1These cross-perspectives of the experiences of Chinese migrants and descendants of French immigrants reveal that French and Chinese sociologists are creating a space of common and located knowledge. Chinese and French sociologists produce a civilizational and historical narrative more than narratives of societies in which inflections are not placed in the same place to think about the relations between structural processes, spaces, individual and collective experiences, subjectivities. If Chinese sociologists have largely focused in recent years on the analysis of social structures and the State, their modes of analysis in this book signal a shift in understanding the structure of the experience of social life, subjectivity and emotions. If, during the last 20 years, French sociologists have increasingly developed theoretical alternatives between structures, agency and individuation, Chinese sociologists have developed a theoretical posture that increasingly articulates social structures, State and individual experiences. The notion of mental mobility, understood in the work of Simmel and the Chicago School as a more or less affirmed capacity for migrants and their children to redefine the meaning of the situations with which they are confronted in the course of their biography, is notably present. In Chinese sociology, the skills of reflexivity and mental mobility are also mobilized in the way of constructing the relationship between social structures and young migrants’ experiences. The concept of subjectivity is introduced by observing the way in which young migrants and children of immigrants think about their social destiny when confronted with the institutional constraints which derive from governance strategies. In a large and heterogeneous Sino-French constructivist space, a mosaic one, young migrants and children of immigrants has been defined by her/his capacity to be an autonomous and reflexive Subject and to construct his/her experience but also to have emotions and feelings.

Structural Processes, Individuals, and Interactions

2In this book, French and Chinese sociologists think together about the migratory experience. The migratory experience appears here as social, individual, and collective, in a context that is both local and global. It is clear in European and Chinese societies how important individual experiences are in the understanding that migrants as actors have of them, and how social structures in process and individual experiences are constantly learning about differentiated modes in the two contexts. Individuals here are also seen as experiencing migration both in their concrete existence linked to collective life and in their most intimate subjectivity. What then makes us pass from experience to trial, for example, the trial of racism or discrimination that runs through most of the texts presented.

3French sociologists apprehend the social life experience of young Chinese migrants and young children of immigrants through turning points (cf. Ingrid Tucci’s chapter) or biographical bifurcations produced by institutions—such as the educational establishment—and work markets. Meanwhile, the professional mobility of young Chinese migrants is apprehended through “zig-zag journeys” (cf. Ji Yingchun and Chen Chen’s chapter). The objective and subjective dimensions of biographical bifurcations constantly interact in the French perspective; for instance, social disqualification and/or ethnic discrimination influence individual subjective identities, the relationship with oneself and one’s dignity, and vice versa (cf. Laurence Roulleau-Berger’s chapter). On Chinese side, in their objective dimension, turning points do not seem to take a central position in the analysis of the individuation processes of young Chinese migrants. In their subjective dimension, the individual and collective biographies have become blurred, the struggle of places and the class struggle become embedded in each other. Rural-urban migration groups have been floating at the edge of the mainstream society of cities, confronted with situations of uncertainty about their individual and social identity (cf. Zhao Yeqin’s chapter).

4French and Chinese sociologists focus on the dilemmas and identity discrepancies between “not being from here” and “not being from there” which characterize “inside strangers,” to quote Lamia Missaoui’s (2003) expression. However, in China the tension between rural and urban belonging produces scrambled identities, especially for those “left-behind children” who became “follow-up children.” In Europe, identity reconfigurations are the result of the interplay between the inherited cultural or ethnic identities and the present identities. The analyses of French and Chinese sociologists show how migrants and descendants of migrants construct their identities from a multiplicity of situations, interactions, and belongings linked to multi-situated socialization spaces. And the more this multiplicity increases, the more the unity and continuity of the self are threatened, the more the registers of inequality multiply and the less easily the individual can be someone.

5We can then distinguish with Robert Castel (2001) “individuals by excess who have acquired a surface, a place and goods, owners of themselves, and individuals by default, not covered by collective systems or unable to join protective collectives, with few resources and supports, less owners of themselves.” It also has been shown that in French and Chinese societies subjectivity has become a collective issue, the “suffering” migrant and the “conquering” migrant appear as two facets of self-government that show the effects of “compressed modernities” (Chang 2010), uncertainties, insecurities, and uneasiness in social lives. This phenomenon highlights the affirmation of the individuation process as a process of civilization that is characterized more by the rise of the norm of autonomy and the injunction to be oneself, which then means there are as many aspirations and opportunities for the individual as there are risks of failure. The risks of not being able to be oneself have increased in the sense that socially weakened migrants are more often than not subject to tensions and double binds in a plurality of local spaces.

6The issue of emotions exists in both French and Chinese sociology of the individual. As Abdelmalek Sayad beautifully put it, understanding the migratory challenge entails apprehending the tension between illusions and sufferings, although it is presented in slightly different terms. Both Chinese and French sociologists emphasize humiliation, depression, despair, loneliness but they also agree on insecurity, anxiety, disillusionment, and loss of individual and collective aspirations.

