The blue economy is a globally emerging concept for ocean governance that seeks to tap the economic potential of the oceans in environmentally sustainable ways. Yet, understanding and implementation of particular visions of the blue economy in specific regions diverge according to national and other contexts. Drawing on a discourse analysis of Chinese language documents, this article assesses how the blue economy has been conceptualised in Chinese state policy and discourse. Part of a state ideology and practice of modernisation that is defined in terms of rejuvenation under a strong state, the blue economy in China is seen as an opportunity to promote modernisation from overlapping economic, geopolitical and ecological perspectives and actions. China’s distinctive model for the blue economy presents emerging challenges for global ocean governance.

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This paper explores the social support of Timorese workers under the Australian Seasonal Workers Programme (SWP). The SWP, which allows citizens from Pacific Island countries and Timor-Leste to work in Australian agriculture for six to nine months, has become the major source of remittances for seasonal workers from Timor-Leste. The paper describes how access to the internet and the availability of social media devices can help to maintain long-distance family relationships, support migrants' well-being and alleviate the effects of socio-spatial segregation to some extent. However, the need to earn remittances in a fixed period of time forces them to accept a trade-off in the quality of their social and personal lives in rural Australia. According to the New Economics of Labour Migration (NELM), isolation and separation from families are part of a rational household strategy to accumulate remittances. This paper argues that insufficient attention has been paid to the social costs borne by workers and left-behind households and that the sustainability of the SWP depends to a large extent on the ability of workers to find ways of meeting their needs for social support. The analysis is based on data from participant observation and semi-structured interviews with 50 Timorese seasonal workers in Australia and Timor-Leste.

This paper discusses the identity complex of Vietnamese marriage immigrants in Taiwan through aspects of everyday life such as food preference and cooking, vehicle ownership and access, leisure, and religious belief. These are in parallel with acculturation, cultural hegemony, spatial and social mobility, social network-building, social capital accumulation, and the strategy of resistance to the stigmatisation of prearranged remittances. This article also analyses identities as pragmatic strategies for Vietnamese wives to demonstrate their agency, and negotiate and bargain their social places within the Chinese-dominated cultural sphere through conforming to mainstream ideologies and acquiring social capital in the local community. The relationship between happiness and identities construction is examined, too. The methodology is based upon in-depth interviews and participant observations undertaken during ethnographic fieldwork in Taiwan.