Back to China: “Return Migration” Practices and Transnationalized Social Capital CANCELLED

In the last few years, young Chinese migrants in Spain have shown a significant trend towards return migration due to both the financial crisis in Europe and the economic prosperity in the PR China. However these movements back to China are not seen as a permanent relocation neither as the end of the migrants’ journey, and therefore do not fit the traditional concept of return migration and its connotation of completion.

While the activities that migrants undertake in order to maintain connections with their countries of origin have been widely studied, the sustained transnational practices and links with the country of migration after return, and the implications of these transnational ties in their daily lives and sense of belonging have not been so extensively researched yet.

The aim of this paper is to analyse the logic and characteristics of nowadays flexible return migration movements among young adults going back to China from Spain, and to explore how they implement their experiences and social capital accumulated in Spain in their new business and professional activities in China. Furthermore, this paper analyses also the strong and diverse transnational ties with Spain that keep them embedded in two societies maintaining their future open to further movements.

The empirical research is grounded in an extensive ethnographic fieldwork carried out mainly in Qingtian County (Zhejiang), one of the best-known qiaoxiang areas in China and the place where most of the Chinese migrants in Spain come from. However the influence of nowadays movement back to China is not only circumscribed to the hometown villages. Thus the research encompasses also the impact of reverse migration flows in larger Chinese cities, such as Hangzhou or Shanghai, where Qingtianese migrants settled down temporary upon their return to China.