Introduction

Since 1978 a large number of Chinese women have emigrated from the People's Republic of China (PRC) through transnational marriages, and this phenomenon has attracted enormous media attention in China. Those Chinese women who tie the knot with foreigners have often been portrayed as seekers of financial gain, while other motivations for expatriation have been overlooked. Moreover, stories of misery in host countries have often been underlined, leaving the real situation of most female emigrants unnoticed. By over-estimating women's motives of financial gain through transnational marriage, existing studies seem to have failed to look at women's own strategies and understandings of their marriages.

This chapter puts this conventional wisdom into contestation by studying women's strategies in the process of negotiating new circumstances. It is informed by the new wave of theoretical perspective on transnationalism, which is defined as ‘the processes by which immigrants form and sustain multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement. We call these processes transnationalism to emphasize that many immigrants today build social fields that cross geographic, cultural, and political borders’ (Basch, Schiller & Blanc-Szanton 1994: 6; Bryceson & Vuorela, 2002). As a new field of study concerned with ‘a growing number of persons who live dual lives: speaking two languages, having homes in two countries, and making a living through continuous regular contact across national borders’ (Portes, Guarnizo & Landolt 1999: 217), the transnationalism approach has gained wide scholarly attention over the last decade. Some recent studies have critically applied this approach in research on the Chinese press (the special issue on ‘Transnationalism and the Chinese press’, China Review, vol. 4, no. 1, 2004), Chinese religion, and overseas Chinese nationalism (the special issue on ‘Modern Chinese religious transnationalism’, European Journal of East Asian Studies, vol. 2, no. 2, 2003; Liu 2006). Nevertheless, while there are some studies on changing family patterns within the framework of Chinese cosmopolitanism (e.g., Chan 1997; Constable 2003), little attention has been paid to the patterns of transnational marriage forged through the Internet and their role in the making of ‘Transnational Chinese’ communities (Liu 2002).