Since China began its open-door and reform policies in 1978, more than three million Chinese students have migrated to study abroad, and the United States has been their top destination. The recent surge of students following this pattern, along with the rising tide of Chinese middle- and upper-classes' emigration out of China, have aroused wide public and scholarly attention in both China and the US. This book examines the four waves of Chinese student migration to the US since the late 1970s, showing how they were shaped by the profound changes in both nations and by US-China relations. It discusses how student migrants with high socioeconomic status transformed Chinese American communities and challenged American immigration laws and race relations. The book suggests that the rise of China has not negated the deeply rooted "American dream" that has been constantly reinvented in contemporary China. It also addresses the theme of "selective citizenship" – a way in which migrants seek to claim their autonomy - proposing that this notion captures the selective nature on both ends of the negotiations between nation-states and migrants. It cautions against a universal or idealized "dual citizenship" model, which has often been celebrated as a reflection of eroding national boundaries under globalization. This book draws on a wide variety of sources in Chinese and English, as well as extensive fieldwork in both China and the US, and its historical perspective sheds new light on contemporary Chinese student migration and post-1965 Chinese American community. Bridging the gap between Asian and Asian American studies, the book also integrates the studies of migration, education, and international relations. Therefore, it will be of interest to students of these fields, as well as Chinese history and Asian American history more generally.

This book explores the children of Chinese single-child families who go to study abroad and in particular the increase in Chinese familial investment in daughters' education within the wider socio-moral transformation of China.

In 2004, Vanessa Fong offered a groundbreaking ethnographic exploration of the social, economic, and psychological development of children born since China's one-child policy was introduced in 1979. Her book Only Hope left readers with a picture of stressed, ambitious adolescents for whom elite status was the ultimate goal, though relatively few were in a position to achieve it. In Paradise Redefined, Fong tracks the experiences of many in her initial cohort of Chinese only-children—now college-age—as they study abroad in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, North America, and Singapore. While earning a prestigious college education in China is the main path to elite status, study abroad provides an alternative channel by offering a particularly flexible "developed world" citizenship. This flexible citizenship promises the potential for greater happiness and freedom afforded by transnational mobility, but also brings with it unexpected suffering, ambivalence, and disappointment. Paradise Redefined offers insights into China's globalization by examining the expectations and experiences that affect how various Chinese students make decisions about studying abroad, staying abroad, immigration, and returning home.

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.

Tech companies such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft promote the free flow of data worldwide, while relying on foreign temporary IT workers to build, deliver, and support their products. However, even as IT companies use technology and commerce to transcend national barriers, their transnational employees face significant migration and visa constraints. In this revealing ethnography, Amy Bhatt shines a spotlight on Indian IT migrants and their struggles to navigate career paths, citizenship, and belonging as they move between South Asia and the United States. Through in-depth interviews, Bhatt explores the complex factors that shape IT transmigration and settlement, looking at Indian cultural norms, kinship obligations, friendship networks, gendered and racialized discrimination in the workplace, and inflexible and unstable visa regimes that create worker vulnerability. In particular, Bhatt highlights women’s experiences as workers and dependent spouses who move as part of temporary worker programs. Many of the women interviewed were professional peers to their husbands in India but found themselves “housewives” stateside, unable to secure employment because of visa restrictions. Through her focus on the unpaid and feminized placemaking and caregiving labor these women provide, Bhatt shows how women’s labor within the household is vital to the functioning of the flexible and transnational system of IT itself.

In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women’s motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.

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.

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.

Since the 1978 opening up of China and her active engagement in economic reformation and modernization, China has become a truly global economic power. These developments have, consequently, had an impact on ethnic Chinese people living across the world. Traditionally, the study of immigrant communities has focused on internal factors, such as the leadership and social organization of the actors inside the communities. This book, however, turns attention to the exogenous factors, which have helped shape the lives of the Chinese diaspora. In doing so, it provides a valuable contribution to the recent literature, which focuses on the effect of globalisation on the Chinese overseas. Using a number of empirical case studies, including the San Francisco Bay, Canada, South Africa and Hungary, it provides an investigation into how China’s contemporary position in the world has affected the identity of the various locales of the Chinese in different continents. Whilst demonstrating the implications of China’s rise on patterns of circular migration and transnational movements, it also explores how the social and economic relations between Chinese communities and their host and ancestral countries have changed. Ultimately, it highlights how China’s rise has brought new economic opportunities and political clout for the Chinese overseas, but at the same time, has created new stereotypes and racial images by association. As an in-depth study of Chinese societies as well as current migration trends, this book will be useful for students of Chinese Studies, Ethnic Studies, Anthropology and Sociology.

There are growing waves of ‘desirable’ migrants from Asia moving to New Zealand, a place experiencing increasing ethnic diversity, particularly in its largest metropolitan region Auckland. In purely demographic terms much of this diversity has been generated by policy shifts since the 1980s and the adoption of a comparatively liberal immigration policy based on personal merit without discrimination on the grounds of race, national or ethnic origin. Due to these changes, migrants from China, and Asia more broadly, have become increasingly significant in migration flows into New Zealand. This in turn makes New Zealand a valuable case study for understanding how Chinese migrants integrate into and affect their host nation. Wang attempts to close a gap in contemporary research by relating cosmopolitanism to migration, particularly in the Asian context. With a cosmopolitan gaze towards migration studies, she makes four key contributions to the ongoing scholarly discussion. Firstly, this is the first comprehensive study to use cosmopolitanism as a framework to study the lives of contemporary Chinese migrants, with implications for migration studies as a whole. It sheds light on the relationship between cosmopolitanism and migrant mobility, taking a new approach to examine the living paradigms of international migrants. Secondly, this book identifies the emergence and development of cosmopolitanism outside the domain of Western middle-class groups. The concept of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ is utilised to break down the Eurocentric notion of cosmopolitanism, and to show the role played by Chinese rootedness during the process of becoming cosmopolitan and encountering diversity. Thirdly, the book advances and enriches the knowledge of studies in ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, by focusing on ‘cosmopolitanism from below’, locating quotidian and ‘down-to-earth’ cosmopolitan engagements that are grounded in everyday migrant lives. Fourthly, it looks at the emotional dimension of migrants negotiating difference and engaging in cosmopolitanism, particularly the ways in which emotions undermine and promote the development of cosmopolitan sociability.