This dissertation is an ethnographic research of three groups of people from South Korea to China -- parents, students and educational agents -- focusing on their ‘greed’, expectation, anxiety, and... Show moreThis dissertation is an ethnographic research of three groups of people from South Korea to China -- parents, students and educational agents -- focusing on their ‘greed’, expectation, anxiety, and dread regarding education. Examining this sheds light on the subjectivities of the people who are confronted with their structural positioning as being sojourners from South Korea and foreigners in China. The individual desire on education is induced by and reflects China’s national ambition in pursuit of educational internationalization and Korea’s compulsion to incorporate overseas nationals into its rhetoric of globalisation. Both nation-states confer political privileges on the children of overseas Korean nationals in their educational trajectories. As a result, individuals are empowered to creatively comply with, tactically appropriate, or, simply discard educational arrangements by the states. Paradoxically, they simultaneously encounter regulatory, socio-economic, and geographical constraints as they reside in China and make plans for further migration. This thesis demonstrates that ethnic solidarity is restrictive in helping Koreans obtain opportunities that they expect to have. Koreans are increasingly scattered depending on their social-economic statuses and set out to merge with non-ethnics. This trait offers a significant insight into the nuanced tendency of the Chinese immigration policy. Show less
Over the past thirty years, China has been witnessing the largest internal migration in the history of the world. Among the studies of labour migrants in China, ethnic minorities have been... Show moreOver the past thirty years, China has been witnessing the largest internal migration in the history of the world. Among the studies of labour migrants in China, ethnic minorities have been largely ignored. This study fills in this research gap by focusing on ethnic Yi workers who migrate from the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Region to the Pearl River Delta area of China. It explores how and why an exploitative and controlling co-ethnic brokerage system is formed and sustained; and how class, ethnicity, and gender intersect in producing the social inequality of Yi labour migrants through the co-ethnic brokerage system. Based on seven and a half months of fieldwork, this thesis analyses the social transformation of Yi society, the formation of Yi co-ethnic brokerage system, the collective and non-collective resistance, and the intersection of Yi labor migrants and the local state in the Pearl River Delta area. The situation of Yi labor migration is conceptualized as “entrapment by consent”, meaning that workers are not coerced by but compelled to rely on an exploitative and controlling co-ethnic brokerage system. I suggest that the crux to understanding the unequal status of Yi migrant workers is the intersection of class, ethnicity and gender. Show less
