I prefer a small online group, up to thirty people. I wouldn’t trust bigger groups, because occasionally stories leak to wider society.Footnote 1
In the chat room when you sit down and say that my child isn’t potty-trained yet, I feel judged by younger mums. They came here young, got married straightaway, and achieved fulfilment through children. They make themselves supermums and superwives. I know my own self-worth. I don’t need to prove myself. Many come here from a difficult life to earn money. I didn’t run away from anything. I gave up everything and came here. I took a risk and don’t regret it so far. I hope I never will.Footnote 2
6.1 Introduction
In the mid 2010s, WeChat (微信 weixin) became the main digital platform in China, as well as a popular social networking space among my research participants.Footnote 3 It emerged as an important technology for everyday services and interactions, including shopping, transport, communication, entertainment and banking. The development of WeChat allowed people, including my research participants, to form groups to discuss their lives and learn about important aspects of their life in China. As elsewhere, the use of technology in China is central to shaping migrants’ identities and subjectivitiesFootnote 4 and influencing their citizenship negotiations.Footnote 5 The widespread use of WeChat prompted some Russian-speaking women to set up private groups to exchange information and share advice on Chinese–foreign families, pregnancy, childbirth, citizenship and education, among numerous other topics. Some women told me that, when these groups first started, they spent many hours in these new digital places, spending time there in search of communication, information and support. The multiplication of new online communities allowed them to maintain their ties with their home countries, as well as forming new ones in China. At the same time, the expansion of the groups in number and size meant for some that the intimacy and trust of a small group interaction became diluted. For that reason, women started opening other smaller groups whose membership they guarded more carefully. One of the WeChat group administrators commented:
When the chats were small, the members were very active. We talked about different kinds of intimate topics and complained about men. It was a very small chat group. We spent all our free time there, crying and chatting with each other about cultural differences and misunderstandings. Now, the chat group has grown and it is not the same. Now it is just a group where you can find some useful information.Footnote 6
The main question that I engage with in this chapter is how, with the growth of the WeChat group chats, my interlocutors navigated the digital and material environments of racialised and gendered family-building and social interactions under the patriarchal Chinese immigration rules. I am particularly interested in how some of the individual experiences and emotions that were expressed to me in one-to-one conversations related to the collective subjectivities and affects of the women’s online social groups. Furthermore, I am interested in how these processes relate to the geopolitical processes of national borders, racial hierarchies and citizenship laws and broader structures of feeling and value that connected the women loosely in what Lauren Berlant calls ‘intimate publics’.Footnote 7 I focus specifically on how the women interacted in two of the WeChat groups that were created by Russian-speaking women to discuss issues that concerned Chinese–post-Soviet relationships. This allows me to tease out the complexities of the interplay between the intimate, the social and the digital, on the one hand, and the location of politics at the interstices between ordinary affect and collective feelings, on the other.Footnote 8 They can also be characterised as ‘affective networked publics’ as they were mobilised and connected through a web of sentiments expressed in textual and symbolic exchanges in the WeChat groups.Footnote 9 This discussion focuses on the particularities of the common experiences and the language in which they were communicated, as well as the unsaid but intensely felt sentiments that shaped these conversations.
The women told me that their ‘non-Chinese’ appearance made them feel that they were not part of Chinese society. Polya, a Russian woman who had lived in China for over twenty years, said that she had never felt she was part of the society, because ‘I can’t change my face, can I?’Footnote 10 Outside their home, their non-Chinese appearance served as a continuous reminder of their foreign origins and complicated their ability to believe they could belong in China. The WeChat groups, on the other hand, offered them an instant flight from the feeling of being foreign. Their online interactions in their native language became an antidote, as soon as they entered the digital chat room, to their daily awareness of being the Other. Often, online daily discussions started with someone posting: ‘I am here in the chat because I have no one to talk to.’
I discuss how these women were conditioned by the knowledge that they represented a valorised and racialised Other and that this was a fundamental constraint on their need to belong and exchange ideas in daily life.Footnote 11 Scholars on digital cultures argue that there is no dichotomy between fantasy and reality in the technologically mediated environment of online participation.Footnote 12 Making sense of their life in China and securing their status in China as wives, mothers, women, immigrants, workers and human beings was a daily struggle for most of the women I met. Their efforts to survive in China as foreigners and their use of WeChat groups for help, connection or advice on how to navigate Chinese cultural, social and legal spheres blurred the lines between reality and fantasy, their own experiences and what others posted about their lives in China. The technology also mediated their daily interactions in Chinese sociocultural realms. Their exchanges and reflections on their experiences in the groups became an important resource that newcomers could use to shape their decisions, opinions and perspectives on matters concerning their lives in China. For many of these women, WeChat communities became an essential part of living – and sometimes surviving – in China. They were an instant source of information, advice and support for the women, many of whom had limited cultural and linguistic knowledge of China and found themselves isolated. Thus, digital space became the terrain where their sense of belonging was partly realised. Through their smartphones, which functioned as ‘technologies of connection’,Footnote 13 the women could channel their emotions, establish new networks and express their hopes and worries. Yet, as I show below, these practices of belonging often took on violent and exclusionary forms.
