Weiqiang Lin

Chinese Migration to Singapore: Discourses and Discontents in a Globalizing Nation-State:

Changing economic realities in the last decade have seen the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) emerging as a major source of ‘new’ migrants in the world. In the context of Southeast Asia as ‘destination,’ inflows from the PRC take on another level of significance given the historical antecedents. In this article, we take Singapore, a Southeast Asian global city-state, as a case study of how Chinese migration histories and circumstances have evolved through time. While colonialism has left the city-state with a large ethnic Chinese population that persists till today, Singapores present-day aspirations to become a globally oriented, open economy have led to a new round of transnational migration, where PRC nationals feature prominently. Focusing on the streams of people moving from China to Singapore in the past and present, a comprehensive range of developments surrounding the said mobilities will be examined. These include a short historical account of Singapores, and more generally Southeast Asias, longstanding exchange with China; regulatory regimes that govern Singapores immigration policies today; the typologies and varied characteristics of modern Chinese migrants gracing the city-states doorsteps; and social tensions arising from these contemporary PRC flows into Singapore sitting uncomfortably between being predominantly ‘Chinese’ and ‘anti-Chinese.’ A few reflections follow as a means to conclude this paper.

Wasting time? The differentiation of travel time in urban transport

Recent years have seen increasing academic interest in transport and the concept of travel time. In particular, scholars have tried to open up travel time to alternative modes of understanding, taking it beyond its usual productivist associations with waste and useless idleness. The author, however, seeks to understand travel time in a different way. Rather than filling it up with activities, it is argued that travel time must first be recognized as constituted by, and constitutive of, society and its rhythms. As such, the author seeks to unpack its value in context, by thinking through its productions, structuring, and potential effects. With Singapores urban transport system taken as a case study, the inequitable ways in which travel time is refracted and experienced by different groups of commuters in this fast-paced city are considered. Specifically, how this time has been hastened for some, rescheduled for others, and rendered especially unpredictable for public transit users through various policies and constraints are put into relations. By attending to the unevenness of these differentiated processes, the author argues that a close contextual reading of transport and its manifold rhythms is indispensable if questions surrounding social equity and sustainability are to be adequately addressed.

Questioning the ‘field in motion’: emerging concepts, research practices and the geographical imagination in Asian migration studies

Corresponding author: Weiqiang Lin, Department of Geography, 1 Arts Link, Kent Ridge, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117570 Email: weiqiang@nus.edu.sg cultural geographies 18(1) 125–131

Migration infrastructures and the production of migrant mobilities

Abstract Since the proclamation of a mobility turn in the 2000s, scholars have populated the field with invaluable insights on what it means to move, and what the politics of movement are. One particularly useful thread revolves around the issue of infrastructures, which have generally been taken to mean the manifest forms of moorings and fixities that help order and give shape to mobilities. Yet, while significant inroads have been made in delineating the morphologies of transport infrastructures, mobilities research has been relatively reticent about the organisational structures, orders and arrangements that give rise to another key mobile phenomenon of our time — international migration. In this editorial introduction, we lay down some groundwork on the productive and political nature of infrastructures that likewise affect and inform the way (im)mobilities are contingently created and parsed in migration. Looking through the prism of East and Southeast Asia and its migration infrastructures, we take advantage of the ‘new’ infrastructural configurations in an emerging empirical context to point to some directions by which mobilities researchers can more rigorously interrogate ‘migration’ as another socially meaningful and specific form of mobility that exceeds a mere displacement of people or change in national domicile.

Re-Assembling (Aero)mobilities: Perspectives beyond the West

Abstract This paper advocates a need to expand mobilities research beyond the West. Employing aviation in Singapore as an example, it demonstrates how the assembling of (aero)mobilities in different contexts never yields passive replicas, but, rather, iterations that develop with reference to one another. This mutual assembling is furthermore a political process, with certain ‘global’ paradigms being more influential than others. Without transcending a Western focus, mobilities research risks obscuring the highly relational way movement is practically (re)assembled, through complex processes of diffusion, adaptation and re-production across space.

Flying through Ash Clouds: Improvising Aeromobilities in Singapore and Australasia

Abstract Scholars have recently been concerned with how the aviation industry is assembled through a series of tightly coupled processes and relations that render it fragile and prone to disruptions. While not disagreeing with this view, this paper explores some alternative ways aviation can be reunderstood as something more emergent and adaptable. Two ash cloud events, in Singapore and Australasia, are elucidated to show how breakdowns in air travel seldom unfold without intervening human actions and spontaneous reformations. Suggesting that aerial systems are thus continually renewed, this paper seeks to recognize in (aero)mobilities their potential for improvisation, even as it acknowledges their riskiness.

