1Although scientific thought was constructed as an element of Western societies, the universalizing and tautological conditions of the narration of “Western” social sciences are largely questioned today. Believing the global discourse signals a great transformation in the history of social sciences, we thus proposed the hypothesis of a scientific revolution, one that imposes displacements, reversals, epistemic conversions and even about-faces. From the production of an epistemology shared with French and Chinese sociologists, we proposed a Post-Western Sociology to enable a dialogue—one held on a level footing—on common concepts and those concepts situated in European and Chinese theories, to consider the modes of creation of continuities and discontinuities, as well as the conjunctions and disjunctions between knowledge spaces situated in different social contexts, and to work on the gaps between them. From the production of epistemologies of the Souths, a non-Western West and the “re-easternization” of the westernized East, we have introduced the idea of the multiplication, complexification, and hierarchization of new epistemic autonomies vis-à-vis Western hegemonies in sociology, and the new epistemic assemblages between European and Chinese sociologies (Roulleau-Berger 2016; Xie and Roulleau-Berger 2017; Roulleau-Berger and Li 2018). We have entered a period of the Post-Westernization of knowledge and the co-production of the construction of transnational and non-hegemonic knowledge.

What Is Post-Western Sociology?

2We propose a political ecology of social knowledge based on the creation of common and localized theories between the diversity of “Western Wests,” “non-Western Wests,” “Eastern Easts” and “re-Easternized Easts” to continue producing a non-Western sociology. Indeed, epistemic autonomies multiply and diversify, and eventually hierarchize, without the Western world ever really perceiving this dynamic of the recomposition of geographies of knowledge in social science. The issue of Western hegemonies still remains throughout the process of recognizing the visibility and legitimacy of this plurality of epistemic autonomies.

3Few Western sociologists work on decentering in order to look at issues on the other side of the boundaries of knowledge. The publication of Edward Saïd’s work Orientalism represented a very important moment in the history of postcolonial thought. Orientalism signified the establishment of systems that would intercept, capture, and orient gestures, discourses, and viewpoints (Agamben 2007). This process of interception was particularly selective; it was done by making active knowledge invisible and by seizing “inert” knowledge—like the knowledge associated with ancient philosophies—in order to incorporate and contain it in subfields. According to Chakrabarty (2000) postcolonial discourse based itself on the idea of provincializing Europe to consider the “subaltern histories” according to their own value, and over the last 30 years this discourse played a key role in the international debate on the “global turn” and the end of Western hegemonies. However, as stated by Achille Mbembe in 2006, Post-Colonial studies are characterized by their heterogeneity but not their originality. In the context of Post-Colonial studies, the “post” does not mean “after” but “beyond” (Kilani 2009)—if the concept of “Third Space” proposed by Homi Bhabha (2007) enables heterotopian thoughts to appear—a significant challenge for today’s sociologists is to invest in different types of third spaces, both situated and globalized, by creating epistemological conjunctions and disjunctions.

4A consensus has progressively formed on the idea of the crisis of Western civilization. In an article published in the French journal Socio, Rajeev Barghava (2013), a central Indian figure in social and human sciences, challenges the fact that, in different parts of the world, the categories of analysis are derived from the Western experience, and he proposes an end to “the epistemic injustice of colonialism of this very small group of societies that we call the West.” We have entered a period of a gradual Post-Westernization of knowledge and co-production of the structuring of metis knowledge.

5After deconstructing the de-provincialization of European universalism, various theories have been advanced: Arif Dirlik (2007) proposed the theory of global modernity, and Ulrich Beck (2006) the theory of cosmopolitanism. Shamuel Eisenstadt (2000) produced the theory of multiple modernities to describe through a comparative civilizational perspective the plural forms of modernities in diverse historical and structural contexts. Despite this perspective by Beck and Grande (2010), Göran Therborn (2003), following in Eisenstadt’s footsteps, considered the different varieties of modernity and non-modernity; he looked at the ways these varieties do not simply coexist and challenge each other, but are entangled with each other.

6More recently, we have to take into account the construction of “non-Western Wests” by different Western scholars in the social sciences (Roulleau-Berger 2011, 2016; Dufoix 2013; Bhambra 2014; Santos 2014; Brandel, Daas and Randeria 2018; Koleva 2018). Epistemologies of the South have been produced not only by social scientists based in the Global South but also by those in the Global North; both groups are looking for this recognition of the world’s epistemic cultural diversity. Epistemic injustice means to effect “a decolonial break” from Eurocentric epistemologies in order to consider a plurality of knowledge spaces. Santos (2017) purposed the development of Epistemologies of the South (2014), which concerns the production of ecologies of knowledge anchored in the experiences of resistance in the anti-imperial South. For him the Northern-centric and Western-centric thinking is abyssal, and he distinguished between abyssal exclusions and non-abyssal exclusions. In dialogue with Santos, Bhambra (2014) believes “connected sociologies” are a way to reconstruct theoretical categories and create new understandings that incorporate and transform previous ones. Both Santos and Bhambra (2017) ask the question of aiming at whether there is a singular global sociology or several alternative ones. In Western countries, some scholars are opening their theoretical spaces separating them from Western hegemonic knowledge, and are breaking the dichotomy between the North and the South, the West and the non-West, modernity and tradition.

7Epistemological Souths are also constructed in a process of “re-easternization” of the westernized East that looks like a kind of matrix of epistemic autonomies today in non-Western countries. In East Asia, the creation of the East Asian Sociologists Network (EASN) in 1992 by Chinese, Japanese and Korean sociologists to produce connected sociologies represented a major challenge. In their preface to A Quest for East Asian Sociologies, published in 2014 by Seoul National University Press, Seung Kuk Kim, Li Peilin and Shujiro Yazawa affirm that the EASN was an initiative to produce a radically reflexive sociology calling into question the concept of Western modernity.

8In China the question of epistemic autonomy vis-à-vis Western sociology was first posed in the 1930s by Sun Benwen. In 1979, at the time of the recreation of the discipline, there rested the question of the sinicization of the discipline, which is rebuilt next, with, or against the West. The question of the epistemic autonomy of sociology via its sinicization in China has always been present in the idea of ​​producing sociological knowledge emancipated from the hegemonic thoughts related to “Western” sociologies.

9In China, sociology as an imported product has repeatedly fallen into debate about whether it should be “localized,” and in what way. Since the 1930s, with the attempts of the first generation of Chinese sociologists, such as Wu Wenzao and Sun Benwen (Zhou 2012, 2017); the efforts in the 1960s of scholars from Hong Kong and Taiwan, including Li Yiyuan, Wen Chongyi, Yang Guoshu, and others (Zhou 2020); and the joint efforts of scholars from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan (Lin 1986; Fei 1999), the discussions about problem awareness, research methods and academic political debates centering on “sinicization” or “localization” have always been accompanied by the development of Chinese sociology and anthropology. In recent years, based on discourse system construction and a focus on “localization,” there has been a new round of discussion in Chinese academia (Hong 2018; Liang 2018; Xie 2018; Zhai 2018; Zhou 2020). In each round of discussion, other than those conversations about universalism and particularism, positivism and humanism, which run through the development of sociology, there are dialogues about the macro and micro, qualitative and quantitative, and disciplinary and application orientations, together with the mingling of academic and political considerations, such as “anti-Western-centrism” and “anti-American-centrism,” demonstrating a very complicated situation.

10However, by eliminating considerations about academic politics in each debate, as well as researchers’ preferences for specific research methods, it can be seen that the focus of discussion on “localization” is centered around three basic questions: (1) How do we regard “sociological theory” that is based on Western social practices and created by Western sociologists? (2) How do we face the problems in Chinese society, and the “China experience” of the Chinese society gained in solving these problems? (3) How do we treat the relationship between Western “sociological theories” and social practices in China?

11For the first question, many scholars believe that sociology originated in Western societies, that Western sociological theory is the disciplinary theory of sociology, and that the general theory of sociology that is applicable to Western societies will undoubtedly apply to other, non-Western societies. From the perspective of cultural relativism, some other scholars believe that Western sociology theory based on the social practices therein is only applicable to Western societies, rather than to China and other non-Western societies.

