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4 - Embedded Migration, Innate Xiangchou

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2025

Linda Qian
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

Chapter 4 describes Heyang as a migrant sending community, built upon and even sustained by migrants’ homesickness. These migration patterns are deeply entangled with the local duck farming industry, and ’duck tales’ told by locals who have personally engaged in the industry at various stages of their lives are highlighted. Informants’ reflections on the significance of duck breeding reinforces the importance of cyclical migration through different stages of a rapidly transforming China. However, four recent ’returnees’ explain how this industry was proving to be unsustainable because of local, national, and global processes of change by the mid-2010s. They each returned to Heyang to work in the ‘Xiangchou Tourism’ industry as tour guides and security guards. Their stories provide insight into the complex emotions that underscore their respective returns to the hometown, ranging from comfort and familiarity to perpetual feelings of precarity due to lingering debts, unstable livelihoods, and uncertain futures.

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