‘Foreign wives’, Eurasian children, and citizenship dilemmas in China

This chapter examines China’s transition to an immigration state by discussing the cases of documented and recognized Chinese–foreign marriages involving women from the post-Soviet Russia and Ukraine. It focuses on how China’s current immigration regime intersects with negotiations of gender, family norms, and citizenship practices. In the early 2000s, the ‘Russian wife’ referred indiscriminately to Slavic women from the former Soviet states; however, since the breakout of the war in Ukraine in 2014, clearer distinctions between Russian and Ukrainian women have appeared in Chinese media coverage. Post-Mao China’s concerns over the Chinese population as a whole are a well-studied area of scholarly enquiry. The party-state’s articulation of the ‘population question’ has been one of the central national security concerns of the reform era, framed across the twin problem of population: quantity and quality. Gender and sexuality have historically been central to China’s colonial encounters and conquests.