12The main divergence in the second question also lies in this aspect. Many scholars believe that there is no substantial difference between Western societies and China, as well as between Western and other non-Western societies—the main difference, they say, is the stage of development. For China as a late-developing country, the most important mission of sociology is to learn from the theory and development experiences of developed Western countries in order to tackle the problems of Chinese society. The scholars holding the opposite view believe that Chinese society is completely different from Western societies, and Chinese sociology should be based on Chinese social practices to solve China’s social problems.

13For the third question, things are much more complicated. First, it is necessary to determine if the researchers are theory oriented or application oriented in terms of research objective. For theory-oriented researchers, the objective of their research is using Western sociological theory to understand the society and solve the problems of Chinese society. Such researchers adopt a “take-it-and-use-it” attitude toward Western sociological theory. Any sociological theory that can be used to better understand Chinese society and help that society solve specific problems is a good theory and worthy of study. Otherwise, theories can be ignored. In such an orientation, there are prominent discrepancies between two opposite attitudes. Researchers holding that of positivism, especially having accepted the theory of evolution, believe that Chinese society is a late-developing one that learns Western sociological theories as “advanced experiences.” However, researchers holding a position of cultural relativism downplay Western sociological theories and believe that Chinese society is totally different from Western societies, and that Western sociological theories formed on the basis of Western societies do not fit the reality of Chinese society; therefore, they cannot be applied to Chinese society and are of no help in solving the problems of Chinese society. Most early sociologists adopted this applied research orientation, so the focus of the debate is whether Western sociological theories are useful for understanding Chinese society and solving Chinese social problems.

14But things are totally different for sociologists holding the theory-oriented view. In the early stage, researchers holding the stance of scientism basically do not have much of an appetite for theory. For these researchers, the problems that Chinese society faces have already been encountered by developed Western countries, and Western sociological theories have already offered good explanations regarding these problems. Therefore, the development of new sociological theory is unnecessary and impossible. Compared with the theory-oriented researchers, those with the perspective of cultural relativism are much more confident. They believe that Chinese society has its own unique logic and should develop its own sociological theory according to the experiences of Chinese society. However, since these scholars hold an attitude that rejects Western sociological theories, they have shown little interest in the general theory that proposes and develops dialogues with Western sociology.

15Within this process, there are two trends in academia. One is embodied by a group of Chinese scholars who have received Western sociological training and have published their research results in Western sociological journals. They are more familiar with the references and problems of Western sociology and are more familiar with Chinese society than Western scholars. So, they explore social facts that can be applied in dialogue with Western sociological theories from the experiences of Chinese society and have yielded many research achievements, which were deemed by domestic scholars as not having reached the “true problems” of Chinese society. The other trend is reflected in the scholars who have not received many disciplinary regulations and theoretical training in Western sociology but have shown intense concern for Chinese society and invested a great deal of time in investigating Chinese society. They have a deep understanding about the “true problems” and complexities of Chinese society; however, affected by their disciplinary training, they have paid too much attention to social facts themselves and have hardly been able to draw themselves away from empirical facts to propose more generalized sociological theories. In this process there is a lack of high-quality research results that can reflect the “true problems” in the experiences of Chinese society and, at the same time, start a dialogue with Western sociological theories and accord with the nature of general sociological theories.

16With the development of Chinese sociology in the recent decade, an increasing number of high-quality large-scale public databases have allowed Chinese scholars to become more familiar with the sociological references used abroad, and the whole academic community has grown more confident in China’s experience and the Chinese model. More and more scholars holding the stance of scientism have started to emphasize the importance of developing general sociological theory with China’s experience; moreover, more and more scholars upholding cultural relativism have started to stress the significance of dialogue in theory. Therefore, we can see a series of high-level research publications that can match theory with unique experiences in China and the country’s “true problems.”

17In this process, people have come to rethink the structure within Western sociological theories that have been formed based on Western social facts and experiences. In the disciplinary system of Western sociology, there are basically two groups. One comprises the scholars engaged in social theory studies within the discipline of sociology, and the other comprises the scholars engaged in area studies. Both groups of scholars have received sociological training, but the former mainly focuses on Western societies, with the main purpose of understanding Western societies and constructing general sociological theories, while the latter mainly takes other societies beyond Western ones and constructs knowledge about such non-Western societies. However, with regard to sociological knowledge constructed by the former group, especially the branches of sociology, it is generally judgment and knowledge about Western societies and is of a limited value in the knowledge of general sociological theory.

18For Chinese sociologists, when we attempt to apply the knowledge formed based on China’s experience to communicate with the general theories of Western sociology, what we should do first is differentiate knowledge based on specific phenomena or experiences in China or Western societies from general sociological theories built on the basis of Western or Chinese societies within the rich and huge theoretical system of Western sociology. We should especially make clear the knowledge forms of general sociological theory based on the experiences and facts in Western societies; however, these forms are seriously restricted by their own experiences in the Western societies, and they lack self-awareness about the theoretical preconditions for their establishment. Perhaps only by clearly distinguishing the different types of knowledge can we develop more valuable general sociological theories in the dialogue between Chinese experiences and Western sociological theory.

19The biggest problem most Chinese sociologists face is how to remove the limitation of “showing concern only for China” to establish a disciplinary sense of sociology, that is to say, how to develop sociological knowledge of a general value based on in-depth research on social experiences in China. In order to better achieve this point, in addition to forming basic disciplinary self-consciousness, we should develop a reflexivity about our own culture and avoid getting trapped blindly in cultural centralism, like other Western scholars have.

20To this end, to allow sociologists in China and Western societies to better understand and practice this academic idea, Post-Western Sociology should further strengthen academic exchange, promote academic cooperation, and form more practices based in both Western and non-Western societies in which both Western and non-Western sociologists participate. In the meantime, by treating one’s own culture and others’ culture equally as research objects, one can form a production and practice process for integrated “sociological knowledge and theories.” This book is one of the results of the “knowledge production and practice process,” one in which scholars in both China and France participated jointly.

21How to define Post-Western Sociology? Post-Western Sociology refuses term-for-term structural comparisons and favors intersecting viewpoints concerning registers of understanding, agreement, and disagreement, as well as the scientific practices of the co-present actors. Post-Western Sociology can also be defined as a global critical sociology. Being fully aware of a strong lack of symmetry in the visibility of knowledge produced in Europe and in China, in this book we are opening up a space for active dialogue between French and Chinese sociologies to show that contemporary sociology can only be the result of intellectual dynamics between the various centers of the West and the East. Post-Western Sociology relies on different knowledge processes (Roulleau-Berger 2015, 2016)—“knowledge niches”—that appear to be specifically European or Asian and do not signify the transferability of knowledge; intermediary epistemological processes that encourage the partial transfer of sociological knowledge from Europe to Asia and from Asia to Europe; and transnational epistemological spaces in which European knowledge and Asian knowledge are placed in equivalence.

22Post-Western Sociology is an advance over Western cultural centralism to a great extent and attempts to propose sociological theories with a more common value on the basis of treating Chinese and Western social experiences equally (Roulleau-Berger 2009a, 2014). As a response to this disciplinary episteme, Chinese scholars should have a more extensive vision based on intensive reflection on their own culture. They should proactively understand the experienced knowledge of Western society, understand how Western sociologists construct and develop their sociological knowledge based on their social experiences, learn the different cultural and social experiences of Western society and of Third World countries other than China, overcome the restrictions of cultural centralism in a broader sense of comparison, and equally treat the experiential facts of each culture and society to develop sociological theories with more general applicability.

23Post-Western Sociology is elaborated from the connections between field practices and the intersecting exploration of what individuals in different situations do, say, and think. It utilizes not the differences but the intervals between the perspectives, practices, and concepts of Chinese and European sociologies to co-produce new knowledge. This is the starting point of the construction process of Post-Western Sociology, and as such, it precedes the conception of theoretical and methodological combinations and assemblages. International sociology and global sociology do not imply this erasure of epistemological boundaries: this is precisely where the distinction between Post-Western Sociology, international sociology, and global sociology lies (Roulleau-Berger and Li 2018).

