Date of Award
8-22-2025
Date Published
September 2025
Degree Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Sociology
Advisor(s)
Prema Kurien
Keywords
Africa;China;Ghana;Global South;International Migration;Political Economy
Subject Categories
Social and Behavioral Sciences | Sociology
Abstract
This dissertation examines how China's political-economic transformations since the 1980s, particularly the restructuring intensifying in the 2010s, have generated new patterns of emigration to Sub-Saharan Africa. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Ghana and China (2016-2022), the study reveals how the simultaneous expansion of state capital and contraction of private sector opportunities in China drives diverse actors—from state-owned enterprise employees to independent entrepreneurs—to seek economic possibilities abroad. The research challenges binary explanations of Chinese migration as either state-led expansion or desperation-driven exodus. Instead, it demonstrates how structural forces of expansion and exclusion operate concurrently across different scales and sectors, creating complex mobility trajectories that defy linear models. Chinese migrants navigate between diminishing opportunities in China's "shrinking birdcage" and the volatile yet promising markets of Ghana, constructing transnational livelihoods through informal networks and tactical adaptations. The findings illuminate how migrants experience simultaneous embeddedness in multiple economic systems, maintaining material advantages in Ghana while confronting status ambiguity and psychological displacement. Their recursive movements between China, Ghana, and other destinations reflect not temporary sojourns but emergent forms of South-South circulation shaped by shifting opportunity structures and geopolitical uncertainties. This ethnography contributes to migration studies by revealing how contemporary capitalism's uneven development produces new modalities of transnational life, where mobility itself becomes a strategy for navigating the contradictions between state power and market forces across the Global South and Global North, as well as the terrains in between.
Access
Open Access
Recommended Citation
Wang, Jinpu, "LIVING IN A MIRAGE OF THE “BIRDCAGE”: CHINESE EMIGRANTS IN GHANA" (2025). Dissertations - ALL. 2204.
https://surface.syr.edu/etd/2204
