Suchergebnisse

AbstractAs globalization spread during the 1990s, and especially since the turn of the millennium, European states have increasingly claimed their right to assert their sovereignty by regulating migration at the level of the individual (OECD, 2001: 76–81). Political parties have succeeded in gaining support on policy statements pertaining exclusively to migration. For example, recent legislation in Denmark restricts the categories of persons eligible as refugees to "Convention refugees" satisfying only the narrowest international criteria set out in the UN Refugee Convention. The civil rights of asylum seekers are restricted by prohibiting marriage while their applications are under review. To limit family reunification among immigrants, the present Danish Government has even prohibited immigrants with permanent residence status and Danish citizens from bringing non‐Danish spouses under age 24 into the country.These attempts at border enforcement and immigration control have been described by some critics as the endeavours of European Union (EU) members to build a "Fortress Europe" against immigrants from developing countries. Policy decisions and the implementation of various measures from finger printing to radar surveillance to control immigrants have corroborated such perceptions, but this paper will show that gaining entry to a highly controlled country such as Denmark from a poorer country such as the People's Republic of China (PRC) is fairly straightforward. Politicians may wish to convey the impression of being in control of international mobility by launching diverse anti‐immigration acts, but since the immigration embargo of the early 1970s all EU countries have received millions of immigrants, and increasingly permit or accept immigrants of various kinds to reside and work within their borders (Boeri et al., 2002). Immigration from developing countries is not evenly distributed throughout the EU, but rather targets specific destinations. This article will attempt to explain the direction of Chinese immigration flows to Europe in response to labour‐market demand, rather than as a consequence of "loopholes" in a country's legal or welfare provisions.By analysing historical and demographic data on the PRC Chinese in Denmark, I attempt to demonstrate that, despite being a European country with one of the lowest asylum rejection rates for PRC Chinese, the scope of Chinese asylum seekers and regular and irregular migrants arriving by way of family reunification remained limited in the 1990s compared to southern, central, and eastern European countries. My analysis of Danish data in relation to Chinese migration suggest that destinations related to the globalization of Chinese migration is more determined by labour and capital markets than the presumed attraction of social welfare benefits provided by a European welfare state such as Denmark.

Examining the policies of the PRC towards Chinese overseas, this paper argues that since the 1990s China has been actively extending its territorial reach to encompass Chinese living outside the sovereignty of the Chinese state. Gradual changes in conceptions and methods to establish allegiances and attract increased financial investments and remittances have re-configured the Chinese state's relationships to Chinese living overseas. By analysing official documents, and through interviews with officials in Fujian (1998–2000), the author identifies two major political shifts in conceptualization. The first appeared in the late 1970s when Chinese citizens living mainly in South-East Asia were again recognized as an important source of revenue to China. A decade later, new policies were introduced appealing to ethnic Chinese and "new migrants" who had left China after 1978. It is discussed how this political adjustment fundamentally transformed the approach towards the Chinese overseas from passive anticipation of being able to gain resources to active state liaison with ethnic Chinese by calling upon their cultural and national loyalties to China.

This article attempts to question the assumption that Confucian values are inherent to the Chinese family and that these values can explain economic success among Chinese overseas. An analysis of Chinese immigrants in Denmark unveils that cultural values are renegotiated in the Danish context as a product of socio-economic conditions. As a result a strong patriarchal family institution has merged and is sustained by the demands of the ethnis niche economy of catering. In contrast to explanations of Chinese overseas economic success as related to the Confucian family ideology of Chinese families in Denmark is one reason among others for the present economic crisis in the Chinese niche of catering.

L'émigration chinoise vers l'Europe, sources chinoises et sources européennes
Mette Thunø
La recherche sur l'histoire de l'immigration chinoise en Europe a longtemps été menée Etat par Etat, et donc limitée aux sources nationales. Pourtant, pour comprendre les premières phases de cette immigration, une approche plus large est nécessaire, avec l'apport de sources chinoises et une coopération plus développée entre chercheurs occidentaux et chinois.
La recherche dans différents pays européens confirme que la majorité des premiers immigrants chinois en Europe sont originaires d'un petit nombre de cantons de la province du Zhejiang, au sud de Shanghaï. Mais les interrogations portant sur le "quand", le "pourquoi" et le "comment" du déclenchement de l'immigration et sur son ampleur demeurent sans réponse.
Dans le but de clarifier ces thèmes, le recours aux sources locales chinoises représente un apport significatif d'informations. Cet article contient la traduction d'un chapitre de la Qingtian County Gazetteer, afin de donner un exemple des informations concernant l'émigration qui peuvent être trouvées dans ce type de source locale chinoise. Ces informations sont analysées, et malgré quelques problèmes concernant leur origine et leur fiabilité, elles démontrent l'intérêt des sources locales chinoises pour la connaissance du phénomène Qingtian dans les migrations en Europe.

This article investigates the transformative impact of information communication technology on China's extraterritorial governance practices directed at Chinese populations residing overseas. Employing textual analysis on official documents, media reports, and data from qualitative interviews with ethnic Chinese association leaders in Europe, we contend that e-governance and social media platforms, notably Weixin, are instrumental in reshaping transnational space by facilitating enhanced overseas social control. Digital technology enables local Chinese officials to extend domestic security and judicial practices by empowering overseas Chinese association leaders as on-the-ground liaison and information conduits. The implementation of e-government services further amplifies the local party-state's access to, and the collection of data pertaining to Chinese emigrants. Drawing on a case study of Qingtian County in Zhejiang province, we posit that China's diaspora governance needs to be understood in the broader context of China's swiftly evolving digital landscape, where Weixin assumes a pivotal role as a digital infrastructure.

AbstractWe explore how the Chinese diaspora state during the COVID‐19 pandemic in 2020 managed to transform a severe health crisis into a geo‐political opportunity for transnational nation‐building through diaspora governance based on extensive use of social media technologies. By adopting a multi‐scalar perspective, we analyse the intertwined nature of top‐down and bottom‐up processes of the Chinese Party‐state's diaspora mobilization. Based on discourse and ethnographic analysis, we argue that China's diaspora governance exposed a new and strong capacity for extra‐territorial governance. We explore how discursive hegemony, social control and diaspora mobilization were achieved by widely employing the Chinese social media application, WeChat. We also contend that this was facilitated by the Italian government's and media's pro‐China attitudes to emphasize the importance of considering transnational embeddedness when studying the implementation and impact of interactive online technology for diaspora governance in an illiberal political context.

AbstractThis introduction provides a presentation of the articles in this special issue by framing the contributions in the context of new dynamics related to Chinese migration studies and the ongoing discussions of the impact of China's powerful economic position. The articles offer new empirical insights to develop new understandings of recent migration and mobilities between China and Europe. By focusing on the changing socio‐economic composition of Chinese migrants in Europe towards highly skilled professionals and investors, changes in Chinese entrepreneurship, increasing Chinese political engagement and activism, and new migration from Europe to China by Chinese descendants, these contributions reflect the importance of developing new theories to better grasp the causes and effects of China's new global economic and political position for Chinese migration. The selected articles identify promising directions for future work on the global discussions of the impact of China as a diaspora state and ensuing policy implications.

The way in which Chinese diplomats communicate has changed recently, from being mostly reactive and pragmatic to being rhetorically more combative. This has generated strong academic, media, and policy interest. However, less academic attention has been devoted to the employment of social media for China's new diplomatic communication strategy. By analyzing the recent employment of Twitter by China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), this article explores the initial digitalization of China's public diplomacy from November 2019 to February 2021. Approaching Twitter as both a virtual network structure and an interactive strategic communication process, we collected 61,000 tweets from Chinese diplomats plus 282,000 tweets from Chinese official media and applied data analytics to examine how the MFA augmented its diplomatic digital presence by responding, reposting/retweeting, mentioning, and hashtagging. We also used discourse analysis to investigate how Chinese diplomats selected topics to generate, diffuse, and affect hegemonic discourses. We argue that China's MFA initially adopted Twitter using a centrally controlled structure of topic, rhetoric, and discourses as well as cohesive dissemination and augmenting strategies. These communication structures created a self-referencing network closely aligned with Chinese official media on Twitter.(J Contemp China / GIGA)