Abstract
James Farrer’s International Migrants in China’s Global City presents a rarely seen longitudinal and qualitative study of how a Chinese city and the multicultural society inhabiting it have evolved over two decades. Across six empirical chapters, Farrer’s book provides a multifaceted analysis of how post-socialist Shanghai has transformed and is continuing to transform through the inflows and outflows of expatriate and transnationally mobile Chinese populations. It traces the changes observed in Shanghai’s expatriate community across a range of themes and settings, from belonging and urban placemaking to social capital and sexual identities, as well as expatriate institutions such as the workplace and international schools.
Farrer draws on an extended period of ethnography in Shanghai, likening his book to an “autobiography” (xi). Indeed, we (the readers) accompany him on his repeat journeys to Shanghai over the years as we turn the book’s pages; through rich narratives, we meet the people he encountered, visualize the scenes he saw, and partake in the intellectual journey he undertook. The book engages thoughtfully with current conceptual debates on critical expatriate studies, postcolonial migration, race studies (particularly “Whiteness” and “Chineseness”) and its intersection with class and sexuality, as well as institutional sociology, among others.
Most provocatively, Farrer forwards the view that postcolonialism may no longer be an adequate scholarly lens for understanding what transpires in rapidly changing global cities like Shanghai, where the racial privilege once associated with “White” mobility collides with the domestic advantage and transnational resources of the globally mobile Chinese. Rather, Farrer draws our attention to the way that the complexities of Chinese business culture entrench the ethnic privilege of the Chinese who have accrued considerable global education and experience, while eroding the power of once-dominant expatriate institutions. Farrer’s arguments illuminate the fluid power dynamics at work, once we bring into view not only migrant inflows but also the outflows and return migration of domestic populations or re-migration of diasporic descendants to the ancestral land. With the latter groups acquiring or embodying new permutations of “cosmopolitan” identities, their statuses rub uncomfortably against those of foreigners whose international backgrounds and cultural capital were once associated exclusively with cosmopolitanism.
While Farrer’s observations on pathways for transnational cultural mobility among the new Chinese mobile elites are to be appreciated, at various junctures, the book alludes to, but glosses over, the heterogeneity of the Chinese populations converging and diverging in Shanghai. Incorporating the latter perspective could have deepened insights on the “mobility lattices” (200) and transnational social fields inhabited by different types of Chinese within the global city (e.g., deskilled returnees; diasporic descendants who re-migrated from abroad and are associated with a range of developmental and socioeconomic attributes).
Also illustrating the convergence of transnational social fields among expatriate and transnationally mobile Chinese communities is Farrer’s discussion of their social reproduction spheres in Shanghai. In highlighting the way expatriates navigate their children’s schooling experience — including moving from local Chinese schools to Asian-based, and subsequently Western-based, international schools — Farrer draws out the politics of cosmopolitanism reflected in their experiences of negotiating cultural differences to acquire what they perceive to be the benefits of selective localization (e.g., language skills and cultural exposure) for their children. Farrer further interweaves other aspects of social reproduction into the discussion, such as expatriate families’ relations with the ah yi (professional domestic helpers, usually from rural China) who work in their homes and the limited extent to which expatriate children are exposed to Chinese society. His account depicts the classed, rural–urban, local–foreign divides that characterize expatriate experiences in Shanghai. The manifold dimensions he elicits show how expatriation emerges as a processural experience, rather than a condition.
Throughout the book, Farrer engages with the relational aspects of the people, places, and processes highlighted in the themes and settings mentioned above. His compelling account of the new Shanghailanders provides a nuanced analysis of a metropolis and its people as they undergo change borne out of globalization and migration, experienced alongside the countervailing pull of localization and place-making processes.