Elitist in Façade

Introduction

The contemporary era of globalization is driven by the pursuit of “flexible accumulation” 1 and fuelled by the ideology of neoliberalism, a malleable technology taken up by various governments 2 that fosters and privileges entrepreneurial subjects. It not only sponsors unfettered mobility of economic capital on the global scale, but progressively calls for unencumbered movement of skilled labor within and across national borders. The latter is exhibited in part in the changing immigration regimes practiced by different nations. In traditional immigrant settlement countries, such as Australia and Canada, where immigration practices were historically dominated by exclusionary mechanisms based on racial discrimination, the last four decades have witnessed the rise of increasingly targeted immigration policies dedicated to attracting skilled immigrants regardless of their country of origin. In traditional countries of emigration, such as China and India, the governments have ratcheted up efforts to appeal to their diaspora elites through proactive migration policies. Given the global competition for talent, skilled and entrepreneurial immigrants have found unprecedented mobility across national borders, making transnationalism an ever more pronounced phenomenon today, which is especially true for Chinese people in the Asia Pacific region.

Researchers have started addressing the phenomenon of transnationalism since the 1990s. 3, 4 It is recognized that transnationalism is closely tied to, if not engendered through, global capitalism. 5, 6 However, in studies of transnationalism, particularly in studies of Chinese transnationalism, global capitalism is often taken as the historical backdrop against which transnational engagements unfold. With few exceptions, 7 rarely have researchers directly addressed how globalization—as a process of capitalization enacted by multiple actors 8 —is constitutive of transnationalism. This paper contributes to the existing scholarship on transnationalism, particularly Chinese transnationalism, with a focus on the production of transnationalism within global capitalism, which enrols multiple institutions, organizations and individuals. Empirically, it draws on a qualitative study that examines the social organization of the career lives of 15 professional Chinese women engaged in circular migration between China and Canada.

Following, I review the literature on Chinese transnationalism. I then introduce and expand the notion of a transnational social field as a conceptual framework to grapple with the social organization of Chinese transnationalism, followed by an introduction of the research, methods, and respondents. When presenting research findings, I first chart the migratory and career trajectories of 15 professional Chinese women, before I map the complex social relations constitutive of the transnational field within which their experiences are embedded. I end the paper with a recap of the findings and a discussion of the significance and implications of the findings.

Chinese Transnationalism

The Chinese have historically been involved in international migration. Ma and Cartier divide the history of Chinese migration into two historical periods of time. 9 Prior to 1960s, it was primarily villagers from Guangdong and Fujian provinces in South China who went abroad as labors and traders. After the 1960s, Chinese emigrated mostly from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, and more recently Mainland China. Recent waves of Chinese immigration are instigated variously by political uncertainties, ethnic discrimination, and in the case of the Chinese from Mainland China, perhaps China’s opening up to the world. The major destination countries for Chinese immigrants include traditional settlement countries on the Asian Pacific rim, such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, and some European countries, such as the United Kingdom. Compared with earlier waves of immigration, the Chinese who immigrated in the post-1960 period are comprised of a higher percentage of well-educated and relatively well-off business people and professionals. 10

Chinese immigrants have always maintained social, cultural, economic, and political ties with their home countries. 11, 12 It is, however, only in the 1990s that researchers started taking up lenses of transnationalism to shed light on the experiences of Chinese immigrants. In her pioneering work on Chinese immigrant investors, business owners, and professionals in North America and South Asia, Ong links Chinese transnationalism to forms of cultural struggles that privilege male power, gendered familial norms, ethnic order, and national ideologies. 13 For instance, in Chapter Three, where she examines the experiences of elite Chinese in the United States, she shows that while the immigrants seek to convert economic capital to social capital in their host country, their ability to do so is limited by the ethnic, social, and moral orders prevalent in the local society. In Chapter Four, where she focuses on the experiences of Chinese families shuttling within the Asian Pacific region, Ong pinpoints that as a transnational strategy, the family deploys flexible citizenship, which is subjected to the regimes of family, nation states, and the market place. In Chapter Five that focuses on Chinese capitalism in South Asia, Ong highlights the ethnic and fraternal links and male bonding celebrated by the elite transnational subjects. Meanwhile, she also shows “the dark secrets of family, nation states and global capitalism” that entrap women in the domestic domains or gendered and exploitative workplaces. 14 She subsequently argues that mobile forces of capitalism are “alternatively destructive and creative of the class, ethnic and gender relations that constitute the very transnational networks that have developed within and alongside global capitalism.” 15

