In the previous chapter, I discussed how along the journey to married life post-Soviet women discovered and adapted to the limiting, precarious and objectifying character of China’s immigration and marriage regimes. The Chinese legal framework and customary practices work together to commodify foreign spouses on Q visas as family visitors with only temporary status. The Chinese marriage immigration regime reflects how the party-state promotes Confucian family mores and emphasises traditional gender roles – men as family breadwinners and women as symbols of domesticity, loyalty and femininity. Most of the women I met for this study found themselves in this situation and tried to navigate the intersecting marriage and migration fields to the best of their ability by making use of the opportunities available to them. While they believed that they had limited agency in many areas of their life in China, including the visa requirements and access to the labour market, the situation where they were most acutely vulnerable was in making choices about their children’s citizenship.

The biopolitical dimensions of the nation engage in dialogue with the geography of national territory through the issue of citizenship. Feminist geographers have explored the role that bodies play in territorial claims and the construction of borders.Footnote ³ Among these varied practices, the birth of a child represents a complex ‘space of geopolitics’, where multiple, overlapping identity claims and power dynamics intersect and clash.Footnote ⁴ The bodies of children born across national borders become territorialised, exposing tensions in the status negotiations undertaken by foreign parents. The birth of a child underscores how bodies serve as tools in affirming national territory. In her research, Sara Smith shows how newborns in northern India are entangled in national and territorial projects.Footnote ⁵ This territorialisation extends when the birth is documented through citizenship papers, formalising the child’s role within the nation state. Children born to Chinese–foreign couples in China, for example, embody border sites where competing norms of citizenship and family converge. Examining the politics of territorial citizenship and belonging within these families reveals the role that the children play in making the embodied geopolitics of belonging.

This chapter discusses the implications of the Chinese citizenship regime for foreign mothers and how, amidst uncertainty about their long-term residency status and fear of being separated from their children, they navigated their mistrust of the Chinese state’s willingness to recognise and protect their parental rights.Footnote ⁶ My central argument is that these women, driven by the profound fear of separation from their children, strategically exploited inconsistences and loopholes in the conflicting national citizenship regimes to safeguard their maternal rights.

5.1 The Embodied Geopolitics of Childbirth

Chinese citizenship has both external and internal borders that are constituted in parallel with and in relation to each other. According to the PRC Nationality Law (1980), a child who is born to at least one parent who is a Chinese citizen in or outside the territory of the PRC is automatically considered to be a Chinese national. Thus, blood ties constitute the external borders of Chinese citizenship. Internally, the household registration system (户口 hukou) complements this architecture by placing citizens into rural and urban categories and distributing rights to education, health care and social benefits in accordance with the place of registration.Footnote ⁷ In China, documenting a birth and attaining citizenship are closely intertwined. A birth certificate is issued at the hospital where the child is born, yet the child’s citizenship status is not complete until a special part of the birth certificate has been detached and submitted to the local household registration office, where the child is written into the hukou system. At this point, the child becomes a fully documented Chinese citizen. Until this household registration takes place, the child’s citizenship is partial. The existence of this temporal space when Chinese citizenship documentation is not complete provides room for final decisions to be made and gives foreign mothers space for manoeuvre.

From my conversations with these women and Russian consulate representatives, it became apparent that the 1980 Nationality Law was not strictly enforced until the mid 2010s; before then, the Chinese authorities had still been ready to issue Chinese visas in the foreign passports of mixed children and the children could reside in China on the same one- or two-year-long family visa as their foreign parent. From 2014 onwards, however, if the birth certificate indicated that at least one of the parents was a Chinese national, these children could not be issued with a Chinese visa because they were recognised as Chinese nationals. The only exception was for those children whose Chinese parent was living abroad for eighteen months or more or had foreign residency at the time of the application. If the child was born in China, instead of a visa they were issued a travel permit (通行证 tongxing zheng) that allowed them to leave China. This single-use document, valid for three months, then replaced a Chinese visa. Outside China the tongxing zheng was supposed to be replaced with another travel permit called 旅行证 lüxing zheng, valid for two years. After two years, the lüxing zheng must be replaced with a new one, but this can only be done in a Chinese consulate outside Chinese borders. One of the main benefits of obtaining a lüxing zheng was that with it a child could freely leave and enter China. In contrast, it was not possible to take a child with a Chinese hukou out of the country without permission from the father. At the same time, children without hukou have limited access to schooling, health care and other social benefits in China. Some women and even consular staff voiced the opinion that local Chinese officials had been instructed not to issue Chinese visas in the foreign passports of children from mixed marriages so that these children had to remain within Chinese territory. Having observed this issue for several years, one Russian consulate staff member concluded that the Chinese state was trying to keep the children as Chinese nationals.Footnote ⁸

