Research Highlighted:

Lan, S. (2021). Finding a Chulu (Way Out): Rural-origin Chinese Students Studying Abroad in South Korea. Pacific Affairs, 94(4), 661-681.

Based on multi-sited research in China and South Korea, this paper examines the motivations for rural-origin Chinese students to study abroad in South Korea and how their overseas experiences are mediated by the intersection of internal and international educational hierarchies. Existing literature on transnational student mobility from Asia mainly focuses on students from urban middle-class background, little attention has been paid to students from less advantaged background. Scholars have noted that China’s seemingly meritocratic gaokao (national college entrance exam) policy in reality functions to perpetuate the structural marginalization of rural students in its educational system. This research moves beyond the internal migration paradigm by examining how social inequalities associated with the rural/urban divide get reproduced and re-articulated by the intersection of class, gender, place of origin, and time management at the transnational scale.

Existing literature on Chinese students in South Korea often treat them as a homogeneous group, rather than making distinctions based on class, gender, and place of origin. This research attends to the heterogeneity within the Chinese student population by focusing on a relatively invisible group of students from rural background. In 2018 when this research was conducted, there were 68,184 Chinese students enrolled in universities in South Korea, constituting almost half of the total foreign student population. Although the majority of them are from urban middle-class or lower middle-class backgrounds, there is a small group of rural-origin students who identify themselves as from wage-earning or low-income families. They remain invisible in the Chinese student community for several reasons. First, social stigmatization associated with the rural often makes them hesitant to identify their rural origin. Second, rural students usually do not share the conspicuous consumption behaviors of more affluent Chinese students and are thus marginalized in the social circle of Chinese students. Last but not least, they are usually busy working at multiple part-time jobs to cover their tuition and living expenses. Although most Chinese students in South Korea engage in some type of part-time employment, those from rural background face more pressure to work hard to support themselves due to their family’s lack of financial resources. This research investigates the following questions: What motivates rural students to study in South Korea? How do class, gender, and place of origin mediate their overseas educational experiences and future mobility trajectories?

Scholars have noted that the expansion of China’s higher educational system has become the main engine for the production of a new generation of educated middle-class. Yet they also note that this new educated middle-class is internally stratified due to university ranking in China.This research contributes a transnational dimension to the formation of the educated middle-class by examining social stratifications among overseas Chinese students. Due to the hierarchical ranking of study abroad destinations and the prevalence of a global educational hierarchy, rural-origin graduates from South Korea will most likely occupy the lower stratum of the educated middle-class compared to their urban peers. Tang and Unger further divide the educated middle-class into those who hold jobs “within the system,” i.e. the public sector, and those who work “outside the system”, i.e. the private sector. The two argue that jobs within the system are not only secure (in terms of welfare benefits)  and financially sustainable, but provide privileged access to “within-the-system” resources that may generate significant grey income outside the system. Due to their less privileged educational credentials and rural family background, and lack of localized social networks in big cities, my respondents usually turn to the transnational realm or the private sector for job opportunities. Despite their overseas degrees and transnational experiences, they are still marginalized within the Chinese social system.       

Robertson et al develop a “mobile transitions” framework to examine the intertwinement of youth’s aspirations for transnational mobility and their transition to adulthood. The popularization of overseas education in China means that an increasing number of Chinese youth are transitioning to adulthood during their time studying abroad. However, such mobile transitions are marked by stratifications along the line of class, gender, and place of origin. The marginalization of rural students in China’s educational system has pushed some of them to become new consumers of overseas education. However, the rural/urban divide continues to shape rural students’ study and work experiences in South Korea in important ways. This research finds a notable tension in my rural participants’ narratives of educational mobility. On the one hand, they are highly aware of structural inequalities in both the Chinese and the transnational educational systems; on the other hand, they also embrace the neoliberal ideology of self-responsibility and self-entrepreneurship. While appealing to the desire for transnational mobility among youth from different social backgrounds, China’s liberalization of policy in the self-funded study abroad market also functions to hide structural inequalities in its social and educational system. Although overseas education offers some rural students opportunities to negotiate their structural marginalization in Chinese society, it also reflects the expansion of internal social spatial inequalities to the international realm. The rural/urban divide and the regional scale of their transnational capital conversion have largely pre-determined rural youth’s disadvantaged position in a stratified Chinese society.

Author Bio

Shanshan Lan is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the Moving Matters research group. She received her Ph. D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She had worked as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University and Connecticut College in the United States. Before joining the University of Amsterdam, she was a Research Assistant Professor in the David Lam Institute for East-West Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University. Lan is the Principal Investigator of the ERC project “The reconfiguration of whiteness in China: Privileges, precariousness, and racialized performances” (CHINAWHITE, 2019-2024). Funded by the European Research Council, this project examines how the western notion of whiteness is dis-assembled and re-assembled in the new historical context of China’s rise as a global superpower.

Research Highlighted:

Hong, Y. (2021). The Educational Hopes and Ambitions of Left-Behind Children in Rural China: An Ethnographic Case Study. Routledge.

Listen to an interview with Yang here, and watch the interview here.

Children who are ‘left behind’ by migrating parents is a growing phenomenon across Asia. Left-behind children is a consequence of China’s rapid urbanization and its peculiar household registration system. The number of this highly disadvantaged young population across China is overwhelming (61 million in 2013). These young people are doubly disadvantaged, first by their poverty and secondly, by the loss of their parents in their day to day life. Research in different national contexts has provided evidence of how growing up as a ‘left-behind child’ can have a profound impact on young people’s development. Large-scale quantitative research has demonstrated well that being ‘left behind’ has an impact on educational attainment as well on measures that explore sense of well-being and character development.

I conducted an ethnographic case study in a rural school with a high proportion of left-behind children in southwest China. Data were collected from 17 left-behind children. I explored in-depth the individual educational experiences of being poor and ‘left behind’ in rural China, and understood how the experiences of young people themselves had shaped their aspirations as well as self identity. Through this deeply qualitative study, first hand insights into the day to day experiences of left-behind children were gained. By living with the students for 4 months; eating, sleeping and spending academic and leisure time together, a rich and detailed understanding of what it meant to be ‘poor’ and ‘left behind’ for the children in this study were possible.

Extending from Bourdieu’s sociological theories, my study offered an original contribution by combining three theoretical/disciplinary perspectives (cultural capital – sociology, rational action – behavioural economics, and self-efficacy – psychology) in a new and useful way to conceptualize aspirations for higher education in the context of rural China. The three different disciplinary perspectives are often seen, at the surface level at least, not especially compatible; this study however integrated them as well as transferring these Western theories to an Eastern context and demonstrating cultural nuances that these theories do not capture when applying in the West.

Key findings

Results of the study were organized as two chapters (Five and Six) in the book to reflect the different educational attitudes and aspirations of left-behind children under study. “University Non-aspirers and ‘the undecided’” referred to those who did not intend to receive university education and those who had difficulty making decisions. “University aspirers’ were those who explicitly expressed that going to university was what they definitely wanted to do. Findings indicated that whilst educational aspirations were embedded in left-behind children’s disadvantaged social background, they were also shaped by the consequences of being ‘left-behind’.

University non-aspirers and ‘the undecided’, and university aspirers were primarily differentiated by their differential attitudes towards higher education as well as schooling in general. Comparing to university aspirers who demonstrated a strong faith in meritocracy, university non-aspirers and ‘the undecided’ shared a strong desire to enter, what they saw as, the real social world instead. Their beliefs and plans with respect to how to achieve their developed future goals were very individualized because they had very personal and varied understandings of the social world as well as how they saw themselves in terms of personal advantages and weaknesses.

Family played a significant role in shaping student aspirations. What was distinct for university non-aspirers and ‘the undecided’ was that educational aspirations appeared to be linked strongly with loose family connections as well as authoritarian family members. But for university aspirers, parents’ expectations, their concern and encouragement became a strong motive to learning. However, despite this, these young people expressed an extreme sense of isolation as even though having developed an aspiration for university, there was no extra parental involvement, advice or support provided as guidance when making future plans.

Although the school provided no guidance and very little support with respect to future preparation, university aspirers were able to gain support from their peers as well as their teachers, while university non-aspirers and ‘the undecided’ were left alone to make decisions only with limited source of information circulated among classmates and friends.

‘Left-behind-ness’ was seen by all these young people as being compensated by a clearly improved family financial situation and their opportunity to stay in education. However, university non-aspirers and ‘the undecided’ felt they could have more positive personal changes if they were not ‘left behind’. University aspirers, while some also acknowledged they could have a better school performance and a closer relationship with parents, being ‘left behind’ was viewed by some as beneficial for securing independence and freedom to decide the future. Overall though, university aspirers largely expressed a strong sense of loneliness and in particular, a sense of making the best of life’s circumstances with bravado. 

Conclusion

This book employed the concepts of cultural capital, habitus, social capital and emotional capital to investigate the role of family in shaping aspirations. I casted some doubts on Bourdieu’s deterministic view that the value families place on their children’s education is the result of class-based dispositions and habitus. Where Bourdieu is useful is in the ways that poverty can impact on families and in the resources families have to support their children, the results of this study led me to suggest that the idea of habitus should be re-considered specifically to different cultural contexts – in this case, in the Chinese society. Whilst family cultural capital supports a child’s education with knowledge, skills and abilities, emotional capital invested by parental encouragement, support, confidence and interest cultivates a strong sense of belonging, assurance and security for a child, which arguably is significant in promoting self-confidence and self-esteem or encouraging a sense of self-efficacy and autonomy. I also suggest it is being emotionally ‘left behind’ that ultimately is the specific disadvantage of Chinese left-behind children, as opposed to the disadvantages associated with poverty alone. 

Author Bio

Dr Yang Hong is currently a lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China. She specializes in the area of social justice, focusing on issues of poverty, gender, education and identity. She can be contacted via email: ruiyinghong2017@163.com.

Research Highlighted:

Li, L., Shen, W., & Xie, A. (2021). Why students leave Chinese elite universities for doctoral studies abroad: Institutional habitus, career script and college graduates’ decision to study abroad. International Journal of Educational Development, 84, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2021.102408

Despite the rise of China’s elite universities in global rankings, the number of Chinese students going abroad to pursue doctorate degrees is still large. In order to understand the reasons behind, we launched a major project since 2018 and have conducted interviews with more than 100 participants in several China’s elite universities. This article reports a part of the findings.

China is forging ahead in its goal to achieve a world-class higher education system and to move from the periphery to the centre of the global knowledge network (Altbach, 2009). To this end, the Chinese government has exerted much effort over the past two decades in reversing its long-term brain drain into a brain gain (Lee, 2013). However, although the world rankings of Chinese universities are improving, the proportion of students in elite universities who choose to study abroad has not dropped significantly. For example, the proportion of C9 league universities undergraduates going abroad for postgraduate studies kept relatively stable, between 22.56% and 25.88% from 2013 to 2019 (Shen et al,2021).

Previous studies suggest a series of pull–push factors at the systematic and individual levels affecting the motivation and outbound mobility of Chinese students. The factors at the institutional level, however, were rarely examined. The changing landscape of Chinese higher education has seldomly been considered either. In this study, we reported the findings of the qualitative interviews with 31 graduates from the chemistry department of Peking University between April and December 2018. The department has been ranked as the best one in its field in China and the 14th best chemistry department in the 2018 QS World University Subject Rankings. Among the 31 graduates we interviewed, 12 students chose to study abroad while the rest 19 students chose to stay in China for their doctorate. We aim to understand those institutional factors behind their decisions to study abroad or not. The concepts of institutional habitus and career scripts provide with us theoretical insights.

Our data suggests that in our case university, there is an institutional habitus because of the dynamic between policy and individuals. The decision to study abroad is not only motivated by the will of students but is also greatly shaped by the institutional habitus of ‘going abroad is excellent’. Furthermore, going abroad has become part of the career script of our interviewees as a result of translating government policies into universities’ entry criteria for new faculty members. At the cognitive level, oversea degrees and working experiences are considered to be relevant to more original work and an extension of research breath. At the community level, it was perceived to be helpful in improving English writing skills, publishing on top international journals, achieving an extensive academic social network. At the organizational level, it was understood a symbolic capital to getting into elite universities which usually prioritize returnees with oversea degree and substantial working experience in top university abroad. If a chemistry student wants to be a faculty member of a research university, then s/he must act in accordance with the career scripts by going abroad. Overseas degrees are still a hard currency in the academic labor market.

This study contributes to the literature in several ways. Firstly, the main body of literature highlights students’ motivations for going abroad as a rational choice to maximise their returns upon returning. We offer a sociological analysis by examining the influence of culture on the decisions of students through institutional habitus. Students may be economical, but their decisions are heavily shaped by the institutional habitus of their universities. Secondly, although previous studies have focused on system-level factors as gaps in teaching and research quality and salary for faculty between peripheral countries and central countries, or individual-level factors as economic pursuit of returns, this study focuses on institutional-level factors and underscores the importance of cross-unit analysis by highlighting the role of institutions in translating system-level policies into student preferences. National policies have conferred a special symbolic and political capital to returnees and subsequently to overseas students in general (Xiang & Shen, 2009), thereby forming the institutional habitus ‘excellent students should go abroad’. As a result, many students decide to study abroad even before they have developed a good understanding of the domestic and international academic labor market.

The phenomenon of “the study-abroad fever of Chinese students” has attracted the attention of many scholars (Zha, 2015), but at the same time, in recent years, the emergence of anti-globalization trends and the deterioration of China’s international relations have also raised concerns that “the numbers of Chinese students going abroad to several of the key receiving countries will slow or even decline”(Altbach, 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic has made it more difficult for Chinese students to go abroad and has an impact on the decision-making of some Chinese students to go abroad. It daunts students’ confidence in international traveling. The rising anti-Asian sentiment and increasing political tensions with China may also cause more tightened visa regulations for students from China where is the largest sending area of international students. This article provides a convincing theoretical explanation from the perspectives of institutional habitus and career script for the mobility choice of college graduates from elite Chinese universities in the past 20 years. In the short term, the habitus of going abroad does not seem to change, but how the epidemic, international competition, and the further improvement of the status of Chinese universities will affect students’ choice of going abroad remains to be seen and studied.

References:

Altbach P G (2009). Peripheries and centers: research universities in developing countries. Asia Pacific Education Review, 10(1):15-27.

Altbach, P. G. (2019). The coming ‘China crisis’ in global higher education. https://www.universityworldnews.

com/post.php?story=20190403104242366. Accessed 6 July 2020

Lee, C. S. (2013). China’s Leap Forward from ‘Brain Drain’to ‘Brain Gain’: Its International Student Recruitment Strategy and the Decision-Making Process of Foreign Students. Contemporary Chinese Studies, 14(2), 321-361.

Xiang B, Shen W (2009). International student migration and social stratification in China. International Journal of Educational Development, 29(5): 513-522

Shen Wenqin, Xie Xinyi, Guo Errong (2021). The changing trend of the academic labor market and the challenge of doctoral education in China. Under review

Zha, Qiang (2015). Study Abroad Fever among Chinese Students. International Higher Education, (69), 15-17.

Researchers’ Bio

Wenqin Shen (Corresponding Author) is an Associate Professor of Higher Education at Peking University. He mainly studies the higher education system from the perspectives of history and science studies (Sociology of Science, Philosophy of Science, etc). He authored and co-authored publications focused on transnational history of idea and practice of liberal Education (China, the UK and the US), international academic mobility (especially the mobility of doctoral students and postdocs) and doctoral career trajectories. He can be contacted via email: shenwenqin@pku.edu.cn

Liping Li (First author) is a lecturer at Capital Normal University and a doctoral student at the School of Education of Peking University. Her main research fields are teacher education, international mobility of university students, and doctoral career trajectories.

Dr. Ailei Xie is Associate Professor and Director of the Bay Area Education Policy Institute for Social Development at Guangzhou University. His main area of research is on social mobility and higher education, and parenting style and anxiety in China.

Rachel Murphy (2020) The Children of China’s Great Migration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Listen to a podcast and watch a video where Rachel speaks about this book.

The Children of China’s Great Migration addresses the phenomenon of children in rural China being separated from their parents because of labour migration. In the 2010s the number of rural Chinese children with at least one parent who had migrated without them exceeded 61 million, equivalent to the population of Great Britain. Nearly half these children had two migrant parents, while the proportions with a migrant father and a migrant mother were approximately one third and 17 per cent respectively. Although the separation of rural families because of labour migration is portrayed in China’s public official and media discourse as a side-effect of development and urbanization, such family separation is integral to rather than incidental to its national strategy of rapid capital accumulation: urban employers and municipal governments fail to pay migrants a family wage or to provide them and their families with access to public services. Instead, most migrants’ children are fed, housed, educated and cared for in the countryside, which depresses employers’ and municipalities’ costs in competitive globalising markets. This book documents how successive generations of individuals with rural origins become trapped in a daily struggle for survival and unreachable dreams, obscuring the inequalities that compel them to ceaseless toil and sacrifice. It especially reveals that children bear the emotional toll.

Drawing on my interviews with 109 children (with a median age of 12 years) from rural schools in two of China’s eastern interior provinces and matching interviews with their caregivers, the book brings children’s voices into the conversation about national strategies for capital accumulation. It focuses on the children’s experiences of the daily routines of care in their families and their daily routines in and around schools when their parents have migrated without them, these being the routines through which family and national strategies for capital accumulation cohere. Through these routines, children are subjected to their families’ and schools’ efforts to inculcate in them a sense of an intergenerational debt that they need to repay through diligence in study and good behaviour. The book chronicles different children’s experiences of these efforts by their age (primary school age or teenage years), gender, academic performance, and place of residence, by their families’ socio-economic circumstances and by who in their family has migrated – both parents, only the father, or only the mother. It also offers a longitudinal perspective on a subset of these children’s experiences, following twenty-five of them and their families over five years (2010-2015), revealing the strains of both parent-child separation and study pressures on the evolution of parent-child relationships and the children’s sentiments and aspirations. 

The stories of these children and their families show how in the early to mid-2010s, imperatives to work, sacrifice, and take responsibility for one’s own success or failure in life were harnessed and animated by and though multi-scalar social, economic and political processes. Specifically, economic production regimes and families’ social reproduction arrangements blended imperceptibly with individuals’ understandings of cherished values around family, gender, motherhood, fatherhood, filial piety, and morality. Pathways to recognition for individuals both within and beyond their families melded such that failure at school, in the labour market or in the marriage market was not just a personal failure but failure as a child, parent or spouse. An emphasis on children’s voices and experiences contributes to a wider social scientific enterprise of rendering visible the mundane material and social practices and power relations through which people order their lives. It reveals the institutionalised inequalities that compel people of all ages to relentless toil and sacrifice, while imperilling children’s access to the material and affective security so essential for their flourishing.

The book invokes a conceptual framework of ‘multi-local family striving teams’, which combines and extends theoretical insights derived from global literatures on (1) co-resident families’ positioning of children as ‘sites of capital accumulation’ and concomitant efforts to invest in their education; (2) the gendered and intergenerational reconfigurations of families through their migration strategies; and (3) the problematization of children’s agency including its relational and contradictory dimensions. The children learned through the aspirations, discipline, permissions, affection and reproach of adults that other people’s happiness depended on their actions, giving substance to their agency.  Simultaneously gendered and intergenerational norms affected the children’s expectations of and relationships with their mothers, fathers and grandparents. For instance, even as a parent-child work-study bargain gave primary school children a way to deal with the daily pain of missing their parents, if their grades had fallen by the time they reached the junior high stage of their education, their resentment against their migrant parents could be intense.  Meanwhile, resentment against migrant mothers could be the most pronounced because mothers were culturally expected to co-reside with their children.

The book additionally examines left behind children’s experiences of cities, showing that boundaries between ‘left behind children’ and ‘migrant children’ are often blurred. Many rural children who visited their migrant parents in the cities during the two-month summer holidays found themselves locked in a small room for hours at a time with a television and homework while their parents worked. The children seldom saw much of the cities. The implications of migrant parents’ deprived circumstances for their children’s summer visits can be extrapolated from findings in Western countries, namely, that school holidays exacerbate class-based educational inequalities because children whose parents have few resources miss out on the enrichment activities and interactions that middle-class children enjoy. The experiences of the children of migrants in China highlight a need for: dedicated holiday activities, greater flexibility in migrants’ employment conditions such that parents can spend time with their children, and approaches to development that enable families to meet their children’s needs for both the material and affective dimensions of care that are so essential for human flourishing.

The research findings draw attention to a need to incorporate children’s voices into policymaking both in China and globally. Children’s voices highlight the harms of processes that separate social reproduction from production and underpin widening socio-economic inequalities. Their voices also illuminate the failings of an education system that is instrumentally oriented towards equipping children to demonstrate their worth in competition rather than nurturing their potential and love of learning. Indeed, the education system – with its lack of plural viable routes for learning – is such that millions of rural children become alienated, written off and destroyed. These voices of children, with their intuitive emphasis on play, human interdependency and affection, if heard, could offer inspiration for alternative values on which to order society.

Listen to a podcast and watch a video where Rachel speaks about this book.

Author Bio:

Rachel Murphy is Professor of Chinese Development and Society at the University of Oxford. She obtained her PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge in 1999. The book project reported here was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Award. Rachel’s recent publications appear in China Quarterly, Population Space and Place, Development and Change, and Population and Development Review and an article on education and repertoires of care in migrant families in rural China is forthcoming in Comparative Education Review. She is President of the British Association for Chinese Studies.

Research Highlighted:

McKeown, J. S. (2021). Wasted talents? China’s higher education reforms experienced through its visiting scholars abroad. Journal of Contemporary China. https://doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2021.1884961

Abstract

China’s post-1978 modernization plans include an internationally competitive higher education system. Central to this effort are researchers and professors capable of advancing China’s technological capabilities and educating its ambitious, globally-minded youth. National funding for scholars going abroad was designed to infuse the nation with sophisticated knowledge and to improve university quality. Research on 131 Chinese scholars who spent significant time abroad, mostly in the United States, shows little evidence that these funded experiences abroad were used deliberately to improve Chinese universities. Results show that policies supporting scholarly exchange have not produced successful internationalization efforts on Chinese campuses. Scholars in STEM fields and those receiving national funding indicated significantly higher research focus and productivity, however did not indicate putting it to use at their home institutions.

Report

For years, visiting scholars from China to the US and other western countries were typically considered academic research partners collaborating on mutually beneficial international exchange. However, Chinese visiting scholars have recently come under intense scrutiny, particularly in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). Hopes of a benign economic win-win scenario between China and more advanced economic powers (particularly with the United States) now seem outdated and naïve. Despite this new attention, little is known or been researched about who these individuals are, now numbering over 45,000 annually in the United States alone, and what experiences they have had. This article seeks to fill the gap in knowledge and contribute to a more complete understanding of what is a complex and enduring relationship between Chinese and other academic communities abroad.

China’s professors, like its students, are highly mobile. It is in this aspect of Chinese university development that this article is situated. The author surveyed 131 recent Chinese visiting scholars, defined as someone on a non-immigrant visa engaged in academic activities and not enrolled as a student. These visiting scholars had spent significant time abroad at foreign institutions, mostly in the United States and other English-speaking countries. Their motivations, funding sources, goals, and experiences abroad, as well as their careers after returning to China, were examined within the context of the growth and competitive aspirations of China’s university sector, within its economic and strategic aspirations overall, in the 21st century. Their anonymous responses reflect a nuanced understanding of their roles in the bigger picture of international academic research cooperation; however, they also reflect an under-utilization of their experiences and skills once back in China. Mostly they show appreciation for the personal and professional benefits resulting from their lengthy experiences overseas, not strategic ones of vital importance to the nation overall or its growing university sector.