7Between structural processes and agency, the status of interactions is introduced via family and interpersonal relationships, for example with peers. French and Chinese sociologists use the concept of interpersonal relationship networks and family networks to understand the educational, professional, urban, and religious socialization processes of young descendants of immigrants or second-generation migrants (cf. Li Yong’s chapter). The question of intergenerational solidarities is raised in both contexts. In Chinese sociology the concept of guanxi (interactions) has played and still plays a central role, one that is more important than it is in French sociology. Chinese sociologists considered social interactions and guanxi to be at the heart of material, symbolic, and emotional exchange (Luo 2008; Luo and Yeh 2012).

8Yang Yiyin (2008, 2012) showed how “we” implies “being one of us,” which is characterized by three traits:

• The permeability of the boundaries of we in the sense that those who are not part of “being one of us” can become a part, and inversely, “insiders” can become “outsiders.”
• The elasticity of the boundaries of we in which routes depend on contexts and circumstances.
• Individual autonomy in the sense that the individual places others within the precise borders of me.

9So, it means the process of continuity or discontinuity of the me, the I, and the Others is produced by different types of emotions in times, spaces, and situations.

10The order of interaction in French sociology is more thought out against the backdrop of a democratic society in a social hierarchy where everyone is entitled to equality and social consideration and respect for others. In recent years, in French sociology, the theories of recognition have developed—particularly in the field of migration with the question of asylum seekers and refugees—which have definitively imposed the need to think about individual and collective struggles for public and social recognition in the public space and in the framework of interpersonal interactions.

Migration, Time, and Space

11In Wang Chunguang’s chapter, space and time constitute social and structural dimensions to understand migrants’ and immigrants’ experiences. It is clear that among young Chinese migrants and the descendants of immigrants in Europe, this tension is exacerbated by the mobility that follows, intertwines, and interweaves … in a plurality of spaces and temporalities. In this book, Chinese and French sociologists unknowingly contribute to the production of a paradigm of mobility starting from different migratory situations which allow the analysis of the paths of young Chinese migrants and young French children of immigrants. Throughout the chapters, sociologists show how spatial segregation in French society produces first and foremost immobilism, social captivity, and perhaps professional mobilities which can lead to social mobility. On the Chinese field they pay attention to the sequences and entanglements of spatial mobilities which articulate with professional mobilities, to the multiple social positionings which could produce social immobility for migrants from a place, from a city to another. In Zhao Yeqin’s chapter, events and biographical bifurcations are linked to space and place.

12In all the chapters, space appeared as a global determining factor of social inequalities and as a factor both influencing and influenced by the dynamics between activities and groups of migrants and descendants of immigrants. It was noted that its double status constituted a constraint, but it also produced value related to social habits and the effects of competition among individuals. Migrants and descendants of migrants do not have access to the same urban spaces and territories, which are subjects of different hierarchies, related to a diversity of activities and a heterogeneity of populations. Some spaces seem more “segregated” than others because of the local extent of entangled and cumulative relegation processes (Grafmeyer 1994), very clearly in French cities and much less so in Chinese cities. Urban villages known as “ant tribes” in China (Lian 2009) can be compared to “cousin hoods,” according to Ahmed Boubeker’s chapter. Both are entrances to the city, at once segregated and sources of sociability. The close notions of community of experience and of belonging to communities of migrants are used to show their collective identities. However, research shows that in China the hukou takes an active part in tracing physical and moral barriers inside the cities, whereas no such equivalent can be found for the descendants of immigrants in France. The hukou is defined in different chapters as a major element in accessing citizenship and the production of spatial and social inequalities. But Sun Zhongwei in his chapter shows with the accelerated development of household registration in China in recent years, the hukou’s effect regarding urban integration has gradually declined.

13For both Chinese and French sociologists, young migrants and descendants of immigrants face a dichotomy between being relegated to given places and being able to circulate between rural and urban spaces, where, depending on timing, life sequences, and situations, they appear more imprisoned or more capable of movement. French and Chinese researchers develop here a dynamic approach to space where young migrants and descendants of immigrants create urban or rural environments around diverse activities in order to then move around depending on social and economic constraints and opportunities in other local, global, glocal spaces. In different chapters the idea of “circulatory territory” (Tarrius 2000) is adopted to show how space, in China and in France, contains identities and alterity, and how margins and peripheries overturning the topics of centrality are established, especially in the French case. Chinese and French sociologists invite us to understand how to inhabit local and transnational spaces (Bastide 2015) in order to see young migrants and young descendants of immigrants who show how the orders of mobility and sedentariness constantly overlap in increasingly complex structures and transnational networks. Social and economic as well as symbolic (by circulating between networks) resources develop through the migratory experience and allow the apprehension of the conditions of passage from one place to another, from one activity to another. In Chinese and European cities, mobility can be in conflict with sedentariness, how spaces recompose according to multiple temporalities.

