Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations 9781138959859, 9781315660493

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ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ASIAN MIGRATIONS

Housing more than half of the global population, Asia is a region characterised by increasingly diverse forms of migration and mobility. Offering a wide-​ranging overview of the field of Asian migrations, this new handbook seeks to examine and evaluate the flows of movement within Asia, as well as those into and out of the continent. It offers in-​depth analysis of both empirical and theoretical developments in the field, and includes key examples and trends such as British colonialism, Chinese diaspora, labour migration, the movement of women, and recent student migration. Organised into thematic parts, the topics cover: • • • •

The historical context to migration in Asia Modern Asian migration pathways and characteristics The reconceptualising of migration through Asian experiences Contemporary challenges and controversies in Asian migration practices and policies

Contributing to the retheorising of the subject area of international migration from non-​western experience, the Routledge Handbook of Asian Migrations will be useful to students and scholars of migration, Asian development and Asian studies in general. Gracia Liu-​Farrer is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate School of Asia-​Pacific Studies, Waseda University, Japan. Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Professor in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore, and Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at NUS’s Asia Research Institute.

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ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ASIAN MIGRATIONS

Edited by Gracia Liu-​Farrer and Brenda S.A. Yeoh

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First published 2018 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 selection and editorial matter, Gracia Liu-​Farrer and Brenda S.A.Yeoh; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Gracia Liu-​Farrer and Brenda S.A.Yeoh to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​95985-​9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​66049-​3 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Out of House Publishing

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CONTENTS

List of illustrations Acknowledgement Notes on contributors

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Introduction: Asian migrations and mobilities: continuities, conceptualisations and controversies Gracia Liu-​Farrer and Brenda S.A. Yeoh PART I

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Asian migrations in the historical context

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1 Colonial and postcolonial migrations Sunil S. Amrith

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2 The changing meanings of diaspora: the Chinese in Southeast Asia Els van Dongen and Hong Liu

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PART II

Asian migration regimes and pathways

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3 Temporary labour migration Michiel Baas

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4 Intimate migrations: the case of marriage migrants and sex workers in Asia Maria Cecilia Hwang and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

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5 Intra-​Asia higher education mobilities Rochelle Yun Ge and Kong Chong Ho

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6 Diaspora engagement and state policies of return migration in Asia Elaine Lynn-​Ee Ho and Madeleine Lim Pei Wei

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7 Ethnic return migration in East Asia: Japanese Brazilians in Japan and conceptions of homeland Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda

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8 Conceptualising Asian medical travel as medical migrations Andrea Whittaker

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9 From Asia with money: the emigration of the wealthy Gracia Liu-​Farrer

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PART III

Reconceptualising migration through Asian experiences

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10 Migration and the production of migrant mobilities Weiqiang Lin and Marielle Stigum Gleiss

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11 The infrastructural turn in Asian migration Johan Lindquist and Biao Xiang

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12 The cultural and economic logics of migration Jamie Coates

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13 Internal and international migration: separate or integrated systems? Ronald Skeldon

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14 Human trafficking or voluntary migration? Lessons learned from across Asia Pardis Mahdavi

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15 Critical expatriate studies: changing expatriate communities in Asia and the blurring boundaries of expatriate identity James Farrer

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PART IV

Challenges in Asian migration

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16 Migration, poverty and source communities Robert Cole and Jonathan Rigg

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17 Remittances, migration, and trade Philip Martin

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18 Transnational migrations and plural diversities: encounters in global cities Brenda S.A.Yeoh

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19 Growing up in transnational families: children’s experiences and perspectives Theodora Lam, Shirlena Huang, Brenda S.A.Yeoh, and Jocelyn O. Celero

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20 Non-​citizen political engagement Erin Aeran Chung and Rameez Abbas

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21 Irregular migration in Asia: are new solutions in sight? Maruja M.B. Asis and Graziano Battistella

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22 Mobilities on edge: migration at the margins of nation-​states Juan Zhang

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Index 299

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ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures 5.1 Number of Chinese government scholarships provided to international students 8.1 Overlapping migration fields intersecting with medical migrations 17.1 Remittances and other flows to developing countries, 1990–​2014 17.2 Factor price equalisation with freer trade

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Map 22.1 The China–​Vietnam borderlands

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Tables 5.1 Percentage of Asian students hosted by leading host countries in East Asia 5.2 Proportion of Asian students hosted in Asian universities 5.3 Reasons for migration 5.4 Government scholarship students divided by continents in China (2009–​2011) 5.5 Comparison between Asian and non-​Asian students on the reasons for studying in China 5.6 Students’ plan after graduation 5.7 Plan after graduation for international students studying in Singapore 5.8 International students’ social network in Singapore 17.1 International migrants in 2015 17.2 Migration humps: trade and low-​skill migration as complements 20.1 Selected non-​citizen populations in Asia 20.2 Modes of non-​citizen political engagement viii

76 80 81 83 83 85 86 87 224 234 266 267

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We would like to thank Leanne Hinves, our commissioning editor at Routledge, for inviting us to embark on this project, and all the contributors for their enthusiastic support. We wish to give special thanks to our capable research assistants,Wei Ning Law from National University of Singapore and An Huy Tran and Mira Malick from Waseda University, who helped in the process of the manuscript preparation. This book project is also supported by Waseda University’s English academic research book publication grant.

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CONTRIBUTORS

Rameez Abbas is Assistant Professor in the College of International Security Affairs at the National Defense University in Washington, DC, where she teaches courses on South Asian politics and international relations.  Among her publications is “Internal Migration and Citizenship in India” in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (2016). She holds a PhD in political science from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Sunil S. Amrith is Mehra Family Professor of South Asian Studies and Professor of History at Harvard University, where he is also a director of the Centre for History and Economics. He is an historian of South and Southeast Asia. Amrith is the author of Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia (2011) and Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (2013). He is currently working on the environmental history of modern India. Maruja M.B. Asis is the Director of Research and Publications at the Scalabrini Migration Center in Manila. Michiel Baas is a Research Fellow with the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. The overall theme in his work is the Indian middle class, focusing on IT professionals in Bangalore, Indian students in Australia, mid-​level skilled migrants in Singapore, and new middle-​class professionals in urban India. In recent years he has published on questions of migration and transnationalism, the body and masculinity, as well as racism and violence. His ORCID (orcid.org) is: 0000-​0003-​4405-​146X. Graziano Battistella is the Director of the Scalabrini Migration Center in Manila, and the founding editor of the Asian and Pacific Migration Journal. Jocelyn O. Celero recently obtained her PhD in International Studies at Waseda University-​ Graduate School of Asia-​Pacific Studies, Tokyo, Japan. Her dissertation examined the transnational life trajectories of 1.5-​and second-​generation Japanese-​Filipinos. Erin Aeran Chung is the Charles D. Miller Associate Professor of East Asian Politics in the Department of Political Science and Co-​Director of the Racism, Immigration, and Citizenship x

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(RIC) Program at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She specialises in East Asian political economy, international migration, and comparative racial politics. Her first book, Immigration and Citizenship in Japan, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2010 and translated into Japanese and published by Akashi Shoten in 2012. She is currently completing her second book, Immigrant Incorporation in East Asian Democracies. Jamie Coates is interested in how mobility and creativity shape perceptions of commonality, self and political possibility. Empirically he has worked on Sino-​Japanese migration, media and tourism, with particular focus on how these issues affect young Chinese efforts to reimagine co-​ethnic and regional identities. He completed his PhD at the Australian National University, and has since taught at the University of Sheffield in the UK, and conducted research at Waseda University in Japan. Robert Cole is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. His research interests surround economic integration, agrarian change and environmental issues in rural contexts of Southeast Asia, focusing on the Mekong countries. His PhD research explores the role of transboundary production of agricultural commodities in driving social change in the uplands of northern Laos. James Farrer is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Graduate Program in Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, specialising in urban sociology in East Asia, researching sexuality, nightlife, expatriate communities, and food cultures. Rochelle Yun Ge obtained her PhD from Sociology at the National University of Singapore. She was a visiting fellow at the Harvard-​Yenching Institute and worked in the University of Macau. Her recent research interests are in the area of internationalisation of higher education in Asia, including but not limited to educational organisation management, international student mobilities, curriculum development and policy analysis. Marielle Stigum Gleiss is Associate Professor of Social Sciences at the Department of Religion and Society, MF Norwegian School of Theology in Oslo. Her research interests include the politics of civil society engagement, migrant labour and discourse analysis. She has published articles in China Information, Media, Culture & Society and the Journal of Chinese Political Science. Elaine Lynn-​ Ee Ho is Associate Professor at the Department of Geography and Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research addresses how citizenship is changing as a result of migration in countries like Singapore, China and Myanmar. This research agenda considers four topics:  immigration and emigration in Singapore; transnational ageing and care in the Asia-​Pacific, international student migration to China, and border mobilities between Myanmar and China. Her ORCID is: 0000-​0002-​5400-​7668. Kong Chong Ho is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. Trained as an urban sociologist at the University of Chicago, his research interests are in the political economy of cities, higher education, and youth. Dr Ho is an editorial board member of Pacific Affairs and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology. Recent higher education publications include “International Student Mobility and After-​Study Lives: the portability and prospects of overseas education in Asia”, xi

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Population, Space and Place (2016); and “The University’s Place in Asian Cities”, Asia Pacific Viewpoint (2014). Shirlena Huang is Associate Professor of Geography at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Faculty’s Migration Cluster. Her research focuses mainly on issues at the intersection of transnational migration, gender and family, with a particular focus on the themes of care labour migration and transnational families within the Asia-​Pacific region. Her ORCID is: 0000-​0001-​8932-​6362. Maria Cecilia Hwang is a PhD candidate in American Studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Her research interests include gender and migration, human trafficking, and sex work. Theodora Lam is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. She obtained her PhD in Geography from NUS and her dissertation focused on understanding changing gender subjectivities, web of care and relationships within the family in the wake of transnational labour migration. Her research interests cover transnational migration, children’s geographies and gender studies, and she has also published on themes relating to migration, citizenship and education. Her ORCID is: 0000-​0003-​0342-​5808. Madeleine Lim Pei Wei is a research assistant and undergraduate at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. Her graduating thesis considers the integration experiences of Chinese migrants who reside in Singapore’s public-​housing estates, where social mixing is mandated by state policy. Weiqiang Lin is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. His research interests lie at the intersection of mobilities, (air) transport, infrastructure and transnationalism. He has published in a wide range of edited volumes and peer-​reviewed journals, including Environment and Planning A, Environment and Planning D, Geoforum, Geopolitics, Mobilities, Journal of Transport Geography and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. His current research examines food logistics and their infrastructures in China and Singapore, as well as their related politics. His ORCID is: 0000-​0002-​5484-​0860. Johan Lindquist is Professor of Social Anthropology and Director of the Forum for Asian Studies at Stockholm University in Sweden. He is a member of the editorial committees of Public Culture and Pacific Affairs, has published articles in journals such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Mobilities, Public Culture, Pacific Affairs, and International Migration Review, is the Co-​Editor of  Figures of Southeast Asian Modernity  (2013), the author of  The Anxieties of Mobility:  Development and Migration in the Indonesian Borderlands  (2009), and the director of B.A.T.A.M. (2005). Hong Liu is Tan Kah Kee Endowed Professor of Asian Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, where he also serves as Chair of the School of Social Sciences and Director of the Nanyang Centre for Public Administration. Prior to joining NTU in 2010, he was Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the National University of Singapore and Chair Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Manchester. His ORCID is: 0000-​0003-​3328-​8429. xii

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Gracia Liu-​Farrer is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate School of Asia-​Pacific Studies, Waseda University, Japan, and leads the Migration and Citizenship Research Group at Waseda Institute of Asia-​Pacific Studies. Her research mainly focuses on two areas: immigrants’ economic, social and political practices in Japan, and how transnational labour mobilities change meanings of work and organisational culture. Her ORCID is: 0000-​0003-​3241-​8703. Pardis Mahdavi, PhD, is currently Chief Academic Officer and Acting Dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Before coming to Denver, she was at Pomona College from 2006–2017 where she most recently served as professor and chair of anthropology and director of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College as well as Dean of   Women. Her research interests include academic freedom, diversity and inclusion in higher education, gendered labour, human trafficking, migration, sexuality, human rights, youth culture, transnational feminism and public health in the context of changing global and political structures. She has published four single authored books and one edited volume in addition to numerous journal and news articles. She has been a fellow at the Social Sciences Research Council, the American Council on Learned Societies, Google Ideas, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Philip Martin is Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California-​Davis. He edits Rural Migration News (migration.ucdavis.edu), has served on several federal commissions, testifies frequently before Congress, and works for UN agencies around the world on labour and migration issues. Martin is an award-​winning author whose research focuses on the impacts of migrant workers on labour markets in destination countries, the effects of emigration and remittances on sending countries, and the recruitment business that moves workers over borders. His most recent book is Merchants of Labour: Recruiters and International Labour Migration (2017). Rhacel Salazar Parreñas is Professor of Sociology and Gender Studies at the University of Southern California. She writes on the labour and migration of women from the Philippines. Jonathan Rigg is Professor of Geography and Director of the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore. He has worked on migration and mobility since the 1980s in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam, as well as in Nepal and Sri Lanka. His most recent book is Challenging Southeast Asian Development: The Shadows of Success (Routledge, 2016). His ORCID is: 0000-​0002-​6563-​4640. Ronald Skeldon is Emeritus Professor in Geography at the University of Sussex and Professor of Human Geography in the Graduate School of Governance at Maastricht University. After taking a BSc (Hons) at the University of Glasgow and a doctorate at the University of Toronto with a study of migration in Peru, he became a Research Fellow at the New Guinea Research Unit of the Australian National University. He then joined the United Nations as a Census Advisor in Papua New Guinea before becoming a Population Officer at the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific in Bangkok. For many years he was on the faculties of the University of Hong Kong and subsequently the University of Sussex. He continues to act as a consultant to international and research organisations. He has published widely on issues around migration and development and lives in Nairn, Scotland. xiii

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Takeyuki (Gaku) Tsuda is a Professor of Anthropology in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. After receiving his PhD in anthropology in 1997 from the University of California at Berkeley, he was a Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago and then served as Associate Director of the Centre for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego. He is the author of Strangers in the Ethnic Homeland: Japanese Brazilian Return Migration in Transnational Perspective (2003) and Japanese American Ethnicity: In Search of Heritage and Homeland Across Generations (2016). Els van Dongen is Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, specialising in modern and contemporary China. Before joining NTU, she studied and conducted research in Belgium (University of Leuven), the Netherlands (Leiden University), China (Central China Normal University and Peking University), and the United States (Boston University). Her ORCID is: 0000-​0003-​2342-​0932. Andrea Whittaker,  PhD, is Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Convenor of Anthropology at the School of Social Sciences, Monash University, Melbourne. Specialising in the field of medical anthropology, her current ARC Future Fellowship studies reproductive travel in Asia for surrogacy. Other recent research includes a project on medical travel in Thailand and Malaysia and another on people living long term with HIV in rural and regional Queensland. She is author of over 119 academic works and her most recent book is Thai in vitro: Assisted Reproduction in Thailand (2015). Another book, International Surrogacy as Disruptive Industry in Southeast Asia, is forthcoming. Biao Xiang is a Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford, specialising in migration and social changes in Asia. He is the author of Global “Body Shopping”, Transcending Boundaries and numerous articles in both English and Chinese. Brenda S.A. Yeoh is Professor (Provost’s Chair) in the Department of Geography as well as Research Leader of the Asian Migration Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Her research interests include the politics of space in colonial and postcolonial cities, and she has considerable experience working on a wide range of migration research in Asia, including key themes such as cosmopolitanism and highly skilled talent migration; gender, social reproduction and care migration; migration, national identity and citizenship issues; globalising universities and international student mobilities; and cultural politics, family dynamics and international marriage migrants. She has published widely in these fields. Her ORCID is: 0000-​0002-​0240-​3175. Juan Zhang is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Social Science, the University of Queensland. Her research interests include transnational mobilities, borders, labour migration, and casinos in Asia. She has published in journals including: Current Sociology, Environment and Planning D, Environment and Planning A, Gender, Place and Culture, among others. Her recent co-​ edited book is entitled The Art of Neighbouring: Making Relations Across China’s Borders (University of Amsterdam Press, 2017). Juan serves on the editorial board of the journal Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration. Her ORCID is : 0000-​0003-​3613-​6332.

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INTRODUCTION Asian migrations and mobilities: continuities, conceptualisations and controversies Gracia Liu-​Farrer and Brenda S.A. Yeoh

Spanning a vast geographic area, Asia sustains nearly two-​thirds of the world’s population. In this populous continent, people have never ceased to move across different boundaries looking for a better life. Economic globalisation, demographic transformations and the expansion of international education and tourism since the 1980s have resulted in even more rapid population mobility. In particular, the attempts at creating integrated regional communities such as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have further facilitated the movements of people within Asia. People migrate –​sometimes permanently but more often than not provisionally –​to work, to study, to marry, to retire, to escape insecure environments and to enjoy a different climate and lifestyle. In recent decades, given the wide array of social organisations, political regimes, economic developmental pathways and cultural configurations in Asia, migration phenomena, patterns and outcomes of mobility are necessarily complex. An increasing number of studies have engaged in the new mobility patterns out of, into and within Asia. The field of Asian migration has accumulated a vast scholarship over the years. This Handbook of Asian Migrations provides an overview of this maturing field and contributes to outlining a conceptual framework for understanding complex migration phenomena in Asia. It hopes to capture the new empirical and theoretical developments that might serve as a departure for comparative migration studies with other regions. Theories of migration, and of international migration in particular, have been influenced by the social experiences and political experiments of classical immigration countries, especially those in North America. The specific political and social contexts in Asia, however, have produced migration phenomena that are fundamentally different from those observed in North America, Europe and Oceania, thereby making it imperative for scholars working in an Asian context to plough the field for new conceptualisations that are more useful in making sense of grounded realities. There are several distinctive conundrums that shape migration in the Asian context. First, the region is replete with diversity and contradictions. It has the world’s richest and poorest societies, and the most advanced and the least developed economies. The political regimes in Asia range from liberal democratic secular states to totalitarian and religious fundamentalist governments. These extreme variations in development both drive and prohibit the movements of people, and create complex patterns of mobility. 1

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Second, Asian nations are torn between an anxiety for building strong national states and an aspiration for creating integrated regional communities. In Asia, the former process –​nation-​building –​is often hostile to population mobility, not only between states but also within a country. The legitimacy of nation-​states is sometimes founded on the solidarity and triumph of an ethnic majority. Nation-​building processes entail the reconstruction of a dominant ethno-​national identity, and to ensure national security therefore means rendering migrants, mostly ethnic others, as outsiders who have no place in the nation-​state. Given a political history comprising largely postcolonial nation-​states, the institutional frameworks for international migration did not develop until very recently in some Asian countries, and are still non-​existent in others. As a consequence, despite the domestic demand for productive and reproductive labour, or the international responsibility for humanitarian assistance, most countries in Asia are reluctant to open their doors to foreign workers or refugees, let alone allow them to settle or give them equal social rights. Those which have admitted migrants in substantial numbers are struggling with thorny issues of the integration of immigrants. How to deal with questions of ethno-​national identity when foreign workers and marriage migrants who enter the nation-​state eventually stay and have children is a challenge many Asian countries now have to face. Regional integration initiatives as seen in the formation of ASEAN, on the other hand, demand lowering thresholds or removing barriers for the flow of people as well as capital and goods, and has the potential for further increasing the mobility of people across borders. Third, a prominent feature of Asian migration stems from the contradiction between rising aspirations and desire for mobility among a broad spectrum of people on the one hand, and the increasingly restrictive immigration regimes on the other. The ‘space’ between human aspirations for mobility and stringent immigration control has been mediated by the rise of the migration industry. At the same time, the development of flexible labour markets characterised by sub-​contracting and the privatisation of migration management mean that intersections between state and market actors are increasingly complex. Almost all authors who contribute to this volume have done extensive and in-​depth fieldwork about various migration phenomena in the Asian region.The results are grounded insights into these diverse and distinctly Asian modes of migration. This introduction chapter lays out the rationale for producing a handbook on Asian migrations, and provides a preview of the contents included in this volume. Parts I and II on historical routes and contemporary pathways survey the main characteristics of these migration phenomena, while Part III, on reconceptualising migration through Asian experiences, showcases innovations in the field. Part IV then discusses the challenges and controversies surrounding migration research and policies in Asia. We conclude this chapter by discussing how studies in Asian migrations have contributed to theoretical developments in the migration field in general, and some of the limitations of the handbook.

Historical routes and contemporary pathways Although in many ways contemporary migrations in Asia are unprecedented, the legacies of earlier colonial population movements continue to exert influences. The patterns, routes and issues of contemporary Asian migrations cannot be understood without examining the history of Asian migrations, especially the mobility revolution from the mid-​19th century to the 1930s, and the new legal and political regime that emerged through the upheaval of war and decolonisation. In this handbook, two chapters provide the historical backdrop to the diverse strands

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of contemporary Asian migration and seven chapters present the distinct migration pathways in contemporary Asia.

Migrations in Asia’s history Taken together,Amrith’s chapter on colonial and postcolonial migrations in Asia and van Dongen and Liu’s chapter on the links between diaspora and migration explain how pre-​modern migrations have established some of the main patterns and routes of migrations we see today. They also provide insights into the shaping of the population geography of various regions in Asia, and explore what migration means to both individuals and larger societies over time. Focusing on two distinct migration populations, those from British India and China respectively, Amrith shows that the mass migrations that took place from the mid-​19th century to before World War Two were the outcome of larger global transformations. On the one hand, the expansion of empires created labour demands in the frontiers of cultivation. On the other hand, the migration revolution could not be possible without revolutions in technology. The building of ocean liners, the extension of railways, and the linking of geographic places through telegraph connections, have all facilitated the movements of people. Moreover, Asian migrations have always been heavily mediated, and as Amrith shows, colonial migrations were predicated on the work of brokers and intermediaries, such as the kangany system which recruited workers through informal social networks. In Asia, and China in particular, any positive value attributed to migration and mobility is seen as a qualisign of a modern subjectivity (Coates, Chapter  12). Both Amrith’s and van Dongen and Liu’s chapters provide historical explanations for why this is so. These chapters demonstrate that it was through the movement of population that ideas were circulated. Asian modernism was intimately associated with migration. Inasmuch as mass migration was to a large extent brought on by the unstable economic and political situations in homelands as well as the labour demands of colonial production, western ideas of nationhood and self-​ determination were also introduced through migrant populations. It is the former migrants who were the harbingers of modern nation-​states in Asia. They naturally became symbols of modernity themselves. Focusing specifically on the unfolding migration history of the ethnic Chinese diaspora, van Dongen and Liu provide further insights into the shaping of both migration pathways and the cultural logic of migration through the conceptual lens of diaspora. The original notion of ‘diaspora’ refers to ‘forced exiles with a shared group identity shaped by common experiences of hardship, and a longing for a homeland in need of reconstruction’ (Chapter 2). In recent decades, in the same way that the notion of society and culture as bounded and stable has been challenged, the idea that diaspora shares a group identity and desires eventual return has also been questioned. This is further complicated by the fact that diaspora has also become a ‘category of practice’ employed by states to claim populations beyond national boundaries and ‘to appeal to loyalties’ (Brubaker 2005: 12, cited in van Dongen and Liu, this volume, Chapter 2). From the pre-​modern era to post-​economic reform, Chinese migration into Southeast Asia and migrants’ social interaction with different host nation-​states embody the different meanings of diaspora. The emphasis on shared ethnic Chinese identity and the labelling of overseas Chinese ‘huaqiao’ represent the Chinese state’s ostensible effort in courting diaspora members in order to harness their economic power. These efforts on the one hand elevate the status of overseas Chinese and, as a consequence, increase the desirability of mobility in the mindsets of mainland Chinese. On the other hand, they also underlie state

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policies that encourage one of the major migration patterns in Asia –​that of the ‘return migration’, a topic we will return to later.

Contemporary migrations One of the purposes of this handbook is to document the varied mobility regimes in contemporary Asia, aiming to capture different forms of migration that have taken place and the institutional frameworks that facilitate or restrict them. Some of these migrations continue historical patterns, while others have been produced in modern political and economic contexts. What often shows up in contemporary migration phenomena in Asia is the ambivalence and anxiety of the nation-​states toward migrants, especially ‘the wanted but unwelcome ones’ (Zolberg 1987). Many industrialised states are scrambling to regulate migration by creating different schemes to classify people and exercise differentiated control. However, we see frequent disjunctures between what the policies intend and what is taking place in actual practice. These tensions take many different forms in the course of contemporary migrations in Asia.

Temporary labour and the many returns While the so-​called ‘temporary labour migration’ is a key feature of contemporary population mobility in Asia, it is also possibly one of the most problematic categories of migration. The problems are multiple, ranging from the ethical to the conceptual. On the one hand, it is a highly politicised as well as heavily mediated form of migration in host countries and economies such as the Gulf States, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. While industries in these countries struggle with labour shortage, labour migration, especially of the less-​skilled, is often seen as a potential threat to social order, public security and national identity. In order to exercise control, labour recruitment is often conducted through intermediaries, such as the kafala system in the Gulf States (Babar and A. Gardner 2016), which has been criticised for labour rights abuse and inhumane treatment of migrants. On the other hand, as Michiel Baas (Chapter 3) argues, there are wide gaps between official discourses on ‘temporary labour migration’ and lived experiences. In particular, temporariness is often an illusion which has to be maintained at a high human cost using various use-​and-​discard measures. Similarly, who belongs to what kinds of ‘labour’ is a subject of contention. The commonly used criteria, ‘unskilled’ or ‘skilled’, neither characterise what the people are credentialed to do, nor describe the type of labour they actually perform. Not only do the countries of immigration enforce migrants’ temporary sojourn and expect eventual return to home countries, but sending country governments may also encourage temporariness and actively design programmes to rein in their overseas citizens. From the perspective of sending countries, emigrants who return may bring back financial resources and human capital. Ho and Lim’s Chapter 6 delineates three types of government return programmes in Asian countries –​the management of labour migrants in unskilled and semi-​skilled work by servicing as well as controlling them; the efforts to lure back highly skilled and capital-​bearing migrants by providing incentives; and outreach efforts to encourage the return of ethnic diaspora with the intention of reaping labour power or financial resources, depending on how diaspora members are placed. Nonetheless, diaspora programmes are not necessarily successful, and state-​sponsored return programmes are often disrupted by re-​emigration or may lead to an under-​utilisation of human and financial resources. The project of return, in the case of Japan and South Korea, is often manipulated by the state into a side door for importing temporary low-​wage labour. Tsuda’s Chapter 7 uses the

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Introduction

specific example of nikkei (ethnic Japanese) Brazilians to illustrate the hypocrisy of such an ethnic project. Because Japan’s national identity clings to the myth of racial homogeneity, instead of opening the door to foreign workers, the government used the legal admission of the nikkeijin (ethnic Japanese people) as a solution to labour shortage. Meanwhile, official discourses continue to treat the policy as an opportunity for those of Japanese descent born abroad to explore their ethnic heritage and visit their ancestral homeland. However, lacking cultural competencies, these nikkeijin’s Japaneseness tends to be questioned and is often rejected. Their economic roles as imported, unskilled, manual labour also marginalise them in Japanese society. As a result, many are disillusioned by their experiences in their ancestral homeland and instead reorient their homeland longing toward Brazil, where they were born.

