UC Berkeley

The steady growth of Chinese migrants to South Africa in the past decade provides an opportunity to use Amartya Sen's (2001) capabilities approach in the field of immigration. This theoretical framing along with qualitative data collected from in-depth interviews and participant observation in three South African cities, Johannesburg, Durban, and Bloemfontein, 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 mainland Chinese migrants move to South Africa because of a desire to adventure 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. As a contrast to these mainland Chinese migrants, Chinese migrants from the province of Fujian embrace a hyper-small pond migration strategy where they move year to year searching out the best places to make money. This is because rather than valuing long-term development and quality of life concerns, Fujianese migrants value short-term money-making above all. These findings suggest alternative ways of understanding factors of migration, a way to utilize Sen's capabilities framework in immigration studies, a model that explains migration from more developed countries to less developed ones, and a potentially predictive model of what may happen throughout the African continent as China invests more in Africa.