Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Creation of a Nonexistent Group: Sino-Vietnamese Couples in China’s Borderlands

The Creation of a Nonexistent Group: Sino-Vietnamese Couples in China’s Borderlands ABSTRACT: Marriage migration to mainland China has only recently attracted attention in public and academic discourse. Driven by a complex combination of structural and personal factors, many of these marriages remain unregistered, and understanding them requires a different approach than that used to study other international marriages in the region. To date, most discussions have addressed the phenomenon from a legal, demographic, or economic perspective. Considered as illegal migrants, many of the foreign women involved in these marriages are reduced to silence. Based on the specific case of Vietnamese women engaged in de facto marriages with Chinese men in China’s southern borderlands, this article describes several factors affecting this social group: the condition of “nonexistence” that the couples experience in their daily lives; the local response to their presence in Chinese communities; and the ambivalent position of governmental bodies regarding their residence and life in China. This ground-level perspective demonstrates how the apparent tolerance of this complex phenomenon may, in the long term, actually create more disturbance in local communities than would be expected. This article reveals how significant gaps between official migration policies and actual practices of governance at the local level limit the social integration of marginalized individuals by sustaining the conditions for their long-term invisibility. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review University of Hawai'I Press

The Creation of a Nonexistent Group: Sino-Vietnamese Couples in China’s Borderlands

Download PDF
29 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/university-of-hawai-i-press/the-creation-of-a-nonexistent-group-sino-vietnamese-couples-in-china-s-gBoCn9eRDd

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
University of Hawai'I Press
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute of Korean Studies, Korea University
ISSN
2158-9674
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Marriage migration to mainland China has only recently attracted attention in public and academic discourse. Driven by a complex combination of structural and personal factors, many of these marriages remain unregistered, and understanding them requires a different approach than that used to study other international marriages in the region. To date, most discussions have addressed the phenomenon from a legal, demographic, or economic perspective. Considered as illegal migrants, many of the foreign women involved in these marriages are reduced to silence. Based on the specific case of Vietnamese women engaged in de facto marriages with Chinese men in China’s southern borderlands, this article describes several factors affecting this social group: the condition of “nonexistence” that the couples experience in their daily lives; the local response to their presence in Chinese communities; and the ambivalent position of governmental bodies regarding their residence and life in China. This ground-level perspective demonstrates how the apparent tolerance of this complex phenomenon may, in the long term, actually create more disturbance in local communities than would be expected. This article reveals how significant gaps between official migration policies and actual practices of governance at the local level limit the social integration of marginalized individuals by sustaining the conditions for their long-term invisibility.

Journal

Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review – University of Hawai'I Press

Published: Dec 16, 2015

There are no references for this article.