragmatic considerations: Firstly, as long as the couple was based in China and planned to stay on, Chinese citizenship was preferable, as it entitled the child to stay in the country without having to undergo the costly and risky procedure of repeatedly regularising the child’s stay. Secondly, Chinese citizenship provided access to schooling and social services. This depended on the child’s registration in the mother’s place of hukou, which was often in a rural area, far from where the couple was living. A third, and major reason, why Cameroonian fathers were willing to forgo their children’s Cameroonian nationality, was that Cameroonian citizenship could still be acquired at a later stage. In Cameroon, there is a whole service sector that produces birth certificates, passports, and marriage certificates, and so on, either legally or illegally (see Alpes 2016). The view that Cameroon was a country where everything is negotiable and can be arranged, as long as one has the money and the right connections, was shared by all Cameroonian research participants. Therefore, Cameroonian fathers generally were not concerned about their children’s Cameroonian nationality, as they were confident that there would always be a way to acquire or change legal documents when needed. They were more concerned about their children’s legal status in China, which in their experience was much more difficult to ensure if they held a Cameroonian rather than a Chinese passport. This reasoning went hand-in-hand with the Chinese wives’ arguments in support of Chinese nationality and hukou registration as a way to ensure access to the public services provided by the Chinese state.

Finally, for children of African–Chinese descent, social recognition often posed a problem. Popular incidents, such as the participation of Lou Jing, daughter of a Chinese mother and African American father, in the Shanghai Dragon TV’s talent show, brought into the limelight public dissent over who may, or may not, qualify to be called Chinese (Lan 2016; Leung 2015). More recent examples include Chinese-Congolese singer Zhong Feifei and Guangzhou-born Chinese youth of African descent who self-identify as native Guangzhou residents, yet are frequently bullied in the social media.¹³ Such experiences of racialisation and alienation and a constant worry for their children’s well-being were shared by many parents of Chinese–Cameroonian children (see also Adebayo and Omololu 2020; Jordan et al. 2021; Ping, Lin, and Zhou 2021). The Cameroonian fathers devised strategies to bolster their children’s self-esteem and envisioned valid alternatives to growing up in China. These include socialising with other Chinese–Cameroonian families, maintaining contact with the father’s family back home, planning for them to have an international education in North America or Europe, or sending the child to stay with a relative in Cameroon where, supposedly, children are socially accepted, irrespective of their ethnicity or race.

Discussion: foreign parent’s agency in citizenship negotiations

As our cases suggest, the foreign parents’ assessment of their children’s future is in large part informed by the perceived status and value of the citizenship available to them. While Vietnamese wives have limited decision-making power over their children’s nationality choices, Ukrainian and Russian wives as well as Cameroonian husbands have more room for manoeuvre. Here, the relative status of the Chinese passport in the global hierarchy plays a crucial role. For Vietnamese mothers and Cameroonian fathers, securing Chinese citizenship for their children is an important step towards their children’s acceptance and belonging in China. For Russian and Ukrainian mothers, the status of the Chinese passport vis-à-vis their home citizenship is more ambivalent, as Russian and Ukrainian passports have a higher value in the global mobility regime and permit greater freedom of travel than Chinese nationality (Harpaz 2021).¹⁴ In addition, these assessments are coupled with considerations of access to educational and health resources for their children in China (see also Ma 2020), as well as with the ease at which the foreign spouse’s nationality can be acquired at a later point in time. In all three cases, foreign parents believed that once renounced it would be impossible for their children to obtain Chinese citizenship later in life, whereas it was possible to get their home country’s passport.

In addition to passports, the discussion on foreign children’s citizenship also includes the importance of hukou. We see in our cases that the foreign parents have different attitudes to the question of registering their child in the hukou system. Vietnamese women preferred registering their children’s hukou in China, because it guaranteed their right to education and social security and was key to achieving full citizenship in China. Once Cameroonian husbands had agreed the child would be Chinese, they passed on the decision and responsibility for hukou registration to their wife and her parents. Conversely, Russian and Ukrainian women perceived hukou registration as a barrier to alternative citizenship for their children. This is because with completing the hukou registration, the ambiguity of their national belonging was erased, i.e. the children would become full Chinese nationals without the right to hold another citizenship. The families’ decisions on hukou registration can also be read as an indication of the foreign parent’s agency and the importance of the child’s citizenship in family negotiations.

The formation of a new family affects the whole multigenerational household, where it is common for Chinese parents-in-law to be actively involved in approving the marriage, organising or sponsoring the wedding, buying property for the newlyweds and providing childcare after the child is born. This applies to the different Chinese–foreign families in our sample. However, Vietnamese, Russian, Ukrainian and Cameroonian foreign spouses responded differently to the involvement of their Chinese parents-in-law in their family life. Factors accounting for these differences include the foreign spouses’ socialisation and cultural expectations as well as pragmatic considerations about the couple’s living and working arrangements. Despite these differences, we observed that citizenship discourses permeated the households and that Chinese grandparents played an important role as the guardians of state values, securing the future of the nation by territorialising their grandchild’s body.

