Transnational Lives in China

Expatriates in a Globalizing City

A. Lehmann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781349345595, 9780230348394
• eBook ISBN: 9781137319159
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Social Sciences

Increasing numbers of people from Western nations are leaving home to work within the developing economies of Asia. Here, Angela Lehmann explores a second-tier city in China and uses sociological theory to understand the impact of global mobility on identity, community and belonging.

1

Introduction

The great escape

Research on migration from the West has expanded rapidly in recent years. The emergence of a burgeoning research discipline reflects an increased number of people from developed countries living and working between national boundaries and the anticipated effect this may have on both sending and receiving nations. It also reflects an increased interest in the social sciences in the everyday lives of those of a ‘middling’ level of transnational experience (Smith 2001). In other words, those who fit neither in the upper echelons of the transnational elite moving between highly paid jobs in major international centres nor in the unskilled or forced migrant group that represents the underprivileged and often disempowered face of globalization.

This growing group of migrants are middle class, relatively privileged and relatively well-educated people and have, until recently, been somewhat ignored from a grassroots, ethnographic perspective (Beaverstock 2002; Willis and Yeoh 2002). It is these transnational workers who will have an increasing impact on the way the world is shaped and the way that perceptions of cultural and social difference are interpreted and recreated on a daily basis. It is possible, indeed likely, that the middle classes from Europe, Australia and North America will have more and more experience as transnational workers living within Asia, particularly within China. Further, it is likely that rather than the traditional financial hubs of Shanghai and Hong Kong, emerging cities may attract increasing numbers of such migrants as new destinations within rapidly growing economies come to challenge traditional destinations (Skeldon 2010: 12).

Even after the global economic crises instigated by the 2008 banking collapse, China’s economy seems to remain on the road to success, and in 2010 it overtook rival Japan to become the second biggest economy in the world. In a 2012 Pew Research Center Poll conducted in 21 countries, only an overall median of 27% thought their country’s economy was doing well. In China, this figure was 83% (Pew Research Center 2013). China’s development is surging forward and its people are overwhelmingly confident in their nation’s increasing power on the world stage (Nye 2010). This confidence brings with it increasing assertiveness on the world stage and a turning of global attention towards China and the other emerging economies.

Meanwhile, reports from the West of increasing unemployment and harsh austerity measures continue. Unemployment has soared among youth across developed nations and those graduating into a recession can face long-term setbacks in their employment opportunities (Papademetriou, Sumption and Terrazas 2010). Graduates, with perceived fewer prospects in their home labour markets, are increasingly seeing the benefit of finding work in emergent markets. While still early in this process of ‘re-drawing the world in lots of ways and at lots of levels’ (Aalbers 2009: 40), it is foreseeable that the numbers of young, professional migrants to Asian countries could increase. It is probable that in this current climate more people from the West will choose to leave home for career opportunities and work experience in Asia. The middle classes are more likely than ever before to pack up and leave their homes in the ‘West’ for the lands of supposed opportunity in the ‘East’.

This phenomenon has been dubbed in the British media the ‘Great Escape’ as ‘old-world escapees desperately seek exit strategies from economies in free fall’ (Khaleeli, Smith and Smith 2013) and has led to murmurings of concern in Britain, the United States and Australia about a possible brain drain as professionals leave in search of a better life overseas (for example, see Murray et al. 2012; Ross 2012). The typical expat is now more likely to live in an emerging country than traditional European locations where they foresee that they can earn more and have a better lifestyle (Hydrogen Report 2012). While the most popular places to live abroad and work remain the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia, their dominance is waning and the emergent economies – in particular, the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) countries – are now seen as ‘expat hotspots’.

This book explores the motivations, experiences and personal consequences of those who move between the developed ‘West’ and one city in mainland China. This research was conducted at a time of immense and rapid change in China and in an emerging city in order to better understand the way everyday lives are connected to wider notions of globality for this important and growing migratory type.

The gold rush

The Chinese city that forms the backdrop to the stories that follow is not a large, cosmopolitan city such as Shanghai or Guangzhou. Such cities are often discussed in sociological literature as ‘global cities’ (for example, Beaverstock 2002; Sassen 2001) which cater for mass movements of people from across the globe and function as a ‘hub’ for global financial flows. Shanghai, Guangzhou and, to a lesser extent, Beijing have a long established presence of foreign traders and business people and the city environment itself is often relatively easily navigated by non-Chinese, with established expatriate communities, groups and associations.

Instead, Xiamen, a second-tier city and an island in Fujian province, allowed for a contained community study. Xiamen was, and continues to be, an example of what Yeoh (2004) refers to as a ‘globalizing city’, indicating that world city-ness should be conceptualized according to different degrees of engagement with globality. At the time of this research, Xiamen could be seen as less ‘global’ than it is today.