Arguments over the status and nationality of mixed children consumed considerable amounts of the emotional and physical energies of my research participants. Their positionality and attitudes were conditioned by the fact that, as Olga explained, China was

Kristina expressed the fear that shaped these women’s pre-emptive behaviour:

Zhanna told me that she had decided not to put her child’s father’s name on the birth certificate after she had given birth in a Beijing hospital. She added that she had no idea where she had got the idea to do this but felt strongly that she had to do it. She then took the birth certificate to the Russian consulate to register the birth. If the father’s name had been written on the birth certificate, she would have needed his permission to apply for Russian citizenship for her child, and she did not want to be constrained in this way. With a Russian birth certificate and passport guaranteed, she went back to the hospital where she had given birth and reported that she had lost the original birth certificate, asking if it would be possible to get a duplicate. The hospital authorities took pity on her and issued a new birth certificate on which this time she included her child’s father’s name. She added that this was possible in the early 2000s when the authorities were more lenient and treated foreigners well. She then told her husband to take this copy of the birth certificate to the local household registration office to register the child in the household system so that he could be enrolled in their preferred local public school. It was illegal, Zhanna conceded, but ‘there were many stories of conflict in Chinese–Russian families that end up with the child having to remain in China. I didn’t think it would happen in my case, but it made me feel calmer anyway.’Footnote ¹¹ When I asked how her husband reacted to her manoeuvres, she jokingly replied that he was accustomed to her resourcefulness. When her mother-in-law expressed concerns about her son’s documents, Zhanna said that she reassured her by explaining that if the worry was about taking her grandson to Russia, she could instead bring her other child and her relatives’ children for care. According to Zhanna, her actions were driven not only by her maternal instinct but also by a desire to secure better prospects for her son, who would benefit from holding documents from both countries.

Just as Zhanna decided to obtain a Russian birth certificate and passport and thus ensure her parental rights and freedom to cross the border with her child, other women decided to go back to their home country to give birth. An additional advantage to securing papers documenting their natal citizenship was to secure substantial support for childcare from their own families and the state. Olya noted that she did not want to be apart from her husband when she gave birth, but he persuaded her that she would be more comfortable giving birth in Russia. She conceded that she was happy do so, because Chinese health care was very expensive. Olya spent the first seven months of her pregnancy in China and had experienced the marketisation of prenatal service first-hand. The first pregnancy consultation that she went to with her mother-in-law cost 2,000 RMB (290 USD), which she knew because she saw the receipt for the bill that her mother-in-law paid on the day. ‘When it was time to have my first scan, we did it and went to the doctor for a consultation. We were told that they had done a 3D scan, but we had to have a 4D image, so the doctor sent us to another hospital to repeat the procedure. One such test costs 500 RMB (72 USD).’Footnote ¹² But when she went to Russia and shared the story with the doctors there, she learnt that repeating the scan was unnecessary. There were additional benefits to giving birth in Russia. These were government support schemes, including a one-off payment of 16,000 roubles (207 USD), another 3,000 roubles (39 USD) for the first six months, and Putin’s subsistence for new families in the first year – around 10,000 roubles (123 USD) per month.Footnote ¹³ Yaroslava, who was preparing to get married and was already thinking about giving birth, said that Shanghai, where she lived, was very expensive, and she needed to have good medical insurance or 90,000 RMB (13,000 USD) to have the baby in a good clinic, so giving birth in her native Ukraine was a cheaper, familiar and more comfortable option at the time.

