Mobility, Networks, and Governance: Multiple Perspectives on Global Asia
27 Aug 2026 - 28 Aug 2026 SINGAPORE
The International Conference on “Migration and Governance in Global Asia” was held in Singapore on 27–28 August 2026. Jointly organised by the Nanyang Centre for Public Administration, the Centre for Chinese Language and Culture, and the Global Asia Research Centre at Nanyang Technological University (NTU Singapore), with support from the Asian Association of World Historians, the conference brought together scholars from Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, participants examined migration, migration governance, geopolitics, the circulation of knowledge and technology, diaspora networks, and cultural spaces. The conference explored, at national, regional, and transnational levels, the expanding movement of people, capital, goods, and ideas within Asia and between Asia and the wider world, as well as the implications of these flows for governance institutions and migrant experiences.
Conference group photograph
Professor Hong Liu, Associate Vice President (International) at NTU Singapore, Director (Research and Executive Education) of the Nanyang Centre for Public Administration, and President of the Asian Association of World Historians, delivered the welcome address. He noted that migration is not only a matter of policy and institutions but is also closely connected to families, livelihoods, and everyday life. Its study therefore requires the combined perspectives of history, anthropology, political science, and sociology. Professor Liu emphasised that “Global Asia” is not a fixed geographical entity, but a relational space constituted through corridors, networks, diasporas, nation-states, and regional organisations. Asian experiences, he argued, should not merely serve as empirical material for testing theories developed elsewhere; they should also provide a basis for generating concepts and advancing theory. He expressed the hope that the conference’s interdisciplinary conversations would deepen understanding of both the historical continuities and contemporary transformations of migration governance.
Professor Hong Liu delivering the welcome address
Professor Liu then chaired the keynote session. In his keynote address, “The End of Suspension? Challenges in Migration Governance in the 21st Century Asia,” Professor Biao Xiang, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, introduced the concept of “suspension.” He argued that prevailing development models tend to treat migrants primarily as labour resources while deferring questions concerning their social relationships, political rights, and emotional needs. Japan’s use of automation to address labour shortages and the problems exposed by COVID-19 outbreaks in Singapore’s migrant-worker dormitories both demonstrate that migration can no longer be governed sustainably through an exclusively economic framework. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s concept of “forms of life,” Professor Xiang stressed that social cohesion must be cultivated through shared spaces and everyday practices. Migrant-worker recreation centres, participatory photography projects, and the experiences of migrant domestic workers show that migrants should be recognised not merely as objects of governance, but as participants in public narratives and shared social life. Future governance, he concluded, must address concrete concerns surrounding employment, resources, and public services, while moving beyond systems that welcome highly skilled migrants yet restrict lower-skilled and vulnerable migrant groups.
Keynote address by Professor Biao Xiang
In his keynote address, “Across a Southward Sea: Chinese Migrants and ‘Illicit’ Activity in Fin de Siècle Southeast Asia,” Professor Eric Tagliacozzo, John Stambaugh Professor of History at Cornell University, examined Chinese migration between the Dutch and British territories of Southeast Asia from a historical perspective. Chinese labourers, miners, petty traders, and merchants played an important role in the region’s gold and tin mines, timber camps, trepang trade, and port economies. Yet colonial governments used borders, taxation, and policing regimes to classify certain forms of cross-border movement, secret-society activity, opium trading, and maritime commerce as “illicit.” Professor Tagliacozzo observed that colonial states depended on Chinese labour, capital, and commercial networks while simultaneously regarding them as potential threats. Changes in the modern East Asian international order also encouraged Chinese communities to seek legal recognition and equal treatment. The categories of the “licit” and “illicit,” therefore, were not natural or self-evident; they were produced as states extended their jurisdiction. This historical experience offers a valuable reference point for understanding contemporary border controls, informal economies, and the stigmatisation of migrants.
Keynote address by Professor Eric Tagliacozzo
Following the keynote addresses, the conference held a launch and unveiling ceremony for The Making of Singapore as an Asian Regional Corridor: Historicity, Trade, and Diaspora, edited by Professors Hong Liu and Cheun Hoe Yow and Dr Huimei Zhang, and published by Routledge in 2026. The volume examines Singapore’s global connections through the interrelated dimensions of historical networks, trade and identity, governance, and culture. It shows how the city-state’s global role grew out of longstanding maritime networks, population movements, and commercial exchanges, and how these connections have continually been reshaped through industrial policy, transnational investment, tripartite cooperation, and multicultural governance. Introducing the volume, Professor Henry Wai-chung Yeung, Choh-Ming Li Professor of Geography and Resource Management at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, explained that the idea of an “Asian regional corridor” draws greater attention than the conventional notions of a “global city” or “regional hub” to the directionality of flows, the work of intermediation, and processes of institutional translation. He also commended the volume’s interdisciplinary combination of archival research, interviews, political-economy analysis, cultural studies, and digital methods, noting that it offers a new framework for understanding Asian regionalisation, diaspora networks, and the global connectivity of small states.
