New Chinese Migrations: Mobility, Home, and Inspirations discusses the most recent trends in international mobility and migration involving Chinese people taking place since the mid-2000s.

This is a plural book. Not only because its chapters, written by different contributors, cover a large array of topics, but also because concepts are proposed in the plural: “migrations,” “communities,” “diasporas,” in a collective effort to testify to the complexity of multidirectional and multi-layered phenomena that until recently have received limited attention amongst scholars. Two approaches are given prominence in the book: particular attention is devoted to how mobilities are now shaped in ways different from those prevailing before the turn of the century; and to the ways in which mobilities serve as inspiration “for the (re) production and renewal of identity” (p. 6), within the framework of increasingly complex relations with the policies of different states. Accordingly, the different chapters offer a lively account of an array of mobilities, mainly taking place within Asia, but also stretching as far as Africa.

To be sure, not all the mobility patterns discussed in the book are new, nor are they typically Chinese but simply confirm some long-term characteristics of global migration (including Chinese migration in Asia). For instance, transnationalism as a strategy for deploying human resources within the family, or transnational mobility as being in dynamic tension with return migration, which are stressed in the introduction, are topoi in the literature on migration.

And yet, most of the contributors to this volume take us on an inspired, often multi-sited, rich ethnographic trip that looks at less explored trends such as the forced dimension of transnationalism linked to policy restrictions on mobility in New Zealand and its impact on the elderly parents of adult migrants (chapter three by Liangni Sally Liu and Xiaoan Wu); the booming Chinese and Taiwanese birth tourist industry (chapter seven by Sean H. Wang) within the framework of an overarching Asian migration infrastructure; the search for “a Chinese space” in the triangular China–Hong Kong–Taiwan cultural and urban space (chapter eight by Yuk Wah Chan and Heidi Fung), the conflation of national identity with a specific group in Brunei which denies minority groups most of their civil rights thus forcing many people of Chinese descent to quit the country (chapter 12 by Amanda R. Cheong), just to mention a few of the many instances of Chinese mobility discussed in the book.

Moreover, the rich ethnographic research underlying most contributions – based on a wealth of in-depth interviews and oral histories that take into due account people's daily experiences – brings to the surface new expectations, new claims and new status-reinforcing strategies connected with individual and collective mobility.

The social actors’ perception and active narration of their own mobility thus emerge as pivotal in the making of individual identities and life-styles. An “emotional geography” emerges when interrogating the Chinese living in Japan (Gracia Liu Farrer, p. 43) which for the older generation Chinese migrants in Sydney includes “a sense of dislocation and loss” (Alexandra Wong and Ien Ang, p. 32), but which, in other instances, pushes students moving across the Taiwan Strait to quit their rosy expectations of China as the Holy Land and undergo processes of re-identification with their country as migration becomes “a liminal terrain of identity” (Katy N. Lam, p. 98). Migration produces an “unaltered sense of alienation” and an “internalization of estrangement,” as in the case of stateless Chinese-Bruneians moving to Canada (Amanda R. Cheong, pp. 198, 200) but in other instances, as in the case of Malaysian-Chinese migrants, it creates the conditions for developing and deploying identities that are multiple, nuanced, and dependent on contexts (Sin Yee Koh, p. 185).

And yet, the approach proposed by the editors in the Introduction casts a shadow on Chineseness as method. Arguing that home-town based networks are now playing a reduced role in Chinese overseas networking, the book's editors claim that many “cross-cut their networks webs with other Chinese from a myriad of geographies” (p. 4). While this is credible, the reader may wonder why networks should be limited only to Chinese people from every corner of the world to the exclusion of non-Chinese people. People who do not share a Chinese background are, in fact, absent from this book.

Prominent space is given in the volume to some social categories such as well-educated and ambitious young people with sophisticated visions of self-development (chapter eight by Linda Yin-nor Tjia and Wing-Chung Ho), international students (chapter six by Pei-chia Lan), people who have enough money to move abroad in order to give birth (chapter seven by Sean H. Wang) and the highly skilled (chapter ten by Kok Chung Ong) while, with only a couple of exceptions, no space is left for less privileged groups such as older generations of migrants.

Blue-collar work is briefly mentioned only in Amanda Cheong's (p. 205) contribution dealing with stateless Chinese Bruneians in Canada. One wonders why transnational migrant workers are left out of the book when short-term worker migration is probably the most outstanding migration phenomenon in Asia. Surely, this type of migration was already in full swing before the 2000s, which is the time line set in the book as separating new forms of migration from the older ones. And, surely, transnational workers – with their regimented mobility while abroad and forced return – do not fit into the concept of “moving desires, strategic transnational practices, open-end migration” (p. 10) that the book editors consider as characterizing new Chinese migration.

To sum up, this is an informative study that presents a mosaic of new Chinese mobility pathways, where mobility is mainly analysed in terms of how it contributes to the redefinition and (re)production of individual and group identities. The greatest value of this book lies in the wealth of ethnographic accounts and enlivening individual narratives that provide fresh perspectives on (mainly inter-Asian) mobilities.