(iPoster) Geopolitical Socialization and Political Orientations of Chinese New Migrants

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Political Science Education & Race, Ethnicity, and Politics
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Race, Ethnicity, and Politics in an International Perspective

Abstract

Why do some first-generation immigrants sustain or intensify homeland-oriented political loyalties after settling in liberal democracies, even under conditions of geopolitical tension between home and host states? Existing scholarship on migration, citizenship, and diaspora politics has emphasized either institutional integration in host societies or transnational ties to countries of origin, but has paid less attention to how geopolitics enters migrants’ everyday civic experiences and reshapes political orientation at the individual level. This paper addresses this gap by developing and empirically operationalizing a conceptual framework of geopolitical socialization.
Geopolitical socialization conceptualizes political orientation as the outcome of an interaction between three analytically distinct but interrelated processes: (1) macro-level geopolitical conditions, such as China’s global rise and shifting bilateral relations with Western democracies; (2) migrants’ pre-migration political socialization, including foundational symbolic orientations formed through education and everyday interaction with state institutions in the country of origin; and (3) the host-society civic climate, understood as the politically and geopolitically inflected context of reception as it is perceived and interpreted in migrants’ daily lives. Rather than treating migrants as passive recipients of geopolitical forces or integration regimes, the framework foregrounds migrants as active interpreters who evaluate civic inclusion, exclusion, and legitimacy through prior socialization and ongoing media engagement.
Empirically, the paper draws on a qualitative-led, sequential mixed-methods research design comparing Chinese “new migrants” from the People’s Republic of China who settled in two liberal democratic contexts—the United Kingdom and Australia. The study combines abductive analysis of 63 in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted in London and Melbourne with a complementary survey of over 600 respondents in Australia, including an embedded vignette experiment on geopolitical framing. This design allows the paper to trace how migrants interpret host-society civic climates under different geopolitical conditions and how these interpretations translate into divergent political orientations, particularly forms of long-distance nationalism.
The paper makes three contributions to migration and citizenship scholarship. First, it advances a mechanism-based account of how geopolitics is domesticated within host societies and experienced by migrants through integration discourses, institutional practices, and everyday encounters. Second, it shows how pre-migration political socialization shapes migrants’ perceptions of civic inclusion and belonging, challenging assumptions that exposure to liberal democratic institutions necessarily weakens homeland-oriented attachments. Third, it shows how long-distance nationalism among immigrants can be understood as neither uniform nor static, but contingent on how civic climates are interpreted in geopolitically charged contexts. Together, these findings reposition geopolitical context as a central—yet socially mediated—dimension of immigrant political incorporation.

Author

• Yun-Tzu Chang, SOAS University of London