In Canada, the last twenty years have also witnessed an increasing number of studies of Chinese transnationalism, primarily focusing on two different populations: wealthy business elites, or what Wong calls the “global capitalists,” who come to Canada through the business immigration programs, and skilled immigrants who struggle with under- and un-employment. 16 Wong’s large survey study shows that Chinese business investors and entrepreneurs, as global capitalists, are involved in multiple social fields, including family, personal, social, ethnic, and business fields. In a large immigrant survey, Ley also profiles business immigrants who self-identified as ethnic Chinese. 17 His study finds some negative association between transnational activities and immigrants’ social and cultural integration in Canada. However, Ley challenges the traditional notion of integration and argues that “astronaut households” may see the two shores of the Pacific Ocean, instead of one country, as an integrated region of opportunity. Walter’s qualitative study followed two Chinese women from investor families over a period of eight years. It casts doubts on Ong’s notion of flexible citizenship, 18 and by way of extension, perhaps Ley’s expanded notion of integration. Walter argues that while being mobile and flexible citizens may be an initial intention for some immigrants, transnationalism might be a transient phenomenon. In the long run, immigrants still need to deal with issues of belonging, integration, and settlement.

Some of the studies within this body of literature focus specifically on the experiences of skilled Chinese immigrants. Salaff and Greve find that given the demands of requalification and the loss of social capital as a result of relocation, dual-career Chinese couples develop coping strategies through mobilizing their transnational social network (i.e., sending children back home to their parents, or bringing parents to support them in Canada). 19 Similarly, Man and Cohen, and Das Gupta et al. examine the transnational strategies professional female immigrants from China and India exercised to meet the contradictory demands at home and in the labor market, while also trying to maintain their class status in the host society. 20, 21 Despite their agency and creativity, like other immigrants with minoritized backgrounds, under- and un-employment remained a persistent challenge for study participants. Given this situation, immigrants may start returning to China or circulating between China and Canada. 22 Guo conceives return migrants as double diaspora (i.e., diaspora in relation to both Canada and China and simultaneously diasporas and returnees). 23 His study uncovers a range of reasons immigrants move to Canada in the first place, and later on, return to China. In his study, 75% of the respondents reported that they were economically better off in China than in Canada. Nevertheless, close to half of the respondents still maintained their family ties to and/or signaled desires for lives in Canada. Ho and Ley’s study touches on another layer of complexity for immigrant returnees. 24 They refer to skilled Chinese immigrants who return to China as “middling” immigrants, arguing that as these immigrants experience downward social mobility in Canada, they are not typically the top talents that the Chinese government targets with preferential policies. As such, the social marginalization that the immigrant respondents experienced in Canada could be reproduced in China.

Clearly scholarship on Chinese transnationalism is expanding. However, researchers in this area do not necessarily agree on what transnationalism is. For instance, Ley uses transnationalism to refer to specific types of activities, such as maintaining contacts in home countries, travel, and sending economic remittance. 25 Yang sees transnational movement as a mode of labor-market incorporation enabled through variations in cross-national markets which afford different employment opportunities and rewards. 26 Ong uses transnationalism to reference the “cultural logic” through which individuals respond opportunistically to the flexible regime of accumulation. 27 Regardless of the approach to transnationalism, most studies follow the experiences of specific groups of individuals—largely business immigrants (capitalist class) or skilled immigrants (labor)—in order to understand the construction of the phenomenon of transnationalism. Although the existing studies address, or at least acknowledge, the conjunctions between capitalism and transnationalism, global capitalism is often taken as a context in which individuals respond with transnational engagements. Researchers have rarely attended to the process of global capitalization as it constitutes, and is constituted by, individuals’ transnational engagements. This paper addresses this issue through resorting to the idea of transnational social field.

Transnational Social Field: An Expanded Conceptual Framework

The term transnational social field was first brought forward by Glick Schiller, Basch and Blanc-Szanton who define transnationalism as “the processes by which immigrants build social fields that link together their societies of origin and settlement.” 28 Their conceptualization of transnationalism is premised on six proposals. Taken together, these proposals can be summarized into the following. First, they believe that transnationalism is rooted in the daily experiences, social relationships, and identity work of migrants, who are compelled to work within the hegemonic contexts of the local and the global. Second, to study transnationalism, they challenge researchers to go beyond methodological nationalism, or the tendency to treat nation state as the boundaries for social analysis. 29 Instead, they ask researchers to rework social science concepts to capture the fluid and complex experiences of immigrants. Third, they also believe that the transnational migrant experience is inextricably linked to global capitalism and must be studied within that context.

