Opting out of the city: lifestyle migrations, alternative education, and the pursuit of happiness among Chinese middle‐class families

Abstract

This article responds to calls among anthropologists to attend to the aspirational qualities of life pursuits by respecting idealized life visions and acknowledging the suggestiveness of living otherwise. It follows a cohort of formerly urban middle‐class Chinese families that have chosen to ‘opt out’ of their successful city lives to pursue alternative lifestyles and education for their children in China's rural southwest. Drawing on literatures about voluntary lifestyle migrations and alternative parenting and education, I show how these families construct meaningful social worlds through class histories, family ideals, and presentist temporalities that deviate from Western class formation and neoliberal constructions of self defined by individualistic identity pursuits. Through analysing a configuration of self and sociality that emphasizes the family and routes parental self‐aspirations through children, the article deepens our understanding of child‐centredness as a key feature of Chinese lifestyle migrations. It shows how quests for ‘the good life’ take shape through diverse sociohistorical and familial contexts with their own temporal orientations and life politics.

Drifting Home: The Quests of Chinese Tourist-Migrants in Tibet

“…Recent studies of marginal populations emphasize the struggles between individualization and the structural constraints imposed by China’s household registration ( hukou ) system. These struggles emerge in relation to new residences and shifts in home-away relationships, as seen among new residents of Lijiang and Dali in China’s bucolic southwest (Friedman, 2023; Salazar & Zhang, 2013; Y. Zhu, 2018) and among Han Chinese tourist-migrants to Tibet ( Zangpiaos ) who constitute the focus of this article.…”