14Chinese and French sociologists converge around the idea that geographic mobilities could produce social immobility in both contexts (cf. Chen Chen and Aude-Claire Fourot’s chapters). They also show how being in a subaltern condition does not necessarily entail spatial isolation, how a limited and constrained mobility in China can become a strategic resource (cf. Grégory Giraudo-Baujeu’s chapter). And vice versa, that spatial segmentations do not necessarily produce captivity but can produce professional and even social plurimobilities. The migratory experience can refer to a variety of spaces and activities which generate dynamics of social reconfiguration, spatial combinations that create circulations and appropriations of multi-situated places which react with one another. Chinese and French sociologists give a central position to space both as a constraint and as a resource, which an actor-migrant who is capable of enriching his repertory of social and economic resources at every new migratory stage can use.

15However, in China geographic mobility deeply subverts social interactions of individuals with their environment, which is challenged by their identities in a plurality of spaces and temporalities at the level of the Chinese continent, and even at the international level. The migratory circulations, experiences, and careers show how temporalities contract in exacerbated accelerations and a lack of limitations in urban and rural spaces located on different levels. The competences needed for mobility convey some “capabilities of aspiration” (in terms of power, dignity, and material resources) (Appadurai 2013) in given temporalities. Space is considered as a protection for migrants because they can move and escape social captivity; geographic and professional mobilities express some forms of resistance to the wage subordination of young workers, as does a refusal to consent to forced labor (Roulleau-Berger 2017). Chinese and French sociologists agree in considering spaces and activities together on different stages of times and spaces, seizing the games between mobilities and territorialities to link the spatial and economic dimensions of the migratory experience and account for entwined socialization processes which can generate economic integration, semi-disaffiliation, and social disaffiliation.

Social Reproduction, School, and Family Government

16Pierre Bourdieu’s social reproduction and social, economic, and cultural capital theories are employed in different chapters to talk about the children of immigrants and second-generation migrants in China. Liu Shiding introduced in his chapter the concept of “the transformation of social plates”—the urban and rural populations—to highlight the relationships between social mobility/immobility, Chinese State and institutional changes

17However, in his chapter, Xiong Yihan operates on a clear distinction between two different class reproduction mechanisms: the ceiling effect in Chinese public schools and the culture of resistance by the children of migrant workers who internalized a status of subalternity and social invisibility. This is particularly true for left-behind children (see Su Liang’s chapter). Transversal analyses of Chinese and French cases show how the process of social reproduction results in social immobility, regardless of social and professional mobility in a context of inflation of educational achievement. The technical branches of vocational education are analyzed in both contexts as socially relegated branches which will produce social subalternity. The social competences of these young migrants and children of immigrants are not guaranteed in school, not legitimized as such, and made invisible. The various approaches show that the hukou system in China has an active role in the creation of educational inequalities, which are remarkably strong in a rural environment, knowing that local governments provide financial support for compulsory education.

18Social reproduction, educational inequalities, and family mobilization strategies delineate here the borders of a shared conceptual space between French and Chinese sociologists.

19The analyses of Chinese cases by French sociologists contain the idea that young migrants or descendants of immigrants in situations of subalternity incorporate the status of a dominated or racialized individual. The strong mobilization of some parents for the social achievement of their children is often associated with a project of ascending social mobility; the parents overinvest in their children’s schooling, a clear trend in Chinese society. But authors describe several forms of family mobilization, which remind us of the work of Zahia Zéroulou (1985), who underlined the different results on the education of descendants of immigrants by showing the role of family dynamics in educational and professional achievement. This author had already explored the notion of family support among siblings, an approach adopted in studies on reciprocal help between brothers and sisters which constitutes a common situation in large families (Moguérou and Santelli 2012; Santelli 2016). In the European and Chinese contexts, the migratory situation also makes the role of older siblings emerge very clearly in families where parents are exhausted because of their working conditions.

20In his chapter Abdelhafid Hammouche analyzes how the sociability networks in French popular neighborhoods are strictly related to family ties; he also shows the network of relatives and the typologies of family solidarity which were arranged during Chen’s childhood in the absence of her parents. In the sociology of migration and of the family, we can see how common knowledge is produced in the analysis of intergenerational relations when it comes to conflicts between parents and children who are bound by multiple cultural belongings, eventually including ethnicity in the French example. In the Chinese analyses, the notion of colonial heritage is used to understand the French example; similarly, French sociologists understand just as well as their Chinese colleagues the complexity and singularity of family reconfigurations in which children are left in the countryside when the parents migrate to big cities. Both on the French and the Chinese sides the different research works analyze the issue of family strategies in building the links which recompose in the dichotomy between the belonging to the village of origin and the anchoring in the city of immigration (cf. Abdelhafid Hammouche). However, the concept of family migration is used by Chinese sociologists to talk about the ever-increasing phenomenon of children who join their parents in big cities. In French sociology of migrations, the notion of colonial heritage through the patriarchal model is widely adopted to discuss the process of empowerment of second-generation Franco-Maghreb or Franco-African youth. We also know that the Maghreb patriarchal model has been remarkably mitigated since the 1980s, although the religious affiliation of the young generations appears today like the expression of a widespread feeling of belonging to certain bloodlines.

