Abstract
The increasing numbers of foreigners coming to live and work in Chinese cities raise important questions about how ethnic diversity can best be managed and utilized within the existing community governance structure in China. An ethnographic study was undertaken in a rapidly diversifying neighborhood in a second-tier Chinese city. Interviews, focus groups, questionnaires, and document analysis supplemented in-depth participant observation in the community over a period of two years. The lowest level of government in urban China, the Residents’ Committee (RC), was used as a platform for developing a community-based project which aimed to promote self-governance and integration of foreign migrants. The project had limited success, however, due to the experience of contradictory and confusing understandings of the project motivations by members of the migrant community. This chapter outlines the role of the RC and the challenges posed by the presence of foreigners in the community. Responses to these challenges included the appointment of a foreign representative to the community; the employment of a social work organization to lead a project to foreigner integration; and the use of culture-learning as a tool to increase both legitimacy and civility. The chapter describes the responses to the project by foreigners in the community which highlight the complex relationship between the Chinese state, international migration, and social engineering.
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Notes
- 1.
The language of contemporary migration is contested and indicates a need for nuanced understandings of the relationships between privilege , temporality, and the migration experience. While those moving to perform unskilled labor and those moving from the developing South are often referred to as ‘migrants’, skilled laborers and those from the developed North are more often referred to as ‘expatriates’—a term fraught with post-colonial connotations, power dynamics, and a sense of temporary stay. For further discussion of the language of migration, see Lehmann (2014), Leonard (2010), Fechter (2007), and Fechter and Walsh (2012). For the purposes of this chapter, I refer to ‘migrants’ indicating that these stories need to be located within larger migration discourses and literature, and as ‘foreigners’ as this is the term used by the people themselves and the host population to refer to international people living and working in their cities.
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The Residents’ Committee structure is arguably the successor to a previous form of pre-Mao communitarian neighborhood management known as the bao jia system, a traditional institution of hierarchical and mutual neighborhood policing and eliminated following the communist reform of Chinese cities in 1948 and 1949 (Tomba 2014, p. 11).
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See also Yan and Gao (2007).
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The participants in the cultural classes were predominantly women. This reflects the gendered approach by the RC and social work agency when designing the program. ‘Housewives’ were the stated target participants and promotional material was directed at ‘overseas ladies’ to ‘enable them to learn about Chinese culture and fuse into community life through the learning process’ (BSWSC 2015). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to address gendered constructions in community management programs. For further on this, the gendered experiences of ‘Western’ migrants in Xiamen were addressed in a previous work (Lehmann 2014) and by Leonard (this volume).
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Lehmann, A. (2019). Creating and Managing an International Community: Immigration, Integration, and Governance in a Mainland Chinese City. In: Lehmann, A., Leonard, P. (eds) Destination China. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54433-9_9
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