Abstract
Since the 1980s, China has become the source of a new type of international migration. In the liberal world of the 1990s, Chinese migrants became the epitome of “flexible citizenship” aimed at maximizing economic advantages. In the postliberal world of which a powerful, affluent, and repressive China is a key player, however, middle-class migrants increasingly leave China to pursue a better life defined in nonmaterial terms such as cultural authenticity, environmental purity, social solidarity, and individual freedom. As a new wave of middle-class migrants relocates to semiperipheral European destinations like Hungary, they seek refuge from the pressures of a society they see as polluted, competitive, and overly materialistic. Counterintuitively, some of these aspirations chime in with nativist ideologies espoused by the populists in their chosen homes.
Introduction
The quest for a better life that drives global migration flows is usually understood as driven by economic accumulation. Although theories of migration have become more nuanced, migrants are still seen primarily as rational economic actors aiming to maximize their incomes. In particular, Chinese migrants have been seen as paragons of flexible accumulation and resource maximization through “flexible citizenship” and “ethnic entrepreneurship” throughout modern history (Ong 1999; Zhou 2010) and often have been associated with the concept of “trading diasporas” (Cohen 2008; see also Tagliacozzo and Chang 2011). These notions suggest an ethnic network that has developed special skills to navigate various legal and social systems to their advantage while utilizing social and cultural capital to minimize risks and maximize profits. This perception has been strengthened since the 1980s by the popular business-school literature on the role of the Chinese diaspora in the economic success of the “Asian Tigers” (e.g., Weidenbaum and Hughes 1996; Redding 1993) and the influential theoretical work of Aihwa Ong (1999).
Other forms of migration—lifestyle migration, marriage migration, educational migration—are acknowledged but not taken very seriously in conceptualizing what migration is. Xiang Biao (2021) has recently suggested that we see these as a shift from “production migration” aimed at capital accumulation to “reproduction migration” intended to maintain and enhance life. Utilizing the Engelsian distinction between “the production and reproduction of the immediate essentials of life,” Xiang argues that reproduction is not only one of “the determining factor[s] in history” (Engels 1884; cited in Xiang 2021: 34), but in international migration as well. The growing number of Chinese people who migrate not for higher incomes or advancing careers but for benefiting from better education, care, lifestyle, and quality of food, air, and water in the destination attests to the emergence of reproduction as an increasingly influential determinant in migration. This trend reflects China's changing position within the global system of production and reproduction: these migrants leave China not because they need money but precisely because they have it.
From Golden Venture to Golden Visas
When mainland China reemerged onto the global migration scene in the 1990s, it was at a time of global neoliberal transformation and relative economic deregulation in China itself. This was a time of rags-to-riches stories, when starting a small business (known as xiahai 下海 [jumping into the sea]) was the most popular path to upward mobility, when Jack Ma started his English-teaching business, and when “selling tea-pickled eggs pays more than developing a nuclear bomb” (kaifa yuanzidan buru mai chayedan 開發原子彈不如賣茶葉蛋) was a popular saying among academics. The first migration flows from a reopened China were of contract workers (mostly in construction carried out by state companies in Africa and Asia), students (at first mostly graduate students in North America, Australia, and Japan) and small entrepreneurs, many of whom had been laid off by state enterprises and were now selling Chinese-made consumer goods in Eastern Europe and elsewhere (Nyíri 2011). All of these flows can be seen as aiming at accumulation. (Accumulation need not be directed at economic capital; it can also work via the conversion of different forms of capital [Bourdieu 1986], such as the translation of university degrees into better-paying jobs.) Entrepreneurial migration, though overwhelmingly legal, attracted public attention through tragedies involving illegal migrants, such as the shipwreck of the Golden Venture in New York Harbor in 1993 and the discovery of fifty-eight corpses in a refrigerator truck in Dover in 2000.
