This book is an ethnographic account of education and migration from the perspective of three groups of South Koreans in contemporary China: migrant parents, children/students, and educational agents. The book reveals how these temporary migrants make choices, plan their trajectories and engage with the authorities, both in China and South Korea. Migrant subjectivities among these groups are driven by and respond to the education-migration regimes of both the sending and receiving countries. As ‘people in between’, they occupy flexible and multiple positionalities that are transnationally distributed. However, paradoxically, they experience a juxtaposition of privilege, integration and separation, which is indicative of the Chinese style of internationalisation. The book adds weight to the argument that China is a temporary destination for foreigners and not one for long-term settlement.

Transpatial Modernity offers the first in-depth account of the triangular relationship among Chinese, Japanese, and Russian literature and culture in the modern era. Drawing on primary sources in all three languages—among others—Xiaolu Ma reveals how Chinese writers translated and appropriated Russian cultural tropes through the intermediary of Japanese writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To trace the global journey of these literatures and ideas, Ma maps four case studies involving leading cultural figures including Leo Tolstoy, Futabatei Shimei, and Lu Xun. Together, they demonstrate the central role of relay transculturation—cultural exchange among at least three cultures, one of which serves primarily as an intermediary—as the key to understanding East Asian modernity. Not limited to a dyadic relationship between source and target culture, Transpatial Modernity explores the implications of cultural brokerage within complex transculturation process, thus establishing the value of a new transpatial framework for understanding literary and cultural exchange in local, regional, and global contexts.