Marriage migration in China and East Asia

Journal of Contemporary China

Volumn 16, Issue 50, 2007, Pages 83-95

  Davin, Delia ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION; MARRIAGE; MIGRATION DETERMINANT;

ASIA; CHINA; EURASIA; FAR EAST;

EID: 33847756338     PISSN: 10670564     EISSN: 14699400     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/10670560601026827     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. There is now a growing literature on marriage migration in China. See for example: Han Min and J. S. Eades, 'Brides, bachelors and brokers: the marriage market in rural Anhui in an era of economic reform', Modern Asian Studies 29(4), (1995), pp. 841-869
2. Cindy Fan and Youqin Huang,'Waves of rural brides: Female marriage migration in China', Annals of the Association of American Geographers 88(2), (1998), pp. 227-251
3. D. Davin, Internal Migration in Contemporary China (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999)
4. Lin Tan and Susan E. Short, 'Living as double outsiders: Migrant women's experiences of marriage in a county-level city', in Arianne M. Gaetano and Tamara Jacka, eds, Women and Rural-to-Urban Migration in Contemporary China (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2004).
5. State Statistical Bureau (SSB), Tabulation of the 1990 Population Census of the People's Republic of China [Zhongguo 1990 nian renkou pucha ziliao ] (Beijing: Statistics Publishing House, 1993). The census figures have shortcomings as a source of migration data. The general principle of the censuses is de facto, with people registered where they were at the time of the enumeration but a de jure element remained. Of those living away from their place of registration, only those who had been away for more than a year in 1990, or six months in 2000, were registered where they were actually living. These censuses thus covered permanent, formal migration involving a change of hukou, and also the longer term informal migration involving prolonged absences from home. They may fail to capture the millions of temporary and seasonal migrants who move backwards and forwards between the sending and destination areas. As most marriage migration does ultimately result in a change of hukou for the spouse who moves, the census is a better source for marriage migration data than for labour migration data. The reader should bear in mind that when marriage is compared with other causes of migration in this paper, the census data used essentially refer to longer-term migration.
6. This may reflect the change in census methodology noted above rather than a reduction in the comparative importance of marriage migration.
7. SSB, Tabulation of the 2000 Population Census of the People's Republic of China [Zhongguo 2000 nian renkou pucha ziliao] (Beijing: China Statistics Press, 2003).
8. Davin, Internal Migration in Contemporary China. Unfortunately, the Tabulation of the 2000 Census gives the reasons for migration by age and sex but not by type of origin or destination area (city, small town or rural area) or by province. Tables 1 and 2 and the accompanying discussion are therefore based only on the census of 1990 using both the main tabulation and SSB, Ten Per Cent Sampling Tabulation of the 1990 Population Census of the People's Republic of China [Zhongguo 1990 nian renkou pucha 10% chouyang ziliao] (Beijing: China Statistics Press, 1991).
9. Fan and Huang, 'Waves of rural brides', p. 241.
10. Ibid.
11. W. Lavely, 'Marriage and mobility under rural collectivisation', in Rubie S. Watson and Patricia Ebrey, eds, Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
12. E. Croll, Endangered Daughters, Discrimination and Development in Asia (London: Routledge, 2001).
13. Cai Yong and William Lavely, 'China's missing girls: Numerical estimates and effects on population growth', The China Review 3(2), (2003), pp. 1-17.
14. For a detailed discussion of the problems see Thomas Scharping, Birth Control in China 1949-2000 (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), pp. 288-298.
15. Hsien-Hui Chu, Opening the Door: An Analysis of International Marriage in Japan, unpublished M.A. dissertation, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Leeds, 2003. I am indebted to Chu for this data which she drew from the Japanese Ministry of Welfare and Labour.
16. Nicola Piper, 'Labor migration, trafficking and international marriage: female cross border movements into Japan', Asian Journal of Women's Studies 5(2), (1999), pp. 69-99.
17. Chu, Opening the Door.
18. It is likely that in many cases brides from south-east Asian countries who marry into Taiwan are themselves ethnic Chinese.
19. Melody Chia Wen Lu, 'Commercially arranged marriage migration: Case studies of cross-border marriages in Taiwan', unpublished paper presented to the International Conference on Women and Migration in Asia, December 2003, New Delhi.
20. Ministry of Public Security, Hanoi, quoted in Asia Times, (12 September 2001)
21. Tran Dinh Lam, 'China's booming trade in Vietnamese brides', Asia Times, (12 September 2001). The tone of Vietnamese reports on the phenomenon is disapproving and they tend to portray the Vietnamese women involved as victims.
22. Barbara Demick, 'North Korea's brides of despair', Los Angeles Times, (18 August 2003).