26 - 27 MAY 2000
BUDAPEST, HUNGARY
The Past Decade of Migration from China
Movement of people from the People's Republic of China to Europe and Asia has both increased in volume and become more diverse in terms of channels in the last decade, and research on it has been done by a very diverse group of people, from American criminologists to Russian demographers. Most of them had not heard about each other before this workshop. Our aim was to bring them together in order to assemble disjointed and partly unpublished pieces of empirical knowledge for analysis with the help of renowned migration scholars. We were wondering whether we could begin to paint a coherent picture of a 'migration configuration' that encompasses shifts between countries, roles and legal/illegal status chosen by migrants with expediencies for social mobility in China, and policies of government agencies in China that influence such mobility.
By PAL NYIRI AND IGOR R. SAVELIEV
The workshop succeeded in bringing together 37 anthropologists, sociologists, demographers, political scientists, and economists, as well as journalists, and government and NGO workers from fourteen countries. The diversity of the papers, discourses, and languages made a common frame of analysis difficult. Nonetheless, common themes emerged from the papers. One of these is the globalization of Chinese migration, which includes several aspects. One aspect is the opening up of new migration spaces from Eastern Europe to Cambodia and Burma, and the commercialization of migration brokerage networks resulting in increased intermigration between individual countries and regions. Another aspect is the increasing standardization of some modes of economic activity and identity discourses, mainly those tied to the People's Republic of China. This has mitigated status and lifestyle differences between migrants following very different routes and possessing different types of cultural capital, making the previously rigid categories of 'student', 'illegal sweatshop worker', and 'overseas Chinese businessman' more mutually permeable. On the other hand, this global Chinese migration stands in opposition to, and sometimes conflict with, established, more stationary overseas Chinese communities whose elites feel that their hard-earned economic and social stability, as well as their control of 'Chineseness' in the local context, is being threatened.Another overarching theme was formulated by Liu Xin in the form of a question: 'What does travel mean to the way a Chinese today sees himself as a person?' Most papers, explicitly or implicitly, struggled with the question of whether the meaning of movement to different social subjects to migrants, non-migrants, elites, and states is different today from what it had been. Papers by Edwards, Guerasimoff, and Thunø supported the view that the PRC government's policy is now lending legitimacy to the 'spatial hierarchy' (Liu) generated by travel, thus co-opting migration into an organizationally underpinned discourse of patriotism. This can make spatial movement a sort of short cut to social movement in a localized context.
The papers challenged several widespread assumptions on migration from China, including the popular criminological view that migrant smuggling is a criminal enterprise controlled by organized syndicates, that the centralized agency in promoting migration is increasingly imputed to be the PRC, and that figures cited in Russian publications concerning 'Chinese expansion' into the far east of the country are exaggerated. China, Russia, and Japan, participants argued, share a situation where reporting and policies on Chinese migrants fall victim to conflicts of interest between various levels and branches of government.
Despite such differentiated treatment of these issues, the papers, especially in the last panel, emphasized the role of new migration in reinforcing the PRC's state-sponsored discourse of 'Chineseness'. As Pieke pointed out, the more dynamic Chinese living overseas become and the closer ties they have with China, the more vital it is for Peking to pre-empt the spilling over of subversive discourses among them into the domestic sphere by emphasizing a single collective identity. The treatment of alternative identities and discourses of truth constructed by various elites and at the grassroots levels, including religious movements and oppositionist political parties active among the rank and file of migrants, was underrepresented at the workshop, but Poisson's paper offered a promising beginning.
We have contacted publishers with a proposal for a volume consisting of selected papers along the conceptual lines of globalizing Chinese migration and its changing meaning. *
This workshop was organized by Dr Pál Nyíri and Professor Igor R. Saveliev and was sponsored by the European Science Foundation Asia Committee and the Economic and Social Research Council Transnational Communities Programme.
Dr Pál Nyíri is a Senior Research Fellow
at the University of Oxford.
E-mail: nyirip@mail.matac.hu
Prof. Igor R. Saveliev is Associate Professor at Niigata University.
E-mail: irs@human.ge.niigata-u.ac.jp