Home on the move : new Chinese immigrants to New Zealand as transnationals

• Main Author: Liu, Liangni
• Other Authors: Ip, Manying
• Published: ResearchSpace@Auckland 2011
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2292/6976

One of the most salient features of new Chinese migrants in recent years is transnational migration. The overall aim of this research is to investigate and understand Chinese transnational migration, based on a New Zealand context and the research focuses on new Chinese migrants from the People's Republic of China (PRC). This study has taken a longitudinal perspective to study PRC migrants' transnational movements and looks at their transnational migratory movements as a progressive and dynamic process. It has examined PRC migrants' initial motives for immigrating to New Zealand; the driving forces behind their adoption of a transnational lifestyle which includes leaving New Zealand to return to the PRC, moving to a third country or commuting across borders; family-related considerations; as well as their future movement intentions. The particular angle taken by this study is through exploring PRC migrants' conceptualisation of "home", citizenship, identity, and sense of belonging to provide a deeper understanding of their transnational migratory experiences. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were deployed to gather data. Qualitative interviews were conducted in multiple sites, including China, Australia and New Zealand. A quantitative online questionnaire survey was conducted globally via the World Wide Web. Both the qualitative interviews and the quantitative online survey show that PRC migrants possess great transnational mobility potential. The transnational movements that many PRC migrants engage in are the result of a combination of personal/family-related reasons and macro-level economic-political driving forces. Even though many PRC migrants originally immigrated to New Zealand for non-economic considerations, economic-related reasons contributed significantly to the decision to engage in later cross-border movements. In addition, PRC migrants intend to keep strong transnational connections with their homeland - China, as manifested by their frequent homeward travels, their strong family and personal networks, their intensive financial activities and investment in China, and a strong sense of 'being Chinese' and strong identification with China. It has been found that citizenship has no real direct effect on how PRC migrants identify themselves or their sense of belonging. In theoretical and methodological terms, this research offers some important implications. Firstly, migration studies should take a long-term perspective by looking at migration as an on-going process, a continuation of an initial moving away from a homeland. Thus, a flexible and more inclusive research framework can be formed. Secondly, the exploration of migrants' conceptualisation of “home” may open up an unconventional way of exploring how migrants' identity is constructed, and may provide valuable theoretical grounding for the understanding of the dynamic process of transnational migration. Lastly, my personal experience of conducting this research tells how powerful some traditional migration theories are in interpreting some aspects of PRC migrants' transnational movements. Some researchers in the field of migration studies passionately advocate that there is an urgent need of challenging the “old” migration theories; however, the real challenge that researchers face is how to tease out useful theoretical elements from both “old” and “new” theories and put them into use towards the research topic chosen.