Professor Henry Wai-chung Yeung introducing the new volume
Book launch
From right: Associate Professor Jue Wang, Professor Henry Wai-chung Yeung, Dr Qiaobing Li, Professor Hong Liu, Associate Professor Cheun Hoe Yow, and Dr Huimei Zhang
Three panels were held on 27 August. Panel 1, “The New Geopolitics and Impact on Migration Governance,” was chaired by Associate Professor Jue Wang, Director of the Nanyang Centre for Public Administration at NTU Singapore. Associate Professor Gordon Cheung of Durham University’s School of Government and International Affairs discussed the coexistence of brain drain, brain circulation, and reverse brain drain amid China–US technological competition, arguing that research environments, national talent policies, and emerging research institutions jointly shape the choices of overseas scientists. Associate Professor Meng-Hsuan Chou, Provost’s Chair in Public Policy and Global Affairs at NTU Singapore, examined the increasing politicisation of migration and higher-education policy, showing how universities have evolved from institutions of talent development into important actors in student-visa administration, research security, and talent selection. Professor Ajaya Sahoo, Head of the Centre for the Study of Indian Diaspora at the University of Hyderabad, used India to illustrate how states mobilise overseas citizenship arrangements, diaspora engagement, and public diplomacy to translate remittances, investment, knowledge, and cultural influence into development resources. The discussion highlighted the combined influence of geopolitics, institutional settings, cultural capital, and family circumstances on the mobility of talent and diaspora communities.
Panel 1: The New Geopolitics and Impact on Migration Governance
From right: Professor Ajaya Sahoo, Associate Professor Meng-Hsuan Chou, Associate Professor Gordon Cheung, and Associate Professor Jue Wang
Panel 2, “Technology, Mobility, and Global Connectivity,” was chaired by Professor Shibao Guo of the University of Calgary. Professor Erika Wenhong Chen of NTU Singapore’s Wee Kim Wee School of Communication and Information used the AI company Manus to develop the concept of “stack migration,” arguing that the cross-border movement of a technology company entails an integrated reconfiguration of talent, code, data, computing capacity, capital, and ownership. Governance is consequently shifting from border control towards the management of network dependencies. Professor Jia Gao of the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute traced the evolution of Australian immigration policy from family reunification towards skills-, business-, and investment-oriented migration, revealing the tension between Australia’s economic reliance on Asia and political resistance to Asian immigration. Dr Chao Yao, Research Fellow at the Nanyang Centre for Public Administration, drew on digital-platform and biomedical-company cases to show how transnational entrepreneurs must navigate overlapping rules concerning national security, data governance, product certification, and cultural influence. The discussion concluded that global nodes such as Singapore can facilitate flows of talent and technology, but cannot remain insulated from great-power competition and cross-border regulation.
Panel 2: Technology, Mobility, and Global Connectivity
From right: Professor Jia Gao, Dr Chao Yao, Professor Erika Wenhong Chen, and Professor Shibao Guo
Panel 3, “Institutions, Social Structures, and Migrant Experiences,” was chaired by Professor Jia Gao of the University of Melbourne’s Asia Institute. Through the experiences of racialised immigrants working in Canada’s settlement-services sector, Professor Shibao Guo of the University of Calgary demonstrated how the devaluation of overseas credentials, gendered assumptions, and precarious employment channel some migrants into particular occupations. Professor Tien-shi Chen of Waseda University drew on her personal experience and cases involving Japanese descendants in the Philippines to illuminate forms of statelessness produced by war, diplomatic change, conflicts among nationality laws, and missing records. Associate Professor Laavanya Kathiravelu of NTU Singapore’s School of Social Sciences argued that formal institutions and informal practices are mutually constitutive, and that migrants move between legal categories, family relations, and labour markets as they negotiate room for agency.
