Destination China

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xiii

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2. International Migrants in China: Civility, Contradiction, and Confusion

   • Pauline Leonard, Angela Lehmann

   Pages 1-17

3. Getting In and Getting On: Negotiating Bureaucracy and Immigration Restrictions

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 19-19

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   2. Marriage Immigration and Illegality in China’s Ethnic Borders

      • Elena Barabantseva

      Pages 21-44

   3. Residence Registration in China’s Immigration Control: Africans in Guangzhou

      • Heidi Østbø Haugen

      Pages 45-64

4. New Country, New Beginning? Constructing New Identities and Social Positions

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 65-65

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   2. Educational Desire and Transnationality of South Korean Middle Class Parents in Beijing

      • Xiao Ma

      Pages 67-90

   3. From Expatriates to New Cosmopolitans? Female Transnational Professionals in Hong Kong

      • Maggy Lee, Thomas Wong

      Pages 91-119

5. A Land of Opportunity? Working as a Foreigner in Post-reform China

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 121-121

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   2. Japanese Labour Migration to China and IT Service Outsourcing: The Case of Dalian

      • Kumiko Kawashima

      Pages 123-145

   3. ‘Devils’ or ‘Superstars’? Making English Language Teachers in China

      • Pauline Leonard

      Pages 147-172

6. Making Urban Spaces: Entrepreneurialism, Multiculturalism, and Cosmopolitanism

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 173-173

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   2. Culinary Globalization from Above and Below: Culinary Migrants in Urban Place Making in Shanghai

      • James Farrer

      Pages 175-199

   3. Creating and Managing an International Community: Immigration, Integration, and Governance in a Mainland Chinese City

      • Angela Lehmann

      Pages 201-228

7. Back Matter

   Pages 229-238

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This book is a compelling account of China’s response to the increasing numbers of ‘foreigners’ in its midst, revealing a contradictory picture of welcoming civility, security anxiety and policy confusion. Over the last forty years, China’s position within the global migration order has been undergoing a remarkable shift. From being a nation most notable for the numbers of its emigrants, China has increasingly become a destination for immigrants from all points of the globe. What attracts international migrants to China and how are they received once they arrive? This timely volume explores this question in depth. Focusing on such diverse migrant communities as African traders in Guangzhou, Japanese call center workers in Dalian, migrant restaurateurs in Shanghai, marriage migrants on the Vietnamese borderlands, South Korean parents in Beijing, Europeans in Xiamen and Western professionals in Hong Kong, as well as the booming expansion of British and North American English language teachers across the nation, the accounts offered here reveal in intimate detail the motivations, experiences, and aspirations of the diversity of international  migrants in China. 

• Immigration to China
• Post-reform era
• International migrants to China
• China and migration
• Migrant communities to China

• University of Xiamen, Xiamen, China

  Angela Lehmann

• University of Southampton, Southampton, United Kingdom

  Pauline Leonard

Angela Lehmann is Assistant Professor of Sociology at The University of Xiamen, China. Her research focuses on migration into China and urban change. Her ethnographic study into expatriates living in China was published as Transnational Lives in China: Expatriates in a Globalizing City by  in 2014.




Pauline Leonard is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. She has published extensively on privileged migration, including Expatriate Identities in Postcolonial Organizations: Working Whiteness (2010) and Migration, Space and Transnational Identities: The British in South Africa (2014). 

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