Welcome to the new millennium of connectivity, synchronicity, and deterritoriality. A marked increase in the frequency, multidimensionality, and multidirectionality of population movements across the globe has prompted intellectual communities to reconsider established notions of citizenship, belonging, and territoriality. Studies associated with “transnationalism” have been at the forefront of many theoretical and methodological propositions. Elaine Ho's Citizens in Motion is a timely and welcome addition to this interdisciplinary scholarship.
The book draws attention to different cohorts of Chinese migrants traversing the borders of China (chapters 2 and 5), Canada (chapter 3), and Singapore (chapter 4). The research is based on more than a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in the three countries and integrated analysis of relevant archival, media, and visual sources.
Chapter 2 depicts the trials and tribulations of Southeast Asian Chinese refugees entering Mao's China. Forced out of their adopted countries by decolonization and Cold War politics, these displaced people suffered discrimination and mistreatment in their ancestral homeland, especially during the Cultural Revolution. Consequently, they developed a unique identity as “refugee-returnees.”
Chapter 3 examines Chinese middle-class and skilled immigrants in present-day Canada. Many face language barriers, underemployment, social alienation, and other integration problems. Reluctant to split their households on both ends of the Pacific, these families decided to remigrate back to China with plans of saving enough to retire later in Canada. They identify with Canada and become Canada's “secondary diaspora” residing in the PRC (p. 42).
Chapter 4 illuminates the social tensions that have arisen between the “old” and the “new” Chinese diasporas in modern Singapore—between local residents and recent arrivals from the PRC. The latter include haughty nouveaux riches as well as temporary construction laborers.
Chapter 5 explores China's contemporary migration scene with vignettes of African students in Chinese universities, low-wage ethnic Chinese workers from Myanmar seeking employment in a border town inside China, and returning diasporic descendants of Muslim Chinese from Central Asia.
Ho's central thesis is that the multidirectional aspects of population movements across national boundaries—emigration, immigration, and remigration—can and should be investigated and analyzed alongside one another. The third phenomenon disrupts the long-standing dichotomy between emigration and immigration. Remigration describes the movement of either the first-generation migrants themselves or their diasporic descendants from the receiving country back to the original sending country (p. 2). Calling this new approach “contemporaneous migration,” Ho departs from the conventional perspective that “stud[ies] migration sites in isolation or as snapshots in time” (p. ix). She argues that, when applied to Chinese migration in the three countries she examines, the contemporaneous framework draws out “the spatial connections and temporal considerations that would be otherwise elided in compartmentalized approaches to migration trends” (pp. 3–4). These multifarious spatial connections and temporal considerations constitute what she calls “citizenship constellations.” Ho borrows the term from Austrian political theorist Rainer Bauböck to illustrate the migrants’ claims to identity and citizenship rights that straddle state borders (p. 11).
Citizens in Motion should be commended for pushing the boundaries of transnationalism scholarship, and for its stimulating and insightful engagements with interdisciplinary debates on deterritorialized citizenship, multiculturalism, and, of course, Chinese diaspora. The contemporaneous migration approach, both as a theoretical framework and as a research method, has broad applications in our time, when social dimensions of citizenship, life course, family strategy, and identity formation have exceeded political boundaries (p. 88). Unlike some of the transnationalism-inspired migration studies that play down the role of the state, Ho's study puts considerable emphasis on the efforts by Chinese, Canadian, and Singaporean authorities to manage immigrants and to extend their extraterritorial reach via emigrants.
An important subtheme of the contemporaneous migration/citizenship constellations theorem is fraternity versus alterity, which offers a novel way to conceptualize communal tensions and the differentiated sense of belonging among Chinese “co-ethnics” as a result of population movements. This model moves beyond the established notions of racial and ethnic differences. It adds nuance to the discussion of diversity and hybridity in the study of Chinese diaspora/Chinese overseas, which has largely overlooked remigration. The fraternity/alterity subtheme works alongside another important subtheme, namely the co-constitution of time and space. Together they illustrate, quite convincingly, that the formation of border-crossing identities and citizenship constellations is a dynamic and mutually constitutive process involving multiple states and migrants as well as non-migrants. The process operates in a specific historical and social context in which narratives of temporal periodization and spatial presence or absence become key elements shaping the configuration of each constellation.
No book is perfect, even a thought-provoking and well-written one like Citizens in Motion. The Southeast Asian refugee-returnees in chapter 2 are probably not an ideal case study to build the contemporaneous migration theory since there was only remigration, but very little emigration and immigration contemporaneously. The analysis of state policy is also uneven, with more in-depth coverage on China compared to Canada and Singapore. More ethnographic and documentary evidence should be provided for both the Burmese Chinese and the Chinese Muslim returnees in chapter 5 to strengthen the analytical points made there.
Minor critiques aside, I think it is fair to say that Ho has produced a book of exceptional quality and scholarly contribution that is truly worth reading for anyone interested in Chinese migration, transnationalism, multiculturalism, or the concept of citizenship.