24How to produce decolonial, non-hegemonic, Post-Western knowledge in the sociology of migration? In Post-Western Sociology doing with or doing together still looks to be central in the fabric of sociological knowledge, even taking into account the alternative political economy of knowledge and the anti-piratic way (Tilley 2017). In this book we will be considering both the local and the transnational dimensions of academic research as part of our attempt to analyze the effects of societal context on the production of theoretical methodologies based on local research situations. However, we will also be analyzing transnational flows between the various contexts of knowledge linked to research methodologies and considering both the processes involved in the production of sociological knowledge and cultural variations in research practices. Theories, knowledge, and methods cannot circulate until these equivalences have been established and appear to be relatively stable, and frameworks based on common conventions and norms governing academic research have been put in place. Practices give rise, in these very different contexts, to sociological knowledge obtained in response to questions that are similar but “situated” in sociologists’ own societal experiences; we will be posing questions about the universal value of sociological knowledge.

25The Post-Western conceptual space is relayed by a methodological space in which sociologists conceive a plurality of temporalities, places, contexts and situations in the construction of tools for field investigations in order to access the plurality of the narratives of society and their multivocality or polyphony (Roulleau-Berger, 2012; Bastide 2015). This signifies the implementation of multisituated and contextualized tools to account for assemblies and disjunctions between the narratives of societies, which are all legitimate, as well as to describe what Ulf Hannerz (2010) calls a “continuum creolization.” In this instance Post-Western methodology is federated around dynamic and non-hierarchical combinations of societal contexts, structural processes, individual and collective actions, and situational orders. Post-Western methodology leads to a multisituated sociology, which does not necessarily mean fields of investigation in several countries, but rather in several differentiated places.

26For Western sociologists, it is essential to step out of the limitations of “Western cultural centralism”; however, Chinese sociologists should not only escape from the limitation of “Western cultural centralism” but should also further avoid falling into “Chinese cultural centralism” in stressing “localization.” They should give equal treatment to the social practice processes of China and Western societies, as well as other non-Western countries, and the sociological theories and knowledge creation and application processes by the sociologists of these countries, together with the “sociological theories and knowledge” formed therein. In order to better carry out Post-Western sociological studies, we should first treat equally the social practices of Western and non-Western countries and regions, and the “sociological knowledge and theory” produced from Western and non-Western social practices. Secondly, we should treat equally the knowledge production processes of “sociological theories” by Western and non-Western scholars in facing the social practices of Western and non-Western societies.

Sociology of Migration and New Trends

27For over 20 years, European and Chinese sociologists have unanimously recognized that the issue of migration has become a major scientific and political challenge. Internal migrations stretch across all sector-specific sociologies in China, and international migrations have gradually become of central importance in European sociological theories. Both internal and international migrations reveal the forces of social, political and economic change at work in increasingly complex, plural and diverse contemporary societies affected by a threefold acceleration, globalization and regionalization of migratory movements. Our team of Chinese and French sociologists have defined common ground on a theoretical and methodological level organized around the migration issue.

Sociologies of Immigration and Migration in France: Conflicts and Agreements

28In France, under the influence of structuro-functionalist or Bourdieusian thinking focused on the determinism and reproduction of social inequalities (Wagner 2007; Réa and Tripier 2008; Morice and Potot 2010; Kergoat, Miranda and Ouali 2011), sociology of immigration was dominant until the 1990s. It referred to a conception of republican and civic integration in which the immigrant was first perceived as a worker. Sociology of migration first focused on the socialization of immigrants (Réa and Tripier 2008) and descendants of immigrants in French society. Abdelmalek Sayad’s (1977) theory of the “three ages” of Algerian emigration played a central role; this sociologist, who was very close to Pierre Bourdieu, considered the first age to be time-limited, “orderly emigration,” the second age to happen when the “temporary lasts,” and the third age to be when immigrants attempt to settle. From this third phase onwards, the immigrant appears as “neither from here nor there,” and second generations are confronted with situations of marginalization, discrimination, and exclusion in the host society.

29In 1981, in the working-class neighborhoods of French cities, young people of the first second generation of immigrants from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa, victims of racism, unemployment, and segregation, engaged in the first urban riots at Les Minguettes in Vénissieux, a communist city with a working-class tradition in the Lyon conurbation, and then mobilized to organize the March for Equality and Against Racism in 1981 (Boubeker 2003; Hajjat and Marwan 2008; Kokoreff 2008). The French state implemented urban social development policies; the Ministry of Housing (Urban Plan) and the Ministry of Culture issued calls for tenders to produce sociological knowledge about these neighborhoods and the cultures of these “young people from the suburbs,” as they were called at the time. At the University of Lyon 2, the ARIESE (Association of research, interventions and sociological and ethnological studies), created in 1981 by Professor Isaac Joseph, a very famous French sociologist, played a decisive role in France in the production of research in urban sociology on the processes of urban segregation and migration building on mainly qualitative and ethnographic surveys, which had contributions from various sociologists mobilized in scientific and political debate. Research on young people “of immigrant origin” initially focused on the processes of exclusion in “the hardship” (Dubet 1987), the construction of ethnicity in the school environment (Payet 1995), job insecurity of youth, urban mobility and intermediate spaces, (Roulleau-Berger 1991), forms of collective action (Lapeyronnie 1987), relationships between young people in street cultures (Lepoutre 1997), and gender and sexism in working-class neighborhoods (Guénif-Souilamas 1999).

30However, very soon the question arose as to how to conduct national statistical surveys in working-class neighborhoods with populations of immigrants and descendants of immigrants. Due to universalist principles, until the early 1990s immigrants, foreigners, and descendants of immigrants could not be distinguished in national statistical surveys. The MGIS Survey Geographical Mobility and Social Inclusion INED (The French National Institute for Demographic Studies) and INSEE (French National Institute for Statistical and Economic Studies)—and it was conducted in 1992—clearly showed that young people of Algerian origin had a very harsh experience of discrimination and that survey produced this statistical definition of immigrants, persons of foreign origin, and descendants of immigrants. The CEREQ (French Center for Study and Research on Qualifications) surveys and the work of Michèle Tribalat (1995) also made it possible to understand the unequal conditions of access to the labor market for young people of foreign origin, while other studies showed that young people of Algerian origin were violently affected by unemployment (Silbermann and Fournier 1999). After the MGIS survey, a very virulent debate between Hervé Le Bras and Michèle Tribalat took place in France on ethnic statistics. The debate was relaunched in 2010 in the framework of the TeO Trajectories and Origins survey coordinated by INED and INSEE (Beauchemin, Hamel and Simon 2015). Patrick Simon (2007) distinguished between nationality and origin by considering that only the combination of the two variables of country of birth and parents’ nationality at birth makes it possible to say that the parents are immigrants; in 2005, for the first time, INSEE introduced into the Employment survey questions on nationality at birth and parents’ country of birth (Santelli 2016). INSEE and INED proposed a precise definition of immigrants and descendants of immigrants: descendants of immigrants are “persons born in metropolitan France with at least one immigrant parent.” Descendants of mixed couples are “persons with only one immigrant parent.” As a reminder, immigrants are “persons born abroad (current borders). Immigrants constituted the largest group of the migrant population” (Beauchemin, Lhommeau and Simon 2015, 35).

