Feeling stuck: (im)mobility and transnational strategies of Chinese migrants in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

This paper examines why many Chinese trader‑migrants in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, experience a sense of “stuckness” in relation to return migration, despite long‑term settlement, economic embeddedness, and frequent cross‑border mobility. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2024 and 2026, we argue that intensified transnational connectivity does not necessarily expand migrants’ freedom of movement. Instead, the intersection of shifting China–Brazil trade regimes, the maturation of Brazil’s informal markets, local urban restructuring, and constraints in China’s labour markets and diaspora policies narrows the feasibility of return. Through the concept of relational (im)mobility, we demonstarte how “stuckness” emerges through transnational comparison, uneven urban development, and unequal capacities to act. Focusing on Belo Horizonte, we show how local dynamics, including the restructuring of the popular economy, intensified competition from “big shops,” and limited access to urban life beyond work, play a decisive role in producing this form of relational (im)mobility. Migrants’ transnational lives—circulating between multiple locations in China and Brazil—continually juxtapose China’s rapid urban transformation with Brazil’s slower urban change, reinforcing aspirations to return. It further shows how migrants actively navigate these constraints through transnational strategies and diaspora infrastructure. By foregrounding an ordinary city absent from global city rankings and overlooked in existing scholarship, this study demonstrates how globalisation is produced and contested through everyday urban practices, while highlighting how local urban conditions mediate Global China processes and shape contemporary South–South (im)mobility.