Singaporean and British transmigrants in China and the cultural politics of ‘contact zones’

Abstract

The international migration of professional workers has increased in scope over the past 20 years as skilled workers are needed when companies’ activities cross national borders. While this trend has been recognised from an economic perspective, much less has been researched from a social and cultural angle. Using case studies of British and Singaporean migration to China, this paper employs a comparative frame to examine the effect of cultural differences—both in terms of business culture as well as social norms regarding ethnicity and gender—on the dynamics of the ‘contact zones’ emerging in various cities in China, including the cosmopolitan cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong, the Chinese capital city of Beijing, as well as the industrial townships of Suzhou, Wuxi and Guangzhou. As sites which invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect, ‘contact zones’ (as defined by Mary Pratt in the context of colonial encounters) are frontiers where ‘difference’ is constantly encountered and negotiated. Given very different ethno-historical linkages traced by Singaporeans and Britons to China and as a result a divergence of cultural imaginings about ‘China’, it is not unexpected that the two groups of transmigrants enact different ways of encountering life in China. The paper explores the differential politics of the Singaporean and British presences in China around three stereotypical images of the foreigner in China—the culturalist, the colonialist and the imperialist.

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