Results from this study show comparatively little evidence that visiting scholars play an important role in the internationalization process of their home institutions after returning to China. Lack of formal avenues to put into practice new-found international experience, such as leading new projects or committees, job promotions, or contributing to their home universities’ administrative structures, were typically reported.

In addition, important and statistically significant differences were observed based on the source of funding for the experience and the scholar’s academic discipline that may contribute to understanding the growing scrutiny of, and at times suspicion towards, Chinese scholars abroad. Heightened tensions, changes in academic visa policies, and calls to restrict what had previously been a welcoming and open international academic exchange between China and the West have occurred recently. Specifically, the findings show that those scholars receiving Chinese national government funding (MOE) and those in the STEM fields reported significantly greater focus on their research agendas, less cultural interaction while abroad, and more joint research outcomes with international collaborators. While some of these findings might be expected, they have not been documented and analyzed sufficiently. Furthermore, the findings can, when taken in context of the overall study, help explain potential sources of misunderstanding and suspicion that threaten this important international academic collaboration.

The main reasons Chinese scholars cited for going abroad suggest that they do not see themselves as part of a top-down strategic project of high national priority in which they must participate. Nor do they indicate that they were mentored to see themselves as such. Rather, the findings show that personal motivations reflecting real career interests and desire for language and cultural gain were strongest. Therefore, the broad and long-standing ambitions of the Chinese state to advance its technological and economic power may be understood as matters of articulated national policy and official rhetoric, however the execution of specific policies and implementation at the local and institutional level seem quite different. While the state may articulate its priorities of making Chinese universities more world-class and improving faculty teaching quality, such national goals were not cited as relatively important reasons for having this experience for these visiting scholars, making the purpose of the funding questionable and adding to the evidence that national policy and local / institutional execution in China are not aligned.

These results suggest overall that both the pre-departure motivations and the post-experience expectations on visiting scholars by their institutions or the state were minimal. Far from expecting clear and prioritized objectives related to helping their institutions modernize and internationalize, or to improve teaching performance or grow a research network abroad, these Chinese scholars seemed primarily motivated to advance their own research agendas for their own professional and individual reasons. Rather than being rewarded with job promotions or cash awards upon return, instead these scholars seemed to derive a sense of reward from the intrinsic value of the time abroad, to gain new knowledge and perspectives, and to develop new interests and skills. These are noteworthy and altogether expected outcomes of scholarly engagement abroad, and in all respects embody the spirit of international educational exchange. Yet, that these experiences are occurring within high-level Chinese national policy priority and under increasingly suspicious host country scrutiny makes the lack of strategic fulfillment particularly important to observe. It seems reasonable to conclude that there may be considerable misunderstanding of these scholars’ actions, misalignment with the Chinese policies that brought them abroad, and a misguided suspicion placed on them by some host country authorities.

Taken as a whole, the Chinese visiting scholars’ motivations for undertaking their extended time abroad, and their activities during it, were very much the same as those of all scholars and researchers who go abroad: individual research agendas, professional development, and personal benefit within the constructs of international exchange. Combined with the scant evidence of long-term impact these scholars had after returning to China, despite generous national investment in their development, this article suggests that CCP policy to fund and use these experiences to improve Chinese universities is not being effectively implemented. The study also suggests that concern about these scholars’ true purposes for being abroad, expressed by some host governments, are not being fairly or consistently made. Therefore, the scholars’ own independently made, individually motivated, professionally important, and personally beneficial experiences suggest that neither sending nor receiving country understands fully the normality of this international academic experience, and that it is much more meaningful for the individual visiting scholar’s career, personal and professional development, and life goals beyond any real or implied national objectives. This article seeks to fill in important gaps in our knowledge.

Author Bio

Joshua S. McKeown, Ph.D. is Associate Provost for International Education at SUNY Oswego and International Education Leadership Fellow at the University at Albany (SUNY). He led SUNY Oswego to awards from the Institute of International Education (IIE) and the Chinese Service Center for Scholarly Exchange (CSCSE) among others. McKeown authored The First Time Effect: The Impact of Study Abroad on College Student Intellectual Development (SUNY Press 2009) and numerous book chapters and articles including in the Journal of Contemporary China (2021). He did his Fulbright in India and was a mentor with IIE’s Connecting with the World Myanmar program.

Watch a lecture video on these two articles

Research Highlighted

Jiang, S. (2020). Diversity without integration? Racialization and Spaces of Exclusion in International Higher Education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2020.1847635

Jiang, S. (2021). The Call of the Homeland: Transnational Education and the Rising Nationalism among Chinese Overseas Students. Comparative Education Review, 65(1). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/712053

These two research articles were developed from a larger transnational study on higher education mobility and the co-constitutiveness of class, race, and urban space. I started this project three years ago, hoping to capture a unique moment of transnational education mobility between China and the US. At that time, President Xi Jinping just abolished his term limit, China’s Belt and Road Initiative is expanding overseas, the US-China trade war escalated under Trump administration, and in the US, federal and state funding for public universities in the US were severely cut. I have intended to examine, how, through educational mobility, the economic, educational, and housing transformations of one city in China influence the uneven class and racial relations of another in the US. To do this, I employed a transnational ethnography to follow Chinese students as they migrate between their hometown Shenzhen and the host city that I called Lakeside. These two sites are uniquely situated within the global student migration, racial relations, and urban transformations. In the late 1970s, China’s Special Economic Zone (SEZ) policy made Shenzhen one of the first cities in the nation to experiment with the market economy. As a result, an emerging urban elite class has benefited significantly from this, to use Aiwha Ong’s language, “exception to socialism”. Lakeside, a medium-sized city in the US Midwest, has a different trajectory to globalization. In the recent decade, constant budget cuts in public education pushed Lakeside University to seek additional revenues outside the state and federal government, and consequently, international student recruitment has become an important source of the new revenue. I conducted participant observation at multiple spaces in both cities, including academic (classrooms, libraries, study rooms), residential (apartments, dorms), and social (tea shops, shopping malls, restaurants, lounges, and others). I also observed weekly meetings at Chinese student organizations, where Shenzhen participants and other Chinese students built close social networks.

In Jiang (2020), the article reveals the persistence of the ideology of whiteness and culture-based exclusion, which not only racialize foreign students of color, but also engage with this student population to perpetuate white supremacy. Chinese students were oftentimes objectified as economic capital and diversity signifier. They were frequently excluded in academic, social, and residential spaces. However, participants in this study interpreted their isolated college experiences as a natural result of living in a white university town, the mentality of which reflects the perpetuation of the whiteness ideology as well as China’s state ideology of racial and ethnic unity. Both whiteness ideology and China’s state discourse on unity aim to consolidate differences to elevate the interests of the dominant groups.

While marginalized, Chinese students also voluntarily isolated themselves from local Black and Asian American communities in the university town. When these students did mingle with Black communities, such as during hip-hop events, their artistic preference of Black cultures does not necessarily translate into the appreciation of Blackness. Rather, it echoes colorblindness in new ways that separate Black characteristics in the cultural form from their roots in the lives of Black communities. To these Chinese students, Americanness is also defined by the lack of Asianness, which echoes the troubling history of the racialization of Asians as the perpetual foreigners in the US.  As a result, these Chinese students are simultaneously validating a global racial hierarchy. Through individual experiences of students, the article calls out the systemic racism in higher education institutions as well as the role of nation-states (such as students’ homelands) in forming international students’ racial understanding in the host society.  

In Jiang (2021), the article investigates how the desire for Western credentials and transnational mobility reconcile with strong nationalist sentiments among Chinese students. I argue that transnational education has become a crucial part of China’s nation-building in the era of intensified globalization. Before studying abroad, these Chinese students were raised in a family culture immersed in patriotic discourses that attribute their family’s wealth to China’s opening-up policies and centralized governance. While living overseas, these students heavily rely on PRC state-affiliated organizations and China-based media to navigate academic and social contexts in a foreign land. Organizations such as Chinese Students and Scholars Association (associated with Chinese Consulates) are important actors in immersing Chinese students with patriotic values. In the US Midwest alone, Chinese consuls are sent to over 100 universities to meet with new Chinese students. For students in Lakeside, the first lecture from these organizations teaches them that America is far from the paradise described by the “American Dream”, an image that these students may have held onto when they decided to study abroad.

In addition to the influence of PRC-affiliated student organizations, Chinese young adults in this study were immersed in pro-PRC ideologies promoted by China-based media when living overseas. The rise of nationalism in the United States since the election of Trump has also been utilized by Chinese media to foster a strong national identity among overseas Chinese. These students have read numerous articles on the “inadequacy of Western democracy” from Chinese media. They have become convinced that while the US is struggling with internal polarization, China seems to be advancing at an accelerated pace. For Shenzhen students, while transnational education is an individual pursuit, the experience of transnational education is structured by Chinese consulates, student organizations and China-based media. The seemingly contradictory existence of the transnational desire for Western education and rising nationalist sentiments work jointly in the neoliberal market economy to build entrepreneurial yet patriotic individuals. This article reveals that the movement, mobility, and fluidity endowed by transnationalism could potentially enhance the migrants’ national identity and political intolerance.

Watch a lecture video on these two articles by Shanshan Jiang

Author Bio

Shanshan Jiang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison (expected graduation May 2021). Her research focuses on the political economy of educational migration, and the transnational construction of class and racial relations through higher education globalization. Shanshan Jiang is also a lecturer in the Department of Educational Policy Studies, teaching both domestic and global education courses, such as School and Society and Globalization and Education. Shanshan graduated from University of International Relations with a B.A. in English Language and Literature and has a M.A degree in Social Sciences and Comparative Education from University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to graduate school, Shanshan worked as a project manager in an educational investment company, and as an English teacher in China. She can be contacted via email: sjiang33@wisc.edu and Twitter @sjiang33.

Research Highlighted:

Tyers, R. (2020). Barriers to enduring pro-environmental behaviour change among Chinese students returning home from the UK: a social practice perspective. Environmental Sociology, 1-12. doi:10.1080/23251042.2020.1855885

In 2015, colleagues and I carried out primary focus group research, and found that a period of study in the UK can positively influence the pro-environmental (‘green’) behaviours of Chinese students. Our participants said that while living in the UK they recycled more, reduced littering, and used less domestic energy. This was not because these Chinese students suddenly became heavily engaged with green norms in the UK, but mainly due to a simple but powerful desire to ‘fit in’ with peers and staff in their new ‘communities of practice’: on-campus, in halls, and homestays. Our findings were published in Sociological Research Online (Tyers et al, 2018) and summarised in a separate NRCEM summary here.

Those findings implied follow-up research: if students changed some green behaviours during their stay in the UK, what happened after they returned home? So, in 2019, funded by an ESRC post-doctoral fellowship, I carried out fieldwork in China – using focus groups with Chinese people who had previously studied in the UK – to find out.*

My forty-two participants were located in the cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Ningbo, and recruited through alumni societies and my own networks. Most now had white-collar jobs in sectors like Finance, IT, Education or Administration.

When asked if their green behaviours and attitudes changed during their time in the UK, participants echoed our previous findings. They said that expectations around energy usage or waste were much stronger in their UK communities in the UK than in those in China, and this influenced them to change too.

“I had a close friend called Nicky; a student from the Czech Republic. I remember she was carrying an empty plastic bottle; she kept it for the whole day because she wanted to put it in the recycle bin. So, I was like, “Why are you still holding this big bottle? Just throw it away in the bin”. She said, “I want to put it in the recycle bin”. So, she kept it for the whole day; you can’t imagine a Chinese person doing that. I do better sorting now because I try to make sure this recycled stuff will be in better use in the future.”

(Female, Hangzhou)

When participants were asked if greener behaviours had endured after they returned to China, responses were far more mixed. While a few participants said they continued to recycle, or to re-use plastic shopping bags after coming home, most said that any green behaviours adopted in the UK were soon lost. The green peer pressure that participants experienced in the UK was suddenly absent in China, where being green often seemed pointless when faced with ‘free-riders’ who didn’t seem to care or understand about, say, sorting their domestic waste correctly.

Perhaps most interesting were the wider barriers to green behaviour in Chinese society which emerged. These, despite my small, unrepresentative sample, might be generalisable beyond these ex-students. Such barriers include the power of ‘mianzi’ and ‘guanxi’, media and government discourses, and an absence of ‘post-materialist’ values.

Mianzi may be translated as ‘face’ – a  desire to maintain favourable self-esteem and project an image of wealth and prestige (Sun et al, 2014). Many participants reported that they and their peers are likely to spend money on luxurious items such as high-performance cars, and noted that the norms around these purchases were quite different in the UK.

 ‘People choose smaller cars in the UK. Here people prefer larger cars . . . I was very surprised in a good way that people, even though they are getting good pay, still go for smaller cars, I think it’s very environmentally friendly. That’s a very good thing for me . . . In China, if you are having more money definitely you’ll get a much bigger car. Sometimes you don’t even need that much size.’

(Female, Shanghai)

Many said that a huge problem in China is one of waste, seen as a consequence of ‘guanxi’. Guanxi literally means ‘interpersonal connections’. Maintaining connections often requires sharing food or giving gifts (Sun et al, 2014). Many participants admitted that such activities are often unnecessarily ostentatious and wasteful but are vital to maintaining friendship bonds or growing professional networks.

‘In China we really have a big get-together, lunch together or dinner, it’s quite lenient that if you can’t finish your food, you can take the leftovers. It’s a shame but people don’t really do it, it means “I’m poor, so give me some food” ’

(Female, Shanghai)

At a broader level, others noted that civil society conditions differed greatly between the UK and China. Two participants, working for a Chinese environmental NGO, observed that NGOs must be cautious about public-facing campaigns, especially since the introduction of a restrictive Foreign NGO Law in 2017 (Standaert, 2017). Instead, many NGOs prefer quiet engagement with government and businesses. This was a topical theme. Just before data collection, the student-led ‘Fridays for the Future’ campaign was active in many western countries, and in Asian cities such as Seoul, Tokyo and Hong Kong. But in mainland China this campaign was practically non-existent.

‘You know the students are doing protesting things, that would never happen in China, like they come out of school and they make a poster and here the parents would never allow this.’

(Female, Ningbo)

In terms of media and government discourses, participants said that the Chinese government is increasingly talking about environmental protection. Several quoted President Xi’s mantra that ‘Green Hills and Clear Waters are Gold & Silver Mountains’. But this discourse is usually about explaining or justifying state policies, rather than emphasising citizens’ individual responsibility – a theme more prevalent in liberal western democracies (Chen and Lees, 2018).

Finally, many participants said that because of the primacy of economic (‘materialist’) concerns, China is not yet ready for rapid moves towards sustainability (a ‘post-materialist’ concern). Individually, many said they were preoccupied with job insecurity or the costs of raising a family, while seeing the government’s main role as raising living standards, not environmental protection. That said, the increasing visibility of problems like air pollution might be changing this, as one participant eloquently discussed:

“Sixty years [ago] we were farmers, so we’ve had a lot of development in the past forty years. Now we’re at a stage where we care more about how much we can spend, not about other things . . . it’s like in the UK in the Industrial Revolution. You guys didn’t care about the environment too . . . But everything takes time, you have to get hurt to change. You have to see the ugliness, the dirty things, to make yourself change.”

(male, Shanghai)

To conclude, this study firstly hints at the power of social norms for quickly changing (green) behaviour in a new country. However, norms can disappear just as quickly as they appear, as seems to have been the case with this group of Chinese graduates following their UK studies.

Secondly, and despite its limited scope, this study suggests some specifically Chinese socio-cultural barriers to greener consumption behaviour: ‘mianzi’ and ‘guanxi’, media and government discourses, and a lack of post-materialist values. Arguably, the responsibility of individuals (and not, say, fossil fuel companies and government infrastructure) towards sustainability has been overstated in western liberal discourses. But it remains the case that changes to individual consumption behaviour – the ways we travel, eat, warm our homes, buy and dispose of products – are vital. It is possible that China may pursue an ‘eco-authoritarian’ approach to this problem, using sanctions and laws rather than ‘soft’ approaches seen so far in liberal democracies. In any case, if and how a country of China’s size and influence fosters more sustainable modes of consumption will be of critical importance in global efforts at decarbonisation and sustainability.

*To reduce the carbon footprint of this fieldwork, I opted to take the train to China, rather than fly. You can read about that decision and its consequences here.

Author Bio

Dr Roger Tyers is a Teaching Associate in Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Nottingham, and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton. His research interests are on behaviour change and public policy, especially regarding sustainability, transport and energy. He can be contacted via R.Tyers@soton.ac.uk or on Twitter @RogerTyersUK

References

Chen, G. C. and Lees, C. (2018) ‘The New, Green, Urbanization in China: Between Authoritarian Environmentalism and Decentralization’, Chinese Political Science Review. Springer Singapore, 3(2), pp. 212–231. doi: 10.1007/s41111-018-0095-1.

Standaert, M. (2017) As It Looks to Go Green, China Keeps a Tight Lid on Dissent, Yale Environment 360. Available at: https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-it-looks-to-go-green-china-keeps-a-tight-lid-on-dissent  (Accessed: 20 August 2019).

Sun, G., D’Alessandro, S. and Johnson, L. (2014) ‘Traditional culture, political ideologies, materialism and luxury consumption in China’, International Journal of Consumer Studies, 38(6), pp. 578–585. doi: 10.1111/ijcs.12117.

Tyers, R. et al. (2018) ‘China-to-UK Student Migration and Pro-environmental Behaviour Change: A Social Practice Perspective’, Sociological Research Online, 42(4), pp. 1–23. doi: 10.1177/1360780418794194.

Tian, M. & Lu, G. (2020, eds.) International Students in China. Special Issue in Chinese. Journal of International Students, 10S(1).

The experience of Chinese students studying in Western countries is one important topic of international student research. The research enthusiasm surrounding Chinese students overseas is not surprising: since the 1990s, China has been a major global exporter of international students. The large population of Chinese students studying in Western, English-speaking countries lends itself to a potential large body of research data. From the perspective of policy-makers and practitioners, understanding the expectations and experiences of Chinese students is crucial for the healthy development of international education sectors.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, observations of Chinese higher education have revealed another important feature of its internationalization process. While China continues to send out their students abroad, the country increasingly enhances its ability to attract in international students. In the year 2001, 61,869 international students studied at Chinese universities. The number increased to 492,185 in 2018.

This trend did not attract much research attention in the first decade of the new century. In recent years, a growing number of scholars has begun to focus on international students in China. Nevertheless, the number of internationally published research is limited, and the scope, breadth and depth of the discussions remain inadequate.

It is noteworthy that we traced many more studies on international students in China in Chinese domestic research literature. This made us reflect on the impact of the language barriers faced by local scholars in disseminating their research in English in international journals.

Against this background this special issue of Journal of International Students was planned and organized. It focuses on the experiences of international students at Chinese universities, providing an important Chinese perspective on the international studies of international students. This special issue includes empirical studies, theoretical discussions and reflections on practices of international student education at universities in different regions of China. Intentionally published in the Chinese language, this special issue hopefully encourages native-Chinese-speaking researchers to contribute to this increasingly important research field. The following is a brief introduction to the nine articles included in the special issue.

The first article, “Stages and Characteristics of the Development in Chinese International Student Education over a 70-Year Period,” written by Lijie Li, analyzed the development of China’s international student education from 1949 onwards. Seven development stages were proposed. Key features of each stage were discussed.

Xiufeng Zhang and Hengwen Yang’s article, “Emergent Topics and Development of the Studies on International Students in China: A Visualized Analysis of CSSCI Journals from 1998 to 2018,” examined research papers in Chinese journals on international students in China. The articles, published between 1998 and 2018, were retrieved from the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index database. The analysis led to the identification of key authors, key research institutes, popular topics and recent trends in the research of international students in China.

“Why did Engineering Students Choose to Study in China?” by Guoyang Zhang and Jiabin Zhu explored the factors influencing international students’ decision to study for an engineering degree at Chinese universities. Data were generated by in-depth interviews with 22 international engineering students at a leading Chinese university. Drawing on the push-pull theory and the three-stage decision-making theory, their qualitative analysis revealed major factors attracting the participants to China, including the availability of scholarships, host university rankings and opportunities for personal growth and professional development.

“Analysis of the Relationship between Learning Environment and Student Engagement: A Case Study of International Undergraduate Students in China” was written by Genshu Lu, Lijie Li and Mei Tian. The article explored the influences of learning environment on international students’ academic engagement. Drawing on a survey involving 1,428 undergraduate international students studying in six Chinese cities, this research revealed uneven academic engagement among the participants. While roughly one fourth of the participants reported to actively participate in learning, the rest was either inadequately engaged or lacked academic engagement. Environment influences were discussed.

Student engagement is also the focus of the article “Exploring Factors Affecting Behavioral, Cognitive and Emotional Engagement of International Undergraduate Students in China” by Meiqiong Gong and Yuhao Cen. This survey study examined the behavioral, cognitive and emotional engagements of 202 international students at a research university in Shanghai. The findings showed that gender, family college education experience and level of study programmes affected the participants’ emotional engagement. In addition, the research revealed the positive influences of supportive campus environment and effective student-faculty interactions on the three dimensions of international student engagement.

Lan Yu and Shucheng Zhu’s “Measurement and Analysis of Learning Engagement of South-Asian Students in Chinese Universities” focused on the learning engagement of 193 South Asian students at three universities in Beijing. Data were generated using a self-developed questionnaire. Results of the exploratory factor analysis revealed four dimensions of South-Asian student engagement. Correlation analysis showed the positive relationships between international student learning motivation, learning behaviors, learning strategies and learning outcomes.

Alexander English and Ruobing Chi’s “A Longitudinal Study on International Students’ Stress, Problem Focused Coping and Cross-Cultural Adaptation in China” explored the relationships between perceived cultural distance, coping strategies and socio-cultural adaptation. The longitudinal survey study involved 121 international students at four universities in eastern China. The results showed that the participants’ perceived cultural distance was not a predictor of their socio-cultural adaptation ability. Compared to their Asian counterparts, non-Asian participants were more likely to adopt problem-focused coping strategies. The research also indicated significant interaction effect between stress, coping strategies and cultures of origin.

“International Student Education as the Cornerstone of Cultural Exchanges: The Case of Xi’an Jiaotong University” was written by Xiaojing Feng, Guangrui Wen, Tingji, Xiangzhe Sun and Wei Zhao. The article discussed teaching, learning and management practices of international student education at Xi’an Jiaotong University in China. Emphasizing humanistic values of international education, the authors reflected on the functions of international student education in the promotion of cultural exchanges and intercultural understanding.

In “Re-thinking International Students’ Voice in South-South Cooperation in Higher Education: An International Development Perspective”, Tingting Yuan reflected on China’s higher education and scholarship provision to international students from developing countries. The reflection was based on a focus-group study involving 40 international degree students in five Chinese cities. The research findings revealed “equality” (i.e. the participants reported little pressure caused by nationality or race) and “sustainability” (i.e. their learning experience is sustainable) as two features of international student experiences in China. The author stressed that the two features reflected China’s distinctiveness in its higher education provision in South-South Cooperation and its status in contemporary global political economy. You can read more details of this article here.

Research Highlighted:

Xing Xu (2021): The enactment of agency in international academic mobility: a case of Chinese female PhD students in Australia. The Australian Educational Researcher. doi:10.1007/s13384-020-00411-x

Read Dr Xu’s other article here.

Background and Research Questions

In China, there has been a rampant folklore about the female PhD, paralleling the female PhD with male and female as a third gender. Whether a third gender discourse was media manipulation or a social epidemic, the current literature on Chinese female PhDs is predominantly developed from an etic perspective. Little is known about how this cohort conceptualises themselves from an emic perspective as they internalise the identity of “female PhD” via their mundane doctoral education practices. Offering a platform for Chinese female PhDs to voice their perceptions is a significant step towards disclosing more pertinent nuances. Using Australia as the research site, this study aimed to investigate the interaction between identity and international academic mobility, with a focus on unpacking two research questions: 1. To what extent is the concept of third gender represented in Chinese female PhDs’ border- crossing doctoral education experiences? 2. How do Chinese female PhDs navigate their identity construction as an in-betweener traversing different sociocultural spaces?