Foreign parents’ perspectives on multigenerational households

Chinese–Vietnamese families

Most Chinese-Vietnamese families live in the rural border regions and comply with the ideal of filial piety in a multigenerational household. This puts the Chinese parents-in-law in a powerful position to decide the future and well-being of household members, including the foreign spouse and her children. As family models in Vietnam and rural China are similar, we found that Vietnamese wives generally complied with the cultural expectations that they would submit to the authority of their parents-in-law. Some coped with their social isolation and restricted agency by exploring social media networks to socialise with Vietnamese friends and family. Others drew into themselves and developed signs of depression, sometimes even avoiding bonding with their children, thus accepting their primary role as child bearers.

Chinese–Russian and Chinese–Ukrainian families

Most Chinese–Russian and Chinese-Ukrainian families in this study resided in urban areas. Few lived permanently in a multigenerational household, but their Chinese parents-in-law would visit from time to time to assist with childcare or simply to enjoy the company of their grandchildren. Many women had the support of their mother-in-law after giving birth, but several also mentioned that their parents-in-law later moved out because of arguments over childcare. Some felt grateful to their Chinese family, such as because they had been given a flat, or as an expression of filial piety. TSome women were often reminded that they lived in a flat that was owned by their parents-in-law and had to abide by their customs. This made them feel outsiders who did not fully belong in China and their family and that they had to please their parents-in-law. Many thus experienced the latter’s involvement as interference and as disregarding their own plans, not only in the practical questions of child raising, but also in terms of choices for their children’s future.

According to the research participants, the question of their children’s citizenship was important to many Chinese grandparents. They often insisted on Chinese citizenship, arguing that certain jobs and professions in China were accessible only to Chinese nationals and hukou holders. Some women learnt that their parents-in-law could make decisive choices for their children without seeking their consent. One of our participants, for instance, was angry when her mother-in-law registered her child in the hukou system without even asking her opinion or requiring her presence. The non-negotiable assumption of the grandparents and the local registrar officials was that the child was a Chinese national. Another woman regretted registering her child in the hukou system under her mother-in-law’s insistence when she ran into problems when securing travel documents to go to her native Ukraine. This intrusive involvement of grandparents made another participant observe that ‘in China a newborn child belongs to the society and parents-in-law, rather than to their mother’.

Consideringthe role attributed to children in Chinese national agenda, we observe that grandparents operate as agents of the state to ensure that hunxue Chinese-foreign children are registered as Chinese citizens. In their eyes, the child belongs to the Chinese state, family and nation. As one of our Russian interlocutors noted: ‘Actually, I can understand this policy … , but not as the mother. I myself need this wonderful son, the Chinese state will manage somehow without him’. These conflicted negotiations of the child’s citizenship show a close interplay between family and national interests in making territorial claims on the child’s identity.

Chinese–Cameroonian families

Like Ukrainian and Russian women, our Cameroonian interlocutors highlighted the cultural similarities with their own society in the way Chinese honour their parents and elders. Even though they may not feel fully accepted into the wife’s family due to being Black and foreign, most Cameroonian husbands were generally happy to extend due respect to the Chinese parents-in-law, such as by paying them regular visits during Chinese holidays. Furthermore, they appreciated the assistance provided by the parents-in-law in administrative matters and childcare. For example, as one of our interlocutors explained, his mother-in-law was instrumental in arranging for the couple’s marriage in the wife’s rural hometown, where Black people had not been seen before. Given that in many Chinese–Cameroonian families both parents were working, the grandparents’ help with childcare was crucial. In several cases, the children lived with their grandparents in the hometown, or the parents-in-law came to live with the couple in the city, if the latter could afford it.

Many Chinese parents-in-law were concerned that their daughters and grandchildren might follow their husbands to Africa (see also Zhou 2017). To avoid this risk, they encouraged their daughters to register their children in their own hukou. Often, the children’s documents remained with the grandparents, particularly if the children were living with them, which strengthened their bargaining power in participating in family decisions. Generally, Cameroonian fathers were supportive of the idea of sending their children to stay with the grandparents and registering them in the wife’s hukou. At the same time, several fathers mentioned that they would prefer their children to be spatially and emotionally closer, and to oversee their upbringing and cultural formation.

