1The interview with Niu that I will discuss here with regards to my own research testifies to the experience of rural migrants and their first heirs in Shanghai: spatial journeys of trips back and forth between the village of origin and the city; geographic and social mobility linked to educational or job opportunities; recurrent tests in access to housing which are based on social discrimination and urban segregation; and plural forms of sociability and socialization in places of legitimacy inequality.

2But it is first of all the experience of migration evidenced by the interview with Niu which catches my attention: from Shanghai to most of the global cities, isn’t the multiplication of the flows of international migrations that accompanied the great shocks of the planet, amongst uprootings, wars, socioeconomic upheavals, natural disasters, and failures of decolonization, one of the greatest facts of the last 30 years? As Laurence Roulleau-Berger writes: “Many of them arrive in Shanghai by following lines of network that link the villages, cities, regions of origin … They appropriate bits of the megalopolis around specific activities and then move according to constraints and economic opportunities in other spaces” (Roulleau-Berger and Yan 2017, 179–181).

3We could find multiple entries about the resonances that this interview on Chinese grounds can evoke with the French immigration grounds that I explored. Specifically, it is a paradigm of mobility that allows one to insist on the temporality of meetings, interactions, and exchanges, on the specific rhythms of sociability in the worlds of migrants between distances and proximities. But I will limit my remarks to a central subject regarding Niu’s interview: mobility and migration in the global city.

Migration as a Pioneer’s Adventure

4Niu spent part of his childhood in his native village, but his parents’ labor migration to Shanghai led him to live with his aunt in Shenqiu (Henan Province), where he was schooled until high school with other children of rural migrants, all of them in an unstable situation which seems to reflect the tensions and contradictions of a changing society, between the rural and the urban, the public and the private. Niu’s integration path, even if his family were present, seems to have been done in great solitude, but what emerges from his testimony is a strength of character that comes from the faith of the pioneer, which does not guarantee its success, because as Abdelmalek Sayad pointed out, migration is an ordeal where one easily passes from illusion to suffering. This route is more broadly part of an environment of young, rural, precarious people on the move who could recall the figure of the “hobo,” or the “truck routiers” described by Robert Castel before the advent of the wage society, even if the great transformation of Chinese society is more about the new spirit of capitalism and globalized flexibility.

5But I could also, without claiming to be comparative, find an analogy with the situation of labor immigration in France, in particular with the Algerians with whom I have worked. This figure of the immigrant is often represented as the great sufferer of modernity, because it would be by sacrifice, in the name of the family and village survival, that the pioneers accept exile. In line with Sayad’s work, I tried to highlight in Familles de l’intégration (1999) other perspectives relating to the motivations of migration. Beyond the figure of the victim of socioeconomic and political conditions, many are indeed engaged willingly in the secret ambitions of success and rupture with traditional rural society. Whether processions of young, rural rebels haunted by the icons of modernity or legions of a reserve army serving the captains of industry of the metropolis, the fever of fortune has also traced their path. As Malika Chafi points out, “The mobility was marked deep within themselves: turbulent professional trajectories, multiple places of residence […] Their heirs have an acute awareness of the ephemeral: the risk does not scare, on the contrary, it conditions the passages.” (Boubeker 1999, 35). In a large noria which can also evoke the experience of Niu and young rural Chinese, Algerian migrants circulate between the two shores of the Mediterranean, in the corridors connecting the metropolis and the colonial and then postcolonial society. But their routes are part of a long line of entrenched travelers. There was no spontaneous generation, but rather the progressive affirmation of migratory projects through “the three ages of Algerian emigration” (Sayad 1977). And the experience of this generation of itinerants in a world of the in-between also joins those of Niu and the Chinese migrants: “Migration imposes to them to deal with this segmentation of urban roles in megalopolises knowing that in each mobility prior to their arrival in megalopolises, the segmentation of roles has already been redefined several times” (Roulleau-Berger and Yan 2017, 187).

Anchoring and Community of Experience

6Access to housing remains a test of urban integration in a global city like Shanghai, where the hukou system contributes to fostering forms of urban segregation and the cleavage between recognized urban dwellers and sub-urban dwellers without hukou. Niu says about himself he is “half a man from Shanghai,” even if he considers that his situation is more enviable than his parents’, whose instability was such that they “did not know how many times they had moved.” He bought an apartment, where he lives with his whole family (including his mother and his sister), and if he chose to take root in the city, create his own business, and pay social security, it is to give his children a chance to get a Shanghai hukou. Niu seems to regret the choice of his parents not to have invested locally in a main residence, meaning that he—unlike some of his comrades, the sons of rural migrants—was cut off from access to social rights and benefits, in particular “to study in high school and take the Shanghai college entrance exam.” He specifies that his home is located in the suburbs of Shanghai, in a “newly developed area” which probably corresponds to an urban segregation area where migrants live without local hukou.

7In the interstices of cities, these “ant districts,” as Lian Si nicknames them, are nonetheless places of mobilization for migrants such as Niu who are trying to overcome precariousness and rebuild new sociabilities. These districts remind me of a model of an urban village on which I worked: the “cousin district” (Boubeker 1982) in the city of Saint-Chamond (Loire), which was throughout the twentieth century the entry threshold into the city for multiple migratory waves. It is the first anchorage in the host country for pioneers who have found the stability of a territory where homesickness does less harm. Failing to return to the “country,” the pioneer builds in between, a utopian imaginary of immigration: the neighborhood is seen as the creation of an intermediary place which allows an escape from an official perspective in which immigration comes down to its work force.

