During this Wine & Discussion meeting, organised by Radboud University, Yunnan Ye talks about her research project.

Although South Asian laborers in the UAE are a targeted community frequently involved in the research on labor migration, the further exploration of topic on other Asian laborers in this state still requires further research, especially for some emerging Asian communities with an increasing presence in the UAE, like the Chinese community. This project by Yunnan Ye seeks to deepen understanding of the Chinese laborers’ experience in the UAE from the 1970s, since this bilateral transnational mobility in the contemporary era can traced back to this period. It aims to unravel a transnational migration network between China and the UAE that has emerged in the last decades. More specifically, the project adds to our knowledge about the everyday experience of Chinese laborers in the UAE. The exploration of the details in this process contributes to figuring out the factors contributing to the migration chain of Chinese laborers between the Chinese mainland and the UAE, and the elements inspiring their motivations of working in a country whose history of bilateral interactions with their home country lacks. The analysis in Ye’s paper is to enrich the narratives about Asian laborers’ working and living experiences in the UAE and to provide an image of one of its subgroups. The analysis is also beneficial to a discussion about the formation of a migration chain between two states with little transnational human mobility in history and the relatively transitory bilateral interactions, which aims at seeking out the factors except for the time factors in forming bilateral migration routes and channels of labor migration.