Algorithmic Agency and the Transnational Self: How Returning Female Migrants Negotiate Digital Affordances in China
Abstract
Today, artificial intelligence deeply influences how return migrants adapt to their home countries. While the economic integration of highly educated Chinese returnees is well documented, their daily digital and gendered experiences remain largely underexplored. Upon returning, the independent transnational values these women cultivated abroad frequently clash with traditional local expectations. This qualitative study applies the Social Identity Model of Identity Change (SIMIC) to examine how highly educated Returning Chinese Female Migrants (RCFM) negotiate algorithmic pressures in contemporary China. Based on in-depth interviews and retrospective online observations of 20 participants, the findings reveal that returnees experience recommendation algorithms as highly active social agents. Participants perceive that these automated systems reduce their complex backgrounds to basic demographic categories—a process identified as algorithmic essentialism. Consequently, users feel the algorithms aggressively amplify traditional marriage timelines, aesthetic censorship, and workplace hostility, severely disrupting the women's social identity continuity. However, the data demonstrates that returning women do not passively accept this automated curation. They actively exercise advanced algorithmic literacy to train recommendation systems, resist gendered digital pressures, and construct empowering online networks. Ultimately, this study suggests that algorithmic agency is a vital psychological coping strategy for female migrants striving to preserve their authentic transnational identities during a complex cultural reintegration process.
Keywords: Algorithmic agency, algorithmic essentialism, return migration, female migrants, artificial intelligence.
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