Educated Return Migrants in Rural China

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.This research attempts to investigate the rural educated return migrants’ mobility, translocal practice and scale negotiation in rural China through conducting an ethnographic inquiry. Return migrants, or (youth who return to their hometown), in this research, refer to the rural students who graduated in tertiary institutions in the city and returned to their hometown in the countryside. The return migration in China is a counter-mainstream movement, as it is reverse against the dominant trend of rural to urban migration. Rural-urban migration is the most basic rural household livelihood strategy in contemporary China that diversifies the household income plan. Moreover, the modernisation hegemony projects the urban sphere as a symbol of being advanced. In tandem with the discourse that is a unique post-socialist China political-cultural tool, the rural population is motivated and even compelled to go to the city to receive the urban influence, once they reach a certain age. As a result, the number of rural migrants in the city has been increasing since the 1980s. In that vein, the motivation and social context of the reverse migration in this research is particularly interesting to explore. In this research, return migrants are viewed as the nexus of body and place struggle. Drawing on a rubric of cross-disciplinary analysis tool, it examines the educated return migrants’ decision of return, career seeking, family and social life. It also investigates their agency of mediating, negotiating and change-making amid the familial and social constraints. Furthermore, I inspect their contribution in the process of rural development. This research consists of two levels. On the individual level, I explore their personal, work and social life, which present their ambiguous position as the return migrants in a rural setting. On the contextual level, I also examine the formation of the social scale which rationales the current rural development discourse. By drawing an in-depth picture of the educated return migrants’ translocal practice in daily life and their participation in rural development, I present their role as ‘place entrepreneur’ situated in the rural-urban dynamic. This thesis contributes to the academic discussion of how inequality in China impacts subjectivity