The “emigration gold rush” (chuguo taojin re 出國淘金熱), as it was called, captured the public imagination in China. It became the subject of fiction (e.g., Chen D. and Chen M. 1997) and numerous TV dramas set in Moscow, Paris, New York, and Tokyo, the first and best-known being Pekingers in New York (1994), based on Glen Cao's autobiographically inspired 1992 novel The Chinese Woman of Manhattan. A lurid romanticism of the frontier characterized this genre. Typically, its heroes were solitary men who found their way to the global city, and after many misadventures and much chiku 吃苦 (eating bitterness), outwitted “whitey” (laowai 老外) on his own turf and struck it rich. As Geremie Barmé (1999) shows in his analysis of Pekingers in New York, the theme of upending racial hierarchies was an important one in the genre (cf. Nyíri 2006). This was also a period of rising popular nationalism marked by the popularity of books such as China Can Say No (Zhongguo keyi shuo bu), published in 1996 (Song, Zhang, and Qiao 1996). The West, in this genre, was a rather generic backdrop of modernity, marked by skyscrapers and fast cars, which often contrasted with the squalor endured by the protagonists. Struggling to make their way from rags to riches, they had no time to pause on a café terrace.
While this fantasy was projected onto global cities, a more typical reality—arguably the most distinct artifact of this migration wave—was the Chinese market, which began its global career in Eastern Europe but was soon found across Africa, Southeast Asia, and South America. At the Chinese market, the migrant entrepreneurs—initially itinerant peddlers known as daoye 倒爺—who sold consumer goods included villagers from southern China but also many former employees—from state-owned trade enterprises, factories, and even banks—who had been laid off or just preferred taking the risks of entrepreneurship. At the time, middle class was not yet a term widely applied to Chinese society, but many market traders came from middling positions as midrange state employees or minor cadres with higher or secondary educations. The life stories told at the market were mostly stories of separation from family and sacrifice endured in order to make money to make life better for the children—these featured in purportedly documentary literature that included books such as Chinese in Eastern Europe: A Chronicle of the 1990s New Gold Rush Emigration (Zhongguoren zai Dongou: 1990 niandai chuguo taojin re jishi [Mao 1992]) or Tearful Danube (Leisa Duonaohe [Li 1993]). As with migrant workers inside China, the same logic of economic accumulation meant that children were often left behind.
The life stories of the 1990s are unimaginable today. Although people continue to go abroad in the name of sacrifice and chiku for the sake of a more secure future (Driessen and Xiang 2021), rags-to-riches is no longer a believable scenario. Thirty years’ economic growth coupled with decreasing upward mobility has raised incomes but produced a more stratified society. On the one hand, people have more money. They are better educated. Many lead middle-class lives, own real estate and cars, and travel abroad for leisure. On the other hand, they have no faith that they will do better in the future. On the contrary, they are afraid of losing what they have, or that their children or child will lose what they have. The risk-taking of the 1990s has given way to risk minimization. If the operative term of the 1990s was xiahai, the operative terms of the 2020s are neijuan 內捲 (involution), referring to increased efforts without improved social status (Q. Wang and Ge 2020), and tangping 躺平 (lying flat), or refusing to participate in the rat race (Sun 2021).
And yet the sort of middle-class people whose predecessors were found in the Chinese markets in Eastern Europe in 1990s are still leaving. They are not leaving to make more money. In fact, they usually don't make money abroad at all; sometimes they make some, but their main source of income remains in China. It is such migrants who make up the bulk of Chinese migrants taking advantage of the so-called “golden visa,” or immigration-for-investment schemes in Southern and Eastern Europe. Most of these schemes were started after the 2008 recession and required a relatively modest investment on the scale of several hundred thousand euros, though amounts and conditions varied. The most popular schemes have been those operated by Greece, Hungary, Portugal, and Spain. In total, these have attracted some fifty thousand Chinese migrants to Europe (Beck and Nyíri 2022; see Surak and Tsuzuki 2021 for an overview).