While some of our interlocutors were generally on good terms with their parents-in-law, others grappled with the effects of cultural misunderstandings (see also Zhou 2017). In our sample, childcare was a repeated cause of friction. While the Chinese grandparents expected their daughter and son-in-law to pay them for childcare-related expenses, some Cameroonian fathers were startled at the seemingly excessive amount demanded. They interpreted this as avarice and compared it with African grandparents who supposedly care for children without compensation. The Chinese grandparents’ position could be understood through the patrilineal norm according to which after marriage a daughter and her children become part of her husband’s family and it is therefore the responsibility of the father’s family to provide childcare. Cameroonian fathers thought that their Chinese parents-in-law had unrealistic expectations of the husband’s economic status and responsibility for his wife and children. As a result, Cameroonian fathers had mixed feelings about their involvement in family matters and were also looking ahead to obtaining possible support from their own families in case their children were to move to Cameroon at a later stage.

Discussion: the role of multigenerational family in Chinese–foreign children’s citizenship choices

Chinese-foreign children’s citizenship choice in China is a multigenerational family matter. Grandparents played a crucial role accross our cases, and at times their involvement was perceived as intrusive by the foreign spouses. But they interpreted and coped with the grandparents’ intrusions in different ways. Vietnamese women had little bargaining power, as they were culturally primed to the role of their Chinese in-laws. Cameroonian fathers were in a dependent situation, not only legally but often also economically, and found it hard to meet the financial expectations of their Chinese wives and parents-in-law. Here gender dynamics played out in a different way from the case of Vietnamese,Russian and Ukrainian wives, as in Chinese and Cameroonian society the husband or family head is expected to care for their dependents.

Russian and Ukrainian women saw the childcare involvement of their in-laws as a personal and societal matter, and also viewed them as an extension of the Chinese state, and as those forging the Chinese–foreign children’s incorporation into the Chinese national body. The foreign parents’ different assessments were related to the degree of their agency, as conditioned by their legal and socioeconomic status in China, but also by their own cultural upbringing, against which they evaluated the Chinese grandparents’ role in family matters. While most Vietnamese and Cameroonian foreign parents did not mind the close involvement of Chinese grandparents in decisions about the children’s futures, several Russian and Ukrainian mothers took issue and felt their maternal rights to be violated. They experienced the role of grandparents in China to go far beyond support with childcare, and perceived them as facilitators of the Chinese state’s interest to territorialise foreign-Chinese children as Chinese citizens.

In her research on religion, marriage practices and reproductive bodies in north India, Sara Smith concludes that ‘bodies make territory’ and that boundaries between bodies and territory are dissolved by the policies, norms, and mores interfering in the reproductive decisions of the people (Smith 2012). Likewise, China’s citizenship practices show a close interplay of geopolitics with body politics. Every baby born to a Chinese parent is territorialised as a Chinese national, and multigenerational families are key players in realising the state’s desire to increase the number of birth registrations.

Conclusion

In this article we have drawn attention to the role of children in the Chinese national body and the growing prominence of children born across national borders in citizenship contestations. Our discussion of the foreign parents' perspectives on citizenship negotiations shows the close interplay of formal laws and informal norms and the role of the multigenerational household in claims made on Chinese–foreign children.

Scholars of contemporary China have drawn attention to the role of family in constructing the ideas of personhood and gendered identities (Driessen and Sier 2019). We have shown that multigenerational households actively participate in articulations of citizenship and in the reproduction of the Chinese national body and territorialisation of children’s belonging. Our analysis of the micro-politics of citizenship decisions made for Chinese–foreign children exposes how the interplay of race, class and gender shapes the foreign parents' perspectives in the context of their precarious legal status and China’s concerns over declining population.

For the Vietnamese foreign wives, their socioeconomic status in China was an improvement; but their lack of documents and marriage registration made them invisible, vulnerable and socially excluded. For Russian and Ukrainian foreign wives, China offered future economic opportunities, but locked them in the condition of legal uncertainty and dependency for at least five years until they qualified for a ten-year residency. The Cameroonian husbands benefitted from abundant business opportunities and the assistance of their Chinese female partners, but were put off by their experiences of racial discrimination and their precarious legal status. As the tensions arising in negotiations of the status of a Chinese–Russian/Ukrainian hunxue child show, the child’s citizenship is a complex site where competing citizenship practices manifest and where struggles over identity play out. This also reflects the way that cultural norms and their translation to the market, where children can become an economic asset, affect how citizenship decisions are made.

Chinese citizenship valorises the child rather than the foreign parent, but the foreign parent’s agency over their child varies depending on their sociocultural background and status in China. The uncertain socio-legal status of the foreign parent is amplified by the hierarchal patriarchal household and the power that Chinese grandparents have over their grandchildren’s citizenship. These common conditions across our three cases manifested differently in family negotiations. The negotiations and particular citizenship arrangements are informed by the politics and power dynamics in multigenerational households, ideals of family norms and dominant hierarchies of gender and race relations. We argued that paying attention to how children’s citizenship is decided on at the level of the multigenerational households illuminates the embodied practices of Chinese territorial sovereignty, where the bodies of children are contested by the state through the family. By looking at the negotiations of children’s citizenship we showed that children’s bodies occupy a prominent place in the state’s territorialising practices that are shaped by gendered, racial, and socioeconomic inequalities.

