© Aeneas Zi Wang
Defining skills in the context of nation-building and talent competition: An analysis of Chinese skilled immigration policies and implications for comparative migration studies
Prof. Aeneas Zi Wang, Ph.D. (Nanjing University)
As countries in East Asia are increasingly entering the global talent competition, there is still a paucity of information on how the notion of skill is construed in these less-studied destinations. This talk examines the concept of skill that has been embedded in China’s immigration policies since the late 1970s. It illustrates how the understanding of skill has been socially constructed and evolved across time. Based on an analysis of primary policy documents, I propose several distinctive approaches to defining skill: inclusivity, focus on science and technology, and fine-tuning desirability. I show how the concept of skill and the ideal “desired labour migrant” in Chinese migration policymaking has no fixed attributes and is anchored in the Zeitgeist of the country’s development trajectory. Moreover, I discuss how China can serve as an illustrative example in future studies of comparative skilled labour migration in broader East Asian contexts.
Aeneas Zi Wang holds the Jiangsu Province Specially-Appointed Professorship and is concurrently an Associate Professor of Sociology at the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Nanjing University. He also serves as an Associate Editor for the journal Migration Studies (OUP) and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Advanced Studies, LMU Munich.
The lecture will take place in presence. Location: Japan Center of the LMU, Seminar Building at the English Garden, Oettingenstr. 67, 80538 Munich, Room 151.
This event is co-hosted by the Center of Advanced Studies.
The event as a pdf for download (PDF, 1,849 KB)!