In 2018, China established the National Immigration Agency, a new bureaucratic body charged with standardizing practice across the PRC. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, China was becoming a growing destination of migration for foreign labourers and experts, but also for refugees and displaced persons. Regulatory frameworks accordingly grew with respect to cross-border marriages, citizenship rights, questions of permanent settlement, and social benefits for spouses of Chinese – areas previously explored by scholars like Elena Barabantaseva. Drawing upon fieldwork, Franziska Plümmer takes on these evolving issues within a broader matrix of borderland studies and demonstrates an impressive range within the social sciences.
The book is structured around two broad case studies. The first embraces the complexities of China's southwestern frontier; the second looks at the northeast border with North Korea. The text therefore advances our knowledge of Yunnan and Jilin's borderlands. Provincial governments are here seen wearing multiple roles: they are border-region propagandists (p. 105), engaged in managing the “zoo-like” atmosphere of cross-border tourism (pp. 109–111), and they promote or wrestle with unwieldy initiatives like the Greater Mekong subregion plans (pp. 185–186) or the less successful Greater Tumen Initiative (pp. 197–204). It can be difficult at times to parse out provincial autonomy amid the broad standardization of the nation-state, but in Jilin province, the border city of Hunchun emerges as exceptional, as does Ruili in Yunnan. Even if economic performances of some borderland SEZs lag behind national baselines, argues Plümmer, the Chinese government has enhanced the role of its periphery by establishing and sustaining such trade hubs.
Border politics and categories for movers and adjacent people are a significant takeaway from this study (pp. 98, 105, 108). China is demonstrated to possess a battery of refugee and resettlement laws, but these are not always put to intuitive use. As Plümmer shows, the UNHCR office in Beijing is reduced to coordinating with third countries, citing a UNHCR estimate of 317,255 refugees in China in 2016, only 668 of whom were engaged with pending asylum processes (p. 99). Prior to encountering this book, the reviewer had naively assumed that the term bianmin was simply a literal translation of “border people,” an indicator of their importance or value for the nation. However, Plümmer demonstrates how the state imposes the label upon new refugees as a way of “legitimizing the denial of their asylum requests and justifying repatriation (qiansong chujing)” (p. 98).
Regular and engaging citations from borderlands scholarship produced in mainland China are another advantageous aspect of this book. We therefore encounter scholars like Zhou Ping (b. 1959), a kingmaker in borderland studies based at Yunnan University who has found new professional success via writing discursive theoretical pieces supporting Xi Jinping's drive toward “inter-ethnic political integration.” Zhou's writings from the late 2000s and early/mid 2010s urge greater standardization and updating of China's border regime, but also have some theoretical valence, differentiating “border studies” from “borderland studies.” Hu Zhiding (b. 1986) of East China Normal University is another bright light in the field engaged with in this book. Plümmer thereby has a good grasp of how the concepts around the PRC's southwestern and northeastern borders continue to evolve, including how global discourse around the 9/11 terror attacks, and a later wave of phobia around refugees or “uncontrolled migration” (to borrow a phrase from British Prime Minister Theresa May in 2017) has impacted Chinese writing. Beyond migration discourse, readers with interests in PRC crisis management or crisis preparation along its border will find chapter four of special interest (pp. 237, 239, 241, 255). This is a valuable book overall, recommended to scholars of China's borderlands, border and migration studies generally, and the burgeoning discourse on rights for migrants.
