“You Find Out What’s Possible”: Economic Opportunities and Strategies of Slovenian Citizens Living in the People’s Republic of China

The article focuses on the Slovenian citizens in China in the 21st century. The authors consider their small numbers and national non-recognition as a distinctiveness in the fast-developing field of research on immigration in China. They discuss the immigration of Slovenian citizens through contrasting engagements with the Chinese economy and propose the analytical categories of “managers” and “entrepreneurs.” They link the former to the local emplacement based on the Slovenian companies’ production units in China and the drive for national groupness, and the latter to the search for niche opportunities in the huge Chinese market. The authors also address this temporality of the migration process and detail the interplay between macroeconomic factors and the individual decisions of its protagonists.
Keywords: immigration in China, emigrants, expats, groupness, entrepreneurship, labor migration