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This paper argues for a flexible identity and citizenship framework to explore how return migrants, "haigui," have readapted and re-established themselves back into Shanghai society, and how they have used their talents, knowledge and "guanxi" networks to optimise their chances of success. It argues that these return migrants, as talent circulators in their circulatory migration process, have adopted a flexible identity and citizenship, to confront their conflicting emotions and negotiated sacrifices for the well-being of their individual self and family as they expand their socio-economic and territorial space.

This paper explores the construction of local and national identities among secondary school students in post-colonial Hong Kong. As a Chinese society that has undergone a prolonged period of British colonial rule, the reunification of capitalist Hong Kong with the motherland under socialism in 1997 has set the context for a negotiation of identities. It has been revealed that the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region has tried to foster a stronger sense of national identity and a sense of belonging among the younger generations through its education reform measures in the new millennium. Nation-building is part and parcel of the reform, although it is being interpreted and implemented diversely by local officials, school principals and teachers. The intersecting and overlapping nature of students' different identities has set the parameters of their identity formation but allows different latitudes of observance and/or choice of different identities. (Contains 14 notes.)