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| 1 |
ID:
189022
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| Summary/Abstract |
China is considered to be the biggest beneficiary of globalization, as evidenced by the growing volume and diversity of people, goods, and information moving across its borders. However, the increase in scholarly attention on China’s borderlands that is warranted by such economic, social, and political activities is absent. This special issue of China Information is committed to new research that addresses mounting challenges facing studies on China’s borderlands, as well as borderland studies in general. This special issue presents the work of emerging scholars who investigate cross-border migration and the key characteristics of China’s borderlands, focusing on previously understudied places that were out of the reach of scholars for years. These studies offer a lens through which the socio-economic and politico-institutional changes in China’s borderlands can be understood within the broader context of China’s time-compressed global rise. A cursory glance at the research topics may give the impression that this special issue appears to investigate migratory phenomena in geographically remote places on the peripheries of the country. However, we suggest that China’s rise is inseparable from, and critical to, a variety of complex phenomena that should be scrutinized and re-evaluated respectively in each contribution to this special issue. As areas experiencing rapid changes, China’s borderlands are the sites of a multitude of processes embedded in the social transformation which affects the country’s borderlands as much as its coastal regions.
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| 2 |
ID:
189023
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| Summary/Abstract |
Amid the post-Cold War global revival of ethnonationalism, Kazakhstan – a newly independent state born out of the collapse of the Soviet Union – launched its ‘ethnic repatriation programme’, encouraging ethnic Kazakhs from outside Kazakhstan to ‘return home’. China has a large ethnic Kazakh population and shares a border of more than 1500 km with Kazakhstan in Xinjiang. Since the 1990s, over 150,000 ethnic Kazakhs originally from China have chosen to emigrate to Kazakhstan. Sketching China’s and Kazakhstan’s state policies toward ethnic Kazakh migration since the 1990s, this article addresses how different factors and rationales have shaped individuals’ decisions to emigrate to Kazakhstan or to stay in China. The article relies upon available, multilingual data and over 30 in-depth interviews with respondents in both Kazakhstan and China. We argue that, for ethnic Kazakhs emigrating from China to Kazakhstan, socio-economically and environmentally based rationales, including perceptions of developmental prospects, social welfare benefits and social ties were most salient during the 2000s. However, since the late 2000s, politico-culturally based rationales, such as ethno-nationalism, Kazakh linguistic and cultural concerns, educational opportunities, and other factors have become increasingly salient especially during the 2010s.
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| 3 |
ID:
189025
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article investigates the increasing development–security conflict in China’s immigration management through the case of a policy trial regularizing Vietnamese labour migration in two Guangxi border cities. China’s border regions host low-income immigrant labourers from neighbouring nations. In the 2010s, China launched a series of policy initiatives to regulate temporary and irregular migrant flows. Based on fieldwork and policy research, this study analyses the development and early implementation of this trial, with a focus on state perspectives. It shows how state actors mobilize migrant temporariness and other policy tools within a negotiation process that aims to resolve tensions between developmental policy aims for transnational economic integration and a drive towards securitizing cross-border mobility. I conclude that state actors fail to reach a balance between the conflicting development and security concerns. I also argue that China’s current risk-averse policy environment makes the development–security policy conflict in its immigration management more difficult to resolve. My findings contribute to our understanding of contemporary Chinese policymaking, including immigration policymaking, as well as to the literature on the development–security nexus in temporary labour management schemes.
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| 4 |
ID:
189024
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| Summary/Abstract |
Chinese nationals who are classified as belonging to the Korean ethnic minority have become increasingly mobile since the 1980s in the China–North Korea borderland. Korean ethnicity plays a significant role in facilitating migration. This article unpacks the mobility–ethnicity nexus through the theoretical lens of ‘migration infrastructure’. To investigate how the borderland residents became mobile subjects as well as the processes intertwined with Korean ethnicity, the ensemble of technologies, institutions, and actors through which migration is reproduced and mediated are examined. Drawing on a multi-sited ethnographic study focusing on a rural community, this research analyses the multi-directional flows between the village, urban regions in China, and the two Koreas. Included are discussions on the changing state policies and regulations, diplomatic relationships between China and the two Koreas, growing migrant networks, brokers, family members, humanitarian organizations and other intermediaries that jointly organize and mediate mobilities, and the processes that are usually linked to evoking and redefining ‘Korean’ as an ethnic category. Ethnicity-mediated migration infrastructure enables villagers to move, but throughout the move they are continuously perceived as ethnically Korean. Mobility-sustained ethnicity calls for research to look at how ethnic categories gradually become relevant in everyday life, and ultimately institutionalized as people move between places.
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| 5 |
ID:
189026
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| Summary/Abstract |
We investigate the labour regime of an agricultural sector in the China–Myanmar borderland. The extant literature on labour generally stresses the hyper-precarity of workers, especially migrant workers. Our case study of the sugar cane cutting industry in Dragon Village, Yunnan Province, suggests that contractors who hire workers from Myanmar are also in a state of hyper-precarity which is shaped by multiple layers of socio-economic and politico-institutional circumstances. We develop an analytic framework for investigating transnational labour contractor regimes, which highlights the strategies jointly adopted by contractors and workers to mitigate the hyper-precarity within which both parties are embedded. We find that contractors are in a hyper-precarious position due to limited micro-level transnational social networks to meet outpaced labour demand, unfavourable meso-level market conditions, and macro-level politico-institutional factors such as the added responsibilities of immigration management, a fast-evolving legal system, and military coups. We also find that contractors adopt strategies to control both workers’ labour process and everyday life, while workers use some counterstrategies to regain agency. Together, they stabilize the labour force for this industry despite their shared hyper-precarity.
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