Women in motion Amidst sweeping changes in the constitution of migration flows from and within Asia in the past decades, an important trend noted from the 1980s is that women are taking an increasingly prominent part in contract labour systems. In some Asian countries, such as the Philippines and Indonesia, women constitute the majority of emigrants (www.unpfa.org). These women are not moving as dependents –​as wives or daughters –​but crossing borders as workers, students and marriage partners. The feminisation of migration has much to do with labour and reproductive demands resulting from economic globalisation, urbanisation and population ageing (Oishi 2005). For female migrants, mobility is often seen as a means of female empowerment, whether as a conscious strategy or an unintended by-​product of the migration experience. Theoretically, migration may improve women’s social position if it leads to increased participation in wage employment, more control over earnings, and greater participation in family decision-​making. However, while migration may potentially open up space for resistance, disruption and emancipation, and in so doing reconfigure gender hierarchies so as to improve immigrant women’s positions of power and status relative to left-​behind men’s, it may also leave gender asymmetries largely unchanged or even further deepen some aspects of women’s subordination. For example, while it has been noted that women migrants, through their work in foreign countries, learn skills which they can then bring back to their own countries and households, the apparent benefits of migration for individuals do not apply to all who have migrated abroad for work. Indeed, de-​skilling often occurs in female migration streams that originate from developing countries and flow to developed economies. Economically advanced societies in Asia, especially in East Asia, face the problems of below-​ replacement birth rate and a rapidly ageing population. The imbalanced gender ratio in rural areas also makes the import of foreign women a marital practice in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Focusing on those involved in sex work and cross-​border marriage, Hwang and Parreñas’s Chapter 4 provides a critical review of the state of research on intimate migrations in the Asian context. They argue that the US-​based radical feminist view to conflate intimate migrations with human trafficking, and the subsequent moralistic condemnation of sex work and marriage migration, does not capture the complexity of intimate migrations taking place in the real world. Instead, they argue that as with all forms of migrations, intimate migrations often involve complex motives –​from love and romance to monetary gains and self-​development. A ‘hostile worldview’ in which the realms of intimate relationships and economic transactions are clearly demarcated will only give rise to heightened regulations and further exacerbate women’s vulnerability.

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New migration pathways The fact that migration has become an important part of political economic change in Asia can be seen in the flourishing of new patterns of migration. On the one hand, these new forms of mobilities are endorsed by Asian states as development strategies; on the other hand, increasing technological capacities and the establishment of migration infrastructure have made border crossing of different types much easier. Education and medical treatments are increasingly commodified and, with the encouragement of the state, have become major channels of migration. In its extreme, residency and citizenship themselves have become commodities up for sale, and this has ushered in wealthy immigrants who treat foreign citizenship as a form of political insurance and a luxury good. Though Asian students still make up the main international student population on university campuses in North America, Europe and Australia, Ge and Ho (Chapter 5) show that student mobilities increasingly take place within the Asian region. Intra-​regional student mobility is shaped by an infrastructure that incorporates both state programmes and business interests. East Asian states, including China, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Taiwan and Singapore, regard the internationalisation of education as an essential indicator of globalisation and an effective way to absorb talent. These governments have thereby crafted favourable policies to attract foreign students. Asian countries have also in recent years built regional education programmes, to encourage student mobility within the regions and foster those regional identities, and thus strengthen higher education in Asia. Accompanying these state policies, a study-​abroad industry involving schools and various education brokers has proliferated to profit from growing international student mobility. Moreover, as Ge and Ho –​as well as several studies on Asian student mobilities – have shown (see Liu-​Farrer 2014; Coates 2015) student mobilities often embody complex logic.This youthful population increasingly sees mobility as a necessary component in constructing a cosmopolitan self. As with student mobility, transnational medical care has become a national development strategy in countries such as Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. An increasing number of people are crossing borders to seek medical treatments.Though mobilities related to medical treatments are often short t​erm,Whittaker (Chapter 8) suggests the use of a migration lens to examine this phenomenon because medical migrations are inseparable from other forms of population movements, such as ‘the movements of expatriate workers, retirement migrants, diasporic returnees, as well as the movements of forced migrants and refugees’. Similar to other forms of migration, they are also a response to the gaps in economic development, living standards and health system inequities between the source and destination countries. However, Whittaker cautions that medical migrations take place within different frames of reference, and different flows take on different social and cultural meanings. While medical travel is a status symbol among some, for others it is a critique of the failed medical systems in their own countries. In some parts of Asia, the intraregional medical migrations are embedded within historical regional circuits related to flows of trade and cultural and linguistic ties. As a pattern of international migration, the exodus of the rich in history is usually associated with political purges and displacements during regime changes. In the mid-​20th century, rich urban business people fled mainland China for Hong Kong and western countries for fear of the Communist Party’s political persecution. Political reasons are considered at least part of the driving force of the flow of affluent businessmen and their families out of Hong Kong before the Chinese takeover in 1997. Liu-​Farrer (Chapter 9) explores a more recent version of rich migration out of Asia and analyses the social meanings of such practice. She points out that although many practical reasons exist for rich citizens to emigrate, the capacity to move, in a 6

7

Introduction

world where citizenship and residency have increasingly become commodified, constitutes an important element in the cultural formation of global elites. Within this cultural frame, physical mobility, or “motility” as Kaufmann et al. (2004) terms it, is seen as a form of capital itself, and is conducive to the accumulation of other forms of capital –​economic, cultural or social –​ immediately or intergenerationally. However, rich emigration challenges several institutions. The realisation of this form of migration often entails transnationally split households, and is premised on a regression of gender roles. Moreover, while globalisation has already created many challenges to nation-​state citizenship, the migration of the wealthy adds further question marks to the meaning of citizenship. Asian mobility pathways are still in the process of expanding. Changing political economic dynamics as well as demographic makeup give rise to a proliferation of migration patterns and channels as well as businesses that service them. Population ageing means more resourceful retirees are moving around (Ono 2015). The growing economy has also attracted young people from other parts of the world to come to Asia and move around within this region (Hof forthcoming). Moreover, regional integration efforts are facilitating more active mobilities of different types within Asia.

Reconceptualising migration through Asian experiences Migration theories of western origins were first drawn upon to inform the research in Asia, and the theoretical innovations in Europe and North America in the past two decades have supplied more analytical tools to make sense of empirical observations in Asia. Nonetheless, the diversity of migration patterns and complexity of mobility processes in Asia have brought up new questions and demand new conceptual frameworks to account for them. This handbook, therefore, does not merely regard Asian migrations as an empirical variation of global migration patterns and phenomena. By moving Asian experiences to the centre of analysis, we aim to take the opportunity to rethink what migration means, how it takes place, and what it entails. The chapters in this volume advocate a processural approach to migration, looking at how mobility is structured, what takes place on the ground, and who are the different actors involved in the production of mobility. Given newly emerging population and development trends particular to Asian regions, these authors question the assumed economic logic of migration that underpins the bulk of the theories on the motivations for migration, and problematise the artificial distinction between internal and international migration, between human trafficking and voluntary migration, as well as between expatriates and migrants.

Migration as a produced process The classical push–​pull model of migration –​the regional economic and population imbalances and the resulting wage differentials or employment opportunity discrepancies –​has never been able to fully explain human mobilities anywhere in the world (Massey et al. 1993), and clearly not in Asia, whether in historical times or at present. In fact, as Amrith points out in his analysis of colonial and postcolonial migration in Asia, neither in India nor China –​the two countries that sent out the largest numerical flows of migrants during colonial times –​‘was there an inevitable link between political or environmental catastrophe and long-​distance migration’ (Amrith, Chapter 1). One of the major contributions stemming from empirical observations of Asian migrations is the attention given to the act of migration itself, emphasising that migration is an orchestrated process, involving participation of a diverse set of actors with varying motivations. In this vein, 7

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no concept disputes the image of simple push–pull dynamics and presents the reality of migration as a heavily mediated process better than that of ‘migration infrastructure’ –​‘the systematically interlinked technologies, institutions, and actors that facilitate and condition mobility’ (Xiang and Lindquist 2014, p. 124, and Lindquist and Xiang, Chapter 11). In their seminal article expounding this concept, Xiang and Lindquist delineate five dimensions of migration infrastructure: ‘the commercial (recruitment intermediaries), the regulatory (state apparatus and procedures for documentation, licensing, training and other purposes), the technological (communication and transport), the humanitarian (NGOs and international organisations), and the social (migrant networks)’ (2014, p. 124). These five dimensions, they propose, involve complex sets of actors interacting with each other with different motives and logics of operations. In their contribution to this handbook, Lindquist and Xiang argue that migration infrastructure has become increasingly central to contemporary migration, especially labour migration, transforming how people move. While in cases of colonial migrations, the mediators tended to be humans and migrations were channelled through social networks that are susceptible to local contingencies, the infrastructure that has been instituted over recent decades, especially since the 1990s, facilitates and regulates contemporary migrations in much more precise, delocalised and systemised ways. However, the development of the migration infrastructure, made up by intense state regulations, commercial brokerages and servicing as well as humanitarian intervention, has not necessarily ‘enhanced people’s migratory capability in terms of making independent decisions, exploring new paths, and cultivating transnational social relations’ (Chapter 11). Rather, it becomes an ‘involution’, multiplying internally without expanding in scope. The ascendency of the idea of migration infrastructure reflects the overall shift in attention of social scientific research to the actual engineering of action. On the one hand, this ‘infrastructural turn’ is an acknowledgement that what is social is no longer separable from what is technical, echoing Bruno Latour’s forceful argument for taking stock of all actors –​human and non-​human –​in the production of social events (Latour 2005). On the other hand, it urges a more careful examination of the previously ‘black-​boxed’ process of migration to identify the different forces that condition its direction, scope and substance (Lindquist et al. 2012). Lin and Gleiss’s Chapter 10, too, focuses on the formative processes of mobilities. Lin and Gleiss take a deliberate look at three mechanisms that shape migrations in Asia –​political economy, transport technology and border governance. Migration features as an important part of the political economy in Asian countries. While receiving countries such as the Gulf States and Singapore rely heavily, and sometimes solely, on migrants to supply productive or reproductive labour, for the sending countries of Nepal, the Philippines and Bangladesh, remittances from their overseas compatriots are a major source of state revenue.1 Demographic crunch and labour shortage, as well as globalisation pressures, have made immigration an unavoidable reality confronting even countries based on founding myths of homogeneity such as Japan and Korea. Meanwhile, major emigration states such as China and India, seek to ‘harness the powers of economic globalisation to their own advantage by mobilising, constraining and structuring the flows of people across national borders’ (Chapter 10). State policies therefore play an active, and in many countries, the primary, role in shaping migration. It is also of little doubt that transport technologies  –​the methods and modes that move people and things –​are an essential component of mobility. Lin and Gleiss demonstrated that technological revolutions, from railway to air travel, have in different historical periods contributed to the expanding scope of human mobility, not only in its geographic reach and the speed of travel, but also transforming the demographic profile of those who move and the purposes for which people move. The extension of railways in the 19th and early 20th centuries not 8

9

Introduction

only allowed people to move by connecting them to the outside world, but it also mobilised workers from different corners of the world to work on its construction. Similarly, the flourishing of low-​cost airplanes, for example, has facilitated the circulation of migrant labour and made transnational living more attainable. Finally, Lin and Gleiss show that the border is the site where the state demonstrates its power to intervene and regulate mobilities. Biometric passports, finger-​printing and selective visa regimes not only allow the state to assert more efficient control over population flows, but also make migrants’ encounters with the border highly uneven experiences.

Complex logic of migration For most of the 20th century, migration research tended to prioritise economic rationales in the explanation of migration. In dominant thinking as reflected in the economic behavioural push–pull model (Todaro 1969), the structural segmented labour market models (Piore 1979) and the neoclassical economic model (e.g., Bojas 1989), labour markets are considered the primary mechanisms by which flows of persons are induced (Massey et al. 1993). Migration is primarily seen as an economic activity. However, migrants are human and migration is a social action, and there is more to the motivations of migration than the search for higher wages or better jobs. Since the 1990s, accompanying the acceleration of globalisation processes, a multiplication of mobility trends beyond those which are economically driven has become conspicuous. As migration studies grapple with theoretical and methodological innovations exemplified by the development of transnationalism perspectives (e.g., Basch, Glick-​Schiller and Szanton Blanc 1993; Smith and Guarnizo 1998; Vertovec 2009) and the ‘mobilities paradigm’ (Sheller and Urry 2006), empirically, too, attention is directed to migration patterns that apparently have less to do with direct economic motives. These include lifestyle migration (e.g., Benson and O’Reilly 2009; Benson 2016), medical tourism (e.g., Connell 2006; Heung et al. 2010), global nomadism (D’Andrea 2007) and young people’s journeys to search for self and to pursue dreams (Fujita 2009). In this context, as the phrase ‘worklife pathways’ indicates, cross-​border mobility can become a way to access both employment opportunities and lifestyle choices, suggesting the inseparability of life and work in people’s broader aspirations for self-​development (Krings et al. 2013). It should be noted that the aspiration for self-​development is not confined to freewheeling movers who have the means for such lifestyle choices. The mobilities paradigm runs the risk of dichotomising mobility and migration and ascribing them to different classes of migrants –​ mobility to those who are ‘wanted and welcomed’ skilled individuals versus migration to those who are ‘wanted but unwelcomed’ low-​skilled labour (Faist 2013, p. 1642). More care needs to be taken in examining the logic of migration, and scholars need to heed the caution against aligning economic logic to labour migrants and cultural logic to more affluent migrants. Coates (Chapter 12) avoids this dichotomising tendency by arguing that not only are economic and sociocultural motivations inseparable in migration, but the distinction between what constitutes economic logic and cultural logic is in itself problematic. Economic motives are themselves cultural products. The separation of the two is the outcome of intellectual development in the 19th century dichotomising the economic and cultural realms in an effort to detach ‘objective’ and measurable conditions from subjective meanings. The prioritising of utilitarian rationales and the dominance of economic theory, in turn, explain the singular focus on the economic rationale of migration that dominated migration studies until the late-​20th century. Cultural logics, on the other hand, tended to be applied to the adaptation and incorporation of immigrants in destination societies, largely due to the urban sociological tradition of immigrant 9

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community research pioneered by Chicago School sociologists in the early-​and mid-​20th century. However, as Coates shows using the example of Chinese migrants, ‘the mobility and the economy are deeply imprecated within cultural imaginaries of desirable lifestyles and personhood today’ (Chapter 12). Mobilities, and the capacities to do so, constitute the modern subjectivity. This applies to the migrants, or those waiting to migrate, in Chinese villages in Fujian (Chu 2010), to medical tourists (Whittaker, Chapter 8), as well as to those Chinese millionaires who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase overseas residency permits and citizenships (Liu-​Farrer 2016). Aside from the increasing attention to the cultural logic of migration, some recent work has also indicated what has been called an ‘emotional turn’. Emotional geography, as a subfield of human geography, ‘attempts to understand emotion –​experientially and conceptually –​in terms of its socio-​spatial mediation and articulation rather than as entirely interiorised subjective mental states’ (Davidson et al. 2012, p. 3). While emotional geographies are charted in a wide range of research inquiries (see Davidson et al. 2012), its relevance to migration is self-​ evident. Why people move is strongly influenced by emotions. The social psychological theory of migration decision-​making –​the argument that it is not absolute poverty that drives people but the sense of relative deprivation that motivates outmigration (Stark and Taylor 1991) –​is but one manifestation of the need to include the role of emotions. Homesickness or nostalgia is another. Postwar return migrants from Australia to the UK, for example, were compelled by a longing ‘for people and places’ and ‘ways of life’ in their home country, as well as ‘not feeling at home’ in the destination country (Thomson, 2005, p. 118). Such emotional drivers of migration are pronounced in most forms of return migration in Asia. Although ethnic return is often ‘a project driven by enterprise rather than by nostalgia’ (Xiang 2013, p. 2) and a response to state policies and economic incentives, such migration is also driven by a longing for the ethnic homeland (Tsuda 2009, also this volume, Chapter 7). In Asia, as many immigrant destination states have established their national identity around ethnic or racial myths of origin, migration and settlement not only involve legal and economic rationales but also implicate a complex emotional geography.

Contesting binaries, challenging terminologies Building on empirical and theoretical developments in the field of Asian migrations research in the past two decades, this handbook also highlights the methodological and conceptual gaps in the field. One of the most glaring gaps in contemporary migration research is the separation of population movements within nation-​state borders and those crossing them. Migration has become almost synonymous with international migration (King and Skeldon 2010) whereas the discussion of internal migration tends to fall under the purview of development, urbanisation and social inequality. While this separation has to do with the different migration regimes governing the processes and outcomes of international and internal migrations, these two forms of migration cannot be separated empirically (Hugo 2016). For example, Chinese migrant labourers in Japanese factories are likely to have taken part in rural–urban migration before crossing international borders (Liu-​Farrer 2013). In border areas where ethnic groups were divided into different national subjects by newly created territorial boundaries, human traffic continues despite the institution of the borders (Hugo 2016; Rungmanee 2016). Scholars challenging the theoretical and conceptual separation of the two forms of migration (Hickey and Yeoh 2016) have contested the normative distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘international’ (Rungmanee 2016; Huang 2016); and explored conceptual and methodological possibilities to reconnect internal and international migration (Hickey 2016; Xiang 2016). 10

11

Introduction

The inseparability of internal and international migrations is also demonstrated in many accounts of migration phenomena described in this handbook, from large-​scale migration taking place in history (Amrith, Chapter 1) to vibrant border mobilities (Zhang, Chapter 22). Skeldon’s Chapter 13 attempts a systematic evaluation of internal and international migration linkages. He argues that one of the key reasons that encourages separate studies of internal vis-​à-​vis international migrations is the separation of data sources, and thereby a lack of reliable statistical data to establish the linkage. National census or large-​scale national surveys on which migration research is often based do not usually provide detailed mobility history, recording ‘only country of birth or last residence and not the specific place of origin, either by small geographic place or by urban or rural sector’ (Chapter 13). Nonetheless, he proposes several scenarios for eschewing binaries and instead linking these two types of migration systems. ‘Step’ migration is a process where rural migrants move to urban centres to accumulate resources and then move across borders when such opportunities occur. In contrast, instead of describing the individual migrants’ lifetime trajectory, ‘stage’ migration highlights the fact that the exit points of most international migrants are urban centres, themselves destinations for domestic rural migrants. Moreover, international migration might lead to labour market demands in the urban areas and induce internal rural– urban migration. Further, in Asia, return migration usually follows a J-​curve –​international migrants rarely go back to the villages or towns they originally come from. Instead, they concentrate in metropolitan areas of the home countries. These different patterns of migration show that internal and international migrations are inseparably linked. Another controversial binary deserving more attention in the Asian context is between human trafficking and voluntary migration. Human trafficking is a legally punishable crime in many nation-​states and the target of international NGO efforts. However, as Mahdavi (this volume, Chapter 14) points out, the concept of human trafficking used colloquially has become ‘both conceptually and juristically obtuse, while narrowly gendered, sexualised, and racialised at the same time’. On the one hand, the victims of human trafficking encompass all women who migrate into the sex industry; on the other hand, it omits male migrants and women not in the sex industry who are nonetheless subject to force, fraud, and coercion in their migratory experiences. Not only does this misrepresentation distort how trafficking is pursued and prosecuted, ‘trafficking’ as an over-​determined category might blot out the actual complexity involved in the production of this practice and the identities of persons experiencing challenges in the course of migration. Mahdavi is particularly critical of the effects of US-​led anti-​trafficking programmes, especially the annual US Trafficking in Persons (TIP) reports on migration policies and migrants in Asian countries. Using the case of the United Arab Emirates and Japan, Mahdavi shows the disconnections between the TIP recommendations and the realities on the ground in these two countries, as well as the discontent of local officials toward such hegemonic sanction. Her ethnographic fieldwork illustrates that migrants increasingly move and live in the in-​between grey spaces of irregular migration and/​or employment.The anti-​human trafficking programmes not only fail to assist migrants in vulnerable situations, but the regulations in response to TIP tend to restrict their options further and, in reality, produce more irregularity, hence aggravating their precarity. In the Asian context, a third binary that becomes difficult to sustain in the age of expanding global movement revolves around the term ‘expatriate’. A term originally applied by human-​ resource management to corporate employees on short-​ term overseas assignments, it has, in recent decades, been appropriated by a plethora of mobile people, from European youth searching for alternative career opportunities in Asia to western retirees enjoying life in sunnier 11

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climates. One characteristic seems to be consistent: ‘Expatriates’ is frequently reserved to label individuals moving between or from the developed western world, while ‘migrants’ is used to refer to those moving out of less developed countries (Al Ariss and Crowley-​Henry 2013). In Asian contexts, this racialised and class-​specific binary becomes unsustainable. In his chapter, Farrer points out that the image of ‘a privileged, credentialed, highly mobile, white, businessman’ (Chapter 15) leaves out large groups of people of different racial profiles moving with varied motives, including Asians studying abroad in the west returning to Asia on corporate packages. Instead of trying to define who is and is not an expatriate, Farrer proposes an urban sociological approach to expatriate phenomena. He argues that ‘one is not “an expatriate” by virtue of being a certain type of person but rather learns to be an expatriate through socialisation into an expatriate community with its collective practices and outlooks’. Returning to Eric Cohen’s original definition of expatriates, he examines how both the continuities and changes in the realms of institutions, geographies and norms solidify as well as transform expatriate identity. While the institutions such as multinational firms and international schools still shape and signify expatriate lifestyle, with changing global norms and Asia’s rising economic power, these institutions have shifted their labour practices and cultural ideals, and are racially diversified and increasingly characterised by the participation of local elites. Traditional expatriate urban spaces of residence and entertainment have become ‘cosmopolitan canopies’ where ‘young expatriates find diverse roles supporting the cosmopolitan lifestyles of increasingly affluent Asian urbanites’ (Chapter 15). Finally, though struggling with institutional hurdles and gender and racial biases, the social and cultural norms of the expatriate community may no longer be self-​isolation. The prevalence of international marriages and mixed-​heritage children also changes the racial composition of the expat community, bringing with it more social openness.

The challenges of migration in Asia People’s mobilities circulate labour power, increase international linkages, facilitate cultural exchanges. At the same time, they bring disruptions to social life, economic structures and political systems in both destination and source countries.While individuals often migrate in pursuit of a better life, geographic mobility and distance may unsettle families and brings unforeseeable emotional consequences to individual members. This handbook examines issues that have generated considerable controversy and public anxiety around migration in Asia. Since the dawn of the new millennium, there has been a recent swing towards a ‘new optimism’ about migration and development. Championed by international organisations, much has been written about the benefits of migration including transnational financial flows towards, and investments in, countries of origin, the multiplier effects of remittances, and the sharing of know-​how through circular migration. In these circles, migration is considered one of the most effective means for alleviating poverty and is used as a strategy for development in many states. The new economic theory of migration specifically posits that people move to supplement household incomes, insure against financial risks, and bring much needed capital for local production in the source communities (Stark and Bloom 1985). Both Cole and Rigg’s and Martin’s chapters examine the economic and social impacts of migration on source regions, and explore to what degree migration fulfils its developmental promise and potential. Through their survey of empirical research centered in Southeast Asian region, Cole and Rigg (Chapter 16) argue that the reason for the difficulty in reaching conclusive findings about the relationship between migration and poverty, both in terms of causality and consequence, is because of four ‘indeterminacies’ –​those of analytic, scale, comparison and periodicity. In other words, the evaluation of how migration affects source communities depends on what one investigates –​using a narrow 12

13

Introduction

economic lens or taking in broader considerations of knowledge, skills and cultural practices –​ and where one looks –​at the individual, the household, or the larger community. The ­developmental outcomes are also context-​specific, depending on a range of conditions in different communities. Lastly, the effects of migration unfold as a process over different durations of time. Cole and Rigg conclude in arguing that, in general, migration increases options for the source communities and builds capabilities. Development is possible within the landscape of human mobilities. Approaching similar issues but as an economist and from a more global perspective, Martin (Chapter 17) agrees with Cole and Rigg’s emphasis on context-​dependent outcomes. Resonating with Lindquist and Xiang’s notion of an ‘infrastructural turn’ as well as Lin and Gleiss’s emphasis on mobility process, he calls for a more detailed examination of the process by which migration is managed in order to gauge the benefits of migration on source countries. Martin separates the labour migration process into three stages –​recruitment, remittance and return –​and argues that each of these stages involves multiple actors with diverse interests and is prone to errors and abuse despite various regulatory efforts. Whether migration brings positive outcomes, how remittances can be utilised to faciliate development, and in what ways return migration can bring back economic resources and technological innovations, all depend to a large degree on how these processes are managed. A second set of issues that has generated considerable debate in the political realm relates to migration and citizenship in both receiving and source countries. In western liberal democracies, naturalisation and voting are used as important indicators of immigrants’ political incorporation. Nonetheless, the naturalisation rate in most destination countries has declined, and so has voting rate (Putnam 2000; Chung and Abbas this volume, Chapter 20). A large body of scholarship has developed in the recent decades that questions and theorises the variation in citizenship acquisition rates, attributing the causes to immigrant characteristics (Borjas 1989; Liang 1994), institutional conditions (Brubaker 1992; Favell 2001), and the establishment of supranational rights regime (Soysal 1994) to the increasing expansion of citizenship rights (see Kivisto and Faist 2009; Chung 2010). These observations and arguments are primarily framed in the context of North America and Western Europe. Chung and Abbas (Chapter 20) argue that, given the differences in terms of the history of national citizenships and patterns of immigration regimes in Asia, the citizenship and electoral-​based evaluation of immigrant political participation needs to be re-​examined. In the context of Asia, they point out that migrants are actively engaged in many forms of political activism both within the national framework of the receiving country –​such as participating in civic associations, engaging in collective action and labour union participation –​and transnational political participation in their home countries’ politics –​from ethnic civic association to diasporic voting. They suggest a shift of focus from investigating migrants’ political incorporation to political empowerment in order to understand immigrants’ political interests and strategies in the changing political landscapes brought on by global mobilities. A related issue that has stirred political controversy concerns the phenomenon of irregular migration. Irregular migration, or undocumented migration, has often been considered an undesirable side effect of migration. Clandestine migrants and visa overstayers are invariably criminalised and politicised, and have become a top immigration control priority in many countries. Asis and Battistella’s Chapter 21 debunks the myth of irregular migration in Asia and argues that much of the so-​called irregular migration is a consequence of gaps and inconsistencies of migration governance. So-​called ‘irregularity’ can result from misclassification due to a lack of diligent screening of asylum seekers, the lack of due process to address migration that is part of historical patterns  –​such as borderland mobility  –​or is facilitated by an irregular 13

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migration industry. Moreover, they point out that irregular migration often emerges in the disjunctures between a structural need for labour and receiving governments’ attempts to keep the imported labour force temporary, especially in tying employment and stay of migrants to their employers. In many Asian countries, such schemes that aid governments to keep track of migrants often end up forcing migrants to endure difficult working conditions, or risk becoming absconders or runaways when the conditions become unbearable. Importantly, Asis and Battistella’s chapter questions the binary between regular and irregular migration. These are not two distinct patterns; rather, the distinction reflects different access to legal channels of migration. In the course of migration, the status of migrants is subject to many uncertainties and therefore prone to irregularity. A third set of concerns in migrant-​receiving societies is inextricably tied to the question of migrant integration and the effects of immigrant presence on the social fabric of the host societies. While much has been written on the effects of race-​based exclusion acts in historical time, and the prevalence of skill-​based selective migration policies in western countries,Yeoh’s chapter takes a different approach in exploring the influence of migration on Asian city life. Urban diversity in Asia is first of all, as Yeoh points out, deeply influenced by the politics and paradox of postcolonial encounters. Colonial migration, nation-​building projects and contemporary mobilities have engendered complex patterns of ethnic and cultural fault lines and different schemes of inclusion and exclusion. The boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are repeatedly challenged and redrawn in postcolonial cities. Diversity politics is often manifested in ‘spaces of enclavement’ that contemporary transnational migration has created. Both the desired high-​ skilled migrants and the ‘needed but unwanted’ low-​skilled migrants are, by choice in the case of the former and by lack of choice for the latter, temporary dwellers in Asian cities.Yet, the spaces they have carved out for themselves become part of the urban cultural landscapes, inspiring conviviality while also instigating conflict. Finally, spaces of the home have also been reconstituted as a form of ‘contact zone’ between family members and familiar strangers. As a response to declining fertility rates and population ageing in industrialised Asian states, marriage and care migrations have become a major trend of transnational mobility and, along with this trend, ethnic and cultural diversities have become everyday realities in the domestic realm. In the spaces of intimacy in homes, the politics of self and other reflects the larger structural inequalities of gender, race, class, culture and citizenship. A fourth strand of work investigates the way migration entails disruptions to family life. The stories of family members who leave behind other members, including children, in embarking on migration journeys are part and parcel of migration history in Asia. In the contemporary era, population mobilities of increasing volume and diversity have resulted in expanding numbers of split households and even broader varieties of family formations. The chapter by Lam et al. (Chapter 19) employs the concept of ‘transnational family’ (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002) to highlight migrant households’ strategies in adapting family life to the dispersal of core members in order to ensure the family’s economic well-​being or elevate its social status. In particular, to counter the view of children as passive receivers of the fate of separation from one or both of their parents, Lam et al. focus on the active roles children assume in migration processes. This is illustrated by middle-​class Asian children who become educational migrants, bearing responsibilities for the family’s transnational capital-​ accumulation projects. Similarly, children of less privileged backgrounds and in marginal circumstances, even those labelled victims of human trafficking, are not necessarily void of agency in their migration decision-​making and mobility processes. Instead, migration becomes a means to attain some degree of independence and social mobility under difficult circumstances. Even children left behind by migrant parents are not simply deprived of 14

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Introduction

parental care and supervision as often presumed. Their experiences are much more complex and contingent as they strive to take charge of their own well-​being, as well as that of other household members including younger siblings. Finally, as several chapters in this handbook infer, the borderland is one of the most contested zones for migrants. Local struggles against state control over historical patterns of social and economic life are often manifested in the persistent transgressive activities in borderlands. Border-​crossing is part of borderlanders’ livelihood strategies, and in no small way an integral part of the economic and social life there. Entrepreneurial transgressions and permissive politics (Zhang, this volume, Chapter 22) are signs of constant negotiation between local interests and state mandates. Zhang’s ethnographic depictions of border-​crossing activities on the Vietnamese and Chinese borders show that local interests are in constant tension with the state’s border regime. Borderlanders carefully negotiate state-​determined border spaces as they produce alternative routes and relations, and experiment with controversial zones of profit and morality. For example, the sex trade and smuggling, though criminalised by the state and condemned by the international human rights regime, are tolerated because they attract business interests and are economically productive in the area. The borderlanders’ ‘counter-​topography’ and the ‘edginess of the borders’ show the unexpected power and autonomy on the margins. As Zhang points out, ‘ “margins” do not suggest that they are marginal to contemporary experiences. Rather, they provide alternative, off-​centre perspectives on a range of political questions –​who defines the border, who navigates the border, who is policing the border, and who claims ownership of the border –​that are central to debates on governance and mobility, security and citizenship, global forces and local strategies’ (Chapter 22).

