1 - Introduction

Summary

Abstract

The introduction starts by contextualizing recent immigration reforms in China that aimed to comprehend new regional mobilities such as increasing influx of working immigrants from neighbouring countries, growing debates on refugee and asylum internationally and within China, and especially irregular immigration in China's border areas that have been below Beijing's radar for the longest time. To understand how the Chinese border regime legitimizes which immigrants to allow in, the book scrutinizes local immigration practices in the border areas. Key research questions are: How does the Chinese border regime exert authority over the border area and border-crossers? How do the notions of national development and security affect the local immigration systems?

Keywords: border regime, migration system, border management, migration, China, sovereignty, authority

Immigration has been the twenty-first century's Rorschach test for the Chinese government. This test, in which a person describes patterns, perceived objects or shapes in an inkblot, is designed to examine one's personality and emotional functioning. Similarly, the Chinese government was looking at the patterns of foreigners’ immigration at the beginning of this century trying to grasp its meaning for the economy, community- and nation-building. The big question has become: how open should a society be towards immigrants and how open or secure should borders be? Beijing's response to an increasing global migration – like that of many other states – was fundamentally shaped by the ‘global war on terror’ and its ensuing violent conflicts, in turn catalysing debates about how borders and immigration should be governed in light of an increasing ‘risk’ associated with opening borders. Over the last two decades, many governments have struggled to reconcile the need to maintain open borders that facilitate ‘talent’ immigration while simultaneously upholding secure borders that prohibit irregular immigration; they have thus grappled with defining rules to select and legitimize certain groups of immigrants over others. Emergency measures following the COVID-19 outbreak in early 2020 showed how fragile the existing systems were: closing down borders was in many countries the first measure taken to prevent the virus from spreading, resulting in months of negotiating the risks of re-opening borders for specific groups of immigrants and travellers. As such, immigration has evolved into a meta-issue of twenty-first-century politics.