A Global Stage for the Chinese Middle Class—and Its Children
What, then, do we mean by middle class in China? Lu Xueyi (2002) famously defined it in terms of a combination of occupational categories, income, consumption, and ethos (cf. Nathan 2016). Our approach builds on Lu's, but, twenty years later, it requires modification because the class and income structure of Chinese society have undergone significant changes at both ends. At one end, the rich, including both private entrepreneurs and rentier members of the high echelons of bureaucracy, have become richer and more numerous; at the other end, blue-collar work in the private sector has become more precarious. We consider “the middle class” to be a useful category that can be distinguished both from “the rich” and the precariat, best defined not through income, property, occupation, education, relation to the party-state system (tizhi 體制), or even a combination of these, but rather through the structure of consumption, aspirations, and social duties. By drawing attention to the centrality of children in middle-class aspirations, Barbara Ehrenreich (1990) makes a compelling argument for including it in the definition. The reason for this is that unlike in other classes, where membership is transmitted by simple inheritance (for people at the extremes of the social spectrum, class position is inherited along with money or the lack of it), the middle class needs to reproduce each generation through the careful molding of its children. Thus, individuals who own real estate and cars; spend substantial parts of their income on optional services broadly related to social reproduction, such as extracurricular classes for children, leisure activities, and paid care for the elderly; and whose incomes or social position are not so high as to free them from worries about their reproduction in the next generation are, for us, living middle-class lives.
As Luigi Tomba (2009) has pointed out, the middle class in China is the product of meticulous reformist social engineering rather than a “natural” outcome of the country's transition to socialist market economy. It has been effectively imagined into being through policies facilitating private property acquisition and increasing leisure time and salaries for professionals in the public sector. The middle class is a crucial strategic tool for capitalist transition: it provides the consumer basis for domestic production; it carries out the professional intellectual labor new modes of production require; it provides a source of aspiration to lower classes; and last but not least, by embodying the imaginary of social mobility through open-ended meritocracy, it is the perfect ideological construct to justify rising inequality (Heiman, Freeman, and Liechty 2012). Indeed, Stephanie Donald and Yi Zheng (2009: 5) have argued that “middle-class-making [was] the foundational project for post-reform affluent China.” In identifying the new model citizen as middle class, with high cultural/educational capital and the capacity to consume, the CCP legitimized material comfort while encouraging the poor to pursue the middle-class ideology of investment-driven self-determination. Marked as “the most important actors in China's civilizing project” or the “backbone of the advanced forces of production,” the middle class is assigned an important role not only as consumers but also as spiritual prefects: as “the object, inspiration, and exemplary yardstick for contemporary governmental discourses of self-improvement” (Tomba 2009: 592).
While other post – World War II states, in East Asia and elsewhere, have played an active role in the conjuring-up of a middle class, this array of instruments deployed in a compressed time, coupled with relentless ideological shepherding in the form of “quality education” (suzhi jiaoyu 素質教育) campaigns, has few if any parallels, and it makes for a tense and ambivalent relationship between the middle class and the state. Although the usual predictions that the rise of the middle class would signal greater public resistance to authoritarian domination have proved wrong (Nathan 2016), nor do this class's aspirations entirely fit the Party's bill. As our research among middle-class Chinese migrants in Hungary shows, the better-educated and higher-aspiring middle class thus produced has embarked on a career of its own. This departure from the state project is probably best captured by the popularity of the discussion on neijuan and tangping, which reveals a fundamental middle-class unease and a capacity to act on it. Bingchun Meng (2018: 157) suggests that “middle-class identity, agenda, positionality and aspiration are all distilled into parents’ anxiety over bringing about a good life for their children.” Indeed, anxieties about maintaining class status, securing a healthy environment, and having some breathing space under China's increasingly all-encompassing surveillance regime are all projected onto one's children. It is for this reason that children are central in justifying middle-class emigration, which functions as an externalization of risks and anxieties onto a global stage.
Gracia Liu-Farrer (2016) has argued that the emigration of the wealthy is another form of accumulation through the acquisition of a particular kind of asset: overseas life experience. This might make sense in countries that are the centers of global modernity, where education, jobs, networks, or simply real estate in San Francisco or London offer symbolic capital that is convertible to class advantage in China. But if we look at the case of Hungary, or Southern European countries that have recently received middle-class Chinese migrants, we get a different picture. Middle-class Chinese leave the world cities of Shanghai, Peking, and Canton to settle in Hungary—where not only don't they make money but they also don't have access to globally convertible education or desirable jobs for the children—in order to alleviate more immediate anxieties.
