Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family

Anni Kajanus

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137509109
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This book explores the children of Chinese single-child families who go to study abroad and in particular the increase in Chinese familial investment in daughters' education within the wider socio-moral transformation of China.

1

Introduction

‘Everyone wants their son to become a dragon and their daughter to become a phoenix’ (Wang zi cheng long, wang nü cheng feng) was a phrase I often heard from the urban Chinese parents and their student children in response to my questions about the parental investment on the education of sons and daughters. The mythical creatures, phoenix and dragon, connote power and distinction, the implication being that regardless of the sex of the child, every parent wants their only child to succeed. The beautiful and graceful phoenix is associated with femininity and the dragon, being the symbol of heavenly and worldly power, with masculinity. Here in short is the argument of this book. The educational achievement of the daughters and sons of urban single-child Chinese families is equally supported by their parents. This is evident when looking at parents who are willing to take on the considerable financial burden of sponsoring their child’s overseas study. In the past four decades, the proportion of women in the student migration flow has increased fivefold, marking a clear change to the previous focus on investing in the future of sons. But despite the relatively equal access to resources and support, the cultural models of gender, that is, models of what women and men are in essence, influence the ways success is defined and pursued. This results in the paradox that women’s educational and professional success is supported in some contexts and not in others, or to put it another way, women as daughters are supported to succeed, but as wives and mothers, they are not. These gendered family roles and obligations shape the experiences and the choices of the young student migrants, but in turn, their cosmopolitan engagements become part of the transformation of the social and moral landscape of China (Yan 2011). Now let us trace the way back to the questions behind this argument and the reasons for asking them in the first place.

Migration and the patrilineal family

Across the research on historical and contemporary migration flows originating from China, a relatively consistent image of the migrant and his culturally defined motivations emerge. From the 19th-century coolie migrants (Campbell 1923; Kung 1962; McKenzie 1925; Mei 1979; Stewart 1951; Zo 1978) to the traders in Southeast Asia (Fitzgerald 1965; Purcell 1965; Skeldon 1996; Skinner 1950; Suryadinata 1985, 2011; Wang 1991), and from the Republican period educated sojourners (Harrell 1992; Orleans 1988) to the reform era labour migrants to the United States and Europe (Benton and Pieke 1998; Liang 2001; Lu et al. 2013; Pieke and Mallee 1999; Pieke et al. 2004) and to the cosmopolitan business men (Suryadinata 2011; Ong 1999, 2006), the Chinese migrant is male, and his ventures abroad are partly aimed at fulfilling his role as a son, a husband and a father in the patrilineal and patriarchal kinship system. By remitting money and investing in home-place projects, he fulfils his filial duty not only to the family but also to the motherland. Taking up the strategy of migration that is high in risk, cost and, hopefully, returns is also in line with the gender model that assigns the male gender with existential qualities of physical and mental strength, autonomy and aggression (Evans 1995). In line with their existential gender qualities – physical and mental weakness, responsiveness and altruism – women have played the supporting roles in Chinese migration. They are the left-behind wives who care for the parents-in-law, the children and the households. Some achieve mobility through the initiative of others, when they follow their husbands, parents or, most recently, their child (Waters 2002, 2005) abroad. A notable exception is marriage migration, which is initiated by women who move abroad to marry foreign nationals (see the edited volume Constable 2005a). But even though women are the initiators of these flows, their migration is still largely in line with the central cultural models of kinship and gender in China, patriliny and patriarchy. They marry ‘out’ of their natal families, and they marry ‘up’ according to the logic of women’s global hypergamy.

There is, however, one group of Chinese migrants who challenge this compliance between mobility and cultural models of kinship and gender: the young mainland Chinese women who go abroad to study. They do not migrate to support a (male) family member or to work for the greater good of the corporate family. They are the daughters of urban single-child families, and their parents are spending their life savings to support their overseas study. These young women articulate their migration in terms of personal goals and interests: career ambitions, desire to see the world and to experience different cultures, to be free and independent. Many of them have no intention of returning to China. Some have local boyfriends and plan to marry, others hope to remigrate to even more desirable destinations after graduation.

