One family, two systems : raising children across the Hong Kong-mainland China border (2003-2012)

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnographic study on the making of mobility. Thanks to the conditional opening of the Hong Kong-Mainland China border for Mainland Chinese after China resumed the sovereignty of Hong Kong in 1997, thousands of Mainland families started to organize their family lives across the border to take advantage of the different regimes over life under the “One Country, Two Systems” arrangement. Their back and forth cross-border mobility for birth, healthcare, and education of their children caused fierce controversies about resource drain in Hong Kong society. But the dynamics of their mobility has seldom been carefully studied.

Mainly based on participant observation research in Hong Kong and Mainland China, specifically Guangdong Province, between 2011 and 2013, this thesis tracks the cross-border mobility trajectories of Mainland families. It documents how daily mobility grew out of the entanglements between Mainland families’ life cycle, the shifting border regime, and the formation of the infrastructures constructed to facilitate, capture, restrict and profit from their movements. It describes the ways in which these families improvised their family lives back and forth the border to raise their Hong Kong-born children as they played with and got trapped in the territory-based entitlement system. It also analyses how multiple institutions and actors on both sides of the border, including state policies, Internet operators, school heads, and school bus operators got involved in these families’ arrangements and constructed a set of infrastructures to facilitate and condition their mobility. Furthermore, the thesis illustrates the encounters, interactions and mutual constitution between these families and the actors who paved the way for them. This research unravels how mobility is socially and historically constructed when post-socialist Mainland China reunites with capitalist Hong Kong in post-1997. The story of these mobile families provides a wonderful prism through which the fragmentation and marketization of life regime in post-socialist Mainland China, the redefinition of citizenship in post-colonial Hong Kong, the differentiated regime of border in post-1997, the market-oriented e-governance in Mainland and education reform in Hong Kong, and the ceaseless history of migration came together. Seeing mobility as a social process, the thesis suggests that the mobility of these families is constructed in their encounters and negotiation with the territory-based citizenship system, the differentiated border regime, and a set of market-oriented intermediaries.

The study explores to rethink the human movement across the Hong Kong-Mainland China beyond the migration paradigm. Treating mobility of gangbao families as a daily practice, the thesis intends to makes sense of the lived experience of movement and develops mobility studies by bringing the border back. Through the lens of mobility, the border is re-conceptualized as a space of differentiated flows. In addition, the thesis provides a case to illustrate the formation of mobility infrastructure, and reveals that infrastructure is more a process than a given structure. Methodologically, the study explores to redefine what is a field site in mobility studies, and suggest that it is crucial to follow the main actors and their networks to map out the field site.