New Mobilities in Asia
About the Book Series
In the 21st century, human mobility will increasingly have an Asian face. Migration from, to, and within Asia is not new, but it is undergoing profound transformations. Unskilled labour migration from the Philippines, China, India, Burma, Indonesia, and Central Asia to the West, the Gulf, Russia, Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand continues apace. Yet industrialization in Bangladesh, Cambodia, and India, the opening of Burma, and urbanization in China is creating massive new flows of internal migration. China is fast becoming a magnet for international migration from Asia and beyond.
Meanwhile, Asian students top study-abroad charts; Chinese and Indian managers and technicians are becoming a new mobile global elite as foreign investment from those countries grows; and Asian tourists are fast becoming the biggest travellers and the biggest spenders, both in their own countries and abroad.
These new mobilities reflect profound transformations of Asian societies and their relationship to the world, impacting national identities and creating new migration policy regimes, modes of transnational politics, consumption practices, and ideas of modernity. This series brings together studies by historians, anthropologists, geographers, and political scientists that systematically explore these changes.
Rural-Urban Migration and Agro-Technological Change in Post-Reform China
1st Edition
By Lena Kaufmann
January 10, 2026
How do rural Chinese households deal with the conflicting pressures of migrating into cities to work as well as staying at home to preserve their fields? This is particularly challenging for rice farmers, because paddy fields have to be cultivated continuously to retain their soil quality and value...
Asian Migrants and Religious Experience: From Missionary Journeys to Labor Mobility
1st Edition
Edited
By Bernardo Brown, Brenda Yeoh
December 01, 2025
Typically, scholars approach migrants’ religions as a safeguard of cultural identity, something that connects migrants to their communities of origin. This ethnographic anthology challenges that position by reframing the religious experiences of migrants as a transformative force capable of ...
Contesting Chineseness: Nationality, Class, Gender and New Chinese Migrants
1st Edition
By Sylvia Ang
December 01, 2025
Nearly eleven million Chinese migrants live outside of China. While many of these faces of China’s globalization headed for the popular Western destinations of the United States, Australia and Canada, others have been lured by the booming Asian economies. Compared with pre-1949 Chinese migrants, ...
Cross-border Marriages and Mobility: Female Chinese Migrants and Hong Kong Men
1st Edition
By Avital Binah-Pollak
December 01, 2025
Cross-border Marriages and Mobility: Female Chinese Migrants and Hong Kong Men focuses on cross-border marriages between mainland Chinese women and Hong Kong men, a phenomenon which is of critical importance to the transformation of Hong Kong. By examining the women's motivations for migration and ...
Cross-border Mobility: Women, Work and Malay Identity in Indonesia
1st Edition
By Wendy Mee
December 01, 2025
Cross-border Mobility: Women, Work and Malay Identity in Indonesia offers a fresh perspective on the association between mobility and the ethnocultural category ‘Malay’. In so doing, it raises new research questions that are relevant to the study of Indonesian women’s socioeconomic mobility more ...
Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean
1st Edition
Edited
By Luke Heslop, Galen Murton
December 01, 2025
Highways and Hierarchies: Ethnographies of Mobility from the Himalaya to the Indian Ocean explores the contemporary proliferation of roads in South Asia and the Tibet-Himalaya region, showing how new infrastructures simultaneously create fresh connections and reinforce existing inequalities. ...
Rethinking Authority in China’s Border Regime: Regulating the Irregular
1st Edition
By Franziska Plümmer
December 01, 2025
In the 21st century, governments around the globe are faced with the question on how to tackle new migratory mobilities. Governments increasingly become aware of irregular immigration and are forced to re-negotiate the dilemma of open but secure borders. Rethinking Authority in China’s Border ...
South Korean Migrants in China: An Ethnography of Education, Desire, and Temporariness
1st Edition
By Xiao Ma
December 01, 2025
This book is an ethnographic account of education and migration from the perspective of three groups of South Koreans in contemporary China: migrant parents, children/students, and educational agents. The book reveals how these temporary migrants make choices, plan their trajectories and engage ...
The Asian Migrant's Body: Emotion, Gender and Sexuality
1st Edition
Edited
By Michiel Baas
December 01, 2025
The Asian Migrant's Body: Emotion, Gender and Sexuality brings together papers that investigate the way Asian migrants experience, think about, perceive and utilize their bodies as part of the journeys they have embarked on. In exploring how bodies are physically and symbolically marked by ...
Tourist Utopias: Offshore Islands, Enclave Spaces, and Mobile Imaginaries
1st Edition
Edited
By Timothy Simpson
December 01, 2025
Released on the 500-year anniversary of the publication of Sir Thomas More's Utopia, this volume seeks to adapt and apply More's fecund imagination to the contemporary leisure landscape. The contributors to this volume theorize and analyze a variety of 'tourist utopias' - a nascent socio-spatial ...
Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty
1st Edition
By Lan Anh Hoang
December 01, 2025
Drawing on ethnographic research conducted at Moscow's wholesale markets from 2013 to 2016, Vietnamese Migrants in Russia: Mobility in Times of Uncertainty provides original insights into how uncertainty shapes social practice, identity and belonging in the context of irregular migration from ...