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Based on in-depth interviews with 40 Chinese professional migrants in Singapore, this paper examines the shifting landscape of transnational citizenship within Asia’s mono-national regimes. As post-pandemic policy tightening and shifting state logics replace once-privileged access to residency, a pervasive climate of uncertainty has been fostered. We introduce the concept of provisionality—the strategic adoption of a temporary status to preserve future pathways to permanence – to theorise migrants’ in-between legal and affective positioning. We show how provisionality operates as a vital transnational strategy, with migrants and their families tactically distributing citizenship roles (e.g. securing SPR while retaining Chinese nationality) to optimise mobility, welfare, and long-term security. However, pandemic disruptions and restrictive policy shifts have laid bare the propound fragility of the ‘dual embeddedness’, trapping migrants in a state of entrenched liminality and forcing a painful recalibration of home, belonging, and citizenship itself.
Wang et al. (Fri,) studied this question.