Governing populations overseas: Ageing diasporas and youth politics in global China

Publication Type

Working Paper

Publication Date

5-2026

Abstract

Studies of diaspora politics have, in recent years, reoriented attention from first-generation migrants to younger cohorts abroad (Moss 2021). This burgeoning scholarship shows that homeland states actively cultivate diaspora youth through summer camps, root-seeking tours, scholarships, and leadership programs (Böcü and Baser 2024; Graf 2018; Liu 2022a; Mahieu 2019). These initiatives position diaspora youth as future bearers of cross-border ties, capable of expanding geopolitical reach and reproducing attachment across generations. Parallel work on transnational repression further documents how diaspora youth are not only courted but also monitored and disciplined, as authoritarian states seek to pre-empt and contain dissent among younger populations overseas (Orjuela, Wackenhut, and Hirt 2025; Wackenhut and Orjuela 2023).

Despite these advances, this literature is anchored in a predominantly macro-political frame. Analyses of diaspora youth politics revolve around questions of grand strategy, security, and geopolitics. Youth outreach is interpreted as an instrument of soft power, regime legitimation, and long-horizon influence (Arkilic and To 2024; Ding 2025). This top-down perspective captures the strategic ambitions of emigration states, yet it leaves in the shadows the organizational and demographic conditions that render youth engagement necessary in the first place. The micropolitics of diaspora bureaucracies, along with the everyday constraints faced by officials tasked with governing populations abroad, remain insufficiently theorized (Délano and Mylonas 2019).

This article addresses this lacuna by shedding light on the administrative pressures that underpin diaspora youth outreach. Empirically, this study draws on eighteen months of fieldwork in Qingtian, a prominent diaspora hometown (qiaoxiang) in China, and its diaspora communities across Europe. The Chinese case offers a particularly productive lens for understanding how population governance is projected beyond national territory. While a vast literature has examined China’s domestic demographic interventions, most notably the now-defunct one-child policy (Cai and Feng 2021; Greenhalgh 2008; Wang 2024), it has been bounded by the territorial state. Far less attention has been paid to how similar governing logics extend to overseas populations (Liu 2021). As China has pursued a more assertive global presence under Xi Jinping (Lee 2018), diaspora youth have become an emerging domain through which demographic anxieties about ageing, succession, and long-term reproduction are refracted outward. Hence, youth outreach exceeds the register of geopolitical engagement. It reflects localized attempts to shore up the durability of diaspora connections.

Discipline

Asian Studies | Migration Studies | Politics and Social Change

Research Areas

Sociology

First Page

1

Last Page

14

Embargo Period

5-10-2026

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