In Citizens in Motion, geographer Elaine Lynn-Ee Ho challenges scholars of Chinese migration to adopt an audaciously broad temporal and spatial vision. As she points out the interconnectedness of multiple sites and contemporaneous flows, some of the most sophisticated conceptualizations in the field – “China and Chinese overseas,” “the centre and its peripheries,” or “migration-as-immigration” – no longer seem adequate. Ho compellingly informs us how Chinese migration, currently, is both a stubborn continuation of and a radical break from its recent past. As Ho astutely argues, emigration, immigration and remigration are not separate movements, but could be understood together as indicative of the globality of Chinese identities and societies, often made invisible in nation-based studies. Such a discovery of overlooked connections demands new concepts and approaches, and Ho clearly succeeds in this task.
A slim volume of less than a hundred pages in chapter contents, Citizens in Motion is distinguished by its broad premises, methodology and argument. First, it rejects the notion that the study of migration is simply the study of immigration, and that racism or racialization is the only dimension worthy of serious attention, much of which is perhaps attributable to the dominance of white settler society perspectives and the critiques provoked by them. Instead, Ho adds to this picture emigration and re-migration, and the cultures they represent. Re-migration is Ho's attempt to depart from “returns,” a growing subject of scholarship, in order to highlight the role of state policies restricting entry and exit, as well as the repeated comings and goings of subjects who migrate as adults and anticipate the needs of children and retirement over the course of a lifetime.
Second, the book stresses both the productiveness and the necessity of considering multiple sites as manifestations of a common global conjuncture. Hence, it pulls together Vancouver, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Singapore as a new geography of migration where individuals and states have become highly active and entwined. Immersed in the crosscurrents of emigration, immigration and re-migration, these global hotspots have seen similar anxieties and strategies related to citizenship, integration and belonging. To bring together coexisting actors of different cohorts and nationalities for such analysis, Ho chooses the category of “co-ethnics” over “Chinese overseas.” She also adopts the term “citizenship constellation” to conceptualize the complex entanglements of multiple diasporas and competing state claims for these diasporas. Additionally, Ho usefully observes that China is no longer just a nation of emigrants, but also of immigrants and re-migrants who no longer have Chinese citizenship. This indeed will have many implications for the research directions of Chinese migration studies.
Third, Ho argues for a new approach to migration through temporality-as-structure. She points out the gaps between synchronous national time and non-synchronous migrant time. Among Chinese co-ethnics from different migrant cohorts and who have achieved citizenship differently through birth rights or parentage, naturalization through skills and education, or naturalization through “new wealth,” temporal ordering matters. Such periodization – which groups came during what time, and which groups came before which other groups – appears to be a powerful strategy of defining “fraternity” against “alterity” for those who feel “threateningly similar.”
Focusing on China, Canada, and Singapore and how new issues of migration emerge and draw them together, Ho's study contains six chapters. Chapter one maps out the key scholars, questions and conceptual ideas for a multi-sited analysis. Chapter two looks at China's diaspora engagement from 1949 to 1979, arguing that the government used to privilege co-ethnicity over skills as the basis for political membership. Chapter three examines the common “de-skilling” and integration experienced by China's new migrants (xin yimin) while in Canada, and a lesser known but similar process upon re-migration to China. These challenges often prompt decisions to re-migrate for Ho's subjects. Chapter four moves between multicultural Singapore and urban China, focusing on the tensions between different cohorts and cultures of migrants and their descendants. Chapter five offers parallel insights about African immigrants to China and ethnic minority emigrants from China. Taken together, these contemporaneous phenomena signal “ways to reconsider the global nature of Chinese society, not in the classic sense of China as represented through the Chinese diaspora, but in the sense of the world as immanent in China yet contingent on events elsewhere” (p. 16).
As a historian, I am less able to comment on a geographer's craft, but have always appreciated the study of migration as an open, interdisciplinary dialogue. My small quibble with the work is that the ethnographic samples in each chapter could be larger and more detailed, but this could be seen on balance with the book's wide frame and relatively concise format. All in all, Citizens in Motion makes several significant interventions in a dynamic field, offering a much-welcomed update to the classic work, Flexible Citizenship (Duke University Press, 1999) by Aihwa Ong. Students and scholars of Chinese migration and society will find Ho's new book highly enlightening regarding our transnational present and the new visions we need.
