Chinese Women in Transnational Marriage Migration 79 in Two British Cities
Chinese Women in Transnational Marriage Migration 79 in Two British Cities

Author(s): Lan Lo, Dr Xia LIN
Subject(s): Politics / Political Sciences, Social Sciences, Psychology, Essay|Book Review |Scientific Life, General Reference Works, Geography, Regional studies, Library and Information Science, Sociology
Published by: Transnational Press London
Keywords: Chinese women; Transnational relationship; marriage migration; Nottingham; London; UK
Summary/Abstract: This paper presents a joint research study involving ten couples in two British cities: Nottingham and London in UK that were interviewed to explore their transnational relationships, families, and experiences of marriage migration. This paper explores the following research questions in the context of Chinese women’s transnational relationship and marriage migration to the UK: 1. What are the culturally situated understandings and experiences of intimate citizenship between Chinese women and their partners? 2. How do Chinese women negotiate perceived cultural, national, and ethnic differences within their relationships? 3. How does transnational migration shape their experiences of intimacy, and vice versa? In terms of methodology the paper uses a qualitative interview-based approach. Thus, ten couples in two British cities were interviewed pre-pandemic who met the following criteria: 1) currently or previously in a committed relationship; 2) the Chinese woman was born in the mainland China; 3) the western partner was born in the UK. The interviews lasted approximately 90 minutes and took place at a time and place of the participant’s choice. The participation was entirely confidential, and their responses were anonymized, as per the British Sociological Association’s code of ethical research. The paper will set out the main findings from the data in areas of such as cultural differences, maintaining spousal relationships, transnational family ties, and employment issues. We will also define the future direction of travel of the research which will explore the extent to which these findings remain constant or have changed in the post-pandemic world. To this end, the original participants will be reinterviewed using the same methods as during the pre-pandemic phase. Our working assumptions are that the main difference will be in the area of employment issues and possibility in terms of maintaining spousal relationships. We predict at this stage that there will be fewer changes in relation to transnational family ties and cultural differences. This paper is original in three main ways: firstly, its focus on Chinese migrant women; secondly, its methodology and thirdly, its pre and post-pandemic comparative focus.

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