In-between: Re-migration, orbital mobilities and emotional circulations of women from China to Taiwan and back to China Beatrice Zani Lyon 2 University, Triangle UMR 5206, Lyon, France. Email: beatrice.zani92@gmail.com, beatrice.zani@univ-lyon2.fr. Abstract: After a first labour migration from the countryside to the city in China, some Chinese migrant working women are engaged in marriage migration to Taiwan. There, they face social, gendered and economic subalternity. Therefore, some women divorce and re-migrate to China, to the city they had been previously working in, where they remobilise social, economic and emotional resources, as well as the new competences and knowledge capitalised during mobility experiences in China and Taiwan. They oscillate between new local and global scales, and generate creative social, economic and emotional connections among spaces, places and people. Mobilities take the shape of physical and virtual, material and emotional ‘orbits’, connecting diverse spatialities, temporalities and affections. Drawing on a multi-situated global ethnographic work tracking women’s migrations from China to Taiwan and from Taiwan to China, this article contributes to the study of physical and virtual, material and emotional mobil- ities of migrants in a globalised social world of interconnection and hypermobility. It provides insights to apprehend, theoretically, methodologically and empirically, the link between mobilities, emotions the digitalisation of social and economic practices. Navigating through spatialities, temporalities and emotions, Chinese women produce ‘in- between’ cosmopolitan biographies inside mutating and fluid local and global, physical and virtual, spaces. Mobilities take an orbital shape, embedded in social and affectional relations, economic practices, and emotions. Keywords: China–Taiwan, cosmopolitan biographies, digital platforms, divorce, emotions, local and global mobilities Introductory considerations On the move One morning in February 2017, I received a phone call from Xiao Mei, 1 a Chinese migrant woman living in Hukou 糊口 village, Xinzhu 新竹 County, in Taiwan. She asked me to join her in Hukou. Her voice was broken and her words were muddled. Xiao Mei is 29 years old and she originally comes from the rural village of Xingning 興寧, Guangdong 廣東 province, Mainland China. At the age of 15, she left the countryside and migrated to Shenzhen, where she worked in the local factories for several years. Through marriage with a Taiwanese native when she was 21, she re-migrated to Taiwan, where she had been living for seven years when I met her. She obtained Taiwanese citizenship and she had a child. Xiao Mei was waiting with her luggage at the train station. As soon as I arrived, she cried and distinctly stated: I want to leave Taiwan as soon as possible, I want to go back to China, my homeland. Taiwan is not my home. I cannot live here any more, I cannot stand this life any more; I want to divorce immediately and get on the first flight tomorrow in the morning. After reflection, she signed the divorce documents. She quickly sent a message on the digital applica- tion WeChat (微信) to some friends in Shenzhen, and left Taiwan for China the following day. Xiao Mei is on the move. Women are on the move. Over the last several decades, China and Taiwan have offered stimulating cases for observing women’s internal, international and transnational migrations (Li, 2013; Hsia, 2015; Roulleau-Berger, 2017). The issue of women’s mobility from China to Taiwan has attracted international scholarship’s attention: in China, women migrate from rural areas to work in the city and re-migrate through marriage from China to Taiwan. However, it has been interpreted under the prism of a unilateral Asia Pacific Viewpoint 2020 ISSN 1360-7456 © 2020 Victoria University of Wellington and John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd doi:10.1111/apv.12254