31And gradually, with the increase in and diversification of migrations in the 20th and 21st centuries, sociologists became interested in the migratory experience in a plurality of spaces and temporalities. Today, migrants come from almost every country in the world. And in this context of globalization many democratic and economically developed states have become countries of immigration. Indeed, despite many restrictions imposed by states, migration and population movements have increased. The circulation of migrating populations has been reconfigured in different ways according to different migration policies (Schmoll, Thiollet and Withol de Wenden 2015; Ambrosini, Cinalli and Jacobson 2020). These different approaches agree on the idea of the production of new inequalities and new social hierarchies, new centralities and new economic and political peripheries, among which are woven lines of transnational, diasporic, and ethnic but also intracontinental networks. The Migrant—whether he belongs to the intellectual or economic elite, whether he is a worker, a small-scale trader, an employee or an entrepreneur, a refugee or an asylum seeker—is increasingly thought of as being endowed with capabilities, capable of action and reflexivity over his spatial mobilities and social experiences.

32Internal and international mobility has been accelerating, and traffic flows have intensified throughout the last twenty years. More and more migrants move, circulate, return, and take different migration routes; they gain experiences and are often challenged in their social, ethnic, and gender identities. These international mobilities reveal what Gildas Simon (2008) called “transnational spaces under tension.” Indeed, migration and population movements have increased, despite the many restrictions imposed by states. The migratory circulation has reconfigured itself in different ways according to different migration policies; new categories of migrants have emerged in the so-called old immigration countries and new immigration countries (Ambrosini 2018). Moreover, a strong trend in migration in recent years has been its feminization since 1970.

33Indeed, migrations have no longer been thought of solely on the basis of the push and pull model, of couples departing and arriving, settling and returning, temporary and permanent. In the 1990s, Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Bash, and Cristina Szanton-Blanc introduced the theory of transnationalism as “the process by which migrants construct social fields that link the country of origin and their country of settlement” with the publication of Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration (1992), a major work in the international social sciences (Mazella 2014).

34If Abdelmalek Sayad had developed the concept of the double absence of the migrant—neither here nor there—in the 1990s, Alain Tarrius (1993), as a pioneer, proposed a sociology of circulations and migratory territories by thinking of the double presence of the migrant—here and there (Tarrius and Missaoui 2000). If, in France, the sociologies of immigration and migration could have been thought of in a dissociated manner twenty years ago, this is no longer the case today (Mazella 2014). Indeed, a sociology of immigration and migration was initially influenced by structuro-functionalist or Bourdieusian thinking; afterward, the need to articulate social, class, and interethnic relations (Poiret 2005) would be increasingly accepted in the sociology of migration. The relationship between migration and plural domination was then rethought on the basis of the production of multisituated inequalities and discriminations in a diversity of spaces and temporalities (Roulleau-Berger 2010). Recent research focuses on experiences of racism and discrimination (Dubet et al. 2013), postcolonial racism, or Islamophobia (Hajjat and Marwan 2013; Giraudo-Baujeu 2014, 2018; Talpin, O’Miel and Frégosi 2017).

35More recently, a sociology of migration, subjectivation, and emotions has emerged (Bastide 2015; Zani 2019). Camille Schmoll (2020) proposed a geography of the new forms of migration in the Euro-Mediterranean space that takes into account gender inequalities and the migrants’ political subjectivities.

36The classic push and pull model is largely insufficient for understanding migratory flows and for accounting for the diversity of migratory situations in a dynamic perspective. Indeed, migration is no longer thought of today solely in terms of departure-arrival, settlement-return, temporary-permanent dyads, but rather in a space in which individuals circulate in various and increasingly individualized ways: here, multipolar, transnational, pendular migrations appear (Tarrius and Missaoui 1995; Tarrius and Missaoui 2000; Péraldi, 2002).

37The issue of migration today requires us to think simultaneously about migration flows and structural processes, individual and collective capabilities and experiences. We are invited to place ourselves in a multidimensional theoretical space to understand how spatialities are hierarchized and how these hierarchies are regularly disrupted, how transnational networks can be formed “with,” “against,” or “above” nation-states by creating processes of cultural, economic, and symbolic conjunction and disjunction (Roulleau-Berger 2012). Unlike migratory globalization in the 19th century, when Europe was the source of all the international emigration, today migrants come from almost every country in the world (Simon 2008).

38In European sociology we now talk more and more about the “cosmopolitan condition” (Agier 2018); it means that for new migrants—asylum seekers and refugees—the circulations produced by globalization impose experiences—rather, ordeals—of national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, social, and cultural borders, resulting in a cosmopolitan condition in European cities. Confronted with recurring risky situations, menace, and uncertainty, the most threatened and exposed new migrants are compelled to cross a succession of borders where, each time, lives are exposed or put in danger, after the migrants have fled wars, the Taliban, etc. The most at-risk migrants are then obliged to stay, for a relatively long time, in liminal situations in European cities that do not necessarily evolve towards stable situations. Karen Akoka, Olivier Clochard, and Albena Tcholakova in the 2017 article “Recognized as Refugees, and Then?” in the European Review of International Migrations showed that starting from 1990, Refugee Studies and Forced Migration Studies styled themselves as new fields of research in social sciences by developing next to the field of international migration. The notion of “forced migration” progressively widened, and several research programs have been developed access procedures to refugee status and the protection of asylum seekers, as well as public policies and the role of international institutions in the “management of the undesirables” (Agier 2008).

History of Sociological Research on Migration in China

39In Chinese academia, research on sociology of migration has been internally divided. Research on migration is mainly concerned with two groups of people, one of which is project resettlers, especially reservoir resettlers (Shi and Chen 1999), with this field including resettlement policies and migrant community management. At the dawn of the 21st century, such research enjoyed an upsurge due to studies on the Three Gorges migrants. The other group is overseas migrants, referring to the Chinese population that moves overseas, including research on overseas Chinese (M. Li 1993). However, for the largest resettlement groups in Chinese society, the “migrating” group that moves from rural to urban areas, from inland provinces to coastal areas, has long been studied as “migrant workers,” the migrant population, or the “floating population.” Under the institutional background of the dual system of urban and rural separation, neither the government nor the scholars—nor even the migrant workers themselves—regard migrant workers entering the city as an act of “migration,” but merely a “short-term” act of mobility. They are considered as having to return to their rural hometown in the near future by those scholars.

40Early research literature mainly pays attention to the mobility behaviors of migrant workers, i.e., why migrant workers go to the city, and how they are able to move into the city. There are two concepts of the utmost importance in this sense: “surplus rural labor force” and “unemployed migrant people.” That is to say, the main reason for migrant workers entering the city is the “surplus” rural labor force, while in terms of migrant workers’ process of entering the city, as well as their living status, the workers are regarded as “unemployed migrant people” by the mainstream scholars. In this process, the introduction of the “push and pull theory” provides a convincing explanation for migrant workers’ motivation for entering cities (Song 1982, 1995); meanwhile, the introduction of the “Social Network Theory” provides a satisfactory explanation for understanding and analyzing migrant workers entering cities and their job-hunting behaviors there (S. Li et al. 2008). Without a doubt, at this stage of the research, a great deal of research literature is focused on the social problems brought about by the swarm of migrant workers into cities, as well as the better solutions for controlling and regulating the “mobility” and job hunting of migrant workers.

41Since the year 2000, with migrant workers staying in cities for a longer period, the proportion of family migration has also increased. The proportion of the new generation of migrant workers—young migrant workers who were born after 1980 and their children and families—has gradually become the mainstay of migrant workers. The government and academic circles have begun to pay attention to migrant workers and migrant populations. Regarding government management, taking the “Sun Zhigang” event in 2003 as the turning point, the government abolished the Ordinance on Detention and Repatriation and released a series of policies on the employment of migrant workers, as well as their wages, social security, and children’s education. Even state-level statistics were acquired based on actual population rather than the previous basis of household registered population. At this stage, for the first time the perspective of “migration” was introduced into the research on migrant workers and migrant populations (Liu 2005). With respect to the social integration of migrant workers in cities, topics such as labor rights protection, education of migrant children, and public participation have become the focus of research on migrant workers.