By choosing to locate this study in a smaller, less ‘global’ city, I observed the various ways in which Western transnational workers negotiate cultural differences in what is perceived as a culturally distanced and sometimes ‘illegible’ environment. This allowed for an emphasis on the negotiation of notions of ‘place’ and how these impacted on the construction of identity and forms of community.

Xiamen is a coastal sub-provincial city in south-eastern Fujian province with a registered household population of 2.3 million at the time of research (Xiamen Municipal Government 2006). It became one of the first five Special Economic Zones in China in 1984, which means that the government encourages foreign direct investment and provides assistance and support for transnational corporations choosing to base their operations in the city. Xiamen (known to the West as ‘Amoy’ during the colonial era) has a history of foreign presence within the city, being one of the original treaty port cities following the Opium Wars between Britain and China in the nineteenth century (for discussion about Xiamen during this time, see Mackenzie-Grieve 1952 and Wood 1998). The foreign presence left after 1949, although since the 1980s it has been returning in a ‘global’ rather than ‘colonial’ guise.

Within eyeshot of Taiwan, Xiamen is a relatively wealthy city with money and goods flowing across the Straits. Xiamen is a major city in the home province of many of the world’s Chinese diaspora and has benefited from their contribution to its economy and development. Xiamen port continues to increase in volume and capacity and since 1981 has remained one of the world’s top 100 ports (China Briefing 2010).

Xiamen in 2013 is a very different experience to what it was seven years earlier. In this land where economic development is happening at a relative lightening pace, urban landscapes can completely change within weeks, let alone years. Xiamen is now home to China’s largest Starbucks. Bars offer cocktails and live music along the water’s edge and the expansive shopping malls could be like those in Singapore, London or Shanghai. The Porsche shop is located near the Lamborghini shop which is not far from the Ferrari dealership. The expatriate scene is nowadays well organized and diverse. Rugby and cricket tournaments are held frequently and the expat-favourite ‘Hash Runs’ are held regularly. Arriving at the heavily promoted beach parties is like walking into a beach party on a Thai island – hundreds, if not thousands of people from all over the world, dance the evening away under the stars.

This is the new China. This is an emerging international city with all the hallmarks of wealth and success and hyper-modernity. Yet this is not Shanghai or Hong Kong. Instead, this is a second-tier Chinese city, one of several such cities along the increasingly wealthy and industrialized eastern coastline.

In 2005, when the research presented in this book was conducted, Xiamen was on the cusp of becoming this ultra-modern city. At this time, the numbers of foreign investors arriving in the city were increasing, but there were still relatively few, what could be termed, ‘Western facilities’ there. It was still a city that was less well known to the West and yet the media and the locals would talk about how it was destined to become a ‘mini Singapore’. The city and its planners and its people – both Chinese and foreign – were looking towards a global future for the city. The time that this research was conducted was a crucial point of change within the urban environment. Like the people I was studying, the city was reaching out to locate itself within the global economy.

This research, like other community studies, is confined in time and space, yet it does address questions of a wider global scale. This study is pertinent because it was conducted during a time of immense and rapid change for both China and Xiamen. It is an analysis of a transformative process of identity and solidarity for a group of people whose numbers are likely to increase in the current context. Xiamen cannot be seen as representative of all communities of transnational workers, yet the processes of change that are underway are transformations taking place in other cities across China and the world, making Xiamen an ideal ‘laboratory’ (see Stein 1960) for exploring the effects and meanings of these changes.

The stories that were told within this growing group of transnational workers spoke of a sense of being on the frontier of globalism. China, for them, was a land of economic promise and a land of the future. It was a time of ‘gold rush fever’. China promised endless opportunities and the realization of ideas and emerging markets.

Yet those arriving from the West had no collective noun that they wore comfortably. The terms ‘Westerner’, laowai (foreigner), ‘foreigner’ and ‘expatriate’ were used interchangeably by members of this group and with a degree of unease. The problematic use of terminology is indicative of the central issues of identity and community in a transnational context. Throughout this book I refer to people I interviewed and interacted within Xiamen as alternatively Xiameners, Westerners, middling migrants, privileged migrants, skilled transnational workers and laowai – a common Mandarin term for foreigners. I use the term ‘expatriate’ in situations where the interviewees themselves would define themselves as such – often in contrast to other Westerners in Xiamen – a division which will be discussed in later chapters. This lack of a comfortable collective noun indicates a need for exploration and definition of such transnational communities and hints towards new senses of belonging and social division within a changing global context.

Transnational capitalists, lifestyle migrants or expatriates?

While it could be said that the study of middle-class migration from the ‘West’ to the ‘East’ is beginning to constitute a new field of migration research, there exists an uneasiness about where such migrants ‘fit’ within the literature. According to Fechter and Walsh (2010) there is an ‘urgent need to develop nuanced understandings of these more privileged tiers of movement and to problematize them’ (p. 19). The difficulty in finding a suitable collective noun for this group indicates a need to further explore how such forms of migration can be understood as both a continuance of historical processes and a new form of mobility. This migratory type should be conceptualized as a migration pattern that is characterized by choice and affluence, and as defined by boundaries and relative limitations. Research into Westerners living in Asia tends to classify or label these migrants as transnational elites, lifestyle migrants or postcolonial expatriates – each emphasizing different aspects of the relative power and freedom they have in making their decision to initially leave home in the developed ‘West’.