21A certain patriarchal model appears to still be very active in Chinese mosaic familialism (cf. Ji Yingchun’s chapter). During the Mao era, Chinese families sought economic stability, security, and social protection above all. Parents of young migrants grew up in this context, internalizing ideological and materialistic norms. The 1978 reforms deeply revolutionized family structures in Chinese society. Emancipation from ideological and economic constraints progressed, and the strong economic growth led to improved living conditions for Chinese families. The changes brought about by a growing GDP, mass education, and the decline of patriarchy destabilized traditional societal structures in China, particularly in rural areas. During the socialist period, individuals who were excluded from the patriarchal family were more or less forgotten in a dominant collectivism, instead of being integrated in a strong welfare State like in Western capitalist societies. At the time, the impossibility of having access to individual rights was the indicator of a “partial individuation process” (Yan 2010). This process came with the reinstitutionalization of gender inequalities and of family as an institution, as well as the separation of career and family life in a context of commodification and privatization on the work markets. In her chapter Ji Yingchun conceptualized the very appropriate notion of mosaic familialism, which contains elements of Confucian patriarchal tradition, of socialist heritage, and of a “compressed modernity” (Chang 2010), and which is characterized by situations of great social and economic uncertainty for individuals and by new dynamics in family relations. This analysis interplays with the analysis on the dissonance between the parents’ strong social aspirations and the objectives of their children, which depend on the combination of institutional school context, family situation, and individual circumstances (see Ingrid Tucci’s chapter). In the same perspective as Ji Yingchun, in her chapter Beatrice Zani described this process by using the idea of oscillation between urban subjectivation and familiar subjection, which results in the reorientation of mobilities in the entanglement of matrimonial regimes and sexual practices. The maternal grandparents also increasingly help with the daughter’s family, which shares the burden of the paternal grandparents as well. This bilateral family network thus forms a private welfare system to support the family of migrants, as well as China’s status as the factory of the world and economic engine (Ji et al. 2020). Intergenerational and gender relations are redefined to keep the pace with the constraints of flexibility which characterize the Chinese work market.

22Since the 1980s, the younger generations have started expressing a desire for freedom from familial constraints and for social autonomy and have focused on developing their own individual identities. Modernization in China saw the opening of a generational gap between the majority of young migrants and their parents in terms of worldview, their relationship with themselves and others, and other social norms produced by distinct moments in Chinese social, economic, and political history. For Aihwa Ong, the Chinese family is managed through a family governmentality (Ong 1999) which depends on productive bodies selling themselves on the labor market and bringing economic resources back to their family. The relationship between individuals and their family during the Mao era (1949–1976) was loosened, to the benefit of their relationship with the State. The State freed individuals from their family and clan ties and from local communities, for their integration into new social structures.

Governance, Public Action and Discrimination

23As far as the analysis of public policies concerning migrants and children of immigrants are concerned, Chinese sociologists adopt the same approach as French sociologists in using the colonial past to apprehend French migratory policies and the management of different immigrant populations. In colonial history at the borders of nation-states in Europe and in Asia, the relationship between colonizers and colonized is then questioned.

24In both cases the biopolitical power is based on counting and selection techniques, assuming the production of moral economies founded on suspicion, contempt, and compassion. Selection policies determinate the access (or lack thereof) of the most poor and vulnerable migrants to social competition, as well as their capacity to ensure and maintain their participation in it. The functioning of these panoptic devices stands on institutional categories and classifications of internal migrants in China and of refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, and others in Europe. Biopolitical devices are then implemented to identify, define, and control the intentions and actions of migrants who are supposed to adhere to narrative identities which conform with institutional norms. The biopolitical devices of the State control and monitor the young migrants and the children of immigrants; but flexibility of social organizations produces a “cross-regional” cooperation between different institutional actors who are confronted with the paths of the “cross-border” mobility of migrant children (cf. Liu Yuzhao’s chapter). But in their chapters Liu Yuzhao and Yan Jun have clearly demonstrated, under the background of government failure and market failure in China, if social organizations are subject to the control of institutional structure and cultural psychology, they have gained space in public action and the third sector beyond state power and market forces has become a strong force in improving public welfare.