Conclusion Asia has seen mass migrations in the past and is witnessing dynamic mobilities at present. Because the postwar nation-​building process in many newly independent Asian nation states made enforcing borders and controlling population movements a priority, the migration trends, especially those of immigration, slowed down, and did not become a subject of social scientific inquiries until the 1970s. Migration research began to thrive in the 1980s when more countries relaxed entry and exit regulations and labour shortages started to emerge in the early industrialised Asian nations. By reviewing research in Asian migrations in the past three decades, this handbook highlights the distinct characteristics and phenomena of population mobilities in Asian contexts. Moreover, these contributions illustrate how an empirical focus on Asia has contributed to theoretical developments in the field of migration. Asian researchers, especially those in critical cultural studies, have in recent years proposed the concept of ‘Asia as method’, arguing that ‘using the idea of Asia as an imaginary anchoring point, societies in Asia can become each other’s points of reference, so that … the diverse historical experiences and rich social practices of Asia may be mobilised to provide alternative horizons and perspectives’ (Chen, 2010, p.  212). Researchers investigating the mobilities of people in Asia have also felt the need to develop theoretical frameworks that match Asian experiences. This is because, on the one hand, how and why people move are related to the political economy, history, geography and sociocultural practices in the particular region. Theories and concepts born out of North American and European experiences cannot capture local specificities. On the other hand, constrained by a lack of statistical data, migration studies in Asia have been mostly qualitative and fieldwork-​based. As a result, for many researchers the grounded realities have not been accurately represented in the academic literature and political discourses, including those employed by international organisations. This handbook, as the first survey of 15

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the field of Asian migrations, presents the empirical insights and theoretical innovations that have emerged in the three decades of research on Asian migration. This said, however, it is not our intention to declare that Asian migration phenomena are unique to the region and the conceptual tools developed out of Asian experiences are only applicable to Asian contexts. None of the phenomena or issues presented in this handbook are exclusive to Asia. The conceptual advancements are also products of continuous engagement with the theoretical developments in the migration and mobility research field in general. Finally, given the vast geographic area covered and the immense complexity of migration phenomena in Asia, this handbook has several limitations. The handbook cannot claim to represent ‘Asian migrations’ in terms of geographic representation. For example, there are too few studies on the Middle East and South Asia –​both areas of intense mobilities.There are also gaps in the coverage of themes. Many migration phenomena and issues are left out. The mobilities of domestic helpers, retirees, institutional careworkers, academics, professionals and entrepreneurs are but some that we have not been able to incorporate into this volume. Importantly, the handbook circumvents topics of forced migration. Refugees and internally displaced persons are perhaps the majority of the people on the move in the Asian continent. Yet literature on such complex movements warrants its own volume. Our decision, however, is to highlight conceptual and thematic innovations that have emerged from empirical studies carried out in different areas in Asia. By illuminating these developments from that part of the world that has thus far remained in the shadow of global migration and mobility research, this handbook hopes to contribute valuable insights to the advancement of migration research in a world in flux.

Note 1 World Bank. Migration and Remittances (3rd edition), siteresources.worldbank.org/​INTPROSPECTS/​ Resources/​334934-​1199807908806/​4549025-​1450455807487/​Factbookpart1.pdf.

References Al Ariss, A. and Crowley-​Henry, M. (2013). Self-​initiated expatriation and migration in the management literature: present theorizations and future research directions. Career Development International, 18 (1), pp.78–​96. Babar, Z. and Gardner, A. (2016). Circular migration and the Gulf States. In C. Solé, S. Parella, T.S. Martí and S. Nita (eds.), Impact of Circular Migration on Human, Political and Civil Rights (pp. 45–​62). Springer International Publishing. Basch, L., Schiller, N.G. and Blanc, C.S. (2005). Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments, and Deterritorialized Nation-​States. Routledge. Benson, M. and O’Reilly, K. (2009). Migration and the search for a better way of life: a critical exploration of lifestyle migration. The Sociological Review, 57 (4), pp. 608–​625. Benson, M. (2016). Lifestyle Migration: Expectations, Aspirations And Experiences. Routledge. Bondi, L., Davidson J. and Smith, M.M. (2005). Introduction: Geography’s ‘Emotional Turn’. In J. Davidson, L. Bondi & M. Smith (eds), Emotional Geographies (pp. 1–​16). Ashgate Publishing. Borjas, G. J. (2011). Heaven’s Door: Immigration Policy and the American Economy. Princeton University Press. Borjas, G. J. (1989). Economic theory and international migration. International Migration Review, 23 (3), pp. 457–​485. Brubaker, R. (1992). Citizenship and Nationality in France and Germany. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Bryceson, D., and Vuorela, U. (2002). Transnational families in the Twenty-​First century. In D. Bryceson and U. Vuorela (eds.), The Transnational Family. New European Frontiers and Global Networks (pp. 3–​30). Oxford: Berg. Chen, K.H. (2010). Asia as Method: Toward Deimperialization. Duke University Press.

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Introduction Chu, J.Y. (2010). Cosmologies of Credit: Transnational Mobility and the Politics of Destination in China. Duke University Press. Chung, E.A. (2010). Immigration and Citizenship in Japan. Cambridge University Press. Coates, J. (2015). “Unseeing” Chinese students in Japan: understanding educationally channelled migrant experiences. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 44 (3), pp. 125–​154. Connell, J. (2006). Medical tourism: sea, sun, sand and… surgery. Tourism Management, 27 (6), pp. 1093–​1100. D’Andrea, A. (2007).  Global Nomads:  Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza And Goa (Vol. 10). Routledge. Davidson, J., Smith, M.M. and Bondi, L. eds. (2012). Emotional Geographies. Ashgate Publishing. Faist, T. (2013). The mobility turn: a new paradigm for the social sciences? Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (11), pp. 1637–​1646. Favell, A. (2001). Immigration and the Idea of Citizenship in France and Britain. New  York, NY:  Palgrave Macmillan. Fujita, Y. (2009).  Cultural Migrants from Japan:  Youth, Media, and Migration in New  York and London. Lexington Books. Heung,V.C., Kucukusta, D. and Song, H. (2010). A conceptual model of medical tourism: implications for future research. Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, 27 (3), pp. 236–​251. Hickey, M. and Yeoh, B.S. (2016). Crossing borders and traversing boundaries: closing the ‘gap’ between internal and international migration in Asia. Population, Space and Place, 22 (7), pp. 642–​650. Hickey, M. (2016). Modernisation, migration, and mobilisation: relinking internal and international migrations in the ‘migration and development nexus’. Population, Space and Place, 22 (7), pp. 681–692. Hof, Helena. (forthcoming). Place and temporality in contemporary professional mobilities: Europeans’ career driven and culture driven migration to Singapore and Tokyo. Social Science Japan Journal. Huang, S.M. (2016). Can travelling mothers ever arrive? Articulating internal and international migration within a transnational perspective of care. Population, Space and Place, 22 (7), pp. 705–​717. Hugo, G. J. (2016) Internal and international migration in East and Southeast Asia: exploring the linkages. Population, Space and Place, 22 (7), pp.651–​668. Kaufmann, V., Bergman, M. M., and Joye, D. (2004). Motility: mobility as capital. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 28 (4): pp. 745–​756. King, R. and Skeldon, R. (2010). ‘Mind the Gap!’Integrating approaches to internal and international migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36 (10), pp.1619–​1646. Kivisto, P., and Faist, T. (2009). Citizenship: Discourse,Theory, and Transnational Prospects. John Wiley & Sons. Krings,T., Bobek, A., Moriarty, E., Salamońska, J. and Wickham, J. (2013). Polish migration to Ireland: ‘free movers’ in the new European mobility space. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 39 (1), pp. 87–​103. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-​Network-​Theory. Oxford University Press. Liang, Z. (1994). Social contact, social capital, and the naturalization process: Evidence from six immigrant groups. Social Science Research, 23 (4), pp. 407–​437. Lindquist, J., Xiang, B. and Yeoh, B.S. (2012). Opening the black box of migration: brokers, the organization of transnational mobility and the changing political economy in Asia. Pacific Affairs, 85 (1), pp.7–​19. Liu-​Farrer, G. (2013). Chinese newcomers in Japan: migration trends, profiles and the impact of the 2011 earthquake. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 22 (2), pp. 231–​257. Liu-​Farrer, G. (2014). Tied to the family and bound to the labor market: understanding Chinese student mobility in Japan. In A.Yonezawa,Y. Kitamura, A. Meerman, and K. Kuroda (eds.), Emerging International Dimensions in East Asian Higher Education (pp. 185–​206). Springer. Liu-​Farrer, G. (2016). Migration as class-​based consumption: the emigration of the rich in contemporary China. The China Quarterly, 226, pp. 499–​518. Massey, D.S., Arango, J., Hugo, G., Kouaouci, A., Pellegrino, A. and Taylor, J.E. (1993). Theories of international migration: a review and appraisal. Population and Development Review, pp. 431–​466. Oishi, N. (2005).  Women in Motion:  Globalization, State Policies, and Labor Migration in Asia. Stanford University Press. Ono, M. (2015). Commoditization of lifestyle migration: Japanese retirees in Malaysia. Mobilities, 10 (4), pp. 609–​627. Piore, M.J. (1979). Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies. Cambridge University Press. Putnam, R. D. (2000). Bowling alone:  America’s declining social capital. In Culture and Politics (pp. 223–234). US: Palgrave Macmillan. Ralph, D. (2015).‘Always on the move, but going nowhere fast’: motivations for ‘Euro-​commuting’ between the Republic of Ireland and other EU states. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 41 (2), pp. 176–​195.

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PART I

Asian migrations in the historical context

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1 COLONIAL AND POSTCOLONIAL MIGRATIONS Sunil S. Amrith

Introduction Asia has always been mobile. Even those agrarian landscapes that appear most settled  –​the fertile paddy fields of the Ganges or Irrawaddy river deltas, for instance –​have been shaped by a centuries-​long process of migration and land colonisation (Eaton 1993; Richards 2003; Lieberman 2013). Merchants’ and pilgrims’ voyages across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea, or journeys along the overland ‘Silk Road’, stimulated the exchange of ideas and material culture (Gordon 2007). Many routes intersected at the port cities of Southeast Asia, which were trade emporia at the end-​point of the northeast and southwest monsoons (Reid 1993). In the 19th century the pace and quantity of migration –​within Asia, and Asia to other parts of the world –​experienced a leap in scale. Mass migration met the needs of expanding empires. Capital investment in plantation agriculture created a need for labour, as industrialisation spurred demand for natural resources. Transportation and communication advances made long-​distance migration faster and cheaper. After a period of interruption and reversal during the decades of decolonisation and the Cold War, transregional migration across Asia has grown again since the 1970s, alongside vast internal migrations. The social and gender composition of contemporary Asian migration differs from the patterns of earlier movements of people, most notably in the much larger proportion of female migrants today. Many routes of migration –​for instance, the vast migration of contract workers from South Asia to the Gulf States –​are new. Nevertheless, the legacies of earlier colonial migrations continue to shape contemporary Asia; the resurgence of migration across Asia in an age of globalisation has reactivated social networks forged in an earlier imperial age of regional connectedness. This chapter explains the causes and pathways of Asia’s first mobility revolution, which took place between 1850 and the 1930s. It examines the relationship between migration and Asian modernity, as migrant networks channelled new political ideas and new cultural practices across frontiers. It proceeds to examine the growing regulation of both immigration and emigration in Asia in the aftermath of the economic depression of the 1930s. Through the upheaval of war and decolonisation, a new legal and political regime emerged to govern Asian migration –​and we still live with many of its institutions. The final section of the chapter considers the decline 21

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and then the reorientation of Asian migration in the post-​independence era, culminating in the resurgence of Asian migration from the 1980s. As such, this chapter aims to provide the historical backdrop to the diverse strands of contemporary Asian migration considered in the rest of this handbook.

Asia’s first mobility revolution The 19th century saw a global transformation in mobility. Between 1840 and 1940, three great migrations reshaped the demographic and cultural balance of the earth (McKeown 2004): the movement of Europeans across the Atlantic (and a smaller number of Asians across the Pacific) to North America; the movement of Indians and Chinese to Southeast Asia; and the movement of people from the interiors of China and Russia to the far northeast of Asia. Migrants travelled under varying degrees of freedom and constraint, ranging from voluntary movement using family networks, to the most restrictive forms of indentured labour not far removed from slavery. While received wisdom would put European transatlantic migrants on the side of freedom, and Asian migrant labour on the side of constraint, recent scholarship has painted a more complex picture. Forms of bondage and dependence continued to constrain Europe’s overseas migrants well into the 19th century (Zahra 2016); and Asian, especially Chinese, migration was very often organised by families and through village networks, with little state involvement (McKeown 2004; Kuhn 2008; Look Lai 2009; Amrith 2011). Mass migration was both a cause and a result of global transformations. C.A. Bayly (2004: 11) observed that, from the middle of the 19th century, ‘contemporary changes were so rapid and interacted with each other so profoundly, that this period could reasonably be described as the “birth of the modern world” ’. Imperial states grew in power and capacity, and made greater demands on their subjects; ideas travelled more rapidly and spread more widely than ever before; industrialisation connected markets around the world. New technologies and new forms of energy brought long-​distance travel within reach of a far greater number of people. The steamship made ocean crossings faster as well as safer, though it was not until the 1880s that steam triumphed over sail. New routes shaped patterns of trade. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 brought Asian producers closer to European markets. In the words of novelist Joseph Conrad, ‘The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam, let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade’ (Conrad 1902: 168). News of prices and pacts, products and places, travelled even faster. By 1870, the British India Submarine Telegraph Company connected Bombay with the Red Sea. A year later, telegraph connections spanned the Bay of Bengal. From Singapore, the line reached through Saigon, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Nagasaki, and up to the Russian port of Vladivostok (Dick and Rimmer 2003). The opening of new frontiers of cultivation produced an insistent demand for labour. Asia’s frontier regions  –​for the most part, the forest frontiers of mainland and island Southeast Asia –​had low population densities. Local peasantries did not find wage labour on plantations attractive and many fought to preserve the freedom of smallholder cultivation or subsistence production. The prior existence across Southeast Asia of small settlements of Chinese and Indian merchants, together with communities of Chinese cultivators and miners in the interior, meant that the structures and precedents were in place to draw labour from the densely populated heartlands of coastal southern China and the eastern seaboard of the Indian subcontinent. Revolutions in transport made this prospect a reality. Recurrent and deep-​seated agrarian, ecological, and political crises in China and India intensified the draw of migration as an avenue to family survival. 22

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In China, the mid-​19th century marked a period of unprecedented social and political change accompanied by violence on a massive scale. The millenarian Taiping Rebellion (1851–​ 66) led to the deaths of up to 20 million people over 15 years. The imperial aggression of the Opium Wars culminated in the concession of treaty ports, which became the prime sites for the recruitment and shipment of Chinese labour overseas.The impact of political instability was intensified by a concurrent environmental crisis: a series of mega-​droughts, linked to exceptionally severe El Niño events in the 1870s and 1890s. In India, the consolidation of British political control over the subcontinent uprooted some social groups and immobilised others. Following the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in the 1830s, Indian workers moved under contracts of indenture to meet the labour demand from sugar-​producing colonies of the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean.The workers came from rural districts of Bihar and Madras. At the same time, deepening colonial control limited the options of groups that had previously been mobile. For weavers, artisans, professional soldiers, and many others, British conquest brought economic ruin. Many urban residents were pushed onto increasingly marginal lands. The acute vulnerability of large parts of South India to famine –​India was as badly affected as China by the droughts of the 1870s and 1890s –​was one result of this enforced decline (Parthasarathi 2009). In neither India nor China was there an inevitable link between political or environmental catastrophe and long-​distance migration. The mechanistic language of the early social science literature on migration, its picture of migration as subject to ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors, fails to capture the role of intermediaries and networks in making overseas migration a viable response to local distress. In the late-​19th century the conduit between crisis and opportunity was provided by what today we would call the ‘migration industry’. From the 1840s, tens of thousands of Indian labourers a year arrived in Ceylon to work on the coffee plantations. By the end of the 1850s, this had grown to nearly a hundred thousand arrivals annually. Between half and three-​quarters of them returned to India each year. The longer journey to Malaya involved smaller numbers until the 1880s, but by the end of that decade, 22,000 people arrived at the ports of the Straits Settlements from India. From the 1880s, Burma was the third greatest destination for Indian labour, and would attract the most migrants of all. By 1911, over 100,000 people each year arrived from India in each of these three destinations across the Bay of Bengal (Amrith 2013; Peebles 2001; Adas 1974). India’s migrants were recruited under a range of arrangements. The earliest migrants to Malaya travelled to sugar and coffee plantations under contracts of indenture, in which labour recruiters and brokers played the role of middlemen. Indentured workers on Malaya’s plantations faced brutal conditions and mortality rates were high. The archives are pervaded by instances of physical abuse and even torture. By the start of Malaya’s rubber boom, indenture gave way to more informal means of procuring labour. Across all three countries to which Indian labour travelled in large numbers, the most common mode of recruitment was the system known as the kangany system (in Ceylon and Malaya) or the maistry system (in Burma). The kangany was often an existing plantation worker who would return to his home village in India to recruit more men on commission.The kangany’s ability to advance money to the migrants’ families put him in a position to offer attractive terms to indebted agrarian families –​and debt provided the bond that kept workers tied to their employers, even when they were not formally indentured (Amrith 2013; Sandhu 1969). Whereas Indian migrants tended to stay within the boundaries of the British Empire, Chinese migrants travelled to a wider range of destinations across multiple empires. And while Indian migrants tended to travel on British steamships to work on European-​owned plantations or in the urban economy, Chinese migrants to Southeast Asia worked primarily for Chinese employers 23

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and capitalists. The majority of Chinese emigrants departed from Hong Kong, Xiamen, Shantou and Hainan Island. Between 19 and 23  million Chinese migrants travelled to Southeast Asia between 1850 and 1940: 6–​7 million to Singapore and Malaysia; 4–​5 million to Java and the outer islands of Indonesia; up to 4 million to Thailand; and another 3 or 4 million to Indochina, the Philippines and other parts of the Pacific taken together. The regional concentration of Chinese migration sharpened over time.Whereas 40 per cent of Chinese emigrants in the 1850s travelled beyond Asia, between the 1880s and 1930 96 per cent of Chinese emigrants remained within Asia (McKeown 2010). In the era of mass migration after 1870, Chinese travelled to Southeast Asia under a wide range of arrangements.What unites them is the importance of social networks and intermediary institutions in making migration possible. Some of these networks and institutions were rooted in the family and kinship. Other common forms included native-​place and surname associations and, on a wider scale, dialect-​group and regional associations. These institutions also hosted the religious and cultural rituals that made long-​distance migration less traumatic, and rendered new destinations more familiar. The importance of social networks was such that where one village had intensive emigrant connections, its neighbours might have none (McKeown 1999). The most fortunate of the emigrants financed their own passages with family resources. Since families viewed emigration as an investment, those with assets were willing to sell or mortgage them in the expectation that emigration would prove fruitful. Another common method was recruitment by an ‘old hand’, a system comparable with the kangany system used to recruit Indian labour: here the recruiter would advance the cost of the passage, and often a recruitment bonus, to the emigrants’ families; the emigrants were bound to work off these debts. More common still was migration through the ‘credit ticket’ system, wherein an intermediary took on the migrant’s debt of passage. Labour brokers in Singapore or Penang worked directly with boarding-​house keepers in Chinese ports, based on the rapid transfer of information about job openings and labour demand. Either on embarkation or upon arrival, the migrant would contract himself to an employer, at least until he had worked off his debts. Labour brokers often worked directly for the Chinese brotherhoods that controlled migrant labour in Southeast Asia. The brotherhoods’ command of armed force ensured that the migrants did not escape their control (Sugihara 2005: 268). Migrants under the credit ticket system suffered many kinds of abuse and exploitation, but the most unfortunate were those who had signed formal contracts of indenture directly with European employers. Chinese labour brokers, again, made these transactions possible. Labourers under indenture tended to come from the most disadvantaged backgrounds; they had least access to the social networks that made migration possible. In all, close to 750,000 Chinese signed contracts of indenture in the late-​19th and early-​20th centuries. This represents a small proportion of Chinese migrants overall. Around 250,000 of the indentured migrants went to the Caribbean and Latin America, where they suffered the most brutal conditions faced by Chinese migrants anywhere, in some cases conditions very close to enslavement. Within Asia, the plantations of Sumatra were the main destination for Chinese indentured workers:  around 250,000 made the journey between 1880 and 1910. Up to a quarter of the Chinese migrant workers to Sumatra’s plantation belt died before working out their contracts. Malaria, malnutrition, frequent injuries, and a high rate of suicide made Sumatra lethal for plantation workers. Until the turn of the 20th century, it proved cheaper for planters to import new labourers from overseas than to care for the welfare of those already in Sumatra. In general, indentured labour recruitment only flourished for destinations which were particularly distant or unattractive, or where Chinese social networks were especially thin (Kuhn 2008; McKeown 2004). 24

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The movement of Indians and Chinese to Southeast Asia represents one of the world’s great migrations of the modern era, but many others were on the move alongside them. Within Southeast Asia the same era witnessed the acceleration and expansion of mobility across the Indonesian archipelago and across the Straits of Malacca (Tagliacozzo 2005; Kahn 2006), together with a deepening of the centuries-​old circuit of Arab mobility between the Hadhramaut and Southeast Asia (Ho 2006). Throughout the region, ‘a significant traffic in human labour existed outside of the power of Europeans… Javanese, Boyanese, Banjarese, Dayaks, Kelantanese,Tamils, and Chinese were all in motion’ (Tagliacozzo 2005: 243–​4). Migration took place overland as well as overseas:  nowhere more so than in China (Gottschang and Lary 2000). With the expansion of railway construction that made a previously remote region more accessible, the decades after 1890 saw a massive migration to the far northwest. C. Walter Young (1932), an American traveller to Manchuria, wrote in 1931 that, ‘the magnitude of this migration [is] perhaps unprecedented in modern history and assuredly unparalleled today’. Between 28 and 33 million Chinese migrants moved to Manchuria and Siberia after 1850, together with approximately 2 million Koreans, and 500,000 Japanese. If we include migration from Russia into Siberia, a further 13 million people can be added to this migration to Asia’s far northeast. Between 8 and 10 million of the Chinese migrants to Manchuria settled there permanently. Overland migration to Manchuria and overseas migration to Southeast Asia shared similar underlying causes, and similar conditions of possibility. They followed similarly circulatory paths; the majority of migrants to Manchuria, too, returned home eventually. In contrast with emigration to Southeast Asia, however, Chinese migrants soon constituted a clear numerical majority in Manchuria, which they did not anywhere in Southeast Asia. Many went to work in mines and on the railways, but most Chinese migrants to Manchuria went as cultivators. A relatively small proportion of the migrants owned land on a freehold basis; many more leased their land, or worked as sharecroppers. Large parts of Manchuria were owned by Chinese official organisations, private or semi-​private companies, and by large landowners. By the 1920s, the soya bean had emerged as Manchuria’s most important cash crop, accounting for 80 per cent of the region’s exports. Family was the ‘engine of migration’ to Manchuria (Gottschang and Lary 2000). Families in Shandong and Hebei sent young men to Manchuria as part of a diversified strategy for family survival –​the expectation of return was almost universal. Most Chinese migrants to Manchuria moved in small groups of kinsmen or fellow villagers. They moved along existing family networks to destinations where uncles, cousins, or other local people had preceded them. When this happened on a large enough scale, whole ‘villages across the sea’ emerged, almost as branches of the original northern Chinese village in Manchuria (Gottschang and Lary 2000).