The membership in the groups was monitored yet fluid. New participants were regularly added to the chats by existing members. The newcomers found the groups valuable because they helped them to learn how to obtain necessary documents and respond to questions from officials in China. Oxana, who had been living in China for two years at the time of our interview, told me that discussion about documents was the most important aspect of the WeChat group exchanges.Footnote 14 She said that nothing else was of any interest to her. Some women explained that they spent a lot of time in the group chats when they were first set up, but over time they no longer found the groups very useful or interesting. There were also those who thought the environment in the online chats was toxic and they exited them because at times personal conflicts were publicly exposed.Footnote 15 Some of the group members branched off to set up their own WeChat groups to test their business ideas or focus on a particular aspect of their lives in China. During my nearly two-year membership of WeChat groups, I learnt a great deal from the daily interactions among members about the topics that provoked heated discussions and long threads of messages. These exchanges evolved without my direction and mediation and reflected the dynamics and issues that were of concern to the women collectively and individually. After I left the groups in August 2018, I received invitations to join new chats about reading and books, art, painting lessons, education, fashion, homemade cosmetics and healthy living, all of which had been started by members of the groups.
How do the intimate publics of these WeChat groups demarcate lines of inclusion and exclusion in relation to other people, subjects and places? How do the intimate (and emotional) geographies of citizenship, cross-border family lives and emotions feature in these conversations? My interest here is to understand the ‘ordinary affects’ of the everyday conversations that unfolded in the digital sphere.Footnote 16 Kathleen Stewart defines ordinary affects as ‘public feelings that begin and end in broad circulation, but they are also the stuff that seemingly intimate lives are made of’.Footnote 17 Sara Ahmed argues that collective emotions, like capital, are produced by being circulated, including in digital spheres.Footnote 18 Ordinary affects contain and express the intensities of the everyday and connect them to complex webs of intimate publics. Experienced as everyday social environments, digital platforms generate and reproduce affective economies. They are expressed through the interplay of gendered, national and racialised power relations. Recent research on digital cultures has shown the close interplay of emotions, technology and politics that shape affective online communities.Footnote 19 Adi Kuntsman, for example, explains how some affective regimes of online socialities can be expressed through language, while others are intensely felt yet remain unstated.Footnote 20 I build on these bodies of work on ordinary affects and intimate publics to trace and understand the role of online groups in how the women navigated their lives in China.
My observations are organised around the themes that I came to see as being at the core of the WeChat group discussions. They are the topics that generated the most intense conversations and produced the largest volume of posts. Often these topics related to the themes that the women discussed in individual conversations with me. Often the online exchanges affected me as well, sometimes leaving me with a lasting impression of fury, fascination and puzzlement. My aim here is to offer close and textured observations of the discursive and emotional landscapes of the women’s WeChat group discussions related to the most salient sociocultural and political topics.
6.2 The Value of a Slavic Wife in China
The topic of the growing popularity of Russian–Chinese marriages often came up in the online conversations. The women regularly complained that their Chinese family members and friends would ask them to introduce their single male relatives to female friends in their home countries. Others shared their negative experiences of dealing with the Chinese media, which, according to them, misrepresented the facts or lied about their lives and published their stories and photos without their permission.
