ABSTRACT
The author concerns a situation in which migration offers women shortcuts to a range of social and entrepreneurial roles and with the way those shortcuts are discursively supported. He mainly talks about migration from the Republic of China to Hungary since 1989, but will occasionally compare it to recent migration to Western Europe to argue that many of the patterns his describe are characteristic of a migration configuration rather than a particular destination. The fact that women have same occupations as men is consistent with qualitative experience that suggests that female and male migrants’ education levels and occupations before leaving China are very similar. Single female migrants, in particular, often have prehistory of government employment, entrepreneurship, and internal migration. In some cases, such as Zhu’s, women are semi-independent migrants whose mobility is linked to the needs and possibilities of the family accumulation project and who continue cooperating with their spouses but are decision makers in their own right.
