Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family

Chinese Student Migration, Gender and Family is a study of the sons and daughters of Chinese single-child families who go abroad to study and in particular explores the increase of familial investment in daughters' education within the wider socio-moral transformation of China. The relationships of support in the family are renegotiated, and lines of generational and gendered power are changing. While this generation of young women have been raised in an environment that fosters individual achievement and competition, they must eventually find their place in the marriage and job markets that are highly gendered. Women are directed towards less demanding career paths and are wary of becoming 'too successful' to marry. Both female and male student migrants draw from their cosmopolitan experiences and resources when negotiating these tensions. Through their individual journeys of migration, they are at the forefront of the current transformation of the Chinese symbolic markets.

Anni Kajanus is a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences, UK.