The transnational capitalist class (Sklair 2001) or transnational elites (Beaverstock 2002, 2011) are highly skilled international migrants – transnational corporation executives or finance professionals, for example – and tend to be concentrated in global cities such as Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong. These elite migrants are major actors that create financial capital and tend to move on a corporate posting or in response to economic or corporate demand. Indeed, the middling migrants presented here do make their decisions in response to economic rationalities, and to an extent we can see that the flow of people does indeed follow the flow of money and corporate interest.

However, research has tended to focus on ‘either end of the labour market, neglecting the middle’ (Clarke 2005: 307, see also Farrer 2010). Those who participated in this study are more likely to follow Amit’s (2007) claim that ‘their more modestly prosperous situations likely reflect a much broader reorientation of global long-distance travel and movement around middle-class, rather than very affluent or very poor voyagers’ (p. 3). Moreover, as we shall see, this group contains ‘perhaps as many refugees from global capitalism as elite talents’ (Farrer 2010: 1225). While the emerging markets do pull these migrants in terms of potential jobs and economic opportunities, this does not adequately reflect the complexities and nuances of individual narratives of leaving home (Castles 2010).

These decisions, whether elite or middle class, are made within specific social, cultural and historical contexts. According to Willis and Yeoh (2005), ‘mobile sensibilities are shaped not just in response to corporate logic or economic rationalities alone but also in the context of social-cultural-political considerations operative at family-community-country scales’ (cited in Yeoh and Huang 2011: 683). Research into lifestyle migration emphasizes the presentation of migration as a route to a better and more fulfilling way of life, especially in contrast to the one left behind (Benson and O’Reilly 2009a: 1). The search for the ‘good life’ manifests in the decision – whether this is explicit or not – to leave home in the West for a better way of life. As we shall see, the quest for leisure and escape is a central theme in the lives of those from the West living in China, and to a degree the participants of this research do fit in this category of lifestyle migrants – albeit often unwittingly.

It is imperative that the ‘newness’ of lifestyle migration and both elite and middle-class migration from the West be tempered with an awareness of the significance of the past in shaping Western mobilities. Indeed, the term ‘expatriate’ is awkward in terms of these newly emerging migratory experiences. ‘Expatriate’ carries historical baggage and indicates a type of migration from the West which is declining in prominence, that is, being employed at home and posted on an assignment, usually with a start and end date. From a researcher’s perspective, the term carries with it a presupposition of national identity and allegiance, indicating a methodological nationalism and doing little to allow for the exploration of fluidities and multiplicities of national and ethnic identities.

The post-colonial is inherent within the shaping of contemporary expatriate mobilities and is essential to understanding constructions of identities and power relations that are both gendered and racialized within globalizing places. Fechter and Walsh (2010) suggest that contemporary expatriates or Westerners who live and work outside ‘the West’ may be regarded as the modern-day equivalents of European colonials and settlers. Yet, despite a recent surge of interest in such migrants (for example, Coles and Walsh 2010; Farrer 2010; Fechter 2007; Leggett 2005; Leonard 2008, 2010), studies into this group of people remain relatively scarce. This book explores how racial and power inequalities exist and are reconfigured and challenged (Fechter and Walsh 2010: 1198) on a daily basis by those from the West living in China.

The term ‘middling migrant’ is perhaps the best fit at present as a functional umbrella concept for each of these migratory types. The middling migrant is disconnected neither from the past as an expatriate in post-colonial Asia, nor from the future as a lifestyle migrant or a potential transnational elite. The middling migrant is situated locally and interacts with particular people on a daily basis.

Walsh (2007, 2012) talks about ‘grounding’ research on expatriate belonging. In other words, research should recognize that transnational belonging is constituted through everyday practices that are about both attachment and detachment. Such an approach to Western migratory experience emphasizes ‘banal geographies’ (Beaverstock 2011) and a useful starting point to uncovering the ‘multiple subjectivities and differentiated power geometries’ operating in transnational lives (Yeoh and Huang 2011: 688). Conradson and Latham’s (2005a: 228) claim that the ‘taken-for-granted texture of daily existence’ can provide useful insights into the lived experiences of globalism for groups of migrants that have thus far been little examined. They argue:

Viewed from this quotidian angle, even the most hyper-mobile transnational elites are ordinary: they eat; they sleep; they have families who must be raised, educated and taught a set of values.

(Conradson and Latham 2005a: 228)

By focusing on these ‘everyday’ experiences of mobility and by ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Vulnerabilities of Global Mobility
• Part II: Power and Community
• Notes
• References
• Index