Theoretical Framework and Research Methods

Given the salience of agency in one’s approaches to identity construction and study in an international education context (Inouye and McAlpine 2017; Phan et al. 2019), agency was chosen as the theoretical lens through which this study addressed the above questions. Also, the concept of in-betweenness (Bhabha 1994; Dai et al. 2018) was utilised, which was suitable for analysing how the participants mobilised agency to construct a transformed identity in physical and psychological transactions at and across the boundaries between their home and host cultural spaces. This study utilised a qualitative methodology of semi-structured interview that offers the flexibility to promote the participants’ fruitful reflection (Mill 2001). Depending on the participants’ availability and preference, either face-to-face (4 out of 10) or telephone (6 out of 10) interviews were conducted. Each interview lasted approximately 90 min. In this time, interviewees were encouraged to share their experiences regarding their preparedness prior to the overseas sojourn and their engagement in learning and social activities while studying in Australia. Further, as this study was a gender-based inquiry, they were also required to interpret their lived experiences from a female PhD student’s perspective.

Findings

By and large, this study reveals that the participants’ representation of their identity takes issue with their home cultural discourse, which stigmatises this cohort as a sexless third gender, objects to a deficit discourse that problematises international students as others, and challenges a broader gender discourse among societies which tends to highlight female doctoral students’ structural constraints (e.g. Haynes et al. 2012; Juniper et al. 2012) instead of their personal agency. With positive self-positioning, the participants employed three forms of “agency in mobility”, namely, agency as struggle and resistance, needs-response agency, and agency for becoming, to construct a transformative identity that was materialised through agentic endeavours and myriad structures within the in-between space. This study illuminates two dualities in the findings. The first duality points to the fact that the participants’ enactment of agency must accommodate structural factors in both home space and host spaces. On one hand, the participants’ agency as struggle and resistance was noticeably manifested prior to their mobility, in subverting the restrictive discourse held by their parents and relatives regarding the female PhD in their home context. On the other hand, their needs-response agency and agency for becoming were noteworthy during their stay in the host context. They presented themselves as proactive agents who capitalised on resources to meet professional, culture learning and emotional needs in the alien context. As well, they invested their efforts in the international education trajectory to transform their identity which features flexibility, inclusivity and liberality. The second duality relates to the reciprocity between agency and the in-between space in shaping the students’ identity. Whereas enactment of agency is entangled with the students’ assessment, imagination and manipulation of the in-between space, their agentic outcomes keep transforming the grand structure of that space, a consequence of which influences their agency.

As one of the first studies investigating the agency of international Chinese female PhDs, this study makes theoretical and empirical contributions documented above. It however has several limitations which hopefully can be addressed in future research. One of them is that it can hardly imply any generalisability or representativity of the cohort of international Chinese female PhDs given its small size. Also, the participants feature a great extent of homogeneity in terms of their socioeconomic level and marital status, which may hinder diverse findings from emerging. In order to tackle this, future research may consider investigating a bigger sample size with more heterogeneity. Further, this study only concentrated on an exploration of students’ interpretations at the time point when their sojourn was underway. Future studies may gain further insights by looking into their narrative after repatriating to China upon graduation. Does Chinese female PhDs’ enactment of agency change as they re-enter the home space? What impact does the international mobility have on their meaning-making and practices of agency upon repatriation? These are questions left to be examined.

Author Bio

Dr Xing Xu obtained her PhD from the University of Newcastle, Australia, and is Lecturer at Sichuan International Studies University. Her research interests include internationalization of higher education, doctoral students’ evaluation of educational experience, academic mobility, identity construction of doctoral students, and qualitative inquiry. Her publications have appeared in Higher Education Research and Development, The Australian Educational Researcher, Reflective Practice, etc. Her recent co-authored book The Eastern Train on the Western Track: An Australian Case of Chinese Doctoral Students’ Adaptation was published by Springer in 2020. She can be contacted via email: xing.xu@uon.edu.au.

Research Highlighted：

Geng Wang (2021) ‘Stupid and lazy’ youths? Meritocratic discourse and perceptions of popular stereotyping of VET students in China, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2020.1868977

Read about Dr Wang’s other article here.

ABSTRACT

Since the start of the Reform Era in 1978, vocational education and training (VET) in China has been seen as inferior to academic routes and positioned at the bottom of the educational hierarchy. VET students are stereotyped as being ‘stupid and lazy’ and suffer considerable prejudice in Chinese society. Drawing on Foucault’s disciplinary power and Ball’s idea of performativity, this paper analyses how academically focused, exam-driven societal attitudes, as a form of meritocratic discourse, impact on these students and on how they perceive their stereotyped position within the Reform Era educational system. The findings reveal that these students have internalised the ideology of meritocracy, coming to see themselves as inferior and inadequate compared to their academic counterparts. Turning ‘the gaze’ upon themselves, they examine whether they ‘add up’ and assume responsibility for their own ‘failures’. VET students are trained to be the new kind of youthful subject required to sustain the Reform Era China’s engagement with neoliberal governance.

Introduction

Based on the lived experiences of Chinese vocational college students, this article focuses on the academically focused, exam-driven societal attitudes and sentiments that have permeated so many areas of these young people’s lives. Drawing on Foucault’s (1977) concept of disciplinary power and Stephen Ball’s (2000, 2003, 2012) idea of performativity, this study analyses how such societal attitudes, as a form of meritocratic discourse, impact on vocational students and on how they perceive their position within the Reform Era educational system.

Theoretical framework

In his early work, Discipline and Punish (1977), Foucault suggests that disciplinary power is a form of ‘power-knowledge’ that observes, monitors, shapes, and controls the behaviour of individuals within institutions and society. The technique of examination is particularly powerful as ‘it is a normalizing gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish’, and ‘it establishes over individuals a visibility through which one differentiates them and judges them’ (1977, p. 184). Within a Foucauldian framework, Ball theorised his ideas about the performance of students, teachers, and schools into the notion of ‘performativity’ (2000, 2003, 2012). For Ball, performativity is a technology, a culture, and a mode of regulation – or a system of ‘terror’, in Lyotard’s words – that employs judgments, comparisons, and displays as means of control, attrition, and change (Ball, 2000; 2003). The performances (of individual subjects or organisations) serve as measures of productivity or output, or as displays of ‘quality’, or as ‘moments’ of promotion or inspection. They stand for, encapsulate, or represent the worth, quality, or value of an individual or organisation within a field of judgement (Ball, 2000). Operating in the neoliberal market of performances, the individual is made into an enterprise, a self-maximising productive unit committed to the ‘headlong pursuit of relevance as defined by the market’ (Falk, 1999, p. 25).

Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power, especially his understanding of using examination as a technique (1977, p. 184), provides a conceptual lens to help us understand how individual young subjects are formed in the Reform Era and how the exam culture constructs the ‘docile and capable’ bodies required by neoliberalism (Foucault, 1977, p. 294). Moreover, Ball’s idea of performativity is an important complement to the Foucauldian perspective for this paper, as it looks at the ways in which lists, grades, and rankings work to change the meaning of educational practice within a neoliberal context (Ball, 2013). Ball extended the Foucauldian concepts to consider how performativity as a key mechanism of neoliberal government uses comparisons, judgments, and self-management (Ball, 2013, p. 163). The next section discusses the methods employed for this study.

Findings

Vignettes of several students’ life stories regarding their family expectations and secondary school learning experiences are presented. These vignettes are representative of the stories told by the participants in the study. The findings also demonstrate how the students perceived the exam system and their stereotyped positions.

Discussion and Conclusion

This study reveals the lived experiences of these students when pushed to achieve academic excellence in their previous schooling experiences, their perceptions of the exam system, and their interpretations of their disadvantaged situations. Growing up in an environment where the meritocratic discourse permeated so many areas of their lives, these students had internalised the ideology of meritocracy and consequently the stereotypes against them, seeing themselves as inferior and inadequate in relation to their academic counterparts. Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power and Ball’s idea of performativity have provided useful tools for making sense of vocational students’ lived experiences and opinions in the Chinese Reform Era.

In their research, Gong and Dobinson (2019, p. 339) found both socialist and neoliberal rhetoric at play in the Chinese young people’s narratives they investigated. They supported the view that ‘the existence of a neoliberal discourse in Chinese education does not mean a neoliberal subjectification in the Chinese people’ (Gong & Dobinson, 2019). However, the findings of this paper demonstrate that the Reform Era has produced a neoliberal legacy – vocational students who are stereotyped as self-deserving failures and assigned to the bottom tier of the educational system. Through the discourse of meritocracy, these young people turn ‘the gaze’ upon themselves to see if they ‘add up’, and take responsibility for their own ‘failures’. They are trained to be ‘bodies that are docile and capable’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 294), producing a new kind of youthful subject who can act in their own self-interest in order to sustain the Chinese Reform Era’s engagement with neoliberal governance. However, the perspectives of these students also offer evidence that young people have the potential to move beyond being mere ‘objects and instruments’ for the exercise of disciplinary power.

Author bio:

Dr Geng Wang currently works as a researcher at School of Education, Tianjin University, China. She is also a member of Tianjin Institute for Emerging Engineering Education. She holds a PhD (University of Glasgow) in education. Her research interests revolve around education and work transitions through the lifecourse, particularly in relation to vocational education and training for young people, what influences transitions and their impact on learning and development. She can be contacted via geng.wang0313@hotmail.com.

Research Highlighted:

Liang, Y., Dai, K., & Matthews, K. E. (2020). Students as Partners: A New Ethos for the Transformation of Teacher and Student Identities in Chinese Higher Education, International Journal of Chinese Education, 9(2), 131-150. doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/22125868-12340124

Introduction

In this theoretical discussion paper, in the context of internationalisation, we contribute a novel perspective for Chinese higher education (HE) sectors by considering the possibility of adopting Students as Partners (SaP hereafter) as an initiative to support the transformation of teacher and student identities within Chinese HE, and advocate further adaptation in Chinese pedagogical practices. This paper starts with an introduction on SaP, followed by a discussion about the concept of identity in teaching and learning. Then, based on the survey results on the expectations of Chinese university students and academics in different periods, critical discussion on the trend of identity changes of student and teacher in Chinese universities is undertaken. This leads to further understanding the intersections between the three bodies of literature (SaP, identity, Chinese HE). Finally, a discussion about the possibility of conducting SaP practices in the context of Chinese HE is critically presented.

The growing body of SaP in teaching and learning

The concept of teachers engaging with SaP focuses attention on the pedagogical relationships between learners and teachers (Healey, Flint, & Harrington, 2014; Matthews, Dwyer, Hines, & Turner, 2018). In practice, pedagogical partnerships between students and teachers unfolds as ‘a collaborative, reciprocal process through which all participants have the opportunity to contribute equally, although not necessarily in the same ways, to curricular or pedagogical conceptualisation, decision making, implementation, investigation, or analysis’ (Cook-Sather, Bovill, & Felten, 2014, pp. 6–7). In partnership, certain values are enacted between students and teachers that define the relationships such that SaP is a values-based practice (Matthews et al., 2018). Healey et al. (2014, pp. 14–15) named the values that underpin this relationship as ‘trust, plurality, responsibility, authenticity, honesty, inclusively, reciprocity, and empowerment’, emphasising that students and academic staff benefit from it together. For Cook-Sather et al. (2014), the values of mutual respect, reciprocity, and shared responsibility for learning and teaching were central to SaP. SaP stretches the traditional boundaries of the curriculum where any space on campus becomes a pedagogical space where students and staff can learn together (Dwyer, 2018). Analysis of theoretical frames in research on SaP found that the constructs of power and identity underpinned partnership practices as relational praxis that calls into question taken-for-granted assumptions about the role of the teachers and the students in ways that illuminate power dynamics and relational identities by giving permission to learners and teachers to reshape them (Matthews et al., 2019a). For the sake of sustainability and enriching SaP as a global scholarship, partnership is discussed as a ‘complex cultural-linguistic construct’, emphasising that cultural backgrounds will affect how people interpret SaP (Green, 2019; Cook-Sather et al., 2018).

Identity in teaching and learning

The concept of identity is about how individuals and society answer the question ‘Who are you?’ (Vignoles, Schwartz, & Luyckx, 2011). In this broad notion, ‘people identify their “selves” not only with their individual physical and psychological characteristics, but also with significant others, groups or social categories, material objects, and places’ (Vignoles, 2017, p. 2). Therefore, the identity of a person is shaped by the influence of personal internal factors and the external environment. At the same time, identity also influences the response of the individual to future expectations (Simon, 2004), which plays a vital role in personal development. As co-existing individuals in universities, the identity of students and teachers can be affected by external social and cultural environments and the perception of differences between different individuals. Such an ongoing and changing process will further link to their academic performance and future development (Lounsbury, Huffstetler, Leong, & Gibson, 2005).

A discussion about identity changes in the progress of Chinese higher education

According to the exploration of Cortazzi and Jin (1996), Tam, Heng, and Jiang (2009), Jia (2011) and Kim and Olson (2016), it is evident that there is a general shift in the identities of learners and teachers toward more egalitarian teaching and learning environments. This is a move toward more participatory and relational pedagogies that value the contributions of students in the learning and teaching process. As reform policies continue in the context of internationalisation, we expect that more Chinese university students and teachers will have a new understanding of their identities through the expansion of their horizons and experiences in the global HE context.

Identity perception in pedagogical partnership

In the context of SaP, Cook-Sather (2015, p. 2) defined the notion of identity as ‘how individuals define and experience themselves and are defined by others—how an individual/personal sense of sociocultural location and character intersects with how that individual is constructed in many different ways within any given culture and society’. Therefore, identity in partnership is about how teachers and students treat themselves as teacher, student, and partners, and how they perceive each other (Matthews et al., 2019b). As one of the important factors of pedagogical partnership, Cook-Sather (2015) pointed out that the identities of students and teachers influence and are influenced by partnership. In partnership, it requires teachers to recognise the value of students in the process of forming their identities. In this way, both students and teachers could gain valuable experiences in a mutual and reciprocal way (Bovill, 2019a). The shift of student and teacher identities reflected by SaP scholars resonates with the marked changing trend in Chinese HE over the past two decades. We posit that SaP is a more developed form of this trend while acknowledging that Chinese HE comprises a large, diverse and complex array of institutions where western pedagogies have to be adapted with criticality.

Adapting to the new era of Chinese higher education

The current ethos of partnership is framed within a western-centric, Judaeo-Christian value system and rooted in student engagement (Healey et al., 2014), student voice (Cook-Sather, 2018) and the response to the commitments on democracy (Bovill et al., 2013), and these practices, not without challenges, have proven impactful in western-centric universities. What values should guide the partnership ethos in China? This is a line of conceptual and empirical research we are currently conducting that draws on the voice of Chinese students and academics at Chinese universities and theorisations of Confucian values intersecting with values espoused in western-centric SaP literature (Liang & Matthews, 2020). The recent research (Liang & Matthews, 2020) has strongly shown, with the establishment of more Sino-foreign universities and the continuous broadening of horizons, SaP practices are growing in Chinese universities. Through a program of research into SaP in Chinese HE, we are exploring this belief and further investigating how student-teacher relational identities are being constructed and disrupted through educational reform efforts. This is also a line of research where many more scholars are welcomed and encouraged to explore and investigate.

Conclusion

This article critically discussed the concepts of identity in the Chinese HE con- text by connecting with the western idea, SaP, attempting to provide a possible way for further identity change of the participants in Chinese HE. Based on the comparison of survey results over a decade spanning the century, the perception changes of teachers and students on their identities in Chinese universities indicate a trend of inclusive and respectful teacher-student relationships and more mutually beneficial teacher-student interactions in teaching and learning—resonates with the relational identity reflected by SaP. Meanwhile, the cultural-depended characteristic of SaP and the gradual opening of national policies and initiatives as the scaffold of each other, providing a positive environment.

Authors’ Bio

Mr Yifei Liang is a doctoral student at School of Education, University of Queensland. His research focuses on students as partners (SaP), student engagement, learner-teacher relationship and higher education pedagogy in the context of Chinese higher education. His scoping review of SaP in Asian countries has appeared in Higher Education Research & Development. He can be contacted via y.liang@uq.net.au.

Dr Kun Dai is a postdoc research fellow (funded by China International Postdoc Program) at the Graduate School of Education, Peking University. His research focuses on teaching and learning in higher education, doctoral education, transnational higher education, and intercultural learning and adjustment. Dr Dai is an associate editor of Journal of International Students. His articles have appeared in several peer-reviewed journals, including Compare, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, International Journal of Intercultural Relations, and Oxford Review of Education. He can be contacted via kdai@pku.edu.cn.

Dr Kelly E. Matthews is an associate professor at the Institute of Teaching and Learning Innovation, University of Queensland. Her research interest includes students as partners in higher education, curriculum design in higher education, and university teaching and learning. Dr Matthews is an Australian Learning & Teaching Fellow and she also serves as Inaugural Co-editor, International Journal for Students as Partners (IJSaP). Dr Matthews can be contacted via k.matthews1@uq.edu.au.

Research Highlighted

Li, H., & Costa, C. (2020). ‘Why do we think we are doing everything right [just] because we do it’: what transforms Chinese and Scottish student-teachers’ taken-for-granted views in study abroad experiences. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2020.1852915

About the Study

Our study is set against the backdrop of increasing global interconnectedness and cultural diversity in many communities of the world. It is part of a larger qualitative study which explored how teacher education is internationalised in China and Scotland and how internationalisation shapes Chinese and Scottish student-teachers’ development as globally competent teachers. Although there are emerging studies focusing on how study abroad experiences shape student-teachers’ learning, scant attention is paid to student-teachers’ perspectives about how they come to know and understand themselves and others from perspectives and experiences facilitated by study abroad programmes.

This paper aims to provide an in-depth understanding of the extent to which Chinese and Scottish student-teachers engage with difference while studying abroad in different countries or regions and how these experiences transform their understanding of difference. More specifically, the study drew on data collected through a qualitative questionnaire and semi-structured interviews with 14 student-teachers from two universities in China and Scotland. The research participants featured in the study fall into three groups: 1) Chinese student-teachers who studied abroad through university programmes; 2) Scottish student-teachers who studied abroad through university programmes; and 3) Scottish student-teachers who studied abroad through external means. Using Mezirow’s (1978, 1991, 2003, 2012) transformative learning as the theoretical framework for data analysis, two overarching themes emerged related to how student-teachers experienced and made sense of difference.

Findings:

The research has evidenced that study abroad programmes that provide student-teachers with opportunities to experience difference as cultural outsiders have a transformative potential. Such experiences can trigger strong emotions which are important for setting the stage for student-teachers’ reflection and self-transformation, and thus serve as edge-emotions (Mälkki 2010). However, this requires deep involvement in the ‘new’ environments. Our study shows that limited contact with local cultures can keep student-teachers within comfort zones as happy learners, foreigners, or tourists abroad. To maximise the benefits of study abroad programmes, student-teachers should be provided with opportunities to step outside their comfort zones, ‘enter into the spirit of other cultures’ (Parekh 2000, 227) and thus challenge their taken-for-granted views. We have also found that appropriate learning support – such as preparatory modules, briefings related to cultural awareness before departure and active discussions during and after study abroad programmes – can better prepare student-teachers to imagine themselves in culturally different contexts.

 Additionally, our study suggests that the different forms of reflection that student-teachers experience when abroad can lead to different levels of learning. This finding provides empirical explanations about the distinction between Mezirow’s (1991) three forms of reflection related to transformative learning. Learning predominantly facilitated by content reflection without inquiring into the root causes of difference led many Chinese student-teachers to uncritically assimilate educational ideas and practices from host countries, preventing them from arriving at transformative insights. Further, if student-teachers are not supported to make critical appraisals of the differences they encounter, such encounters can inadvertently reinforce ethnocentric or inappropriate views about themselves and others as shown in some Chinese student-teachers’ experiences. At best, such an approach can trigger some level of process reflection – demonstrating an ability to make changes in their behaviours to accommodate some of the features of the local culture. Nonetheless, ‘change in behavioural repertoire’ through process reflection leaves student-teachers’ assumptions, particularly their challenged views, unquestioned, which cannot allow for ‘epistemological change’ (Taylor 2017, 20).

In contrast, critical reflection on difference moves student-teachers from a transitional stage characterised by challenges in frames of reference and discomforting emotions towards a transformative insight. Students who engaged in  group critique or self-questioning – as facilitated by the Scottish academic support teams – was vital to encourage student-teachers to (re-)examine their taken-for-granted perspectives and formulate more justifiable, open and inclusive views about different cultures and practices. The ‘potentially colonist nature’ of study abroad programmes (Parr 2012, 106) is a common feature in many previous studies exploring the experiences of Western student-teachers sent to developing countries (Buchanan et al. 2017; Santoro and Major 2012), but it was not present in the study abroad programmes promoted by the Scottish university in our study.

Implications:

Our findings presented in this paper provide important pedagogical implications. To provide a discourse for disrupting student-teachers’ frames of reference, the pedagogy of discomfort is an essential approach for both study abroad programmes and teacher education curricula. This requires teacher educators to develop knowledge and skills to “push” student-teachers out of their comfort zones in a supportive way. Central to such an approach is the design of effective learning content and also contexts that can problematise student-teachers’ pre-assumptions and allow them to perceive ‘otherness’ via an informed and reflective approach. Critical pedagogy is also vital to fostering transformative learning in teacher education as it can encourage student-teachers to critically reflect on multiple perspectives or norms held by people of different cultures. This requires teacher educators to develop an appreciation for difference and be critically aware of their own frames of reference and how they influence their practices in teacher education.

Nonetheless, a successful incorporation of the pedagogy of discomfort and critical pedagogy depends on institutional support and professional training of teacher educators who are the key actors in designing, writing up and implementing study abroad programmes (Morley et al. 2019). Meanwhile, conversations among all stakeholders, including student-teachers, teacher educators, researchers, institutional leaders and policymakers, are essential to ensure that the aims of study abroad programmes are effectively communicated and fully integrated in teacher education to foster critical reflection and transformative learning experiences.

Authors’ Bio

Dr Huaping Li is a lecturer at Shanghai Normal University in China. Her PhD looked at the internationalisation of teacher education in China and Scotland from a comparative lens. She is keen on research themes related to teacher mobility, international student mobility and teachers’ global competence in an increasingly global and multicultural context. She is currently working on research projects focusing on university students’ participation in study abroad programmes in China, Scotland and South Korea, and international students’ online learning experiences. She can be contacted via: huaping_li@shnu.edu.cn

Dr Cristina Costa is an academic in the School of Education at Durham University in the UK. She has a strong interest in educational and digital practices and inequalities. She has conducted research on different topics including widening participation, digital literacies and digital inequalities, curriculum innovation and digital scholarship practices. Recent past projects include the ERASMUS+ funded project on Digital Literacy and Inclusion of Learners from Disadvantaged Background, and the SRHE and Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland projects on Estranged Students’ Experiences of Higher Education (with Professor Yvette Taylor).

Currently, she is alongside Dr Huaping Li working on a project funded by the BA/Leverhulme Small Grants entitled ‘From on-campus to online: International students returning to academia in the context of COVID-19’.

