Chinese Migration and Families-At-Risk


Book Description

Migration has played a significant role throughout Chinese history. Over the past few decades, the movements of the Chinese people, representing as they do a huge proportion of the world population, have attracted increasing attention both domestically and globally. Chinese migration is often a particularly complex phenomenon. On one hand, its characteristics have been shaped in many ways by numerous social, political and economic changes throughout the world, while, on the other, it has profound influences on the host countries and on China itself. Detailed investigation of the changing profiles of Chinese migrants, the reasons behind their movements, the challenges they face, and the strategies they use to cope with these problems will have significant implications for future policy making and practice. Chinese Migration and Families-At-Risk contributes to a better understanding of the various facets of Chinese migration. Its chapters address different concerns related to Chinese migration in the modern world, including the patterns and influences of internal migration within China; the issues related to migration from mainland China to Hong Kong, a special administrative region in China; and the history, features, and impact of Chinese migration to Western countries. Grounded in recent and contemporary research and scholarly inquiry, Chinese Migration and Families-At-Risk provides a comprehensive and critical review of the essential issues related to Chinese migrant families, and is undoubtedly a vital book for all who want to have a deeper understanding of the trends and current situation of Chinese migration.




Handbook of Chinese Migration


Book Description

The recent unprecedented scale of Chinese migration has had far-reaching consequences. Within China, many villages have been drained of their young and most able workers, cities have been swamped by the ‘floating population’, and many rural migrants have been unable to integrate into urban society. Internationally, the Chinese have become increasingly more mobile. This Handbook provides a unique collection of new and original research on internal and international Chinese migration and its effects on the sense of belonging of migrants.




Migration in China and Asia


Book Description

This book will enlarge our grasp of global migration phenomena, offering insights into the fascinating, at times startling, realities of human migration in Asia. The chapters presented in this volume offer variety in not only theme but in approach to migration in Southeast and East Asia. Particularly welcome for a volume on migration studies, a discipline that has long been dominated by economists, sociologists, and geographers, are the chapters that approach the subject from an anthropological or ethnological perspective. These chapters bring to our attention details of the lives of migrants and their communities that are often lost in studies of migration statistics, the economic aspects of migration, or aspects of urban geography with which we have become more familiar. Some chapters are more theoretical in nature and herein lie some of the most important reasons for studying migration involving Asian countries: migration studies have, until relatively recently, developed their theoretical insights on the basis of European migration to North America. Asian migration offers new theoretical challenges to migration scholars; its dynamism is such that predictions of what is to come are not for the risk averse. The empirical studies here provide fascinating details of the strategies used by asylum seekers, of marriage migration, of the role of homeland languages in education, of the workings of ethnic entrepreneurs, of the media’s role in sustaining Chinese communities, and on the incentive structures that are helping to shape return flows to China. For readers who are from Asian countries, this book will illuminate the changes that are taking place in your region as a result of migration. For readers from developed and other societies, it will provide new insights into migration involving this understudied part of the world, an area that supplies the lion’s share of immigrants to developed economies, and the area whose rapid economic development will soon make it their greatest competition for migrants, especially the highly skilled.




New Chinese Immigrants in New Zealand


Book Description

This book focuses on new immigrant families from the People’s Republic of China to New Zealand and investigates how these families have adapted to New Zealand immigration policy regime, which does not accommodate their cultural preference to live as multigenerational families easily. The book analyses a three-generation framework: First-generation adult immigrants, their children and older parents. It examines how migratory mobility and intergenerational dynamics configure migratory trajectories of individual family members and shape their family lives and sense of identity. The book sheds light on how different family generations pursue their own interests and goals while maintaining family unity and cohesiveness in contexts of increasing transnational mobility opportunities and constraints. It also investigates how familial ties, transnational connections and a sense of identity and belonging are defined and redefined during the process of transnational migration. This book can serve as a heuristic reference to and meaningful comparative parameter for studying transnational family migration in other contexts. As a significant theoretical contribution to the theory of transnational family formation in contexts where restrictive immigration policies result in members of multigenerational families living across different countries, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of sociology, anthropology, race and ethnic studies as well as Asian and Chinese studies.




Migration, Indigenization And Interaction: Chinese Overseas And Globalization


Book Description

The twelve chapters included in this book address various issues related to Chinese migration, indigenization and exchange with special reference to the era of globalization. As the waves of Chinese migration started in the last century, the emphasis, not surprisingly, is placed on the “migrant states” rather than “indigenous states”. Nevertheless, many chapters are also concerned with issues of “settling down” and “becoming part of the local scenes”. However, the settling/integrating process has been interrupted by a globalizing world, new Chinese migration and the rise of China at the end of 20th century.




