关键词: 社会排斥, 中越边境, 越南女性配偶, 跨国通婚

Abstract:

With the development of the thoughts of “cultural turn” and “spatial turn”, geographic space has been subjectivized and has participated in the construction of social ideology. Its research perspective, from macroscopic to microscopic, focuses more on “offbeat groups” who are excluded and marginalized by the mainstream society in a micro-scale domain. It has been a long time since the interaction and the intermarriage between the nationals across the Sino-Vietnam border due to their geographical proximity and ethnic and cultural similarities. The number of the transnational marriages in this area has increases annually since China and Vietnam successively carried out the “Reform and Opening-up” policy, especially after the normalization of the Sino-Vietnam relations in 1991. The Vietnamese brides, due to the lack of legal status, are often excluded from the mainstream society in the everyday life. The Social Exclusion Theory, developed in Europe in the 1990s, originated in the study of social inequality and now has become a core concept of interpreting various social problems. This article, with the Qiaotou administrative village of Hekou County, Yunnan Province as the location for case study and with a qualitative research method, in a micro-spatial scale explores the social exclusion suffered by the Vietnamese brides. The researchers investigated in January 2012 and August 2012 respectively 10 Vietnamese brides on the spots of 7 villages. The research findings are shown as follows: 1) Without legal status, the Vietnamese brides have no access to buying train tickets and to checking in at hotels, which make their activities restricted in the terms of public space; 2) The Vietnamese brides and the indigenous villagers, being “Others” and “Subjects” respectively in “place”, form two opposed “spaces”. The Vietnamese brides, without citizenship and excluded from the village’s public space, have no access to the village’s political affairs and social activities. Even worse, the Vietnamese brides are monitored by the indigenous villagers who try to prevent them from escaping, which makes them live in a situation somewhat similar to “Panopticon” proposed by Jerome Bentham and developed by Michel Foucault. 3) The inferior spatial position of the Vietnamese brides’ houses worsens the social exclusion of the Vietnamese brides. The spatial analysis of a house owned by an indigenous villager who married a Vietnamese bride reveals that the spatial marginalization caused by the house being on the edge of the village—an inferior spatial position, hinders the communications between the Vietnamese brides and the indigenous villagers. This study reveals that the spatial exclusion of the Vietnamese brides are due to their lack of legal status, economic inferiority and stigmatization imposed by the public opinions. This study enriches, in terms of the micro-space, both the Social Exclusion Theory and its related empirical research.

Key words: social exclusion, Sino-Vietnam border, Vietnamese bride, transnational marriage