Research Highlighted:

Su, X., Harrison, N., & Moloney, R. (2020). The value of Xinjiang class education to ethnic minority students, their families and community: A capability approach. The Qualitative Report, 25(11), 3847-3863. https://nsuworks.nova.edu/tqr/vol25/iss11/5

Abstract

This article illustrates how families of Xinjiang class students perceive the benefits of the Xinjiang class policy for students. Through the work of Melanie Walker, we adopted the capability approach as an analytical tool and collected data through in-depth interviews with families of Xinjiang class students over three months of fieldwork in Xinjiang and eastern China. We obtained a list of seven functional capabilities that illuminate the value of Xinjiang class education, and complaints that need to be addressed in the future. The results demonstrate how the benefits of Xinjiang class education, from a familial perspective, accrue to students, their families, as well as to the wider community. Also, the findings reveal that agency of parents is limited in this educational process. We propose that a pretransition program and improved communication between parents and teachers would facilitate better outcomes for students and their families, and ultimately result in more effective implementation of Xinjiang class policy.

The Xinjiang class policy, as part of a long-term government strategy to support interethnic relationships, and to provide ethnic minorities with access to higher education in Xinjiang, funds middle school students, mostly ethnic minorities from southern Xinjiang’s impoverished rural and nomadic regions to attend boarding schools in predominantly Han-populated cities located throughout eastern China. Research on the Xinjiang class policy has largely focused on the Uyghur-Han dichotomy, and in particular the interplay between the institutionalized authority of the state agenda and the responses of ethnic minority (especially Uyghur) students, with a small number of studies focusing on students who have graduated from Xinjiang classes. Although there are numerous critiques of Xinjiang class education regarding the discussion of its political goals over educational goals, the value of this schooling for ethnic minority students and their families has been largely overlooked, in the general discussion of how Xinjiang classes translated resources into students’ capabilities, and provided them with real opportunities and options to strive for certain achievements.

Through the Capability Approach developed by Amartya Sen, and further illustrated by Melanie Walker in the educational context, the notion of functional capabilities is used to articulate the capabilities that are fostered through education and valued by undergraduates. Functional capabilities capture the significance of both capability (opportunity) and functioning (achievement) in learning. Four overarching functional capabilities and nine subthemes consist the research finding. Specifically, families of Xinjiang class students recognize individual functional capabilities which contains valuable factors such as independence, employability and knowledge on students, after they received education in eastern China. Second, relational functional capabilities being founded in the data refer to students’ development associated with benefits to their family or ethnic community, it focuses on three dimensions including being respected and inspiring community member in terms of academic achievements, financial contribution to the family, and supporting local community members in education. Third, collective functional capabilities refer to one’s role as an agent of social change, in this sense, graduates of Xinjiang classes are keen to improve the situation of their local society. Besides all the functional capabilities fostered through Xinjiang class education, families’ complaints about limited information concerning the program, and top-down communication with school teachers is founded in the data.

Ethnic minority education in China is often viewed as promoting national integration, while ethnic minority people are viewed as passive recipients of mainstream education and its policy directives. The significance of this research lies in its attempt to involve families of Xinjiang class students into the discussion of government schooling and to voice their perspectives about Xinjiang class education, through which we present evidence showing how parents observed students developing functional capabilities through government schooling. Moreover, we find that educational mobility inevitably influences the parent-child relationship largely through the discontinuity of home and host cultures. Specifically, students are separated from their home and community for at least four years, moving strategically between different settings in their “double life,” thus positioning them as familiar strangers both at home and in schools. On the other hand, parents have high expectations in allowing their children to go-away for education, despite the fact that some lack understanding of their children’s “new” lives in inland China. Hence, the existence of silence between students and their families could not be ignored and should be included in the discussion of the long-term impact of government schooling on ethnic minority students.

Authors’ Bio

Dr Xin Su is currently a lecturer at School of Education, Henan University, Kaifeng, China. She has obtained her PhD degree from the Department of Educational Studies, Macquarie University. Her research focuses on ethnic minority education in China, especially those from Xinjiang, and the interplay between family/community expectation and identity exploration. Please direct correspondence to xin.su@henu.edu.cn.

A/P Neil Harrison works at School of Education, Macquarie University. He has worked in Indigenous education as a primary, secondary and tertiary teacher, and has over 30 years of teaching and research experience in the field. Neil’s current research focuses on teaching about the experiences of trauma, and in particular teaching difficult histories.

Dr. Robyn Moloney used to teach in the Department of Educational Studies, Macquarie University, and she is now a professional casual staff at Macquarie University. She is a language educator with 30 years’ experience. Robyn’s research interests include issues of intercultural language and development.

Paul Willis, author of the landmark ethnographic study, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, has written a brand new book. This book is entitled Being Modern in China: A Western Cultural Analysis of Modernity, Tradition and Schooling in China Today. Michael Apple, perhaps channelling the thoughts of many readers, confessed his surprise upon finding this out: ‘Being Modern in China may come as a surprise to some people who are familiar with his work but are not aware that he was recently a professor at Beijing Normal University (BNU)… I too was surprised—but in a good way’ (Apple, 2020, p. 4). The interaction between schooling and social reality is the core of the analysis in this work, as it was for his previous study. The major difference is that, in this case, Willis’s focus is on contemporary China.

What is this book about?

The book is reflective of Professor Willis’s typical ethnographic style. The materials are either directly derived from, or embedded closely within, his personal experience of Chinese society. From 2014 to 2017, Willis was a Professor at a major university in Beijing. He drew on examples from his everyday lived experience of being a ‘lao wai’ (foreigner/outsider) in this Chinese mega-city to construct his book. The work is based primarily on his three field trips (to a migrant school, an NGO organization, and a remote rural village), his students’ retro-ethnographic writings that they produced as part of their course assignments, and his interpretation of relevant media content. While it is impossible to summarise all of the book’s insights in several sentences, it can be broadly understood, as Willis himself puts it, as an exploration of how ‘mesmerised modernity meets the Gaokao.’ In other words, the book considers China’s ‘quite special relationship with modernity,’ examining how this ‘future-obsessed society is simultaneously structured by and in continuous dialogue with the past, specifically in its forms and grammar, as well as in its ultra-high-stakes exam system and its culture stretching back millennia’ (Willis, 2020, pp. viii).

The book begins with the introduction of three main ‘arrows of modernity’, constituted by the ‘symbolic orders’ (as opposed to ‘material orders’) of human experience. Willis argues that these orders are characteristic of contemporary Chinese society. They include the intense veneration of the city and a corresponding hierarchy in which the city is valued more than the country; a ferocious yet moneyless sort of ‘spectral’ consumerism (e.g. consuming fancy items not by materially possessing them, but by mentally experiencing or imagining them); and the rise of an almost ‘supernaturally invested’ use of the Internet (Willis, 2020).

Subsequently, the book goes on to portray and explore the Chinese school system, with Gaokao and its associated ruthless exam system at its centre. It analyses this system in relation to the ‘arrows of modernity.’ In terms of the ‘city/country’ binary, Willis argues that success in the educational system is both materially and symbolically associated with access to the city. In this model, successful students (referred to as G-routers—G stands for Gaokao) move to the city first by attending university and then by building their livelihood through their new life in the city. These successful people may even end up bringing their families with them to the city (as one mother says to a child: ‘When you grow up, where do you want to take me?’ p. 79). Less successful students (referred to as non-G-routers) are reduced to finding an alternative, probably less dignified, path to the city (for example, by becoming migrant workers). In terms of consumerism, the G-routers who thrive in the rigorous school system develop a mentality of ‘delayed gratification’ which chains them to a dull, commodity-deprived present in exchange for the promise of a bright future. The non-G-routers, on the other hand, who have less hope of a bright future are more likely to ‘consume’ their resources fully in the present. They tend to be emersed in commercial styles, cultures and attitudes, even though, paradoxically, they will eventually be those who are most emblematic of ‘spectral’ consumerism due to their fateful lack of financial resources. As for the Internet, given the educational system’s emphasis on hard work, students are warned of the potential threat that the Internet might pose to their academic success. As a result, those who are at different ends of the school system also relate to the Internet differently. The non-G-routers use the Internet for ‘messing around’ and having fun in an immediate sense, whereas the G-routers restrict themselves to becoming ‘netizens,’ presenting their views as carrying weight in serious debates.

How is this book related to Willis’s previous work?

To compare Willis’s new book with his landmark previous study, it will first be necessary to summarize his earlier work. In Learning to Labour, Willis conducted an ethnographic investigation of the experiences of working-class students in UK context. He concluded that the subculture formed by students of working-class origins was partly responsible for them ‘choosing’ working-class jobs. Rather than resisting or challenging the unjust social order, young ‘lads’ who identify their families as ‘working class’ (rather than middle class), will tend to grow hostile towards the mainstream school system (which, after all, is geared towards the middle class). They will therefore identify even more actively with their working-class origins. This not only stops them from achieving upward social mobility through the equality supposedly provided by formal education but also encourages them to exhibit an apparent eagerness for working-class occupations—as if social reproduction is a result of individual’s willing choices.

In some ways, Being Modern in China can be seen as an extension of the basic logic of Learning to Labour. Just as the working-class ‘lads’ in 1970s Britain seem to ‘learn to labour’ willingly, the students in contemporary China (G-routers and non-G-routers alike) ‘learn’ to accept their own social status voluntarily in relation to the rapid modernisation of the wider nation by either passing or failing to pass the Gaokao. More broadly, as part of a neo-Marxist line of thinking, Being Modern in China further attests to how cultural elements retain a relative level of independence from other material and institutional factors, asserting their own power over the shaping of social destinies. In Apple’s words, this ‘constitutes a substantive contribution to the questioning of the orthodox view of economic determinism within the political economy of education’ (Apple, 2020, p. 1).

Another noteworthy and inherently interesting point is that, rather than limiting his theoretical focus (and even his emotional sympathies) to the non-conformists (as was the case in Learning to Labour), in Being Modern in China Willis observes the social world primarily through the lens of conformists. As an invited professor at a prestigious university in Beijing, Willis was, in his own words, “part and parcel” of China’s contemporary education system. More importantly, one of his most important sources of information was his daily interactions with university students, who would necessarily have been G-routers/conformists in high schools, given that they were taking his class. As a champion of social justice with a working-class background, Willis in Learning to Labour was drawn to the side of the non-conformists and the socially ‘oppressed’ almost naturally. He argued that their unique agency should be recognised. In this light, it is particularly interesting that, in Being Modern in China, he was instead emotionally invested in his own students (necessarily), who were primarily privileged conformists. This likely provided a special kind of ‘tension’.

Why should researchers in the field of educational mobility read this book?

For those who fall broadly into fields related to the sociology of education, this book explores the reproduction of the existing social order within and through people’s experiences of schooling. It also provides detailed examples of how this process is mediated by cultural practice, as well as how it intersects with the wider context of a rapidly changing, modern, and modernised society (a context that should not be seen as limited to contemporary China alone but typical of many social realities).

For those researchers who focus specifically on China, this book offers valuable insights into China’s education systems, the experiences of its students, and more. It also interrogates the Chinese character not through a top-down analysis of policies or propaganda but through people’s daily lives.

On a less formal and more personal note, for researchers who are of Chinese origin or are already very familiar with China, this book offers an opportunity to ‘turn the familiar into the strange.’ For those who are not familiar with the Chinese society, by contrast, it ‘turns the strange into the familiar.’ Finally, by blurring the boundary between academic and popular writing, Willis uses ‘poetic and forceful prose’ that ‘is a great pleasure to read’ (Xu, 2018, p. 162).

References and links

Apple, M. W. (2020). Test Scores, Identities, and Cultural Possibilities, Educational Policy. Online first. Advance online publication. 1-10. doi:10.1177/0895904820904948

Willis, P. (1977) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs. Farnborough: Saxon.

Willis, P. (2020) Being Modern in China: A Western Cultural Analysis of Modernity, Tradition and Schooling in China Today. Cambridge: Polity.

Xu, J. (2018) Being Modern in China by Paul Willis (review), China Review International 25(2): 161-165. Doi: 10.1353/cri.2018.0037

Research Highlighted:

Lu, L. (2020). The (In)significance of Race in Singapore’s Immigration Context: Accounts of Self-Differentiation by Academically Elite Students. Journal of Language, Identity & Education, 1-18. doi:10.1080/15348458.2020.1832494

Introduction

In order to counter low birthrates, the Singapore government recruits top-performing students from China and Vietnam with scholarships to augment the local talent pool. Another criterion, is that most immigrants must be ethnically Chinese, so as to fit into the nation’s majority racial group. This study examines whether and how race (or other factors) might play a part in the formation of friendships and relations amongst a group of top-performing students in Singapore. Rather than assuming the importance of race from the outset, I looked at how various aspects of identity emerge from the ways they described their school experiences and peers in interviews and focus group discussions. What I found was that instead of race, informants referred to themselves and others in terms of Singaporean-ness. They used different labels of nationality and the varying amounts of time they have spent as immigrants in Singapore to mark themselves and others as different. Most importantly, ways of speaking that showed that they were from China were seen as barriers to integration with locals.

Method

The data I present in this paper are part of an ethnographic study I undertook in Singapore between March and December 2014. This paper focuses on two datasets. The first dataset consists of life history interviews that I conducted with 20 individuals. This was aimed at uncovering the educational pathways they undertook, as well as how they experienced life in each school they attended. The second dataset was collected while I was a participant-observer for six months in a particular peer group of 11 core members, of whom three were involved in the life history interviews. This peer group is made up of individuals who had graduated from St Thomas’ in 2011.

I focused on data when informants described their experiences in school, and talked about themselves in relation to others, for example, what and how labels of race or nationality were used in these descriptions. I then considered how the use of these labels and descriptors might be linked to wider attitudes and common stereotypes in Singapore society. The method of data analysis is based on the principles outlined by Bucholtz and Hall (2005) regarding identity, as well as Blommaert and Rampton’s (2011) approach toward investigating rather than assuming categories that individuals (dis)associate themselves from/with. In this paradigm, identity is seen to be an emergent product of linguistic practice, possibly encompassing macro-level demographic categories (e.g. race); it may be indexed through a speaker’s style, use of language forms and positioning, and is relationally constructed between self and other; it may be in part intentional, in part habitual (and less conscious), in part an outcome of negotiation and co-construction with interlocutors, in part linked to wider social structures and systems.

Key Findings

Findings suggest that labels of race were never used in their accounts. Instead, individuals tended to refer to themselves and others in terms and characterisations of Singaporean-ness.

Labels of nationality and the amount of time spent in Singapore are used to distinguish themselves and others. Negative stereotypes were most associated with immigrants from China, though informants from China also reproduced these same associations when referring to persons from China who have arrived more recently in Singapore. Crucially, practices that indicate that someone is from China are not valued and at times to be avoided, while local ways of behaving (such as using Singlish) are seen to be more important when interacting with locals. In Singapore’s context, these patterns of self-differentiation might be explained if they are seen in the light of wider discourses: (i) anti-immigrant sentiment; (ii) the status of English and Singlish in Singapore; and (iii) how styles of English are linked to notions of social class.

Implications

The state’s conceptualisation of race and ethnicity fails to recognise how overt ‘Chineseness’ is not valued in local contexts when academically elite immigrants interact with their Singaporean peers. While both groups might be identified by the state as ethnically Chinese, immigrant informants from China possess different linguistic and cultural practices from Singaporean Chinese. These different practices manifest as inequalities when transported across contexts (different spaces). My informants respond to the altered value of their original practices by adopting acceptable repertoires (English/Singlish) when interacting with locals and abandoning repertoires that index migrant status. The state’s apprehension of ethnicity – expecting that immigrants can fit in locally just because they fit official racial categories – does not consider how cultural practices are re-valued when transported to a different space. Singapore’s case offers a cautionary tale for how the transnational movement of highly-skilled and talented individuals, even when supposedly sharing similar ethnic characteristics with the local polity, is never seamless and straightforward.

Author Bio

Luke Lu is currently Lecturer at the Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies, Nanyang Technological University. He has completed a Linguistic Ethnography of academically elite students in Singapore, examining how they discursively positioned themselves to wider structures and discourses in local spaces. He is primarily interested in approaches to interactional sociolinguistics and ethnography, pertaining to issues such as transnational mobility, education, language rights, language planning and policy, and ethnicity. Luke can be contacted via lujiqun@ntu.edu.sg.

Research Highlighted

Siqi Zhang & Cora Lingling Xu (2020). ‘The Making of Transnational Distinction: an Embodied Cultural Capital Perspective on Chinese Women Students’ Mobility’, British Journal of Sociology of Education, p.1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2020.1804836

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About the article

The rapid rise of international education worldwide and China’s dramatic economic development have led to a boost in Chinese students’ pursuit of transnational higher education in the UK. Statistics from the Centre for China and Globalization (CCG 2015) reports that more than 60% of the international Chinese students in Britain were female Chinese students in 2015. With the implementation of one-child policy, women’s improved position in Chinese society and family is the driving force for urban Chinese middle-class young women’s drastically rising transnational education mobility (Kajanus 2015a). Many studies focus on the visible cultural capital and students’ distinction such as the degrees which Chinese international students obtained and its conversion to job competitiveness, but less visible embodied cultural capital has been somewhat neglected in the literature of international students’ distinction. Distinction can also be problematic as mobility sometimes disrupts the advantages that are usually assumed to be linked with cross-border student mobility (Xu 2015; Xu 2017; Xu 2018a; Xu 2018b). Transnational distinction is highly relevant in an age when western degree inflation intersects with harsh gender expectations for Chinese women student migrants, a significant group of players in the scene of UK higher education. As there are rising numbers of women Chinese students participating in the flow of transnational educational mobility, it appears crucial to investigate how Chinese women students studying in the UK negotiate their positioning, especially in relation to how they construct their own distinction to justify their transnational education moves. This article aims to address these research questions: How does transnational student mobility from China to the UK still bestow these women students’ ‘distinction’ against the backdrop of ‘Western degree inflation’ in China’s labour market? More explicitly, when Chinese women students claim distinction from gaining a UK degree, what is the significance of such transnational student flows that result from such a search for distinction?

This research applied a mixed qualitative methodology including participant observation and semi-structured interviews in a British university. Participant observations were conducted in diverse students’ social activities. Meanwhile, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 25 participants during the fieldwork. We find that upon entering a new transnational HE field, most participants expressed a strong disappointment and even depression when their middle-class social status was overridden by their status as ‘racialised migrants’ (Cui 2015). Most participants felt that their middle-class social status, social network and family resources in China were cut off due to transnational mobility. The transnational education mobility seems to diminish the likelihood of converting their possessed capitals into a desired distinctive status in this new transnational HE field (Xu 2017). However, it was shared by most participants that distinction can be achieved through accumulating embodied cultural capital, namely, the absorption of new gendered practice. Their distinction is reflected from their active comparison with their Chinese peers and their peers studying in the US on the basis of the new embodied acquisition of global cultural taste obtained from the cultural opportunities/consumption that transnational mobility offered. Some participants perceived that performing locally accepted middle-class British made them feel more recognised in this transnational HE field. Meanwhile, most of the participants embodied increasing global cultural tastes through frequenting exhibitions, museums and galleries in their spare time. However, participants’ interpretation of ‘British local middle class’ or ‘embodied higher taste’ was restricted to their perception because of the mixture of their middle-class taste and their taste for popular mass culture. We also find that Chinese women students’ choices of returning to their home country after graduation were also strongly affected by the gender norms in home country, participants feel that their absorption of new gendered disposition of mind was restricted when taking her final destination into consideration.

We argue that these students’ transnational distinction can be contingent upon the fields where they perceived they were/would be in, the mixture of what embodied cultural capital they have actually obtained and which peer groups they compared themselves with. In these students’ attempts to mark their transnational distinction, they displayed notably uninformed understanding of the complex racial/ethnic and class fabrics of the British society. Such a partial frame of understanding in relation to the host society had induced a mixture of results, including their heightened sense of marginalisation and their romanticised ascription of cultural superiority over peers studying in other popular destinations. But it still took time for students to ascertain what newly acquired cultural capital and disposition of mind to maintain when the field is about to change. Therefore, we argue that the distinction achieved during transnational student mobility is field-specific and educational mobility can both relegate their social status as well as elevate their middle-class distinction under certain circumstances. There still exist complexity to their realisation of distinction.

Authors’ Bio

Siqi Zhang (PhD) is a teaching fellow in Moray House School of Education and Sport at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD research explores the ways in which gender and cultural capital are closely linked with international students’ transnational educational choices and their transnational study experiences during their stay in a Scottish university. Her research interests include sociology of education, gender, cultural capital, transnational educational mobility, social inequality in education and student experience in international higher education. She can be contacted via siqi.zhang@ed.ac.uk; Twitter: @_Siqi_Zhang.

Dr. Cora Lingling Xu

Dr Cora Lingling Xu (PhD Cambridge, FHEA) is Assistant Professor at Durham University, UK. Her research interests include educational mobilities, identities and social theories. She has researched cross-border student and academic migration, ethnic minority and rurality topics within contemporary Chinese societies. She is an editorial board member of the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Cambridge Journal of Education and International Studies in Sociology of Education. She is founder and director of Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities. She has more than a dozen publications in journals such as The Sociological Review, British Journal of Sociology of Education, International Studies in Sociology of Education, Time and Society,  and European Educational Research Journal. You can access her publications here. She can be contacted via Email: lingling.xu@durham.ac.uk; Twitter: CoraLinglingXu.

Research Highlighted

Mulvey, B., & Lo, W. Y. W. (2020). Learning to ‘tell China’s story well’: the constructions of international students in Chinese higher education policy. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1-13. doi:10.1080/14767724.2020.1835465

Our goal in this study was to understand how international students are constructed in Chinese policy texts, using a policy-as-discourse approach. We draw out the nuances and possible internal contradictions of policy texts and the various ways students’ roles are represented within them, by taking a discursive approach which is rarely used in studies on international student mobility policy, with a few exceptions (see Riaño, Mol, and Raghuram 2018b). A critical discussion of the ethical dimensions of Chinese higher education internationalisation is not present in the existing literature (e.g. Pan 2013; Zhu and Zhang, 2017; Ma and Zhou 2018; Liu and Wang 2020), despite the rapid rise of China as a destination for international students. As such, we outline the discursive constructions of the roles of international students in national policy texts and discuss these constructions in relation to a body of critical approaches to internationalisation that has developed with reference to Western internationalisation (e.g. George Mwangi et al. 2018).

In terms of the approach taken to analysing the data, we draw on the important work of Lomer (2017a) who applies a policy-as-discourse analysis to national policies in the UK. This approach can be described as broadly Foucauldian, in that discourses are seen as socially produced forms of knowledge which limit and shape what it is possible to think or express about social practices (Bacchi and Goodwin 2016).

The major themes we found in our analysis are as follows: (i) students as para-diplomats, (ii) students as a point of mutual exchange, (iii) students as future elites, (iv) students as of insufficient quality, (v) students as a potential public security threat. The dominant representation of students uncovered through the thematic analysis conceives of students as tools for the realisation of China’s foreign policy goals. This construction of students’ roles is common in other contexts such as the UK, the USA, and Canada (e.g. Wilson 2014; Trilokekar 2015; Lomer 2017a). For example, Wilson highlights how scholarship programmes in the West, such as the Fulbright and Colombo programmes (Sidhu 2006; Tran and Vu 2018) often portray international students as playing the role of a ‘para-diplomat’. However, in these contexts, the para-diplomat construction appears to have become less dominant over time, with neoliberal constructions of students becoming more common as a result of the ‘aid to trade’ (Stein and de Andreotti 2016) shift in higher education. This is in contrast to Chinese policy texts, where the construction of students as para-diplomats is primary and the recruitment of students is not undergirded by economic considerations.