Sky Watching: Vertical Surveillance in Civil Aviation

Scholars have written extensively about vertical surveillance as an extension of aeriality. They have interrogated the aerial platform as a synoptic means to behold, control and wage war from above, and as a locus through which air power can be challenged from below. While this perspective highlights the complex reciprocities linking the sky and the earth, its focus remains fixated on aeriality’s (in)capacities to render terrestrial life explicit and governable. As an inhabitable space, the sky is rarely considered as a target of rational knowing and control through vertical surveillance. This article examines the views generated in sky watching, or the tactical monitoring of airspaces in air traffic management (ATM), as a rejoinder. It examines ATM’s methods of knowing the sky, its conservative logics in ‘spacing’ aircraft, and the assembling processes that geopolitically produce unequal surveillant orders. It argues that the sky, along with its visualisations, finds substance through particular technologies, calculations and expertise that repeatedly draw on the West’s visual rationalities. While a ‘benign’ form of seeing/knowing in civil contexts, sky watching in ATM summons geopolitical power not through brute force, but by discerning which visions are ‘acceptable’ for the administration of aviation safety and airborne life.

Drawing lines in the sky: The emotional labours of airspace production

This paper takes as its starting point the idea that airspace is not a singular, finished interface for aeromobile activities to take place in. Striated by lines that connect some points rather than others, it is a contested network of vectors that sometimes require additional human inputs for traffic to flow in desired ways. Assuming the view of a globalising city-state in Asia, this paper refers to two sets of empirical evidence to build its case: first, over 100 airline newsletters on the ‘Singapore Girl’ published between 1982 and 2000, and, second, fifteen sets of interviews with air hub development officers working for Singapore. Particular attention is paid to the emotional labours that have been invested by these aviation workers to induce particular, favourable business environments for air traffic to grow in the city-state. In so doing, this paper emphasises the uneven way aerial vectors are distributed across the globe, and highlights how these air-lines have a tendency to bypass (small) states not at the forefront of global aviation. Even for a successful overcomer like Singapore, the reordering of airspace does not come with the latitude of manufacturing a brand new air-scape, but involves the development of innovative counter regimes, people-performed technologies, and tactical solutions in an unequal air world.

Moving in relations to Asia: The politics and practices of mobility

Reflecting the region’s increasing prominence, Asia is becoming an important focal point where a myriad of ‘new’ mobilities can be unearthed and analysed. From the revival of the ancient Silk Road for freight (Calder, 2012), to the growing complexity of Asian migrations within and beyond the region (Amrith, 2011; Fielding, 2016; Nyiri and Tan, 2016), Asia has captured the imagination of academics, commentators and policymakers alike as a milieu where the rapid circulation of people, goods and ideas has gained considerable momentum. Yet, despite these transformations, the ‘new’ mobilities turn (Cresswell, 2006; Sheller and Urry, 2006) has been less than responsive to the promise of this contextual shift. Having first found currency in Western Europe (especially Britain and Scandinavia) and North America, much of this work remains rooted in the specific interests, agendas and critiques tethered to the politics and practices of these societies (Lin, 2016). Consequently, this research tends to coalesce around particular issues, like risk, security, infrastructural disruptions, sustainability and community interactions in Western multicultural contexts. This mismatch between scholarly interest and the quickened events taking place in Asia calls for a renewed approach that would take the latter more seriously as a field of research. Indeed, while ubiquitously experienced, mobilities do not assume universal forms, but take on new significances when they meet the road ‘elsewhere’ (Cresswell, 2014). Foregrounding Asia as an empirical focus is not to aver that there is something essentialist or phenomenologically bounded about this region. Neither is it to extend mobilities research by simply adding another collection of narratives to its repertoire. Rather, by turning to a neglected context, emplacing mobilities in Asia augurs an epistemological re-orientation that can expose mobilities research to novel sets of questions, dispositions and connections (Steele and Lin, 2014). An enabler of these alternative insights is the heterogeneity of Asia, which opens up new exchanges and traffics taking place both in and beyond Asian spaces. Further nuancing these moves, Asia is a region that has undergone particular histories and developmental experiences on the world stage, including colonial subjugation and, now, a global neoliberal order (Ong,

Transport provision and the practice of mobilities production

This paper propounds a practised understanding of transport provision. While transport geography tends to focus on the effects of planning, mobilities studies view transport provision as framing backdrops of mobile lives. Neither has fully addressed how transport provision is a derivative of mundane practices that contingently lay transport’s structural foundations. This paper argues that delineating these practices imputes a much-needed ‘livingness’ to transport’s formal production and allows for more congruous conversations between transport provision and use. Through a three-part examination, I foreground what potentially goes on during transport’s planning and operations, and highlight the contingencies of these less-than-unitary processes.