One day in September 2016 a group member published an advert saying that a wealthy Chinese male friend wanted to find a Russian or Ukrainian wife. This prompted an immediate explosion of responses in the group. ‘It seems to be popular to “save” beautiful Russian and Ukrainian women via marriage,’ commented one woman.Footnote 21 The same person later added that few Chinese men were interested in her because she was divorced, had a son and had just turned forty. This post also started a discussion about what some women, evoking the Chinese notion of suzhi or human quality, called the excellent value (kachestvo) that Slavic wives brought to Chinese men. The women offered their views on the importance of Chinese notions of suzhi and mianzi in China. For example, ‘My husband (at that point my future husband) heard about Slavic women and was determined to find one to marry.’ Another group member sent a message saying that ‘face (mianzi) is the only thing that Chinese people value’ and anything that earns face can be translated into economic capital for their Chinese family. Yet another member added that the Chinese ‘are proud that they can marry foreign women without paying for them, like Chinese women. Among the Chinese it is becoming a popular trend to marry women from our countries.’ This discussion developed into a debate about the monetary exchange (彩礼 cai li) that is traditionally part of the marriage contract in China. Some women in the group were not aware of this tradition and wrote that they felt cheated when they realised that their Chinese family had not given them anything in return for their agreement to marry their son. Others explicitly said they did not want any money, but at least one participant felt that she needed to inform other group members about it, remarking, ‘We should inform all our women that they shouldn’t miss out on this money. Let the Chinese men fork out. We bring quality genes to them. We are hardworking and domestic. Let them pay for this.’ This topic led to collective reflections on what a great bargain the post-Soviet women were for Chinese men and the society at large: ‘Not all Chinese people know how special we are – we don’t get sick, we don’t complain; we are very strong, don’t need any money, just love. We don’t demand a bride price … As soon as this becomes public knowledge, all Chinese women will be left without grooms. Their men will come after us.’ There seemed to be a consensus (in the absence of any dissenting views) in the group chat that Slavic women were a bargain in the commodified Chinese marriage market. However, the gendered, objectifying and racialised nature of this market remained unquestioned. It seemed to me that the valorised character of the women from the former Soviet Union did not trouble the group. However, when their personal life or images were used by Chinese media without consent, they openly expressed their anger to the group. One day in November 2016 one woman, who had divorced her Chinese husband, wrote that she was unsurprised when one of the group members posted her wedding picture from a few years ago, which had been published on the cover of an online Chinese magazine: ‘And just like that, totally by accident, I find out that my photograph is published in a periodical that I wasn’t even aware of … It pisses me off when they steal photos. I didn’t give any interviews and didn’t give any permissions to publish my photo either!’
Her frustration and anger at the lies about her life and the lack of respect for her privacy were shared by others. Some women commented how they had stopped replying to requests for an interview from media outlets. Being a subject of popular and media attention and not being able to influence the narrative of the stories about them presented in the media was a source of frustration and anger for many of these women. It made me realise that this was probably the reason why some women did not want to talk to me individually or did not want me to be part of their WeChat groups. The lack of control over how they were depicted in the media and perceived by others made them suspicious of anyone taking an interest in their lives.
The sense of being an object of collective and intense attention in China often generated lively exchanges on WeChat. The irritation and frustration produced by the post about the unauthorised publication of the wedding photograph were complemented by their pride in their value to Chinese men and families and the society itself. These contradictory affects related to different aspects of the objectified status of the women in the Chinese sociocultural realms co-existed in the groups without been openly challenged. They did not go so far as to question a marriage culture that historically objectified women and in recent years has presented women from the former Soviet Union in China as a high value commodity that can be acquired for free or at a discount. Their main, and often only, legal and socioeconomic status as prestigious foreign wives had to be maximised to secure their social position in China through other practices which included reproducing relations of racialised and gendered hierarchy and inequality, as evidenced in the collective feelings expressed in the groups towards Chinese women.
6.3 Denigrating Chinese Women
Discussing the differing qualities of the women from the former Soviet republics and Chinese women was a frequent topic on the WeChat groups. I found it surprising that generalised and offensive comments about Chinese women were not openly refuted by any of the group members. They often described Chinese women as spoilt, infantile, selfish, needy, fake and weak. For example, one member of the group wrote in January 2017 that ‘Chinese women won’t have a child without a flat, a car and a decent amount of savings, because, in their opinion, there is not enough money [in it] to feed their child’. Chinese women were presented as hypochondriacs for whom everything related to gynaecology, including menstruation and pregnancy, was like a deadly disease. At the same time, they depicted Chinese women’s attitude to having an abortion as very relaxed – ‘having an abortion is as easy as spitting out a sunflower seed’ – but after the abortion the women were cared for by their partners as if they were on their deathbed. This comment was complemented with a contrasting observation that said that ‘Our women aren’t like that. They get up, shake off the effects of a general anaesthetic and rush off to the school, shop and work.’ One group member completed the depiction of a group portrait of Chinese women with the remark: ‘I cannot understand what Russian men see in Chinese women. In our province they are forever throwing tantrums.’ It was not clear whether the collective attitude expressed in WeChat groups towards Chinese women was based on any specific experiences and interactions with individual Chinese women.
