The Making of an Ethnoburb: Studying Sub-ethnicities of the China-born New Immigrants in Albany, New Zealand

Abstract

Over more than three decades New Zealand (NZ) has abolished its racially-biased immigration policy and changed to select immigrants based on personal merits, since 1997 new Chinese immigrants from China have become the second-largest immigrant group in NZ. Reflecting the rapid changes in Mainland Chinese society, different waves of Chinese immigrants have arrived in NZ during the past three decades, each carrying distinctive characteristics. Despite the magnitude of this immigrant population both globally and in NZ, the subethnicities of these immigrants have never been conceptualised theoretically. Based on the digitally- enhanced research techniques together with ethnographically-based study, the paper aims to remedy this research gap in Chinese diaspora studies. Two theoretical concepts are used in this research. The first is the concept of sub-ethnicity which refers to finer boundaries drawn within an ethnic group by nationality, language, region of origin, class, or other distinctions. The second is the concept of ethnoburb - a model of ethnic settlement where the suburban ethnic communities and clusters of associated residential areas and business districts in large metropolitan cities are highly concentrated. This research considers these two concepts are correlated to each other since certain ethnoburb has particular attraction to certain sub-ethnic group; and vice versa, certain subethnic group intends to gather in same ethnoburb unintentionally or unconsciously. Applying these concepts, the research considers Albany as an example of a distinctive Chinese ethnoburb for the China-born new immigrants, especially for the most recent arrivals. The paper makes theoretical contribution to understand the complementarity between these two concepts and their methodological implementation towards studying new Chinese migration.

Keywords: Albany; China; Ethnoburb; New Zealand; New chinese immigrants; Sub-ethnic divide; Subethnicity.