Katie Willis

Singaporean and British transmigrants in China and the cultural politics of ‘contact zones’

The international migration of professional workers has increased in scope over the past 20 years as skilled workers are needed when companies’ activities cross national borders. While this trend has been recognised from an economic perspective, much less has been researched from a social and cultural angle. Using case studies of British and Singaporean migration to China, this paper employs a comparative frame to examine the effect of cultural differences—both in terms of business culture as well as social norms regarding ethnicity and gender—on the dynamics of the ‘contact zones’ emerging in various cities in China, including the cosmopolitan cities of Shanghai and Hong Kong, the Chinese capital city of Beijing, as well as the industrial townships of Suzhou, Wuxi and Guangzhou. As sites which invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and whose trajectories now intersect, ‘contact zones’ (as defined by Mary Pratt in the context of colonial encounters) are frontiers where ‘difference’ is constantly encountered and negotiated. Given very different ethno-historical linkages traced by Singaporeans and Britons to China and as a result a divergence of cultural imaginings about ‘China’, it is not unexpected that the two groups of transmigrants enact different ways of encountering life in China. The paper explores the differential politics of the Singaporean and British presences in China around three stereotypical images of the foreigner in China—the culturalist, the colonialist and the imperialist.

Heterosexuality and migration in Asia

There have been few analyses of heterosexuality in the context of migration, particularly within Asia. As a corrective, in this themed issue we bring together four articles to contribute to debates on the fluidity of heterosexuality and how the performance of heterosexuality has particular spatialities within East and South-East Asia. Each article uses ethnographic methods to produce nuanced analyses of specific and spatially contingent performances of heterosexuality. A migration focus illuminates how spatial dislocation provides opportunities for both men and women to play out different heterosexual identities. At the same time, migrants come across challenges and obstacles to their performances of heterosexuality, such as the state regulation of the migrant body, economic necessity, and gendered and ethnicised behavioural norms.

Health reform in Latin America and Africa: decentralisation, participation and inequalities.

Abstract As part of broader neoliberal economic policies most governments of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa have implemented reforms of the formal health sector since the early 1980s. Driven both by the need for greater efficiency and calls for increases in patient choice and participation, these reforms have taken on different forms across the regions, but the main features have been decentralisation, increased user fees and the introduction of forms of health insurance. This paper considers the nature of these reforms, how the broad category of ‘neoliberal health sector reform’ has played out in different places and the impact of these reforms across socioeconomic groups.

'Singapore Unlimited'?* : Transnational elites and negotiations of social identity in the regionalization process

Drawing on the burgeoning literature on globalization, international migration and the deterritorialization of social identity in transcultural contexts, we examine the diasporic designs of the Singapore state in its ‘goregional’ push and compare this with individual (re)negotiations of social identity as a result of relocation in China. While the state has exhorted the value of configuring a Singaporean diasporic identity which facilitates cultural penetration of the Chinese nation through network capitalism and ethnic entrepreneurship and by projecting Singapores brand name on foreign shores, identity negotiations of individual citizens across transnational space appears to be both ‘strategic’ and ‘sticky’.