42Since 2009, the National Health and Family Planning Commission has organized the China Migrants Dynamic Survey, with the annual survey sample size running about 200,000. At the same time, Shanghai University, Sun Yat-sen University, Peking University, and the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics have also conducted many large-scale questionnaire surveys on migrant workers and migrant children (Liu, Xin and Shu 2011; Feng and Chen 2012). As a result, a large amount of high-quality survey data for the migrant population was produced, and research results based on the data were created. After optimizing the index system for the urban and social integration of the migrant population, a systematic consensus began to take shape (Zhang and Lei 2008; H. Zhou 2014). The research includes in-depth analysis of the factors that affect migrant workers’ social integration, the intergenerational differentiation of migrant workers, and skill development.

43In conducting research on migrant workers, the academic circle has shown little concern for the majority of “migrants” with household registration through employment after entering university or joining the army or directly entering cities by employment in the large-scale urbanization process in China. It was not until 2005 that anti-Japanese demonstrations made the government and academia notice that a great deal of “white collar” migrant groups had entered the cities from rural areas (Y. Li 2005), as well as “the three big mountains” they face: housing, medical treatment, and children’s education. Later, with the concepts of “new migrants” or “white collar migrants,” academics did a series of studies on the problems faced by this group (Zhang and Lei 2008, 2009), including studies on the migrants in the lower end of white-collar employment, the “ant tribe” (Lian 2009).

44In a word, under the “sociology of migration” framework, the academic circles in China started comprehensive comparative studies on the migrant population, white-collar migrants, and reservoir migrants, as well as international migrants (including emigrants and immigrants); many scholars and institutions that take migration as a research topic tend not to simply take a certain migrant group as their research subject. For example, the Professional Committee of Migration Sociology under the Chinese Sociological Association has escaped from the limitation of “project migrants” and is covering more research subjects and scholars under this research topic.

45For most studies on migrants and the migrant population, scholars generally take the “migrant” group and its “migrating behaviors” as a question under study, namely, studying the migrating process or the problems migrants faced in migration, as well as how to understand and explain such problems. However, the studies have missed the possibility of enhancing understanding in a cross-cultural context of sociology and of constructing more generalized sociological theory.

46Other than working together in academic politics to some extent to jointly challenge the academic hegemony in Western sociology, with American sociology as the mainstream, what is more important to the joint Chinese-French “Post-Western Sociology” is treating the cultural practice of different societies with a more equal academic attitude, and constructing the general theories of sociology on the basis of these cultural practices. This requires more cultural self-consciousness on the part of related scholars in terms of concept and method; moreover, selecting research objects and access paths is undoubtedly a very important step.

47The most distinctive characteristic of the “migrants” group is their more in-depth and extensive cross-cultural practice and experience due to the migration behavior itself, as well as the more direct and profound cross-cultural understanding formed in such cross-cultural practices and experiences. Therefore, taking “migrants” as the important research object of Chinese-French “Post-Western Sociology,” the cross-cultural fieldwork practiced by cross-cultural research groups is of vital significance to overcoming the researchers’ “cultural centralism” limitation and to reconstructing sociological knowledge in a “multi-contextual” view (Roulleau-Berger 2011, 2016; X. Zhou 2020).

48In the sociology of migration Chinese sociologists use the concepts of social structures, interactions and guanxi, and individual strategies (Li and Li 2013) to understand the migratory experience; they analyze how the less endowed migrants, in terms of social capital and economic and symbolic resources, are subjected to the forces of political and economic measures; they consider available networks of trust and community solidarity, and the strategies to find social and spatial anchorage in economic spaces. And French sociologists are more using the concepts of structural processes, individuation and subjectivation, agency and capabilities.

Gender and Migration

49In Europe, the issue of gender in international migration has long remained unaddressed. Since the publication of the 1984 issue of International Migration Review devoted to migrant women, and one of its articles, by Mirjana Morokvasic, “Birds of Passage Are Also Women,” many books and journal articles have been devoted to migrant women. The first research on European female migration was carried out in the early 1970s. The figure of the female migrant worker was built up during the 1980s, and from the 1990s onwards research has focused on care work and domestic work in its economic and cultural dimensions, based on the model of traditional domesticity, which produces domination in the world space. The presentation of the differences and similarities between male and female migration has made it possible to consider the forms of empowerment in migration. In particular, migrant women at work were largely invisible and gradually became particularly visible in domestic service, care work, prostitution, and human trafficking of women. The issue of the (international) transfer of reproductive work has repercussions for the production of the global care chain and has been the subject of several research studies.

50Gradually we have talked less about women and more about gender in order to shift the focus to gender differences. And women have increasingly emerged as actors in their migration. In fact, over the last twenty years or so the individual migration of women has emerged as an important element of change in international mobility. Women who leave their country alone for economic reasons aspire to find work that provides financial resources that they can pass on to their families back home. Those who join their husbands find it difficult to find employment in host societies. Women in migration appear to be a very vulnerable category in the face of employment flexibility and demand for illegal work, forced to engage in the informal economy. Indeed, they are very present in precarious work, subcontracting, outsourced jobs, home-based sales, home-based work, etc. From the 1980s onwards there has been an increase in demand for labor in the service sector, often the least qualified one; the economic situation of migrant women expresses forms of domination and discrimination between men and women and between women in the labor markets. Finally, some of those who aspire to find employment in tourism or the service sector are abused in the sex industry and human trafficking of women.

51From the 1980s onwards, the notion of empowerment, which was widely used in gender studies, was also used to consider the issue of gender and migration, and then gradually gave way to analyses in terms of agency capacity and the intersectionality of inequalities and discrimination (Mazella 2014). The intersectionality of inequalities in the migratory experience has later been declined in many works around the tryptic of class, gender and race according to different theoretical modalities (Roulleau-Berger 2010; Cossée et al. 2012).

52International migration has been feminized, and the work of women is concentrated in different labor markets in particular: domestic work, care, and prostitution. Today, a significant number of women from poor countries are forced to do domestic work, relegated to degrading and often undeclared work. These unequal situations cannot be dissociated from the globalization process. The disqualifications and humiliations suffered by migrant women are particularly visible thanks to the expansion of the global market for domestic work. Care work shows how gender, ethnicity, and globalized social stratification can be combined in a “negative” way that distributes women in transnational spaces by giving them access to invisible forms of work. Care work shows how economies are dematerialized, how women in migration play a central role in this process where the exploitation of material resources is combined with circuits for the exploitation of emotional resources (Ehrenreich and Hoschschild 2004; Mozère 2004). Care work accounts for forms of inequality that result from the combination of processes of economic globalization, ethnicization of labor markets, and subordination. It unfolds in the invisibility of work, where service relationships and bonds of intimacy are confused, where social identities constructed in other spaces become blurred, where domestic work can evolve into prostitution (Lieber and Lévy 2009).

53The gender perspective was missing for a long time in early studies on Chinese migrant workers, although many studies at that time noticed the gender difference in the migration process of migrant workers. For example, it was noted in many studies that among the early migrant workers entering cities, young females comprised a large proportion of these migrants; in the 1990s, in the early stage of migrations to Shenzhen and Dongguan, the cities with mainly labor-intensive industries, there was an especially stark gender imbalance among the migrant population. Without doubt, at that time the majority of migrant workers were young and unmarried females. Once they reached the age of marriage they would quit their job and return to their hometown in rural areas. Under the circumstances at that time, the proportion of migrant workers moving with their families was not very high, so it was mainly men who went out to work after marriage. Despite this being the case, family planning as the national policy at the time had a one-vote veto effect in local assessments, and family planning for the floating population was the focus of the work of the local governments in the inflow areas. Therefore, the focus on female migrant workers in many early studies is also closely related to this policy.

54Later, as more and more scholars—especially a large number of female scholars—who received academic training overseas entered the field of migrant population research, the feminist perspective, gender research, and gender-related research topics, such as gender inequality and women’s rights protection, have become even more distinctive in the field (Tong 2003). In this process, Pun Ngai promoted a series of research projects on labor issues from a feminist perspective, including her book Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Pun 2011). After that came more and more research on specific female groups in the migrant population, including Pan Suiming’s and Huang Yingying’s research on “streetwalkers” (Huang 2016) and Shen Yuan’s research on the “wives of the truck drivers” (Research Group on Chinese Truck Drivers, Public Welfare Institute of Transfer Foundation 2018), Xiao Suowei’s research on “mistresses” (Xiao 2013), etc.