As the generation of Chinese-foreign children grows of age, it will be of research interest to look into the ways that they experience and exercise their socio-legal status, and how the citizenship choices their families made impact on their life. Several years have passed since conducting our empirical fieldwork. Some of the children who were still small at the time have reached adulthood by now and will be able to make independent assessments of their parents’ citizenship choices. The choices of Eileen Gu, introduced at the beginning of this article, are an example of her privileged status as a professional Olympic athlete, and such flexible citizenship choices are not available to the majority of people born across Chinese-foreign distinctions. We look forward to learning more from the new generation of Chinese–foreign individuals on how they deal with the increasingly nationalistic discourses in China and the openings and closures prompted by changing citizenship and nationality laws.

Acknowledgements

This paper was first presented at the conference ‘Immigration and the Transformation of Chinese Society’ at the University in Manchester (25/26 April 2019). We thank the workshop participants for their encouraging and valuable feedback. Additionally, we acknowledge the invaluable research assistance of Séverin Kaji and Eva Lena Richter. We thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as Gordon Mathews and Willy Sier for reading and providing their comments that guided our revisions.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

The research for this paper was funded under the Europe–China 2013 call (ESRC ref ES/L015609/1; DFG project number 258454708, ref AH 210/1-1). .

Notes

1 Nationality Law of the People’s Republic of China, effective on 10 September 1980, http://www.china.org.cn/english/LivinginChina/184710.htm (last accessed 13 June 2022).

2 We prefer the term ‘Chinese–foreign families’ to alternatives such as international, transnational cross-border, inter-racial or mixed families. It best captures the commonalities shared by the three cases under study and reflects common categorizations used in China (Wang 2014). Making estimations of the number of Chinese–foreign marriages and children born to them is difficult, because official statistics include only marriages registered within the territory of China.

3 Notable exceptions are Adebayo and Omololu (2020); Jordan et al. (2021); Zhou and Jiang (2022) which touch on the situation of Chinese-African children.

4 The focus of Michaela Pelican's research was not specifically on Chinese-Cameroonian families, which explains the relatively small sample of interviews used for this article. Additionally, our analysis draws insights from the studies by Zhou (2017) and Kaji (2022) who were affiliated with the research programme.

5 Séverin Kaji provided his insights on Chinese–Cameroonian student couples (see also Kaji 2022) and conducted three interviews specifically for this article and shared the transcripts with us.

6 The perspectives of Chinese spouses on Chinese-African families and child raising practices have been explored by Jordan et al. (2021); Zhou (2017); Zhou and Jiang (2022).

7 Most Chinese had not made clear distinctions between Russians and Ukrainians before the outbreak of the Russian–Ukrainian war in Donbas in 2014. Until then, Chinese popular discourse referred to the European parts and people of the former Soviet Union as Russian or Sulian (Soviet in Chinese). Only after the war were clearer distinctions drawn between Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus.

8 See Barabantseva and Grillot (2019) for a more detailed discussion about visa conditions and requirements.

9 Michaela Pelican has heard of a few Cameroonian women who are married to Chinese husbands but has not met any of them.

10 Exit and Entry Administration Law of the People's Republic of China . Adopted by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress on 30 June 2012, and entered into force on 1 July 2013, http://cs.mfa.gov.cn/wgrlh/lhqz/lhqzjjs/201401/t20140121_961580.shtml#:~:text=The%20exit%2Fentry%20administrations%20of,residence%20permits%20with%20the%20duration (last accessed 12 July 2022).

11 This argument resonates with the findings of Jordan et al. (2021) based on their sample of five Chinese-Nigerian, two Chinese-Congolese, and one Chinese-Cameroonian families.

12 See also Hunyh and Park (2018) on a critical reflection on the role of race in Africa-China relations.

13 Bilibili video ‘Black students speaking fluent Cantonese saying they are 100% Guangzhou residents’, uploaded 14 May 2021, https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1qV411E7tB?from=search&seid=1694139090364871440&spm_id_from=333.337.0.0 (last accessed 22 June 2022). Bilibili video ‘A black man talking about his life in China for over 11 years’, uploaded 2 March 2020, https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1KE41177iA?from=search&seid=17997985688568194277&spm_id_from=333.337.0.0 (last accessed 22 June 2022).

14 This has changed with visa restrictions introduced by some Western countries to Russian passport-holders following Russia's invasion in Ukraine in February 2022.