Levitt and Glick Schiller continue developing the notion of transnational social field. Drawing on Bourdieu’s work on social fields and the work by Manchester school on social networks, they define social field as “a set of multiple interlocking networks of social relationships through which ideas, practices, and resources are unequally exchanged, organized, and transformed.” 30 Informed by Bourdieu’s work in particular, they propose that social fields are “created by the participants who are joined in struggle for social position,” which can impose disruption as well as reinforce power relations along social differences such as gender, race, and class. 31 Following the same line of thinking, Shan, Pullman and Zhao propose the notion of transnational social space. 32 This idea of a transnational social space is not to replace the use of transnational social field. It is rather to suggest that some of the transnational fields are contingent and precarious. It is also to stress that different games of distinctions emanating from diverse social fields may be evoked to constitute the power matrixes shaping transnational engagements.

People similarly endowed with diverse capital or similarly situated within matrixes of power may not be equally active in the transnational field. To explain such differences, in their construction of transnational social field, Levitt and Glick Schiller also make a distinction between ways of being and ways of belonging. 33 Ways of being refer to how individuals may be embedded within a transnational field but may not consciously identify with the field itself. Ways of belonging, on the other hand, reference actual social practices that signal a conscious connection and identification with particular field. Such a distinction highlights that a transnational social field is simultaneously an objective and subjective phenomenon that can be studied through an understanding of individual experiences. Further, transnational social relations and networks may be constituted through multiple institutions, organizations, and actors across place. I propose that the everyday experience of individuals is indeed socially organized across locality, although the organizational property of the transnational field might be more emergent than established. Levitt and Glick Schiller touch on this point when they state that “social fields contain institutions, organizations and experiences […] that generate categories of identity that are ascribed to or chosen by individuals and groups.” 34 By addressing how various types of actors act in concert to produce transnationalism, I also hope to trace how global capitalism or the global process of capitalization, with its crisis-prone property, recruits compliance and gets constantly renewed in practice.

The Research, Methods, and Participants

This paper draws on a qualitative study that examines the social organization of the career trajectories for a group of transnational Chinese immigrant women. This study has two inter-related components that were completed between June 2014 and June 2015. The first part of the study involved life-history style interviews with 15 Chinese migrant women, who 1) were trained in applied sciences and engineering and 2) moved twice or more between China and Canada for work and settlement purposes. The women were recruited to participate in the research through three means of communication: 1) the personal and professional networks of the research team, 2) advertising the study through posting flyers in community centers, and 3) using Chinese social media such as qq and WeChat. Table one provides the demographic information of the women. Of the 15 women, 12 were in their 30s and 40s, two above 50 and one in her 20s. All but two were married and had at least one child, while one was single and the other divorced. All women were trained in what is traditionally known in China as li-gong-ke or applied sciences and engineering (seven in architecture and engineering, three in computer sciences, one in mathematics, one in medical sciences, one in husbandry, and two in a mix of sciences and social sciences). Prior to migrating to Canada, one earned a doctoral degree (Hong), five a master’s degree (Anna, Biella, Emily, Cindy, Gina, and Nancy), and eight a bachelor’s degree (Deng, Fang, Irene, Julia, Kate, Linda, Mandy, and Oprah). The majority of the women immigrated to Canada as skilled immigrants (dependent or independent). Linda and Emily were the exception: Linda migrated as a business migrant, and Emily came as a dependent of her parents who were business migrants. The first landing in Canada for all women occurred between 1996 and 2012.

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table 1

Transnational and occupation mobility of study participants

Interviews with the women were conducted in Chinese mixed with English, either face-to-face, virtually through Skype, or over the phone. Interviews ranged from 45 minutes to two hours. Face-to-face interviews were conducted in my office or a place convenient for the participants. Interviews focused on their migratory and career trajectories. Particular attention was paid to how the women sought out or responded to opportunities, and how they imagined, justified, planned, and realized their migratory and career moves in relation to the social, cultural, familial, and economic contexts within which they negotiated their social positionality and professional opportunities. All interviews were transcribed verbatim in the language of the interviews and sent back to the women for member check. Where the women requested revision of original transcripts, we accepted the revised version as the basis for data analysis. Interviewer reflection was conducted after each interview to generate initial and emerging themes, as well as to identify the actors that play an important role in the constitution of the transnational field the women found themselves.