55Among the studies on gender and migration, intermarriage and social integration during migration has always been a very important topic. It is mainly reflected in the fact that many studies take the migration of couples as one of the indexes in measuring the local social integration of a migrant population (Zhang and Lei 2008). On the other hand, it is reflected in the influence of intercommunity marriage on the social integration of migrants, including the great deal of studies on migrant wives and migrant brides, as well as the impact of mixed marriage on the social integration of an ethnic migrant population, which also includes the influence of marriage migration on the social mobility of females.

56Without doubt, gender inequality and gender discrimination has always been one of the key points in American sociological studies, especially migration studies. In Chinese studies there has been abundant research on gender inequality; however, little of it is from the perspective of discrimination.

Migration, Urban Integration, and Work

57The process of urban integration in sociology is often related to the question of migration that we will introduce here. First, the assimilation approach characterizing the Chicago School’s studies of immigration (Park 1926) described how migrants could use adaptation strategies to settle in urban enclaves; then, they would usually leave these places, become involved in competition for space with other social groups, and develop their own social trajectory. Park and Burgess dealt with the concept of urban integration and segregation. The question of upward social mobility among second-generation migrant communities was broached: the assimilation theory initially showed how the children and grandchildren of migrants gradually acceded to the social statuses of the host society and that this process had an element of irreversibility about it.

58Today in European cities the Chicago’s School’s theory still could be mobilized to analyze some ascendant social trajectories of migrants, for example new entrepreneurs and traders. But in the neighborhoods of European cities, particularly in the working-class suburbs of French cities, spatial, social, and economic segregation have increased over the last forty years. In European cities, the processes of urban segregation have been thought of as being embedded with the processes of economic and social insecurity and impoverishment, ethnicization of labor markets, and racial discrimination. Starting in the 1970s, mass unemployment, precarization of labor and employment relations, relocation of work, and deindustrialization have relegated young people from the working classes, and particularly young descendants of immigrants, to the margins of the labor market in European cities. These forms of distancing and marginalization—or even exclusion—of the “weakest” shed light on the social and moral boundaries between “haves” and “have-nots,” between “integrated” and “outcast,” between “natives” and migrants. In this context of economic insecurity, urban labor markets have become highly ethnicized by producing assignments to “non-places,” captivities in menial jobs. A dual process clearly reflects the development of a labor market characterized by underemployment—at the heart of which stands the migrant subject to the global labor market. Alongside micro-segmentations in urban labor markets, ethnic and multi-ethnic niches, as well as ethnic and multi-ethnic enclaves, are emerging. Finally, local and global poor-to-poor markets have largely developed in European cities.

59Obtaining a work contract, then, plays a decisive role in a migrant’s situation. In the EU countries, on the whole a majority of migrants have not a work contract in these sectors of agriculture, construction, tourism, catering, domestic services, and the cleaning sector, but there are variations from one EU country to another (Ambrosini 2007). In the EU countries we can speak of a double process of insecurity and ethnic discrimination that also combines to produce situations of unemployment faced by migrants (Roulleau-Berger 2010). In Europe unemployment and segregations of migrant workers in labor markets generate a market of “underemployment.” Today, in most countries of the EU, ethnic discrimination, insecurity, and the proliferation of precarious forms of employment combine to “pulverize the conditions of the work contract” (Beck 1992) due to the plurality and flexibility of transitional employments, and to specific forms of work that are more or less official. This dual process clearly reflects the development of a market of underemployment, at the heart of which stands the figure of the migrant forced into it.

60In Europe the process of the segregation of migrants in the labor markets means ethnic segmentation, that is to say, a hierarchical proliferation of “ethnic niches” (Waldinger 1994; Waldinger and Bozorgmehr 1996). The segmentation process of European labor markets may be defined as being sited and differentiated by migrants’ country and geographical origin. In increasingly polarized European cities, migrants are integrated into networks that are clearly based on highly structured forms of economic organization; their activities are organized around the principles of free trade and community affiliation. The least skilled migrants are operating in an ethnic economy that is both local and global and is organized around sectors of economic activity, such as restaurants, food retail, small-scale distribution, the clothing industry, trade, and, more recently, electronics and computer services.

61Individuals’ positions seem to be linked to social capital, language skills, and professional qualifications; depending on the strength of their position, individuals will be more or less visible and enjoy a greater or lesser degree of social recognition. Ethnic niches are becoming increasingly less dominated by one ethnic group and more pluriethnic, as successive waves of migrants from different continents find work in them. The process of social integration for migrants in Europe was transformed, producing urban tensions and conflicts, discriminations, and microsegregations (Mingione 2013).

62So, the Chicago School’s theory cannot be really adapted to analyze the situation of children of immigrants in Europe today. For children of immigrants, intergenerational mobility seems to be increasingly less linear and may give rise to a “segmented assimilation” (M. Zhou 1997)—more especially pluri-segmented assimilation—that reflects the irregular, reversible, unexpected, multidimensional, and differentiated aspects of urban and economic integration (Roulleau-Berger 1999, 2013).

63In China, Shen Yuan and Wen Xiang (2014) show how the new working class is forming. For the first generation of migrant workers, internal migration produces trajectories of professional mobility whereby migrants change their position without moving on a vertical axis passing from one hierarchy to another; it is thus a horizontal mobility organized around a linear sequence of turning points, which means a sequence of movements in professional hierarchies built around a single activity (such as construction) or around completely disjointed activities in which professional contents have no connection between them (Roulleau-Berger 2009b). In Chinese cities the internal migration of young Chinese—increasingly stratified—is fundamental to understand the transformations of the regime or urbanities. The Chicago School’s theory still makes sense in certain situations to understand the process of social mobility of Chinese migrant workers (P. Li 2012; C. Li 2013) and also that of new international migrants in big cities, for example, successive waves of Arab and sub-Saharan traders in Guangzhou (H. Liu 2013) and Yiwu.

64But this theory cannot be used to analyze the process of social disqualification for the new, less-qualified, young, internal migrants, who form a new urban underclass and experience a new poverty in “urban villages”—the “ant tribes” (Lian 2009)—or new urban villages that appear on the outskirts of megalopolises; some of them are constrained to leave the big cities and go back to their home area. Secondly, young internal migrant graduates gain access to skilled jobs in Chinese megacities as technicians, executives in private or public Chinese enterprises, and in international enterprises, but most of them remain migrants and are in situations of job and housing insecurity. These young people, the majority of whom do not have an urban hukou, are victims of employment discrimination by local authorities: for example, a young graduate with a rural hukou cannot easily get an urban job; young graduates are forced into informal jobs or situations of unemployment (Roulleau-Berger and J. Yan 2017).

65Most migrants came from regions relatively underdeveloped in terms of economic and social development. In the place of arrival they faced a society with a more mature and stable main population. In China, for example, there is Shanghai; although Shanghai is a city of immigrants that had been forming since the opening of the port in 1842, after the foundation of the new China in 1949, and especially after the year 1958, it experienced a relatively long closed period, and a relatively closed and stable group of main residents and culture formed. It can be stated that all of the chief megacities in China, with the exception of Shenzhen, experienced a relatively closed period of development before the reform and opening-up, resulting in a relatively stable residential structure and a local culture with its own characteristics. When some migrant populations from less developed areas enter the city, the key problem they face is how to get stable employment and higher payment, allowing them to socially integrate into the local society. In this process, although assimilation and segregation have always been the focus in the theoretical and policy discussions, the migration mode built under the concept of cultural pluralism has never become the mainstay.