From “Gold Digging” to “Lying Flat”
In the research we have been conducting among “golden visa” immigrants in Hungary, one interlocutor told us: “Our expectations are quite simple: a good enough life in a good enough environment, where the kid can be happy. However simple this sounds, we could not realize that in China.” Overwhelmingly, and almost uniformly, migrants name their reasons to migrate as clean air, safe food, a green environment, a relaxed lifestyle, and most of all an escape from “involution” in a society they see as polluted, expensive, ruthlessly competitive, and overly materialistic. A conscious rejection of this competition is a striking element of migrants’ narratives. It is often described as an escape from an overwhelming pressure to perform—projected onto one's children but perhaps, in an unacknowledged way, relating to oneself. As one of our interlocutors put it: “In China, expectations are very high, you have to paint, you have to swim, you have to play the piano, and speak English, of course. . . . You must do everything professionally, go to training classes all the time. Our salary is not enough to pay for all the classes for the kid.” As the quotation suggests, expectations on children directly translate into immense expectations on their parents in terms of energy, time, and money—and it is exactly this pressure they seek to leave behind.
Unlike twenty years ago, these migrants are not aiming to move from a semiperiphery to a center of world modernity—or at least they say they do not. (In reality, some had applied to the EB-5 investor immigrant program in the United States, or wanted to move to Canada under the Business Immigration Program, which required an investment of C$800,000, but when their US application was rejected or the Canadian program was abruptly canceled in 2014, they quickly had to choose another destination after having already made arrangements to leave.) Instead, they are moving away from global cities to a semiperiphery; they are downscaling rather than upscaling (Beck and Nyíri 2022). In the imagination of these middle-class migrants, Europe is no longer a proxy for the generic West but is cast in contradistinction to both China and the Anglo-American world that are understood as excessively competitive (Nyíri 2017). The dream in these stories is not modern life among skyscrapers but slow life in a green, culturally and historically rich, infrastructurally amenable, and—as we will discuss below—racially white urban setting that is seen as distinct from North American and Australian modernity (Nyíri and Beck 2020). The protagonists are not heroes or villains who struggle and sacrifice, but happy nuclear families. This is a sort of overseas tangping dream that rejects the imperative of constant development and getting ahead in the name of staying still and enjoying the moment.
One of our informants told us that he and his wife do not like high-rises and had not been to either North America or Australia; instead, they “yearned” for European culture and architecture. After moving to Hungary, he took a wine-tasting course, bought an espresso machine, and is experimenting with different sorts of coffee. They took two three-week driving holidays in Italy, including a detour to the vineyards of Barolo. Another couple say they rejected the idea of moving to the United States because of the proliferation of guns and drugs there—not good for raising a boy. A young mother whose husband works in the United States said she was reluctant to move to America, a country founded, she says, by unpatriotic people. Rather, she wanted to expose her four-year-old daughter to European culture before their eventual move to the United States. She takes her daughter to museums and on trips to Western Europe; at home, she has her listen to Peking opera and recite classical Chinese poetry. Many migrants emphasize Hungary's “rich cultural environment” as something that compensates for its “poverty and shabbiness.” As one mother told us, “You've got to have culture.”
The centrality of the child in these migrant narratives is remarkable, especially if we compare them to the 1990s, in which the present of the child was absent, although its future often loomed explicitly or implicitly behind the narratives of sacrifice. Not only did all of our interlocutors (bar one) move to Hungary with their children, but most of them explicitly named their child's needs and the necessity to provide a suitable physical, social, and educational environment for them as the primary reason behind relocation. Whereas for 1990s migrants, the family meant the more or less extended kin whose material welfare was presented as the purpose of (mostly male) migration (whether or not they actually ended up benefiting), for today's middle-class migrants the family is the nuclear family whose primary function is emotional care, and which constitutes the ideal form of child-rearing.