The narrative of students as para-diplomats appears to change subtly over time, as international student recruitment is referenced in relation to China’s grand strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) (e.g. MOE, 2017c; MOFCOM, 2018). This ‘outward’ shift is reflected in policy documents released since the inception of the BRI which increasingly employ a discourse of ‘mutual understanding’ between China and BRI countries through ISM (MOE 2019a). Indeed, a stated goal of the BRI is to ‘strengthen exchanges and mutual learning between different civilizations’ (BRI 2020). Policy texts also appear to suggest that to achieve the desired outcome of improved international relations from the recruitment of students, said students recruited by Chinese universities should not be ordinary members of their home societies. For example, the 13th five-year plan for the development of national education calls for the ‘strengthening the cultivation of elites’ through international education (MOE 2017d), and a press release on the Belt and Road Initiative includes a quote from Xu Tao, Director of the Department of International Cooperation and Exchange in the MOE, who emphasises that a goal of China’s international student recruitment is to ‘cultivate high-level talented individuals’ and to ‘train young elites and future leaders in developing countries’ (MOE 2017a).

The analysis also uncovered a theme which is present in documents from 2018 onwards: the suggestion that the ‘quality’ of international students should be improved, implying, contradictorily, that students are not future elites who are highly likely to go onto positions of influence. For example, it is suggested that ‘University admissions departments … should guarantee and continuously improve the quality of international students’ (MOE 2018b). This calls into question the idea that China is recruiting international students who will go on to become societal elites able to act as ‘interpreters’ of China in their home country (Scott-Smith 2008). Recent research, which reports that universities in China needed to lower entrance requirements in order to recruit more international students, echoes this finding (Song 2018; Liu and Wang 2020).

The final theme highlighted in this article is one in which international students are presented as requiring guidance in order to understand and obey Chinese laws. This theme echoes Ho’s (2017, 26) finding that some international students perceived that administrators were concerned with the ‘moral degradation’ of domestic students through contact with international students. This theme also emerged after 2018, possibly in response to the perceived problem of international students ‘misbehaviour’, several instances of which were reported in Chinese state-controlled media (Yan 2019). This led to an unnamed MOE official stating that universities ‘should seriously punish foreign students if they violate those rules’ in the state media outlet People’s Daily (Yan 2019). It is likely that the emerging policy construction of students as potential security threats is related to these developments. In other words, this policy is framed as a solution to the ‘problem’ of unruly international students constructed through policy discourse.

In the conclusion of this article, we seek to reflect on these findings in a critical light. We suggest that interaction between sending and host countries within the Global South clearly offers opportunities for re-thinking the fundamentally exploitative and imbalanced relationships which inform discourses contained within ISM policy in the Global North. A discourse of mutual exchange has emerged in Chinese policy texts, which seems to be fundamentally opposed to the constructions of students as valuable to the extent that they are economically or politically useful, which appear to reproduce those found in the Global North. The narrative associated with the BRI seems to hint at a move towards the kind of internationalisation conceived of in ‘soft’ critiques of internationalisation. For example, literature on global public goods often calls for a conceptualisation of internationalisation based around notions of ‘win-win’ (Marginson 2007, 331) and ‘shared prosperity’ (Stein 2017, 13) echoing the narrative of ‘mutual exchange’ in BRI related ISM policy discourse. However, policy discourses are often contradictory (e.g. O’Connor 2018), and in this case, Chinese ISM policy discourse also presents international education as a resource for securing national (geo)political advantage, and international students variously as politically docile tools for securing this national advantage and as future elites, and at same time as academically and morally deficient, and as a public security risk, effectively undermining the narrative of mutual civilisational exchange.

Ben Mulvey is a PhD candidate at the Education University of Hong Kong. Ben’s research focuses on educational migration between Africa and China, and what this student flow reveals about China’s attempts to (re)shape the global “field” of higher education. He can be contacted via the following email address: bmulvey@s.eduhk.hk

Listen to an interview with Ben Mulvey; Read the summary of Ben’s interview

Read Ben’s other entries here, here and here.

William Lo is an Associate Professor and the Associate Head of the Department of International Education at the Education University of Hong Kong. His research areas include higher education policy and comparative and international higher education, with a focus on East Asia. He has published more than 50 articles, chapters, books, and special journal issues. He serves as an Associate Editor for Asian Pacific Journal of Education and Higher Education Evaluation and Development. He holds a PhD in social policy from the University of Bristol.

Research Highlighted

Chen, S. (2020). Competing for privilege –aspirational youth at a Chinese high school entrepreneurship competition. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 1-16. doi:10.1080/01425692.2020.1836475

Abstract

The recent expansion and diversification of the overseas education market in China have given birth to the so-called “Background Promotion Projects” that help elite university aspirants elevate their application backgrounds. Based on ethnographic findings of a Chinese high school entrepreneurship competition, one of such programs, this study analyzes how prospective applicants to Western elite universities learned “the art of aspiration” by constructing and performing entrepreneurial subjectivities. Building a link between Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “the capacity to aspire” and Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s theory of “the aspirational class,” this study reveals how the deepening social stratification in China and the rise of a global meritocracy reinforce each other. Demonstrating how privilege is consolidated and justified through the (re)production of aspirations, this study further contributes to the theorization of class reproduction and education at a time of post-industrial change and international mobility.

Introduction

Situating a high school entrepreneurship competition in the context of Chinese globalization and industrial upgrade, this ethnographic study offers a glimpse into the overseas education service where different capitals – the material, social and cultural – are mobilized for the (re)production of aspirational subjectivities through the performances of entrepreneurship. Examining the preparatory stage of student migration, this study reveals how deepening social stratification in China and the rise of a global meritocracy reinforce each other in the transnationalized production of inequality.

Theoretical framework

This study builds a link between Elizabeth Currid-Halkett (2017) theory of “the aspirational class” and Arjun Appadurai’s (2013) concept of “the capacity to aspire”. Termed by Currid-Halkett (2017) as the “aspirational class”, the new elite class elevated with the ascendance of a new post-industrial economy. One of the most telling consumption habits that set them apart from other social groups is their (increasingly) heavy investment in their children’s education (ibid). Currid-Halkett’s notion of the “aspirational class” also applies to the Chinese context where a shift from a labour-intensive industry to a knowledge-based economy is taking place. Similar to their American counterparts, the new elite in China have stepped up their investment in education with the goal of sending their children to elite universities in developed countries.

The selection criteria used at these elite universities are based on a meritocracy paradigm that values a proven track record of achievements that signal sophistication, talent and intellectual promise (Liu 2011). Such aspirations and experiences align with the shared values of the aspirational class, and familiarity with these cultural values and social practices is closely related to what Appadurai terms “the capacity to aspire”. According to Appadurai, aspirations as cultural capacities are “formed in interaction and in the thick of social life” (2013, 187) and are closely related to local ideas and beliefs (Appadurai 2013). Seen from this perspective, the high school entrepreneurship competition, in a Bourdieuian sense, is part of an overseas education pipeline that enhances the students’ capacity to aspire globally.

Methods

This competition is held once every semester break in Shenzhen. I conducted my ethnographic study on two occasions: 13–17 July 2017, and 22–25 February 2018. I compensated for the short duration of the field study by employing a mix of data collection methods, including interviews, focus groups and onsite and participant observations. I conducted semi-structured interviews with 28 out of 57 participants in total. Informants were recruited by way of snowball sampling, starting with those with whom I became acquainted during the competition and extending to their team members. I also conducted focus group studies with the organizers of the competition, as well as with the advisors, coaches, judges and parents of the competition participants.

Ethnographic findings

The competition not only discouraged the participants’ fixation on conspicuous consumption, but it also attempted to cultivate the contestants’ cultural omnivorousness. As a marked feature of the aspirational class, such an eclectic cultural preference is a new form of cultural capital that reflects education and comfort in diverse environments (Currid-Halkett 2017), which provides advantages in an open world (Hanquinet, Roose, and Savage 2014). Besides, participants’ display of their ease in and enjoyment of the gruelling competition was a manifestation of cultivated talent acquired through long, sophisticated training as well as a validation of their elite positions. Moreover, the competition was a social event where young aspirants met and networked with peers, educators, experienced entrepreneurs and potential investors. In this process, participants engage in a mode of interaction that reflects privileges and advantages in social life. Last but not least, the competition enabled applicants to build up a track record of extracurricular achievements conducive to their future study and work.

Conclusion

The preparatory services provided by overseas education agencies, as a form of concerted cultivation, not only prepare applicants to navigate the admission systems of elite schools, but also enhance their capacity to aspire by offering a continuing record of individuated and skill-based experiences. Acquiring the mindset and practical discipline of a “strategic cosmopolitan” (Mitchell 2003, 387), the participants equip themselves in ways that suit the imperatives of the global labour market. For this young aspirational class, with their prospective elite educational credentials, transnational mobility and understanding, knowledge of and social connections in the global labour market, “desire tends to inform possibility: what is imagined is simply made possible” (Sellar and Gale 2011). Their less-privileged peers, who are absent from these types of high school entrepreneurship opportunities, however, may as well be “out” of the global economic arena.

References

Appadurai, A. (2013). “The Future as Cultural Fact.” In Essays on the Global Condition. London: Verso.

Currid-Halkett, E. (2017). The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Hanquinet, L., H. Roose, and M. Savage. (2014). “The Eyes of the Beholder: Aesthetic Preferences andthe Remaking of Cultural Capital.” Sociology 48 (1): 111–132.

Liu, A. (2011). “Unraveling the Myth of Meritocracy within the Context of US Higher Education.” Higher Education 62 (4): 383–397.

Mitchell, K. (2003). “Educating the National Citizen in Neoliberal Times: From the Multicultural Self to the Strategic Cosmopolitan.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 28 (4): 387–403.

Sellar, S., and T. Gale. (2011). “Mobility, Aspiration, Voice: A New Structure of Feeling for Student Equity in Higher Education.” Critical Studies in Education 52 (2): 115–134.

Author Biography

Dr. Siyu Chen works as an assistant professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen). She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose work spans the fields of creative industries, education, urban studies and media studies. Her research examines the mutually constitutive nature of social practices, modes of power, and the intersections of multiple axes of identity, including place, gender and class. She is the winner of the Theodore C. Bestor Prize for Best Graduate Paper on the Anthropology of East Asia 2015 and the Asian Anthropology Best Paper Award 2017. She can be contacted via siyu.chen06@gmail.com.

Research Highlighted

Heng, T. T. (2020). The Role of Theory in Qualitative Research: Insights from Studies on Chinese International Students in Higher Education. Journal of International Students. doi:https://doi.org/10.32674/jis.v10i4.1571

Abstract

Given the historic high in international student numbers in higher education institutions worldwide, research on international students has likewise kept up with the growth. However, scholars observe that research in both higher education and international students lacks theoretical engagement and exhibits narrow epistemological framing. Drawing on Tight’s (2004) and Abdullah et. al’s (2014) approach, this article examined 43 qualitative research articles about Chinese international students to investigate the role of theory in influencing research designs, aims, and findings. Using research on Chinese international students as an analytic example, this study found that twenty-eight percent of the articles lacked theoretical engagement, and that acculturation and sociocultural theories were most popular. Further, more than half of the articles focused on Chinese international students’ challenges, in contrast to their changes or agentic potential. These findings are discussed in light of the implicit assumptions scholars make, with the conclusion that there is an urgent need for scholars to grow, diversify, and create theories relating to research on international students.

Background

Theory in research is defined as “a set of concepts and the proposed relationships among these, a structure that is intended to represent or model something about the world” (Maxwell, 2005, p. 42). Typically, research studies are guided by a theoretical or conceptual framing that draws on relevant theories and ideas—with their attendant assumptions—to inform research design, focus, method(s), and, eventually, data analysis. Other than framing research, theories can also be generated, for instance, through the grounded theory technique (Strauss & Corbin, 1994). Theoretical or conceptual frameworks are closely bound to the researcher’s paradigm, which, in turn, is shaped by the researcher’s personality, experiences, culture, and external environment. Qualitative educational research, in particular, thus is assumed to be value-laden (Lather, 1992; Pillow, 2003).

Theoretical engagement in qualitative research is essential. Without it, studies have limited reach and a field’s maturation can be inhibited (Abdullah et al., 2014; Kuhn, 1970; Rocco & Plakhotnik, 2009). Yet, Tight (2004) found that more than half of higher education research is atheoretical. Likewise, Abdullah et al. (2014) found 66% of articles on international students reflected low theoretical engagement and attributed this to the peripheral and economic lens through which international students are frequently viewed. As both studies offered macro perspectives around the issue of theory, this article drew on the method of both studies to offer a more intimate analysis of the theory-research nexus in the literature on Chinese international students. Chinese international students are used as an analytic case as they are the largest source of international students worldwide.

Method

Taking reference from Tight’s (2004) and Abdullah et al.’s (2014) research approach, a literature review was conducted on Chinese international students in 16 higher education journals. Included in the review was qualitative research articles between 2005 and 2017 that involved more than 50% Chinese international students as participants, and that focused on their experiences. Forty three articles were analysed for general publication trends, method/ologies, degree of theoretical explicitness (implicit, some, explicit), research focus, and theoretical perspectives.

Findings

General publication, method, participant, and location trends

There was a growing number of research on Chinese international students with 67% of the articles published after 2010. Interview was the most popular data collection method (84%), followed by descriptive survey (39%), and focus group (14%). More studies involved graduate students (47%) as opposed to undergraduate (19%). The largest proportion of studies was located in the United Kingdom (26%), followed by the United States (16%) and Australia (16%), New Zealand (12%), and Canada (9%).

Theoretical engagement

Thirty nine percent of the articles was theoretically explicit, 33% provided some evidence, and 28% was theoretically implicit. The most popular theories were sociocultural theories (39%) and acculturation theories (33%).

Theory-research focus nexus

Sixty percent of the articles focused primarily on challenges or issues faced by Chinese international students, with 38% of these articles offering an extended explanation for the challenges. Articles published after 2010 were more predisposed to acknowledging students’ agency (59%). Research using sociocultural theories tended to feature students’ agency more than those using acculturation theories.

Discussion

Only 39% of articles on Chinese international students explicitly used theories to frame the research or engaged deeply in theoretical discussions, highlighting, again, the marginalized role of theory in research. Low theoretical engagement in research could spell implications for research design. For instance, the aggregation of undergraduates with graduates reveals an assumption that the experiences of these two groups are similar (but are they?) and the under-utilization of methods like reflections and action research may suggest that scholars assume Chinese international students are to be researched on (but not with?). That most research tended to focus on students’ challenges (60%) as opposed to changes/agency (40%) invites us to ponder what assumptions we hold around Chinese international students and how research may unknowingly perpetuate implicit bias around them. Further, that research using acculturation theories appear less predisposed to examine student agency may reveal the underlying assumption of the theory that adaptation to a dominant culture is ideal. This holds consequences for how international students are portrayed—as meeting, or not, the standards of their new environment—possibly illuminating hidden assumptions we make of Chinese (and other) international students.

In sum, this article invites us to reflect on the assumptions scholars make in their choice of theory, the assumptions a theory is premised on, as well as the consequences of chosen theories on international student research. Such reflexivity can guard against narrow ways of researching and knowing, and are essential in elevating research and helping the international student field mature.

References

Abdullah, D., Abd Aziz, M. I., & Mohd Ibrahim, A. L. (2014). A “research” into international student-related research: (Re)visualising our stand? Higher Education, 67(3), 235–253. doi:10.1007/s10734-013-9647-3

Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions (2nd ed.). University of Chicago Press.

Lather, P. (1992). Critical frames in educational research: Feminist and poststructural perspectives. Theory into Practice, 31(2), 87–99.

Maxwell, J. A. (2005). Qualitative research design: An interactive approach. SAGE.

Pillow, W. (2003). Confession, catharsis, or cure? Rethinking the uses of reflexivity as methodological power in qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 16(2), 175–196.

Rocco, T. S., & Plakhotnik, M. S. (2009). Literature reviews, conceptual frameworks, and theoretical frameworks: Terms, functions, and distinctions. Human Resource Development Review, 8(1), 120–130.

Strauss, A., & Corbin, J. (1994). Grounded theory methodology: An overview. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 273–285). SAGE.

Tight, M. (2004). Research into higher education: An atheoretical community of practice? Higher Education Research & Development, 23(4), 395–411.

Author Bio

Tang T. Heng is an Assistant Professor at the Nanyang Technological University—National Institute of Education. By studying what happens when people and ideas circulate across borders, she highlights issues related to diversity and education through a comparative and international education lens. Concurrently, her research foregrounds the role sociocultural contexts play in shaping the values and behaviors of learners/teachers, and how they adapt to different contexts. Tang was conferred the Comparative and International Education Society’s Study Abroad and International Students SIG Early Career Award in 2019. Her research has been published in international refereed journals like Journal of Studies in International Education and Studies in Higher Education. She can be reached via email at tangtang.heng@nie.edu.sg.

Research Highlighted:

Dai, K., & Hardy, I. (2020). The micro-politics of cultural change: a Chinese doctoral student’s learning journey in Australia. Oxford Review of Education, 1-17. DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2020.1825369

Read about Kun’s other publication here.

Abstract

Considerable research has investigated Chinese students’ intercultural insights in different national contexts, where culture is understood as coterminous with nationality/regionality. However, few have explored the more micro-political aspects of Chinese doctoral students’ narrative experiences in national settings, within a more cultural framework. This article seeks to take such an approach through a reflexive narrative account of the first author’s experiences as a Chinese doctoral student in Australia. To do so, we draw upon Bhabha’s notion of “in-between space”, and work by Gill on intercultural adjustment. We show how the first author’s doctoral journey was characterised by a sense of “in-betweenness” at the micro-political level, including in relation to the cultural boundary crossing associated with having to change fields of study and supervisors. This narrative provides a nuanced account of an international student’s experiences and reflects the usefulness of examining the particularity of international doctoral students’ learning experiences at a much more fine-grained level, via a more intercultural lens.

Introduction

Doctoral education is a significant part of the HE system and doctoral students are also one of the major groups contributing substantively to creativity and innovation in knowledge, which productively influences the development of society (Shin, Postiglione, & Ho, 2018). At the same time, when international doctoral students encounter different academic and sociocultural contexts, they experience complex changes to their identity, with attendant changes to their sense of agency as diasporic academics (Lee & Elliot, 2020). As part of this journey, vacillating between the standpoints of being a more independent and dependent learner, as a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate, can be associated with senses of both empowerment and disempowerment (Goode, 2007). Thus, doctoral students’ learning experiences can be very diverse, so it is necessary to understand the specificity of the circumstances within which these students conduct their research in different educational contexts (Pearson et al., 2011). To contribute to scholarship in this field, we illustrate and analyse the first author’s experiences as an international doctoral student at an Australian university, and how specific micro-political intercultural issues that he faced during his journey influenced his learning through this experience.

Research Method

This study adopts notions of intercultural adjustment, especially Gill’s (2007) analysis of Chinese students’ transformative learning framework. Furthermore, Bhabha’s (1994) concept of in-between space was used to examine the fluidity of the first author’s experiences through a more critical lens. To tell the story of this positioning in various in-between spaces of intercultural adjustment as part of the first author’s doctoral journey, we draw upon a reflexive narrative approach. In this study, we adopted narrative as the method to frame the data analysis. At the same time, we recognise that the first author’s story/ies is/are not simply a product of his “own” understandings of the world, but also the result of the broader conditions within which his story/ies become comprehensible. By adopting these approaches, we were able to critically and reflexively examine his experiences whilst maintaining confidentiality.

Findings

The narrative started with illustrating the first author’s doctoral research journey in a cross-disciplinary context from Digital Media to Education. As he has studied in Australia for about three years, he felt confident in this initial stage even though he changed his focus from digital media to educational technology. After starting his journey, he gradually realized that he might not get proper supervision, and then he worried about his research. However, dramas always happened. His supervisors left the university, and he had no choice but to change supervision teams. Due to the differences between his research focus and the new supervisor’s expertise, while they worked together and attempted to make his study better, his research was still not on the right track. In the third-year assessment, internal panel members still questioned his research. After this assessment, change happened again. Unfortunately, the new supervisor needed to retire due to personal reason and left the university. In this case, he felt so disempowered and lacked the confidence to complete the study. Luckily, he found new supervisors to support him. Although research topics have been changed due to the shift of supervisions teams, he did not give up and finally completed the study. When he reflected his journey, he felt that the doctoral journey is a process of shaping a sense of in-betweenness: shifting between different research fields, topics, and supervision teams.

Discussion

Based on the first author’s ‘zigzag ‘doctoral learning experience, this study reveals that his PhD journey positioned him in an in-between space where he was constantly immersed in a cycle of stress-adaptation-development, and where he established a sense of in-betweenness, characterised by different senses of agency, identity, and belonging. In these arrangements, power was always at play. Various predictable (e.g. change of majors) and unpredictable changes (e.g. changes of advisors) dynamically and constantly positioned him within different power dynamics. The interaction between intercultural adjustment model and the concept of in-between space shed light on this learning transition, particularly in relation to the micro-politics of cultural change that surrounded the forms of cross-disciplinary academic cultural adaptation he had to undertake in his journey. Importantly, they also flag the significant power relations more broadly that infused his whole doctoral journey. His reactions to the changes indicate a resilience towards expected and unexpected adversities as well as the effects of such power relations.

His journey suggests that he was in the stress-adaptation-development trajectory, but in a very different way from how such a trajectory is conceptualised in existing literature. It could not only be adopted in the analysis of more typical nationally/regionally based intercultural learning and adjustment, but also could be used as a lens to theorise and analyse more micro-political processes of learning trajectories. Moreover, his PhD research trajectory indicated he was ultimately able to become a self-determined and active agent (Marginson, 2014) but this process was tortuous with many twists and turns, establishing a complex sense of in-betweenness in response to different expected and unpredictable changes. His experience indicates that he was immersed in a unique in-between space that was created by constant negotiations between colonising and colonised cohorts, complicated relations of power, and various clashes in and between different types of “cultures”, which potentially shape individual hybridity and sense of in-betweenness.

Conclusion
This study revealed that as a result of the first author’s peculiar cross-disciplinary academic cultural adaptation, he became an in-betweener at not just the macro level of culture, but at a micro-political level. In this particular space, he had to navigate twists and turns in different stages of the learning journey which was not a straightforward process of stress-adaptation-development as some other studies have found. In contrast, his journey was a pathway of continuous processes of stress, adapting and development, characterised by a more or less continuous sense of in-betweenness in relation to each of these states. His experiences certainly confirm doctoral learning and research journeys as complicated rather than linear. However, students may engage in multi-faceted and complex journeys, far beyond what might be anticipated.

Authors’ bios:

Dr Kun Dai is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Funded by China International Postdoc Exchange Program) at Graduate School of Education, Peking University. His research focuses on transnational higher education, international students mobility, intercultural learning and adjustment, teaching and learning in higher education.

Dr Ian Hardy is an Associate Professor at the School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia. Dr Hardy’s research focuses on educational policy, globalisation, and teacher education.

Research Highlighted:

Weinmann, M., Slavich, S. & Neilsen R. (forthcoming 2021). ‘Multiculturalism and the “broken” discourses of Chinese language education’, In: Halse, C. & Kennedy, K. (eds.). The future of multiculturalism in turbulent times. Asia-Europe Education Dialogue series, Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

The context of Chinese language education in Australia

Mandarin Chinese has a unique place in Australian society. As China is Australia’s key trading partner, the teaching of  Mandarin has received significant government support (Chen, 2015), especially as Australian schooling policy highlights the importance of language learning for future global citizens (Council of Australian Governments, 2019). Chinese also has the highest number of speakers in the Australian population after English, and is widely taught in Australian schools (Orton, 2016). However, despite the accolades, learners from non-Chinese backgrounds often feel demotivated for two reasons: the relative difficulty of Mandarin compared to cognate European languages (Scarino et al., 2011), and their perceived disadvantage compared to their classmates of Chinese heritage (Chen & Fletcher, 2016).

