Commentary response to reviewers

I thank the reviewers for their insightful comments on Citizens in Motion. The book seeks to steer migration and citizenship studies towards analysing emigration, immigration and remigration trends under the same framework – an approach which the book terms ‘contemporaneous migration’ – rather than treating them as discrete phenomenon for study. Citizens in Motion shows how studying these migration trends simultaneously draws out contestations over rights and belonging within a migration site, as well as the citizenship constellations that are forged across migration sites. Such an approach highlights the multiple, contingent ways in which fraternity (i.e. similarity) and alterity (i.e. difference) interface, not only in the countries where migrants have moved abroad but also the countries which they have left. The book uses the case of Chinese migration in Canada and Singapore to illustrate these examples, and further examines the changes taking place in China, the ‘ancestral land’, which is fast evolving into an immigration society. In so doing, Citizens in Motion also draws out the interethnic and co-ethnic tensions that coexist in multicultural societies experiencing multidirectional migration.

Ishan Ashutosh approaches the book’s arguments through the lens of critical diaspora studies, rightly noting that ‘diaspora’ – as an object of study – should not be treated as an ‘appendage of the nation state’. Ashutosh’s reading of Citizens in Motion reiterates the book’s central aims to ‘[prie] apart…essentialised notions of culture’, in particular the assumed affinity between co-ethnics, as well as bring to view the effects of ‘temporal coding’ (Ho, 2019: 55) on debates and practices of citizenship and belonging. Incisively, Ashutosh captures a theoretical puzzle that the book engages with by asking ‘what are the implications of routing migration theory through contemporaneous migration – emigration, immigration and remigration – instead of diaspora’s mobilities of dispersal, settlement, connections, and return?’. A concise response would be that Citizens in Motion draws from both critical diaspora and transnationalism studies, but it also destabilises the tendency of research in these fields to deploy spatial imaginations that fix migration hubs as either ‘sending’ or ‘receiving’ sites. As Ashutosh observes, the book also addresses the significance of temporality in the social constructions of race and ethnicity that undergird both nation and diaspora. This analysis of temporality is not only limited to the states’ narrative of time but also the discordant temporalities experienced by migrants themselves (e.g. Chapter 2). Where I depart from Ashutosh’s reading of Citizens in Motion is that the book does more than ‘privilege the mobility of those entitled to formal rights’; rather it extends analyses of citizenship by showing how the formal rights that a migrant-turned-citizen has acquired may not be rights that he or she can exercise (e.g. employment and social rights) if compelled to remigrate on account of deskilling and integration challenges in the country of naturalisation (see Chapter 3). The book also observes that formal rights do not translate automatically into recognition and acceptance by more established members of the polity (i.e. earlier cohorts of migrants-turned-citizens).

Contestations over the right to belong are addressed throughout the book by bringing together four research projects, which Liangni Liu observes, at first reading seem irrelevant to one another until one realises that combining them draws out ‘the complex relations that China has with other nations by emigration, immigration and remigration’. For Liu, the book’s discussion of alterity and fraternity dynamics is a productive way of interrogating the distinctions between different cohorts of Chinese co-ethnics. However, she adds that the ‘discussion of Singaporean emigrants in China in Chapter 4 does not gel well with the first section’. As Liu did not elaborate further in her review, I can only surmise that her observation refers to the way the chapter juxtaposed immigration and emigration trends in Singapore, and connected these to migration trends in China. As the chapter sought to show, territorial and temporal framings of belonging and rights persist in both the Singaporean state and society’s attitudes towards new immigrants as well as the extraterritorial reach extended by Singapore towards its diaspora (‘Singapore diaspora’). The book further illustrates how the everyday encounters that the Singaporean-Chinese experience with domestic-born Mainland Chinese sharpen a sense of difference between co-ethnics. This theme is sustained in Chapters 2 and 5 which show that the remigration of Chinese diasporic descendants identifying with different natal lands generate new axes of alterity with the domestic-born Mainland Chinese in China. In these ways, the book draws out how identity labels are created, understood and experienced among co-ethnics. Such qualitative distinctions are all the more important to investigate given recent events in Hong Kong where protests by Hong Kong-born residents against the Mainland Chinese (seen as outsiders) have sparked hate and violence, rippling to diaspora politics in countries where different groups of overseas Chinese dwell, some identifying with Hong Kong and others identifying with Mainland China. Similar dynamics differentiating co-ethnics can also be observed in countries that experience immigration and emigration simultaneously, such as Australia, Germany, Ireland, Israel, India, Japan, Korea and more – what remains is for researchers to excavate how fraternity and alterity manifest in contemporary times under new pressures for identity consolidation vis-à-vis fragmentation.