Oxana also said that, during the regular pregnancy check-up appointment, all the staff in the Chinese hospital came to take a look at ‘a pregnant foreign woman’: ‘I was in a state of shock and there were ten people in the room with me. I was lying with my legs spread out, and the doctor shouted to my husband in the corridor to come and take a look.’ Oxana was pleased to have delivered her baby in a familiar environment and organised Russian citizenship. She didn’t get hukou for her child, because, in her words, ‘it was illegal because they had Russian citizenship’, and as the child was still small, she was not yet thinking about the choice of schools. While school education was a major factor for women to think that hukou registration was an advantage, some were looking ahead at higher education and they decided to give birth in their home country and give their children their home citizenship, because they thought that the competition for a higher education place at home was less fierce than for children with foreign citizenship in China and in their home country it was easier for them to get into a good university.Footnote ¹⁴ Another Belarusian participant called Olya arranged for her son to get Belarusian citizenship, but she told me that she was planning to change it to Chinese before he turned eighteen so that he would not be called up for national service in Belarus. She did not want to change his citizenship too soon, because she wanted ‘to play it safe a thousand times over.’Footnote ¹⁵

Many of these women, in light of their precarious legal status, developed the urge to protect themselves in case their married life and stay in China came to a sudden halt. Even in cases when they did not have a child, the question of citizenship preoccupied them:

Ukrainian women talked about similar issues. Yaroslava told me:

The practices of marriage and parenthood operate at the global and local intersections of gender, race, class and ethnicity, and in China they are additionally shaped by notions of blood-based national belonging, a multilevel citizenship regime and customary practices. On top of having to engage actively with and interpret new cultural and moral fields, foreign wives were confronted with the geopolitics of citizenship as it affected their children’s status. Negotiations over children’s citizenship varied and depended on many factors, including the level of trust between the spouses, the family’s socioeconomic status, the woman’s occupation and experience of living in China and the role that the Chinese in-laws played in the nuclear family’s affairs.

5.2 ‘When You Want Peace, Prepare for War’

During my WeChat conversation with Olga, she told me about emotional discussions with her husband concerning the citizenship of their son:

Even in happy and stable families the women wanted to arrange for the child to take their citizenship. Just in case. For example, Polina considered her marriage a happy one and had complete trust in her husband. Yet she felt she needed an extra layer of certainty that her son could never be taken away from her. To dilute the chance of family conflict, some women planned to have two children with two different citizenships.Footnote ¹⁹ Marina was happy that one of her sons had Russian citizenship, but she thought that it made her husband jealous, because he wanted both sons to be Chinese. She explained, ‘Every time I tried to take my sons to Russia so that they could improve their knowledge of the language, my husband would try to obstruct my plans.’Footnote ²⁰ The way Natasha put it was straightforward: ‘I am glad my daughter has Ukrainian citizenship, just in case. I will never let her give up her Ukrainian citizenship. This is probably because I am not a hundred per cent sure that I will stay in China.’Footnote ²¹ The women’s uncertainty and ‘unspoken fear’Footnote ²² of separating from their child prompted these migrant women to use their national citizenship to defend themselves against future catastrophes and secure their parental rights. Their maternal subjectivity prompted them to value their home citizenship. Polina, a Beijing-based research participant, considered herself lucky for having successfully persuaded her husband to apply for their son to abandon his Chinese citizenship in order to become a Russian citizen, against pressure from both the local authorities and their Chinese family:

In some families, the foreign women’s citizenship choice for their children was a cause for family conflict. Polina observed that her Chinese parents-in-law were very upset to learn of their grandchild’s change of citizenship, because it limited his prospects of pursuing a career in the civil service or the Chinese army. By securing a link between motherhood and the child’s body through the mother’s citizenship, the women attempted to build an internal safety net, what Wolf called a ‘uterine family’, preventing their child from becoming a full Chinese citizen, while thus securing a stronger legal bond between themselves and their children.Footnote ²⁴ Women actively looked for ways to outwit China’s single nationality law to secure their parental rights and give their children more citizenship flexibility. Alyona, who came from Ukraine, managed to play the contradictions of national citizenships to both her own and her child’s advantage by arranging for her child to have two passports. Yet she admitted that this was risky and one of the citizenships could be revoked at any time.