The few historical records of Chinese women student migrants (Ling 1997, 1998; Orleans 1988) focus on time periods when student migration was still mainly a strategy of a few elite families, the number of women student migrants was very small, and many of them were spouses of male student migrants. In recent years, China’s overseas study fever has gained increasing scholarly interest (Fong 2011; Nyíri 2006; Pan 2011; Waters 2005, 2008; Xiang and Shen 2009; Yang 2014; Yan and Berliner 2011). A detailed examination of the implications of investing in daughters’ overseas education within the Chinese family system, and the role of the young overseas educated women in the changing gender dynamics of the family and the job market, is still lacking – a gap this book is intended to address.

Sending sons abroad to study makes sense in terms of the patrilineal, patrilocal and patriarchal principles of Chinese kinship. A son is traditionally responsible for caring for his parents in old age and parents thus benefit from his success and rely on it. Daughters, on the other hand, become part of their husband’s family upon marriage and are responsible for performing in practice much of the care their husband owes to his own parents. According to this logic, parents can expect no direct return for their investment in a daughter’s future. But as the family planning policies made single child the norm in urban areas, parental support for daughters’ education and future increased to an extent that there appears to be little difference between sons and daughters (Fong 2004; Tsui and Rich 2002; Zheng 2000).

The findings of my research support this view. Urban parents are willing to go into great lengths to ensure that their only child, a daughter or a son, will get a share of the newly available wealth of the country. This development is reflected in the rapid increase of investment in daughters’ education abroad. In 1980, only 12 per cent of Chinese student migrants in the United Kingdom were women, but by 2000 when the first single-child generation was entering higher education, women had come to constitute half of the flow (see Table 3.1). In my UK survey, 94 per cent of the female students received funding for their studies from their parents, for the male students the figure was 88 per cent.

This book thus explores the question of how does the recently increased familial support for female student migration interact with the cultural models of kinship and gender. Interaction here points to the mutual impact between culture and migration. First, the aim is to offer an insight into the transformation of the social and moral landscape of China and the role migration plays in the changing family and gender dynamics. Second is to look at how cultural models shape the migration flow and the experiences of migrants. In other words, what makes the student migration specifically ‘Chinese’? This chapter introduces some of the key themes that are developed further in this book and briefly outlines the concepts that provide the theoretical underpinnings for the book. First, I make the link between the structural factors that shape migration flows, the individual choices and motivations and the cultural models in which all of these are embedded. Second, I will explore the relationship between mobility and different forms of power, which include cultural hierarchies, economic dependencies, national political projects and the interests of the various agents of the international education market.

Migrant subjectivities

To understand the mutually constitutive dynamics of the Chinese cultural models of kinship and gender and the student migration flow, we need to look at all three aspects of migration flows: the structural context that facilitates migration by enabling and driving people to look for opportunities elsewhere; the cultural models that shape the form mobility takes and the way it is viewed and experienced; and the role of individual choice and manoeuvring. Chinese student migration is clearly embedded in the transformations of the Chinese society and culture in the past three decades, which I will discuss in more detail in Chapter 2. In brief, student migration has responded to the economic needs of both, the country and the people. The reform era governments have promoted the internationalisation of education as one of the keys to the country’s development. For individual families and students, overseas education has given opportunities for career development, higher earnings and accumulation of financial, social and cultural capitals outside the national politico-economic borders. The main destination countries, as well as the international education industry with its various agents, brokers and institutions, have generally been eager to accommodate to the needs of the student migrants in return to the revenue they bring. The policy changes in China and the destinations countries, as well as the economic trends in both national and global levels, have caused periodic fluctuations in the flow. Apart from these structural developments, the sociocultural changes of the recent decades have given Chinese student migration its character. The increase of youth autonomy, consumerism, the rise of individualism and women’s changed position in the society and in the family are all directly linked to student migration (Jankowiak 1995; Kleinman et al. 2011; Rofel 2007; Stafford 2013; Whyte 2003; Yan 2003, 2009, 2011, 2013).