This collective dislike of Chinese women extended to some group members’ reflections on their sons’ potential future romantic relationships. ‘I wouldn’t want my child to marry an Asian woman, because they have grown up with many silly commercial traditions,’ one woman stated. Another agreed that she would not be happy if her son brought home a bride who was Chinese, and she would do everything she could to prevent him from marrying her. Yet another woman from the chat recounted an exchange at a fruit stall that she repeated as follows:
The seller was complaining that it was time for his son to marry, but they did not have enough money. He estimated the cost of the marriage: 200,000 RMB (28,800 USD) to pay the parents of the bride, 200,000 RMB (28,800 USD) to give to the young couple and 200,000 RMB (28,800 USD) to buy a flat for them. I realised that these conversations followed me everywhere in China and I promised myself that I wouldn’t let my son marry a Chinese woman.
These comparisons about the qualities and cost of Chinese and Slavic wives went further when, on one occasion, the topic moved to remarks about Chinese women’s choice of partners. One woman wrote, ‘Chinese women are even willing to marry black-as-pitch African American men working in children’s nurseries.’ Another responded, ‘I have never seen a Chinese woman with an African American man from a nursery. Their parents don’t allow them to marry losers who work in nurseries. I don’t know any such cases.’ These exchanges ended abruptly without anyone raising a question about the racial prejudice expressed in these comments.
This failure to defend Chinese women contrasted starkly with another online conversation comparing working and stay-at-home post-Soviet mothers in China, which caused heated discussions and aired a variety of standpoints. Nobody in the group seemed to have found offensive or protested about the shared opinions about the inferior qualities of Chinese women. Many women in the chat did not or could not work in China due to their visa restrictions, but there were a considerable number of working or studying mothers who had employed a nanny to look after their children. When one stay-at-home mother commented that only mothers should look after and care for their children, because if anything happened to the children, the mothers would not forgive themselves, several working women responded that she shouldn’t judge them, because she didn’t know them or their circumstances. Only at that point did the group administrator post a message asking the chat members ‘not to offend each other. The aim of this chat is to share experiences, give advice, opinions, useful information … let’s not spoil a pleasant atmosphere! This is a nice chat, which has helped many mothers over questions related to documents and other problems of mixed children.’ The exchange of messages expressed the putative racial hierarchies and structural inequalities that circulate in Chinese and post-Soviet areas and inform ordinary affects in both societies. They implied that a Black man who worked in a nursery was a poor choice for a partner. The unspoken assumption was that women should aim to marry up, and what that meant was that their partner should be of a higher socioeconomic status and background than themselves, which was in part defined by his skin colour. The WeChat groups seemed to be in a silent agreement that Slavic women were more valuable, more genuine and altruistic and made better wives for Chinese men and superior mothers for hunxue children. These thoughtless generalisations and the racial injustices expressed towards Chinese women and Black men remained unchallenged in the group exchanges. Nobody stood up in their defence.
The women occasionally compared the status of their home country’s citizenship to that of holders of Western passports. One group member recalled her experiences in Istanbul, when the bouncers in a nightclub would not let her enter the club but accepted the credentials of her Swiss friend, who then went in without a problem. ‘This is why nationality is important,’ she concluded. Another member agreed that ‘not long ago, Italians wouldn’t let any single Russian women younger than thirty years of age enter their country, because our prostitutes were driving them crazy’. She added, ‘I don’t say that citizenship is everything, but people judge each other by their citizenship, too.’
This exchange started a heated discussion about the value of citizenship, with some participants commenting that it was easier for those holding a Western passport than a Russian one in China, and others arguing, as one of them put it, that ‘the passport isn’t as important as what your own potential and ambitions are, and why we should be ashamed of our own country and worship Euro-America?’ The latter participant added that ‘to say that one person is better than another based on their passport is a form of discrimination’. What is interesting about these discussions was that, while the conversation about the value of stay-at-home versus working mothers and Russian versus Western citizenship generated a variety of responses, the chat about the qualities of Chinese and Russian women remained within a simple dichotomous framework of good and bad. The post-Soviet women’s legal status in China did not provide them with stability and confidence in the future, and they seemed to Other Chinese women, who were the primary target of their derogatory attitudes, using a racial trope that justified their view that their status as foreign wives and mothers was more valuable. That childbearing and caring qualities were women’s primary roles was not challenged or questioned in these conversations. The WeChat group exchanges created an image of Chinese women as a group category that was othered as inferior in terms of their womanly and motherly qualities.
6.4 ‘Why Do You Need Hukou?’