Migration and Asian modernism ‘Migration’, the American demographer Kingsley Davis (1951: 107) wrote, ‘is the result of an idea –​an idea of what lies somewhere else.’ Mobility in its many forms widened people’s social networks and their imaginative worlds. Writing in the 1930s, the American-​trained Chinese sociologist Ta Chen concluded that the influence of returned emigrants on their local societies in China was ‘exerted largely through the building of schools’, arising from their ‘profound faith in education’. His is a fascinating and strikingly modern account of the social effects of migration. ‘Money and ideas about the spending of money flow together through the same channel,’ Chen (1940) wrote:  ‘The material contributions and the intellectual contributions are intertwined.’ 25

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The circulation of ideas accompanied the movement of people across the South China Sea. From the 1880s reforming Qing officials and revolutionary anti-​Manchu activists alike began to see the overseas Chinese as a fruitful source of financial support and investment. For their part, many Chinese in the diaspora began to see that a strengthened, modernised China with a stronger voice in the world would improve their position as minorities overseas. The Chinese government established its first overseas consulate in Singapore in 1878. Chinese commissions of inquiry investigated the appalling conditions suffered by Chinese indentured workers in Cuba, Peru, and Sumatra. The Chinese diaspora proved a battleground of ideas for those with very different views of China’s future. Sun Yat-​sen (1866–​1925) built his political movement from the support of overseas Chinese communities. In 1905, he formed the Tongmenghui (the Chinese Revolutionary League) with the support of the Chinese student community based in Tokyo. Sun travelled widely in Southeast Asia; in 1906, he formed the Singapore branch of the Tongmenghui. The contacts and resources that Sun mobilised during his travels provided the lifeblood of the Chinese revolutionary movement. Overseas Chinese support was crucial to several attempted uprisings in the southern provinces in the first decade of the 20th century. Soon after the revolution of 1911, overseas Chinese began to contribute their resources, finances, and skills to building a new China. In India, too, the development of mass politics drew heavily upon ideas, networks, and resources from overseas. The movement for the abolition of indentured labour was one of the most widely supported political movements in modern India; it preceded the rise of mass nationalism, fuelled by news reports of the brutality to which indentured workers were subject (Sinha 2015). The political strategies of the most iconic of India’s political leaders, Mohandas Gandhi, were forged not in India but in South Africa –​where he spent two decades as a lawyer and as leader of a movement for Indian rights (Hofmeyr 2014). The visit to Malaya in 1929 of South India’s leading campaigner for caste and social reform and leader of the Self Respect Movement, ‘Periyar’ E.V. Ramasamy, marked a political awakening among Tamil migrant workers in the cities and on the plantations. E.V. Ramasamy’s tour stimulated the development of the Tamil language press in Singapore, and helped to disseminate a Tamil regionalism that was distinct from Indian nationalism (Amrith 2013). By the early decades of the twentieth century, the scale and pace of Asian migration gave rise to new ways of imagining the world.Technology bridged distance. New ideas of citizenship brought under debate the relationship between land, migration, and political representation. Newspapers addressed, and in the process they created, new publics. Their debates, and their readership, crossed colonial and national borders. The vernacular press in urban Southeast Asia spoke of –​and spoke to –​​many ‘imagined communities’, not merely national ones (Anderson 1991). They appealed to constituencies defined in local, regional, religious and ethnic terms, which were not always mutually exclusive. Port cities played a central role as sites of debate and encounter. Texts circulated between them; translation and republication were common in a world when ideas of copyright were still in flux (Hofmeyr 2014). Often debates over social and religious reform transcended linguistic or cultural boundaries. The English-​educated elites of many of these port cities forged an inter-​ethnic public sphere (Frost 2002; Chua 2012). Inter-​ Asian migration gave rise to a distinctive Asian cosmopolitanism –​but it had clear limits.

Migration and the state In the modern world there has been a close connection between the history of migration and the history of migration control (McKeown 2008). Historically, Asian states, and the Chinese 26

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state in particular, have been more concerned with controlling emigration than immigration, though the official ban on the emigration of Chinese subjects that lasted into the 19th c­ entury was rarely effective, and honoured mostly in the breach (Kuhn 2008). The acceleration of Asian migration in the 19th century took place in a context of capitalist expansion and imperial competition: the hunger for labour in Southeast Asia was such that very few restrictions were placed on the entry of migrant labourers into countries like Malaya. Singapore and Malaya did not introduce immigration control until 1930. Nevertheless, European empires in Asia were concerned with distinguishing between different types of migrants for other reasons. The British colonial government of India passed a set of complicated rules governing which social groups of Indians could and could not leave the country (Amrith 2013). Concern with political subversion or with smuggling encouraged many colonial states to guard their borders more closely, and to try to distinguish between legal and illicit flows (Tagliacozzo 2005). Almost all of the colonial societies of Southeast Asia distinguished between indigenous and migrant populations –​even where migrants had settled for several generations. In the Dutch East Indies, migrants from other parts of Asia were categorised as ‘foreign Asians’ and had different rights from ‘natives’. Nevertheless, in comparative perspective, what is most striking about the Asian context is how late migration control became widespread: most Asian migrants before the 1930s travelled without passports or visas. The global economic depression was a turning point. It brought the inequalities of colonial capitalism to the fore, and raised new questions about inequality and redistribution; this made the question of political institutions –​their inclusions and exclusions –​more important than ever before. With prescience, John Furnivall, the Burma-​based British scholar-​administrator, wrote in 1939 that ‘we can already see that 1930 marks the… close of a period of 60 years, beginning with the opening of the Suez Canal, and, although less definitely, the close of a period of 400 years from the first landing of Vasco da Gama in Calicut’ (Furnivall 1939: 428). The collapse of global commodity markets led to a reversal of the flows of migration that had become entrenched over 60 years. Colonial laws restricted fresh migration from China and India to Southeast Asia –​as often through changes in labour recruitment regulations as through explicit immigration restriction. Ethnic tensions flared up at a time of rising unemployment –​for instance during the anti-​Indian violence in Burma that accompanied the Saya San Rebellion of 1930–​32. Emergent nationalist movements in Southeast Asia demanded further immigration restriction; the British Indian government retaliated, in 1938 and 1939, with a unilateral ban on all labour emigration from India to Malaya or Ceylon (Amrith 2010). World War Two brought the trauma of dislocation and forced migration for millions of people across Asia. It also put an immediate end to patterns of long-​distance migration linking India, China, and Southeast Asia, though many of those routes of migration were already under strain –​subject to new immigration and emigration controls, and swayed by new forms of populist anti-​immigrant politics –​even before the war.With decolonisation in the 1940s and 1950s, paths of migration that had previously taken place within the boundaries of a single empire, for instance the vast Indian migration to Burma, became international movements.

Postcolonial migration The 1930s and 1940s marked a rupture, bringing an end to patterns of Asian migration that had persisted for almost a century. Distinguishing migrants from locals, identifying and resettling refugees and displaced peoples, became central to new states’ assertions of authority, and their definitions of citizenship. Asia’s new states had to balance the demands of ethnic nationalism with the fact that their boundaries were inherited from the imperial structures from which 27

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they were created. The idea that nations each constituted the homeland of a particular majority ethnic community was a common-​sense proposition in the mid-​20th century. Yet many of Asia’s new nations were conspicuously multi-​ethnic, multi-​religious, and multi-​lingual. Given the heterogeneity of Asia’s population, the new international borders both united and divided people. New international borders left many ethnic groups without a state; they created ‘ethnic enclaves included in larger … political units’, and left ‘pools of people as minorities on one or both sides of the frontier’ (Cribb and Li 2004).The transformation of India and China –​the two largest source countries of emigrants –​fed the epochal shift away from long-​distance migration. With the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, overseas migration from China virtually ceased for three decades; the main exception to this trend came in the continuing flow of Chinese to Hong Kong. International migration from India continued, but on a significantly reduced scale compared with the colonial era. India’s international migration sought new routes: first to the old colonial centre, the United Kingdom, and later to the Middle East. The great migrations from China and India that had shaped Asia’s capitalist development and its population geography from the late-​19th to the mid-​20th centuries came to an end. But those earlier migrations left a significant legacy. In every new nation in Southeast Asia there were significant Chinese and Indian minorities. Their experiences in the postcolonial era were mixed; but for many of them, their migrant origins were a source of disadvantage and discrimination long after their parents or grandparents had made their journeys across the Bay of Bengal or the South China Sea. In keeping with a wider global pattern, the decades between the end of World War Two and the 1970s saw a decline in international migration within Asia. Economic integration in general within East Asia, and between East and Southeast Asia, reached a low point; integration between South and Southeast Asia fared worse still. For most of the Cold War, Prasenjit Duara has argued, ‘the economic energies of Asian countries in the two camps were directed more towards the nation and the supraregion than the region itself ’ – the ‘supraregion’, here, refers to the geographically dispersed capitalist and socialist blocs (Duara 2015: 254). However, in an era when virtually all postcolonial states believed in planning and when even pro-​western and market-​oriented states intervened to shape their economies and societies, millions of people were mobilised to move within Asia’s new national borders in pursuit of ‘development’. For instance, whereas in the age of empire the frontiers of migration for the young men of Tamil Nadu lay overseas, after 1947 these patterns of movement were redirected within India’s borders. In India and throughout Southeast Asia, millions moved to work in factories and workshops; they moved to work in the offices of expanding government bureaucracies; they moved to work in the informal economies that flourished at the interstices of regulation, in neighbourhoods unmarked on maps; they moved to build the dams and power plants that fuelled dreams of an industrial future. Above all they moved to Asia’s growing cities. Even in China, where the government instituted the hukou system to inhibit population movements, the violent mass mobilisation of the Great Leap Forward displaced large numbers of people, and the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution sent millions of students and urban dwellers to the countryside (Lary 1999). After the reorientation of the middle decades of the 20th century, the 1970s marked another turning point in the history of migration in Asia. Accelerated internal migration has led to the growth of megacities that attract hundreds or thousands of new migrants every week  –​ alongside this growth, hundreds of smaller cities have developed, many of them within a very short space of time. This mass movement is particularly evident in China, where earlier strict controls over migration and settlement in urban centres have fragmented, leading to the largest and most rapid urbanisation in history. Mumbai, Jakarta, Manila, and Dhaka are not far behind Chinese cities like Guangzhou or Shenzhen in their capacity to attract migrants. At the same 28

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time, increasing prosperity and increasing inter-​regional inequalities have stimulated a resurgence in international migration in Asia. Some of the new routes of migration are entirely new; others built on long historical connections, including many described earlier in this chapter. Two main circuits of Asian migration established themselves from the 1970s: the first, from the 1970s, involved the migration of millions of short-​term contract workers from South Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Thailand to the oil-​producing states of the Middle East. The majority were men working in construction, though an increasing proportion of women made the journey from the 1980s, to work in domestic service and in the leisure industry. The second circuit of Asian migration, which took off during the 1980s, drew migrants from South Asia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Burma, and Vietnam to the growing economies of Southeast Asia and Northeast Asia: Singapore, Malaysia,Thailand, Japan and Korea.The migration of young women for leisure industry and domestic work constitutes a significant proportion of this movement, as does the movement of male construction and manual workers. Both streams of migration have grown in scale over the past decade, and both involve large numbers of undocumented (‘illegal’) migrants. There has at the same time been a marked ‘feminisation’ of several currents of mobility –​internal and international, skilled, and unskilled –​since the 1980s (Kaur 2004). Alongside a resurgence in labour migration, the last three decades have also seen a movement with fewer historical precedents: a vast movement of skilled professionals and hundreds of thousands of students, together with significant and unprecedented marriage migration across national frontiers. Intra-​Asian migration forms part of a continuum that includes movement to the United States, Australasia, and Europe.

Conclusion In many ways contemporary migration in Asia is without historical precedent; this can be seen in the diversity and complexity of routes and kinds of migration; in the unprecedented speed of long-​distance travel; in the instantaneous nature of the communications technologies that tie migrants to their families and their homelands. In its gender composition, too, current migration is unprecedented. In the colonial era, by far the majority of Asia’s migrants were men; this is no longer the case. But in other ways, understanding the long history of Asian migration continues to be important to illuminate our present condition. Historical analogies can be helpful in understanding what is truly distinctive about recent patterns of migration; moreover, direct historical continuities can be seen in some, though not all, routes of Asian migration. There are plenty of analogies to be made between historical and contemporary migration in Asia. In terms of the drivers of migration, there are parallels with an earlier era of imperial globalisation in Asia. Internal and international migration today are consequences of processes familiar to historians: sharpening inequalities between regions, and between the city and the countryside; environmental pressures on agrarian regions, including but not limited to natural disasters; the circulation of ideas and information giving rise to new aspirations and the search for a better life far away. In terms of the mechanisms of migration, too, there are important historical analogies to be made. Today, as in the past, Asian migration depends very often on informal networks of information, capital, housing, and emotional support. Contractors, ‘jobbers’, brokers, intermediaries, play a pivotal role in facilitating both rural–urban and intra–rural migration in Asia, akin to the kangany of the 19th century; similarly, migrants to China’s cities continue to depend on informal connections: networks of kin and fellow villagers. Now, as in the past, these networks are fragile. They can unravel as quickly as they form. Migration scholars Stephen Castles and Mark Miller (2009) see the ‘migration industry’ as a distinctive feature of Asian migration in global 29

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perspective; as discussed earlier in this chapter, the migration industry in both China and India has deep historical roots. Another sort of analogy can be made in discussing the conditions that migrant workers face. In the lack of autonomy that so many migrant workers in the Gulf and Southeast Asia experience, there are undoubtedly parallels with earlier forms of unfree labour. Activists for migrant rights have at times drawn directly on an historical language of ‘indenture’ and even ‘slavery’ to describe the working conditions of migrants in both the Middle East and in Southeast Asia. Such analogies can obscure as much as they illuminate; they tend to elide the significant changes in the political, institutional, and geopolitical structures under which contemporary migration takes place (Amrith 2011); yet they can assume political and discursive importance within activist movements to bring about improvements in migrants’ working conditions. Contemporary Asian migration does not merely resemble past practice; there are direct continuities inherent in the ways that particular places are connected. This can be seen most evidently in the continuing centrality of port cities like Singapore and Hong Kong as hubs of Asian connections –​as destinations and as transit points in migrants’ journeys. Both port cities have adapted to global transformations, yet their basic outward orientation provides a continuity with their colonial histories as free ports (Tagliacozzo 2007). Similarly, many of the regions from which Asia’s migrants originate have deep histories of mobility: migrants from Bangladesh, for instance, often come from regions which have long been connected, along riverine routes, to Indian Ocean networks (Alexander, Chatterji and Jalais 2015). Many of the Tamil Nadu villages that are home to the migrant construction workers who have moved to Malaysia and Singapore since the 1980s have much longer histories of connection with Southeast Asia. Often, migrant workers follow in the footsteps of their grandparents whereas their parents tended to have more sedentary lives in the period of migration’s interruption in the mid-​20th century (Amrith 2013). All the while, new relationships are being forged between old diasporas and their newly ascendant homelands, eager for capital, expertise, and connections. While countries like Singapore aim to attract highly skilled Asian professionals (Yeoh and Lin 2012), their home countries seek to draw them back. Following the example of Taiwan, China and India have both made efforts, in the 21st century, to encourage their diasporas to invest in their homelands, and to encourage migrant professionals to return. A significant number have begun to do so, as rapid economic growth creates opportunities and boosts salaries. In 2004, the Indian government instituted a partial concession to the ban –​in place since 1955 –​on dual citizenship. Tellingly, the Indian government’s efforts were directed largely towards Indians in the West, with a more ambivalent view towards working-​class Indians settled elsewhere in Asia (Sinha 2015). At the same time, new forms of migration superimposed upon older ones –​’old’ and ‘new’ diasporas are divided by class and experience as often as they are united by a shared culture.

References Adas, M. (1974). The Burma Delta: Economic Development and Social Change on an Asian Rice Frontier, 1852–​ 1941. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Alexander, C., Joya C., and Annu J. (2015). The Bengal Diaspora:  Rethinking Muslim Migration. London: Routledge. Amrith, S.S. (2013). Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Amrith, S.S. (2011). Migration and Diaspora in Modern Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Amrith, S.S. (2010). Indians overseas? Governing Tamil migration to Malaya, 1870–​1941. Past and Present, 208, pp. 231–​261.

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Colonial & postcolonial migrations Anderson, B. (1991). Imagined Communities:  Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. 2nd ed. London: Verso. Bayly, C.A. (2004). The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–​1914. Oxford: Blackwell. Castles, S. and Miller, M.J. (2009). Age of Migration. 4th ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Chatterji, J. (2012). South Asian histories of citizenship, 1946–​1970. Historical Journal, 55 (4), pp. 1049–​1071. Chen,T. (1940). Emigrant Communities in South China, ed. B. Lasker. Honolulu: Institute of Pacific Relations. Chua, A.L. (2012). Nation, race, and language: discussing transnational identities in colonial Singapore circa 1930. Modern Asian Studies, 46, p. 2. Conrad, J. (1902).The end of the tether. In Youth, A Narrative, and Two Other Stories. London: W. Blackwood and Sons Ltd. Cribb, R. and Narangoa, L. (2004). Orphans of empire: divided peoples, dilemmas of identity, and old imperial borders in East and Southeast Asia. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 46 (1), pp. 164–​187. Davis, K. (1951). The Population of India and Pakistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dick, H. (2006). Southeast Asia as an open system: geo-​politics and economic geography. In: P.H. Kratoska, R. Raben and H.S. Nordholt, eds., Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space. Singapore: Singapore University Press, pp. 250–​274. Dick, H. and Rimmer, P. (2003). Cities, Transport and Communication: The Integration of Southeast Asia Since 1850. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Duara,P.(2015).The Crisis of Global Modernity: AsianTraditions and a Sustainable Future. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eaton, R. (1993). The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–​ 1760. Berkeley:  University of California Press. Frost, M.R. (2002).Wider opportunities: religious revival, nationalist awakening, and the global dimension in Colombo, 1870–​1920. Modern Asian Studies, 36 (4), pp. 937–​967. Furnivall, J.S. (1939). Netherlands India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gordon, S. (2007). When Asia was the World. London: Yale University Press. Gottschang, T. and Lary, D. (2000). Swallows and Settlers: The Great Migration from North China to Manchuria. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Ho, E. (2006). The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hofmeyr, I. (2014). Gandhi’s Printing Press:  Experiments in Slow Reading. Cambridge, MA.:  Harvard University Press. Kahn, J. (2006). Other Malays:  Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World. Singapore: NUS Press. Kaur, A. (2004). Wage Labour in Southeast Asia Since 1840: Globalisation, the International Division of Labour and Labour Transformations. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Kuhn, P. (2008). Chinese Among Others: Emigration in Modern Times. Singapore: NUS Press. Lary, D. (1999). The ‘static’ decades: inter-​provincial migration in pre-​reform China. In F. N. Pieke and H. Mallee, eds., Internal and International Migration: Chinese Perspectives. Richmond: Curzon, pp. 29–​48 Lieberman, V. (2013). Strange Parallels Southeast Asia in Global Context, c.  800–​ 1830:  Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Look Lai, W. (2009). Asian diasporas and tropical migration in the age of empire: a comparative overview. Journal of Chinese Overseas, 5, pp. 28–​54. McKeown, A. (2010). Chinese emigration in global context, 1840–​1950. Journal of Global History, 5 (1), pp. 95–​124. McKeown, A. (2008). Melancholy Order:  Asian Migration and the Globalization of Borders. Cambridge University Press. McKeown, A. (2004). Global migration, 1846–​1940. Journal of World History, 15 (2), pp. 155–​189. McKeown, A. (1999). Conceptualizing Chinese diasporas, 1842 to 1949. Journal of Asian Studies, 58 (2), pp. 306–​337. Ong, A. (1999). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press. Parthasarathi, P. (2009). Historical issues of deindustrialization in nineteenth-​ century South India. In: G. Riello and T. Roy, eds., How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500–​1850. Leiden: Brill, pp. 415–​435. Peebles, P. (2001). Plantation Tamils of Ceylon. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Reid, A. (1993). Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1460–​1680, Volume 1: The Lands Below the Winds. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Sunil S. Amrith Richards, J.F. (2003). The Unending Frontier:  An Environmental History of the Early Modern World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Sandhu, K.S. (1969). Indians in Malaya:  Immigration and Settlement, 1786–​1957. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Sinha, M. (2015). Premonitions of the past. Journal of Asian Studies, 74, pp. 821–​841. Sugihara, K. (2005). Patterns of Chinese emigration to Southeast Asia, 1869–​1939. In K. Sugihara, ed., Japan, China and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850–​1949. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 244–​274. Tagliacozzo, E. (2007). An urban ocean:  notes on the historical evolution of coastal cities in greater Southeast Asia. Journal of Urban History, 33, pp. 911–​932. Tagliacozzo, E. (2005). Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States Along a Southeast Asian Frontier. New Haven: Yale University Press. Yeoh, B. and Lin, W. (2012). Rapid growth in Singapore’s immigrant population brings policy challenges. Migration Information Source. Available at:  www.migrationpolicy.org/​article/​rapid-​growth-​singapores-​ immigrant-​population-​brings-​policy-​challenges/​ [Accessed 3 April. 2017]. Young, C.W. (1932). Chinese immigration and colonisation in Manchuria. In W.L.G. Joerg, ed., Pioneer Settlement:  Cooperative Studies by Twenty-​ Six Authors. New  York:  American Geographical Society, pp. 330–​359. Zahra, T. (2016). The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World. New York: W.W. Norton.

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2 THE CHANGING MEANINGS OF DIASPORA The Chinese in Southeast Asia Els van Dongen and Hong Liu Introduction Dispersed over all corners of the earth, the Chinese diaspora –​estimated to be around 60 million –​is the largest in the world. It constitutes an important part of the Asian diaspora, not only because of its size, but also because more than three-​quarters of the Chinese diaspora still reside in Southeast Asia today. Due to geographical proximity and trading ties, the Chinese diaspora has a long history in Southeast Asia, which was the main destination of emigrants from the Southern Chinese provinces of Fujian and Guangdong until the 1950s. From then onwards, re-​migration from Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan to North America, Australasia, Europe, and Japan led to a more geographically diverse Chinese diasporic landscape. Following the start of economic reforms in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the late 1970s, places of origin of Chinese emigrants also became more varied as the latter departed from everywhere in China, and not merely from the traditional emigration areas (qiaoxiang) in South China. Even though the Chinese diaspora is unique in many ways, it can also illustrate some of the broader concerns and changing contexts pertaining to the Asian diaspora. These include questions of identity and homeland ties; the various factors that contribute to divisions within diasporas; the attempts of governments to incorporate diasporas; and the changing relationship between states and diasporas in different historical periods and geopolitical contexts. Guided by such an understanding, this chapter provides an historical overview and theoretical framework of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia in the context of changing meanings of diaspora (identity, difference, and homeland linkages) from the beginning of Chinese settlement in the region to the present.

Three meanings of diaspora and the Chinese in Southeast Asia In its original meaning, the term diaspora refers to the ‘scattering’ of Jews and Armenians that connoted suffering and oppression as ‘victim diasporas’ (Cohen 1997: 4). As such, the term implies forced exile, a shared group identity shaped by common experiences of hardship, and a longing for a homeland in need of reconstruction. Although multiple uses of the term have marked its proliferation since the 1990s, we still find some reference to this original meaning in literature on diaspora, such as in the emphasis on identity and collective memory, occurrences of alienation in host societies, and the preservation of homeland ties among diasporic communities. 33

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Scholarly literature of recent decades also includes new meanings of diaspora. In one sense, the term has become integrated into broader attempts to deconstruct ‘bounded and static understandings of culture and society’ against the background of newer paradigms such as globalisation and transnationalism (McKeown 1999: 308). As a project of resistance, diaspora exposes the limits of the nation-​state paradigm and focuses instead on interconnections at both sub-​national and transnational levels. Here, the role of networks is particularly relevant in what McKeown has referred to as a ‘diasporic perspective’ that pays attention to transnational flows and connections (ibid.:  307). Diaspora in this sense also challenges the understanding of movements as linear and uni-​directional, as in older conceptions of migration. Culturally, diaspora signifies a revolt against a single narrative in favour of diversity, heterogeneity, or what McKeown (1999) calls ‘diaspora-​as-​difference’. In a third sense, however, the term diaspora has become a ‘category of practice’ employed by states to claim populations beyond national boundaries and ‘to appeal to loyalties’ (Brubaker 2005:  12), reflecting the tendency of ‘nationalising transnational mobility’ (Ho, Hickey, and Yeoh 2015: 153; Xiang,Yeoh, and Toyota 2013). As a political category, governments have used the term to erase differences in an attempt to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Since it is in the interest of nation-​states to conceive of ‘their’ diasporas as homogenous groups that can be managed and that share their loyalty to the ‘motherland’, the notion of difference so central to diaspora-​as-​critique comes under threat in this third use of the term. The homogenisation that underlies diaspora is not just specific to the political use of the term; it also underlies its original meaning. Conceiving of diasporas as groups that share the common experience of forced exile minimises internal differences, such as those of class, race, religion, dialect, origin, occupation, or generation. Hence, scholars have warned of the dangers of essentialisation and homogenisation when applying the term ‘diaspora’ outside specific historical contexts (Ang 2003; Wang 2004). It is thus important not only to focus on the historical experiences of the Chinese diaspora, but also on divisions within Chinese communities. The tension between the diverse meanings of diaspora as group identity, difference, and homeland ties, is also visible in changing research paradigms on the Chinese in Southeast Asia, which continues to be a main geographical focus of research. Until World War Two, the Chinese were perceived of as ‘unchanging’ sojourners in scholarship (Purcell 1951). The term huaqiao (overseas Chinese) mostly appeared in official discourse and in scholarship to refer to the period before World War Two, when Chinese bachelors from the southern provinces of Guangdong and Fujian migrated to Southeast Asia with the intent of returning to China. Up to the 1960s, the term ‘Nanyang Chinese’ (Nanyang huaqiao), which suggested the existence of a unified and homogenous community, was commonplace in research. During the 1950s and 1960s, in the context of the rise of nationalism and the Cold War, researchers mostly framed identity questions in terms of studies on the assimilation of the Chinese in several Southeast Asian countries (Skinner 1957;Wang 1959).This nation-​state framework used in studies up to the 1980s gradually made way for a ‘diasporic perspective’ that focuses instead on transnational mobility, links, flows, institutions, and networks (McKeown 1999). During the 1980s, scholars also replaced the simplistic dichotomy of unchanging sojourners versus assimilated nationals with an understanding of identity as a complex and multilayered category, consisting of, among others, national, cultural, ethnic, and class identities (Wang 1985). With the growing impetus of cultural studies since the 1990s, researchers further problematised notions of ‘Chineseness’, multiculturalism, and diaspora as markers of cultural preservation, ‘separateness’ and ‘proto-​nationalism’ (Ang 2003). Since then, the ‘hybridity’ behind terms such as totok (‘pure’ Chinese) or peranakan (ethnic Chinese of mixed origin) has been increasingly acknowledged (Ang 2003; Coppel 2012). In recent years, scholars have also paid more attention 34

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to the question of ethnic minorities and changes in identification modes of these communities in a global context (Barabantseva 2011; Leo 2015). At the same time, questions pertaining to agencies, interfaces, and marginality as a source of diasporic Chinese strength have been addressed (Liu 2006; Liu and van Dongen 2013). Whereas earlier criticism of the Chinese diaspora focused on its spatial quality of China-​ centredness or the denial of localisation, Shelly Chan has recently argued in favour of the use of the concept of  ‘diaspora’ in a temporal sense. Diaspora, Chan argues, is less about deconstructing the model of centre and periphery than it is about asking who is making claims about diasporas and for what purpose at specific moments in time. Hence, both centre and periphery are contingent forces, subject to shifting interests, perceptions, and values in time (Chan 2015). Highlighting the tension between the various understandings of diaspora, and keeping in mind Shelly Chan’s proposition regarding changing understandings of diaspora at different ‘moments’ in time, our overview discusses five main periods or ‘moments’ that have defined the evolution of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. They are (1) the early history of the Chinese traders in the Nanyang and colonial expansion (15th-​19th centuries); (2) the mass labour migration movement after the 1850s; (3) the nationalist movement of the early 2​ 0th century; (4) the period of decolonisation and the Cold War; and (5) the period of China’s reform and opening-​up (post-​1978) in the era of globalisation and neoliberalism. Each period manifests changes in diaspora as homeland ties, dynamics of difference, and the perception of the Chinese state regarding the role and relevance of the Chinese diaspora. If we understand diaspora as a field of competing interests across time and space, constructed and shared by diasporic communities, host societies, and the homeland, diaspora remains a useful category of analysis.

