Nigerians in Chinese criminal courts: the legal-lay encounter in the periphery

Abstract

The past decades have witnessed China's emergence into the global spotlight as it undergoes economic growth and social changes. For the first time in its history, the country has become a destination attracting many tourists, investors and an influx of migrants. While the movement of people elsewhere is primarily from the periphery to the core, migration to China takes a new form, manifesting 'superdiversity' in terms of categories of migrants (Vertovec, 2007): composed of professionals and entrepreneurs from developed countries as well as traders from developing nations. Nigerians, among other south-south migration population to China, are the most visible group. Their high profile is not merely owing to the number of migrants, but can also be ascribed to the media coverage of social issues and criminal offences that are associated with this influx. This paper, drawing on a four-month fieldwork in a Chinese city that is reported to be most densely populated by Nigerian migrants, empirically illustrates how Nigerians interact with Chinese criminal justice system. What challenges does this globalised mobility bring to China that is traditionally an emigration country? How does the state respond to diasporas-related multilingualism in the legal sphere? With analysis of authentic trial data, the paper reveals the complexity of interpreter-mediated legal-lay communication in Chinese criminal courtroom and the interaction dilemma when interlocutors with truncated linguistic repertoire rely on English as the lingua franca. Adding to existing research on sociolinguistics of globalisation, the paper explores how the state power is consolidated in the form of linguistic resources and the language ideologies that lead to new forms of inequality (Blommaert, 2010).