About the book
This open access book explores the role of family, public, market and third sector welfare provision for individual and households’ decisions regarding geographical mobility. It challenges the state-centred approach in research on welfare and migration by emphasising migrants’ own reflections and experiences. It asks whether and in which ways different welfare concerns are part of migrants’ decisions regarding (or aspirations for) mobility. Employing a transnational and a translocal perspective, the book addresses different forms of geographical mobility, such as immigration, emigration, and re-migration, circular and return migration. By bringing in empirical findings from across a variety of Western and non-Western contexts, the book challenges the Eurocentric focus in current debates and contributes to a more nuanced and more integrated global account of the welfare-migration nexus.
From familial pressure to seeking one’s fortune
For many Chinese students, educational sojourns abroad are seen as an alternative route to social mobility. This view is often shared by the students’ parents, who can therefore go to great lengths to pay for these sojourns. Some take up loans from friends and family, empty their savings or even sell their homes in order to fund their children’s studies. While they have high expectations that their children will become successful, the convention of familial eldercare acts as a ticking clock. As their parents age, the sojourning youth seeking their fortune know that they are expected to eventually return. This chapter is based on an ethnographic study of a group of Chinese international students in Norway. The topics addressed here are, frst, what motivated them to travel, second, their aspirations for the future and third, how they envision their present experiences as facilitating this future.
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Alexander Gamst Page
From Familial Pressure to Seeking One’s Fortune: Chinese International Students’ Search for Geographical and Social Mobility as a Response to Societal and Familial Pressures
In: Migration to and from Welfare States. Lived Experiences of the Welfare–Migration Nexus in a Globalised World
Oleksandr Ryndyk, Brigitte Suter, Gunhild Odden (eds.)
Springer International Publishing (2021)
ISBN: 978-3-030-67614-8 (hardcover) / 978-3-030-67617-9 (softcover) / 978-3-030-67615-5 (ebook)
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-67615-5