Hui Chen

In recent years, while scholarly work on new immigrant destinations (NIDs) within the United States and Europe has increased, little attention has been given the role and significance of the migration industry in promoting the emergence of NIDs. This is a particularly significant lacuna as some Asian nations are undergoing dramatic migration transition despite the lack of immigration regulatory infrastructure. In this context, focusing on the role of commercial intermediaries play in the formation of NIDs is an important perspective in understanding migration transition in Asia. Drawing on qualitative interviews with Filipino domestic workers and intermediaries, this paper analyzes how intermediaries promote Mainland China as a new destination for the Filipino domestic workers by creating a new promising market, border-crossing tactics, as well as managing migrant workers using training and control strategies at ground level.

In public health research, the health issues of irregular and vulnerable migrant populations remain under-explored. In particular, while mainland China has become a new and popular job-seeking destination for Filipino domestic workers (FDWs), the health status of FDWs and their access to healthcare have been invisible to public and academic concerns. This paper fills this lacuna by conducting a qualitative study that investigates FDWs’ self-reported health status and their healthcare-seeking behaviors. The results show that: (1) respondents do not report significant abusive and exploitative experience because the scarcity of FDWs in China in relation to the high demand enables them a certain degree of agency in labour market; (2) while FDWs do report some health problems, they tend to resort to self-medication and food-healing; (3) the main factors influencing health-seeking behavior include the fear of deportation, language gaps, the lack of knowledge of the local healthcare system and dependence on co-ethnic networks which serves as a double-edged sword; (4) these factors also lead to hesitation in health-seeking choice between public and private hospitals, which sometimes result in delayed treatment. This paper contributes to revealing the health conditions of FDWs in mainland China and calls for more inclusive health policy to enroll foreign domestic workers into the local health system in China.

Inverse globalization and the spread of epidemics have affected the world economy. Promoting the convergence and resilience of the tourism industry is an important means of boosting regional economic recovery and high-quality development. Taking the nine cities in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) as cases, this study measures the state of development in each city from 2010 to 2019, and it constructs a coupled coordinated model to evaluate the integration of culture and tourism development. The entropy method and the coupling-coordination-degree model are evaluated through this empirical analysis. The results demonstrate that most cities in the GBA show an upward trend in the development and integration of the tourism industry. The development and integration of the tourism industry in Guangzhou and Shenzhen has always been in a leading position. The main factors that affect the level of tourism-industry convergence in the GBA cities include the level of economic development, the scale of government spending, the level of urbanization, and the level of technological innovation.