Mapping translocal lives Chinese migration, entrepreneurship, and the China-Bourdeaux wine economy

This dissertation examines the migration–development nexus through the case of Chinese migrants engaged in the Bordeaux wine industry. It analyses how migration and development are co-constructed across macro-level policy contexts, meso-level industry and place conditions, and micro-level migrant practices. By focusing on a specific migrant group, the study contributes to scholarship on the diversification of Chinese migration in the European Union and explores how migrants navigate mobility, entrepreneurship, and middle-class lives within translocal contexts.
It develops a translocal, multi-scalar analytical framework that integrates migration infrastructure theory, mixed embeddedness, and middle-class migration studies. Empirically, it draws on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in China and France between 2020 and 2023, combining document analysis, 96 semi-structured interviews, and participant observation in trade events, châteaux, and community spaces.
It advances several theoretical and practical contributions. First, it emphasises the need to analyse not just policy or agency in isolation, but the layered interactions between macro state strategies, industrial and place conditions, and micro migrant practices. Second, it demonstrates how migration and arrival infrastructures not only facilitate migration capabilities but also shape aspirations. Third, it refines the mixed embeddedness approach by developing a translocal variant. It also highlights the mutually reinforcing nature of economic and social embeddedness, and how migrant entrepreneurs reposition themselves across changing contexts. Fourth, it conceptualises the settlement of Chinese middle-class migrants in Bordeaux as a process of middle-class identity reproduction shaped by both translocal structural constraints and migrants’ agency.