Interviews with the women pointed to three interrelated areas that influenced the women’s transnational experiences: the public (educational and governmental), private (corporate), and community-based organizational policies and/or practices related to the recruitment and retention of immigrant women in sciences and engineering in both China and Canada. To learn about the public policies and practices, interviews were conducted with one sectoral researcher, one immigration consultant, three immigrant service workers, two educators and one staff member in a higher education institution in Canada, and one group of government officials (four people) from China who were on a trip to recruit overseas talents from Vancouver. To develop a sense of the policies and practices in the corporate world, interviews were conducted with one human resource manager and two head hunters (in one interview) in Canada, one manager of a private funding organization, and one Chinese entrepreneur who operated a private foundation and was starting a large business in Canada. In the community realm, interviews were conducted with three advocates for women professionals in Canada, and one Chinese leader from a professional Chinese association in Canada. A manager from an association for overseas professional women scientists in China decided to respond to our questions in writing, rather than taking an interview. In addition to these interviews, government documents, such as immigration policies in Canada and overseas talent recruitment policies in China, were collected in order to provide a policy context for the study.

All interviews from the second part of the study were also transcribed verbatim and sent back to the participants for member check. Concerted efforts of data analysis took place right after completion of data collection. Interviews with the women were analyzed thematically to track their transnational career trajectories and strategies. Data generated from the second part of the study were analyzed to identify the actors and factors that pushed and pulled the Chinese women in different directions. A closer examination of both sets of data shows how a complex of transnational social relations are reticulated as a multitude of actors, policies, and practices come into interactions vis-à-vis global capitalism. It is this net/work of actors, policies, and practices on which the rest of this paper focuses upon.

Immigrant Women’s Migratory and Career Trajectories

The Chinese women who participated in the study immigrated to Canada for various reasons. Some of them were career related: institutional and administrative constraints encountered at work, income penalty for being a Chinese working in international companies, and/or limited international mobility due to holding Chinese passports. The majority of the women also suggested that their migratory decisions were, in part, the result of family influence or familial decisions (i.e., spouse’s or parents’ decisions, the need to have a second child, and/or the need to provide a more relaxed educational environment for children). Some also related that they were attracted to Canada because of the quality life, highlighting food safety, air quality, the natural environment, and, in one case, the Western style of life. They chose Vancouver as the place of landing primarily because of its geographical proximity to China, and, in some cases, due to family ties and connections with friends who were already living in Vancouver. Between three weeks to four years after arriving, 14 women returned to China and one moved to New Zealand (to close her daycare business there). Although the circumstances for their return migration differed from case to case, they could be summarized under three headings: 1) dismal employment prospects in Canada; 2) perceived career and business opportunities in China given the booming economy (see also Guo); 35 and 3) uniting families and caring for elders. At the time of the interviews, however, only two women were still working in China and all other participants had migrated back to Vancouver, reportedly for reasons related to their children’s education. When asked about their future migratory plan, the majority of the women were ambivalent or equivocal about where to settle in the future. Indeed, it was clear from the data that the women’s transnational movements were interlinked with their overall family plans and relations, as well as the economic opportunities presented to them or perceived across place.

With regard to their career lives, at the time of the study, six of the women were still in a state of transience, working in non-standard employment positions, such as tutors, or were unemployed and/or preparing to return to university or college. Four women managed to acquire paid employment in professional fields. Among them, two remained in their original fields of training, one (Hong) by returning to China to become a medical professor and one (Irene) by switching to a neighboring field and becoming the only woman who made it to a managerial position in a mainstream company in Canada. Two switched their specialties: Anna, an interior design architect, became a housing project coordinator, and Cindy became a coordinator for a Chinese investment company. Five of the women (re)started their own businesses or became self-employed. Biella and Linda owned businesses prior to coming to Canada and continued on this track after arrival. Three others (Deng, Gina, and Julia) became self-employed with their businesses either straddling China and Canada or remaining tightly anchored to the Chinese community in Canada; Deng became a real estate consultant, while Gina and Julia opened immigration and education consultancy companies in Canada that exclusively served Chinese clientele. Julia described her business in the following way:

In this case, Julia requested that a staff member write exams to be qualified as an immigration consultant in Canada. Meanwhile, she also transformed her previous social capital from China into business opportunities in Canada. To a great extent, she made her career possible through bringing together cultural capital, social networks, and economic capital (investment by friends) across place.

The case above clearly shows that many of the women were extremely entrepreneurial. They were aware of their unique positions within the transnational space and made strategic decisions to capitalize on their transnational positionalities. However, what needs to be noted is that identification of their transnational advantage did not always translate into individual success. For instance, when Deng lost her job as a computer program developer in Vancouver, she spent time developing a type of management software and tried to sell it to the hospitality industry in China. She expressed that she had an extensive social network within the hospitality industry in China. She, however, discovered that China was still reliant on intensive labor and not ready for a technology-based management system. Although she ultimately failed in this endeavor, her experience highlights that when constructing their career pathways, the women were imaginative, adventurous, and entrepreneurial. Importantly, they were sensitized to their transnational positionality and attempted to leverage it as a comparative advantage, although there was no safety net for such entrepreneurial endeavors.