Some of the most frequently asked and hotly debated questions were about the Chinese political institute of hukou. When WeChat group members asked what hukou was, others rushed to explain that ‘you are not fully Chinese until you are in the hukou system’. One woman noted that she went to her local immigration office as often as she went to her place of work. The benefits and limitations that hukou posed for ethnically mixed children and their foreign parents were topics of bottomless discussions. One group member wrote that her head was spinning from trying to decide what citizenship was best for her child: ‘I feel like a caged bird without any way out. I’d like them to be a Ukrainian. … I’d be calmer, but would the children be safer if they were Ukrainian? All this information is so confusing.’
As in their individual conversations with me, many women poured out their frustration in the WeChat discussions, saying that not having hukou was a major stumbling block for their children’s inclusion and future prospects in China. For example, in February 2017, one woman posted a comment that the lack of hukou was restrictive to her son, because without full Chinese citizenship he could not represent his school in football competitions. Another participant concurred with this view: ‘I decided for myself that if my son wanted to live in China then it was best for him to have Chinese citizenship. I don’t want the life of a laowai (foreigner) for him. When he graduates from a university and wants to live in China he will have problems with non-Chinese citizenship in China.’ Another woman disagreed: ‘There are no problems here for foreigners. The problem is when a mother can’t live with her child in her own country for as long as she wants.’ This comment conveyed the difficulties that conflicting citizenship laws and visa regulations posed for women and their children if they wanted to go to Russia. As I found out, mothers could not spend more than three months in Russia with children who had Chinese passports, because there was a yearly limit on the number of temporary permits for foreigners that Russia would issue. The women learnt that no concessions were made for Russian citizens with foreign family members, including children. If the limit for the given number of residence permits had been reached, they would have to wait for another year. Many women wanted to be able to go to their home country for extended periods while the children were small, but could not and felt that the Chinese and Russian immigration and visa rules obstructed their plans. Even their home country, of which they were citizens, was not ready to accept them with a child with a foreign passport. As one group chat participant noted:
As a Russian citizen with a foreign child, I have to wait for a visa for over half a year and keep constantly returning to China while I’m waiting for this ‘gift’. We overstayed my child’s Russian visa by four months and had to pay a fine to the Russian authorities. The expiry of the visa meant he could no longer reside in Russia and get a place in a state kindergarten in Russia.
This reflects some of the struggles that the women had to overcome when they found themselves divided by borders and subjected to different immigration laws from their children. They felt they were ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’: whatever decision they made about their child’s citizenship would prejudice them one way or another.
To obtain citizenship for their children in their country of origin was not straightforward. To do so the women had to learn how to bypass intrusive Chinese state practices. Often, the state extended its realm to the family space, where the Chinese grandparents acted as agents of the state by making decisions about their grandchildren’s citizenship. The intrusive behaviour of the grandparents was common and led at least one woman to observe that ‘in China a newborn child belongs to the society and parents-in-law, rather than to their mother’. Some women felt they were powerless when it came to making decisions about their children’s citizenship because such choices were made without their involvement. In June 2017, one participant complained that legalising the status of her child in China didn’t even require her presence and consent. She had been very angry when she found that her mother-in-law had registered her child in the hukou system without asking her. The non-negotiable assumption of grandparents and local officials was that the child was a Chinese national. This mother’s bitterness about this situation was palpable in her WeChat comment: ‘They didn’t even ask me, the morons.’ Another woman regretted registering her child in the hukou system at her mother-in-law’s insistence when she ran into problems when organising travel documents for her child to go to her native Ukraine.
The women discovered that, once a child was entered into the hukou system and was therefore registered as a full Chinese citizen, it was difficult to obtain their home citizenship, because the mother needed to get a written permission from the child’s father to register her child in her home citizenship. ‘I would have arranged for a Russian passport for my child if I didn’t need the stupid husband’s consent,’ one chat participant commented. And another woman wrote that, according to her husband in Shenzhen, the local authorities had refused to accept their application for the cancellation of Chinese citizenship. There was a sense of desperation and helplessness in her messages: ‘Where can we go? Where do they accept these applications?’ The difficulties of renouncing Chinese citizenship and the complications that some authorities created to obstruct such requests were recurring themes in WeChat comments:
Our marriage isn’t registered because of my husband’s job. I have a student visa and am planning to give birth in Russia and after the birth we are planning to write [the father’s name] on the birth certificate, give [the child] his surname and give him Russian citizenship. But I worry that, when I apply for a Chinese visa, they will see the birth certificate, and even though our marriage isn’t registered, they will give the child Chinese citizenship. I’d like to avoid the procedure of renouncing Chinese citizenship.
