New York: Palgrave Macmillan [an imprint of Springer Nature], 2019. xiii, 238 pp. US$65.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-137-55710-0.
China is entering a new era in which it is increasingly the destination of immigrants the world over. This book analyzes this era, in chapters depicting immigrants to China from a range of countries, engaged in a range of occupations. Although it cannot cover every aspect, its breadth is its great strength.
Angela Lehmann and Pauline Leonard’s introductory chapter makes the important point that because many foreigners reside illegally in China, and many more go back and forth as “visitors,” the exact number of foreigners living in China cannot be known, although the figure is no doubt considerably greater than the 600,000 reported in the 2010 census. They distinguish between those migrants legally in China on a long-term basis, those short-term migrants who go back and forth between China and elsewhere, and those who are “under the radar” legally and thus administratively unrecognized. In chapter 2, Elena Barabantseva discusses marriage migration among the Yao on the Chinese-Vietnamese border. Until the early 2000s, the state was largely irrelevant to the movement of women across the border for marriage among the patrilocal Yao, but today the women who come to China are deemed “illegal migrants” bearing “illegal children” and subject to “human trafficking.” Heidi Haugen’s chapter 3 discusses immigration and residence restrictions of Africans in Guangzhou. The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games led to a tightening of controls across China, including in Guangzhou, but as Haugen reveals in several vignettes, the residence requirements remain contradictory, such that a migrant’s successful exit from China became a question largely of chance and the goodwill of the particular government officials they happened to encounter.
Xiao Ma’s chapter 4 discusses the educational fervour of anxious South Korean middle-class parents in Beijing. The parents send their children either to international schools (expensive but favoured), to Chinese public schools, or to overseas Korean schools; they are generally desperate to raise their children to be “global citizens” and thereby potential future winners in Korean and global contests for success. In chapter 5, Maggy Lee and Thomas Wong discuss female transnational professionals in Hong Kong. Unlike China, which basically does not accept non-Chinese immigrants seeking to make China their permanent home, Hong Kong does indeed accept such immigrants, and for this reason, the inclusion of Hong Kong in this book is misleading. Nonetheless, the chapter presents convincing portrayals of immigrants, classified as “traditionalists,” “individualists,” or “new cosmopolitans,” the last of whom have greater flexibility and mobility in their global networks.
Kumiko Kawashima’s chapter 6 considers Japanese digital workers employed on local terms by Japanese companies in Dalian: in a Japan that has been in economic decline, these workers do jobs similar to those undertaken by contract or casual workers. Dalian has not had much anti-Japanese fervour; nonetheless, Kawashima notes that many Japanese do not stay, but leave to find greener pastures elsewhere. Chapter 7, by Pauline Leonard, examines English teaching in China, where teachers may be hired on the basis of their white skin colour alone, with no other qualifications. Teachers are characterized as “low quality” or as “foreign devils” when political tensions between China and Western countries arise, but also may be seen as “superstars” simply because of their whiteness. This chapter reminded me of Japan in the early 1980s, where I was a young English teacher—much of what Leonard discusses about China now could have been said about Japan then.
James Farrer’s chapter 8 deals with “culinary migrants” opening restaurants in Shanghai; its interviewees are of higher socioeconomic status than those depicted in other chapters of the book. From having almost no foreign restaurants 50 years ago, the Shanghai restaurant scene has exploded, from French chefs charging US$1000 per meal to many more modest places offering “everyday meals,” in a cosmopolitan mix of “culinary globalization from above and below.” Finally, Angela Lehmann’s chapter 9 discusses migration to China from a Chinese as well as foreign standpoint. Lehmann was asked to take a government position in Xiamen helping foreigners to assimilate into the city; she is thus able to depict a Chinese city government response to the growing global presence in Xiamen, a view differing from the foreigner-based perspectives of most of the book’s other chapters.
This book is partial—I can immediately think of half-a-dozen other nationalities and ethnicities who make their living in China in various ways who do not appear in the book—but is nonetheless highly interesting, in portraying the different situations of many of the multiplicities of foreigners who now come to China. I would like to have seen a concluding chapter giving a broad overview of migration to China. Several of the chapters in the book mention that foreigners cannot think of China as home because residence is always conditional, given Chinese government policy. This is related to the broader issue of ethnic belonging to a country, as in China and Japan, as opposed to civic belonging to a country, as in Canada and Brazil, with the former ethnically exclusive in terms of who can belong, and the latter ethnically inclusive. A concluding chapter might have placed this book’s chapters within such a larger framework of cultural attitudes and contemporary politics and economics. Without that, the book’s larger significance remains implicit. But for anyone interested in issues surrounding immigration to China, this book is well worth reading. I’ve learned much from it, and other scholars and students of China no doubt will too.
Gordon Mathews
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR