This study examines interactional management practices and narrative co-construction in lawyer-asylum seeker consultations in Flanders, Belgium. Drawing upon linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork, it presents a case study of a consultation between an Afghan applicant for international protection, his adviser, and his lawyer. The purpose of the consultation is to prepare the applicant for testifying at the upcoming asylum hearing. Data analysis focuses on (i) the reorientation of the asylum narrative from an authentic-experiential towards a more objectified formal-institutional account; (ii) the participants’ positioning work that indexes this reorientation process; and (iii) their fluctuating alignment of local-interactional and translocal-gatekeeping perspectives. In the discussion, we analyse the consultation in terms of competing legal and experiential voices and views on participant roles/responsibilities. We reflect on how this ambiguity of roles and ideologies relates to the constructed character of credibility, which reveals the importance of adequate legal assistance in this linguistically challenging context. (Legal consultations, asylum procedure, linguistic ethnography, narrative performance, credibility assessment)*

More than 100,000 people from the city of Tianjin were evacuated to the countryside in a civil defense program during the 1970s. Many evacuees refused to submit to state migration mandates, instead sneaking back to the city illegally or petitioning to regain urban residency. City officials responded flexibly to the evacuees’ pleas, sympathizing with family reunification and treating suburban districts (jiaoqu) on the outskirts of Tianjin as a buffer zone between city and countryside. Dominated by agriculture but home to a growing number of factories, workshops, and offices during the 1970s, jiaoqu became a solution to evacuation headaches. When compared with the recent coerced movement of hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens on national security grounds, the civil defense evacuations of the 1970s suggest that it may be misguided to think of the Mao Zedong years as a faraway time that was more radical or repressive than China today.

Using received texts and excavated funerary epitaphs, this article examines the intricacies of gender and migration in early medieval China by exploring women's long-distance mobility from the fourth century to the sixth century, when what is now known as China was divided by the Northern Wei and a succession of four southern states—the Eastern Jin, Liu-Song, Southern Qi, and Liang. I focus on three types of migration in which women participated during this period: war-induced migration, family reunification, and religious journeys. Based on this analysis, I propose answers to two important questions: the connection between migration and the state, and textual representations of migrants. Though the texts under consideration are usually written in an anecdotal manner, the references to women, I argue, both reveals nuances in perceptions of womanhood at the time and elucidates the contexts within—and through—which long-distance travel became possible for women.

It has become known that the Confucius Institute (CI) and the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office (Qiaoban) are operated as tools of state-led mechanism, or Chinese statecraft with the ultimate goal of expanding China's cultural soft power. Following the direction, Xi Jinping has been pushing the notion of the “Chinese dream,” focusing on the realm of Chinese traditional culture and launching a new state-led mechanism. This article examines an emerging state-led mechanism known as “Chinese Homeland Bookstores” (CHBs), which was proposed by a provincial government-financed state-owned enterprise, and recently expanded to Thailand and various Mekong countries. I contend that the entities, such as CHBs and also CI and Qiaoban, are being extensively utilized as part of a larger state apparatus supporting the regime's Chinese traditional culture campaign. However, the CHB case and those of other government-led institutions illustrate how they combine nation-state work with market-oriented business strategies, to effectively promote Chinese culture “going out” with a focus on financial sustainability.