To connect these dynamics to migrant experience, I explore the formation of migrant subjectivities, which encompass structural conditions, cultural models and individual reflexivity (some would say agency). Sherry Ortner’s (2005) conceptualisation of culture and reflexivity is a useful starting point. Culture as a set of models, meanings and dispositions shared by a group of people within particular structural conditions is simultaneously collective and subjective, constitutive of people’s subjectivity and reflected upon by them. Cultural formations are thus powerful constituents of people’s subjectivities, but at the same time, they are rarely internalised in full. As Ortner argues,

I said earlier that I take people to be ‘conscious’ in the sense of being at least partially ‘knowing subjects,’ self-aware and reflexive. Subjectivities are complex because they are culturally and emotionally complex, but also because of the ongoing work of reflexivity, monitoring the relationship of the self to the world. No doubt there are cultural subjects who fully embody, in the mode of power, the dominant culture (‘Davos Man’), and no doubt there are cultural subjects who have been fully subjected, in the mode of powerlessness, by the dominant culture. By and large, however, I assume at the most fundamental level that for most subjects, most of the time, this never fully works, and there are countercurrents of subjectivity as well as of culture.

(2005:59)

Change and transformation are central to Ortner’s notions of culture and subjectivity. New modes of power, often originating in economic and political transformations, come to be embedded in the cultural formations that are central to the subjects’ positioning and self-positioning in the world. In China, perhaps the most important of these cultural formations has been the family, or the kinship system. The importance of the particularistic ties of kinship in determining a person’s status, identity and role in both public and private domains has continued (although not unaffected) across various structural transformations during the past century. Each of them has left a mark to the relations of power and attachment in the family, from the rise of conjugality during the collectivist era to the rise of the desiring individual in the reform era (Kleinman et al. 2011; Rofel 2007; Yan 2003, 2009, 2011). I will thus begin the exploration of the student migrants’ subjectivity within the domain of the family. As Silvia Yanagisako and Jane Collier (1987) and more recently Carsten (2004) have argued, kinship and gender are often mutually constituted cultural formations, and the study of one should include the other. I treat them not as separate domains but as two perspectives on the same set of issues that concern human relatedness. The recent transformation of the Chinese family system, which has followed from the one-child policy and other reform era transformations (urbanisation, market capitalism and consumerism), has critical implications for the cultural model of gender.

Cultural formations are models that inform the subject on an abstract level; they do not determine actions on a practical level. They form an ethical discourse against which moral dilemmas of lived experience are reflected, explaining, justifying and motivating actions and relating a person to the world. To conceptualise the relationship of an acting subject to these abstract models, to see how they are intersubjectively produced and enacted and to bring them to the level of lived experience, I turn to the concept of affect. Of its various recent theoretical deployments, I find Analiese Richard and Daromir Rudnyckyj’s (2009) concept ‘economies of affect’ particularly useful. This Foucauldian ‘economy’ refers to a zone where certain types of subjects are produced through affective attachments and enactments. Affects are thus not only the emotional impacts other people, landscapes, encounters and objects have on individuals and groups (Stewart 2007; Navaro-Yashin 2009) but a form of subjectification (Muehlebach 2011; Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009). Family is a site of strong affective attachments and it is through these ties of affect that cultural formations become alive; in other words, the models of kinship and gender become part of the student migrant experience. Affect is not an inner state outwardly expressed, but a relationship of sentimental nature that has an impact, thus being inherently reflexive and intersubjective (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009).

For most modern populations, the economy of affect is a single zone where the self, the family and the state form a continuum of government. In the case of China, the state tries to forge affective attachments with the student migrants by instilling in them a sense of filial nationalism (Fong 2011). Even more importantly, it directly influences the affective ties within the family through various policies that have, sometimes unintentionally, resulted in the recent transformations of the intergenerational, conjugal and gender relations. Apart from the affective ties with the parents, sexual and romantic affect is central to the experiences of the student migrants, who are in the age group that has recently started dating or are hoping to marry soon. The sexual and romantic ties of affect include not only romantic and sexual relationships but powerful fantasies about an ideal relationship and a partner. Finding a compromise between fantasy and reality often involves reflexive work on the various models of kinship and gender the student migrants are invested in.