The same tropes of ‘hope, hype and fear’ (Duff et al., 2015, p. 139) that frame the teaching of Mandarin in Australia are also reflected in recent media and professional teacher conversations around popular discourses of Chinese language education. In order to tease out these complexities, our study followed a mediated discourse research approach (Scollon & Scollon, 2004), which is ‘grounded in the notion that human action is accomplished through discourse as it appears in many forms, whether talk, a wide range of hard copy and digital texts, mental representations of texts from the near or distant past and potential futures’ (Roozen & Erickson, 2017, p. 2.03).

Data sources

We drew on two studies investigating recent perspectives on the teaching and learning of languages in Australian schools. In the first, we analysed how Chinese (Mandarin) language programs and policy rationales had been represented in mainstream Australian print media between 2012—when the now-archived Asian Century White Paper (Australian Government, 2012) was released—and 2017.

In the second study, we interviewed languages teachers from Victoria, Australia, for their perspectives about the implementation of the National Curriculum (Languages). Here we draw on one group interview with two teachers of Asian languages: ‘Stephanie’, Head of Languages at a Catholic secondary school in metropolitan Melbourne and a teacher of Japanese, and ‘Eric’, who works at an independent Foundation–Grade 12 college. He also holds a leadership position in Languages, and teaches Chinese, his native language.

Thematic analysis was used for both studies (Nowell et al., 2017). We began by grouping the selected articles in terms of the socio-historical and political discourses that they represented or challenged regarding China and Chinese language learning, followed by a close analysis of textual features. For the interview data, we analysed stories the educators told in relation to their experiences, pedagogy and practice, then explored underlying beliefs and tensions—and the discourses that shaped them (Lather, 2013).

Theoretical underpinnings

Our exploration of the discourses of (Chinese) language takes as its premise that languages teaching and learning ‘both reflect and constitute language ideologies, … [which] involve not just language issues, they also intersect with taken-for-granted ideas of race, ethnicity and culture, producing and reinforcing complex relations of power’ (Kubota, 2019, p. 111).

The multilingual turn (May, 2014) in language studies has highlighted the complex interconnections between language, culture, identity and difference (Kramsch & Zhu, 2020). In Australia, the tensions between Western, white and Anglophone ‘norms’ (Kincheloe & Steinberg 1997) and ‘others’ (Said, 2003) are reflected in the contentious relation between monolingualism and multilingualism in Australia (Piller, 2016), which continues to impede ‘a more constructive approach that seeks to … integrate the multiplicity of linguistic stimuli and various cultural settings for any language user, irrespective of whether they speak one or many’ (Nord, 2018, p. 9). Drawing on these theoretical directions, we re-examined how speakers, teachers and learners of languages, and multilingual classrooms are constructed and perceived, and how these dynamics could be more comprehensively understood and interrogated (Weinmann & Arber, 2017).

Findings and discussion

We found a strong discrepancy between advocacy for Chinese language instruction as strategic for Australia’s economic future, and media and public debates that portray Chinese as ‘too difficult and too foreign to learn’. The overarching themes that emerged from our data were:

• Chinese as the ‘language of the future’
• Ambivalence towards teaching and learning Chinese
• Chinese culture and language as too foreign and ‘difficult’.

The ‘language of the future’

In half of the articles selected, Chinese programs were portrayed as ‘state of the art’; headings such as ‘bilingual first in schools’ suggested that bilingual programs are a new phenomenon, rather than long-established in Australia. Several articles also celebrated Chinese language programs as technologically innovative, enabling students to form ‘virtual relationships’ with ‘digital sister schools’ in China, suggesting that the goal of language learning is to communicate with ‘foreign people’ overseas—and excluding the significant Chinese-speaking community in Australia’s ‘own backyard’.

Ambivalence towards Chinese language study

Reflecting the controversy of China’s investment in ‘cultural projection to the world’ (Gil, 2015), many articles criticised the role of Confucius Classrooms. Headings such as ‘Schools paid $10,000 to teach Chinese’, and ‘China sends teachers to Palmerston’,suggest that such programs are driven by China alone. In the same article, a statement such as ‘the Territory will soon be speaking Chinese if the NT [Northern Territory] Government gets its way’ imply hostility towards the arrival of ‘twenty Chinese teachers set to be calling the Northern Territory home’. Chinese language and culture are thus politicised as threats to Australian national identity—a view reinforced and manifested by a hierarchical view of languages.

‘It’s too foreign’

Chinese may be the ‘language of the future’—but for some, ‘survival’ Chinese may be enough, as an Australian company manager comments: ‘I don’t believe Chinese is essential as all Chinese students learn English … however, basic Chinese skills assist in business etiquette and overcoming the cultural barrier’ (Irwin, 2016).

With this view, proficiency—and a deeper understanding of Chinese culture and society—are therefore supposedly unnecessary. Surprisingly, some Languages teachers we interviewed expressed similar concerns:

We’ve always viewed Japanese with a sense of prestige. Kids like animated cartoons, feel like there’s things they can really relate to. Now, Chinese hasn’t got that. (Stephanie)

Popular culture can generate an interest in language learning, but it does not occur as often as assumed (Armour & Iida, 2016). Stephanie’s comment suggests that China and Chinese language lack cultural aspects that Australian students can relate to, and are therefore perceived as distant from ‘Australian’ culture. This is a theme echoed by Eric:

The [Chinese] textbook layout … doesn’t feel Western. It feels, just even opening the book, [the] quality of the pages, fonts … kids look at it and go, ‘This looks really foreign.’ (Eric)

For Eric, even a common textbook resource represents a linguistic and cultural chasm between East and West, which alienates Australian students when they first encounter Chinese.

These research snapshots reflect well-documented themes in media and teacher discourses in Australia about Chinese language education: Chinese language study as purely instrumental, exoticising cultural and linguistic ‘others’, along with strong ambivalence towards China and speakers of Chinese.

With current Australia–China tensions, re-establishing relationships that move beyond the binaries of ‘us versus them’ could be crucial for stability in our region.  If Chinese is to be positioned as the ‘language of the future’ and worth studying, it requires progressive policy and language programming that recognise that ‘while multilingualism is laudatory, the means by which one becomes multilingual also matter’. More critical engagement with Australia’s multicultural identity is needed, which will also raise new questions about how Australia communicates with its Asian neighbours.

References

Armour, W. S., & Iida, S. (Eds.). (2016). Are Australian fans of anime and manga motivated to learn Japanese language? Asia Pacific Journal of Education, 36(1).

Australian Government. (2012). Australia in the Asian Century White Paper. http://www.defence.gov.au/whitepaper/2013/docs/australia_in_the_asian_century_white_paper.pdf

Chen, P. & Fletcher, C. (2016). Politics, economics, society, and overseas Chinese teaching: A case study of Australia. Chinese Education and Society, 49(6), 351–368.

Chen, Z. (2015). Challenges of teaching Chinese in Australian schools: Lesson from beginning teacher-researchers. Journal of Language Teaching and Research, 6(5), 933–942.

Council of Australian Governments: Education Council (2019). Alice Springs (Mparntwe) Education Declaration. http://www.educationcouncil.edu.au/site/DefaultSite/filesystem/documents/Reports%20and%20publications/Alice%20Springs%20(Mparntwe)%20Education%20Declaration.pdf

Duff, P., Anderson, T., Doherty, L., & Wang, R. (2015). Representations of Chinese language learning in contemporary English-language news media: Hope, hype, and fear. Global Chinese, 1(1), 139–168.

Gil, J. (2015). China’s cultural projection: A discussion of the Confucius Institutes. China: An International Journal, 13(1), 200–226.

Irwin, D.(2016, 24 October). First job–and where are you now? Gold Coast Bulletin.

Kincheloe, J. L. & Steinberg, S. R. (1997). Changing multiculturalism. Open University Press.

Kramsch, C. & Hua Z. (2020). Translating culture in global times: An introduction. Applied Linguistics, 41(1), 1–9.

Kubota, R. (2019). English in Japan. In P. Heinrich & Y. Ohara (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of Japanese sociolinguistics (pp. 110–126). Routledge.

Lather, P. (2013). Methodology-21: What do we do in the afterward? Qualitative Studies in Education, 26(6), 634–645.

May, S. (Ed.). (2014). The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and bilingual education. Routledge.

Nord, H. (2018). Monolingualism versus multilingualism: Remarks on limiting visions. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326493960_Monolingualism_versus_Multilingualism_remarks_on_limiting_visions

Nowell, L., Norris, J., White, D. & Moules, N. (2017). Thematic analysis: Striving to meet the trustworthiness criteria. International Journal of Qualitative Methods. https://doi.org/10.1177/1609406917733847 

Orton, J. (2016). Building Chinese language capacity in Australia. The Australia–China Relations Institute (ACRI).

Piller, I. (2016). Monolingual ways of seeing multilingualism. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 11, 25–33.

Roozen, K. & Erickson, J. (2017). Expanding literate landscapes: Persons, practices, and sociohistoric perspectives of disciplinary development. Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press. http://ccdigitalpress.org/expanding/

Scarino, A., Elder, C., Iwashita, N., Kim, S. H. O., Kohler, M., & Scrimgeour, A. (2011). Student achievement in Asian languages education. Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

Scollon, R. & Scollon, S. W. (2004). Nexus analysis: Discourse and the emerging internet. Routledge.

Weinmann, M. & Arber, R. (2017). Orientating languages: Navigating multilingual spaces. Curriculum Perspectives,37, 173–179. doi: 10.1007/s41297-017-0028-4

Author biographies

Dr Michiko Weinmann is a senior lecturer in Languages Education, and Director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning Languages (CTaLL) at Deakin University, Melbourne. She has researched and published on multilingual education, Asia literacy, and teacher mobility. Michiko curates the Languages resources website: www.languageteacherhelpmate.com. Her forthcoming co-authored book (with Dr Rebecca Cairns, Deakin University) ‘Rethinking Asia-related Curriculum’ will be published by Routledge in 2021. Michiko is on Twitter at @MichikoWeinmann

Dr Rod Neilsen is a senior lecturer in TESOL at Deakin University, Melbourne. He has worked as an English teacher and teacher educator on five continents. He has conducted research into pre-service and in-service teacher mobility and multilingual approaches to language learning. Rod is the Chief Editor of the Australian journal, TESOL in Context. You can follow Rod on Twitter at @RodNeilsen

Sophia Slavich is a Chinese and EAL/D language teacher with experience in primary, secondary and tertiary levels. She conducted research in language education policy as part of her Masters of Teaching degree at Deakin University, Melbourne. Sophia is an advocate for linguistic diversity and the worldviews it represents. She currently teaches Chinese at Stawell Primary School, Victoria and works as an instructional coach for beginning teachers with the Teach for Australia program.

Research Highlighted:

Zhao, X., & Hu, Y. (2020). (Open Access) A Phenomenographic Study of Chinese Undergraduates’ Conceptions of Learning in Transnational Programs. SAGE Open, 10(3), 1-13.

In Chinese higher education, transnational programs or Chinese-Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools (CFCRS) programs (Zhongwai Hezuo Banxue Xiangmu), are becoming increasingly prevalent. It a joint venture between local Chinese universities and foreign or overseas higher education institutions (HEIs), with the aim of educating Chinese students only (Hou et al., 2014). The teaching staff is composed of both foreign lecturers from partner universities and Chinese lecturers. The programs include both language learning and specialized knowledge teaching in a foreign language. The educational resources such as teaching plan, instruction outline, teaching technologies, textbooks, and curriculum system are introduced from the partner foreign universities. Due to the education input of the materials and staff, the teaching and learning methods are diverse, including group discussion, presentation, role-play, business game simulations, and so on. Moreover, assessment methods adopted by foreign partner universities have also been borrowed to diversify the traditional Chinese evaluation system. Thus, a cross-cultural education context is formed. Nonetheless little is known about student’s actual learning experience in such programs, which may be valuable for improving the education quality.

The present study investigated Chinese undergraduates’ conceptions of learning in programs cooperatively run by Chinese and non-Chinese universities. The research methodology adopted is phenomenography, which is defined by Marton (1994) as “the empirical study of the limited number of qualitatively different ways in which various phenomena in, and aspects of, the world around us are experienced, conceptualized, understood, perceived and apprehended” (p. 4424). Data are collected through semi-structured interviews with a group of undergraduates and analyzed following the phenomenographic principles to identify the referential and structural aspects of each conception. The referential aspect (also named as the meaning aspect) captures the global meaning of the phenomenon, whereas the structural aspect is composed of an internal horizon and an external horizon. The internal horizon denotes the focus of an individual’s attention and it “consists of the aspects of the phenomenon simultaneously present in the theme of awareness, and the relationships between these aspects and between the aspects and the phenomenon as a whole” (Cope & Prosser, 2005, p. 350). The external horizon, sometimes named as the perceptual boundary (Bruce et al., 2004), is composed of those aspects which constitute the background.

Six main conceptions of learning, including sub-conceptions are identified, namely, learning as increase of new knowledge (A), memorization with (B2)/without (B1) understanding, application with (C2)/without (C1) understanding, making sense of the knowledge acquired (D), gaining a new perspective to view reality (E) and personal change and growth based on an extensive understanding of learning (F). Generally speaking, the relationship found between conceptions is hierarchical, with Conception A as the least complicated learning conception and Conception F as the most advanced learning conception. Yet the sub-conceptions or branches are also notable. The findings not only demonstrate the complexity of Chinese students’ conceptions of university learning under a cross-culture learning and teaching context, but they also point to the possibility of there being something new to discover, even for some familiar and well-established conceptions.

This study calls for the attention which should be paid to the quality of CFCRS programs. In the Chinese context, policy makers considered transnational programs to be a sound way to improve the quality of teaching and learning in universities, as quality foreign education resources could be imported via such programs. However, the findings of this study reveal that the quality of CFCRS programs might be questionable from the learner’s perspective. The undergraduates investigated clearly demonstrated an overreliance on elementary and less advanced learning conceptions, whereas the pursuit of meaning was ignored and understanding, insight, and reflection seemed to be downplayed. Students’ conception of learning will affect their learning approaches and further the quality of learning as a whole as demonstrated by a number of researchers (Duarte, 2007; Edmunds & Richardson, 2009; Ellis et al., 2008). More sophisticated conceptions should be developed if deep approaches to learning are to be attained. Thus, the student participants in CFCRS programs are advised to have more advanced qualitative or transformative ways of understanding learning.

References:

Duarte, A. M. (2007). Conceptions of learning and approaches to learning in Portuguese students. Higher Education, 54, 781–794.

Edmunds, R., & Richardson, J. T. (2009). Conceptions of learning, approaches to studying and personal development in UK higher education. British Journal of Educational Psychology, 79(2), 295–309.

Ellis, R. A., Goodyear, P., Calvo, R. A., & Prosser, M. (2008). Engineering students’ conceptions of and approaches to learning through discussions in face-to-face and online contexts. Learning and Instruction, 18(3), 267–282.

Hou, J., Montgomery, C., & McDowell, L. (2014). Exploring the diverse motivations of transnational higher education in China: Complexities and contradictions. Journal of Education for Teaching, 40(3), 300–318.

Marton, F. (1994). Phenomenography. In T. Husen & N. Postlethwaite (Eds.), International Encyclopedia of Education (pp. 4424–4429). Pergamon

Author Biography:

Xiantong Zhao got his PhD degree at UCL Institution of Education (previously known as Institute of Education, University of London). He has been working at Faculty of Education Southwest University since Sept. 2017. His research interests lie in internationalization of higher education, cross-border higher education (transnational higher education), cross-cultural university teaching and learning, comparative higher education and phenomenography. Since 2017, his research interest has been focused on international aspects of higher education, in particular international visiting scholars, returned early career academics (RECAs), overseas students in Chinese universities and Chinese students in transnational programs. He is now searching for academic collaboration with those who are interested in the topics mentioned above. Please get in touch if you are interested: 314829991@qq.com

Research Highlighted:

Xing Xu, Helena Sit & Shen Chen (2020): International education through a bioecological development lens – a case study of Chinese doctoral students in Australia, Higher Education Research & Development, DOI: 10.1080/07294360.2020.1811646

Read Dr Xu’s other article here.

Background

Scholars have identified an increasing interest in exploring the lived experiences of international research students in Australia (e.g., Ai, 2017; Yu & Wright, 2016), which ranks fourth in attracting international doctoral students (Shen et al., 2016). However, few studies have focused specifically on the Chinese cohort, which remains the largest single national group (Shen et al., 2016) with steadily rising numbers (Chung & Ingleby, 2011). By listening to Chinese doctoral students’ emic conceptualizations of studying in Australia, this study aimed to expand the current literature regarding the enablers and disablers that contribute to their doctoral journey as a developmental trajectory under a self-formation paradigm of international study. Specifically, this article focuses on addressing two sets of research questions:(1) According to the participants, what factors contribute to their positive and negative experiences of studying in Australia? (2) Through the lens of the bioecological systems theory, how do these factors dynamically interact with each other to affect the participants’ doctoral trajectories?

Theoretical Framework

This paper adopts the theoretical framework of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory. It offers an analytic framework that explains human development as proximal processes within a constellation of relationships that forms the whole system of a person’s environment. A bioecological approach would contribute to a comprehensive yet nuanced understanding of the person–environment interactivity in Chinese students’ navigation of their doctoral trajectories. It would also offer international education market dominated by the global North countries such as Australia valuable insights to accommodate needs in the global South and capitalize on intellectual assets of the global South. This study bears potential practical significance to the internationalization of doctoral education given the salient status of the Chinese cohort in the international education market.

Methodology

This paper adopts a volunteer-employed photography (VEP) approach, wherein participants use photographs they choose to assist their recall or make concrete their point. Applying VEP to examine doctoral students’ experiences, previous research has revealed that the method (combined with interviews) brings abstract questions down to a hands-on and imagery level due to its visual nature (van Auken et al., 2010). Thus, it enables more disclosures of the students’ lived reality. Snowball sampling was utilised for the recruitment of participants, which secured 24 participants. The data collection was conducted over two phases: the first being the time-point where participants consented to participation, after they were informed of requirements concerning collection of photos and ethics considerations; and the second being the interview, when they elaborated on their chosen photos. The participants were required to prepare self-taken photos depicting settings, activities, or persons that negatively and positively affect their study trajectory. They were guaranteed sufficient time to compile photos they took previously or to take photos to capture a current phenomenon (Bates et al.,2017). The 24 participants were then invited to take part in a one-on-one interview. The photographs with concomitant elicitations, along with the interview transcripts, were transferred into NVivo 12 for thematic analysis.

Findings

Findings of the study reveal that the developing person with varying dispositions, resources, and demands sits at the core of the developmental trajectory. In particular, this study shows how developmentally generative dispositions featuring agency, initiative, and engagement, reflected in inward management, enabled the participants’ doctoral study. Further, the participants demonstrated inviting demand characteristics as agents who reciprocated care and showcased initiative, encouraging favorable reactions from the social nexus. Through these transactions, more developmental dyads featuring mutually supportive effects were nurtured, boosting positive development of the doctoral trajectory. Nevertheless, not all characteristics were developmentally instigative. Health issues, for example, were counterproductive in terms of stimulating and sustaining the students’ momentum, posing barriers to the doctoral development. Further, the evolvement of development was embedded at the intersection of various contexts, ranging from direct settings to broader sociocultural factors. The findings show that the participants’ doctoral trajectory transcended the academic sphere and was influenced substantially by non-academic factors. It was holistically molded by social agents, behaviors, and relationships within the microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, and macrosystem. The complexity of the content and structure of these subsystems concurrently enabled and restrained the students’ PhD journeys.

The findings suggest some practical suggestions for stakeholders involved in this trajectory. For example, the doctoral students’ situation warrants empathy and cultural sensitivity from supervisors who enact pedagogical principles based on equity and professionalism. As important shapers of students’ experiences, institutions and faculties should give greater voice to PhD students regarding teaching, learning, and other facets of student life, as a holistic understanding can allow for optimization of service delivery. Further, as the core driving force in the bioecological system, it is contingent upon PhD students to initiate their autonomy to negotiate, utilize, and create resources for their development in both their home and host environments. A fine-grained elaboration of these practices, however, is neither the focus of this study, nor possible to accomplish in a piece of this length. Based on a small sample, this study is limited in terms of generalizability and representativeness. Nevertheless, it has contributed to the current scholarship of international education by (1) further substantiating the self-formation paradigm based on empirical discussions with a particular cohort in a particular locale, and (2) unpacking the entwining dynamics shaping the developmental trajectory of international study using the broad framework of the bioecological systems theory.

Authors’ Bio

Dr Xing Xu obtained her PhD from the University of Newcastle, Australia, and is Lecturer at Sichuan International Studies University. Her research interests include internationalization of higher education, doctoral students’ evaluation of educational experience, academic mobility, identity construction of doctoral students, and qualitative inquiry. Her publications have appeared in Higher Education Research and Development, The Australian Educational Researcher, Reflective Practice, etc. Her recent co-authored book The Eastern Train on the Western Track: An Australian Case of Chinese Doctoral Students’ Adaptation was published by Springer in 2020. She can be contacted via email: xing.xu@uon.edu.au.

Dr Helena Sit is a Senior Lecturer and PhD supervisor in the School of Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Prior to joining the University of Newcastle, she worked as a teaching and research academic at Macquarie University and the University of Hong Kong. Her research expertise includes Second Language Education, International Education, Higher Education and Teacher Education. Her research experience is concerned with internationalisation, transformative learning, and innovation language education programmes. She supervises Ph.D. students in Education and her contributions have been recognised at both the national and international levels. 

Dr Shen Chen is a teacher educator in School of Education at University of Newcastle, Australia. He has extensive teaching experiences including a visiting fellow in Cambridge University, Warwick University, UK, University of California, Berkeley, USA, University of British Columbia, Canada, University of Hong Kong, Nanjing University, Beijing Language and Culture University, China. His contribution has been in the teaching and research of culture in language education and second language teacher education. He was the recipient of the Australian National Teaching Award in 2014. His established record as an excellent researcher has been demonstrated by 8 books and numerous articles.

Research Highlighted:

Yu, J. Consuming UK Transnational Higher Education in China: A Bourdieusian Approach to Chinese Students’ Perceptions and Experiences. Sociological Research Online, 0(0), 1-18. doi:10.1177/1360780420957040

Background

Accompanying the ascendance of neoliberal market principles in higher education systems (Naidoo and Williams, 2015), the ‘student-as-consumer’ discourse has prevailed in the Global North while developing great complexity, which diverges across different nation-states (Brooks, 2018). However, little is known about students receiving Western higher education in the transnational education market (TNE), ‘in which the learners are located in a country different from the one where the awarding institution is based’ (Council of Europe, 2002), particularly in China, where a neoliberal approach does not apply. In the Global North, where the ‘student-as-consumer’ discourse took shape, ‘the state’s right to intervene is habitually questioned’; by contrast, in China, the intervention of the state into any social conduct is widely accepted (Marginson, 2018: 498). The Chinese state is the largest promoter and regulator of TNE. On the one hand, TNE represents ‘a faster and more efficient way’ to directly import advanced educational resources and to train competent professionals domestically (Huang, 2007: 428). On the other hand, foreign education, together with the mobilities of foreign people, information, and ideology also present a potential threat and thus must be controlled under a centralised plan (Lin, 2016). Thus, instead of a bottom-up way that is more responsive to the market, the development of TNE in China has been characterised by centralised control and top-down planning (Lin and Liu, 2016). All foreign TNE establishments operating in China are required to operate within the ‘Chinese–Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools’ (CFCRS) framework laid out by the Ministry of Education in partnership with a Chinese higher education institution.