As Ehrenreich suggests, what defines the middle class is its children, and more particularly its specific ideas and practices about child-rearing. One of the proxies for middle-class status is what Ehrenreich (1990: 83) sees as professionalism (which Bourdieu would call habitus) that is acquired through investment in long-term education: “All that parents can do is attempt, through careful molding and psychological pressure, to predispose each child to retrace the same long road they themselves once took.” Similarly, Annette Lareau (2003) observes that “concerted cultivation”—as opposed to working-class “natural growth parenting”—defines middle-class child- rearing. These observations can be applied to China's middle class in equal measure.
However, the popularity of “intensive parenting,” or parents’ hands-on involvement with their children's daily lives, among today's Chinese middle class has had ambivalent consequences. Widely seen as making parents responsible for securing their child's competitiveness through the cultivation of their talents, it has exacerbated an ultracompetitive environment for children, in which money and time became increasingly coveted—yet inherently limited—resources, an environment migrant parents say they fled from (Yang X. 2021).
Moreover, because in practice it is usually mothers who attend to the child's emotional needs and shuttle them from one extracurricular activity to the next, “intensive parenting,” despite its foreign origins, has contributed to what Yan Yunxiang (2021: 223 – 52) sees as the revival of the Confucian ideal of the “virtuous womanhood” under a state-led ideology of “neo-familism.” Indeed, in some cases—as with Hong Kong “astronauts” in 1990s Canada (Ong 1999)—it is the mother who stays with the child in Hungary and becomes a full-time housewife, usually having quit a white-collar job in China, while the husband stays in China and continues to earn an income. Quitting one's career in order to relocate to the other side of the world and provide one's child with the best environment—less stress, less studying, more time, and blue skies—has emerged as a new pattern of motherly sacrifice. But in other cases, both parents move to Hungary and take care of the child together, living in semiretirement off income that continues to accrue from property or business in China. Many parents are vocally opposed to their own parents’ participation in raising their children and prefer to have them a continent away in a way that rather goes against China's revived discourse of filial piety. A third scenario—though certainly on a smaller scale—is enacted by stay-at-home fathers who decide to quit the rat race in order to devote their time to their child and to support their wife's career.
Ken is one such person embodying this emerging ethos of fatherly sacrifice. A biological engineering and marketing graduate, he decided to take a break from his highly paid career in order to take his son to Hungary before school age and devote all his time and energy to smoothening his transition to the new country. Rather than waiting until his late thirties or early forties, as most middle-class Chinese men do, he opted to have a child early on, already planning to leave China for a less stressful and cleaner environment for child-rearing. Soon after his son was born, he submitted a US immigrant investor visa application, which was rejected after a three-year wait. At this point Dan, his son, had only one year left before having to start school, and Ken and his wife felt they had to find a quick way out. “Both my wife and I have studied in China, and we think education is not going in the right direction . . . I think you can learn only if you enjoy studying. In the Chinese education system that's simply impossible.” Ken made his peace with Hungary because “the country might be small, but at the end of the day, the only thing that matters is that Dan is happy and is growing up enjoying life and developing his own personality.”
At least initially, then, these parents do not look for the utility of educational outcomes in terms of their convertibility to global careers by moving to places associated with global wealth and power (Liu 1996), which may lead to upward mobility for children (Woronov 2008), but rather they seek less stress and more free time, indicating that they are less concerned with future social mobility and more with the present, affective quality of life (Beck and Nyíri 2022). Instead of attempting to compete by conforming to the prescribed models of achievement and trajectories for social mobility, the families in our study utilize the capital they already accumulated to opt out of that competition early on and open up new opportunities in the transnational sphere, thereby creating “a room for maneuvering, and for altering the trajectories that were seemingly laid out at birth” (Orellana et al. 2001: 587).
Interestingly, many of these parents choose ordinary public schools for their child's education in Hungary. As one of our interlocutors mentioned, the agency that introduced the Hungarian immigration scheme to her advertised the country as having “excellent free education.” She recited the internalized idea that even though Hungary was a small country, “it's a nation that loves studying.” This claim is usually supported not by test results or state spending on education—both would locate Hungarian education in the bottom segment of the region—but by the number of Nobel Prize winners. In the opinion of these Chinese parents, free access, in contrast to the overt commodification of education in China, is part of what “good education” means. A young single mother in Budapest who manages a translation company in Wuhan described her process of school selection in the following way: “My primary objective when choosing a school for my son was not really an educational standard, but to find teachers who are not only kind and devoted to children but are also unconditionally welcoming toward immigrant children.” Keeping to her word, instead of opting for a private international school in Budapest's upper-class districts, she chose a relatively run-down public school in the heart of an ill-reputed inner-city district of Budapest that is famous for its inclusiveness. But why would she need to move to the other side of the world to find a school that does not discriminate against Chinese students? As this reasoning suggests, what our interlocutors were looking for was really anything that was different from Chinese education (Beck and Nyíri 2022).