Related to such diversification of co-ethnic identities are the vantage points that we bring to our analyses of migration and citizenship. Pu Hao’s critique of Citizens in Motion draws from Chinese notions of family and ‘native-place community’ that are premised on Confucianism. While the book recognises – through its discussion of tianxia (all-under-heaven) – the cultural ideologies underpinning how migration and ethnicity are linked to lineage and spatial organisation, it does not assume that such geographical imaginations should determine spatial organicism or social orders (e.g. naturalising the myth of blood ties or provincialism). What emerges from Hao’s review of Citizens in Motion is the vantage point assumed by the reader: Although the reader identifies as a sojourner, his vantage point is one that emanates from a culturalist perspective rooted in China. In a different spirit, Citizens in Motion urges readers to be reflexive of, not only the situated knowledges we embody (i.e. vantage points) but also the situated knowledges of those to whom we relate. Hao also suggests in his review that the book’s engagement with ‘cognitive taxonomies’ is based on psychology theories, when in fact the book draws its inspiration from political and cultural theorists (Mezzadra and Nielson, 2013). In similar vein as them, Citizens in Motion considers the varied contexts and cultural dynamics that shape identity and migration. Throughout the book chapters, distinctive logics of fraternity and alterity are discussed – as manifested in Canada, Singapore and China – shaped by and shaping history, politics and society. The book compares state narratives of fraternity and alterity with the lived realities of overseas and returnee Chinese – elicited through a decade of ethnographic research – bringing attention to ‘the multiple ways in which alterity manifests’ (Ho, 2019: 89) across different geographical and cultural contexts. Hao’s interpretation of issues around suzhi (‘quality’) as a ‘mismatch between a person’s behaviour and attitude with the morality, responsibility, and demeanour expected for his/her position’ reflects a reading of suzhi that gives it a priori status, rather than understanding it as a ‘corporeal politics of quality’ with an ‘indeterminancy of meaning [that] operates as a kind of floating signifier, or the holding of a differential, as it traverses the complex terrain of economic, social, and political relationships’ (Anagnost, 2004: 197; also see Yan, 2008). While extant conceptualisations of suzhi has centred on class differentials or rural migration to cities in China, Citizens in Motion considers how discourses of suzhi operate fluidly in an international context through migration to legitimise development-based national hierarchies that are associated with one’s personhood and national background, while also intersecting with other identity axes. As a marker of alterity, discourses of suzhi, as Chapter 5 shows, are contingent on social context and mutable across space.

In her review, Lynn Staeheli helpfully brings greater nuance to the book’s central arguments on temporality as a subjective understanding of time ‘that is neither linear nor measurable’. Reiterating the importance of studying relationships – rather than merely patterns – produced during and through migration, Staeheli reminds readers of the book’s central arguments of how temporality features in feelings of fraternity and alterity, with both occurring simultaneously rather than operating individually. Echoing her call to explore ‘the ways that movements are lived and experienced in the ordinary lives of people’, Citizens in Motion begins such a task by providing a conceptual framework that brings together multidirectional migration trends and their impact on citizenship transformation within and across nation states. While the book focuses on Chinese migration, its conceptual explorations – anchored on empirical analyses of relationships and lived realities that I could share only in limited ways given word constraints – will hopefully be translatable into other research contexts and adapted to their attendant cultural specificities, carving out new pathways for our future conceptualisation of migration and citizenship.