25In the contributions of Chinese and French researchers the question of social categorization, the stigmatization of young descendants of immigrants and children of immigrants, the struggle for recognition was envisaged through a kind of theoretical quasi-symmetry. In China young migrants without hukou cannot participate in the local college entrance examination where they are living, and they have to return to their hometown in high school to participate in the college entrance examination. Although young descendants of immigrants have access to public schools, they often face marginalization and discrimination in the school space. Educational policies towards migrants in both contexts are apprehended in their complexity. In China, local governments develop differentiated action tools based on urban-rural dual policies, which contribute to the exclusion of the children of migrants from the school system and the invisibility of the Chinese underclass. In France, research showed that anti-discrimination policies in schools did not compensate for the school dropout process of young descendants of immigrants.

26It should be noted here that both Chinese and French sociologists talk about the institutional discrimination and educational inequalities that migrants face. In his chapter, Liu Shiding introduces the concept of social plates linked to the hukou system. In her chapter, Su Liang recalls that educational inequalities in China derive from the hukou system; she also uses the concept of violence and institutional discrimination towards young descendants of immigrants in Givors. In the process of institutional discrimination Liu Yuzhao asks a very important question about migration policies: where are the boundaries of national and international governance vis-à-vis different types of immigrants? And what about colonial legacy? The same author shows how educational policies implemented by local governments for the children of migrants who possess little social and economic capital rely on inter- and intra-regional cooperation to control the transregional mobilities of migrants coming from inland China. From the Chinese standpoint, the concept of cooperation is generally evoked to analyze the different forms of action of political actors and labor markets (cf. Liu Shiding’s chapter). From the French perspective, in her chapter Marie Bellot combines the concepts of cooperation and plural competitions between public institutions and some types of social organizations which have been diversified these past few years when dealing with the schooling of the children of migrants. In China indeed, the relations between local governments and social organizations are symbiotic and at the same time present many areas of uncertainty. Similarly, Yan Jun introduces the issue of the conflict between financial distress and legitimacy pressure through the concept of flexible confrontation on the “illegality” of governance. Xiong Yihan also introduces the concept of institutional discrimination and combines it with academic vulnerability and social reproduction. Ingrid Tucci in this publication distinguishes between systemic or institutional discrimination and isolated discrimination which defines situations of physical, verbal, and symbolic violence. If the accent in Chinese analyses is rather placed on systemic and institutional processes, in French sociological analyses these processes are arranged with the social integration of young migrants and children of immigrants.

27French and Chinese sociologists then ask the question of cooperation, conflicts, and disputes between the central State and local governments in China. The accent is placed on the Chinese approaches to the role of local social organizations, which have increasingly been established in the past few years. These organizations focus on enlightenment rather than respect and are described as “merchandized,” regularly facing the conflict between financial distress and legitimacy pressure (see Yan Jun’s chapter). French analyses are heavily geared toward the various public action regimes by actors related to different institutions who are forced to cooperate in producing migrant support policies. However, just as in the analyses of the educational system, the concept of institutional discrimination is largely agreed upon and takes an important status compared with the pervasiveness of the French republican model and its “citizens’ community” in French policies. This leads to a form of blindness towards ethnicity, which Chinese analyses also perceive as such.

28On French side, the relations between young descendants of immigrants/young migrants and institutional actors were also analyzed in order to understand the integration and social and professional exclusion process starting from the notion of service relationship. The competence registers of institutional actors and the repertories of social, economic, and moral resources are evoked in Aude-Claire Fourot’s analysis, while the service relationship is less developed in Chinese analyses. In French and Chinese cases we can identify different registers of competences in which integration and employment actors use in their service relationship with young descendants of immigrants: the contractual register, the technical register and the civil register. Starting from the interplay between these different registers, three types of service relationship could be defined between the actors of professional integration/employment in France and social organizations in China, and children of immigrants and young migrants : relationships based on solidarity (cf. Yan Jun’s and Liu Yuzhao’s chapters) , relationships based on some sort of resignation, and relationships based on a kind of closure.These relationships showed competence registers which were differentiated in their combination, some form of engagement and disengagement in the service relationship through a certain kind of social and professional recognition and non-recognition and the process of socialization of youth (Roulleau-Berger 1998). In France and in China local actors are confronted with migration and the provision of integration services who hold second-class citizenship status on their respective society (cf. Aude-Claire Fourot’s Chapter).

29Lastly, if Chinese analyses explore the construction of experiences and individual identities in the framework of migration policies in China and in France, French analyses focus more on the double injunction to be oneself and to submit to the State, which can be described as a “double subjectivation and subjection process” (Fassin 2005).

