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Public Attitudes and the Chinese Migrants in Central‐Eastern Europe
Author(s) -
Liu Amy H.
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
international migration
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.681
H-Index - 64
eISSN - 1468-2435
pISSN - 0020-7985
DOI - 10.1111/imig.12638
Subject(s) - neighbourhood (mathematics) , aggregate data , competition (biology) , population , political science , survey data collection , sociology , demographic economics , social psychology , economic geography , geography , psychology , economics , demography , medicine , mathematical analysis , ecology , statistics , mathematics , pathology , biology
The Chinese are one of the largest migrant groups in Central‐Eastern Europe. While governments have welcomed these newcomers, we do not know whether locals share this sentiment. This is because we have not had the requisite data. In this article, I address this shortcoming. I draw on two oft‐cited explanations in the migration literature to examine public attitudes toward the Chinese. The first is about competition over scarce economic resources; the second is about conflicts between two distinct cultures. Using two different survey samples, I find strong evidence to corroborate the second hypothesis. Attitudes toward the Chinese are generally negative when the aggregate Chinese population is large. Public discourse (i.e., passive contact) reinforces cultural stereotypes. There is, however, a caveat: An increasing Chinese presence in a person's neighbourhood (i.e., active contact) can offset these negative effects. As the spatial gap between the two cultures closes, the social ones correspondingly narrow.