Overview

More than 35 million Chinese people live outside China, but this population is far from homogenous, and its multifaceted national affiliations require careful theorization. This book unravels the multiple, shifting paths of global migration in Chinese society today, challenging a unilinear view of migration by presenting emigration, immigration, and re-migration trajectories that are occurring continually and simultaneously. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic observations conducted in China, Canada, Singapore, and the China-Myanmar border, Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho takes the geographical space of China as the starting point from which to consider complex patterns of migration that shape nation-building and citizenship, both in origin and destination countries. She uniquely brings together various migration experiences and national contexts under the same analytical framework to create a rich portrait of the diversity of contemporary Chinese migration processes. By examining the convergence of multiple migration pathways across one geographical region over time, Ho offers alternative approaches to studying migration, migrant experience, and citizenship, thus setting the stage for future scholarship.

Full Product Details

Author:   Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho
Publisher:   Stanford University Press
Imprint:   Stanford University Press
ISBN:  

9781503606661

ISBN 10:   150360666
Pages:   184
Publication Date:   18 December 2018
Audience:   Professional and scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

"Contents and Abstracts1Migration and Citizenship chapter abstractThis chapter considers the way that multidirectional migration flows are transforming national citizenship and its territorial premises. Eschewing the tendency to study emigration and immigration as discrete fields, it proposes an approach that brings together seemingly distinct emigration, immigration, and re-migration trends under an analytical framework known as contemporaneous migration. This approach illuminates how citizenship formations in different national contexts are increasingly drawn into a constellation of relations, situating the migration and citizenship politics of national societies in a trans-territorial context. The chapter contextualizes developments in Chinese emigration and immigration to China in wider theoretical debates on emigration and diaspora, citizenship and territory, immigrant integration and re-migration, and ethnicity and co-ethnicity. It signals the multifaceted aspects of migration that interconnect China with migration sites globally, changing citizenship norms and practices. 2Chinese Re-migration chapter abstractCounter-diasporic migration, or the return of diasporic descendants to an ancestral land, has become a global trend. This chapter troubles linear narratives of emigration and immigration by examining the re-migration of diasporic descendants, focusing on Chinese diasporic descendants in Malaya, Indonesia, and Vietnam who were compelled to leave due to persecution between 1949 and 1979, a period of the inauguration of communist rule in China. The Chinese state resettled the refugees in state-owned farms and labeled them as ""returnees,"" legitimizing its reach toward the diaspora. But the social realities they experienced expose contestations over presumed kinship and co-ethnicity. After 1978 China's diaspora strategizing shifted from privileging co-ethnicity to encouraging foreign investment and skills transfer to benefit national development. This discussion foregrounds how citizenship formations in China were intimately connected to the experiences of the Chinese abroad and those who re-migrated to the ancestral land. 3Citizenship Across the Life Course chapter abstractAnalyzing emigration, immigration, and re-migration concurrently, under the framework of contemporaneous migration, directs us toward evaluating what it means to stake claims to different components of citizenship in more than one political community across a migrant's life course. This chapter examines the way the Mainland Chinese migrants negotiate social reproduction concerns that extend across international borders, their multiple national affiliations, and aspirations for recognition and rights as they journey between China and Canada across the life course. Patterns of re-migration are transforming the social relations of citizenship, re-spatializing rights, obligations, and belonging. Source and destination countries are also reversed during repeated re-migration or transnational sojourning. Transnational sojourning forges citizenship constellations that interlink how migrants understand and experience citizenship across different migration sites. 4Multiple Diasporas chapter abstractThis chapter examines how fraternity and alterity operate in contradictory ways under conditions of contemporaneous migration. While fraternity connotes membership in a national community, alterity refers to the state of being different or the process of ""Othering."" The chapter focuses on Singapore as a hub, where concurrent immigration and emigration flows are creating new postcolonial nation-building challenges. Contemporary immigration from China is juxtaposed against past migration from the same ancestral land, generating both co-ethnic and inter-ethnic tensions in a multicultural society. With growing numbers of Singaporeans now moving abroad, Singapore has also become a country that seeks to assert an extraterritorial reach over its emigrants. The multidirectional migration flows evinced in Singapore exemplify how states and national societies invoke temporal framings to prioritize natal ties that are based on selected versions of territorial belonging, memory, and culture. 5China at Home and Abroad chapter abstractStudying the interface of distinct yet interrelated migration trends through the framework of contemporaneous migration allows us to conceptualize both inter-ethnic and co-ethnic relations in culturally diverse societies. The Chinese worldview of tianxia informs understanding of the multidirectional migration patterns that reflect and impact China's domestic management of ethnic diversity and its external relations. This chapter argues that contemporaneous migration further illuminates three dimensions of alterity, namely alterity as phenotypical difference, as the diversification of co-ethnicity, and as spatial recalibration. It interfaces African immigration to China with the re-migration of Chinese diasporic descendants to the ancestral land, and the emigration of ethnic minorities in China. Such an analytical approach reveals how fraternity and alterity operate within and across ethnic categories in transnational contexts. 6Contemporaneous Migration chapter abstractThis chapter shows how the analytical framework of contemporaneous migration allows an examination of citizenship constellations that are forged across migration sites. It draws together key themes that emerge from this approach, namely on citizenship and territory, fraternity and alterity, and the co-constitution of time and space. The chapter further signals the new research directions that contemporaneous migration brings to overseas Chinese studies or research on the ""Chinese diaspora,"" and to the Chinese worldview of tianxia in relation to notions of cosmopolitanism. It also sets out the methods through which contemporaneous migration can be studied."

