Post-Soviet Brides in the China Dream: Marriage, Migration, and Geopolitics Across Borders
March 12 @ 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Free
Join the UBC Centre for Migration Studies Borders research group for a talk on marriage migration, race, and geopolitics.
Post-Soviet Brides in the China Dream is the first interdisciplinary work on marriage migration from the former Soviet Union to Reform-era China, almost invariably involving a Slavic bride and a Chinese husband. To understand China better as a destination for marriage migration, the book delves into the politics and lived experiences of desire, marriage, and race, all within China’s pursuit of national rejuvenation. It brings together diverse sources, including immigration policies, migration patterns, TV portrayals, life stories, and digital ethnography, to present an embodied analysis of intimate geopolitics. It argues that this particularly gendered and racialized model of international marriage is revealing of China’s relations within the global world order, in which white femininity embodies the perceived success of Chinese masculinity and nationhood.
Prof. Elena Barabantseva’s research interests lie at the intersection of borders, identity, migration, intimacy, and citizenship in the context of a globalizing China. She is currently a member of the British Academy Global Convening Programme Chinese Global Orders (2023–2026) and participates in the UKRI Network Plus Global Shifting Polarities: China, Russia, and Eurasia in Transition. She is the author of De-Centering China: Overseas Chinese, Ethnic Minorities and Nationalism (Routledge, 2010) and Post-Soviet Brides in the China Dream: Migration, Marriage and Geopolitics (Cambridge University Press, 2026). Her filmmaking-as-research practice has resulted in two feature-length documentary films, British Born Chinese (2015) and A Letter to Chinatown (2025), as well as several short films, including Border People (2014) and Group Wedding (2018).