Over time, however, parents tend to become more ambivalent about the wisdom of such a choice, and anxiety about losing out begins to cast a shadow on the ideal of a carefree and happy childhood. Indeed, one group on the WeChat social media app catering to some three hundred Chinese parents in Budapest, where members initially shared leisure tips, gradually evolved into a high-pressure environment where members give each other tips about more efficient studying habits and extracurricular classes. As one remorseful but ambivalent confession in the group read, “I am an extremely lazy mother. I got so tired under the high pressure of education back home, so after we came to B[udapest] I just let go [laughing-crying face emoji]; apart from making sure there's enough to eat, drink, and use, I feel I have been far too careless about her studies, I regret it so much, I have to focus more [sorry face emoji].” Still, the initial rationale is an important departure from the utility-driven transnational educational choices familiar from the Chinese context (Hansen and Thøgersen 2015) that are generally understood as the direct outcome of what Andrew Kipnis (2011) has identified as the pervasive “educational desire” that has become a determining force in Chinese society. This is so even if parents who explicitly endorse freedom and try to reintroduce free time into the vocabulary—and practice—of child-rearing may rationalize their choices by believing that enabling a child to develop their inner propensities might make him or her more competitive in the long run.
If we want to look for a pop culture representation of this migration, it may be Where Are We Going Daddy?, a hugely popular reality show in which fans can vicariously participate in the family lives of China's most popular celebrities. In each episode, a celebrity “daddy” goes on a trip with his child, within China or abroad. The destination is kept secret from the child, who has to figure it out after arrival. Because the concept is to show fathers taking care of their children in an unfamiliar environment while their wives, back in China, watch and comment, Chinese authorities have praised the series for its zheng nengliang 正能量 (positive energy), as it putatively promotes progressive family values (Keane and Zhang 2017; Hird 2018). Several episodes of Daddy were filmed in Hungary in 2018, and although their direct—intended—effect was to promote tourism rather than migration to Hungary (Sherry Snow Pear 2018), the show's images of consuming wholesome food in the Hungarian countryside combined with father-child bonding reflects the fantasies of many migrant parents.
Looking for the Pure Land
Europe—in contradistinction to the global cities of liquid, hybrid ultramodernity—has long been a purveyor of slowness, luxury, “authenticity,” and purity in such things as food, cosmetics, or “culture” to the global middle and upper classes. In the past twenty years, we have seen the rise of a middle-class pursuit of authenticity in China as well. Authenticity and purity can be related to safety when it comes to food, baby formula, or cosmetics. We know how powerful the fears of contamination and adulteration are in contemporary China; Yan (2012), among others, has written about the centrality of such fears in debates about morality. But authenticity has also become prized when it comes to architecture, dwellings, and antiques: here, state-backed neotraditionalism has coalesced with the rising middle-class quest for consumable culture to produce the heritage fever that has been much written about (Silverman and Blumenfield 2013; Zhu and Maags 2020). Even the countryside has been remarkably resignified in this recent period, from the locus of backwardness to the location of genuine Chinese culture, from the location of dirt to the location of purity.
And as the Chinese middle class laments that there is little left of the authentic self to be consumed, Europe becomes the unadulterated Other still available for consumption (Nyíri and Beck 2020). This has been reflected in dramatic changes in the preferences of Chinese tourists in Europe. In the 1990s, they were mostly looking for urban modernity—and were disappointed by the lack of skyscrapers, broad avenues, and high-tech rail networks (Nyíri 2006: 99 – 108). But in the 2010s, the focus of increasingly sophisticated middle-class travelers shifted to the delights of nature and the terroir: many were visiting the hot springs in Iceland or taking road trips to French wineries. By the end of the decade, Balkan countries like Serbia and Montenegro were among the European destinations with the steepest increases in Chinese tourist numbers (European Travel Commission 2020).
