Defense committee:
The Chair of the Examination Board, Adriana Qubaiova, Department of Gender Studies, CEU;
Supervisor: Jean-Louis Fabiani, Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, CEU;
Internal examiner: Szabolcs Pogonyi, Nationalism Studies Department, CEU;
External examiner: Pal Nyiri, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam;
2nd External examiner: Sara Friedman, Indiana University.
The story of Chinese golden visa migration to Budapest told through the pages of this thesis is as much the story of migration, as the ethics of parenting, and the emerging political subjectivity that lies at their intersection. The migration studied here departs from conventional pursuits of material wealth and is primarily oriented at child-rearing instead, making it an exemplar of reproduction migration - to the extent that it by and large forsakes production. However, the migrants in this study drop out of the parenting race in China not for the potential rewards of educational choices abroad in the future, but to escape from a detrimental environment to one that seems to be best for their child at the present. Instead of striving for the superior by conforming to the hegemonic definition of success by material wealth, they opt for a cheaper and slower environment and aspire to redefine success as a simple, “good enough” life.
Taking my participants’ need for escape, and their quest for a good enough life just as seriously as the economic exigencies that necessitated and enabled this to be pursued in a cheaper environment in the first place, I operationalize the notion of geoarbitrage, and Weber’s distinction between Zweckrationalität and Wertrationalität. I approach this mobility by accounting for the economic structuring of a distinctly anti-economically oriented agency as two sides of the same coin and point out how these supposedly mutually excluding rationalities in fact play out in an inherently dialectical manner, mutually implicated upon, and constituted by each other. As such, the specific orientations to time and space through which these parents carve out new meanings for the good enough life stand at the heart of this inquiry.
I argue that this self-conscious spatial downscaling suggests a renunciation of the norms and values of material modernity accompanying China’s swift and profound economic, political, and social reconfiguration, mediated through changing notions of child-rearing. Temporally, it points to the present as the decisive temporality for decision-making, personifying a specific temporal orientation toward the basic ethical question of living a “good enough life.” In essence, it is a temporal-geoarbitrage by which migrants use their capital to opt out from the normative implications the grinding temporal structures of contemporary urban China and choose Hungary as an “oasis of deceleration” in order to repossess the temporal autonomy over how to spend their lives.
Living decidedly simple lives in distinctly simple environments, deliberately refraining from extravagance and luxury, these parents step off the beaten track of success defined by material wealth; and derive meaning to their lives from a distinctly postmaterial appreciation of individual self-actualization, self-expression and autonomy instead. Eschewing both the state-sponsored notion of neo-familism underpinning the “China Dream” and the global middle-class mandate of intensive parenting, these parents chose to move to Hungary to cultivate their children’s autonomy, and in a dialectically manner, reclaim their autonomy as parents. As such, this research seeks to elucidate the social consequences of China's rapid economic development coupled with tightening autocracy, focusing on the emergence of a novel form of political subjectivity viewed through the prism of middle-class child-rearing practices as it assumes new potential in the migratory environment. An anthropological account of the dialectical relationship in which the parent and the child form and guide each other through their new environment explores the complex relationship between migration, parenting, and evolving political subjectivities.
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