Passing on their maternal national citizenship to their child secures these women’s parental rights but compromises the child’s Chinese citizenship. Without hukou registration, the child is considered an incomplete citizen and can enjoy only limited rights and responsibilities. They can reside in the country without a visa yet, at the same time, their rights, such as access to education, are limited. They cannot go to just any state nursery or school because not every school accepts children without hukou registration. When I asked Sonya from Belarus whether it was important for her to get Belarusian citizenship for her two children, she explained that she thought it had been important in the past, until she found out the implications for their education:

Staking a claim to their home country’s citizenship for their children at the expense of Chinese hukou or finding a way to arrange dual citizenship informally for their children were ways in which these women played with the rules about national citizenship to secure their maternal bond to their Chinese children within the limited space and constrained rights they were afforded.

5.3 The Role of Multigenerational Households in Children’s Citizenship

Some of the women felt that they had little control over their children’s citizenship choices. Olga said that her Chinese family had refused to allow her son Russian citizenship from the beginning. She said that they had promised to look for an opportunity to arrange both Russian and Chinese citizenships, but in the end arranged for him to have only Chinese papers. Anna signed an informal contract with her ex-husband saying that, in the case of divorce, their son would remain with her but she would agree to his having Chinese citizenship.Footnote ²⁶ However, her Chinese father-in-law took her son’s documents and arranged for the boy to have Chinese citizenship without seeking the agreement of the child’s parents.

Other women assumed their children shared their citizenship until one day they discovered that they did not. One such example is that of Sasha. Sasha met her husband while working in a Chinese restaurant in the suburbs of Moscow in the early 1990s. She has lived in Changchun since 1996, when she moved there with her Chinese husband and their two daughters, who were born in Russia. Sasha gave birth to their third daughter in Changchun, where she was living with her three daughters at the time of our first meeting in 2016. Her husband had by then been working in Guangzhou for several years and came back to visit them once a year during the Chinese New Year. The only reason she had not sought divorce, she told me, was for fear that her husband would not let her keep their youngest daughter: ‘He would give her to his sister, or the wife of his older brother. He will not look after her. Why would I want this?’Footnote ²⁷

The two older daughters were already adults and had their own jobs, although they continued to live with their mother. Sasha told me she was shocked to find out that her daughters, who were born in Russia, were Chinese citizens – a fact that she discovered when the Chinese authorities refused to put Chinese visas in their Russian passports. In the eyes of these officials, their Russian passports had become defunct because they already had Chinese citizenship and did not require a family visa to remain in the country. Sasha suspected that her husband had previously registered their daughters in the hukou system without letting her know. This had probably occurred, she stated, when they were going through a difficult period in their marriage and he was worried that she would return to Russia with the children. She added: ‘Chinese men are very worried about it. I know three women whose husbands took their children and won’t let them see their mothers. The women had to leave China and their children stayed behind. I know three women this happened to.’Footnote ²⁸ Lena arrived in Beijing almost ten years after Sasha and learnt by chance of possible legal difficulties after becoming a mother in China:

This is how Lena recognised her insecure and dependent status in China and decided not to take the risk. She later admitted that, even if the official from the Embassy had not advised her to return home to give birth, she would have done her utmost to give her son Russian citizenship. When I asked why, Lena confessed that there were many stories of unhappy Chinese–Russian couples at the time. She went back to Russia when she was six months pregnant and has ever since regarded it as one of the most important decisions of her life. After she had come back to China with her three-month-old baby son, she and her husband got married and moved in together. When, several years later, Lena’s marriage did not work out, she recalled her conversation with her former husband:

A year after their divorce, the couple reached a compromise. The son lived with Lena in Beijing and her ex-husband paid for his education and the apartment, while Lena paid for her son’s Russian-language classes and their daily necessities, using the income from her small cargo business.

