Education, Migration, and Cultural Capital in the Chinese Diaspor ...

With the approach of 1997, marking the transfer of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, many middle-class Chinese are said to have become ‘reluctant exiles’ from the territory (Skeldon, 1994). For those families with the necessary resources, migration offered a way of protecting social status and material possessions and ensuring safety and political freedom. In 1992 around 38,000 people left Hong Kong for Canada; approximately 15,000 people went to Australia; and 15,000–16,000 people went to the United States (Skeldon, 1994).¹⁰ According to Skeldon (1994), these people included ‘some of the best educated, well trained, and highly skilled of Hong Kong’s population’ and many had ‘considerable wealth’ (pp. 31–32). Emigrant profiles showed a concentration of people with degree-level education, that is, 15–19%, compared to the population of Hong Kong as a whole, which is 4% (Skeldon, 1994).

The significant impact of this migration upon various host societies (see Ley, 1995; Olds, 1998) spawned a dominant image of a powerful and hypermobile group of elite and privileged Chinese migrants. They were, it was frequently claimed, highly strategic in their ostensibly relentless pursuit of capital around the world, which would often involve the separation and spatial dispersal of the family unit for substantial periods of time (Ong, 1999; Waters, 2002). I want to focus on their pursuit of cultural capital and the way in which this has intersected with transnational forms of migration.

The accumulation of cultural capital involves the acquisition of a variety of embodied cultural traits, and used in relation to Chinese transnational migrants, the relationship between this and cosmopolitanism are evident. Cosmopolitanism describes the active consumption and appropriation of ‘different’ cultures through regular, long-distance mobility (Vertovec & Cohen, 2002) and results in the development of cultural competences (Hannerz, 1996). The social spaces inhabited by the cosmopolitan are often ‘bounded and elitist’ and ‘marked by a specialized and—paradoxically—rather homogenous transnational culture, a limited interest in engaging “the Other”, and a rather restricted corridor of physical movement between defined spaces in global cities’ (Vertovec & Cohen, 2002, p. 7; cf., Hiebert, 2002).