Methodological and theoretical approaches to the case

This article emerged from a research project exploring the influence of TNE in-situ experience on Chinese students’ socio-spatial mobilities, based on a qualitative case study of the University of Nottingham, Ningbo, China (UNNC), the first Chinese-Foreign Cooperative University. In the partnership, the University of Nottingham gained full control over the curriculum and other academic affairs, while leaving the administrative issues to Zhejiang Wanli College and its parent Wanli Education Group, such as campus construction, facilities management and logistics, negotiations with the Communist Party of China (CPC) and government. Drawing upon 30 semi-structured interviews (including 27 with Chinese UNNC students and 3 with UNNC staff), this article examines Chinese students’ perceptions and experiences of UNNC education with reference to patriotism education by the Chinese partner, international education by the University of Nottingham, and investment strategies by students themselves. The analysis of this paper mainly adopts a Bourdieusian perspective, seeing knowledge construction in the global field of higher education as intrinsically linked to power inequalities. ‘The West’ exercises symbolic power that confers the ability to legitimate certain forms of cultural capital, such as the English language, Western lifestyles, Western university credentials, etc. There is thus a‘stratification of knowledge’ between ‘the West’ and ‘the rest’, where the knowledge of the West is legitimised with higher symbolic value.

Findings and discussions

First, Chinese patriotism education is provided at UNNC but has been kept to a minimal level compared to public universities in China. There is only one relevant module, Chinese Cultural Courses, delivered to Chinese students through weekly evening courses outside their university curriculum. Most students showed resistance, although some of them appreciated the necessity of such courses at UNNC. Without having much effect on Chinese students, conversely, the courses have been gradually adapted, with its content being depoliticised and its pedagogies leaning more towards British-style education.

Second, in talking about their experience of ‘a truly international education’ as advertised on the UNNC official website, the students frequently referred to ‘critical thinking’ and often in a positive way. Most students tended to believe that the liberal arts education they received at UNNC was more advanced than traditional Chinese-style education. Nevertheless, there were also students felt the true spirit of British liberal arts education was ‘sometimes not properly delivered’. Students observed a ‘merely rhetorical’ misinterpretation of ‘critical thinking’; in some cases, ‘critical thinking’ was simply understood as ‘rebellious thinking’. Some students also felt ‘cultural bias’ of the Western teachers and challenged the necessarily positive view of ‘critical thinking’ as it was implemented at UNNC. The durable, transposable Western educational habitus is generative of the teaching and learning that Chinese students experienced. As a result, formal education at UNNC served to impose Western discourses on Chinese students.

Third, a consumerist approach emerged in students’ perceptions of TNE. Students have cautiously calculated the quality of service, the long-term return in both the local and international credential markets, and the risk of potential failure. It turned out that UNNC was the ‘most score-effective’ option, which comes with good returns and low risk. On the one hand, UNNC experience is beneficial for Chinese students to gain the linguistic and institutionalised cultural capital that is necessary for future global mobility, as well as to imitate the educational habitus in the field of global education that is dominated by ‘the West’. On the other hand, they can also avoid the risk of potential failure in overseas education, staying embedded within domestic sociocultural networks, with the extra benefit of a good university credential that is convertible within the Chinese educational system.

Despite this consumerist approach, some students regarded their perceived-change in UNNC towards ‘utilitarianism’ as necessarily negative. They attributed this perceived-change to Chinese society and as by no means relevant to UK higher education which represents ‘humanitarianism’, contradicting the intensifying marketisation that many scholars have observed in the Global North, and particularly in the UK.

In conclusion, the case-study students have become voluntary participants in the symbolic violence exercised by ‘the West’, experiencing and perceiving TNE through ‘the symbolic veil of honour’ and thus valuing British education highly in both material and immaterial forms. This unique transnational educational space has emerged as an important factor in shaping students’ perceptions and experiences, incorporating the field of UK higher education into the field of Chinese higher education. They converge and, at times, collide, while both are embedded in the wider field of global higher education. Market-based rationalities converge with a centralised statist agenda, while being subordinated to a symbolic classification in which ‘the West’ dominates and colonial relations of knowledge production emerge. British-style education is perceived as legitimate, not only conditioning students’ perceptions of Chinese patriotism education but also affecting the staff’s approach to the ‘enhancement’ of pedagogies. Consumerist approaches further affirmed its symbolic value, by accelerating the circulation of cultural capital gained in a Western setting through active conversion into economic capital in the global marketplace. However, through transubstantiation, economic capital is presented in the immaterial form of cultural capital, and hence the real instrumentalism of cultural capital is concealed (Bourdieu, 1986). Cultural capital seems to be fundamentally different from economic capital because its self-interested nature is much less transparent. As can be seen in UNNC students’ responses, UK higher education was perceived to be unrelated to ‘utilitarianism’ and was only characterised by ‘humanitarianism’. As a result, Chinese students highly valued UK higher education in both material and immaterial forms, colouring the way in which they experience and perceive TNE, which is strengthened rather than being balanced out by China’s nation-building efforts. This article reveals the persistent symbolic power of UK higher education in the transnational context and its reproduction within the hierarchically structured global field of higher education.

References

Bourdieu P (1986) The forms of capital. In: Richardson JG (ed) Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. New York: Greenwood Press, pp. 241–258.

Brooks R (2018a) Understanding the higher education student in Europe: A comparative analysis. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education 48(4): 500–517.

Council of Europe (2002) Code of Good Practice for the Provision of Transnational Education. Paris: UNESCO.

Huang F (2007) Internationalization of higher education in the developing and emerging countries: A focus on transnational higher education in Asia. Journal of Studies in International Education 11(3–4): 421–432.

Lin J (2016) Basic relationships among scale, quality, and benefits in Sino-foreign cooperative education. Chinese Education & Society 49(4–5): 254–270.

Lin J and Liu M (2016) A discussion on improving the quality of Sino-foreign cooperative education. Chinese Education & Society 49(4–5): 231–242.

Marginson S (2018) National/global synergy in the development of higher education and science in China since 1978. Frontiers of Education in China 13(4): 486–512.

Naidoo R and Williams J (2015) The neoliberal regime in English higher education: Charters, consumers and the erosion of the public good. Critical Studies in Education 56(2): 208–223.

Author’s Biography

Jingran Yu is a visiting scholar at Southern University of Science and Technology (China). She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Manchester (2020). Her interests lie at the intersection of sociology, education and geography, including but not limited to socio-spatial (im)mobilities and (in)equalities; international branch campuses; transnational higher education; cosmopolitanism; educational space and place. She can be contacted at yujingran.ac@gmail.com

Research Highlighted:

Yiu, L. (2020). Educational Injustice in a High-Stakes Testing Context: A Mixed Methods Study on Rural Migrant Children’s Academic Experiences in Shanghai Public Schools. Comparative Education Review, 64(3), 498-524. https://doi.org/10.1086/709429

ABSTRACT 

This mixed method study analyzes rural migrant children’s academic experiences in two Shanghai public schools when 2012 PISA scores were administered. It contributes empirical evidence on how hukou status shapes educational inequality in contemporary China. Since rural migrants are ineligible for the high-stakes test for Shanghai’s senior secondary admission (zhongkao), teachers diverted resources towards urban children at the expense of rural migrants, regardless of academic potential. Such “successful” teaching practices to maximize ranking motivated excessive resource provision to the detriment of urban youth’s development. This article argues that it is only possible to understand these patterns through an inequality theory that explicitly considers the diminished integrity of teaching in high-stakes testing contexts. The framework explains educational injustices when the moral assumption of “good” teaching to benefit a child is no longer valid, with implications on the growing global emphasis on high-stakes testing.

BACKGROUND 

Rural migrant children’s education has emerged as one of the most pressing problems facing contemporary China.  Under the hukou system, a hereditary household registration system that determines Chinese citizens’ access to public services (e.g. education), these young people face educational barriers and may be at risk of developing into an urban underclass.  In response, Shanghai’s equity-focused reforms (2008-11) aimed to dissolve hukou barriers and increase educational opportunity by allowing migrant children to attend public schools for compulsory education. 

Examining rural migrant children’s academic experiences in Shanghai public schools during this reform period provides opportunity to examine hukou inequality in a high-stakes testing context.  In Shanghai, divergent municipal policies towards migrant children’s education intersect with high-stakes testing pressures to situate public schools in a dilemma:  enrolling rural migrant youth who are excluded from the high-stakes zhongkao that has grave school consequences. While Shanghai reforms entitle rural migrant children to access public schools for compulsory education, restrictive post-compulsory educational policies in the city exclude rural migrants from Shanghai’s zhongkao. Thus, schools have little incentive to academically invest in rural migrant children.  

Importantly, research typically overlooks the role of high-stakes testing on rural migrant children’s education in the city, despite the dominance of exam-oriented teaching in China’s education system.  The few exceptions suggest that high-stakes testing is a critical factor in rural migrant children’s inequitable, public school experiences.  This article examines how high stakes testing shapes youths’ academic experiences in two Shanghai middle schools, which enrolled urban and rural migrant youth, during the reforms. 

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

To examine the extent and ways in which educators provide rural and urban students different learning opportunities and environments within the same school, the predominant framework conceptualizes inequality in terms of ability-grouping, a practice of sorting students based on ability or prior performance into “tracks” to better meet students’ needs through a more homogeneous learning environment.  This inequality framework has two moral assumptions:  1) “good” teaching practices aim to benefit the child, 2) any tracking-induced achievement gap is unintentional because teaching is done to benefit the student.

However, the predominant framework does not explain the inequality patterns in the two investigated Shanghai schools, where a different inequality emerged in response to maximizing ranking. Drawing on sociological theories of public measures, I develop an alternative educational theory to explain how high-stakes testing pressures differentiate students’ academic experiences within the same school when the moral assumption of “good” teaching no longer holds.  In both Shanghai schools, “successful” teaching practices to maximize ranking and consequent resource allocation led to two educational injustices.  First, “successful” teaching  is a source of injustice when educators prioritize ranking above the well-being of all students–urban and rural migrant. Second, in response to ranking pressures, educators in both schools admitted contributing to a widening hukou-achievement gap by diverting resources towards urban youth who “counted” for Shanghai zhongkao, at the expense of rural migrant students who did “not count.” 

METHODS 

I conducted a mixed methods analysis of resource allocation, i.e., the decision-making process by which educators in two Shanghai schools invested instructional resources along hukou lines. School S segregated rural migrants into hukou-based homerooms, in which “urban” and “rural” homerooms were high and low track, respectively. Contrastly, School I sorted rural migrants into integrated homerooms, in which “high ability” and “low ability” were high and low track, respectively. 

FINDINGS

An exam-induced inequality 

In response to Shanghai zhongkao pressures, both schools differentiated students into two ranking-oriented categories: “those that counted” (urban) and “those that did not count” (rural migrants). 

Educational injustice against rural migrant children

In both schools, homeroom sorting patterns are not explained by the predominant inequality model of “good” teaching, which expects schools to sort high-achieving rural migrant students into appropriately challenging high-track homerooms to develop their academic potential. Rather, homeroom track placement revealed a puzzle: both schools sorted high-achieving rural migrant children into low-track homerooms. 

Due to zhongkao exclusion, educators in both schools intentionally prioritized the academic development of students who “counted” (urban youth), at the expense of high-achieving children who “didn’t count” (migrant youth).  Both schools thus de-prioritized the academic growth of high-achieving rural migrant students, despite high scores indicating academic potential. These students were sorted into low-track homerooms, which provided a lower quality learning climate compared to high-track homerooms.  For example, School I educators sought to “spur on” low-achieving urban youth through a learning climate positively influenced by high-achieving, migrant classmates. As educators in both schools used “successful” teacher practices to maximize ranking, they admitted homeroom sorting neglected migrant children’s academic needs.

Educational injustice against urban children 

While homeroom placement privileges urban students’ academic development compared with their rural migrant peers, both schools’ label of “those who count” overlooks “successful” teaching as a form of injustice to urban students.  In both schools, urban students received excessive amounts of instructional time in-between class periods and after school. The instructional purpose of providing additional classroom teaching was to establish urban youth’s strong academic foundation in grades 6-7 for the accelerated learning of grades 8 and 9. However, teachers invested in urban youth’s academic growth at the expense of non-academic development. Consequently, Shanghai urban youth expressed anxiety from test pressures and considered test scores to represent their value.  

IMPLICATIONS 

This paper has two significant implications for China’s policymakers, scholars, and educators.  First, findings contribute to our understanding of hukou inequality in contemporary China. In Shanghai’s high-stakes testing context, the hukou institution has become a school marker of whether to academically invest in a child.   Shanghai findings converge with global data to reveal an exam-induced inequality in high stakes testing contexts, where teachers systematically prioritize students whose academic development will increase school ranking.

Second, I problematize the predominant conception of “educational equity” for China’s rural migrant children. Policymakers and researchers generally define educational equity for China’s rural migrant children as equal access to “quality” education (e.g. public school); such a conception motivated the Shanghai reforms highlighted in this study. However, my findings reveal the distorted understanding of educational equity that arises when we assume that teaching practices are “good” in  high-stakes testing context. As Shanghai educators used “successful” teacher practices to maximize ranking, they excessively invested in urban students’ academic growth at the expense of non-academic development. The education that urban students receive should no longer be regarded as the educational equity model for rural migrant students. When maximizing ranking is the purpose of education, teaching itself constitutes a form of injustice to all students. I thus propose an “equity” re-conceptualization towards whole-child development and the re-centering of teaching on the child.

Author Bio

Lisa Yiu is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Education, University of Hong Kong. Her equity-focused research applies critical and sociology theory to investigate diversity and inclusion issues for immigrant-origin youth in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.  Her work, which has been recognized by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education, is motivated and critically enriched by her experiences as an inner-city teacher in Los Angeles Unified School District and English-as-a-Second-Language teacher in mainland China.  Publications include Harvard Educational Review and The China Quarterly. She can be contacted via email: liyiu@hku.hk.

Research Highlighted:

Poole, A. (2020). Constructing International School Teacher Identity from Lived Experience: A Fresh Conceptual Framework. Journal of Research in International Education. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1475240920954044

Abstract

This research note offers background information to my recent paper (Poole, 2020) published in the Journal of Research in International Education. The paper argues for the need to move beyond distilling international school teachers’ experiences into a teacher type or teacher typologies, and instead to take teachers’ lived experiences as an end in themselves. Lived experience is characterised by a certain kind of ambivalence, messiness, and complexity that typologies are unable to capture.

In attempting to better convey what I mean by international school teachers’ lived experiences, I make an analogy to The Beatles. Whilst it may seem somewhat irrelevant at first, I ask the reader to indulge me. The connection will become apparent soon enough.

As a teenager, I was obsessed with the Beatles. I knew their music inside and out. My ear became so familiar with their sound that I could name any of their songs within the first few beats. However, when the Beatles released a collection of outtakes and rarities as part of their Anthology series, it felt like I was listening to them again for the first time. I was struck at how clear the initial performances were. Often, the first take would consist of drums, guitar and bass. When listened to in this form, the music was vibrant. It had a warm resonant room sound to it, as if you were in the room whilst it was being played. It was rough. You could hear the mistakes. The fingers fumbling for the chords. A guide vocal leaking into the drum microphones. Takes breaking down. False starts. It was honest. However, once the recordings had been over-dubbed, mistakes corrected, that room sound was gone. It no longer felt as if you were in the room with the band. It did not feel honest. Suddenly, those recordings that my ear had grown so accustomed to felt like imitations.

The above analogy helps to convey what I am trying to do in my research in relation to teachers’ experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools. I am listening for the resonant room sound of their lived experiences.

The International School arena was once considered to be somewhat anomalous (Pearce, 2013) and something of a well-kept secret. Traditional International Schools, or Type A schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013), were designed for the children of a global trans-national elite, who required schooling that would enable them to enter a university in their home countries. However, in the last ten years or so, a new type of international school has emerged. Rather than catering to the children of transnational elites, these new schools, referred to as Type C non-traditional schools (Hayden & Thompson, 2013), are frequented by indigenous middle-class families. Within China, these Type C schools have been referred to as ‘Chinese bilingual schools’, or, as I like to call them, ‘Chinese Internationalised Schools.’ Chinese Internationalised Schools typically follow the Chinese National Curriculum until grade 9, with students transitioning to some type of international curriculum (such as International General Certificate of Secondary Educations, Advanced Levels or the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme) for the remainder of their high school years.

Along with this shift from traditional to non-traditional international schooling, we can also see the emergence of a new type of international school teacher. Typically, teachers in Type A schools will be licensed practitioners back in their home countries and/or have experience of teaching. Whilst this type of teacher can be found in Type C schools, the vast majority (at least in Chinese Internationalised Schools) are not career teachers. Rather, they are what Bailey and Cooker (2019) call ‘Accidental Teachers’. These teachers may not necessarily be qualified teachers, yet they still find employment in Chinese Internationalised Schools, if not always for their professional capital, then certainly for their ‘ethnic capital’, that is, their embodiment and performance of ‘western whiteness.’

I was an Accidental teacher. I did not set out to be a teacher, but by happenstance, I became one. Before my recent transition to the academic arena, I spent ten years teaching in Chinese Internationalised Schools. To return to the analogy of the ‘room sound’, I was in the room with the teachers. I saw the mistakes. It was live, raw and often raucous. In a colleague’s words, teaching was ‘messy business.’ However, as part of my studies and subsequent research, I found that the work I was reading on international school teachers just did not have that same resonance. That immediacy and messiness was absent. I felt this absence most keenly in studies that presented teachers in terms of types or typologies.

I was reading about ‘the Maverick’ (Hardman, 2001), a global traveller or someone seeking to escape from national constraints and other issues in their home country. It is likely that we all know a teacher who fits this description. I was reading about ‘Type A’ , ‘Type B’ and ‘Type C’ teachers (Bailey & Cooker, 2019). Type A teachers see their job as supporting travel and mobility. Type B teachers see their jobs in ideological terms. Type C teachers view their primary attachment as being to the locale in which the international school is situated. I was reading about the ‘adventurer’ (Rey et al., 2020), young teachers who, to escape the debts they had accrued in their home countries, often due to university fees, flee to teach overseas.

However, I was not reading about me or my colleagues. I was not reading about teachers in Chinese Internationalised Schools. Here were we, complex, dynamic and evolving human beings, reduced to a letter or a type. Where did all the experience go? It was like the label or letter was some kind of cookie cutter, trimming away the superfluity of lived experience.

To return to the analogy of The Beatles and their recordings, I could not hear the resonant room sound of our lived experiences in the literature. This absence was partly due to the novelty of Chinese Internationalised Schools, but also due to a paucity of work that critically engages with the International School Teacher experience (Bailey, 2015). These typologies could be thought of as a form of quantizing or auto-tuning that renders the contradiction and messiness of the lived into processed experience. The Accidental teacher (Bailey & Cooker, 2019) label comes close to capturing our experiences, but is not sufficiently nuanced to capture the heterogeneity within our group.

All of this points to the need for researchers to not only listen to the voices of teachers, but also to capture the resonance of their lived experiences. This is what I attempted to do with my recent paper, and what I am planning to develop in an upcoming book, provisionally entitled International Teacher Identities: Examining Internationalised Schooling in Shanghai. If I can retain the energy and vibrancy of teachers’ lived experiences in a form where theory helps to capture rather than smother the resonant room sound of lived experience, then I will have finally produced something that speaks to both teachers and researchers.   

References

Bailey, L. and Cooker, L. (2019). Exploring teacher identity in international schools: Key concepts for research. Journal of Research in International Education, 18(20), 125-141.

Hardman, J. (2001). Improving recruitment and retention of quality overseas teacher. In S. Blandford, & M. Shaw (Eds.), Managing international schools (pp. 123-135). London: Routledge Falmer.

Hayden, M., & Thompson J. J. (2013). International Schools: Antecedents, current issues and metaphors for the future, in R. Pearce (Ed.), International education and schools: Moving beyond the first 40 years (pp. 3-23). London: Bloomsbury.

Pearce, R. (2013). International Education and Schools: Moving Beyond the First 40 Years. London: Bloomsbury.

Poole, A. (2020). Constructing international school teacher identity from lived experience: A fresh conceptual framework. Journal of Research in International Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/1475240920954044

Rey, J. Bolay, M. & Gez, Y. N. (2020). Precarious privilege: personal debt, lifestyle aspirations and mobility among international school teachers. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 1-13. doi.org/10.1080/14767724.2020.1732193

Author’s bio

Adam is Director of Research in the Institute of Impact Studies in Beijing Foreign Studies University (BFSU). Along with his colleagues in the institute, Adam is currently developing a project to establish the pedagogical needs of teachers and stakeholders in BFSU International. His research interests include international teachers’ experiences in international schools, teacher professional identity, and developing the funds of identity concept. He is currently writing a book, which explores teachers lived experiences in Chinese Internationalised Schools in more depth. Adam can be reached at tyger106@hotmail.com and via his profile page at Research Gate. His ORCID identification is orcid.org/0000-0001-5948-0705.

Research Highlighted

Li, B., & Shen, Y. (2020). Publication or pregnancy? Employment contracts and childbearing of women academics in China. Studies in higher education, 1-13. doi:10.1080/03075079.2020.1817888

The ‘publish or perish’ system has been widespread in the global higher education sector to incentivize academic performance. How the system affects academics in non-western countries has received scant attention. In recent years, more and more Chinese universities start to introduce a tenure track system in which the employees sign a fixed term contract with interim and end of term reviews. After the review, the employees would either be promoted to tenure positions or lose their jobs. The term of contracts would usually be 4-6 years. The Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) include numbers of publications and successful grant applications.

In our recent article “Publication or pregnancy? Employment contracts and childbearing of women academics in China”, we used a mix-method approach to understand the relationships between contract types, work pressure, childbearing intentions and individual coping strategies. The quantitative analyses show the relationships between these factors, and the qualitative results provide in-depth understanding on how women academics acted in response to the changing evaluation and contracting practices.

Our research compared the differential impact of fix-term and permanent contracts on women academics. We examined their perceived work pressure and the childbearing decisions of women academics in China. The survey data were collected in 2019 through an online survey of 453 women academics working in universities across China. The research establishes a significant correlation between the types of contracts and the reproductive practices of women academics of childbearing age. In order to obtain more detailed information on the underlying consequences of the new system and the respondents’ coping strategies, interviews were conducted with women academics across different stages of their career.

We found that 70% of the respondents considered that fixed term contracts increased the pressure to write and publish. 82% experienced psychological pressure and worried about contract renewal. People working under fixed term contract felt more stressed than those who did not sign the contract. What is more, it had increased the anticipated pressure for those who were about to sign a fixed term contract. Women academics and PhDs have adapted their reproductive behaviour in response to the greater work pressure. The data shows that there is a significant difference in the timing of childbearing between women who had signed a fixed term contract and those who had not. Nearly 70% of the respondents who had ever signed fixed-term contacts had deliberately moved forward or delayed their childbearing, a much higher rate than those who had not signed fixed-term contracts (37%). However, their adaptation cannot solve all the problems they have to face and could cause vulnerability and inequality. More and more PhD students give birth before they graduate. Universities and supervisors, however, are slow to meet their childcare needs. Employers are reported to prefer women PhDs who have already had children upon recruitment.

The findings also show that the new system adopted in China offers higher risk contracts with higher pay than the old-fashioned permanent contract. Some respondents recognise the benefit of the new system. However, because employers do not necessarily take into account women’s reproductive needs, the incentives come at the costs of high pressure and staff anxiety.

The findings confirm widespread influences of a managerialist approach to stimulate research outputs in academia. Against the background of the new family planning policy and the growing favour of managerialism in China, our paper sheds new light on the impact of the introduction of a competitive employment system on employees’ work and life balance and the interaction between employment status, reproductive behaviour and mental stress.

We provide several suggestions to policy makers and university management. It is worth noting that the fixed-term system is new in most universities in China. Universities may have been overly excited about the magic power of ‘publish or perish’ contracts to stimulate research outputs and failed to notice that in other countries that have adopted the system, there are supportive arrangements for women. The fact that some respondents reported that some universities had introduced additional policies to improve the situation shows that university management can have the goodwill to improve. In addition to learning from international best practices, universities planning to introduce the probation-tenure system could learn from other universities in China that have made adjustments to support women. In addition, the state as a regulator of universities may consider establishing guidelines to minimize the difficulties that women academics have to face as the evaluation practices change. Supporting both employers and families simultaneously would be more effective than supporting one side alone.