Uncertainty, Social Disqualification, and Work

30Piore and Sabel’s (1984) theories of the segmentation of labor markets or segmented assimilation theories (Zhou 1997; Silberman and Fournier 2006) are still used and revised by French and Chinese sociologists on Chinese and French fields. Flexibility and job insecurity are shared concepts, used to describe the de-skilling and disqualification process on work markets. Chinese sociologists appropriately describe Adji as “trapped in low-skilled, catering, low-pay and precarious jobs” (see Li Zhen’s chapter). In China the labor markets are full of greater flexibility and uncertainty; a globalized neoliberal model has fostered employment systems which strengthen social inequalities and commonly exclude the less qualified, forcing them into disqualified and disqualifying jobs (see Sun Zhongwei’s chapter).

31In this book Chinese and French sociologists have demonstrated that new generations of migrants and children of immigrants in the working classes are most likely to have to cope with uncertainty and disqualification; ethnic and class discriminations are distancing young people of foreign descent from labor markets. Precarious migrant populations are subjected to dominations, symbolic and identity-threatening violence, and discrimination, even racism, in their respective labor markets. Symbolic violence is constructed in professional relationships by means of phenomena of horizontal and vertical social disqualification, alienation of identities, contempt and humiliation in dirty jobs, low income levels, no upward professional mobility, and low social protection in China; it is worth noting that Chinese and European sociologists converge in their analyses of disqualified or subaltern work (cf. Li Zhen’s and Laurence Roulleau-Berger’s chapters). In her chapter Chen Chen has demonstrated how discrimination is a constraint on mobility in geographic, social, educational, and occupational domains. In his chapter Liu Shiding demonstrated how provincial government policy treats employment opportunities for migrant workers differently than those for local workers, how such discriminatory policies have met with resistance in the course of the implementation.

32In China and in Europe, sociologists have clearly shown that young migrants and descendants of immigrants are faced with social and moral risks: the less qualified may not find a “position,” and those who are better qualified often have to make do with youth-labeled employment areas in which they cannot really start their professional socialization. Young migrants are clearly in danger of never gaining access to a position in their own society. Competition has become more severe; diplomas have lost their value while social desires and ambitions have continued to soar—over the last 40 years for young Europeans and the last 10 years for young Chinese migrants. Such systemic disqualification has been attenuated in the middle and upper classes, but it has greatly impacted the lower classes, especially young unqualified migrants in China and young people of foreign descent in France. French sociologists analyze how it moulds employment access trajectories, quantitatively as well as qualitatively (Nicole-Drancourt and Roulleau-Berger 2006). Chinese sociologists are more concerned with the structural processes which are producing these new social phenomena as blocking upward socioeconomic mobility.

33Young Chinese migrants are increasingly confronted with intensified competition for academic titles, which accentuates structural discrepancies between their aspirations and the possibilities of accessing labor markets. The social differentiations inherent in the process of social stratification will be increasingly marked with the phenomenon of academic inflation. The global deformation of relationships between the academic and labor markets results in a widening discrepancy between the nominal value of diplomas and their value as measured in the real transactions of the labor market. However, the generation of young workers entering the Chinese labors markets clearly differs from the generations of their parents, who spent their entire professional lives in the same places of work, with stability of employment. Before the reforms, work was experienced as an obligation and a duty to society. Today, however, work is represented more as a means of earning a living as well as the main factor for independence and the construction of social identities.

34On the other hand, Chinese sociologists—cf. Wang Chunguang’s chapter (Wang 2017)—have done research about international migration. Forms of discrimination and racism towards young Chinese migrants in the West are expressed in different ways according to young migrants’ skills and educational qualifications. They also differ from the racism shown to migrants from African countries, Syria, Iraq, and the Maghreb. In addition, the least qualified migrants are often viewed by potential employers as unskilled, inexperienced, and not committed to their work. Racism at work towards young migrants from Africa or the Maghreb is fueled by an internal colonialism, manifested by wariness and suspicion by employers and social inclusion stakeholders—cf. Ahmed Boubeker’s and Grégory Giraudo-Baujeu’s chapters (Boubeker 2018). It is clear that overqualified and overeducated young Chinese are indirectly discriminated against when the link between professional qualifications and the opportunity for professional mobility is severed (Li Yong 2020). In this case, a university degree is no guarantee that one will secure positions that lead to vertical mobility in a company’s hierarchy.

35In China and Europe alike, sociologists have observed that young migrants and descendants of migrants refuse disqualification and loss of social status (Roulleau-Berger and Yan 2017). Since the end of the 1970s in France, young people have experienced employment as a place of disappointment and disillusionment which manifests the increasing divide between their aspirations and opportunities in the labor market. Consequently, the employment crisis has engendered a feeling of collective disillusionment with work among young people. The intensification of competition for academic diplomas has created increasing distortions between diplomas and jobs by transforming the relationship between social classes and the teaching system. The main victims of the devaluation of academic diplomas have been—and still are—the academically less well endowed. The phenomenon of mass youth unemployment and loss of social status has created a sort of collective disillusionment resulting in a structural discrepancy between aspirations and chances (Bourdieu 1978), between the social identity which the teaching system seems to promise and the social identity offered by the labor market. The gulf separating the aspirations produced by the teaching system and the chances which it actually provides has been constantly widening, thus provoking the revolt and hatred among poorly qualified young people of working-class origin.