A common affective sentiment that infused the women’s WeChat discussions over children’s status was uncertainty about the future that fed into their anxiety about passports and citizenship rules, as indicated by these posts from April 2017: ‘I was told that it is easy to get Russian citizenship now, but nobody knows what will happen in the future.’ Another participant added another consideration to the already complex picture of citizenship options: ‘My husband told me that it won’t be possible to get hukou later … the laws will change and our child will be left without citizenship. This is dangerous. Everything is getting stricter.’ The lack of confidence in the legal and immigration systems made the women scrutinise the conflicting border regimes and the conditions for long-term residency in China. When one woman commented that ‘without a work visa there is no prospect of being hired, and without a family visa there is no prospect of long-term residency’, another woman replied in response that ‘they give long-term residency to those with special talents, not to ordinary wives … to receive a green card, you need to deposit money for a year’. Another group member interjected, ‘Put pressure on your husband. Gently. Maybe he doesn’t want to freeze money for a year! In Hangzhou it was 200,000 RMB (USD 28,800) for a year, in other cities it was 100,000 RMB (USD 14,400).’ The woman who started this conversation continued:
We tried, and I even got a police certificate that is only valid for one month, but then my husband told me abruptly that it was very difficult and we wouldn’t try any more. The main stumbling block is the police certificate. Russians can only get it in Russia and legalise it in a Chinese consulate in Moscow. You can’t do it in other cities.
What is clear from this post is the frustration the woman felt over being dependent on her husband’s wishes to assist her with the paperwork and a financial guarantee, and her powerlessness in the face of bureaucracy and the paper walls constructed by marriage and immigration rules. State regulation and patriarchal norms made the women dependent on their husbands whose position was in turn shaped by their own social class, economic abilities and willingness to play the system.
6.5 The Multilayered Chinese Border Regime
The women often complained about the restrictions of Chinese immigration laws and the rigidity of the family visitor visa that didn’t grant them the right to work. Most days, women shared information on how they had applied for documents and overcome bureaucratic hurdles. Only by exchanging their experiences with other women in WeChat groups did it become clear that practices differed in different Chinese consulates and immigration offices in China. For example, some women learnt that the Chinese consulates in Russia complicated and even obstructed applications for lüxing zheng (旅行证).Footnote 22
One woman who had contacted the Chinese consulate in Yekaterinburg wrote that she had been provided with no information about lüxing zheng, almost as if the consulate workers had never heard of it. Another added that in St Petersburg she was told that they would provide a lüxing zheng only if the child renounced Russian citizenship, while in Khabarovsk and Moscow it was possible to apply for the document without any questions being asked.Footnote 23 The experience shared by a WeChat group member living in Xiamen was particularly telling. After divorcing her Chinese husband, the woman continued living in China, teaching Russian at a university on a working visa. She managed to obtain lüxing zheng for her son after a seven-month wait, but the local schools refused to enrol him without a hukou or a Chinese visa.Footnote 24 As a result, she explained that she had to send her son to live and study in her native St Petersburg while continuing to live and work in China. Yet another woman described her experience in a Chinese consulate in Kiev two years previously, saying that a lüxing zheng had been issued in place of the expired tongxing zheng. She added, ‘the Chinese cleverly came up with the ideas of tongxing zheng and lüxing zheng – our children are Chinese and non-Chinese at the same time. But if the family falls apart, who are the children to stay with? I am not prepared to leave them with my husband.’ ‘Nobody is prepared to do that. I am scared even to think about it,’ another woman added.Footnote 25
As the summer months of 2017 approached, the WeChat group became busy with messages from group members seeking advice on travel documents for the approaching school holiday season. Requests for the list of documents required for exit and entry from China, the procedure for application and the legalisation governing travel documents were posted and responded to daily, sometimes reaching a total of over 100 posts a day. Those who had already obtained the necessary documents or had recently travelled across China’s borders shared their experiences with the rest of the group. The flurry of messages was spurred on by information circulating about a trial for streamlining border control at Shenzhen Airport that had been announced in February 2017. These measures were aimed at collecting biometric information from all foreigners between fourteen and seventy years of age.Footnote 26 The information warned that these data would serve to enforce single citizenship on Chinese nationals who had been naturalised by a foreign country without having given up their Chinese household registration (hukou) and were, therefore, in possession of de facto dual citizenship.Footnote 27
While these new measures did not have direct implications for foreigners living in China on family or work visas because their marriage or labour status did not open the pathway to full citizenship, some of the women in the group became alarmed. The WeChat discussions over the announcement of these new measures at Shenzhen Airport symbolised the uncertainty felt by women facing difficult choices for their children’s citizenship. By narrowing the space for negotiating the citizenship of mixed children’s status in China, the introduction of the measures produced a new battleground for parental rights.
