Asian class as method: Comparative insights into Asian migrants’ middle-class backgrounds

This article investigates the middle-class identities of Asian migrants, with a focus on Chinese and Indian international graduates in Australia. While many migrants arrive with middle-class backgrounds from their countries of origin, little is known about what constitutes ‘middle-classness’ in those contexts. By examining migrants’ classed narratives, this article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of class as both socially constructed and context dependent. By detailing the interview process and referencing to the contexts of China and India, this paper aims to advance discussions on interview strategies to draw out participants’ class backgrounds and serve as a conceptual discussion on the heterogeneity of the ‘Asian middle classes’. This article advances three key insights. First, it furthers our understanding of how class may or may not translate conceptually across contexts. This is supported by discussing the nuances around ‘cadre’ and the xiaokang concept in the Chinese context, and the importance of land ownership and paid staff in the Indian context. Second, this article demonstrates how class and inequalities cross borders to shape migrants’ lives and aspirations in host countries. Third, through centring ‘Asian class as method’, this article argues for Asia as a productive space to uncover new perspectives of class. This approach can decentre dominant understandings of class founded in ‘western’ contexts and generate original, critical perspectives on class and migration.