Identity and Status Hierarchy in Transnational Space

My first research stream contributes to a transnational perspective on ethnic identity construction. My forthcoming article, "Neoliberal multiculturalism and ethnic entrepreneurial self" examnines how Chinese Muslims negotiate ethnic identity and status hierarchies through transnational economic engagement. I argue that China’s ambition to establish itself as a global power has led to the emergence of a new official discourse of neoliberal multiculturalism, which redefines minoritized ethnicity as a global market asset. I show that Chinese Muslims have mobilized this neoliberal multiculturalism state discourse as a cultural repertoire to reimagine symbolic hierarchies of class, ethnicity and nation, and to negotiate authoritarian state power.

Xu, M. (forthcoming). Neoliberal multiculturalism and ethnic entrepreneurial self: a transnational perspective on ethnicity in China. The Sociological Review.

My book chapter "Diasporic before the Move" theorizes how migration and transnational connections shape Chinese Muslims' identity formation. Contrary to the prevalent notion that diasporic consciousness arises from transnational mobility, this study demonstrates how Hui Muslims cultivate a diasporic identity within China through integration into a transnational Islamic network.

Xu, M. (2022) “Diasporic before the move: China’s Hui Muslims’ trade and ties with Iran and Muslimness.” In Routledge Handbook on Middle Eastern Diasporas, edited by Abdelhady, Dalia, and Ramy Aly, 262-273. Taylor & Francis.

Relational Work in the South-South Economy

Non-citizenship & Racialization

The second stream of my research explores how people negotiation transnational economic relations in a global market characterized by high levels of informality and uncertainty. My doctoral dissertation examines the relational work of Chinese Muslims who work as Chinese-Arabic / Chinese-Persian translators for Middle Eastern traders coming to China to import goods. The dissertation traces the labor practices of these translators as they transform from employees in small-sized trade markets to independent global entrepreneurs.

The dissertation engages with debates on market and morality to deepen the theorization of agency in economic life as the creative and reflexive capacity of individuals to fulfil and balance diverse economic, relational, moral concerns. Drawing on Zelizer’s concept of relational work, it investigates how Chinese Muslims navigate informal labor relations in the transnational trade economy. While existing studies show that informal workers assert agency by moralizing labor conditions and humanizing market interactions to sustain labor relations, I extend this scholarship by examining a less-theorized aspect of agency - how workers negotiate the morality of everyday resistance to perceived exploitation and inequality. This analysis highlights the moral labor of structurally marginalized actors as they pursue economic mobility and contend with entrenched power asymmetries.

The dissertation project also explores the relational work deployed by Chinese Muslim translators to broker transnational trade. Drawing on cultural economic sociology and the theory of emotional labor, I demonstrate how brokers manage emotions to ease and resolve tensions in economic exchanges, and how they use cultural norms to enforce informal cross-border contracts. These findings reveal the relational mechanisms of brokerage in the South-South economy and their role in shaping the social structure, as well as the moral and emotional dynamics of the global market.

Lastly, I also engage with studies of race, migration and transnationalism to examine the symbolic construction of citizens/non-citizens globally. My article “Constructing the Refugee” challenges the pitfall of methodological nationalismin research on refugee representation in the Western context. This project provides a comparative analysis of news coverage on the Syrian refugee crisis in the UK and Canada, showing how racialized discourses about refugees travel across national contexts to contribute to divergent nation-building projects. It demonstrates how media reports in both countries adopt a ‘victim-pariah couplet’ framework to unsettle refugee rights. While they emphasize distinctive discursive elements to construct different imaginaries about “the nation”, the construction of refugees as threats and passive victims both erase refugee’s own voice and reproduce their racialized image in the Western media.

Xu, M. (2021). "Constructing the refugee: Comparison between newspaper coverage of the Syrian refugee crisis in Canada and the UK.” Current Sociology 69 (5): 660-681.