Chinese New Migrants In Suriname

This book covers various aspects of New Chinese Migration in Suriname in the 1990s and early 2000s. It is an ethnography of New Chinese Migrants in the context of South- South migration, but also a first ethnography of Chinese in Suriname, as well as an analysis of Surinamese ethnic discourse and ethnopolitics. Starting in the 1990s, renewed immigration from China changed the dynamics of the Surinamese Chinese community, which developed from a Hakka enclave to a culturally and linguistically diverse, modern Chinese migrant group. Local positioning strategies of Chinese had always depended on ethnic entrepreneurship and political participation, but were now complicated by anti-immigrant sentiments.

This book will enlarge our grasp of global migration phenomena, offering insights into the fascinating, at times startling, realities of human migration in Asia. The chapters presented in this volume offer variety in not only theme but in approach to migration in Southeast and East Asia. Particularly welcome for a volume on migration studies, a discipline that has long been dominated by economists, sociologists, and geographers, are the chapters that approach the subject from an anthropological or ethnological perspective. These chapters bring to our attention details of the lives of migrants and their communities that are often lost in studies of migration statistics, the economic aspects of migration, or aspects of urban geography with which we have become more familiar. Some chapters are more theoretical in nature and herein lie some of the most important reasons for studying migration involving Asian countries: migration studies have, until relatively recently, developed their theoretical insights on the basis of European migration to North America. Asian migration offers new theoretical challenges to migration scholars; its dynamism is such that predictions of what is to come are not for the risk averse. The empirical studies here provide fascinating details of the strategies used by asylum seekers, of marriage migration, of the role of homeland languages in education, of the workings of ethnic entrepreneurs, of the media’s role in sustaining Chinese communities, and on the incentive structures that are helping to shape return flows to China. For readers who are from Asian countries, this book will illuminate the changes that are taking place in your region as a result of migration. For readers from developed and other societies, it will provide new insights into migration involving this understudied part of the world, an area that supplies the lion’s share of immigrants to developed economies, and the area whose rapid economic development will soon make it their greatest competition for migrants, especially the highly skilled.

With the rapid economic development of China and the overall shift in the global political economy, there is now the emergence of new Chinese on the move. These new Chinese migrants and diasporas are pioneers in the establishment of multiple homes in new geographical locations, the development of new (global and hybrid) Chinese identities, and the creation of new (political, economic and social) inspirations through their mobile lives. This book identifies and examines new forms and paths of Chinese migration since the 1980s. It provides updated trends of migration movements of the Chinese, including their emergent geographies. With chapters highlighting the diversities and complexities of these new waves of Chinese migration, this volume offers novel insights to enrich our understanding of Asian mobility in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The book will be of interest to academics examining migration, mobility, diaspora, Chinese identity, overseas Chinese studies and Asian diaspora studies.

A concise and compelling survey of Chinese migration in global history centered on Chinese migrants and their families.

The recent unprecedented scale of Chinese migration has had far-reaching consequences. Within China, many villages have been drained of their young and most able workers, cities have been swamped by the ‘floating population’, and many rural migrants have been unable to integrate into urban society. Internationally, the Chinese have become increasingly more mobile. This Handbook provides a unique collection of new and original research on internal and international Chinese migration and its effects on the sense of belonging of migrants.

In this volume, Li Wei brings together contributions from well-known and emerging scholars in socio- and anthropological linguistics working on different linguistic and communicative aspects of the Chinese diaspora. The project examines the Chinese diasporic experience from a global, comparative perspective, with a particular focus on transnational links, and local social and multilingual realities. Contributors address the emergence of new forms of Chinese in multilingual contexts, family language policy and practice, language socialization and identity development, multilingual creativity, linguistic attitudes and ideologies, and heritage language maintenance, loss, learning and re-learning. The studies are based on empirical observations and investigations in Chinese communities across the globe, including well-researched (from a sociolinguistic perspective) areas such as North America, Western Europe and Australia, as well as under-explored and under-represented areas such as Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, and the Middle East; the volume also includes detailed ethnographic accounts representing regions with a high concentration of Chinese migration such as Southeast Asia. This volume not only will allow sociolinguists to investigate the link between linguistic phenomena in specific communities and wider socio-cultural processes, but also invites an open dialogue with researchers from other disciplines who are working on migration, diaspora and identity, and those studying other language-based diasporic communities such as the Russian diaspora, the Spanish diaspora, the Portuguese diaspora, and the Arabic diaspora.

Despite its modest size, the republic of Suriname is today the site of many distinctive processes of globalization. This intersectional study teases out the complex relationships among class, gender, and ethnic identity over the course of Suriname's modern history, from the capital city of Paramaribo to the country's resource-rich rainforest.