66Large-scale population migration in China is greatly different from the situation in Europe. First, large-scale population migration in China originated from the separate urban-rural structure under the planned economic system. What migrant workers face is not merely the job transfer from agriculture to industry or the tertiary industry, but the transition of social identity from rural residence to urban residence that was formed in the former planned economy, as well as the breakthrough from the strict urban-rural structure that was based on the differences of the two identities. Under such an institutional system, what migrants need to break through is not only the division between urban and rural areas, but also national and collective ownership, internal and external systems, and a series of barriers from local separatist systems that are based on “fiscal federalism” (Zhang 2007). Therefore, for the “migrants” in China, what they face in the process of migration is not an ethnic difference and cultural gap (including language barriers), but in a larger sense the institutional discrimination and barriers formed by a series of system designs. As a matter of fact, because of the long-term existence of institutional obstacles, the vast migrant population must often face a huge actual gap between the cities as the place of arrival and rural areas as the place of departure. This is one of the most important background conditions for domestic migration in China. According to the view of Professor Sun Liping, Chinese society is a “fractured” society (Sun 2003), one in which the huge gap between city and rural area in reality and the great deal of institutional barriers intensify each other and direct the development of Chinese society to the marathon route, and some groups who run slower are faced with the threat of suspension of the race or fall behind.

67Second, large-scale population mobility emerged against a highly globalized backdrop. At the beginning of reforms and opening up, the underdeveloped Chinese society lagged far behind Western developed countries, and was even left behind by the “Four Asian Tigers” in East Asia. In the 1990s, the income of urban residents in coastal areas in China was only about one-twentieth of the per capita income of Taiwanese residents. And the income of farmers in inland provinces like Sichuan and Henan was only one-fifth of the per capita income of residents in coastal areas in Guangdong Province (Y. Liu 2009). Under these conditions, when Western enterprises entered the Chinese market and settled down rapidly in coastal cities in China, senior managers dispatched by developed Western countries and millions of migrant workers “encountered” in the enterprises. The vast coastal areas in China have since become a “migration” society composed of a high-income group from developed countries, college graduates from inland rural areas and cities, and migrant workers from inland rural areas. These people are from societies at different levels of development, and the reproduction of their human capital is completed in their place of origin to a great extent; in this case, a “fractured” structure with huge differences among different groups is formed, and such a “fracture” is not merely reflected in organizational aspects (Y. Liu 2009) but, even more so, in social ones.

68After the year 2010, with the swarm of migrants from more less developed countries into China (like the Africans in Guangzhou) (Liang and Liu 2014), the “fractured” structure in coastal areas in China became more complicated. The globalized production system and the separate urban-rural structure unique to China are integrated with antagonism between the migrant structure, capital, and labor force, compounded by the highly consistent governance structure of the local society, to form a “supraclass” labor production system (Y. Liu 2009), producing great barriers to the local social integration of migrants.

Migration and Globalization

69If globalization is a multidimensional process, and if we have already seen several globalizations, the faces of Metropolises have been largely “cosmopolitanized.” Transnational spaces are the scene of a proliferation of new economic, social, and moral assemblages—in the sense of Saskia Sassen (2006)—between intermediate and international cities in the world where new denationalized upper classes, middle classes, and underclasses have been formed.

70In the framework of an intensification of international migrations, traditional ethnic enclaves become more saturated. Urban enclaves become more and more pluri-ethnic. Ethnic and pluri-ethnic districts exist in every international city, and they are always linked to other ethnic spaces situated in other international cities. For the inhabitants of the city concerned, these districts may appear to be urban enclaves, while for the migrant they are a place of international exchange—they are, in fact, both one and the same. Ethnic and multi-ethnic enclaves are linked to other ethnic and multi-ethnic spaces situated in other international cities via “bazaar economies” (Geertz 2007)—which means locality, commerciality and ethnicity-constructed assemblages between polycentric economies and hierarchically organized economies beyond the nation-states. For example, in the bazaars of European cities, African, Maghrebian, Indian, and Chinese merchants sell new clothes, belts, scarves, bags, bracelets, calculators, watches, toys, electrical goods, etc. These economic forms are visible in the transnational circulations of poorly qualified populations. Processes of recomposition, segmentation, and diffraction of the local and global labor markets find expression in the multiple constructions of arrangements between the diversified and hierarchically organized forms of labor that influence the mobilities and circulations within and between international cities.

71In that context of an implementation of a pluralizing of economies, the diversification of migrants’ biographies highlights the apparition of “partially denationalized classes” (Sassen 2006), especially with the formation of transnational elites, new middle classes, and disqualified or poor migrants. In that process of construction of a globalized social stratification, the richest and the poorest are particularly visible. The migration trajectories related to commercial or entrepreneurial dynamics may be qualified as trajectories of upward mobility that are built in the continuous accumulation of personal and social resources. Finally, internal migrations also reveal today migrants who move in a random mode on the Chinese mainland between different jobs and activities in order to try to achieve upward social mobility in Chinese society. In this movement of the intensification of internal migrations in China and economic transformation, unskilled young people from rural areas travel on migration routes in search of employment, subject to the constraints and flexibility of the development of a Chinese-style capitalism.

72Since the end of the 1980s, global trade, investments abroad, and circulation of capital have all been accelerating, and migration dynamics never stop multiplying and diversifying. Economic, scientific, and technical elites’ migrations highlight the renewed forms of these new mobilities. “Top-down globalizing” shows how a fraction of migrants is forming of the new cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, residing for a part in Europe and made up of highly skilled and qualified migrants from continental China, Eastern and Central Europe, the Maghreb, and the Middle East. As new cosmopolitan bourgeoisies are formed (Wagner 2007), migrants with high social and spatial capital have access to positions of cadres in international companies and to “top-down” social statuses.

73Migrants engaged in international ethnic trade also access mid-scale positions by producing a new middle class. But communities of the country of origin funnel the less qualified migrants, the most destitute ones, towards the sectors where they are subject to real exploitation. Middle classes internationalize but remain within a national frame, while the upper class and the underclass may firstly be defined as denationalized (Le Galès, Andreotti and Fuentes 2015).

74In Europe, among asylum seekers and refugees living in situations of high social and economic insecurity, a new figure, that of the hobo (Anderson 1993), appears: they are the “leftovers/remnants/left-behinds of globalization” or new supernumeraries, objects of invisibility and of public and social nonrecognition, forced into “lost lives.” The “leftovers/remnants/left-behinds of globalization,” voiceless, placeless, without any positive recognition, remain forced to be themselves against and despite domination, sound and powerful racism, assignations to invisibility, and marginalization into spaces of no-rights.

75In the new round of globalization, the pivot of globalization is not merely the “global city” as the node of globalization (Sassen 1991); these cities include “international communities” of a large number of migrants and a few globalized elite groups that maintain the operation of the global system, whom Geng calls “global man” (Geng, Shu and Lin 2012). Increasingly convenient transportation and communication networks, large-scale e-commerce platforms, and the widespread adoption of online office and conference systems have enabled more and more non-elite groups to possess the ability to become the “global man.” The global system no longer takes the “localization” system built on the global city and the international communities as an intermediary; it can be linked to everyone’s daily work, study, and life directly.

76In this process, the main groups who are deeply involved in globalization are not the migrants who have realized “globalization” in the place of arrival to some extent, but the “migrants” with the attribute of “global man” who have kept moving on a global scale. Just like the early nomadic groups on the Mongolian grassland, these people are constantly “dwelling on water and grass” worldwide. They interact and exchange with different cultures but never try to completely integrate into local civilization. They are always ready to hunt for global capital, commodities, and flow of information. Even if they have stayed in a culture for a long period and have developed the ability to fully integrate into local society, they always maintain the ability to constantly have “mobility” worldwide.

77In the past system of globalization, the groups who possessed this attribute and ability generally were the very few elite ones at the very top of the system. However, in the new round of globalization, more and more people are coming to have this attribute and ability, even, to some extent, the refugees and illegal international workers at the bottom of the system. In this case, studies on migration require more work on tracking the sustained migration behavior of these migrant groups, as well as the long-term cross-cultural communication and cooperation process with different cultures.

78For studying these questions, we should not only rely on long-term and in-depth fieldwork, but also require stable research groups engaged in cross-cultural cooperation for deep exchange and collaboration. This book serves as an attempt to conduct such in-depth cooperation and communication by combining long-term fieldwork with cross-cultural research groups.

