Temporary Labour Migration and Chinese State-Led Infrastructure Development in Serbia

The Chinese state has been central to China’s global integration in the past two decades and has mediated the growing diversity of Chinese migration pathways to the rest of the world. This chapter examines one pathway in which the state has had an explicit role in structuring the migrant experience, that of Chinese temporary labour migrants as part and parcel of China’s state-led global infrastructure development where Chinese rail, road, energy, manufacturing, and mining projects have been established as a product of state intervention. Through the lens of three state-led infrastructure projects in Serbia—the Belgrade–Budapest railway, the Belgrade bypass, and the Zijin Bor copper mining complex—this chapter explores how the state has undergirded Chinese labour migrants’ pathway to Europe, defined their social relations in host contexts, and reproduced the unequal power relations sustaining the state-led model of development.