Early Chinese traders and colonial expansion Individual Chinese traders reached the south of the Malay Peninsula and mainland Southeast Asia as early as the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BCE–​220 CE), but it was only with the growth of commercial activities in Southeast Asia in the 13th century that Chinese communities arose (Wade 2009; Zhuang 2001). Under the Yongle Emperor (1360–​1424), Zheng He’s maritime excursions in the 15th century (1405–​1433) served to formalise relations with Southeast Asia under the tribute system. Even though overseas trade was banned during the mid-​15th century, in 1567, a partial lifting of the ban led to a de facto legalisation of trade and the increase of private junk trade. Before the arrival of the Portuguese and the Spanish in Southeast Asia in the 16th century, the Chinese were already active as commercial middlemen in the region. During the early colonial period, they worked as artisans and labourers, and as ‘tax farmers’ under colonial rulers. Under this system, the Chinese secured licences to collect taxes on local goods and services for the colonial authorities, with opium, spirits, gambling, and pawnshops becoming lucrative areas (Kuhn 2008; Skinner 1996). This system built on the local system of indirect rule of ‘officers’ in pre-​colonial Southeast Asia, the so-​called kapitan system, in which top merchants operated as leaders of Chinese communities. As traders, mostly Hokkien [Fujian] merchants from South China engaged in private trade, exchanging Chinese goods such as ceramics and silks for Southeast Asian products such as spices and sandalwood. A  vast business network connected the Hokkien traders from the Kyushu Islands to the Malay Archipelago and crossed communities in Korea, Kyushu, Ryukyu, Taiwan, and Manila. These networks were based on family, native places, lineage, guilds, and personal ties, consolidated through practices such as the adoption of sons from within the clan or sworn brotherhoods (Chin 2010: 174, 193, 196). Already during this early period, the Chinese 35

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community was far from homogenous. In the early urban settlement of Spanish Manila, for example, it consisted of Chinese leaders who acted as middlemen, rich merchants who provided products for the famous Manila-​Acapulco galleon trade, small merchants and artisans residing in the Chinese quarter (the Parián), and labourers offering food and services (Kueh 2014). In the 17th century, Chinese trade in Southeast Asia expanded.Tin and gold mining and the growing of pepper and gambier arose in the region to meet Chinese demands. By the 18th century, the Chinese also gradually became engaged with setting up the rice trade between China and Southeast Asia. Some of these early labour migrant communities in Borneo, Riau, Bangka, and Johor set up ‘kongsis’ or partnerships between labourers, headmen and capital providers, or ‘taukehs’ that made them self-​ruled and quasi-​autonomous (Trocki 2005). Other forms of community arrangement during this period included the ‘bangs’, organisations based on dialect and with complex internal hierarchies that cut across class divisions, and that provided recruitment and offered patronage (Kuhn 2008). Each of the main dialect groups had its own niche occupations, influenced not only by the skills of the respective emigrants but also by networks and conditions in the host societies. The Hokkien, maritime traders since the 1500s, were present in Taiwan, the Philippines, Java, Malaya, Borneo, and Siam. The Cantonese specialised in, among others, trade and cash crops, and could be found in great numbers in Malaya.The Teochiu [Teochew] people, mostly based in Thailand, were known for shipbuilding, but also worked on plantations and engaged in businesses such as the rice trade. The Hakka migrated to Malaya (West Borneo) and Singapore, where they engaged in mining, forestry, and agriculture (McKeown 2010; Wang 1991). The Qing government continued Ming policies of prohibiting migration and treating migrants as ‘outcasts and deserters’, partly because of their actual support for the Zheng Chenggong (Koxinga) regime in Taiwan (Yen 1978: 7). Although emigration remained banned until 1893 (with bans on trade instated and lifted during the 18th century), the first half of the 19th century witnessed a rapid expansion of Chinese communities in Southeast Asia (Wade 2009; Wang 2009). Because of the trading ban, the demands of trading itself, and the dependence on the winds for return, the early communities of Chinese traders in Southeast Asia were temporary and forced sojourners (Chin 2010: 157; Wang 1981: 120). Given the rapid growth of communities, evictions and massacres of the Chinese communities already took place in Manila (1603), and Batavia (1740) (Kuhn 2008). Since those who migrated were male (mostly bachelors) and huaqiao who had the intent to return to China, a dual family system emerged. Maintaining a family in their place of origin, they married local wives. Because of this practice, ‘creolised Chinese societies’ such as the Mestizos in the Philippines and Peranakans in the Malay peninsula and the Indonesian archipelago, developed in a stable fashion in the 17th and 18th centuries (Skinner 1996). Merchants of these communities, rooted in both local and Chinese cultures, made suitable revenue farmers. By the end of the 18th century, the economic position of the Chinese in Southeast Asia was secured through tax farming and strategies such as trade peddling and giving advance credit (Kwee 2014). Whether in European colonies or in monarchies not under colonial rule, the Chinese in Southeast Asia benefitted from the protection of weak patron-​states and the existence of occupational niches (Kuhn 2001). During this early period, it was the socio-​economic visibility of the Chinese traders and middlemen –​as opposed to their physical visibility in other geographical contexts –​that led to discrimination (Wickberg 1994:  70) and the preservation of homeland ties. However, as explained, differences within this group identity were already manifest, as the early ‘sojourners’ were not merely traders, but also labourers and artisans. Whereas Safran has identified ‘pariah capitalism’ as a trait of the Chinese diaspora, Wang Gungwu has warned against a singular 36

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understanding  of  the Chinese diaspora with ‘business acumen and wealth’ as such (Safran 1991: 89; Wang 2004). Moreover, trading networks during this early period defy nation-​state approaches and reflect the second meaning of diaspora, emphasising the role of co-​ethnicity in the construction of these networks (Curtin 1984). Finally, the Chinese state’s primary strategy was to prevent migration rather than to obtain the loyalty of its diaspora.

Mass labour migration after the 1850s Since the mid-​19th century, labour migration and the migration of those of lower socio-​economic backgrounds further complicated the picture of the Chinese diaspora as a socio-​economically privileged class; migration was an economic survival strategy. The scale of labour migration from South China increased massively, facilitated by the emergence of large-​scale transoceanic shipping between the 1870s and the 1920s. Domestically, population pressure (between 1790 and 1850, the Chinese population rose from 300 million to 420 million), price increases, inflation, the uprisings of the Taiping and Muslim rebellions, and the rise of warlordism are commonly listed as push factors (Hoerder 2012: 23). Regionally, following the Treaties of Nanking (Nanjing) (1842) and Tientsin (Tianjin) (1856) that ended the Opium Wars, the treaty ports of Guangzhou, Xiamen, Fuzhou, Ningbo, and Shanghai were opened for trade and British Hong Kong was founded in 1842. Whereas earlier migration had taken place through merchant networks in Fujian or miners from Guangdong, now Hong Kong emerged as a centre of migration (McKeown 1999: 313–​314; Sinn 2013). Here, the second meaning of diaspora as networks, connections, and flows stands out. From Hong Kong and these newly opened treaty ports, coolies and labourers were shipped to the New World (the British West Indies, Cuba, and Peru) and Australasia to fill the void of the abolished slave labour.They worked in the plantation economy or as labourers in the service of industrialisation. Although the coolie agencies in these ports, as well as in Hong Kong and Singapore, were mainly foreign-​owned, some were Chinese-​owned; in addition, many relied on Chinese ‘coolie brokers’ (ketous) and subordinate brokers (Yen 2013: 75). Ending in the 1870s, but continuing until the 1920s in Southeast Asia, the Chinese coolie pattern was short-​lived; coolies only constituted one eighth of the 2.5 million Chinese migrants during the 19th century (Hoerder 2012: 25–​26; Wang 1991).1 In Southeast Asia, colonial expansion and the increasing European demand for Southeast Asian products saw Chinese trade and retail business thriving, with the Chinese replacing existing traders. On the production side, a rising number of Chinese worked in mines and on plantations to deliver products for the Chinese, regional, and European markets (Kwee 2014: 292; Trocki 2005). From the late 1​ 9th century until the 1940s, European imperialism connected China and India more closely with Southeast Asia. Labour market integration and colonial policies led to mass migration of Chinese and Indian workers, with one estimate of Burma, Malaya, and Thailand receiving more than 15 million Chinese and Indian immigrants during this period. Under the indenture system, Chinese labourers worked in plantations in Malaya, Sumatra, British North Borneo, and Sarawak, where they cultivated rubber, coffee, palm oil, tobacco, sugar cane, and coconuts (Kaur 2014: 167–​171). With the arrival of the British in Southeast Asia and the foundation of the Straits Settlements (Penang, Singapore, and Malacca) in the 18th and 19th centuries, these places attracted both the intermediate Chinese merchant class, and migrants from China.The intermediate merchant elite consisted of Peranakan or Straits Chinese, who were the offspring of Chinese immigrants to the Malay archipelago and local women. Starting in the early 19th century, direct colonial administration signified the decline of the tax farming system in Southeast Asia and the role of the Chinese intermediate elite in this system (Kuhn 2001). This decline of the old elite would also impact community organisations. 37

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Concerning group identity and relations with the homeland, with mass migration since the mid-​19th century, native-​place organisations (huiguan) based on the intersecting ‘segments’ of dialect, locality, and surname (Crissman 1967) in both North America and Southeast Asia served to assist the migrants upon arrival. These ‘adaptive organisations’ (Wickberg 1994), hierarchically organised and with wealthy community members as leaders, helped the new arrivals with services such as housing and employment. The organisational principles of the huiguan reveal the importance of kinship and family relations in the migration system, as well as the crucial role of language in networks. Dialect groups engaged in specific niche occupations, as noted above, and chain migration of those from the same local area and/​or kinship group to the same destination occurred. Apart from these native-​ place organisations, a number of other organisations also had important functions in colonial Southeast Asia, such as the secret societies and the trading guilds. Chambers of commerce replaced the trading guilds that functioned as umbrella organisations of the huiguan, trade associations, and other associations during the late 1​ 9th century. As such, supra-​dialect organisations were already in place as mass migration transformed the older intermediate communities. The voluntary organisations were also instrumental in the sending of remittances to the hometowns, or qiaoxiang, which served as one of the most important and tangible linkages between the Chinese diaspora and China, contributing to the emergence of transnationalist capitalism (Liu and Benton 2016; Wickberg 1994). As for the attitude of the Chinese state toward the Chinese diaspora, an important shift took place during this period. The Chinese government engaged in the protection of the Chinese emigrants, with the first Chinese consulate being established in Singapore in 1877 (Yen 1978: 7). The question of the nationality of the Chinese overseas first emerged during this period, namely in the 1868 Burlingame Treaty between the Qing government and the United States. The Qing government did not recognise naturalisation of Qing subjects in the United States or after their return to China, thereby confirming that Chinese were huaqiao (overseas Chinese) who were legally, politically, and culturally tied to the Qing government (Shao 2009: 9). The Chinese state now recognised the existence of Chinese communities outside China, considering them as Chinese nationals who belonged to the Chinese state.

The early ​20th century: the call of the motherland During the early 20th century, the question of group identity and homeland ties and diaspora in the sense of states seeking to claim populations intersected most clearly.The ‘formalisation’ of institutions that confirmed homeland ties entered a new stage during this period, with an impetus from the Qing government.When Chinese consulates were established, the latter attempted to promote Chinese consciousness through cultural activities and Chinese schools. For example, the second consul in Singapore, Tso Ping-​lung, who arrived in 1881, promoted interest in the Chinese classics through the literary society, the Hui Hsien He (the Society for the Meeting of Literary Excellence). He also encouraged wealthy merchants to set up Chinese language schools (Yen 1978: 8). Apart from the already existing huiguan and Chinese schools, a third vehicle for the promotion of nationalism was the circulation of newspapers. The latter allowed for virtual connections between émigrés and their hometowns in the form of qiaokan or overseas Chinese magazines. Through these magazines, the hometowns sought to involve migrants in the development of the hometown, with education being an important aspect of this. However, the qiaokan mostly encouraged loyalty towards the native place rather than the creation of broader ‘imagined communities’ during this period (Hsu 2000). Apart from qiaokan, revolutionary newspapers, books and periodicals were published in Tokyo, 38

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Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Singapore and circulated through local branches of the Tongmenghui (Revolutionary Alliance) and affiliated organisations. To reach illiterate audiences, the revolutionaries used newsletters to spread cartoons with revolutionary content, set up ‘reading clubs’ (shubaoshe), first in Singapore and Malaya between 1908 and 1911 and later throughout Southeast Asia and North America, and ‘drama troupes’ (Yen 1978: 16, 18–​19). In the context of mounting local nationalisms and anti-​Sinicism, in terms of diaspora as group identity and difference, during this period, there was a tension between identification with what Kuhn has referred to as the ‘primary community’ based on dialect, kinship, and native place, and the ‘secondary community’ based on supra-​dialect, supra-​kinship and pan-​Chinese principles (Kuhn 2008: 170–​171). The Chinese state played an important role in this process as new migrants arrived from China, and as cultural and political identification became a central issue. In combination with a new wave of migration, especially with female migration being permitted, communities that consisted of Chinese of ‘pure’ Chinese heritage born in China expanded. Both the Chinese and intermediate communities such as the Babas were therefore faced with choices regarding identification: they could preserve their distinct identity, integrate further into the host societies, or pursue ‘re-​Sinification’. The latter meant adopting Chinese language and customs and identifying with the social and political interests of the Chinese community at large, a choice that was sometimes driven by local community leaders rather than the Chinese state (McKeown 1999). Here, diversity existed in the form of the distinct identification choices that members of Chinese communities made, with dialect and kinship divisions coexisting with pan-​Chinese nationalism. Identification choices were complicated by the presence of reformers and revolutionaries who competed with the government for the support of the Chinese diaspora. Between 1900 and 1911, revolutionaries led by Sun Yat-​sen, reformers under Kang Youwei, and the Qing government alike courted the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia and elsewhere to support their causes. With the Qing government failing in its protection of the Chinese overseas against exclusion laws that emerged in the settler societies of North America, New Zealand, and Australia, the revolutionaries exploited anti-​Manchu sentiment in overseas Chinese communities (Yen 1978: 8). Here, again, the term huaqiao served to unite the Chinese diaspora and to win their hearts and minds. Southeast Asian Chinese played an important role in Sun’s efforts, with the Singapore branch of the Revolutionary Alliance founded in 1906. It became the Nanyang headquarters of the Alliance in 1908, but due to limited support, Sun Yat-​sen relocated the headquarters to Penang in 1909 (Wang 1981:133). Even so, the majority of huaqiao in Singapore and Malaya did not support the revolutionaries (Duara 1997;Yen 1978: 13–​14). In 1909, China proclaimed a nationality law based on jus sanguinis or right of blood. Under this law, all those born of Chinese parents were Chinese. The identification with China was the strongest during the 1930s. The 1911 Revolution was thwarted by the attempts of Yuan Shikai to restore the monarchy. The Beiyang government in Beijing and Sun Yat-​sen’s Kuomintang in Guangzhou competed for legitimacy in a country torn apart by warlord factions. After unification in 1927, and especially after the Japanese occupation during the 1930s, Chinese communities abroad chose ‘re-​ Sinification’: they increasingly identified with China as a nation-​state rather than just with their hometowns, and sent massive amounts of remittances to China (Clammer 1975: 13; Hsu 2000). Singapore played an important role in this ‘Nanyang Chinese nationalism’ during China’s war with Japan. It was home to the headquarters of the biggest global overseas Chinese relief fund organisation, the Federation of China Relief Fund of the South Seas, which raised almost C$200 million [Chinese currency during the Republican era] and 39

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which also organised the sending of voluntary troops, technicians, and labourers to support China’s anti-​Japanese endeavours (Koh 2013: 1). Overall, the three meanings of diaspora intersected in the question of political and cultural identification with ‘China’ during this period. The presence of consulates and efforts by competing political forces to reach out to the Chinese communities influenced the institutionalisation of group identity. Diversity was a question of the degree of identification, as the influx of new migrants from China transformed existing intermediate communities who had lost their socio-​economic niches. Finally, the Chinese government now actively claimed its diaspora and made efforts to obtain its economic, political, and cultural support.

Decolonisation, the Cold War, and re-​migration after 1949 With decolonisation in Southeast Asia, the ‘pillars’ of the Chinese communities (voluntary associations, schools, and newspapers) were eradicated in some nation-​states and preserved in others. Assimilation policies of different degrees, depending on factors such as the relative size of the communities and the nature of the political system, were put in place in various countries of Southeast Asia. Indonesia, the Philippines and Thailand implemented strong assimilation policies, with community organisations being dismantled and newspapers and schools shut down. In Thailand, which had not been colonised, cultural assimilation policies such as the ‘Thai-​ification’ of Chinese schools, political repression, and economic nationalist policies had already been in place since the early ​20th century (Skinner 1957). Countries with Chinese communities that constituted a large percentage of the total population, applied less drastic policies that allowed for the preservation of group identities. In Malaysia, for example, Chinese secondary schools continued to exist, but they were subject to government control (Suryadinata 1997: 11–​13). Even though the relevance of national assimilation policies during this period challenges the use of the concept of diaspora in favour of ‘ethnic Chinese’, the former remains relevant for this period because it was the perception of a unified Chinese diaspora, more loyal to China than to the host societies and in this sense a problem, that strongly influenced these policies. Cultural assimilation was often coupled with economic policies directed at benefitting indigenous entrepreneurs. For example, in Indonesia, the benteng system, which restricted the import of certain goods to indigenous entrepreneurs only, was introduced during the 1950s. In 1959, the ethnic Chinese were also prevented from engaging in retail trade outside cities. In the Philippines, the Filipino First Policy (1948–​1972) led to the nationalisation of several industries, and Malaysia pursued its New Economic Policy (NEP) (1970–​1990) to increase the Malay share in economic activity. Differences within diaspora regarding cultural and political identification with China were hence intensified during this period. As for the claiming of the Chinese diaspora by the Chinese state, after 1949 a contradictory policy of engagement and disengagement took shape. Initially, the PRC continued to engage with the Chinese overseas, returnees, and dependents, and gave preferential treatment to these groups because it relied on remittances for efforts of economic development and industrialisation. However, in the context of the Cold War and the spread of Communism in Southeast Asia, the Chinese in the region came to be regarded as a ‘fifth column’ serving China’s interests (Wang 1981: 279). This perceived lack of political loyalty to the host countries was conjoined to suspicion caused by economic dominance rooted in the historical socio-​economic status of the middlemen (Suryadinata 2007: 4). The Nationality Law of 1909 had proclaimed all Chinese overseas as the subjects of China, and the law of 1929 continued this ius sanguinis principle. With colonial administrations mostly 40

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relying on the principle of ius soli or place of birth as a basis for nationality, the resulting de facto dual nationality became a predicament during the period of decolonisation (Kratoska 1993). In response to this, the Sino-Indonesian Dual Nationality Treaty of 1955 ended this ambiguity. Chinese nationals abroad were asked to choose a nationality, and they were usually encouraged to take up local nationality. Huaqiao who intended to return to China were separated from huaren, who chose host country nationality. Even though the treaty was not always applied, the disengagement with the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Between 1949 and 1961, about half a million Chinese arrived in or returned to the PRC, driven by patriotism towards China and tensions in Southeast Asian countries, such as anti-​ Chinese movements (Fitzgerald 1972). In 1965–​1966, thousands more arrived in China when a coup in Indonesia was followed by an anti-​Communist purge that also targeted ethnic Chinese. The ‘returned overseas Chinese’ (guiqiao) were given a distinct legal status and many were segregated from local Chinese on overseas Chinese farms (huaqiao nongchang), and in special villages and schools, resulting in a ‘unique form of ethnicity’ (Ford 2014: 240). As class struggle in the PRC intensified, the ‘foreign relations’ of the ‘disobedient’ returned overseas Chinese were considered problematic; they were labelled as members of an exploitative class in the early 1960s (Chan 2014: 233). During the Cultural Revolution (1966–​1976), policies towards the Chinese overseas were discontinued and relatives of the Chinese overseas were persecuted because of ‘capitalist’ associations (Fitzgerald 1972). Hence, regarding the Chinese state claiming ‘its’ diaspora, this period witnessed the tension between engagement for the purpose of remittances and disengagement because of the perceived ‘capitalist’ ideology of the Chinese diaspora.

Economic reform and the new migrants since 1978 Even though diaspora as a community intent on returning has become more problematic since the start of the reform era, questions of group identity have received a new impetus with the arrival of ‘new migrants (xin yimin)’ from all over China globally. With the liberalisation of migration laws in North America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, the latter became primary destination countries, but migration to Southeast Asia also continued. These ‘new migrants,’ estimated to have reached about 9 million worldwide, consisted of students who had remained abroad after graduation and of professionals, but also of chain migrants and irregular migrants. An important difference with the older generations of migrants was that these ‘new migrants’ were mostly highly educated Chinese nationals with vast transnational networks. In Southeast Asia, due to growing land connectivity and investment from China, mainland Southeast Asia in particular has witnessed the influx of new migrants. During the early 1990s, with support of the Asian Development Bank, the Great Mekong Sub-​region (GMS) countries of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar,Thailand,Vietnam and China entered into an economic cooperation programme. Here, hydraulic projects and mining attracted a new wave of Chinese labour migration in countries such as Cambodia and Laos, which historically had smaller Chinese communities because of their inland location (Tan 2012). Consequently, a gradual restoration of the key institutions of the Chinese communities, such as schools, newspapers and community organisations, followed in these mainland Southeast Asian countries, even though China’s interests and agents were largely driving this restoration (Nyíri 2012). In maritime Southeast Asia, the number of new migrants from China has been smaller in comparison, but here, too, the older communities have been faced with more economic, political, and cultural influence from Mainland China. This has prompted a new wave of ‘re-​ Sinicisation’ or a renewed emphasis on Chinese identity in intermediate communities such as 41

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the Mestizos in the Philippines and the Peranakans in Indonesia. Apart from the celebration of Chinese ancestry, Chinese rituals and holidays have also been reinstated in certain Southeast Asian countries, even though these are manifestations of a totok (‘pure’) and not a Peranakan Chinese culture from a local perspective (Hau 2014). As such, there are certain parallels with the early 2​ 0th century, when the rise of nationalism and the arrival of new migrants confronted Chinese communities in Southeast Asia with political and cultural identification choices that transcended identification based on dialect, class, or native place. However, during the late ​20th century, Mainland Chinese capital was an important driver behind these choices.2 Nevertheless, the local support for this renewed emphasis on ‘Chinese’ identity signifies an important shift from previous historical periods during which this identity was suppressed. Adapting to new needs, voluntary organisations have transformed themselves into transnational and even global organisations. Although membership of some of these organisations has remained based on kinship or locality, it has become more open in practice and oriented towards business networking both with China and within the Chinese diaspora. New types of organisations have emerged, such as professional or alumni organisations. These organisations have set up regular large-​scale events, often with the support of hometown governments in China (Liu 1998). New migrants have also set up their own organisations. Hence, during this latest period, diaspora as group identity has centred around the question of the relation between the older and newer communities and the renewed influence of Mainland Chinese culture on the existing communities. The family structure itself has also undergone massive changes. For some of the new migrants, education has become a migration strategy, with children being placed at prestigious universities in the West. New types of ‘astronaut families’, in which family members are spread between continents and shuttle back and forth to combine business with family reunions, have emerged (Waters 2005). Discourses on transnationalism have gone hand in hand with notions of ‘flexible citizenship’ shaped by strategic considerations and ‘deterritorialised’ forms of belonging (Ong and Nonini 1997; Ong 1999). Here, diaspora as the erosion of fixed and static boundaries appears most manifest. Even Chinese talent migration policies have made increasing room for contributions of highly skilled Chinese from abroad. In this ‘temporal-​spatial stretch’, policies have facilitated contributions from abroad and the transnational circulation of talented Chinese (Leung 2015). Diaspora as homeland ties has equally been transformed in the internet era, which permits ‘transmigrants’ to become multi-​local and to ‘manage and mirror their physical mobility in a globalised world’ (Ip and Yin 2016: 166). In spite of the seeming erosion of boundaries, however, the Chinese state has become once again proactive in claiming its diaspora. Although the PRC relaxed its emigration restrictions during the early 1980s, it also promulgated the 1980 Nationality Law of the People’s Republic of China, which reiterated the no-​dual-​nationality principle of the 1955 Sino-​Indonesian Dual Nationality Treaty. During the first stage of economic reform (1978–​1994), China particularly sought investment from the Chinese diaspora, with the majority of investments coming from the Chinese in Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia (Smart and Hsu 2004). Since 2000, it has focused on the development of high-​tech industrial development parks and knowledge-​intensive development models, with highly skilled Chinese being the focus of policies. Hence, the Chinese state continues to play a significant role in regulating mobility patterns through a well-​established system of diaspora policies and institutions (Liu and van Dongen 2016). We should also note that, in this process, China is becoming an immigration country in addition to a country of origin of ‘new migrants’ (Li and Yu 2015). As China emerges as the second largest economy in the world and takes on a more assertive foreign policy, the age-​old question of identification and of divisions within the Chinese 42

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diaspora has resurfaced. For the first time in modern history, a rising China defines the dynamic relationship with its diaspora. It has shaped Chinese communities in the neighbouring countries, where China’s presence is much more visible and impactful. Hence, ‘re-​Sinicisation’ at the turn of the 21st century has been driven primarily by the Southeast Asian Chinese communities as a strategy to ingeniously respond to the opportunities presented by a rising China.The revival of Chinese culture and ethnic pride and the multi-​dimensional efforts by the Chinese state also play a significant role in facilitating this process (Liu 2016). In the meantime, the Chinese diaspora’s engagement with China has evolved in the different national and regional contexts of firmly established Southeast Asian states, thus exercising a much stronger degree of political, economic and cultural control over their ethnic Chinese populations. Re-​engagement with the Chinese in Southeast Asia, driven by economic interests and based on Mainland understandings of ‘Chineseness’, ignores the complex identity processes of those who belong to different generations, classes, dialect groups, and places of origin, and who have been subjected to a variety of identity politics in their countries of residence.

