“Big Fish in a Small Pond”: Chinese Migrant Shopkeepers in South Africa

Edwin Lin

International Migration Review, 2014, vol. 48, issue 1, 181-215

Abstract: type="main" xml:id="imre12074-abs-0001">

The steady growth of Chinese migrants to South Africa in the past decade provides an opportunity to use Sen's (2001, Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press) capabilities approach in the field of immigration. This theoretical framing reveals that the Chinese employ, what I call, a small pond migration strategy – utilizing mobility to maximize their social, economic, and human capital. I argue that the Chinese move to South Africa because of a desire to venture out of China and pursue freedoms associated with being one's own boss. Once in South Africa, they choose to stay because of comfortable weather and a slower pace of life, despite losing freedoms associated with high crime in Johannesburg. The findings suggest alternative ways of understanding factors of migration as well as a model that explains migration from more developed countries to less developed ones.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1111/imre.2014.48.issue-1 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:intmig:v:48:y:2014:i:1:p:181-215

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=0197-9183

Access Statistics for this article

International Migration Review is currently edited by Ellen Percy Kraly

More articles in International Migration Review from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().