Also of note, the majority of the participants ended up working for Chinese owners and investors and/or serving the Chinese communities either in Canada or in China. In fact, out of all the women who participated in the study, only Irene located a position within a graphic design company owned by Canadians. The research finds that working for Chinese employers often resulted in a clash between prior class positions (i.e., professional middle class) that participants subjectively identified with and the class position (i.e., working class) that they were reduced to after immigration. For instance, Anna, trained in interior architecture in the United Kingdom, was a space planner in Beijing. After moving to Canada, she worked initially for a Chinese builder as a consultant before moving on to work as a housing project coordinator for a Chinese family who resided outside of Vancouver. Deep at heart, however, she felt little respect for her former employer who she referred to as “Shanxi Farmer” as he was perceived as unskilled except for a keen sense for money. Regardless of how the women reconciled their new realities, the trend for the women to concentrate within the Chinese business world constitutes the problematic I wish to investigate further below.

Production of the Transnational Field: The Governments

As suggested in the last section, the Chinese women often found themselves engaged within the Chinese business world. This business world should be understood as different from ethnic enclave businesses. It is also drastically different from the kind of Mandarin capitalism or Confucian capitalism that Ong describes in South Asia; that is, a form of capitalism based primarily on fraternity networks. 36 The type of business practices that the research participants engaged in signal distinct ways global capitalism is accomplished today in the Asian Pacific rim, which produces possible transnational engagements for the women. In the following two sections, I examine a multitude of institutions as they conjoin labor and capital in order to understand the organization of the transnational social field. In the current section, attention is paid to how governments on both sides have mobilized particular kinds of mobility in the competition for human and economic resources.

Troubling the Elite Façade of the Transnational Social Field: Discussion and Conclusion

Chinese transnationalism is an expanding phenomenon. To understand its constitution, it is necessary to approach it as being generated as part and parcel of global capitalism. This paper takes on this challenge by tracing the migratory and career pathways of some professional Chinese immigrant women and a multitude of actors, including not only the government, but also public and private institutions and community-based organizations that participate in joining skilled labor and economic or monetary capital floating in the Asian Pacific area. The study might have provided anecdotal evidence on surplus capitals from China trotting the world. Global studies, however, have unequivocally pointed to the rising economic power of China in the global arena. 51 It is likely this very economic context that makes Chinese transnational engagements a common practice for many. This large economic narrative, however, has to be read in conjunction with the contradictions and crises that people experience in their everyday world. In other words, despite its elitist façade, it should be noted that the transnational social field itself is fragile, contradictory, and prone to crises.

Global Chinese capitalism can be considered as a modernist project of China as it ratchets up its game in the global arena. Although it celebrates entrepreneurial and skilled subjects, not every skill, and not every Chinese body overseas is the desired subject within the transnational field. Free-floating capital from China are often in quest of scientific and technological skills that are directly relevant to the development needs of national economies. Not every skilled Chinese can become the desired transnational subjects either. Those who have a better chance within the transnational social field are often those with foreign training, hence endowed with Western cultural capital (i.e., degrees from the West).

For those who fulfil the profile of transnational entrepreneurial subjects and venture into the transnational field, there might be a hefty social cost to pay. In this study, the women, particularly those who are more entrepreneurial, tend to live transnational family lives. In fact, all 15 women, except for one, lived transnational family lives for at least a period of time. They “chose” transnational family lives because their desired life space is often not their desired economic space. Although some of them seem to ride on the neoliberal im/migration policies in both China and Canada, flexible citizenship was not found to be a sustainable plan for the women. In fact, to maintain flexible citizenship, the women had to stay flexible with their career plans. Furthermore, long-distance relationships, in some cases, not only took a toll on the spousal relationship, but also on the relationship between parents and children. Some of the women who accompanied their children as single parents in Vancouver were visibly unhappy during the interviews. One chose to divorce and remarry because of the long-distance relationship. In one family, the children were distanced from their father and stopped communicating with him as a result of his long absence as well as cultural clashes when they started living together again. Although the transnational field presents an elite façade, just as capitalism itself that is full of contradictions and crisis, there may be deeper social crevices in the corresponding lifeworld that circular migrants have to face.