In response to a series of messages on the difficulties of cancelling Chinese citizenship or obtaining a lüxing zheng, one woman concluded that ‘the best solution is to give birth at home, stay there for eighteen months and not put the father’s name on the birth certificate. Then there definitely won’t be any problems.’ One WeChat group member whose child had lüxing zheng noted, ‘my child is 90 per cent Chinese. It even says in the lüxing zheng that it replaces a Chinese passport.’ One woman’s response was, ‘I envy those who have left a blank space instead of the father’s name on the birth certificate.’Footnote 28 As I discussed in the previous chapter, mixed children’s bodies became a battleground for citizenship contestations, with the Chinese authorities playing a vocal role.
But even the omission of the father’s name from the birth certificate did not fully guarantee that the women could freely take their children out of the country. One woman noted that she had not put the father’s name on the child’s birth certificate but on one occasion the immigration office demanded that she do a DNA paternity test, and when the paternity of the Chinese man was confirmed, the immigration office stopped issuing Chinese visas to her child. Another woman concurred with this view, with the observation:
My husband isn’t listed anywhere in my child’s documents and every time we apply for a visa renewal, people recommend he should take a DNA test to confirm paternity. They say, ‘Don’t you care about your child? Those Russians will take him, but he is ours, Chinese.’ So, if you take a DNA test there is a 100 per cent chance that a court will give your child to the father, particularly if there is money involved. The most secure option is not to put the father onto the birth certificate, but this is not fair towards the father or the child.
The overwhelming opinion voiced by the members of the group was that while the children were small they should have the same citizenship as the mother to minimise the risk of losing them to the Chinese state.
6.6 Stories of Resistance and Survival
Occasionally, women posted messages about their marital difficulties, arguments with their husbands and parents-in-law and other family problems. Some asked for advice about lawyers, separation and divorce in China. Not being able to pay legal fees was a frequent problem. Sometimes these messages were from women who were urgently looking for a fast and safe way to leave China to go to their home country with their child. The exchanges about separations and divorces highlighted the main areas of insecurity for foreign spouses in China.
Some of the main problems that the women wrote about were their misunderstandings with their Chinese families, the incompatibility of the citizenship regulations affecting them and their lack of labour and property rights. In theory, to get a divorce was easy and relatively inexpensive (20,000 RMB (2,880 USD) in legal fees). However, some women believed that, in the case of a divorce, their rights would not be guaranteed. Furthermore, some found that their Chinese family would not accept joint custody of their child or agree to the divorce: ‘I would have found a job in China and offered to live independently from him. The child would continue going to the nursery. He could have visited us. But [my husband] didn’t want this and his mother wouldn’t have agreed to this arrangement.’
One day a group member asked how to register a flat correctly and legally, including the household registration. A reply followed almost immediately: ‘Make sure the documents include your name, so that in the case of a divorce what you are entitled to is given to you.’ As it turned out, some women found that, even if they had contributed financially to purchasing a property, this would not be reflected in the paperwork. It was very common for property bought in a marriage to be registered in the name of the Chinese husband’s father or mother. One woman said, ‘My parents-in-law and my husband constantly say that the flat that we bought is theirs, although I contributed money from my business.’ Another woman agreed:
I definitely know that my husband will register the flat that we are planning to buy in his mother’s name. What is more, our family are military people with connections. Where do I go if I need to fight them? In principle, I can’t claim anything, because my husband doesn’t have anything. The car that he is planning to buy will be in his mother’s name. I am totally convinced of this.
A woman who moved back to Russia wrote that her husband in China, from whom she had separated, had recently got in touch, asking her to return to China because he could not take out a loan without her. According to her, he had registered several flats in his own name, but wanted to take out a bank loan in both names, to which she disagreed, because he had already sold two flats without her permission. One chat group member remarked that in China ‘there is a high chance you will be left with nothing, so it is much better to buy property at home’.
Although the women were permitted to contribute financially to the purchase of the flat, some found that it was difficult to include a foreigner in property and household documents in China. The women complained that Chinese authorities do not include foreigners in hukou, so there were situations where a Chinese husband appeared to be single in his hukou papers, although he was married. In other cases, women said that their husband’s status had been changed to married, but their foreign wife’s name had not been added to the hukou registration. Only in Shanghai were foreign wives included in hukou.
