Paper short abstract:

Based on semi-structured interviews, this paper examines the overlapping between professional and personal life among self-initiated skilled Western migrants in China. It focuses on the role of interracial friendship and family ties in the accumulation of white mobility capital in China.

Paper long abstract:

With the rise of China’s economy, more and more white Westerners are moving to China for better job or business opportunities. In addition to the so-called transnational elites, there is an increasing number of self-initiated migrants from the Western world. However, China’s restrictive immigration policy, draconian Covid-19 control, and increasingly competitive job market, have posed significant challenges to the social mobility, job security, and personal life for white migrants who used to be considered as a privileged group. Based on twenty-four semi-structured interviews between 2019 and 2023, this paper examines the overlapping between professional and personal life among self-initiated skilled Western migrants in China. It focuses specifically on the role of interracial friendship and family ties with diaspora and local Chinese in the accumulation of white mobility capital in China. Scholars have conceptualized white capital as an embodied form of cultural capital that is linked not only with physical appearance, but with citizenship, linguistic and educational background, and white-supremacist ideology as a global power structure. This paper moves beyond an essentialized understanding of white capital and reconceptualizes it as a dynamic construction that is reassembled and reproduced through migrants’ active engagements with multiple groups of institutional and social actors in China. It argues that interracial friendship and family ties not only contribute to social mobility opportunities for Western migrants in China, but add complexity to their racialized and gendered subjectivities in the context of rising nationalism and xenophobia in China’s market economy.