36Young migrants of working-class origin and children of immigrants expressed a refusal of the “dirty work” inflicted upon their fathers: factory work, the production line and clocking in, specialized skilled work in the major industries, and the “donkey” work (packer, courier, salesperson, etc.), implying they thought of these jobs as having to be highly dependent on a small boss. The devaluing of the workers’ conditions, the intensified pressure of work conditions, the increased precariousness of status, and the rise of unemployment transformed the factory into a repellent for the fathers working there and their children, who would do everything in their power to avoid working there. In China the children of migrants only accept the “dirty work” with great difficulty since they have seen their parents exhausted and even killed by work. The least qualified—often condemned to becoming unskilled workers—thus refuse to engage in work which disqualifies them, and they situate themselves in a distanced relationship to factory work. This disenchantment takes objectively and subjectively different shapes according to social class, with the phenomenon progressively affecting young people who are better endowed academically (Bourdieu 1978).

37In both China and Europe, young migrants’ aspirations have become progressively blurred and restricted, yet more firmly entrenched, while employment increasingly provokes the fear of never achieving stability in the labor market and never accessing a qualified and qualifying job (Roulleau-Berger 2016). For these poorly qualified children of immigrants in Europe and of migrants in China—destitute, exploited, and revolted by their working conditions—work appears to be a cause of suffering and revolt. Today Chinese sociologists focus on the subjective experiences of second-generation migrants who bear the suffering and humiliation of the first generation. They are highly incensed and have developed competencies for resisting and combating situations of oppression and injustice. In France, the phenomenon of social disqualification first produced disillusionment before actively contributing to blurring the aspirations of young migrants and shaping situations of double constraints in the relationship to work.

38So grammars of contempt have been produced in Western democracies and how the young descendants of immigrants and new migrants express their feelings of injustice and their demands of recognition. In 1981 in France, in working-class suburbs like the Minguettes, near Lyon, “rodeos” took place and cars were burned in the middle of the streets. In the 1990s, in other French and British suburbs, riots took place and were widely covered by the media. These unprecedented events were analyzed by sociologists as being the result of the conjunction of different factors: a high unemployment rate, deteriorated environmental and accommodational conditions, a captive population, a feeling of inequality and helplessness, racial discrimination, the relationship to the police, school dropouts, and family difficulties (Kokoreff 2008). Riots have been defined as a moment in which new forms of collective action are built on the margins of the conventional political field, and in which feelings of injustice combine with demands for respect

39In different chapters how, in their own analysis and in their comments on French cases, Chinese sociologists have used the same concepts as French sociologists, like discrimination, humiliation, and stigmatization. Why? On the one hand, since 2000 there has been an increasing number of workplace conflicts in China. Protests organized by young migrant workers and structured social movements are on the rise. Young migrant workers who experience indecent working conditions frequently gather to protest, they demand respect and recognition, decent working conditions, and social justice, namely their wages, social security, and severance pay. The balinghou (1980s), jiulinghou (1990s) and linglinghou (2000’s) generations endure the same suffering and humiliation as their parents. They are also increasingly conscious of their social rights and their level of aspiration is rising (Cai, Liu, and Wang 2009). Young migrants are developing new working-class cultures of resistance based on ties and solidarities brought from their home communities.

Urban Margins and Making the City

40The idea of an urban fringe space is used in the present publication to deal with the issue of the urban segregation of young migrants and descendants of immigrants and their low accessibility to public spaces. Space, including segregated space, is also thought of as a common resource, bringing opportunities which can be seized or not by migrants in situations of subalternity following different modalities.

41In European cities, the processes of urban segregation have intertwined with processes of economic and social insecurity and impoverishment, ethnicization of labor markets, and racial discrimination. Starting from the 1970s, mass unemployment, the precarization of labor and employment relations, the relocation of work, and deindustrialization 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.

42As villages and cities in Chinese provinces empty out, young migrants aspire to leave their native homes for lives of adventure and freedom. Many of them arrive in Shanghai following the networks that link villages, cities, regions of origin … and move to megalopolises where they produce plural socializations in spaces of unequal social and economic legitimacy. An increasing number of young Chinese are also leaving China for other international cities. Oscillating between situations of rural affiliation—for some of them—and situations of urban integration, young Chinese migrants in Paris and Lyon, just like in Shanghai, experience urban socializations defined as paradoxical and contradictory, disturbed by the immensity of the megalopolis. These socializations produce orders of mobility which clash with orders of sedentariness (Tarrius 2000) when Shanghai residents in China make Chinese migrants feel like an unwanted presence. These young migrants may be caught up in tensions between assignment to places and forced or desired mobilities, and, depending on the times, work sequences, and situations, young Chinese migrants appear to be either captive, or else capable of movement. Liu Neng in his chapter is evoking the production of dual marginality which denotes the social fact that the migrant subject is facing an identity dilemma, one in which they are shocked by the fate of a double-stranger in the City. In French sociology we also have considered the conflicts of double identities and subjectivities for descendants of immigrants in the process of taking place in urban space.

