Education, Employment and Citizenship: An Anthropological Study on the Aspiration of Yunnanese Youth of the Thai-Burmese Borderland

The life of a youth is closely related to aspiration in the contemporary world. But what is being aspired to and how aspiration is pursued varies socially and culturally, in connection with specific historical contingencies. In this thesis, I study mobile aspirations—the interweavement of social mobilities and geographical mobilities—of Yunnanese youth in and from the Thai-Burmese borderland. Based on ethnographic data collected in a thirteen-month intensive fieldwork in 2018/19, this thesis asks how Yunnanese teenagers, i.e., those who were born in Thailand and undocumented migrants from Northern Burma, pursue their aspirations. The thesis attempts to answer this question by observing teenagers’ strategies and practices in plugging into opportunities and circumventing challenges against the backdrop of the influx of Chinese capital into Thailand. By looking into the teenagers’ stories, encounters and practices in the realms of education, leisure, employment and the pursuit of citizenship, I argue that the pursuit of aspiration is inextricably linked to migration: their aspirations are expressed spatially, by movement through space. This thesis departs from conventional approaches of studying youth aspiration in relation to time, particularly the focus on life course transitions and progression through, or stagnation at, life stages. Based on the ethnographic depictions in this thesis, I argue that the aspirations of Yunnanese youth are more fruitfully analyzed in relation to the theoretical intersection of migration and aspiration.
Apart from engaging with the anthropology of youth, the thesis dialogues with research on Yunnanese Chinese by diversifying their representations. In focusing on younger generations from a non-Kuomintang (KMT) community, the thesis finds that whether Chinese overseas are benefitting from the rise of Chinese capital varies, what it means to be Yunnanese Chinese shifts from generation to generation, and that the social, cultural and historical backgrounds of Yunnanese living in the Thai-Burmese borderland are highly diverse.