Middle-class desire for authenticity and rootedness has also manifested itself in the rising popularity of rural “communes” (X. Wang 2021). However, this desire cannot be satisfied in China, as actually moving to such a commune, or to another form of countryside living made amenable for consumption, is often prohibitively expensive (such as the much-publicized Aranya Commune in Hebei [C. Yang 2021]). Even more importantly, it means cutting one's children off from good schools and potentially attracting unwanted attention as nonconformists: discussions of tangping on social media have been deleted by government censors (E. Chen 2021). It is, therefore, cheaper, safer, and more convenient to search for this pastoral utopia elsewhere, and migrants project a feeling akin to nostalgia for a simpler life and more meaningful human relations onto Europe. Middle-class Chinese migrants remain flexible citizens in the sense that their transnational lives are enabled by a form of arbitrage of differing and unequal economic and social regimes. They benefit from wider access to such flexible citizenship made possible by the expansion of “golden visas” and other selective immigration schemes. Yet for those seeking refuge in the groundedness of terroir, flexible citizenship may have lost much of its emotional appeal. Middle-class migrants may be flexible citizens, but they want to achieve or recover—for themselves or their children—a sense of tangible cultural citizenship they feel they have lost or never had.
In this optics, lifestyle migrations may intersect in unexpected ways with currents of ideologies of environmental, cultural, and racial purity. And this is the final twist we would like to highlight. Since Max Weber, we have associated modernity with disenchantment. Ong (2005) points out how postcolonial developmentalist governments like Singapore's or Malaysia's developed discourses of cultural uniqueness meant to “reenchant” citizens in order to differentiate and legitimize their modernizing projects vis-à-vis those of the former colonial powers. Increasingly, reenchantment with culture has become a global trend in the repertoire of authoritarian populism (Mishra 2017). The new non-Euro-American consumer class emerges against the backdrop of a world racked by a populist backlash against the “liquid” and the “hybrid” celebrated by postmodern theorists, searching for something solid amid constant flux. And Hungary, because of the nativist ideology championed by its government, has a particular appeal here.
To be sure, Hungary offers middle-class Chinese migrants a quickly attainable, discounted version of Europe. But the Hungarian government's militant anti-immigration rhetoric since 2015 has made global headlines. This is an apparent paradox. Yet it seems precisely this nativism that strikes a chord with Chinese migrants. State-controlled Chinese media has portrayed Europe as failing to contain the wave of refugees bringing crime and disorder (Shi-Kupfer, Gong, and Lang 2016). This official narrative coalesced with a popular antiliberal discourse in Chinese social media, which, like the American alt-right or Hungary's prime minister Viktor Orbán, accuses liberals of betraying the interests of their countries and their historical values (Zhang 2019). In this narrative, hard-working Chinese migrants are victims of baizuo 白左 (“libtards”) who embrace undeserving queue-jumpers and undermine the values that made Europe great in the past (Zhang 2018; cf. Lin 2020). In contrast, Prime Minister Orbán (2017), while firmly rejecting immigration in general, has said that “real refugees,” who flee political correctness in Western Europe, were welcome in the country. This stance resonates with many of our interlocutors. The mother of a twelve-year-old boy who moved to Hungary from Shanghai in 2015 told us: “I like Orbán. Because he managed to keep out the riffraff. Because he knew that if he let bad people in, good people like us wouldn't come.”