To put it simply, affect refers to the relationships practised between individuals, not to the experience of the individual per se. Cultural models are enacted in these relationships, thus becoming constitutive of the subjectivity of the individual, in other words, her or his modes of perception, desires and anxieties (Ortner 2005). Two important points follow from this conceptualisation. First, particular types of affect enable particular types of subjectivities. In order to understand the subjectivities of the Chinese student migrants and the global connections that emerge from this flow, we must look at the ties of affect they have with the Chinese state and with their families and, moreover, how the state influences the affective ties within families. Second, locating agency in the reflexive quality of affect, and thus subjectivity, removes its problematic association with individual autonomy, freedom and resistance. As Saba Mahmood (2005) famously argues, having agency does not equal to exercising free will. More precisely, freedom is always of a historically specific kind, defining the techniques of the self through which agency is exercised (Laidlaw 2002), drawing from Foucault. The systems of power are multiple, and we thus need to be careful when defining people’s actions as resistance. When a Chinese student migrant claims that her filiality towards her parents is best performed by pursuing personal success and happiness, should this be seen as a manifestation of the waning patriarchy and generational hierarchy, or as the result of the rise of the neoliberalist individualism and market-driven consumerism? Agency that reflects upon and acts against one system of power is often embedded in another power system, not in some mythical autonomy of the individual (Mahmood 2005). As a result, groups of people have subjectivities that are partly shared but never exactly the same.

In China, power systems include, for example, the hierarchies of gender and generation, regional and economic stratification and the political system. In the case of the student migrants, cosmopolitan resources, and cosmopolitanism itself as a resource, can be added to the list. Because of their engagements with the power systems of other cultures and societies, as well as a ‘cosmopolitan competence’ (Friedman 1994; Hannerz 1990) they develop to varying degrees, student migrants are at the forefront of many sociocultural transformations in China. Pierre Bourdieu (2007) has called a similar process in post-war France a ‘unification of symbolic markets’, when women and landless men from rural Béarn started to migrate into cities. As a result, the value systems of the rural and urban societies became unified in a way that devalued the peasant way of life and shifted the rural power hierarchies. Bourdieu’s focus is the changing marriage market, and I will take up his work again in my discussion of the student migrants and the Chinese marriage market in Chapter 6. Here I want to borrow his more general insight that the unification of symbolic markets is not a process that encompasses the society as a whole, but takes place through countless individual journeys. Each individual must negotiate the conflicts of different symbolic systems in her or his personal experience. For the student migrants, conflicts between different models of kinship and gender arise when they try to combine personal interests, hopes and ambitions with the gendered models of filiality and success. The conflicts can take the form of personal anxiety when individuals are invested in more than one symbolic system and must act against one, or there are conflicts between people, often the student migrant and her or his parents, about the terms of familial responsibilities, the gendered forms of support that flow between parents and the child, or choices over what subject to study, where to work and live, whom to marry and so on.

Chinese cosmopolitans

The student migration flow ultimately consists of global connections and disconnections between people, money, technologies and ideas – cosmopolitan projects in the critical sense of the term. ‘Cosmopolitan’ as a concept referring to internationally mobile people and their attachments to different places encompasses both the fact of mobility (of people, but also of things and ideas) and its ideological connotations. For the young student migrants and their families, cosmopolitan subjectivity is something that is desired and achieved through conscious effort. For the Chinese state, the training of talents (rencai) overseas is an integral part of national development plan, reflected in the policy of ‘Support overseas study, encourage people to return, give freedom to come and go’ (Zhichi liuxue, guli hui guo, lai qu ziyou). What does cosmopolitanism mean, then, to these different agents? Not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Affected Mobility
• 3. Cosmopolitical Education
• 4. Migrant Journeys
• 5. Leftover Women
• 6. Cosmopolitan Lives
• 7. Being the First to Get Rich
• 8. Conclusion – Women’s Power in the Chinese Family
• Appendix
• Glossary
• Notes
• References
• Index