The transnational one-child generation: family relationships and overseas aspiration between China and the UK

ABSTRACT

Education-motivated migration from East Asia is regarded as a family capital accumulation project where middle class families reproduce their socioeconomic advantage at a transnational level. This study focuses on one-child generation migrants from mainland China who came to study in the UK as teenagers or young adults but remained to work as professionals after their education. Caught between the British social/employment system and the Chinese family system, the one-child migrants showed a fragmented sense of belonging and a high level of uncertainty in the migration plan. The pervasive Confucian family culture in these transnational families also calls for an expanded conceptualisation of the term ‘children’ and a long-term observation of their mobility curve in the project. This paper incorporates rational motivation with human complexity in the context of transnational reality, thus it contributes to a more nuanced understanding of changing intergenerational relationships in the transnational family capital accumulation project.

KEYWORDS:

• One-child generation
• Chinese middle class
• transnational families
• capital accumulation
• international students

Acknowledgements

This article is the outcome of a PhD research funded by the Hong Kong Alumni scholarship, University of Kent. The author would like to thank the two reviewers for their insightful suggestions, Dr. Ruth Evans and Dr. Jane McCarthy for their comments on an earlier draft, and Mr. Michael Deane-White for proofreading the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Mengwei Tu http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6855-1381

Notes

1 Study abroad has been limited to a privileged few until the late 1990s following state-initiated study abroad programmes (Skeldon 1996). Notably, the percentage of private-sponsored students (annually) rose from 65% in 1996 to 90% in 2001 (Li 2010, 283). It was also the time when the children born after the one-child policy passed into their 20s.

2 To apply for a family reunion residence permit, parents, who fall into the category of ‘elderly dependent relative’, must prove that they have no means of survival in China and that joining their child in the UK is the only option. Most middle class parents in this study did not qualify. See https://www.gov.uk/join-family-in-uk/eligibility.

3 People who were born a few years before the 1979 one-child policy can still be effected by it because their parents were not allowed to have a second child.

4 The Russell Group represents 24 leading UK universities. See http://russellgroup.ac.uk.

5 Recruitment advertisements were posted on two online forums widely used by Chinese migrants in the UK: LKCN http://lkcn.net/bbs and Powerapple www.powerapple.com.

6 I do not mean that aspiration transfer exists only in one-child families, but that the having only one child makes intergenerational transfer more intense. Fong (2004) demonstrated such intensity in her ethnographical account of one-child families in China.