Conclusion The tension between the three meanings of diaspora in the five main ‘moments’ discussed above reflects not only the changing nature and interests of the Chinese diaspora, but also the changing nature and interests of the Chinese/​Southeast Asian states. Firstly, group identity, even though based on a set of stable organisational principles, altered in tandem with both policies in China and in the host societies. Initially condemned by the Chinese state as traitors, the bachelor communities of Chinese ‘sojourners’ set up trading partnerships, utilised vast networks, and gradually secured their socio-​economic position during the early colonial period. With mass migration, they set up native-​place and other organisations, schools, and newspapers, which received support from the Chinese state during the height of political and cultural identification with China at the turn of the 20th century. During the period of decolonisation and the Cold War, Southeast Asian governments suppressed the same community organisations for fear of being extensions of the Chinese revolution of 1949. Since the start of reform and opening up in the late 1970s, ‘re-​Sinicisation’ efforts or the explicit cultural identification with ‘Chineseness’ reflect the tension between local and Mainland understandings of ‘Chineseness’. Changes in the relation between Chinese communities and the homeland are also manifest in shifts in migration patterns.These evolved from the willingness to return to China permanently, not only during the early period but also in the case of returnees during the Cold War, to complex patterns of re-​migration and temporary migration. Secondly, that diaspora is not a singular and static entity is clear throughout the various historical periods. Merchants, artisans and labourers already constituted part of the Chinese diaspora during the early colonial period. They furthermore organised themselves based on the intersecting principles of dialect, native place and surname, even though supra-​dialect organisations were already present. Class distinctions are equally important, as petty merchants and labourers complicate the image of the socio-​economically established middlemen. Specific connectivities, networks, and flows demonstrate the relevance of thinking of ‘diaspora-as-difference’ in addition to the broader strokes of homeland ties as discussed above. Variations in political and cultural identification and the tension between local and trans-​local identification marked the early ​20th century, when the Chinese government actively reached out to Chinese communities in Southeast Asia. With decolonisation, local policies in Southeast Asian countries with regard to community organisations, Chinese language schools and newspapers further influenced differences regarding political and cultural identification with ‘China’. Since the 43

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reform and opening up, the arrival of ‘new migrants’ in Southeast Asian countries adds another layer of dynamics regarding identity-​as-​difference. Finally, we should note that increasing variation in channels of migration, types of employment, places of origin, motivations for migration, class backgrounds, and religious diversity add to the lack of the existence of   ‘a’ Chinese diaspora. In spite of this diversity and fluidity, however, the Chinese state has long laid claim on ‘its’ diaspora, even though the markers of belonging and unbelonging have shifted over time. At first unwilling to accept migration and considering its diaspora as traitors, the claiming took the form of preventing emigration. The Chinese state first actively reached out to its diaspora during the late 19th century, with a peak during the early 20th century. During this period, the Chinese diaspora was part and parcel of the struggle for ideological legitimacy between the CCP and the KMT. After decolonisation, the Chinese state engaged in a precarious balancing act of engagement for the purpose of remittances and disengagement because of ideological distrust. Since reform and opening up, this ambiguity has made room for a full-​fledged charm offensive and the promotion of a Mainland understanding of  ‘Chineseness’, driven by economic investment and, more recently, regional infrastructure projects under the ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative that was launched in late 2013 to economically and strategically connect China with its neighbouring countries alongside the maritime Silk Road and Central Asia. It remains to be seen what the long-​term implications of the dynamic interaction between older communities, new migrants, and the renewed Sino-​Southeast Asian connectivity in the context of a rising China will bring. The latest diasporic ‘moment’, in short, has yet to run its course.

Acknowledgement The authors would like to thank the editors of this volume for their constructive comments, and Wang Gungwu for his insightful feedback to the panel on ‘Beyond Fixed Geographies: Diaspora and Alternative Conceptions of Southeast Asia’ at the SEASIA conference in Kyoto, 12–​13 December 2015. Els van Dongen and Hong Liu received funding from Nanyang Technological University (M4081271, M4081020) respectively for this research. The authors are responsible for any remaining errors in this chapter.

Notes 1 According to McKeown (2010, 2011), the overall figure of 2–​8 million Chinese migrants for this period is too low because it is mostly based on a limited number of Chinese and English sources that count contract labour and ‘coolie’ migrants only. Based on Chinese-​language sources, he argues that more than 20 million Chinese left South China between the 1840s and the 1930s. 2 We thank Wang Gungwu for bringing this point to our attention.

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Els van Dongen & Hong Liu McKeown, A. (1999). Conceptualizing Chinese diasporas, 1842 to 1949. Journal of Asian Studies, 58 (2), pp. 306–​337. McKeown, A. (2010). Chinese emigration in global context, 1850–​1940. Journal of Global History, 5, pp. 95–​124. McKeown, A. (2011). The social life of Chinese labor. In E. Tagliacozzo and W. Chang, eds., Chinese Circulations:  Capital, Commodities, and Networks in Southeast Asia. Durham:  Duke University Press, pp. 62–​83. Nyíri, P. (2012). Investors, managers, brokers, and culture workers: how the ‘new’ Chinese are changing the meaning of Chineseness in Cambodia. Cross-​Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, 1 (2), pp. 369–​397. Ong, A. and Nonini, D., eds. (1997). Ungrounded Empires:  The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism. New York: Routledge. Ong, A. (1999). Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality. Durham: Duke University Press. Purcell,V. (1951). The Chinese in Southeast Asia. London & New York: Oxford University Press. Safran, W. (1991). Diasporas in modern societies: myths of homeland and return. Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, 1 (1), pp. 83–​99. Shao, D. (2009). Chinese by definition:  nationality law, jus sanguinis, and state succession, 1909–​1980. Twentieth-​Century China, 35 (1), pp. 4–​29. Sinn, E. (2013). Pacific Crossing:  California Gold, Chinese Migration, and the Making of Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Skinner, W. (1957). Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Skinner, W. (1996). Creolised Chinese societies in Southeast Asia. In A. Reid, ed., Sojourners and Settlers: Histories of Southeast Asia and the Chinese. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, pp. 51–​93. Smart, A. and Hsu, J. (2004). The Chinese diaspora, foreign investment and economic development in China. The Review of International Affairs, 3(4), pp. 544–​566. Suryadinata, L. (1997). Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia: Overseas Chinese, Chinese Overseas or Southeast Asians? In idem, ed., Ethnic Chinese as Southeast Asians. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, pp. 1–​24. Suryadinata, L. (2007). Understanding the Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia. Singapore: ISEAS. Tan, D. (2012).‘Small is beautiful’: lessons from Laos for the study of the Chinese overseas. Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 41 (2), pp. 61–​94. Trocki, C.A. (2005). A drug on the market: opium and the Chinese in Southeast Asia, 1750–​1880. Journal of the Chinese Overseas, 1 (2), pp. 147–​168. Wade, G. (2009). General introduction. In idem, ed., China and Southeast Asia, Vol. 1. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge, pp. 1–​38. Wang, G. (1959). A Short History of the Nanyang Chinese. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press. Wang, G. (1981). Community and Nation: Essays on Southeast Asia and the Chinese. Singapore: Heinemann Educational Books. Wang, G. (1985). The study of Chinese identities in Southeast Asia. In J.W. Cushman and G. Wang, eds., Changing Identities of the Southeast Asian Chinese Since World War II. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 1–​21. Wang, G. (1991). Patterns of Chinese migration in historical perspective. In idem, China and the Chinese Overseas. Singapore: Times Academic Press, pp. 3–​21. Wang, G. (2004). The problems with (Chinese) Diaspora: an interview with Wang Gungwu. In G. Benton and H. Liu, eds., Diasporic Chinese Ventures: The Life and Work of Wang Gungwu. London: Routledge, pp. 49–​60. Wang, G. (2009). Extracts from The Nanhai Trade. In G.Wade, ed., China and Southeast Asia. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge, pp. 105–​156. Waters, J. (2005). Transnational family strategies and education in the contemporary Chinese diaspora. Global Networks, 4 (4), pp. 359–​377. Wickberg, E. (1994). Overseas Chinese adaptive organizations, past and present. In R. Skeldon, ed., Reluctant Exiles:  Migration from Hong Kong and the New Overseas Chinese. Armonk, New  York; London:  M.E. Sharpe, pp. 68–​84. Xiang, B., Yeoh, B.S.A., and Toyota, M., eds. (2013). Return:  Nationalizing Transnational Mobility in Asia. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

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The changing meanings of diaspora Yen, C. (1978). The Role of the Overseas Chinese in the 1911 Revolution. Singapore: Chopmen Enterprises. Yen, C. (2013). Chinese Coolie Emigration, 1845–​74. In C. Tan, ed., Routledge Handbook of the Chinese Diaspora. London; New York: Routledge, pp. 73–​88. Zhuang, G. (2001). Huaqiao huaren yu Zhongguo de guanxi (The Relation between the Chinese Overseas and China). Guangzhou: Guangdong Gaodeng Jiaoyu Chubanshe.

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PART II

Asian migration regimes and pathways

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3 TEMPORARY LABOUR MIGRATION Michiel Baas

Introduction Temporary labour migration might be one of the most easily recognised forms of migration because of its immediate association with disenfranchised migrant workers. Yet, the ostensible straightforwardness of its three inherent components –​temporary, labour and migration –​also makes it one of the most illusive ones. Although the focus in many studies is indeed on migrant workers with temporary work visas, undertaking hard labour over long hours and with limited rights, other studies take a much broader approach and include virtually any person migrating to another country for the purpose of finding employment. While both strands of research have their obvious reasons for doing so, the primary aim of this chapter is to disentangle the three different components that make up the concept and, by doing so, argue that each in their own way –​temporary, labour and migration –​builds on problematic assumptions. These assumptions tend to replicate the way receiving nations organise and manage their inflow of migrants through highly specific categories. By taking a critical approach to the way migration research is generally organised along the lines drawn by migration regimes of receiving nations, this chapter seeks to contribute to a growing awareness that this is ultimately an inadequate way of understanding migration. Although the analysis will specifically zoom in on the case of Singapore, other Asian nations that receive a large number of migrants organise their inflow in a similar matter. Moreover it can be argued that increasingly this way of organising migration is replicated outside the Asia region as well (see Asis and Battistella, this volume, Chapter 21). In order to better understand what temporary labour migration actually entails in terms of theory, policy and practice, this chapter is organised around the three components that create the illusion of a coherent whole. In the first section, the chapter engages with the ostensible temporal aspect of migration and seeks to put forward the argument that labelling labour migration as ‘temporary’ draws on an inherently contradictory assumption. At a macro level temporary labour migrants form a more or less permanent presence in most developed Asian nations, which contrasts rather ironically with ‘labour migration’ at an individual/​micro level which tends to be ‘permanently’ temporary. The second section aims to unpack the meaning of labour when we speak of ‘labour migration’. It is here that we will encounter a problem in the literature on labour migration itself; some studies define it in terms of low-​skilled and low-​waged, while others include all migrants 51

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seeking employment in another country. Investigating the way ‘labour’ itself is interpreted will take us deeper into the way migration itself is actually organised across the Asia-​Pacific region. Labour may reference ‘work’, but it often also points at a particular hierarchy whereby certain migrants are privileged over others. In the final section the implied or assumed meaning of ‘migration’ itself will be unpacked. In the most general interpretation of migration it is imagined to describe a cross-​border trajectory whereby a migrant moves from one country to the next. While numerically this may be unjustified –​there are many more internal than international migrants –​it continues to define the way migration is understood by the public at large, impacting both politics and policy, and it guides the vast majority of academic research into migration (see Skeldon, this volume, Chapter 13).The ‘question of migration’ is not simply one of internal vs. international, though. What constitutes migration references a political process of inclusion and exclusion as well as othering, whereby the idea of the ‘migrant’ needs to be reiterated on a regular basis. Globalisation and the potential for ‘transnational’ lives are crucial to understanding this, but perhaps even more so the way migration programmes are continuously fine-​tuned to control and regulate the inflow and temporary/​permanent stay of migrants even further. Based on this, the chapter suggests that an increasing number of migrants actually never quite ‘migrate’ in the classical sense any more. In short, what this analysis will finally reveal is that the three elements that ‘define’ temporary labour migration are not only problematic in themselves but also as an allegedly coherent phenomenon. In the conclusion, this chapter will make some suggestions for future research and will suggest that we need to start adopting a more critical stand to the way we conceptualise the idea or question of migration itself.

Temporary migration Temporary becomes permanent In recent years there has been growing awareness that the temporal dimensions of migration deserve our specific attention (Robertson 2016; Robertson and Ho 2016), especially since an increasing number of migrants can be characterised as ‘permanently’ temporary or their pathways as ‘continually’ circular (see also Zapata-​Barrero et al. 2012). While previously permanent residency permits and dual citizenship statuses were observed to facilitate transnational lifestyles, the fact that a growing number of migrants have no access to (eventual) ‘permanency’ has produced a different kind of transnationality characterised by marginality, inequality and exploitation. The way migrants negotiate, engage with and experience the various temporal aspects of their individual trajectories, often faced with the structural constraints imposed by the architecture of a particular migration programme, has thus become a pressing concern. Receiving nations in the West as well as the East have been organising, streamlining and managing their inflow of various migrants via skilled migration programmes for decades. An important difference, though, is that while Europe and North America have gradually shifted towards immigrant incorporation –​thus offering routes towards permanent residency –​migration in Asia continues to be premised on the idea of exclusion (Lian et al. 2016: 3) and difference. This means that Asian migration programmes tend to be more hierarchically organised than their western counterparts, with migrants categorised in highly specific groups on the basis of education, skill and wage levels. These categories not only correspond with specific rights in terms of staying on (for instance in case of job loss), eligibility for permanent residency, or family reunion, but also determine who is allowed to apply for the particular visa he or she qualifies 52

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for. In the case of low-​skilled migrants, the procedure often requires the involvement of specific professionals, such as brokers or agents, who charge a considerable fee for their services. The intermediation by such professionals is another feature that sets Asian migration programmes apart from their western counterparts (see also Battistella 2014: 14; Lian 2016: 4). A brief history of how these programmes developed over time illustrates their divergent trajectories.

Migration programmes in the West In the West, migration programmes typically emerged during and after World War Two. The agriculture-​based Bracero Program in the US, for instance, facilitated temporary labour migration between the US and Mexico commencing in 1942. While it was initially intended to alleviate wartime labour shortages, the programme in fact ran until 1964. The H-​2 Visa Program, which was instituted in the 1950s, initially also aimed to facilitate low-​skilled migrants to find temporary employment in the US by giving them so-​called ‘non-​immigrant visas’. In the mid-​1980s this programme was split into two different sections: H-​2A and H-​2B. The H-​2A continues to facilitate low-​skilled migration (particularly for agricultural work) while the H-​ 2B has become synonymous with high-​skilled migration. While the influx of low-​skilled and often illegal (Latin American) migrants finding employment in the US continues to feature prominently on the political agenda, the H-​2B visa does so as well, especially where it concerns US-​based companies recruiting foreign personnel –​for instance from India for the IT industries –​who are held to compete (unfairly) with local professionals. European nations have a less-​r igid division in terms of skills in their migration programmes. Initially, however, these programmes were strongly oriented towards low-​skilled personnel who, post-World War Two, were in great demand with fast-​g rowing West European economies that experienced severe labour shortages in manufacturing, construction and the service industries (Castles and Ozkul 2014: 2). Besides spontaneous migrants who were regularised once they found jobs, many immigrants initially hailed from the former colonies (ibid). This changed with the emergence of so-​called guestworker programmes in the 1960s. Germany’s Gastarbeiter arrived throughout the 1960s and 1970s under its Gastarbeiterprogramm. Other European nations such as Belgium, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden ran parallel programmes. While in the Netherlands these gastarbeiders initially mainly hailed from southern European nations such as Italy, Portugal and Spain, from the 1960s onwards migrants would increasingly arrive from Morocco and Turkey. It has been noted that, like comparable schemes in Western Europe, the German guestworker programme eventually failed to achieve its aims. Although most migrants only came with the intention to work for a few years, others stayed on longer and eventually started bringing over dependents. In addition to this they managed to gain longer-​term residence rights and access to Germany’s welfare system. When Germany ended its formal agreement with Turkey for labour recruitment because of the 1973 oil crisis, it found that many migrant workers stayed on because of a lack of job opportunities back home. Family reunions and the formation of ethnic enclaves heightened the sense of a certain irreversibility about the situation (as discussed in Castles and Ozkul 2014: 32). At present the Turkish community in Germany is roughly 2.8 million and, although not only the product of post-World War Two migration, it cannot be denied that its guestworker programme played a crucial role in facilitating this. Other Western European nations also became home to significant groups of former migrants. For instance, in the Netherlands the Turkish and Moroccan communities are now the two largest ethnic communities, closely followed by those from the former Dutch colonies, Indonesia and Surinam.1 53

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In Western Europe, temporary labour migration thus often resulted in the formation of ethnic communities in the host nation. Although this was initially the product of so-​called ‘non-​return’ –​ meaning that the scheme under which these migrants had entered the country had intended it to be temporary –​at present most European nations offer routes towards citizenship. Until the 1990s this was a relatively straightforward affair; however, in more recent years additional requirements regarding minimum income, guaranteed length of employment and knowledge of local culture and language have been added. Concerns over the formation of ethnic enclaves, issues of non-​ integration and ‘Islamisation’ seem to have fuelled these developments the most.

Migration programmes in the East In Asia labour migration programmes can be traced back to the colonial days of indentured and semi-​indentured labour flows, something both colonial authorities and the private sector were heavily invested in (Hugo 2009; Amrith, this volume, Chapter 1). It’s a little-​known fact that, in terms of the scale of movement of people, this was actually comparable to movement across the Atlantic at the time (Amrith 2014). In the century after 1840, some 20 million Chinese and 30 million Indians moved to Southeast Asia to work on its plantations and in its rapidly developing cities (Amrith 2014: 1569). Furthermore, it has been estimated that in the 1911–​1929 period alone, the combined migration to Burma, British Malaya and Thailand was more than twice the number of migrants who headed for the United States (Lian et al. 2016: 4)2. This development was directly related to the free and open immigration policy that British, Dutch and French colonial powers practised between the 1850s and 1930s because of labour shortages and other needs of local colonial economies. The multi-​ethnic/​racial composition of countries such as Malaysia and Singapore continues to reflect that many stayed behind and went on to form permanent communities in the countries they migrated to. While the oil crisis of 1973 marked the end of guestworker schemes in countries such as Germany, the oil boom of the early 1970s actually triggered the emergence of the first Asian migration schemes (Wickramasekara 2014:  58). Fuelled by economic growth, nations in the Gulf embarked on ‘ambitious modernisation programmes’ which required the inflow of large numbers of labour migrants who primarily hailed from Asia (ibid). Similarly, the rapid development of Malaysia and Thailand also necessitated significant numbers of labour migrants during this period. However, as Wickramasekara writes, apart from Hong Kong other East Asian nations did not operate migration schemes for low-​skilled labourers, although there was certainly demand there as well (ibid: 58–​59). Taiwan only liberalised the inflow of low-​skilled workers in the early 1990s, while South Korea did this even later in 2004 (ibid: 59). What stands out when it comes to Asian migration schemes and programmes is that they were and continue to be guided by economic considerations in which profit maximisation is key.This is mainly reflected in how they consider different groups of migrants as inherently unequal and place them in a hierarchical schema in terms of their rights in and obligations to the host nation. Most concretely this becomes clear when we look at the maximum number of years a migrant can be employed in a particular country, or the way eligibility for permanent residency or citizenship is organised. The case of South Korea illustrates this clearly. Its migration programme in its earliest form –​the Industrial Trainee System, launched in 1994 –​allowed its ‘trainees’ (who were in fact mainly low-​skilled contract workers) to stay for a maximum of three years (Castles and Ozkul 2014: 39). In 2005 the South Korean government replaced this programme with its Employment Permit System, which recognised migrants’ labour rights –​something it previously didn’t –​but is again capped in terms of the length of stay in South Korea (ibid). In a similar vein, Singapore limits the maximum number of years a low-​or semi-​skilled migrant worker is allowed 54

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to be employed in the city-​state. Basic skilled construction workers, for instance, can only be employed for up to ten years, while higher skilled ones are permitted to stay as long as 22 years.3 Furthermore, the categories of construction and foreign domestic worker also come with specific age-​limits. In terms of eligibility for permanent residence both countries also entertain specific rules.While South Korea restricts this to so-​called ‘special talent’ –​excelling in a specific field such as science, management, education, cultural arts, or athletics –​Singapore excludes its Work Permit holders (thus low-​skilled workers) from eligibility.

Ethics, concerns and awareness A growing body of studies engages with the ethical dimensions of temporariness and restrictiveness of migration, especially in terms of the way specific migration schemes exclude low-​ skilled migrants from basic rights or simply treat them ‘differently’. Scholars have noted how this may facilitate or even encourage exploitation and abuse (e.g. Hugo 2009; Dauvergne and Marsden 2014a). Concern is also voiced over working and living conditions, health and safety standards and quality of accommodation provided. The latter is not only about hygiene standards and comfort but increasingly also about segregation from local inhabitants, as migrant dormitories are more and more constructed in isolated areas on the outskirts of cities. While studies on migrant workers in the Gulf stand out in terms of their association with the above-​ mentioned issues (e.g. Ahmed, A. 2010; Bindhulakshmi 2010; Buckley 2012; Jureidini 2003; Prakash 1998; Rahman 2010; Rajan and Narayana 2011; Timothy and Sasikumar 2012), there has been a growing body of work on Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan as well. In the case of Singapore a particular focus of research has been on foreign domestic workers (e.g. Yeoh and Huang 1998, 1999, 2000; Parreñas 2000, 2001; Yeoh and Annadhurai 2008). However, more recently the living conditions of construction workers have come under scrutiny as well (e.g. Rahman 2004; Rahman and Fee 2005; Rahman and Kiong 2013; Yaw and Ofori 1997, 2001). What stands out in the analysis is that the ‘temporariness’ of arrangements in terms of labour contracts and working permits contribute to an innately unequal and unstable relationship between migrant, employer and the state. As mentioned earlier, considerations of profit maximisation play a crucial role here; both employer and the state benefit from the system’s flexibility and hierarchical organisation. In the case of Hong Kong and Taiwan this has led to increased political participation and protests by migrant workers in recent years (see also Constable 2009), while Singapore’s Little India Riot of 2013 could possibly be understood within this context as well. While so far the focus has been on the temporalities of labour migration, it is now time to move on to the element of ‘labour’ itself. As the next section will show, the notion of labour is imbued with a particular fuzziness and characterised by ambiguity. With migration programmes strongly bifurcated between low-​skilled and highly skilled migrants, the inevitable question is whether these seemingly polar opposites actually represent the skills of the individual migrants.

Labour migration The fuzziness of labour The International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that there are currently 105 million persons working in a country other than where they were born.4 These migrants make 55

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up 90 per cent of the total number of international migrants worldwide. As the ILO further elaborates, only an estimated 7–​8 per cent of migrants are refugees or asylum seekers, some of whom are also regularly employed. The labour mobility that organisations such as the ILO speak of basically encapsulates virtually all migrants, and thus does not differentiate between the various categorisations that nation-​states themselves use. This also contrasts with the popular notion of ‘labour’, which tends to reference work that is of the low-​skilled and low-​waged variety. Within migration literature, this interpretation of labour reverberates in the bulk of studies on labour migration, though there is certainly no clear consensus on what ‘labour’ actually means. Graeme Hugo’s (2009) study distinguishes six types of temporary labour migrants in Australia who, in terms of skills, wages and temporalities, could not be more different from each other. Besides low-​skilled contract and seasonal workers, Hugo includes highly skilled professionals as well as those coming in as international students or on so-​called Working Holiday Maker visas. His approach is an attempt to cover the whole gamut of different types of migrant ‘labour’ which resonates with the migration infrastructure of countries as diverse as Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore or South Korea. However, the study of migration itself continues to be strongly bifurcated between low-​and highly skilled migrants in its focus. In doing so, studies tend to reflect the way receiving nations organise and manage the inflow of migrants themselves. A brief return to the Singaporean case will prove illuminating in this regard. While low-​skilled migrants by far outnumber highly skilled ones in Singapore, the city-​state mainly envisions itself as a destination for highly skilled or so-​called ‘talent’ migrants, and has thus implemented a whole range of policies and other initiatives to attract them to its shores (e.g. Shachar 2006; Yeoh and Eng 2008; Ho 2011; Yeoh and Huang 2011). The use of the term ‘talent’ is particularly interesting here, denoting a whole interplay of factors ranging from skills and education to the notion of being ‘global citizens’. The latter is clearly also imbued with the idea of high mobility, which is adorned with an aura of cosmopolitanism and success and infused with a considerable amount of symbolic value or capital (Yeoh and Eng 2008: 236). This kind of symbolism seems partly a by-​product of the rhetoric of the global war for talent itself, which has led to the emergence of a new type of global meritocracy. Influenced by this, the Singaporean government, as well as other Asian nations, has changed its social and economic policies with the aim of attracting the ‘best and brightest’ (Ng 2011: 262). For such talent migrants a wide variety of nomenclature has effloresced in recent years, ranging from elite transnational subjects and astronauts to frequent flyers, globalites and transnational nomads (for a more wide-​ranging discussion of this, see Baas 2017). What stands out in the Singaporean case is the alternative trajectory that is envisioned for both low-​and highly skilled migrants. While low-​skilled ‘workers’ strictly come in as temporary labour, highly skilled ‘professionals’ are afforded more permanent pathways. Besides envisioning these highly skilled migrants as important to the country’s ambition to remain globally competitive, they are also imagined to provide a solution with respect to certain demographic concerns brought about by an ageing population and low fertility rates. Both these problems are experienced by other Asian nations such as Japan and South Korea as well, something which has received significant scholarly interest in recent years. As we will see below, not only does the bifurcation between low-​and highly skilled migrants in migration studies divert from the way local populations engage with questions of migration, it also does not always adequately reflect the actual level of education, skills and/​or income of migrants themselves. In short, what we need to engage with more critically is migrant categorisations themselves.

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The ambiguity of skills As noted, Graeme Hugo (2009) identifies multiple categories among the broader spectrum of temporary labour migration. While this in itself introduces a more diverse perspective to the idea of labour, it is also indicative of a problem which is obfuscated by the very bifurcation between low and high. As I have argued elsewhere (Baas 2017), there is a growing group of migrants who could be conceptualised as the ‘mobile middle’; skilled migrants who actively negotiate the constraints and test the flexibilities of a skilled migration programme in order to work and potentially stay on permanently in a particular country. In Singapore this mobile middle sees itself represented in a mid-​level skilled visa category, which is currently also the fastest growing one. However, the designation of mid-​level skilled often does not adequately capture the skills, level of education and income of those who make up this middle ground between various more clearly defined categories. In Singapore those who fall in the category of mid-​level skilled migrant in terms of income (S$2,200–​S$4,500 per month) and education/​skills can apply for a so-​called S-​Pass. This work visa not only facilitates mid-​level skilled migration to Singapore but also functions as a bridging category for those migrants whose skills/​education and proposed salary do not squarely meet the criteria of those intended for low-​or highly skilled migrants. Some of the Indian migrants I interviewed for my research, for instance, were highly educated, but the salary packages they had been offered were lower than what was required for a so-​called Employment Pass (or E-​Pass).This E-​Pass is primarily oriented towards highly educated migrants. Other migrants had been awarded an E-​Pass based on a salary which in reality they did not make; their employer required them to return a portion of their salaries in cash every month. While this chapter does not intend to discuss the legalities of such arrangements, what it brings to the fore is that the low-​vs. highly skilled bifurcation does not necessarily always reflect the way ‘migration’ gets organised or works out in practice. Thus, in the case of Singapore, the ambiguity of skills is partly resolved by the mid-​level skilled category, which caters to a diverse range of migrants who do not fit into the neat compartmentalisation that the other categories represent. The category of international students functions as another example when it comes to how education/​skills and employment are not always neatly aligned. Recent scholarship on international students from Asia, for instance, clearly indicates that in order to finance their study abroad and/​or pay for their daily expenses, international students are almost exclusively involved in work of the low-​skilled variety (e.g. cleaning work, waiting tables or driving taxis) (see Baas 2010; Liu-​Farrer 2012). At the same time, international students are typically equated with high-​potential or talent migrants and in the case of Australia, for instance, the country directly recruits its highly skilled migrants from the pool of freshly graduated international students. Yet, as Liu-​Farrer also points out, considering them as ‘skilled’ migrants is problematic, since having completed a tertiary education is the main qualifier for this (2012: 161). Moreover, as Liu-​Farrer writes, ‘international students are often recruited for a plethora of political, economic, and cultural initiatives, from producing international peace and supplementing the shrinking domestic student pool to enriching campus life’ (ibid). As such, they are generally left out of studies of labour migration altogether. The question of ‘labour’ is thus indicative of a particular fluidity which studies of migration often have a hard time adequately capturing. Mid-​level skilled migrants are one such category; slotted in-​between two more recognisable groups of migrants, they are in fact a rapidly growing group in Singapore. The inclusion of other categories of migrants, most notably that of international students, further muddies a clear definition of what can be understood as

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temporary labour migration. The primary question that the final section will engage in, then, is that if both ‘temporary’ and ‘labour’ are in themselves problematic in terms of what they are assumed to stand for, what does this tell us about commonly held ideas of migration itself?

