Expatriating is patriotic? The discourse on 'new migrants' in the People's Republic of China and identity construction among recent migrants from the PRC

Abstract

After 1978, the People's Republic of China (PRC) moved to (re-)legitimise, by both institutional and discursive means, allegiance to China in established overseas Chinese communities. In this article, I attempt to show how it has progressed to the next step: celebrating migration as a patriotic and modern act, and encouraging transnational practices among people who are in the process of leaving China. More specifically, I discuss how the state discursively constructs 'new migrant' culture; how it engages in imagining the transnational community of new migrants and operationalises imaginaries of the home province and the homeland. I also explore how identity construction among recent migrants is manipulated by elites that participate in this state-promoted imagining process.