Contrary to the perception that older adults are passive care dependents of their children, some Chinese older adults are becoming primary caregivers in migrant families. Using the case of Chinese older migrants who move temporarily to Singapore for grandparenting duties, this article examines the grandparenting migrants’ contributions to social reproduction through transnational care circulation and underscores how their migratory experience changes their perspectives of intergenerational familial contract. While previous studies on older migrants tend to consider the impacts of welfare support in the migrant‐receiving context, we extend that body of work by integrating analyses of the private sphere with the public sphere across the migrant‐sending and ‐receiving contexts to examine how transformations in both domains impact the grandparenting migrants’ ageing subjectivities. Our findings reveal gradual changes to the intergenerational familial contract in Chinese migrant families. The grandparenting migrants minimise their expectations of intergenerational reciprocity and instead emphasise the well‐being of the next generation and maintaining their autonomy in later life. Their aspiration for independent ageing, we argue, is made possible by the expanded state social protection in the homeland and the realisation that depending on their migrant children for old age care could be impractical and unfavourable for both generations
Migration studies typically conceptualise children as either “stayers” or “movers.” However, such binary conceptualisation is at odds with the experiences of children who cross borders frequently. Using the case of children with Hong Kong right of abode who live in southern China but commute daily to Hong Kong to pursue education, this paper examines the structural and family factors leading to this form of frequent border crossing and identifies 4 major strategies that mothers of these children use to help them overcome the barriers to acculturation. These strategies underscore the salience of the rhetoric of cultural membership as symbolic boundaries that delegitimise claims to citizenship of the perceived outsiders and the situated agency of parents in maximising the life chances of their children by helping them permeate the rigid symbolic boundary, and overcome identity ambivalence associated with their simultaneous existence in 2 politically and socially divided territories.
This article addresses the intersectional nature of intimate partner violence (IPV) against female marriage migrants in Mainland China-Hong Kong cross-border marriages. The author analyzes data from 15 battered female marriage migrants who share the same ethnicity as their husbands to illustrate how the immigration of female marriage migrants intricately intersects with gender, class, and culture to form a multifaceted system that traps battered marriage migrants in abusive marriages. It is proposed that marriage migration, as a distinct form of migration, involves certain intrinsic risk factors that make marriage migrants particularly vulnerable to IPV.
Transnational grandparenting examines the care that grandparents provide across borders, recreating familyhood. This paper investigates how Information Communication Technologies (ICT) mediate ageing in localised and transnational contexts. We focus on grandparenting migrants from the People's Republic of China who moved temporarily to Singapore and Sydney, Australia. We introduce the concept of "care technologies" to explicate two dimensions of governmentality. The first dimension considers how governmentality underpins care relations that extend from the individual and family to wider migration, care, and welfare regimes. The second dimension considers how ICT mediates care relations that are situated in place (i.e., localised) and those that extend across borders (i.e., transnational). These two dimensions of care technologies are intertwined: while ICT is given social meaning through care relations, it is their co-constitution-seemingly offering possibilities of/for care-that entrench the governmentality effects of regimes that position grandparenting migrants as transient older carers.
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