Another recurring topic was the women’s lack of parental rights over their children. ‘I don’t want any property, I just want my child. Let them take the flat,’ wrote a Russian mother who had to leave China in a hurry. Another woman responded:
We are often silly and proud. We don’t need anything; I am taking my children and leaving. … It is not right to do this. We don’t want to, but our children do need it. We need to fight for our children’s rights. We need to bring up children without support, home or money. And he is free as a bird – he can fly wherever he wants. When I once argued with my husband, he said straightaway, ‘Let’s file for a divorce.’ I told him, ‘I’ll divorce you when you buy me a flat where I want and we sign an agreement for alimony.’ He calmed down. Fight for your children’s rights, look for a lawyer and interpreter.
Other women added to the thread by sharing their own experiences:
- Maybe I shouldn’t have left? Maybe I have a normal family: my husband doesn’t need anything, his mother is around, as well as a mistress (xiao mi), according to tradition. Everything is okay. We lived four years without children and courted for two years before that. In Russia our life was ideal, but everything changed with the move to China. I told him, if he wanted an open marriage, please tell me. I can date other guys. … In Russia he was unusual, but in China he is ordinary. There are many like him. … I have tolerated it for two years … I would have had to keep on tolerating it if my child had Chinese citizenship … it would have been like an imprisonment for me if I could not leave China with my child.
- Me too.
- It is so difficult if you don’t have anywhere to go, the child doesn’t have your citizenship and you have to put up with this torture.
One day in April 2017 a chat member posted a message explaining that she had had to leave China suddenly with her daughter because her husband was threatening to take the daughter away. She wanted to return to China but was not sure if it was safe to do so, so she turned to the group for advice. A message responding to her question appeared: ‘If you come back to China with a child, they will certainly take her away. Don’t forget that in Russia health care is free. There are also anti-crisis centres and social housing with social support. To come back to China is silly. … As soon as they see your child is in China, they won’t let her out.’ Another chat member agreed with this advice:
What you don’t know yet, the whole group knows very well, because there have been too many bitter stories and many women know [for a fact] that people in China worship money. If you were not respected before, how can you hope for respect now? Don’t listen to the advice of your friends, but study Chinese laws. Who are you in China? … You are a simple Russian woman without a job or resources. … Are you expecting protection from the Chinese state?
Soon, a reply from the author of the original post followed: ‘I would have liked to write a story – the events are too bitter. At the moment my life is in tatters and I have to start from the beginning here to find myself (nayti by sebya).’ WeChat groups encouraged solidarity among women through sharing their stories of struggle and survival in China. They helped them navigate the Chinese border regime and family norms that excluded them yet included their children. In the process they developed resilience and resistance in solidarity with other foreign mothers in similar situations, yet differentiated themselves from the Chinese women who were constructed as Others.
6.7 Conclusion
The women’s discussions in the WeChat groups led me to reflect on the intimate publics of the women’s lives across digital and physical spheres in China. Their camaraderie in their common goal of making a success of their stay in China for themselves and their children in a foreign sociocultural and hostile legal and economic environment ran parallel to a broad spectrum of collective emotions in relation to others. The Othering of Chinese women as inferior, and their suspicion of my research interest in their WeChat discussions reveal their collective sense of insecurity, uncertainty and mistrust. Some women who found themselves in difficult situations with Chinese laws, norms and families could rely only on support, including financial help, from fellow foreigners in their WeChat groups. But their dependent and objectified status was too sensitive to be entrusted to outsiders. The sentiments of disgust, anger, shame, fear and uncertainty that reverberated through the daily discussions reflect the inequalities that exist in the racialised structures of the marriage economy and citizenship in China. These women were part of the system but could not control it. Although Chinese women remain subject to patriarchal norms and structural inequalities in their own society, the exchanges in the WeChat group created them as different and inferior.
In China the valorisation of white women as objects of sexual longing and as a national reproductive resource, on the one hand, and the devaluation of foreignness as a status and social identity, on the other, are not contradictory. These processes work in tandem. They are part of the global system of racial hierarchies that work together with local articulations of inequalities through the mobilisation of desire and the exercise of power. It is within this space that the fabric of ordinary affects expressed in these WeChat groups can be understood. In the digital space, racism was both a resource and a mode of survival. While in private conversations the focus was on the women’s limited socioeconomic status and high levels of objectification, the semi-anonymous digital sphere provided a platform for violent and derogatory feelings to be freely expressed.
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