In part, this is linked to a perception of safety and order: several migrants said Hungary was safer than Western European countries because it had fewer African and Muslim immigrants. After an Austrian-born ethnic Albanian man shot four people in Vienna in November 2020, the consensus on social media groups formed by Chinese “golden visa” immigrants in Hungary was that the lack of refugees in Hungary makes such an attack unlikely. A young man who graduated from a Scottish university and worked as a researcher for a Communist Party think tank but decided to move to Europe as it was “free” from the “lies of the Chinese government” mentioned the small number of Africans as the main reason for his choice of Budapest over Scotland. Similarly, when Ken had to make a quick decision about moving abroad and faced a choice between Greece, Portugal, Spain, and Hungary, he rejected the first three because of what he thought were their unstable governments and poor economy, but most importantly, the massive presence of Muslim immigrants. A country that was “relatively traditional, relatively religious,” as he assumed Hungary to be, was a safer environment for Chinese immigrants like him. Probably following Hungarian government discourse conveyed by Chinese media—but disregarding actual levels of church attendance or influence—he considered Hungary a genuinely Christian country in a way other European countries were not, and it was this feature that made the country more welcoming and inclusive in his eyes. Although initially they considered moving on to Vienna, after his son encountered what he saw as xenophobic behavior at a Vienna playground he changed his mind, saying this was not the sort of environment he wanted the child to grow up in: “I don't want him ever to be told by anyone to go back to his country.” He attributed their more positive experience in Hungary to the Christian nature of its society.
But, in addition to safety, there is another layer of meaning associated with whiteness and Christianity that has to do with purity. Worries about contamination of consumer goods (food, drugs, cosmetics) are ubiquitous in China (Yan 2012), but here suspicions of cultural contamination have a racial undertone. Just as milk powder can be trusted as genuine if it has been canned in Holland or New Zealand, Europe can be trusted as genuine if it is white. In Vice China, a youth magazine, a Chinese student in England wrote, “Europe is someone's luxurious and beautiful living room; we have come a long way to this land of manners and brought our money. . . . Suddenly, a bunch of uninvited guests break down the door, have no appreciation for the display in the living room, and pay no heed to us, who are sitting with stiff backs on the sofa” (Ji 2019). In these migrant stories, the adversary is no longer the white man who must be defeated in order to attain wealth, but the colored poor who might spoil its enjoyment.
Long Live Being Happy
Kaixin wan sui 開心萬歲 (long live being happy) is the motto of one of our interlocutors’ profile on her social media account. Such phrases are the stock of Chinese social media user profiles, yet in the context of migration to Hungary it acquires a new, programmatic significance. The migration we describe in this article is limited to a small number of people. Yet it is significant, first, because it reflects new ways in which Chinese people relate to and remake the world as the balance of economic power continues to shift. One aspect of this is the remaking of global racial and class hierarchies, which produces new ideological alliances and oppositions. While reconceptualizations of the good life and deterritorialized strategies for attaining it are broader and more varied global processes, they intersect with these ideological and racial shifts.
Second, our case suggests that, for a rising global middle class, migration cannot be reduced to an accumulation strategy for upward mobility or a way of hedging against risks: it can also be a strategy of resistance against pressures produced by social and educational involution. Simultaneously, it can provide a lens onto shifting family ideologies. It shows that we need to widen the usual focus on economic accumulation in migration—even in the broader sense that includes education—to consider a broader variety of what it means to seek a better life. Xiang's (2021) formulation of “reproduction migration” is helpful in capturing the tectonic shifts in the global political economy of migration if we think of the West as becoming a site of reproduction.
Yet this classification is too limiting for two reasons. First, it implies a separation between the economic and the social, but productive and reproductive activities are much harder to separate from each other. Second, reproduction implies preservation—for example, preserving class status across generations (through the conversion of forms of capital or the securing of wealth). This captures part of the phenomenon but not the rejection of one's existing lifestyle and status, the opting out of a circuit of capital conversion, and the aspirations for an imagined different life. These raise complex questions that cannot be answered within a purely political-economy framework. Xiang writes that the root cause of reproduction migration is the monetization of reproduction needs such as health care and education, and people migrate to be able to keep up with that monetization. But our research suggests that they may also migrate to opt out of it—if they have the luxury of that choice. Elsewhere, writing about Chinese workers and engineers abroad, Miriam Driessen and Biao Xiang (2021: 205) observe that “Chinese migration is no longer about American or Japanese dreams. . . . Chinese migrants pursue Chinese dreams.” This observation holds for much migration throughout history, but in our case, migrants do seem to pursue European dreams.
