The half-million Chinese citizens travelling overseas to work each year are often misled about the job, charged high recruitment fees, not paid wages, or injured on the jobsite. But what recourse do they have? An analysis of Chinese court decisions shows that workers, including those who use informal brokers, are sometimes able to receive unpaid wages or work injury compensation upon their return. However, practical obstacles like obtaining physical evidence or affording a lawyer still prevent many abused workers from obtaining justice.

Drawing on ethnographic research in Prato, Italy, a city known for its concentration of Chinese migrants working in the fast-fashion sector, this essay charts the contours of what encounters between ‘Made in Italy’ and ‘Made in China’ have produced. Grappling with the observation that place-based labels exist paradoxically in an intensely globalised world, it focuses on place-based histories to argue for a dynamic consciousness of place.

Increasing numbers of students, workers, and tourists around the world are challenging how we define labour migration. In particular, Japan was an early adopter of policies that have blurred the lines between migration and other forms of human mobility. As the largest non-Japanese group living and working in Japan, the experiences of Chinese people represent an important part of how we understand international labour migration in East Asia today. This essay reflects on ethnographic research conducted with young Chinese in Tokyo.

Due to a massive and sudden influx of capital from China, much of which was invested in shadowy gambling operations, in just a few years Sihanoukville went from a dreamy, low-budget tourist destination on the Cambodian coast to Southeast Asia’s ‘new Macau’. When, in the summer of 2019, the Cambodian authorities banned online gambling, the local economy came tumbling down. As construction sites all over the city halted operation, workers, both Chinese and Cambodian, were hit particularly hard by the crisis. This essay looks into their plight.

Despite the ostensible complementarity of the structural shortage of industrial labour in Mongolia and the excess thereof in China, Chinese workers have constituted a source of anxiety in post-socialist Mongolia. Drawing on fieldwork at a Chinese-owned fluorspar mine in Mongolia between 2018 and 2019, this essay sheds light on the tension between bilingual and monolingual Chinese workers in the Sino-Mongolian industrial sphere. While the monolinguals rely on the bilinguals to facilitate industrial production, they also regard the latter in a suspicious light.