Globalizing Chinese Migration


Book Description

This title was first published in 2003. Globalizing Chinese Migration is the first volume to deal comprehensively with the most recent wave of the migration from the People's Republic of China to Europe and Asia. By analyzing the Chinese state’s role in this migration, the authors dismiss as fiction the theory (sometimes advanced by hostile and racist foreign observers) that Chinese authorities are intent on using mass emigration as an expansionist tool. They go on to explain that migrants who might, in earlier times, have been reviled as traitors and absconders are today more likely to be viewed by sections of the Chinese state bureaucracy as patriots who remain part of China’s polity and economy and contribute to its standing overseas. Some senior officials, however, particularly diplomats, stress the harm done by new migrants, both to China’s economy (which loses assets as a result of the migrants’ entrepreneurial activities) and to its reputation in the world. An essential resource for academics and students alike, the volume presents important new data on aspects of Chinese migration largely neglected in the existing English-language literature. These include new forms of emigration from China (by students and by workers from the country’s north-eastern provinces) and emigration to destinations (including Russia, Southeast Asia, and Japan) normally unremarked by students of population movements.




Children of Migrants in China


Book Description

Children are precious in China especially as its population ages rapidly. The unprecedented fast urbanization and massive internal migration have profoundly changed almost every aspect of society. They have impacted the livelihood of children of migrants most. Because of the hukou system and related policies, China’s internal migrants face major obstacles to assimilate into cities. But more than that, as this book shows, these policies have also torn families apart on a scale unseen heretofore. More than 100 million children grow up in unstable families and the great majority have suffered from prolonged separation from their parents in the migratory upheaval. This book provides an updated analysis of this mega and painful process unfolding at various geographical scales. The chapters revolve around the central notion of family togetherness, or the lack thereof. The book measures, dissects, and analyses the impacts of migration on children and recommends policies to address major problems from a variety of disciplinary perspectives employing different methodologies. The problems faced by the children of migrants remain enormous, and it is a looming huge crisis in the making. If unaddressed, those problems can damage a whole generation with serious consequences. The chapters in this book were first published in Eurasian Geography and Economics.




New Chinese Migrations


Book Description

With the rapid economic development of China and the overall shift in the global political economy, there is now the emergence of new Chinese on the move. These new Chinese migrants and diasporas are pioneers in the establishment of multiple homes in new geographical locations, the development of new (global and hybrid) Chinese identities, and the creation of new (political, economic and social) inspirations through their mobile lives. This book identifies and examines new forms and paths of Chinese migration since the 1980s. It provides updated trends of migration movements of the Chinese, including their emergent geographies. With chapters highlighting the diversities and complexities of these new waves of Chinese migration, this volume offers novel insights to enrich our understanding of Asian mobility in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The book will be of interest to academics examining migration, mobility, diaspora, Chinese identity, overseas Chinese studies and Asian diaspora studies.




Living with Vulnerabilities and Opportunities in a Migration Context


Book Description

The book grapples with social inequality, inclusivity, and diversity through the discussions of wellbeing, wellbecoming, and resilience of floating children and left-behind children. It invites families, schools, communities, social organisations, and governments to rethink and recognise the qualities of left-behind children and floating children. The book will be of interest to research students, sociologists of education, educational studies scholars, social workers, school professionals, and policy makers in and beyond China. The past two decades have seen exponential growth of urbanisation and migration in China. Emerging from this growth are a myriad population of floating children and left-behind children and the ever greater social-spatial interpenetration that places these children at risk of undesirable wellbeing. The living and schooling of these children are fraught with potholes and distractions in the context of migration and urbanisation. Extant work often treats floating children and left-behind children as two discrete populations and comes to grips with their wellbeing separately. The deficit model and the ‘do-gooder’ approach have prevailed for a long time, intending to fix the “problems” and correct the “abnormalities” associated with these children. This book differs, however, in its efforts to blur the dichotomy between floating children and left-behind children; in its transformative view and strength-based approach that recast vulnerabilities into opportunities; and in its focus on the nurture of enabling ecologies instead of the nature of individual inferiorities.




Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change


Book Description

Inspired by recent work on diaspora and cultural globalization, Adam McKeown asks in this new book: How were the experiences of different migrant communities and hometowns in China linked together through common networks? Chinese Migrant Networks and Cultural Change argues that the political and economic activities of Chinese migrants can best be understood by taking into account their links to each other and China through a transnational perspective. Despite their very different histories, Chinese migrant families, businesses, and villages were connected through elaborate networks and shared institutions that stretched across oceans and entire continents. Through small towns in Qing and Republican China, thriving enclaves of businesses in South Chicago, broad-based associations of merchants and traders in Peru, and an auspicious legacy of ancestors in Hawaii, migrant Chinese formed an extensive system that made cultural and commercial exchange possible.