8But more broadly, through Niu’s testimony the figure of the migrant refers to a tangle of territories, to spaces used and recomposed according to multiple temporalities (Roulleau-Berger 2017), which could recall the notion of “circulatory territories” (Tarrius 1993) which, by being superimposed on urban developments and lifestyles, makes it possible to relocate an economic and social function and to open another dimension to the territories of migrants in the city. This pioneering approach was oriented towards a new reading of the city—the emergence of a global city which passes through large metropolises and the new cosmopolitanisms of certain ethnic districts and other “urban villages”—where the migrant can finally free himself from the costume of captive creature of the official commonplaces and their hierarchies of identity, and appear, such as himself, in his multiple roles and social practices.

9If in Chinese cities the practice of hukou is a discriminating factor which makes it possible to cross spatial and social inequalities and to highlight a whole system of differentiation of identities as well as the economic logic at work behind these internal borders to Chinese society, nevertheless, as Niu testifies, borders are also the place for the construction of new identities. From this perspective, migrations do not operate on the simple mode of attraction and mobilization around places of production, but rather on the knowledge of how to cross borders. And the new figures of migrants like Niu always maintain a posture of distance vis-à-vis the places they cross and where they can also build forms of sociability or crossroads conducive to their circulation: as Alain Tarrius writes, “In the beginning, they regroup with parents and neighbors […] then during the long time of transmigration, urban stages, recruiting new companions, they share their destinies, affective or commercial, with all kinds of foreigners who become their new relatives: alterity gradually replaces identity to qualify the link in the new social environment of each migrant, and the initial designation of ethnic is no longer justified” (Tarrius 2012).

10Echoing this point by Tarrius on European grounds—but also in line with the transnational anthropology of Arjun Appadurai (2001), which insists on the diasporic dimension of the new cultures of migrants—the interview with Niu testifies to an ability to reinvent collectives at a distance from primary socialization and the migrant’s culture of origin. Niu thus attests to the primacy of the experience shared with other children of rural migrants who came from different regions of China and went to school, like he did, in Shanghai. A “community of experience” which, to a certain extent, could be the echo of generations of heirs of North African immigration in France in “the worlds of ethnicity” (Boubeker 2003) through the mobilization of intercultural resources—more precisely, on how to cross cultural borders—as many provisions which participate in the processes of adaptation to the immigration society.

From Here and There: Mobility as a Strategic Resource

11Niu bought his home in a peripheral district where he attended school and where he has lived since he first arrived in Shanghai. This is also where the main address of his transport company is located. In fact, he rarely returns to his native village, and he has “few close friends there,” even if his wife is from the same locality and he was able to count on family networks to build his career and eventually create his own business.

12Social sciences remain at the traditional perspective of the community too often, while mobility or roaming is thought of as an emancipatory wrenching of the individual from his anchorage. As Niu’s experience shows, while many young, rural migrants gain access to employment via strategies for mobilizing family networks, and more generally via the guanxi, over the course of geographic mobility, these networks of interpersonal relationships tend to evolve. And individual networks tend to organize themselves based on new social ties. Thus, despite the great distances separating the big cities like Shanghai and certain rural provinces providing manpower, the ease with which the interpersonal links extend demonstrates the strength of the guanxi and the connection of migratory spaces. By playing on the borders of hukou politics, rural migrants move from one city to another: between resistance and adaptation, according to the sequences of their journey and opportunities, the nature of the links they maintain with their network is transformed to produce horizontal mobilities, or ascending or descending vertical mobilities.

13Niu’s testimony projects towards the horizon of transnational migrations and on a line of Franco-European or Franco-Maghrebian lands that I have been able to explore with other researchers1 since the end of the 1980s. What matters is not so much the permanence of cultural relations but the dynamics of mobilization, which make it possible to redefine a relationship with the local, as an environmental effect inscribed in urban society. Certainly the inequality of situations can overlap with that of social status; space can be experienced as a place of confinement, of withdrawal, but it is also built through an ability to renew forms of anchoring, both unique and collective routes that use localities as stages beyond home ports. A static problem of origin and belonging is thus replaced by that of the future and of an imaginary of the space of the place as deployment. This is how nomadic-sedentary dualism finds itself in a variety of situations where everyone can move from one role to another. A perspective of external emigration (Sennett 1990), making precariousness a virtue, beyond social markers between here and elsewhere: circulatory territories (Tarrius 1992) of places and memories on which networks are articulated of exchange, constitutive movements of social forms beyond the sedentarities, gaps, interstices, intervals, or transitional zones through which passages are made. Far from being passive in the face of discriminatory and segregative social relationships, migrants give other meanings to their solidarities, thereby opening up new fields of economy, territorial identification, and urban memory. This questions our very partial knowledge of the transformation of the spatialization processes of social differences.

14Geographical representations are thus overturned by the formation of a space of variable geometry and of discontinuous nature. As Jean Rémy points out, “attachment to a place is made up of the substitution between places […] this intermingling calls into question the spatial architectonics of a sedentary lifestyle. The current mobility brings a particular plasticity since it articulates the mobility of people and the transfer of messages.” (Rémy and Voye 1992, 42). Anchoring as a place of reference is not in contradiction with being both “from here and elsewhere” (Tarrius, Missaoui and Qacha 2013), because change of space and mobility can also be the condition of local investment. One can be at the same time “from here and elsewhere” by connoting reference relay spaces which serve as spatial and chronological landmarks for individual routes as well as collective routes. It is a matter of edge spaces of already in one, still in the other; neutral spaces of neither in one nor in the other; intermediate spaces.