Panel 3: Institutions, Social Structures, and Migrant Experiences
From right: Professor Tien-shi Chen, Professor Shibao Guo, Associate Professor Laavanya Kathiravelu, and Professor Jia Gao
Taken together, the three panels showed that migrant experiences are shaped by the interaction of law, race, class, gender, family, and social organisations.
On the morning of 28 August, the conference convened a plenary session entitled “Global Asia and Its Genealogies,” chaired by Professor Jon Wilson, Dean of NTU Singapore’s College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences and Director of the Global Asia Research Centre. Drawing on the Global Asia programme at the University of Tokyo’s Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, specially appointed Professor Shigeto Sonoda described Global Asia studies as a reflexive intellectual practice centred on “interconnection, comparison, and collaboration.” He stressed the need for researchers to reflect on their own epistemic positions and to expand their sources and methods through migrant narratives and digital media. Professor Henry Wai-chung Yeung of the Chinese University of Hong Kong used Vietnam and transnational manufacturing to explain “strategic coupling” in global production networks: whether localities derive sustained benefits from foreign investment depends on the ability of governments, domestic firms, and industrial clusters to strengthen their institutional and technological capabilities. Geopolitical tensions and supply-chain security are also shifting corporate strategies from a singular emphasis on efficiency towards greater resilience. Professor Ahmed Ibrahim Abushouk of Qatar University’s Department of Humanities observed that the Middle East has long been marginalised within mainstream accounts of Global Asia. He called for the reconstruction of the Middle East’s connections with South and Southeast Asia through Indian Ocean trade, religious networks, labour migration, and knowledge circulation, and advocated polycentric histories that challenge Eurocentric spatial categories and historical periodisation.
The discussion addressed the place of Central Asia, Japanese official development assistance, geopolitics, and the use of artificial intelligence to translate local archives. Participants agreed that “Global Asia” should not become another closed regional label, but should instead serve as a method for studying interregional connections and processes of mutual constitution.
Plenary Session: Global Asia and Its Genealogies
From right: Professor Henry Wai-chung Yeung, Professor Shigeto Sonoda, Professor Jon Wilson, and Professor Ahmed Ibrahim Abushouk
Panel 4, “Community Networks and Cultural Spaces,” was held on the afternoon of 28 August and chaired by Associate Professor Shaohua Zhan of NTU Singapore’s School of Social Sciences. Dr Sylvia Ang, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Monash University, proposed “Asian class as method,” arguing that migrants’ education, family resources, and social standing in their places of origin are reassessed after migration and cannot be understood solely through Western measures of class. Rachel Yulin Hong, a PhD student in NTU Singapore’s Public Policy and Global Affairs programme, examined Jinjiang, Fujian, from 1979 to 2024 to show how diaspora capital, family networks, local government, and firm capabilities transformed a hometown economy dependent on remittances into one based on manufacturing and transnational business. Hanxiang Zhang, a PhD candidate at SOAS University of London, used a documentary project on Hainanese kopitiams in Southeast Asia to explore food spaces, community interaction, and migrant memory, highlighting the value of visual methods for preserving cultural heritage. Associate Professor Cheun Hoe Yow, Director of NTU Singapore’s Centre for Chinese Language and Culture, examined a Chinese family spanning China, Malaysia, and Singapore to show how governance at local, national, and transnational scales shapes identity and mobility across generations. The panel demonstrated that families, migrant hometowns, food spaces, and visual media serve as important infrastructures for the cross-border circulation of people, capital, and memory.
Panel 4: Community Networks and Cultural Spaces
From right: Rachel Yulin Hong, Hanxiang Zhang, Dr Sylvia Ang, Associate Professor Shaohua Zhan, and Associate Professor Cheun Hoe Yow
The conference concluded with closing remarks by Associate Professor Cheun Hoe Yow. He observed that the two-day meeting had illuminated the complexity of migration governance in Global Asia from multiple perspectives: past and present, state institutions and everyday experience, and population mobility and technological flows. Asia, he stressed, is not only a major arena of global movement, but also a source of concepts, theories, and research methods. Future research should strengthen collaboration between history and the social sciences, among different parts of Asia, and between academic researchers and migrant communities. Alongside the study of state governance, greater attention should also be paid to migrants’ everyday lives, social relationships, and lived agency.
Closing remarks by Associate Professor Cheun Hoe Yow
Throughout the conference, discussions were lively and highly engaged. Participants raised probing questions and continued to exchange views and analyse cases during the breaks, reflecting a strong shared interest in the development of Global Asia and in the pressing issues facing the region today.