Migration and im/​mobility Paradigmatic shifts in migration research Like most fields of scholarly inquiry, that of migration has gone through various paradigmatic shifts over time, influenced by research findings as well as changes in the geopolitical, sociocultural and economic landscape across sending and receiving nations. What stood out in earlier research was the deeply functionalist approach with a weighty neoclassical focus that sought to explain migration via various push and pull factors (Arango 2000; Castles 2000; Fog and Sorensen 2002). Key in this was not only to explain but also to predict migration, and as such various socioeconomic indicators would be employed to understand what motivated migrants to leave their homes for ‘better’ destinations elsewhere. Migration thus described a process from A to B which in its conceptualisation was imbued with a particular inevitability. In line with this, an eventual return ‘home’ was chiefly conceptualised in terms of either failure to make it or (at best) retirement after having faced hardships overseas (e.g. Cerase 1974; Gmelch 1980; Rhoades 1979). Questions of integration and assimilation initially also built upon this notion of permanency; temporary migrants (guestworkers) were observed to stay on permanently over time and by doing so posed a challenge by, for instance, not integrating or assimilating into local cultural norms and values (e.g. Brettell and Hollifield 2000). Especially in Europe this led to significant public debates about ‘national culture’ to which newcomers are perceived to be a threat. The 1990s introduced an important shift in thinking about migration with the concept of transnationalism, which was held to challenge the legitimacy of the nation-​state itself. The argument which became increasingly prominent was that a growing number of migrants could be observed to maintain multiple ties and connections between home and host country, living ‘transnational lifestyles’ across and beyond nation-​state boundaries (see for instance Vertovec 1999; Guarnizo and Díaz 1999; Glick-​Schiller 1999). Studies of globalisation were particularly of influence here, as it became clear that these transnational lifestyles were made possible by the arrival of budget carriers as well as technological advances such as the availability of cheap calling cards and (later) the emergence of online media. An inevitable consequence for migration studies was that it had to refocus its attention on the multiplicity of migrant lives and thus move away from earlier models that were utilised to investigate migrant trajectories. Important in the early phase of the study of transnationalism was to establish this optic as a ‘new’ approach to understanding current-​day migration (Kivisto 2001). In the two decades since, studies have now advanced to the stage of arguing that increasingly migrants leave ‘home’ with the idea of transnational lifestyles in mind (e.g. Baas 2010). The role of social media cannot be denied here: more than ever before migrants are able to access and compare information about various migration programmes, strategies and opportunities online, envisioning a life across and beyond borders for themselves. Consequently, migration is increasingly referred to as transnational migration or, as we will see below, as transnational mobility.

Mobilities paradigm The introduction of the ‘new mobilities paradigm’ by Mimi Sheller and John Urry (2006) has confronted the study of migration with new questions about how to understand the mobile 58

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trajectories of migrants across the globe. Introduced as a fundamental recasting of social science by drawing attention to the constitutive role of movement within the functioning of social institutions and practices, it is important to underline that this new paradigm is not simply about asserting that the world is more mobile than ever (Sheller and Urry 2006). Rather, it seeks to highlight that the complex character of mobility systems draws upon the multiple fixities or ‘moorings’  –​often on a substantial physical scale  –​that produce fluidity elsewhere (Sheller 2011). From this it follows that the systems which regulate or lubricate mobility are deeply infused with notions of il/​legalities that are constructed upon sociocultural and political ideas of belonging and what the nation-​state is imagined to stand for.What is crucial to this new way of thinking about (transnational) mobility is that its focus is not necessarily only on questions of movement but also, perhaps even more importantly, on the power of discourses, practices and infrastructures that both facilitate as well as obstruct, pause and even bar movement (Sheller 2011: 2). The new mobilities paradigm’s influence on migration research cannot be denied, especially in terms of refocusing its orientation towards questions of who gets to migrate, under what conditions, and how discussions in receiving nations about this often centre on deeply neoliberal notions of benefit and profit. Aihwa Ong’s (2006) conceptualisation of neoliberalism as exception, through which she addresses the way governing activities are recast as non-​political and non-​ideological, thus mainly requiring a technical approach, has been instrumental in rethinking what migration actually entails in this respect.What follows from this is that denying citizenship to some migrants while fast-​tracking the applications of others depends on one’s marketable skills and ultimately usability for the receiving nation.With the fine-​tuning of migration programmes, especially those of countries such as Australia, Hong Kong and Singapore that are highly dependent on a sizable inflow of variously skilled migrants, this has partly resulted in a refocus within migration research on questions of ‘immobility’, rather than the idea of frequency and fluency of mobility that seems to imbue transnational lifestyles. As Cresswell (2012) notes, this immobility is characterised by notions of stillness, waiting and being stuck, in effect not moving forward. Increasingly this ‘not moving forward’ within the context of the system itself is about not being eligible for a more permanent residency status and thus also about denying –​even in the very long term –​certain groups of migrants to ever have equal rights to other groups of migrants and local citizens. Migration has thus increasingly become about the opposite of what it was inherently and historically layered with. From a perspective that initially drew heavily on push-​and-​pull models and described a one-​way trajectory in which non-​return was assumed, the study of migration has increasingly become about describing transnational lifestyles in which frequent mobility seems key and notions of settling locally (integrating, assimilating) are gradually eroded to make way for lifestyles that appear to exist betwixt and between country of origin and destination. More recently, however, we have come to realise that with the fine-​tuning of migration rules and regulations, limited mobility or immobility have become undeniable elements in many migration trajectories as well. One could even argue that for an increasing number of migrants, migration, as previously observed, is not what characterises their trajectories at all. It is here that we need to return to the concept of temporary labour migration itself, because while for a large group of migrants in the Asia-​Pacific region it does capture the pathways they are on, at the same time the very opposite could also be argued.

Conclusion A number of recent publications have engaged with the question of temporary labour migration in terms of ethics and ideology (e.g. Lenard and Straehle 2011; Lenard 2012), especially 59

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with regards to the idea of a triple-​win of which the International Labour Organization is an advocate. The first two wins are for the migrants and economies of receiving nations, while the third is for the economy of the sending nation (Dauvergne and Marsden 2014a: 227; see also IOM 2008: 92). Essentially it links questions of migration to those of development, while also engaging with notions of (in-​)equality, constraints and opportunities. Such discussions about the ethics of temporary labour migration are rarely about all labour migrants; instead their focus is on a very particular labour migrant who is defined largely in terms of the category he or she falls into with respect to a particular migration regime.Yet as we have seen in this chapter, temporary labour migration is a troublesome concept. The concept of temporary labour migration is indicative of two problems which together point at a more general problem within migration research. First of all the concept reflects a way of thinking about migration that is in essence too narrow and too oriented towards capturing particular groups of migrants within highly specific categories. The second problem is directly linked to this in that the concept fails to connect with the on-​the-​g round experiences of temporary labour migrants. In fact the migration experience is often permeated by contradictions produced by the very terminology used. Temporary can be a permanent status, but also a ‘temporary’ phase on the road to a permanent status. Furthermore, while at a macro level ‘labour’ includes all migrants seeking employment in another country, in practice receiving countries treat variously skilled migrants in completely different ways. Highly developed nations in the Asia-​Pacific region that are on the receiving end of a significant number of migrants –​even more so than elsewhere, perhaps with the exception of the Middle East –​have implemented migration architecture that treats different groups of migrants in a deeply hierarchical fashion. This is reflected in regulations regarding the maximum age of migrants and possible length of their employment, the eligibility to apply for permanent residence permits, the freedom to switch employers, and even reproductive rights. Natalie Oswin (2014) captured it well by arguing that in Singapore migrant workers are put on a different trajectory of life and death from higher-​skilled migrants and the local population. Finally, there is the issue of migration itself. As the recent paradigmatic shift in terms of a renewed focus on mobilities has indicated, our focus as migration researchers should be much more oriented to the notion of immobility, of migrants not ‘migrating’ as such. I would argue that an increasing number of migrants actually are not migrants at all, but should perhaps be thought of as cross-​border workers who simply move to another country temporarily without ever going through an actual and more traditional migration process. The creation of migrant enclaves in Hong Kong, Singapore, and also in the Middle East is indicative of this. Housing migrants far from city centres, in dormitories that may have all the facilities that a migrant would require for his day-​to-​day needs, but which at the same time are oriented towards segregating him from ‘local’ daily life, is an undeniable element in this. It is here that the question of the future of migration itself presents as one that ought to feature prominently on the research agenda for years to come.

Notes 1 Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek: statline.cbs.nl/​StatWeb/​publication/​?DM=SLNL&PA=37325&D1 =0&D2=a&D3=0&D4=0&D5=a&D6=l&HDR=G2,G3&STB=G1,G5,T,G4&VW=T (checked 19-​ 09-​2016). Turkish: 397.471; Moroccan: 385,761; Indonesian: 366,849; Surinamese: 349,022. 2 Please note that it concerns ‘gross’ migration here, meaning that a significant number of these migrants did in fact return. This chapter does not engage in discussions of how much the ‘net’ migration eventually turned out to be. 3 This rule does not apply to Malaysians.

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Temporary labour migration 4 See:  International labour migration. A  rights-​ based approach, available here:  www.ilo.org/​wcmsp5/​ groups/​public/​–​ed_​protect/​–​protrav/​–​migrant/​documents/​publication/​wcms_​208594.pdf (visited 15-​09-​2016).

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Temporary labour migration Yeoh, B.S.A. and Annadhurai, K. (2008). Civil society action and the creation of ‘transformative’ spaces for migrant domestic workers in Singapore. Women’s Studies, 37 (5), pp. 548–​569. Yeoh, B.S.A and Eng, L.A. (2008). Guest editors’ introduction’. Asian Population Studies, 4 (3), pp. 235–​245. Yeoh, B.S.A. and Huang, S. (1998). Negotiating public space: strategies and styles of migrant female domestic workers in Singapore. Urban Studies, 35 (3), pp. 583–​602. Yeoh, B.S.A. and Huang, S. (1999). Spaces at the margins: migrant domestic workers and the development of civil society in Singapore. Environment and Planning A, 31 (7), pp. 1149–​1167. Yeoh, B.S.A. and Huang, S. (2000). ‘Home’ and ‘away’:  foreign domestic workers and negotiations of diasporic identity in Singapore. Women’s Studies International Forum, 23 (4), pp. 413–​429. Yeoh, B.S.A. and Huang, S. (2011). Introduction: fluidity and friction in talent migration. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37 (5), 681–​690. Zapata-​Barrero, R., Garcia, R.F and Sanchez-​Montijano, E. (2012). Circular temporary labour migration: reassessing established public policies. International Journal of Population Research, pp. 1–​14.

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4 INTIMATE MIGRATIONS The case of marriage migrants and sex workers in Asia Maria Cecilia Hwang and Rhacel Salazar Parreñas

Introduction Intimate migrations refer to cross-​border movements that fulfil the intimate needs of individuals, particularly those that pertain to the emotional and sexual realms, which can include migration for marriage, sex work, or romance.1 Building upon a narrower definition of intimacy, we distinguish this type of migration from those of domestic workers. Eileen Boris and Rhacel Parreñas (2010) formulate an expansive definition of intimacy and include care and domestic work in their definition of ‘intimate labour’. In so doing, they consider the meeting of personal needs to be an intimate matter, which is a logic that agrees with that of V   iviana Zelizer who sees intimacy as entailing the sharing of ‘knowledge and attention that are not widely available to third parties’, including ‘such elements as terms of endearment, bodily services, private languages, emotional support, and correction of embarrassing defects’ (Zelizer 2005: 14–​15). In our definition of intimate migrations, we make a distinction between the personal and intimate needs of individuals. Met by domestic and care workers, and family members, personal needs involve the work of care and reproduction. In contrast, we narrowly define intimate needs to refer to one’s sexual and emotional desires. The intimacy sought through intimate migrations includes the pursuit of love, marriage, and romantic partnerships, and can be fleeting or long-​lasting. Intimate migrations fulfil the intimate needs of the migrant or other individuals. V   arious historical flows of women’s migration, including those from and within Asia, fall into the category of intimate migration, including those of Asian migrant women who crossed borders as sex workers (Warren 2003; Y   ung 1995) or brides (Gardner 2009; Glenn 1986; Luibhéid 2002). Likewise, although the contemporary feminisation of migration has been characterised by the rise in women’s migration as workers, including those who pursue sex work (Cheng 2010; Cheng and Kim 2014; Chin 2013; Parreñas 2011), many women continue to migrate as family members, whether as wives, fiancées, or daughters (Choo 2016; Constable 2003; Faier 2009; Freeman 2011; Friedman 2006;Thai 2008). In other words, many are primarily intimate migrants. Despite its prevalence, intimate migration is a highly stigmatised process. Cross-​border marriages are typically accused of constituting not just ‘fake marriages’ (Freeman 2011; Friedman 2006) but also of being abnormally unequal heterosexual partnerships that can result in abuse of women (Constable 2003). Indeed, cross-​border marriages are often correlated with 64

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domestic violence or human trafficking in dominant discussions (Constable 2003; Freeman 2011). Similarly, dominant narratives in policy debates and popular media reduce sex work to human trafficking (Hoang and Parreñas 2014). In this essay, we look at the experiences of intimate migrants, whom we note are predominantly women. Our discussion seeks to explain the stigma surrounding intimate migrations, its underlying logic, and lastly, legal regimes that impact the lives of intimate migrants. We begin by providing an overview of contemporary intimate migrations from Asia and a summary of the prevailing debates on such migrations. As we illustrate, intimate migrations are often viewed with moral suspicion.Then we follow with a discussion on the impacts of stigma on the experiences of intimate migrants, drawing attention to the heightened surveillance of intimate migrants, and address the politics of gender in these migration and citizenship regimes.

The vulnerabilities of intimate migrants There are two prevailing groups of intimate migrants: sex workers and wives.The former group encompasses not just those who engage in prostitution but a wide range of workers who receive payment to sexually arouse or stimulate clients in a variety of ways. They include Filipino migrant hostesses in Japan (Parreñas 2011) and South Korea (Cheng 2010; Choo 2016) and sex workers who circulate the global cities of Dubai, Kuala Lumpur, and Shanghai (Chin 2013). Migrant wives include those traditionally considered ‘foreign brides’ or ‘mail-​order b​ rides’ such as women from Asia, Latin America, or Eastern Europe who enter relationships with western men (Constable 2003; Johnson 2007; Schaeffer 2012), Filipino women who seek marriages with Korean farmers (Choo 2016) and Japanese rural men (Faier 2009), and Vietnamese women who are wedded to men in Singapore (Yeoh et al. 2013) and Taiwan (Bélanger and Wang 2013). Many also marry co-​ethnic men, such as Vietnamese brides who marry members of the Vietnamese diaspora or Viet Kieu (Thai 2008); ethnic Korean women of northeast China or Chosǒnjok who marry South Korean men (Freeman 2011); mainland Chinese women who marry older Taiwanese men (Lu 2012; Friedman 2006); and finally Indian women who pursue arranged marriages with members of the Indian diaspora (Abraham 2000; Charsley et al. 2012). Migrant wives meet their spouses through a variety of channels, including social networks established by pioneer migrants (Bélanger and Tran 2011). However, expanding ‘intimate industries’ (Parreñas, Thai, and Silvey 2016) have also facilitated the introduction of such couples through romance tours (Freeman 2011) or cyber chat rooms that make possible ‘virtual romances’ (Constable 2003). Intimate migrants represent some of the most vulnerable migrants across the globe today. Migrant sex workers, as they engage in an occupation that is either criminalised or not considered legitimate work in many countries, are relegated into shadow economies and remain outside the purview of labour regulations. While many secure work independently (Hwang 2017), they also frequently rely on middlemen who potentially could take more than half of their earnings (Chin 2013; Chin and Finckenauer 2012). These intermediaries need not be members of organised crime but small-​scale operators of brothels, spas and saunas or clubs, or they could be agents, fake husbands or jockeys (Chin and Finckenauer 2012; Hilsdon and Giridharan 2008). Although popular media representation tends to focus on migrant sex workers who are coerced and trafficked into prostitution, recent empirical studies find that many migrant sex workers voluntarily engage in prostitution and had likely done so prior to migration (Chin and Finckenauer 2012). Also in a vulnerable position are foreign spouses, most of whom are women (Donato and Gabaccia, 2015), because of the relationship of unequal dependency constituted 65

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by  the  legal  status of their migration. Across the globe, foreign spouses are rarely granted citizenship immediately upon marriage but are instead relegated to a temporary status that is conditional to their continued marriage to their citizen-​spouse before they can gain eligibility for permanent membership. The length of conditional residency varies. It is for instance two years in the United States, three years in Japan, and five years in Germany. During this time, the foreign spouse is a legal dependent of the citizen-​spouse, which results in a status of unequal dependency that in turn leaves the foreign spouse vulnerable to abuse (Iglauer 2015). Indeed, many scholars have observed higher rates of domestic violence in foreign marriages than in other marriages (Abraham 2000; Choo 2016). As one writes, ‘foreign women who marry American men are between three and six times more likely to be victims of domestic abuse than American women’ (Kusel 2014:173). A similar problem has been cited in South Korea where foreign women represent a disproportionate number of domestic violence abuse victims (Iglauer 2015). Historically, in the United States abuse victims had no legal recourse as they risked facing deportation if they left their marriage before the end of their conditional residency. Yet, even with recourse, women are often unaware of their legal rights, as many are forced to live in isolation from local communities by their husbands (Choo 2016).

Radical feminists’ view on intimate migrations Though one group of intimate migrants pursues marriage and the other sex work, they are frequently lumped together as sex-​traffic victims in the literature on human trafficking (Cheng 2010). The collapsing of these two categories of intimate migrants speaks of the dominance of radical feminist thought in policy debates and popular narratives surrounding intimate migrations, especially in the United States (see also Mahdavi, this volume, Chapter 14). After all, it is radical feminists who theoretically argue that marriage is a form of prostitution, meaning the contractual subjugation of women by men (Pateman 1999), and who likewise assert that prostitution is nothing but a reflection of men’s dominance and ownership of women (Mackinnon 1991). Reflecting the dominance of radical feminist views on cross-​border marriages, claims of trafficking of not just sex workers but of foreign brides as well are common not only in popular media but also in scholarly literature. For example, legal scholar Jane Kim (2010) insists on such depictions of foreign brides in China, referring to them as nothing but ‘marriage slaves’. Based on an unverifiable source, specifically drawing from a United States Congressional testimony of one person, Kim (2010) asserts that close to 50 per cent of North Koreans in China are women who are trafficking victims. Attempting to elicit moral panic, she claims, Of the tens of thousands of North Korean refugees hiding in China, in 2008, it was estimated that a disproportionate number, nearly two-​thirds of the refugee population, were women. Of these women, 70 to 80 percent of North Korean refugee women are trafficked into forced marriages, commercial sex exploitation, and exploitative labour. More recently, North Korean refugee women have also been forced into Internet stripping. Attributing increased incidents of trafficking to the increasing profitability of selling North Korean women, an aid worker estimated in 2010 that women make up 80 percent of North Korean refugees in China and that more than 90 percent of North Korean refugee women become victims of trafficking (Kim 2010:455).

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While we doubt the veracity of Kim’s claims, we quote her at length to provide an example of the prevailing view on foreign brides and the reduction of their experiences to nothing but abuse. If not a trafficked person, then they are victims of domestic violence. Despite the prevalence of such claims, there remains a concerning lack of reliable data on sex trafficking. Still, there is a preponderance of academic writings on the subject. In a recent survey of the literature on gender and migration, Donato and Gabaccia found that ‘one-​third of scholarly articles appearing after 1983 that address the feminisation of migration focus exclusively on the sexual trafficking of migrants or on women working in the sex industry’ (2015: 36). One central reason we question the reduction of international brides to trafficking victims is the contrary depiction of their marriages provided in empirically grounded research. The adverse reaction against intimate migrations and the unverifiable claim that they would likely lead to abuse is due not only to the influence of radical feminist thought and anti-​prostitution beliefs, but also because of negative sentiments against the purchase of sex. Indeed, from South Korea to Germany to the United States, prospective husbands pay a few thousand US dollars to marriage broker firms to help arrange the migration of their wives. Such payment is dismissed as immoral because it defies the ‘hostile worlds view’ (Zelizer 2000, 2005) on intimacy and economy. By ‘hostile worlds view’, Zelizer refers to the ‘rigid moral boundaries between market and intimate domains’ (2000: 823). The intersection of love and money –​and of intimate social relations and economic transactions –​is said to result in moral contamination, because intimacy and the private sphere are shaped by sentiment and solidarity while economics and the public sphere are motivated by calculation and efficiency. To put it simply, the ‘hostile worlds view’ assumes that love and money are mutually exclusive. In this perspective, sex for money would be morally wrong while sex for love would be considered proper. T   he moral stronghold of the ‘hostile worlds view’ over mainstream views on intimate migrations, and the anti-​prostitution sentiment that it espouses, eliminates the need for evidence in unsubstantiated cries of the human trafficking of intimate migrants. It also allows for the prevailing negative views on intimate migrations to linger, which, in turn, unavoidably shape the experiences of intimate migrants.

Grounded approach to intimate migrations in Asia While grounded empirical studies on migrant sex workers remain few, there is a burgeoning literature that relies on ethnography (Parreñas 2011) and interviews (Chin, 2013; Chin and Finckenauer 2012) to provide a broad description of their experiences. The difficulty of access has required these researchers to be more creative than usual. In their study of Chinese migrant sex workers, Ko-lin Chin and James Finckenauer (2012) managed to access interviewees in ten cities by paying their way into brothels as potential customers. Parreñas (2011) likewise faced the challenge of access, and gained the trust of potential interviewees among Filipino migrant hostesses in Tokyo. While she met scores of them visiting their workplaces, and also restaurants and places of worship they frequented, not one would agree to sit down for an interview. After three months of failed attempts to secure even one interview, Parreñas decided that the best way to gain entrée was by working alongside them. Working at the bar opened doors for her. While her initial approach yielded a zero per cent response rate, all those she approached after she started working as a hostess agreed to an interview. Explaining this drastic shift, Parreñas learned that hostesses avoided talking to those unfamiliar with their work because of the effort involved in having to undo the misinformation guiding their questions. Diverging from a moralistic and reductionist approach to denounce intimate migrations, these ethnographic and in-​ depth studies illustrate that, though women involved in these

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migrations are indeed vulnerable to exploitation and violence, these cross-​border movements can also be avenues for women to experience love and romance (Constable 2003), self-​g rowth (Choo 2016; Faier 2009), mobility (Thai 2008), and cosmopolitan aspirations (Chin 2013), despite the insecurities that may arise from their migration. Scholars highlight the experiences of marriage migrants as workers (Piper and Roces 2004) and their economic contribution to sending communities in the form of remittances (Bélanger, Tran, and Le 2011). Likewise, the work of young scholars like Catherine Man Chuen Cheng (2016) spotlights both the unpaid reproductive labour that migrant wives perform for the families of their spouses and their economic contribution arising from their paid labour in receiving communities. Challenging reductionist discourses, these empirical researches pay attention to the vulnerabilities of intimate migrants without denying their agency.

Regulating intimate migration Regulating marriage migrants Historically, the migration of brides and wives had been closely regulated by destination countries, especially in North America and Europe, and Asian women in particular had faced harsher immigration restrictions. In the United States, the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and of the Gentlemen’s Agreement in 1907 virtually halted the migration of Chinese and Japanese labourers respectively, yet exceptions were made for the brides of Chinese merchants and Japanese men already in the country (Gardner 2009; Luibhéid 2002). However, Chinese and Japanese women were subjected to stringent immigration control so as to ensure that they were bona fide wives and not labourers or prostitutes whose immigration was prohibited under the Page Law of 1875. Eithne Luibhéid (2002) documents the onerous bureaucratic process migrant Chinese women had to undergo before they could even sail to the United States, including a series of investigations conducted by the American Consul in Hong Kong, the Tung Wah Hospital Committee, and finally the British Colonial government. Upon arrival on US soil, women then faced immigration officials who examined them through racialised and gendered markers of respectability such as their ‘bound feet’ for Chinese women (Gardner 2009; Luibhéid 2002). In trying to distinguish ‘real’ wives from prostitutes and deny entry to the latter, US immigration developed regulatory techniques –​including the collection of biographical details, photography, and the compiling of case files – ​based on constructs of race, gender, sexuality and class, that would inform the subsequent regulation of other migrants (Luibhéid 2002). Within Asia, many contemporary examples of state monitoring of marriage migrants from Asian countries bear resemblance to earlier forms of distinguishing bona fide wives from economic migrants, including sex workers. In her ethnography on Chinese marriage migrants in Taiwan, Sarah Friedman (2015) illustrates the border regime that women have to confront at Taiwan’s gates, and in particular the intrusive interrogation that they have to undergo in order to prove the authenticity of their marriages to Taiwanese men. Implemented in the early-​21st century amidst soaring numbers of international marriages involving Taiwanese men, such regulatory practices of identifying ‘sham’ marriages create and reinforce normative understanding of the constitution of ‘real’ marriages. However, focus on marital fraud also reveals bureaucratic and social anxiety over the co-​mingling of intimate and instrumental motives behind these marriages. Of particular concern to Taiwan’s bureaucrats is that migrants use marriage as a migration loophole to engage in illegal employment and particularly for sex work. As Friedman explains, ‘The ubiquitous expression “sham marriage, actually prostitution” 68

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(jia jiehun zhen maiyin) made the association of sham marriage with sex work virtually unquestionable during the early years of the 21st century when the interview system was being established’ (2015: 60). That women are ‘likely to become’ or are in fact economic migrants in guise as marriage migrants animated many receiving countries to impose more stringent immigration requirements for marriage migrants. In South Korea, for instance, anthropologist Caren Freeman (2011) documented how the government promoted and subsidised the brokering of marriages between Chosǒnjok women and South Korean farmers to remedy the growing bride deficit in rural areas. The South Korean government envisioned these unions as a form of ‘marital diplomacy’ that would unite the Korean diaspora across nation-​state borders. As Freeman (2011) notes, in addition to recruiting wives, the government initially instituted an open-​door policy that also invited Chosǒnjok migrants to work in South Korea’s factories under the industrial trainee programme. However, as the word Chosǒnjok became synonymous with ‘illegal migrant workers’ in the 1990s, not only did the government begun to view Chosǒnjok migrants with suspicion in general but Chosǒnjok wives, first idealised as innocent brides, were later demonised in popular narratives as opportunistic women who use marriage with unsuspecting Korean farmers for ulterior –​often economic –​motives. Thus, in 1998, the new nationality law also imposed a longer naturalisation waiting period for foreign spouses, from six months to two years. Such a prolonged ‘graduated citizenship’ process (Yeoh et al. 2013) has in fact become the norm in destination countries’ immigration policies. In 1996, the United States Congress passed the Immigration and Marriage Fraud Amendments, requiring a two-​year Conditional Permanent Residency status for foreign spouses before they can obtain a Permanent Residency (Constable 2003). Likewise, a spousal visa in Japan requires yearly renewal for three years before the migrant spouse becomes entitled to permanent residency (Parreñas 2011). Many destination countries’ contemporary policies on international marriages are premised on principles of coverture, which regard women as dependents of their spouses for financial and legal support while awaiting entitlement to permanent residency and naturalisation (Constable 2014; Yeoh et al. 2013). In Singapore, the entry of Vietnamese women is restricted to a visitor’s pass until their husbands sponsor their permanent residency. Until then, they are barred from working and are not entitled to citizenship rights, including access to health care (Yeoh et al. 2013). Migrant women’s legal dependence upon their husband places them in precarious migration status, as a husband’s refusal to sponsor an application for permanent residency, or the dissolution of a marriage prior to obtaining residency or citizenship, can render migrant women deportable. As Nicole Constable (2014) notes in her study on domestic workers who become wives and mothers, an abusive husband or a divorce can then propel women into an undocumented status. Thus, contemporary immigration policies on marriage migration serve to exacerbate women’s dependency on their husband and consequently leave them susceptible to abuse. Although most empirical research focuses on the regulations imposed by receiving countries, the lack of a sending-​country perspective is partially remedied by research conducted in the Philippines and Vietnam. Pressured to address the problem of human trafficking and the exploitation of migrant women, the Philippines has instituted policies regulating the emigration of brides (Constable 2003). In 1990, the Philippine Congress passed the Republic Act 6955, also known as the Mail-​Order Bride Law, which prohibits the recruitment of Filipino women for marriage to foreign men. Today, Filipino women who seek to migrate as fiancées or spouses must attend pre-​departure orientation and guidance counselling with the Commission on Filipinos Overseas. While these emigration requirements aim in part to make women aware of the risks involved in ‘mail-​order bride’ migration (Constable 2003), 69

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they also compound the bureaucratic hurdles that marriage migrants endure, as those who fail to complete these requirements are disallowed from leaving the country. The regulation of marriage migrants by the Philippine government reflects a gendered pattern of policing by migrant-​sending countries, whereby women are closely monitored while men face little restrictions on their mobility (Oishi 2005). In Vietnam, the state remains ambivalent in its approach to regulating marriage migration. As Bélanger (2016) illustrates, although local state officials recognise the economic benefits of marriage migration, they are nonetheless required to endorse the central government’s position in defining it as a form of human trafficking.