With no right to work or social protection and temporary, dependent residential status in China, it was common for women to seek extra assurance to secure their parental rights. The main advantage for women living in China of having a home nationality passport for their children is that, if they need to, they can quickly return with their child to their home country without seeking permission from the Chinese-national parent. Yet, securing home citizenship alone was not always enough and some women decided to protect themselves by registering the birth as a single parent, leaving the space for the father’s name on the birth certificate empty.

5.4 Stories of Conflict and Escape

Anna’s story had a happy ending but she said it would have been very difficult to tell her story three years before we met. With the passing of time, she felt she could talk about her painful past. When we met in Harbin she was in a new relationship. One of the first things she told me was that she was happy that she had given birth to her son in Russia, because this had helped her when she started arguing about her son’s status with her ex-husband. She said that they had had a good life together and blamed her divorce on her job.

Anna worked in a Chinese company in a managerial role and was getting a good salary and had good work conditions. She said that family life suffered because she worked long hours and when she was not at work she was worrying about it. When she became pregnant, she decided to give birth in Russia, because she was not confident about her Chinese language skills and wasn’t psychologically ready to give birth in China. She sorted out her son’s paperwork in Russia and returned to China when her son was four months old. Her Chinese father-in-law insisted on arranging a Chinese passport for her son and she reluctantly agreed. When, three years later, her marriage was collapsing, at the divorce proceedings her husband agreed that their three-year-old son could stay with his mother.

However, when Anna started dating a new man and they moved in together, her ex-husband collected their son, giving the excuse that they were going to visit his grandparents, and then he later called Anna to say: ‘We are not coming back; our son is with me.’ She looked for her son for three weeks with the help of a Chinese friend, using a mobile signal. She found her son and took him from the playground in a kindergarten where her husband had taken him. She continued: ‘It was operation 007. We left for Russia the following day and lived there for a year.’ Her new Chinese husband joined her in Russia. After returning to China, she gave birth to her second son, but arranged for him to have Russian citizenship in a Russian consulate.Footnote ³¹

When I asked Anna if there were many women who found themselves in a similar situation, she said that one woman had turned to her for help and advice, but she did not know how her story had ended. In her words, the woman had no rights in China, because her child had Chinese citizenship and the husband had taken all her documents and hidden the child from her. The woman did not even have documents confirming that the child was hers. Anna offered to help her with the legal aspects of her case and accommodation and a job in Harbin, but the woman lived in a different part of China and refused to travel to Harbin. She had no chance of taking the child with her outside the country. Her only option was to take the child, go to another town and live there, but it was not possible to do this without documents.Footnote ³²

Lena, who was involved in Russian community affairs in Jilin, told me of a new Russian mother with a two-month-old baby whom she was supporting, because her Chinese family had refused to let her be with her daughter:

According to Lena, from the perspective of the Chinese family, the child belongs to the family, and if the mother who is supposed to care for him isn’t prepared to live by the family’s rules, she cannot be trusted. ‘The mother-in-law issued her with an ultimatum – yue zi or a divorce. They don’t trust her. She had given birth and now her function was over. She had given birth to a beautiful child.’Footnote ³⁵

The lack of understanding and difficulty they had in accepting unfamiliar cultural practices were often perceived by the women as a desire by the family to control and infringe on their maternal rights. Another participant, Viktoria, shared her observations about her mother-in-law’s change of attitude towards her after she had given birth:

The zuo yue zi tradition had become a popular private industry in the neoliberalising healthcare system in China, as some of my participants experienced. Olya spent two months in a doing-a-month centre where she and her baby were looked after while her husband was out of the country on a business trip: ‘If you can afford it, you can pay for it. It costs 2,500 USD for one month in our town. In Shenzhen, it would cost 10,000 USD.’ One of the most negative aspects of the system was that she had restricted time with her baby and that she wasn’t allowed to sleep with him. Reflecting on this experience, she said she would have preferred to have been at home and hired a childminder who would come to help from time to time.