Reviews

Migration practices in the globalized world are changing the ways we understand resettlement, citizenship, identity, and the sense of home. Elaine Ho's multi-sited ethnographic study offers a sophisticated analysis of the challenges and opportunities for belonging and states' management of cultural diversity in China, Canada, and Singapore today. -- Min Zhou * University of California, Los Angeles, and editor, <I>Contemporary Chinese Diasporas</I> *

Migration practices in the globalized world are changing the ways we understand resettlement, citizenship, identity, and the sense of home. Elaine Ho's multi-sited ethnographic study offers a sophisticated analysis of the challenges and opportunities for belonging and states' management of cultural diversity in China, Canada, and Singapore today. -- Min Zhou * University of California, Los Angeles, and editor, <I>Contemporary Chinese Diasporas</I> * Citizens in Motion is a pathbreaking study on contemporary migrations to and from China. It provides an instructive model on capturing the multiplicity of contemporaneous migrations that link nation-states while expanding our breadth of knowledge on questions of citizenship for transnational subjects and troubling assumptions of co-ethnic allegiance. This book is a must-read for specialists of China, migration, and racial ethnic studies across disciplines. -- Rhacel Salazar Parrenas * author of <I>Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work</I> * Citizens in Motion is an invaluable contribution to literature on Chinese migration and diaspora, and wider migration studies more broadly, for several reasons: its expansive, multi-sited methodology; the varied Chinese diasporic histories woven into the present; and the conceptual frameworks she deploys, like those of 'citizenship constellations' and 'Tianxia', which complicate our understandings of mobility, belonging, difference and the state. --Caroline Faria & Devon Hsiao, Space and Polity Citizens in Motion makes several significant interventions in a dynamic field, offering a much-welcomed update. Students and scholars of Chinese migration and society will find Ho's new book highly enlightening regarding our transnational present and the new visions we need. --Shelley Chan, The China Quarterly [This] book is a timely production enriching the expanding scholarship on new Chinese migration. It offers an understanding of the diverse trends and directions of contemporary migrations from China and raises important questions regarding cultural and economic citizenship. -- Yuk Wah Chan * <i>China Information</i> * This richly documented and theoretically provocative study is a timely and important contribution to the literature on migration journeys, showing how these transform transnational subjects and states alike. It will appeal to a broad interdisciplinary readership concerned with the questions of migration, citizenship, and ethnicity far beyond Chinese studies. -- Elena Barabsentva * <i>The China Journal</i> * In Citizens in Motion, Elaine Ho...[argues] for an approach that transcends place-time snapshots in theorisations of migration and citizenship....[This] book offers a rich and complex narrative, and much food for thought for theorisations of migration and citizenship. -- Sin Yee Koh * <i>Asian Journal of Social Science</i> * The conceptual framework and future directions identified by this book are aspects that scholars of overseas Chinese studies and history can learn from, especially in terms of how the book emphasises local contexts and their uniqueness, as well as the expansive analytical framework it adopts. -- Guo Mei Fen * <i>The International Journal of Diaspora Chinese Studies</i> * Ho emphasizes both temporality and spatiality by drawing out the implications of multidirectional Chinese migrations and the multiple national configurations through which migrants might claim inclusion and, in turn, be claimed by various diasporas. Such multiply relocated migrants illustrate the strengths of Ho's approach. -- Madeine Y. Hsu * <i>Cross-Currents</i> * Citizens in Motion should be commended for pushing the boundaries of transnationalism scholarship, and for its stimulating and insightful engagements with interdisciplinary debates on deterritorialized citizenship, multiculturalism, and, of course, Chinese diaspora....I think it is fair to say that Ho has produced a book ofexceptional quality and scholarly contribution. -- Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang * <i>Journal of Asian Studies</i> * [This book] adds new and hitherto unexplored dimensions to ideas of 'multiculturalism' and 'belonging', highlighting the complexity of ethnic identity, migration and temporality....It is thought-provoking and richly informative and essential reading for anyone interested in understanding the contemporary Chinese diaspora. -- Johanna Waters * <i>Social and Cultural Geography</i> * Citizens in Motion is a welcome reorientation of migration studies' conventional cartographies....[It] illuminates how migrant mobilities are animated through the entanglements of national integration and extraterritorial citizenship that differentiate the kinds of attachments and identities held by migrants. -- Ishan Ashutosh * <i>Dialogues in Human Geography</i> * Ho is a skilful qualitative researcher who draws out rich data from her exhaustive fieldwork research, including interviews, participant observation, media analysis and analysis of other textual and visual sources. -- Liu Liangni Sally * <i>Dialogues in Human Geography</i> * Works on international migration emphasize the mobility and flexibility brought about by transnationality, but they seldom discuss the conceptual and methodological challenges of understanding the (in)variability and multiplicity of identity and membership. Citizens in Motion promotes an approach that stresses the accretion of identities rather than the displacement of one identity for another. -- Pu Hao * <i>Dialogues in Human Geography</i> *

Author Information

Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho is Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore.

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