Contesting Chineseness (a.k.a. my book is out!)

It’s been a long time coming… my book with Amsterdam University Press is finally out! It details how ethnic Chinese subjects negotiate their identities in an age of contemporary Chinese migration and China’s ascent.

Here’s a brief synopsis:

Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of China. While many of these faces of China’s globalization headed for the popular Western destinations of the United States, Australia and Canada, others have been lured by the booming Asian economies. Compared with pre-1949 Chinese migrants, most are wealthier, motivated by a variety of concerns beyond economic survival and loyal to the communist regime. The reception of new Chinese migrants, however, has been less than warm in some places. In Singapore, tensions between Singaporean-Chinese and new Chinese arrivals present a puzzle: why are there tensions between ethnic Chinese settlers and new Chinese arrivals despite similarities in phenotype, ancestry and customs? Drawing on rich empirical data from ethnography and digital ethnography, Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants investigates this puzzle and details how ethnic Chinese subjects negotiate their identities in an age of contemporary Chinese migration and China’s ascent.

Click to order! (20% discount code: NEWAUP2)

Preview here.

Stuck between the Global North and South: Middling migrants in Australia and Singapore

Finally, my piece comparing Nepali migrants living in Australia and mainland Chinese migrants living in Singapore has been published in the Journal of Sociology. The paper details their migration experiences and the techniques used by Australia and Singapore to produce temporary and compliant migrants.

The author’s copy is available through a link under my publications. The abstract is as follows:

The literature on ‘middling transnationals’ is growing although studies on Asian middling migrants are still relatively lacking. Current understandings on middling migrants are also frequently fixed on migrants’ mid-level skills and their middle-class status. Drawing on interviews with Nepali migrants living in Melbourne, Australia and mainland Chinese migrants living in Singapore respectively, this paper considers how their middling visa status and imaginaries interact with anxious desires. This paper argues firstly that migrants from the Global South experience heightened anxious desires due to imaginaries oscillating between the Global North and South. Second and relatedly, it argues that migration regimes keep migrants compliant through managing their anxious desires. By detailing the experiences of different groups of Asian migrants in separate migration regimes, this paper aims to highlight the heterogeneous experiences among migrants originating from the Global South, and the techniques used by different states to produce temporary and compliant migrants.