43Migrants appropriate parts of the megalopolis through specific activities and then move to other spaces depending on economic constraints and opportunities. However, most of them have the impression of “floating, whirling” in the city. Finally, young Chinese migrants who move to megapolises often produce spatial journeys that are made of round trips between their homeland, other Chinese cities, Shanghai or Paris … before definitively settling in the city. Today’s Chinese metropolis appears to be crossed by internal borders that move according to the physical and social distance of vulnerable social groups. Areas of urban segregation are emerging, particularly for migrants without a local hukou. Most of the young Chinese migrants in Shanghai do not really feel recognized by the Shanghai population; some of them are returning home, which means a “reverse urbanization,” a Chinese concept invented by Liu Neng (cf. Chapter 2 in this Part).

44How is the city manufactured? How does urban citizenship invent itself in urban “fringes?” In this perspective, the city is thought of as being structured around a plurality of urban orders that are constantly being redefined and renegotiated by escaping too normative and universalist conceptions of the city to address the moral boundaries within the city and the movements from one urban space to another, from one place to another. A hierarchy of spaces and places described as “central” or “peripheral,” “marginal,” then appears, in which city dwellers invent the city from skills and knowledge born in spaces of weak legitimacy, where the cities work on themselves.

45Young migrants and children of immigrants are constantly confronted with double-bind situations between injunctions to take their place in the city and difficulties accessing spaces of strong urban legitimacy, where social and moral systems capturing “selves” and linked to emotional capitalism result in new forms of urban subordination, where the manufacturing of urban citizenship occurs through appropriation, invention, the “remote” reinterpretation of spaces, more or less spaces of strong political and economic legitimacy. The multiplication of situations of social and economic exclusion in European cities, especially in pauperized districts, generates spatial captivity and can also give rise to the production of invisible activities in urban interstices, to spatial combinations, circulations, and appropriations of places that react to one another, from one city to another.

46Several chapters show young working-class migrants in China and in France while they manage situations of subalternity through solidarity with peers, neighborhoods, religion, culture, and family. The role of interpersonal networks or guanxi is decisive in opening new horizons of action and opportunities to escape urban inhospitality and school segregation in Chinese megalopolises. This is in line with the conception of a negotiated urban order made from the unstable and precarious structure of a plurality of local orders in “moral areas” (Park 1926), spaces of unequal legitimacy and societal interstices in a city constantly being redefined (cf. Ahmed Boubeker’s chapter). In European cities intermediate spaces illustrate unique, plural, microbial, minor practices, revealing migrants who are both dominated but capable of invention (Roulleau-Berger 1991,1999), the “art of making do,” or tactics of the “weakest” against the “strongest” (de Certeau 1980)—cf. Michel Kokoreff’s chapter. This perspective is very close to that of Liu Neng when he considers subjectivity of the weak, the ability of the weak to mobilize resources, can be regarded as another feature in the full-scale cultural drama of migration in China. Although European and Chinese cities are today busy evicting and expelling, communities of experiences are also being formed from liminal socializations “at the city’s edges,” where migrants, refugees, the voiceless, etc., place themselves, rally together, and act to assert their humanity.

47In this book, Chinese sociologists also use the notion of survival strategies and space corners to analyze peer socialization of migrants in France. William Foote Whyte’s Street Corner Society, published in 1943 by the University of Chicago Press, remains a major classical reference to understand the sociability of young migrants in big cities, the creation of gangs and their influence on local life. But Chinese scholars do not talk about intermediate spaces, interstices, peripheries, etc. The concept of intermediate spaces shattered the normative center/periphery pair to consider new urban cosmopolitanisms to see mobile populations, diasporas, roaming, and nomadism that reveal how the orders of mobility and sedentariness are constantly superimposed in increasingly complex assemblages and transnational networks.

Conclusion

48In order to further develop the paradigm of Post-Western theory, in the present publication we created post-western knowledge by crossing sociological perspectives on the topic of migration, by carrying out field research in Europe and in China, and by comparing our ways of carrying out qualitative research. We have analyzed the way in which sociological knowledge is built by observing the different forms of experiences on Chinese and European research fields. If Post-Western Sociology relies on different knowledge processes—“knowledge niches,” intermediary epistemological processes, transnational epistemological spaces—in this book we have produced crossed analyses on the same materials collected from the fields where Chinese and French sociologists have worked, allowing the production of more common knowledge than located knowledge; we have opened a clear Post-Western Space where we have drawn discontinuous and continuous continuities between Chinese and French sociologies.