The women’s decisions about the citizenship of their children within the limits of the PRC’s citizenship rules highlight the tensions between their personal choices, cultural practices and the geopolitical forces they were subjected to. Many women reflected on the problem of acquiring citizenship for their ethnically mixed children. One participant captured a common sentiment shared by many women. ‘Chinese men will never willingly give away a hunxue child. This isn’t because of their paternal feelings, but because they want to use the child to show off (predmet ponta).’ She noted that a man with an ethnically mixed child would find it easier to get a wife after a divorce than for a divorced woman with an ethnically mixed child to find a husband.Footnote ³⁷ ‘In the north-east, men rarely give their children up. The children are continuing their family name. This is very important to them.’Footnote ³⁸

Others related tensions that arise in the family because of their attitudes towards Chinese–white children in China: ‘The Chinese have a cult of European beauty. They worship it. They crave beautiful children. This is like eugenics, they need beautiful children.’Footnote ³⁹ Lena illustrated this popular sentiment in a story about her university colleague who had a European appearance. This woman was approached by a Chinese man on the street, who told her: ‘I want children from you. My parents insist on it. You are suitable according to every criterion.’Footnote ⁴⁰ She thought that this example conveyed the widespread attitude towards white women who were perceived first and foremost as the potential bearers of hunxue children. My interlocuters as a result believed they had to defend their rights and prove their worth beyond their potential reproductive qualities.

These women’s personal aspirations, desires and expectations clashed with Chinese cultural and state norms of marriage and citizenship. But the conflict was resolved in a positive way, at least for Lena and Anna. Lena moved on from her dependent position to take up a semi-independent position as a single foreign parent in Beijing after she had divorced her husband but kept their child. While she still relied on her ex-husband’s support for their child’s education, she told me that she was convinced that she had earned his respect by fighting for her dignity and maternal rights. She told me that she was thankful to her ex-husband for teaching her about the ‘Chinese mentality’ and has since found it easier to understand and accept it. Anna was also happy that her son could stay with her. She has learnt to understand her ex-husband’s position and could not help but feel sorry for him.

5.5 Negotiating Social Acceptance and Belonging

Questions about the social acceptance and belonging of the ethnically mixed children in China have concerned many women. From a very early age, their children had become aware of their difference and the greater societal attention they attracted. Olga in Harbin noted that every day people were commenting to her son: ‘Have you dyed your hair? Are you a foreigner? Are you hunxue?’ From the time that he was three years old, her son started asking her questions about his identity. Olga recalled that he used to ask her if he was Chinese or Russian and she had to explain that, according to his passport, he was Chinese, but that his mother was Russian. Because their children did not look like most people in China, some women had to come to terms with these issues and the children’s unclear place in society. In Beijing, Lena noted that even before she had given birth she was wondering about ‘who my children would look like. Their skin colour was troubling me (nastorazhival menya). Everything was new. … Everything was different.’Footnote ⁴¹

The main area of concern for the mother of a ten-year-old girl was how her daughter would fit into Chinese society: ‘I am not sure how she will feel here in the future. That is the problem. I do not know how she will deal with her identity problem.’Footnote ⁴² These women had become accustomed to the conventional notion in China that Eurasian children were ‘clever and beautiful’ (聪明 congmin and 漂亮 piaoliang) and they were exposed to this idea daily. ‘If you ask a taxi driver or talk to a Chinese friend, of course they will say that a Eurasian child is very beautiful and the child will receive numerous compliments.’Footnote ⁴³ Some women agreed with the Chinese attitudes towards ethnically mixed children – on several occasions I came across women saying that ‘the mixing of blood’ makes children healthy and strong.Footnote ⁴⁴

These narratives of mixed-race Chinese identity rest on the belief in a hierarchical relationship among people from different ethnic groups and of different skin colour. In this imagined global racial hierarchy, blackness is positioned below Chineseness, while ‘yang’ or ‘whiteness’ is associated with ‘more developed’ and ‘more beautiful’.Footnote ⁴⁵ This translates into the social phenomenon that Chinese children with a foreign parent of African descent face more scrutiny than those with a foreign parent of white European descent.Footnote ⁴⁶ Whiteness is largely met with admiration and praise, whereas blackness is often viewed with disdain, perceived as a form of pollution and a threat to the Chinese nation.