Regulating migrant sex workers Although Asian women have historically migrated to engage in sex work (Warren 2003; Yung 1995), they have become a ubiquitous presence in many parts of the world in recent decades as a consequence of economic globalisation (Chin 2013). However, it remains impossible to obtain a definitive estimate on the scope of sex work migration, given that most sex workers cross nation-​state borders through clandestine channels (Chin 2013; Hwang 2017; Parreñas 2011). Sex work is commonly conflated with prostitution in mainstream discussions. However, many scholars have shed light on what Ronald Weitzer refers to as the ‘polymorphous paradigm’ of sex work, meaning the ‘constellation of occupational arrangements, power relations, and participants’ experiences’ (2012:16). Empirical studies show that sex workers from Asia provide a wide range of sexual services including ‘commercial flirtation’ (Parreñas 2011), ‘girlfriend experience’ (Choi 2017), escort services, and sex. Contemporary policies on prostitution in destination countries vary, ranging from criminalisation to legalisation. In Hong Kong, prostitution is not a criminal offence but the strict regulation on practices associated with sex work, including soliciting and operating brothels and vice establishments, makes it virtually impossible for most sex workers to engage in sexual commerce without breaking other laws (Lee 2007). Finally, Singapore has long tolerated red-​light districts where sex businesses operate and attract a sizeable number of clientele (Weitzer 2012). Despite the expansion of sexual commerce and the ubiquity of migrant sex workers in various parts of the world, there remain no avenues for them to legally migrate and work, leaving murky channels for migration the only option for women. There are a few exceptional cases of authorised migration for sex workers, including Filipino entertainers who work in US military camptowns under E-​6 entertainer visas (Cheng 2010). Similarly, until 2005, thousands of Filipino hostesses migrated to Japan as contract workers on entertainer visas. Many followed a ‘circular migration’ pattern whereby they work in Japan for up to six months and return to the Philippines after the end of each contract (Parreñas 2011). In Hong Kong, immigration policies allow a small number of nightclubs to employ women –​mostly from the Philippines and Thailand –​as dancers on six-​month work visas (Emerton and Petersen 2003). And while these dancers are known to engage in prostitution, nightclubs are able to circumvent the law through a ‘bar fine’ system where clients pay for women’s time but not for the provision of specified sexual services (Emerton and Petersen 2003). Facing virtually no legal channels to migrate, most sex workers from various Asian countries migrate using illicit means. They migrate as tourists (Chin 2013; Chin and Finckenauer 2012; Parreñas 2011), students (Chin 2013; Choi 2017), marriage migrants (Chin and Finckenauer 2012; Mix and Piper 2003) and business travellers (Chin and Finckenauer 2013); some obtain illicit work visas for other forms of employment (Chin 2013; Hilsdon and Giridharan 2008). However, while these channels allow women to enter and legally stay in 70

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destination countries, many –​including tourists and students –​also become ‘illegal’ migrants by working without permit. As such, when arrested, they face penalties for violating both anti-​ prostitution and immigration laws (Lee 2007). Sex workers utilise both formal and informal ‘migration industry’ actors (Hernández-​ León 2013) to migrate and work in the sex industry. For instance, hostesses on entertainer visas in Japan are required to work with middlemen brokers to secure employment (Parreñas 2011), while sex workers in Malaysia work under ‘syndicates’ who help them navigate the complicated process of migrating as tourists and students (Chin 2013). However, Maria Hwang’s research on Filipino sex workers who circulate as tourists in Asian cities like Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, and Macau, illustrates that women also migrate independently using their own financial resources, knowledge about migration, and social networks (Hwang 2017). Yet, the ‘non-​citizen’ status (Goldring and Landolt 2013) of sex workers leaves them vulnerable to labour exploitation. As Parreñas (2011) illustrates, the ‘indentured mobility’ of hostesses on entertainer visas places women under the control of migration brokers, allows them no labour market flexibility, and can consequently confine them to abusive labour conditions. During her research in Japan, Parreñas also encountered migrant hostesses who ran away from their clubs in order to escape abusive workplace conditions. However, by becoming undocumented migrants, they also become susceptible to other forms of migrant vulnerability, including deportation and dependency on the individuals who assist them.Yet even when migrant sex workers maintain valid immigration status, many remain vulnerable to deportation by working without permits.  As Maggy Lee (2007) shows, Chinese sex workers who migrate to Hong Kong on a ‘Two-​Way Permit’ or visitor’s visa are routinely arrested, imprisoned, and deported; as a result, Hong Kong, where the crime rate is one of the lowest, now holds the largest proportion of female prisoners in the world (Walmsley 2006, as cited in Lee 2007). The global campaign on human trafficking has done little to alleviate the vulnerability of migrant sex workers. On the contrary, the dominant influence of radical feminists in crafting anti-​trafficking policies has only hampered the migration of sex workers despite the absence of empirical evidence linking sex work migration and human trafficking (Chin and Finckenauer 2012; Parreñas, Hwang, and Lee 2012; Weitzer 2007). In Japan, the government’s crackdown on sex trafficking resulted in a 90 per cent decline from 2004 to 2006 in the number of Filipino hostesses employed as overseas contract workers (Parreñas 2011: 4). In recent years, independent sex workers from the Philippines who migrate to Asian global cities such as Hong Kong find their mobility increasingly restricted by the anti-​trafficking emigration policy of the Philippine government (Hwang 2017). Although anti-​trafficking advocates may view these policy changes as a reflection of progress in the global campaign against human trafficking, Rhacel Parreñas offers a dissenting voice, arguing instead that these policies pose a ‘setback to the emancipation of women’ who are stripped of their livelihood (2011: 4). And as many feminists have cautioned us, policies designed to curtail human trafficking only serve to restrict the mobility of women (Chapkis 2003; Sharma 2005).

Conclusion This chapter analyses the concept of ‘intimate migrations’ from the perspective of marriage migrants and sex workers, the majority of whom are women. We draw upon an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that interrogates the experiences of Asian women who migrate to traditional destination countries in the West but also to developed economies in Asia. We examine the stigma surrounding intimate migrations and in particular its conflation with 71

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human trafficking and migrant women’s exploitation. In doing so, this chapter illuminates the moralistic logic of the ‘hostile worlds view’ (Zelizer 2005) that shapes both emigration and immigration policies that disproportionately affect migrant women. As we illustrate, stigma on intimate migrations results in the heightened regulation of women’s mobility, which serves to exacerbate women’s existing vulnerability due to migration and citizenship regimes in sending and destination countries. Finally, the conflation of intimate migrations with human trafficking, and in particular the trafficking of women, has left the lives of other intimate migrants under-​examined. As the work of Masako Kudo (2009) on Pakistani husbands of Japanese women and of Parreñas (2011) on transgender hostesses in Japan illustrate, expanding our analysis to include the experiences of not only women but also men and transgender migrants allows us to understand the gendered politics of intimate migrations across and beyond gender binaries.

Note 1 Deborah Boehm first introduced the concept of ‘intimate migrations’, defining it as ‘flows that both shape and are structured by gendered and familial actions and interactions, but are always defined by the presence of the US state’ (2012: 4).

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Maria Cecilia Hwang & Rhacel Salazar Parreñas Oishi, N. (2005). Women in Motion:  Globalization, State Policies, and Labour Migration in Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Parreñas, R.S. (2011). Illicit Flirtations: Labour, Migration and Sex Trafficking in Tokyo. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. —​—​—. (​ 2010). Homeward bound: the circular migration of entertainers between Japan and the Philippines. Global Networks, 10 (4), pp. 301–​323. Parreñas, R.S., Hwang, M.C. and Lee, H.R. (2012).What is human trafficking? A review essay. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 37 (4), pp. 1015–​1029. Parreñas, R.S., Thai, C.H., and Silvey, R. (2016). Guest editors’ introduction: Intimate industries: restructuring (im)material labour in Asia. Positions, 24 (1), pp. 1–​15. Pateman, C. (1999). What’s wrong with prostitution?. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 27 (1:2), pp. 53–​64. Piper, N., and Roces, M., eds. (2004). Wife or Worker?: Asian Women and Migration. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Schaeffer, F.A. (2012). Love and Empire:  Cybermarriage and Citizenship Across the Americas. New  York: NYU Press. Sharma, N. (2005). Anti-​trafficking rhetoric and the making of a global apartheid. NWSA Journal, 17 (3), pp. 88–​111. Thai, H.C. (2008). For Better or For Worse: Vietnamese International Marriages in the New Global Economy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Warren, J.F. (2003). Ah Ku and Karayuki-​San: Prostitution in Singapore, 1870–​1940. Singapore: Singapore University Press. Weitzer, R. (2012). Legalizing Prostitution: From Illicit Vice to Lawful Business. Reprint edition. New York: NYU Press. —​—​—. ​(2007). The social construction of sex trafficking:  ideology and institutionalization of a moral crusade. Politics & Society, 35 (3), pp. 447–​475. Yeoh, B.S.A., Chee, H.L. and Vu, T.K.D. (2013). Commercially arranged marriage and the negotiation of citizenship rights among Vietnamese marriage migrants in multiracial Singapore. Asian Ethnicity, 14 (2), pp. 139–​156. Yung, J. (1995). Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Zelizer,V. (2005). The Purchase of Intimacy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. —​—​—. (2000). The purchase of intimacy. Law and Social Inquiry, 25 (3), pp. 817–​848.

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5 INTRA-​A SIA HIGHER EDUCATION MOBILITIES Rochelle Yun Ge and Kong Chong Ho

Introduction This chapter introduces intra-​Asian higher education mobility as a relatively new trend, which is an outcome of the dynamic economic changes occurring in East Asia, propelled by state policies towards higher education, and sustained by a strong interest among Asian youths to move overseas in search of education and a broader experience. While reviewing pertinent literature in this field, this chapter uses findings from a unique mixed-​method study, conducted in nine universities spread across five Asian countries, to illustrate diverse higher education migration experiences in East Asia.

Significance of higher education migration in East Asia East Asia (Northeast and Southeast Asia) has, over the past decade, experienced a rapid growth of international students in higher education (Table  5.1). Among the East Asian countries with a significant presence of foreign students, China leads the group, followed by Japan and Malaysia.With the exceptions of Malaysia, which experienced a decline, and Japan, with a modest increase of 3.19 per cent, all other countries saw a significant double-​digit growth in student numbers, with China having an almost 50 per cent increase and Taiwan a doubling of international student numbers. In the cases of Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia, the number of inbound international students has already exceeded the outbound group (British Council 2008). The growth in international students in this region has been bundled with an assortment of goals and anticipated impacts tied to a new government emphasis on internationalising higher education (Altbach 2004; Mok 2007; Yonezawa 2007; Ishikawa 2009). In the case of South Korea, Byun, Jon and Kim (2013) evaluated the initial success of the Brain Korea 21 strategy, which strengthened the research capacities of a selected number of top Korean universities, focusing on attracting international faculty and students (specifically with the Study Korea Project). Seoul National University exerted a push towards more independent governance. Similarly, the Project 985 in China has been linked to a push towards the internationalisation of major Chinese universities, emphasising their empowerment as well as their research impact (Zhang, Patton and Kenny 2013). Singapore’s case represents a third example of how key Asian government initiatives are aimed at strengthening the research capacities of 75

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Rochelle Yun Ge & Kong Chong Ho Table 5.1  Percentage of Asian students hosted by leading host countries in East Asia Year 2009

China Japan Malaysia South Korea Singapore Taiwan Thailand

Year 2012/​2013

% Increase

Number of int’l students

Percentage of Asian students

Number of int’l students

Percentage of Asian students

238,184 131,599 57,842 50,030 40,401 39,533 16,361

67.9% 93.2% 70.4% 95.4% -​ -​ 87.2%

356,499 135,803 40,471 59,472 48,938 79,730 20,309

62.93% 93.45% 68.38% 93.33% -​ -​ 85.27%

49.67% 3.19% -​30.03% 18.87% 21.13% 101.68% 24.13%

Note: Except the figures for China and Taiwan, data were retrieved from a UNESCO statistics release: stats.uis.unesco.org/​unesco/​TableViewer/​tableView.aspx. The definition of international (or internationally mobile) students, according to UNESCO, refers to ‘students who have crossed a national or territorial border for the purpose of education and are now enrolled outside their country of origin’: glossary.uis. unesco.org/​Glossary/​en/​Term/​2242/​en. Data for Taiwan was retrieved from the website of the Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan): depart.moe.edu.tw/​ED4500/​cp.aspx?n=1B58E0B736635285&s=D04C74553DB60CAD. The figure includes both long-​term and short-​term overseas Chinese and foreign students. The source for the China figures was ‘Statistics of International Students in China, 2011’ (‘laihua liuxuesheng jianming tongji’ in Chinese). The figure includes both degree and non-​degree international students. The data is also available from the website of the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China: www.moe.edu.cn/​publicfiles/​business/​htmlfiles/​moe/​s7567/​list.html.

universities  and  research institutes,  while at the same time attracting academics, researchers and students to staff the expanded research infrastructure (Sidhu, Ho and Yeoh 2011, 2014). Malaysia, on the other hand, has been pushing international education programmes in order to establish itself as a regional education hub aimed at attracting fee-​paying students to its private universities (Padlee, Kamaruddin and Baharun 2010; Knight and Sirat, 2011). As an Islamic country, Malaysia has also become an attractive higher education venue for students from the Middle East (Sirat 2008;Yusoff 2011, Graf 2016).Thailand, a relative late-​comer to international education, is making efforts both in quality and human resource development, and has managed to attract a substantial number of students from other ASEAN countries (Pimpa 2011). An important feature of international students in East Asia is that they tend to be overwhelmingly from within the same region. In all of the seven cases represented in Table 5.1, the share of international students from within Asia is more than 65 per cent. The regional student support for East Asia universities is understandable. Centuries of migration within Northeast and Southeast Asia have resulted in sustained ties between societal segments in receiving and sending countries, allowing students from these countries to fit in easily (British Council 2008; Ge and Ho 2014: 210 [see Table 6]; Ho 2014a: 179). Intra-​region trade continues to remain very strong, creating a strong familiarity and social ties among the business communities of these countries.The short distances between host and home countries also allow for regular visits (Ho 2014a: 179). Foreign students support the internationalisation efforts of Asian universities and their respective countries in a number of ways. There is considerable evidence to suggest that international students in science and technology fields have immediate importance for the research 76

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capacities of the university and to the host economy after they graduate. The experience from the United States shows that international students are more likely than local students to opt for science and technology programmes (She and Wotherspoon 2013: 2). Meanwhile, PhD students in science and engineering have a positive impact on total patent applications and patents awarded to the universities, industries and other enterprises (Chellaraj, Maskus and Mattoo 2005: 25). Even as academic research positions shrink, graduate students and post-​doctoral students in biomedical sciences continue to gravitate towards non-​academic research careers (Fuhrmann et.al. 2011: 244; Gibbs et.al. 2015: 6). During their stay in the host country, foreign students play a sociocultural role by increasing global awareness for domestic students (Elkin, Devjee and Farnsworth 2005). And after graduation, they are seen as potential ambassadors for the host country (Byun and Kim, 2011). Thus, as universities and countries see international students as important resources in higher education, our research attention must focus on the economic and cultural factors which shape the international students’ mobility (Pimpa 2003; Liu-​ Farrer 2009). This attention should include aspects of the university system (e.g. reputation, facilities and programmes) that are attractive to university students (Joseph and Joseph 1997; Mazzoral and Souter 2002; Price, Matzdorf, Smith and Agahi 2003;Veloutsu 2004). And as these students spend years in the host countries, research focus should include the nature of the adjustment process, for example, the relationships international students form with other students, their use of city amenities, and their relationship with local residents in the host environment (Al-​Sharideh and Goe 1998; Sam 2001; Kashima and Loh 2005; Sawir, Marginson, Deumert, Nyland and Ramia 2008). Lastly, we should look at international student mobilities from a life-​course perspective. International students are, in most cases, single young people who move for study at a point in their life course when they are in a position to discover, create and define their individual identities. The overseas study period is significant because it coincides with their transition to adulthood. As Hopkins (2006) discovered, conceptions by youths about being an adult and going to university include a mixture of responsibilities (such as making decisions and achieving goals) and having fun (including social life, drinking, making new friends, etc.). The latter is also emphasised by Waters, Brooks and Pimlott-​Wilson (2011:456) who argue that “the accumulation of cultural capital… are placed alongside a desire for excitement, fun and adventure. Furthermore, an overseas education can also be seen as a means of ‘escape’, escape from manifold pressures and expectations within the UK system and escape to a new life abroad.” It is important to highlight that this critical period occurs within a context where youths are away from home, family and friends, and are therefore driven to make new contacts, experiencing a new cultural context in which friendships are formed and for a substantial amount of time defined by the duration of their study. Giddens (1991) as well as Patiniotis and Holdsworth (2005: 85) argued that the study abroad period represents a fateful moment in youthful lives precisely because the journey takes the student away from established practices and domains, requires them to negotiate unknown terrains, and has significant implications for their futures. For this group of students, the study abroad period intensifies a ‘do-​it-​yourself ’ biography (Prazeres 2013: 814). For this group of students, their journey abroad to study also implicates their transition to work, in terms of their imagination of a working future after college.

The New Asian education migrants As we are looking at international students in higher education, it is important to link student migration to the labour market. A set of factors operating in East Asia has conspired to make international students an important source of skilled labour. Several Asian countries have 77

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experienced dramatic decline of fertility rates in the last three decades. As this has translated into lower numbers of youths entering the labour force, low fertility countries such as South Korea and Singapore have started to allow skilled migrants to augment the domestic labour force. International students, as potential human resources, are looked upon favourably by the host governments. As international education often results in host country friendships, familiarity with the host language and cultural adaptation, international students often graduate with a more intimate knowledge of the host society along with a local social support system. The host government thus often regards student migrants as potential skilled immigrants with recognised credentials and better chances to integrate into the society. As foreign students tend to choose universities in countries where they would also like to work after graduation (Baruch, Budhwar and Khatri 2007), universities play a significant role as a broker organisation to ease youths into the country and eventually into the labour force (Liu-​Farrer 2009; Hawthorne 2010).

Characteristics of the New Asian education migrants Several unique characteristics of international students over other types of migrants are worth highlighting. First, the involvement of universities and governments in educational migration shows that the process is more often than not a well-​organised one. Meanwhile, as suggested by Table 5.1, intra-​Asian student migration is the dominant mode. Therefore there is a stronger possibility that the networks of students and graduates and home schools are well developed as sources of information and advice to new cohorts of students seeking to study abroad. The chances of prospective students knowing contacts from friends and family who are based in the host country are also high. Knowledge and information about the host country and institution are often provided by their home schools and/​or the senior students who have either already been in the host country or returned home, as well as from contacts among friends and family sources. They arrive with the approval of the host government and, in the case of scholarship holders, there is an orchestrated process in place to facilitate the student’s insertion into the host university and society. As education migrants, international students move to the host country with a clarity of purpose defined for them by parents, former teachers and scholarship agencies, although not necessarily fully endorsed by them. Second, as highlighted in the earlier section, this group of migrants is made up of youths for whom studying abroad is often the first time they have left home for a significant period of time. As Waters, Brooks and Pimlott-​Wilson (2011: 456) pointed out, the migration decision might well be prompted by considerations of escape from as well as escape to. The ‘escape to’ framework may additionally suggest a time perspective of deferment by keeping the future at bay (Brannen and Nilsen 2002: 520), a distinct opposite to the conventional student time perspective of preparing for the future. Another significant characteristic of youth migrants is that they are in a crucial period of identity formation. The international students are open to new behaviours and beliefs. Their transition to adulthood is experienced in the host country, and more immediately within the host institutions. It creates the possibility for university to be a key institution in the host society to incorporate diversity and multiculturalism as part of its education mission. The context of peer learning, dormitory living, and a common student identity also encourage pairing and marriage formation. Rosenzweig (2008: 61) noted that students who completed education in a high income country had advantages in the host country’s marriage market, citing his earlier study (Rosenzweig, Irwin and Williamson 2006:  77) that found, from the New Immigrant Survey of new legal immigrants to the United States, that 56 per cent of student stayers became an immigrant by marrying a US citizen. Such a situation provides significant transformative 78

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experiences which are noteworthy milestones in a student’s life course. This implies a higher possibility for systematic integration into the host society. It is especially so for intra-​Asia movement, as the important rationales for Asian students to study in another Asian country are the considerations of geographical proximity and cultural similarity (Ho 2014a: 179). Third, this group of education migrants is highly mobile. Moving overseas for education is likely to be the first time for many to be overseas for an extended period of time. While there, they are also likely to develop a strong education background and use the host country as a stepping stone to move on to other countries after graduation. Universities that adopt English as the medium of instruction are especially favoured by students who plan to eventually work in English-​speaking countries. Graduates not only have the option of remaining in the host country after graduation, but also have high possibility of returning home or going to third countries (Collins, Ho, Ishikawa and Mah 2016).

Types of university contexts and the students’ post-​education trajectories The new Asian higher education takes place in a wide variety of campuses. Out of this variety, we highlight three types which are significant for the mobility of their students. First, at the apex of the higher education sector in East Asia, are flagship national universities which have been restructured as global universities and which, as a result of this new mission, attract a variety of international students. As major universities of their respective countries, they have a disproportionate share of their country’s higher education budget and corresponding international student shares compared with other universities in the country. Being located in the major cities in Asia adds to the attractiveness of these universities for international students (Ho 2014b). Given the rigour of education and training, international students from such flagship universities are likely to be in great demand in their home countries, host countries and third countries because of the portability of their degrees. The second type of educational institutions offers cross-​border or transnational higher education. These occur because providers see the operation of education services overseas as a way to make money, and host country governments see imported higher education programmes as one way of keeping youthful talent at home (Ziguras and McBurnie 2011). For example, from the viewpoint of higher education development in China, hosting transnational programmes is a way to build domestic capacity, facilitate internationalisation of programmes and curriculum, and provide local students with international exposure (Huang 2007). In the Singapore case, however, the attraction of these transnational education-​providers is part of a state policy to build a hub for education services (Olds and Thrift 2005). Given their transnational nature, the programmes are almost always taught in English. The students come from such transnational campuses, particularly those in branch campuses of overseas universities, are likely to use such experiences to move to other countries after study. The third type of campus is that provided by private universities. There is considerable variety of such campuses in East Asia. In Japan, private universities can draw on financial support from affiliated primary and secondary schools (Yonezawa 2007: 485). Since the 1980s, China has introduced private higher education institutes. Besides vocation-​based private institutes, new systems include extensions of public universities and foreign local university partnerships, the latter valued for the potential to transfer foreign expertise in teaching and research to the host country (Ennew and Yang 2009). Ortega (2015) described how private universities in the Philippines adopted a flexible education and training system, with flexible faculties and facilities, in order to train and graduate students with skill-​sets in high demand overseas, and which met the entry standards in these job markets. While these 79

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universities currently get the bulk of their enrolment from local students, they are increasingly working with labour brokers from other developing countries to train their students in the Philippines for similar employment niches (Ortega 2016). These students are likely to exhibit a two-​step mobility pattern of moving from home country to the Philippines to study, and then on to a third country after study. Given the inherent difficulties of describing the enormous diversity of university contexts in East Asia. This is the flagship university, which has been the focus of key government higher education policies. Our chapter introduces the cases of China, a rising global political and economic power with a strong higher education focus; South Korea, a high-​technology newly industrialised country and also a growing cultural power due to its media industries; and Singapore, a cosmopolitan global city state. These three diverse cases will be used to illustrate how students enrolled in these universities make their selections, their adjustment process within the host countries, and their future plans after graduation.

Three modes of insertion, adjustment and mobility The dominant mode of intra-​Asian educational mobility is associated with a variety that is defined by the different host society higher education policies, the very different strengths of their flagship universities, the key attractions of the major cities which these universities are located in, and the varied motives of the region-​based students who select these universities. In this section, we draw on the three cases from a unique multi-​sited mixed-​method research project entitled ‘Globalising Universities and International Student Mobilities in East Asia’ (GUISM).1 Table  5.2 shows the profiles of international students who studied in China, Korea and Singapore.While the majority are Asian students, China hosts the highest percentage of students from outside Asia, indicating a rising global attraction. Singapore’s status as a regional education hub is reflected by its recording of the highest proportion of Asian students. The three countries are different in terms of percentage of Asian students and, more importantly, where they were drawn from. Geographical and cultural proximity and well-​established economic ties have led to a neighbouring country pattern for Asian education migration.Among the top three source countries for the demonstrated cases, South Korean and Vietnamese students make up the first two major groups in China; in return, Chinese students make up half of the international students’ population in South Korea; Singapore attracts a large group of Malaysian students.

Table 5.2  Proportion of Asian students hosted in Asian universities

China South Korea Singapore

% of Asian students

Top three home countries

62.4% 78.4% 97.9%

Korea,Vietnam, Indonesia/​US China, Malaysia, Japan China, Malaysia, India

Note:  Result from the GUISM project:  National University of Singapore represented the Singapore figure (n = 474), Renmin University and Sun Yat-​sen University were selected to represent China’s case (n = 735), and the sampled universities in South Korea were Seoul National University and Korean University (n = 1002).

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Intra-Asia higher education mobilities Table 5.3  Reasons for migration Reasons for destination selection

China (mean)

South Korea (mean)

Singapore (mean)

Educational Cultural Financial Social

2.81(b) 2.59(a) 2.37(b) 2.21(b)

2.79(b) 2.46(a) 2.27(c) 2.23(b)

3.02(a)**** 2.19(b)**** 2.45(a)*** 2.32(a)*

Note: The groups a, b and c are based on the ANOVA result. *p