ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore Chinese international students’ construction and practices of ‘symbolic boundaries’ with social media platforms in the context of intra-diasporic relationships. I first unpack how WeChat was utilised by the young Chinese migrants to create and participate in online groups, which helped them tap into available diasporic resources and make connections with other Chinese migrants. In this process, however, intra-ethnic boundaries were enacted to construct sub-group categories and to distinguish themselves from these categories of Chinese migrants. I highlight the mixed ways in which Chinese international students related themselves to the local Chinese diaspora and their peers. After unpacking the literature on the complexity of being Chinese, I detail how the process of symbolic boundary-making is realised through practices of differentiation in relation to social media platforms. In this sense, social media became both a reference point and an everyday space through which Chinese international students made sense of and navigated their relationships with their co-ethnic peers in Australia.
