ABSTRACT This paper examines Chinese overseas labor migration under the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through the lens of legal (in)visibility, i.e., the uneven ways workers, employment relations, and workplace harms become legible or remain opaque within legal systems. While existing research has documented the growth of Chinese labor mobility alongside the rollout of BRI, less is known about how recruitment, overseas management, and dispute resolution are governed across borders, and what kinds of labor protections are practically enforceable. Drawing on a dataset of labor lawsuits adjudicated in Chinese courts involving Chinese workers and Chinese companies operating in five African countries, the paper shows that overseas labor migration is featured by selective and uneven legal visibility. The cases surface disputes over remuneration, contractual obligations, recruitment and dispatch fees, and work‐related injuries. They also reveal how layered subcontracting, dispatch arrangements, and informal brokerage complicate employer identification and responsibility. The analysis identifies three forms of legal (in)visibility: (1) employment relationships are partially obscured by fragmented contracting chains; (2) workers are visible as deployable labor yet only contingently recognized as rights‐bearing subjects when seeking remedies; and (3) judicial procedures individualize disputes in ways that reduce structural conditions to limited, document‐driven claims. The paper contributes to broader debates on transnational labor governance and the role of home state institutions in governing overseas labor migration.
Ding Fei (Fri,) studied this question.
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