Eurasian children’s features are also valued as being particularly beautiful. Advertising agencies capitalised on this and frequently circulated adverts on WeChat groups in search of Eurasian baby models, offering to pay them up to 400 RMB (58 USD) per hour. Yet another dimension of being regarded as a first class person and valorisation of whiteness for market consumption lies in the underlying sense of inferiority and the belief that the Chinese population is somehow of lesser quality. This sentiment, shared at a national level, often manifested in acts of prejudice and discrimination towards children in the school environment. Lena was very well aware of her son’s experiences in school: ‘Sometimes small children hurt him. At a subconscious level, they do not really understand why some children do not look like them and they behave in an aggressive way. They do not know how to behave towards a person with a different skin colour. Everything that they cannot understand is automatically rejected. Of course, this affects his development and personality.’Footnote ⁴⁷

When Lena tried to raise the issue with the school, the teacher did not know how to react because she had never experienced anything like it before, yet she often made use of the child to emphasise her own superiority by giving him poor marks, making him sit at the back of the classroom and telling him off for no reason. In 2018, a thirteen-year-old Ukrainian-Chinese schoolboy committed suicide in Shanghai, leaving a note that blamed the educational system for his decision. Despite his parents’ attempts to call public attention to the school’s systematic abuse of their son, the police refused to investigate the case.Footnote ⁴⁸

Such struggles about their children’s place and acceptance in Chinese society exacerbated the women’s uncertainty about their citizenship and education choices. Some considered sending their children to study in their home or other foreign countries. Oxana told me that she and her husband did not want to send their child to study in a state school in China because they did not want them to be educated in an atmosphere where ‘business relations are valued from a very young age’. Instead, they were thinking about educating their child in Russia. It was cheaper and, besides, she said that she was a patriot.Footnote ⁴⁹

5.6 Conclusion

While the status of white women from the post-Soviet republics as foreign spouses marks the boundaries of foreignness and race in China, their Eurasian children become border sites where competing family values and citizenship practices meet and clash. Family members’ negotiations of these children’s status expose not only their personal ambitions, fears, insecurities and character, but also national anxieties, cultural tropes and deep-seated norms and beliefs that feed into the formulation and practices of China’s citizenship and immigration regimes. Hunxue children occupy an ambiguous space of in-betweenness, yet as ‘beautiful and clever’ future members of the Chinese nation, they are actively absorbed into the sphere of Chinese civilisation through dominant family norms, citizenship practices and education policies. In the Chinese national imagination they are, in Haiyan Lee’s terms, strangers who are actively converted into core members.Footnote ⁵⁰ Their mothers, on the other hand, remain permanent outsiders. Unlike the strangers in Lee’s analysis who ‘allow us to see alternative, marginal, or soft boundaries that do not always align with national boundaries’,Footnote ⁵¹ the position of foreign wives in Chinese society sheds light on the limits of the dominant patriarchal ethics and racial hierarchies of the citizenship regime that makes them part of Chinese families yet denies their social and economic rights outside their family homes. Despite the important reproductive and caring roles ascribed to them in Chinese official and popular discourses, their status remains that of permanent sojourners.

The women I interviewed redefine and exercise their agency despite their uncertain future and legal status in China. They take steps to be listed as single parents on their children’s birth certificates, secure citizenship for their children in their own country of origin or informally ensure that their children hold two citizenships. They utilise these unofficial resources and tools to safeguard their maternal agency and parental rights. Through the informal act of claiming maternal citizenship, the women confront the exclusionary logics of Chinese national citizenship that incorporates their children’s bodies at the expense of their parental rights. These practices have been possible so far, given the fragmented character and patchy implementation of immigration laws and administrative regulations, which create spaces in which the women can engage in productive interruptions of national boundaries and reinterpretations of conflicting citizenship regimes.