Doing Fieldwork Together

79This work is the product of a lengthy scientific collaboration between French and Chinese sociologists as part of the LIA (International Associated Laboratory) research programs. We put methodological approaches in place to explore the sociological field in both France and China. Researchers from Shanghai University’s School of Sociology and Political Science were invited on short- and medium-term exchanges to explore the sociological landscape in France. By the same token, French researchers participated in medium- to long-term exchanges in China.

80Dialogue on these inaugural field experiences in France and China gave rise to the CMIRA research program “Young migrants, economic marginalization and urban skills in Lyon, Milan, Shanghai” (2015–2019), funded by the Rhône-Alpes region and the INJEP (National Institute of Youth and Popular Education). It was supervised by Professors Laurence Roulleau-Berger and Liu Yuzhao, with the participation of Beatrice Zani, Grégory Giraudo-Baujeu, and Marie Bellot from Triangle, ENS Lyon, Yan Jun and Su Liang from the School of Sociology and Political Science, Shanghai University. The biographical interviews presented in this work were conducted with young descendants of immigrants in Lyon and young Chinese migrants in Shanghai. Interviews carried out with institutional actors in Shanghai were part of the “Academic research on the public welfare institutions for migrant children in the Yangtze River Delta and education forum” program and were supervised by Professor Liu Yuzhao.

81Within the framework of these programs, teams made up of Chinese and French researchers did fieldwork together in both contexts. Part of the fieldwork involved joint teams, and we organized workshops to analyze the field materials. We held extensive discussions on the challenges of categorizing second-generation young internal Chinese migrants and the second-generation immigrants in France in order to define our population and create a consistent methodological approach across the areas of research. Through the lens of previous research programs and workshops, we observed that the process of urban integration and social marginalization in second-generation young Chinese migrants and the second-generation immigrants in France appeared to be governed by similar forces. We identified biographical pathways characterized by oscillations between integration and urban exclusion. We also highlighted societal singularities, such as forms of ethnic discrimination in France and spatial mobility on a very large scale in China.

Field areas and survey methods in France

82In 2016, we conducted fieldwork in the city of Lyon and identified 37 priority areas (QPV) that account for 12 % of the metropolitan population, largely concentrated in the eastern part of the conurbation. Research areas were established in Givors, Vénissieux, and La Duchère.

83The town of Givors is home to 19,419 residents, with 28.7 % of them under the age of 20. The rate of unemployment is 19.8 % and the poverty rate is 27.7 %. Givors has a rich industrial heritage and was led by successive communist mayors from 1953 to 2020. It is bearing the brunt of deindustrialization with the closure of a number of factories and is also marked by large urban renovation projects. Like many French towns after World War II, Givors experienced several waves of immigration. The glassmaking industry enticed many Italian immigrants to settle in Givors, followed by Portuguese and Spanish immigrants from the 1950s onwards, and then immigration from Algeria and Turkey. Despite a large protest movement to keep it going, the glassmaking industry in Givors closed its doors in 2003, turning an industrial and historical page that had lasted over two centuries. The metalworking and steelmaking industries gradually gave way to logistics, transport, and commerce companies with the establishment of the “Givors 2 Vallées” business zone in 1976, now the fifth largest business hub in Greater Lyon. The recent 2020 municipal elections saw the appointment of miscellaneous left-wing city officials, and an ecologist candidate as the new mayor.

84Vénissieux is located southeast of Lyon and with 65,894 residents is the third largest town in the French department. While at the end of the 19th century Vénissieux was only a small town, the construction of the Marius Berliet automobile plants during the inter-war period slowly transformed the town into an industrial city and home to a large worker population. Consequently, 9200 housing units were built between 1965 and 1973, 60 % of which were low-rent housing (HLM) accommodating up to 25,000 inhabitants and 40 nationalities, mainly due to the presence of major industries. The Minguettes district is now known as one of the largest Priority Urbanization Zones (ZUP) in France, previously making headlines in the summer of 1981 as the epicenter of the first urban riots in France. Vénissieux has been headed by communist mayors since 1944 and is currently the poorest municipality in the Lyon metropolitan area, with a poverty rate of 29 % and a soaring unemployment rate of 22.8 % (35.1 % in the Minguettes district).

85Situated on a hillside west of Lyon, la Duchère is the 9th district of Lyon. It covers around 120 hectares and has 10,214 residents. In 1964, a third of the population consisted of Algerian repatriates. This district has many issues that can be found in other large neighborhoods: deteriorating building conditions, a lack of equipment and infrastructure, isolation, and growing socioeconomic fragility. Since the early 2000s, la Duchère has been a focal point for the implementation of urban policies in terms of renovation, demolition, and reconstruction. Residents of la Duchère are less affected by unemployment and economic difficulties found in similar working-class areas; nevertheless, the unemployment rate is 27.6 % (compared to 14 % across Lyon), there is a high number of residents with no tertiary education (47.6 % compared to 25.4 % across Lyon), and the poverty rate is 37 %.

86We employed the in situ observation method to meet the youth of second-generation immigrants in the Lyon metropolitan area and conducted urban and economic ethnographical research in la Duchère, Vénissieux, and Givors. We carried out 30 biographical interviews with the youth of second-generation immigrants from the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa aged 18 to 31 years. These interviews gave us the opportunity to address a broad range of topics and areas in these young people’s lives: their childhoods, families, socializations, peer relationships, and social and vocational integration, as well as their relationship with institutional actors, etc. Our goal was to retrace their migratory careers, struggles, and social experiences. We gathered 20 narratives about city life from young people from Vénissieux and Givors. These narratives allow them to tell a story about themselves through urban walks, itineraries, and journeys. Talking about the city is a way of talking about themselves.

87In addition, we conducted 25 interviews with institutional actors across different structures in France. These include professionals in social inclusion from social services and job centers, sports and prevention educators, youth workers in related sectors, and MJCs (Cultural and Youth Centers), as well as youth officers from Vénissieux and Givors.

Field areas and survey methods in China

88In Shanghai, a large number of rural migrant workers live and work in the city suburbs like the Pudong, Baoshan, Qingpu, Minhang, and Jinshan districts, among others. Schools for migrant workers’ children are also concentrated in these places. In the Shanghai part of the CMIRA program, six primary schools located in different areas in the suburbs have been chosen to avoid any disproportionate similarity of students’ experiences and to help the researchers understand the differences in educational choices and job opportunities caused by different regional industrial structures and educational conditions. The research team established contact with primary schools for the children of rural migrant workers in order to find the children of the first generation of internal rural migrant workers in Shanghai. With the help of the headmasters of those primary schools, the researchers were able to contact young internal migrants. In each school, graduates born between 1981 and 1997 and currently working in Shanghai at that time were chosen as interviewees. Interviews were conducted in public welfare institutions in the field of migrant children in the Yangtze River Delta with the help of Shanghai United Foundation. The aim was to understand the history, challenges, and policy environment of relevant organizations in various places, as well as to build a collaborative mechanism to solve the educational problems of migrant children.

Selection and analysis of biographical interviews

89We firstly analyzed the biographical interviews separately before selecting the pathways of five young migrants in China and five young descendants of immigrants in France that encapsulate the essence of migratory processes. Both French and Chinese researchers worked with the same entire raw data set from the field, which was translated from French and Chinese to English.

90Next, in an effort to improve our analytical framework, we opened our work space to other specialist researchers in the field of migration and invited them to perform joint analysis on the biographies. Finally, we opened a collaborative space for reflection to share our points of view in order to deepen the paradigm of post-Western sociology. As a result, we have identified five major subfields through our interview analysis:

• migration and education
• migration and family
• migration, integration, and urban segregation
• migration and work
• migration and governance

91Each researcher was invited to comment on a pair of interviews according to his or her interest and field of expertise. While most commentators chose to write one comment per interview, some commentators preferred to write an article that cross-analyses both interviews.