Authors’ biography

Dr Bingqin Li is SHARP (special hire) Professor and the Director of the Chinese Social Policy Stream at Social Policy Research Centre (SPRC) at University of New South Wales in Sydney. She received her PhD in Social Policy from LSE UK. Before moving to UNSW, she worked at LSE and Australian National University. Her research is on social inequality, urbanisation and local governance in China. Her current projects include local government social service delivery, disability employment and digital economy, aging, urban and community development.  Google Scholar UNSW official page

Dr Yang Shen is an associate professor at the School of International and Public Affairs at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. She did her PhD in Gender Studies at the London School of Economics. Her current research projects include women’s fertility practices, housing and intimacy and online dating in China. Her academic articles have appeared in Journal of Family Issues, China Quarterly, Habitat International, Policy Studies, among others. Her book monograph ‘Beyond tears and laughter: gender, migration and the service sector in China’ has been published by Palgrave in 2019.

Relevant publications by the authors

Shen, Y. & Li, B (2020) Policy coordination in the talent war to achieve economic upgrading: the case of four Chinese cities, Policy Studies. Online first.

Shen, Y. & Jiang, L. (2020). Labour Market Outcomes of Professional Women with Two Children After the One-Child Policy in China, Journal of Social Issues. Early view.

Shen, Y. & Jiang, L. (2020). Reproductive choices of highly educated employed women with two children under the universal two-child policy, Journal of Family Issues, 41(5): 611-635.

Research Highlighted:

Wu, Jinting. (2019). Confucian revival and the hybrid educational narratives in contemporary China: A critical rethinking of scale in globalisation and education. Globalisation, Societies and Education, 17(4), 474-488.

Today China witnesses a renaissance of classical studies and Confucian Academies across the nation. With an estimated 10 million children attending Confucian kindergartens, classes, and schools, cultural heritage has increasingly become a new marker of social distinction. Meanwhile, Confucian tradition is often associated with excessive testing, competition, and academic burdens that continue to hinder China’s educational innovation. In this paper, I attempt to examine such hybrid educational narratives to understand the idiosyncratic features of Chinese educational globalisation. This paper also problematises the dominant hierarchical conception of scale in comparative education research and rethinks globalisation as a comingling and friction of multiple imagined communities.

Throughout China’s dynastic and modern history, the shifting narratives of Confucian doctrine have always corresponded with China’s changing educational paradigms. The first period occurred in the late Qing dynasty when the Ti-Yong debates upheld Chinese classical learning as the essence (Ti) and denigrated Western learning as mere utility (Yong). The second period occurred in the May Fourth Movement in 1919 when intellectual elites radically rejected traditional values and promoted the Western utilitarian approach to education, resulting in an overall suppression of Confucianism and classical texts in the educational system (Pepper 2000, 61). The third major change took place during the communist rule when China adopted the Soviet model to educate citizens as both ideologically correct and technically savvy (you hong you zhuan), leading to the branding of Confucian teaching as feudalist and antirevolutionary. The fourth major change was at the turn of the twenty-first century when the structural subordination of students to teachers and test-based curricula in state schools have been identified as setbacks to Chinese educational competitiveness. Curriculum reformers turned to the Anglo-American child-centred pedagogies as a critique of Confucian rote learning and inscription of social hierarchy. While Confucian pedagogical practices are challenged, curiously, today’s China also witnesses the ‘rehabilitation’ of the ancient sage and the all-out search for classical wisdom, a cultural and educational movement involving people from diverse backgrounds and facilitated by mass media, the market, the state, and the academia.

The newest wave of Confucian revival coincides with the tightening of the state grip in post-reform China. The state becomes a tireless champion of ancient classics in its strive for modernity, which can be seen in a number of public commentaries made by President Xi Jinping, deploring the de-Sinicisation of school curricula and promoting Confucian legacy as the ‘cultural gene of the Chinese nation.’ While the current Confucian revival is aptly seen as a form of state governing and social control, ordinary people also actively appropriate Confucian teachings to orient themselves in China’s dizzying socioeconomimc dislocation. 

A media studies professor, Yu Dan offered popular interpretation of The Analects (lunyu) in China Central Television’s popular program Lecture Room (baijia jiangtan), and enjoyed immense popularity among ordinary Chinese citizens who are hungry for existential guidance to navigate the whirlpool of socioeconomic changes. Additionally, scholars also aid the Confucian revival movement by offering national studies classes (guoxueban) to business entrepreneurs in leading universities. These classes appeal to businesspersons who seem to aspire for a model of the ‘Confucian enterpreneur’ (ru shang) by translating their material wealth into ‘cultured’ social distinction (Wu and Wenning 2016, 563). Meanwhile, there are many Confucian academies and classics chanting programs that appeal to parents who are disillusioned with the exam-centred educational system and look to alternatives in the hope to provide a more human, nurturing learning environment. While Western progressive educational philosophies are widely sought after by urban parents, on the other hand, the learning of traditional Chinese culture and values has also undergone a boom in recent decades (Pang 2014). A growing number of middle-class children attended private Confucian academies alongside mainstream schools, which, occupying a growing market niche and often charging substantial fees, teach the young recruits proper filial behaviours, a balanced and healthy living style, and cultural literacy through activities such as calligraphy, martial arts, tea ceremony, and chanting classics (Yu 2016). Classical learing in Confucian academies offers one of the latest educational models through which parents explore alternative pathways to cultivate high suzhi of the child, defined as cosmopolitan, mobile, creative, and knowledgeable in the global neoliberal economy.

The revival of Confucianism presents a cultural-educational lens to understand Chinese nationalism and globalisation. As China continues to grow economically and looks inward to take stock of its own cultural heritage, Confucian teachings re-entered to parry the Western cultural influence. The concept of guoxue re (the craze of national studies) captures a distinct form of nationalism in today’s China. It is hybrid moment of cultivating world citizens with Chinese hearts, and can be interpreted as a collective form of cultural intimacy, described by Herzfeld (1997) as the larger concerns of the nation-state intertwining with the everyday desires of its citizens to form a curious space comprehensible only with an insider’s sensitivity. The popular vision of foreign superiority and Chinese backwardness has been retooled by an orientation towards a greater understanding of China’s cultural distinctiveness and the dual needs for Sinicisation and globalisation.

Based on the case of the Confucian revival, I offer a critical perspective to rethink the concept of scale and the global-national-local distinction in comparative education research. Much energy in comparative studies of education has been devoted to spatialising the differences, making the global-local binary ever more durable. Classrooms and schools are often considered as the local, state policies and bureaucracy as the national, and international travelling discourse as the global. Yet, the utility of scale is increasingly called into question. Scholars in human and cultural geography have had sustained theoretical reflection on the concept of scale, positing that scale is less of a physical domain than an interplay of different regimes of value, and the ways in which certain values become hegemonic. Indeed, scalar logic reinforces a hierarchy of knowledge production, where some forms of knowledge are taken as paradigms, and other forms of knowledge as contained in local particularity. A flexible understanding of scale as flat ontology, on the other hand, attempts to denaturalise the material effects of assigning the global more causual force and regarding others as merely derivative (Marston, Jones, and Woodward 2005).

Confucian revival is not merely a national (or nationalistic) phenomenon; it is simultaneously deeply localised – in shaping parental strategies at childrearing – and global in reach, speaking to the worldwide interest in Confucian Heritage Culture associated with Chinese students’ academic achievement and China’s economic and political ascendency. Confucian revival is a site of multiple imagined communities – of the nation-state, students and families, self-searching populace, global China watchers, and much more. It is simultaneously a local, national, and global phenomenon which renders the scalar logic unproductive. Hence, in the field of comparative education, scale needs not to be seen as a ‘matter of fact’, but a ‘matter of concern’. This paper urges us to move beyond seeing scales as physical entities to seeing them as assemblages and frictions of imagined communities, discourses, values, and meanings.

Jinting Wu, 2019

References:

Herzfeld, M. 1997. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York, NY: Routledge.

Marston, S. A., J. P. Jones, III, and K. Woodward. 2005. “Human Geography Without Scale.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (4): 416–432.

Pang, Qin. 2014. “‘The Two Lines Control Model’ in China’s State and Society Relations: Central State’s Management of Confucian Revival in the New Century.” International Journal of China Studies 5 (3): 627–655.

Pepper, S. 2000. Radicalism and Education Reform in Twentieth-Century China: The Search for an Ideal Development Model. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wu, J., and M. Wenning. 2016. “The Postsecular Turn in Education: Lessons from the Mindfulness Movement and the Revival of Confucian Academies.” Studies in Philosophy and Education 35: 551–571.

Yu, Hua. 2016. “Between the National and the International: Ethnography of Language Ideologies in a Middle-Class Community in China.” The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher 25 (5): 703–711.

Author Bio

Dr Jinting Wu is Assistant Professor of Educational Culture, Policy and Society. She is an educational anthropologist with an interest in philosophy and cultural studies. Her research often deploys ethnographic field methods to critically investigate relationships among schooling, society, and culture; it also examines educational policy shifts both as lived experiences and as reflecting the larger spheres of cultural ideation, social (re)production, nation building and globalization. Recent projects have involved study of rural minority education, child disabilities and special education, immigrant youth and families, and educational meritocracy on the global stage. Prior to joining the GSE faculty, she worked as Assistant Professor at the University of Macau (SAR, China) and was a postdoctoral fellow of educational sciences at the University of Luxembourg. Jinting is author of Fabricating an Educational Miracle (SUNY Press, 2017 AERA Division B Outstanding Book Recognition Award; The Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award).

Research Highlighted:

Ruan, J. 2019. “Bribery with Chinese characteristics” and the use of guanxi to obtain admission to prestigious secondary schools in urban China, Critical Asian Studies, 51(1):120-130

Guanxi, the Chinese personal relationships, connections or networks, is a fundamental element of traditional Chinese social structure, which continues to be pervasive in contemporary China and often involves bribery and corruption. How can we distinguish proper guanxi from bribery?

Some argue that bribes are one-off but guanxi is premised on a long-term relationship. Other argue that guanxi is based on affection and esteem while bribery is based on coercion. Some argue that bribery is based on improper inducement while guanxi is not. However, evidence from this study supports a different point of view.

The author carried out ethnographic case studies in two Chinese cities where parents used guanxi to obtain school places in prestigious schools. Evidence has shown that a bribery relation in Chinese society can be a guanxi relation involving some degree of affection and esteem while simultaneously having a coercive intent. In addition, some bribery in China does not necessarily involve coercion, but instead relies on ethical force. Moreover, some affection or esteem in guanxi practice are not genuine but a performance to cover the bribery, which makes it difficult to distinguish proper guanxi from bribery.

Bribery cannot be distinguished from guanxi simply by judging whether it is a one-off deal or a part of a long-term relationship. Some bribery in China may involve long-term indebtedness and the return of favors after a long period of time, which looks like a proper guanxi but in fact bribery with long-term trust. Moreover, long term friendship in Chinese society also involves bribery from time to time.

Bribery in China is significantly influenced by the concept and ethics of renqing. Although guanxi and bribery acts can be distinguished theoretically by whether these carry an improper inducement, it is extremely difficult to distinguish them in practice since many people consider giving money to officials as following a traditional ethic (renqing) and is proper.

中文摘要

一些学者试图区分某种行为是人情关系还是贿赂，但在中国，有些行为是很难断定它是人情还是贿赂的，这与一些中国传统观念和做法有关。首先，传统上人们更看重人情伦理而非法律，这使得人们很难判断拉关系行为是否存在“不当引诱”； 第二，贿赂中使用的一些互动仪式其实是一种表演，企图证明其不道德行为的正当性，有意混淆人情关系与贿赂；第三，贿赂中所表现出的一些“感情”和“尊敬”有时只是一种逢场作戏，而并非真正的感情和尊敬；第四，有些人试图将他们的贿赂关系表演成一种长期的亲友关系，而不是一次性的交易，这也加大了局外观察者区分人情关系和贿赂的难度。由于“道德化”的文化习俗把人情关系和贿赂混为一谈，使得观察者很难通过判断一项行为是否是纯粹基于尊敬还是被胁迫、是基于长期关系或一次性交易、是基于“不当引诱”还是正当合法行为。

Author Bio

Dr Ji Ruan is currently an associate professor in sociology in Hanshan Normal University in China. He earned his PhD in sociology at the University of Kent, U.K. He is author of Guanxi, Social Capital and School Choice in China: The Rise of Ritual Capital (Palgrave). His research interests include guanxi, bribery, corruption, social stratification and exclusion, rural governance, Confucianism. he can be contacted via 200807689@qq.com.

Recent publications:

Ruan Ji & Chen Feng (2020) The Role of Guanxi in Social Exclusion against the Background of Social Stratification: Case Studies of Two Chinese Villages, Journal of Contemporary China, 29:125, 698-713, DOI: 10.1080/10670564.2019.1705001

Ruan, J. 2019b, Motivations for Ritual Performance in Bribery: Ethnographic Case Studies of the Use of Guanxi to Gain School Places in China，Current Sociology，DOI: 10.1177/0011392119892676

Ruan, J.2019a. “Bribery with Chinese characteristics” and the use of guanxi to obtain admission to prestigious secondary schools in urban China, Critical Asian Studies, 51(1):120-130

Ruan, J. 2017c. ‘Interaction Rituals in Guanxi Practice and the Role of Instrumental Li’, Asian Studies Review 41(4): 664–678

Ruan, J. 2017b. ‘Ritual Capital: A Proposed Concept From a Case Study of School Selection in China’, Asian Journal of Social Science 45 (3): 316–339

Ruan, J. 2017a. Guanxi, Social Capital and School Choice in China: The Rise of Ritual Capital, London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Research Highlighted

Zhenjie Yuan & Hong Zhu (2020): Uyghur educational elites in China: mobility and subjectivity uncertainty on a life-transforming journey, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2020.1790343 (open access)

Relocation as a strategy: policy designs and spatial agendas of the Xinjiang class

Education has been perceived as a key mechanism to ease interethnic conflict, enhance mutual trust, and promote national unity in China, a state that has been presented for decades in its official media as multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. However, taking the Uyghur as an example, although preferential policies have been deployed for years, conflicts between the Uyghur and Han-dominant educational systems have continuously been reported. Spatial isolation, religion, language, and sense of ethnic belonging, etc. are the most-discussed factors leading to gaps between Uyghur students and mainstream society in educational/career contexts across schools, universities, and workplaces.

This article concerns a boarding school project named Xinjiang Interior Class, which has been defined as an emblem of a nationalist project aimed at improving minority education and fostering solidarity among ethnic groups. Unlike the trend of “moving-inwards” that introduces educational resources into Xinjiang– the focus of most preferential educational policies related to Xinjiang – the Xinjiang class represents a “moving-outwards” trend: Xinjiang students are relocated from their home areas to receive education at designated campuses in selected central and eastern cities. In this vein, the policy involves a physical relocation of students (mostly ethnic minority, especially Uyghur) from Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region to the eastern and central parts of the country.

The Xinjiang class policy has been defined as successful in official discourses, increasing from 1,000 enrolments in 2000 to around 10,000 enrolments since 2014. By 2017, nearly 100,000 Xinjiang students had received education through this policy, with about 21,000 graduates starting their careers in Xinjiang. However, the policy has been critiqued due to its strategy of removing students from their homeland, and its explicit political goals of cultivating politically loyal (mostly ethnic minority) elites. Arguably, the policy is one of the most influential but controversial minority education policies in contemporary China.

Current debates and research questions

The policy has attracted increasing academic attention. Existing scholarship has focused on interethnic interaction and identity politics among current students and graduates in different spatial contexts (including schools, universities, and workplaces), unveiling both the efficiencies and problems with of the policy. Although the existing research has revealed myriad interethnic politics in everyday schooling, critical, but still underexplored, questions are: Who are the students before they enter such a new educational world? How did they experience the relocation process? Drawing on theories of mobility and subjectivity, especially in relation to train space, this study interrogates Uyghur students’ subjectivity experiences in this space-in-motion.

Subjectivity, in this study, refers to all the elements that make up a thinking, perceiving and feeling human subject. These consist of the various domains of conscious experience – the attitudes, values, memories, feelings, beliefs, interpretations, perceptions, expectations, imaginations and personal or cultural understandings specific to a person. This study focuses on subjectivity since it focuses more on ideas about the subject and one’s own mental world, which is expected to provide a more subtle and nuanced perspective on understanding the thoughts, feelings and perceptions of the Xinjiang students during the process of mobility.

Methods

The field site of this study is a moving train. This study is based on a “mobile ethnography”, which is a qualitatively-based method of tracking the students’ journey, gathering students’ insight and capturing the student voice. I had a seat in the same compartment as the students, spending the entire three-day and two-night trip with them, which offered me significant time and space to talk with students, hear their voices and observe their behaviours. Drawing on interviews (N=16), observations, and questionnaire surveys (N=97) with Uyghur students on a train which took them to their new educational world, this article examines what the students felt, thought, perceived and did during the trip, and analyses how these subjective experiences are related to the process of being mobile.

Findings and discussions

We find that the process of mobility provided the students with a specific time and space to rethink who they are and how they are connected to different places, people and communities. The rich but subtle experiences during the mobility process result in intricate subjectivity uncertainty for the students, chiefly entailing a strong sense of eliteness, a reinforced sense of self-discipline, and increased place identity to Xinjiang. Furthermore, these experiences also rendered the train an affective space, where bodies (students), materials, emotions and imaginations were intertwined, but also a social-political space entailing significant implications for examining the politics of ethnicity in relation to the Xinjiang class.

The article supplements the current literature by presenting the poetics and politics of subjectivity among Uyghur students in a mobile space, further reinforcing the significance of mobility theories in understanding ethnic migration and its politics in China.

First, this study offers researchers a mobilities perspective to examine the interethnic politics of the Xinjiang class, but also reminding both scholars and observers of China to extend their focus to other spatial contexts associated with the policy.

Second, we contend that mobility has become a core value and emblem of progress during China’s modernization and urbanization, and should be a critical perspective for examining ethnic politics in contemporary China. We argue that the process of movement/travel, an important but underexplored arena, might not only create a transitional time-space for (ethnic minority) migrants to conduct relocation, but also produces intense psychological and behavioural responses to their decisions about and expectations of im/mobility, which is connected to the broader socio-economic picture in China.

Authors’ bios

Dr Zhenjie Yuan is Associate Professor in School of Geography and Remote Sensing, Guangzhou University. He holds a PhD in Human Geography/Chinese studies from the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies, the University of Melbourne. His research is inter-disciplinary, traversing across geography of education, sociology of education and ethnic studies. It focuses particularly on the politics of multi-ethnic interaction of the “Xinjiang Inland Class”. Email: zjyuan@gzhu.edu.cn.

Dr Hong Zhu is a Professor in the School of Geography and Remote Sensing, Guangzhou University. His research interests lie in social and culture geography. He is also the Director of Guangdong Provincial Center for Urban and Migration Studies. He is now the Principal Investigator of a Key Project of the National Science Foundation of China which focuses on human-place interaction and the negotiation of place for various types of migrants in the context of China’s globalization and modernization. Email: zhuhong@gzhu.edu.cn.

Research Highlighted

Koh, S.Y., Hoon, C.-Y., & Noor Azam Haji-Othman. (2020). ‘Mandarin Fever’ and Chinese Language-learning in Brunei Middle Schools: Discrepant Discourses, Multifaceted Realities and Institutional Barriers. Asian Studies Review. doi:10.1080/10357823.2020.1801577

The rise of China as a global economic powerhouse has led to a surge in Chinese language-learning worldwide (i.e. ‘Mandarin Fever’), including in Southeast Asia. The rapidly growing interest in Chinese language-learning around the world has brought about shifts in some Southeast Asian governments’ stances towards Chinese education and Chinese language-learning in schools. Given the long histories of suppression or curtailment of Chinese schools and Chinese language-learning in many Southeast Asian countries, does Mandarin Fever signal the cusp of a transformative change in ethnic minority education and language-learning in these multicultural contexts?

We explore this question through the case study of two Chinese middle schools in Brunei Darussalam, a Muslim and English–Malay bilingual majority country. Drawing on participant observations at two private Chinese middle schools, 19 interviews with teachers and parents, and 10 focus group discussions with students conducted in 2018, we find that there are discrepant discourses and multifaceted realities within and between different groups. By this, we mean that there are conflicting and irreconcilable desires and realities in the learning of Mandarin in Brunei.

Teachers and parents agree with and understand the need for Brunei’s school children to learn Mandarin, and often articulate this in relation to ethno-cultural preservation as well as China’s global and local economic position. Despite their desire for ethno-cultural maintenance, parents ironically emphasised that a basic understanding and command of Mandarin was the least they expected from their children. This paradoxical co-existence of desire and actual expectation among parents is understandable, given the context of Brunei’s linguistic and cultural environment, which does not usually require advanced use of Mandarin either in the workplace or in everyday life. Furthermore, parents themselves may not be fluent Mandarin speakers and may lack the ability to nurture their children’s learning of the language outside the classroom.

Students, however, struggled to understand the broader and longer-term benefits articulated by their parents and teachers. Instead, they articulated banal motivations such as being able to communicate with non-English-conversant family members (e.g. their grandparents) and new migrants from China. This suggests that students primarily considered Mandarin to be a communication tool with ‘others’ who are not conversant in English. Some students gave deviant responses, demonstrating their inability to understand the utility of the Mandarin, and their frustration at having to learn what they perceive to be a difficult and an unnecessary subject.

We found that students repeated the discourses of ‘should learn the mother tongue as a Chinese person’, ‘at least being able to speak Chinese’ and ‘shameful if we can’t speak our own language’ that their parents and teachers had verbalised. In their study on language attitudes and linguistic practices among parents and students in the Chinese diaspora in Britain, Australia and Singapore, Li and Zhu found that the parents articulate similar ethno-essentialist ideologies, but the younger generation tend to embrace multilingualism and desire ‘a more dynamic and fluid definition of Chineseness’ (2010, p. 166). In contrast, our student respondents did not seem to downplay their Chineseness. For them, learning Mandarin appeared to be a necessary task that they should do because their parents and teachers told them to.

This apparent lack of inherent motivation on the part of students was linked to the institutional barriers to Chinese language-learning in Brunei. First, there is a lack of textbooks and teaching materials appropriate to Mandarin school learners in Brunei. Second, there is a heavy reliance on foreign teachers since there is no teacher training programme for Mandarin teachers locally. Third, Mandarin is not a compulsory or significant subject in key examinations (e.g. Primary School Assessment, end of Year 6; ‘O’ Levels, end of Year 9). Finally, while there have never been any official bans on languages other than Malay (the official language of Brunei), many younger Chinese perceive an instrumental and integrative need to master the Malay language and English (the main working language of Brunei).

Our study finds that there are similar challenges to Chinese language-learning in Brunei as there are in neighbouring countries where the Chinese are ethnic minorities, such as Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines. We argue that it is the cumulative effects of these educational and non-educational institutional barriers that hamper the development of an effective and comprehensive Chinese language-learning environment in Brunei.

Our findings suggest that the rise of China has had a limited impact on Chinese language-learning among Chinese students and parents in Brunei at this stage. A plausible explanation for this is that the cumulative institutional barriers are relatively entrenched, and there may be a time lag before the effects become evident. This highlights the importance of contextualising any analyses of ‘Mandarin Fever’ to the specific ethno-cultural and ethno-political contexts of the location under study.

Nevertheless, our exploration of the emergent interest among non-Chinese students and students of mixed ethnic genealogies in Chinese language-learning suggests that the rise of China may have potential longer-term impacts on Chinese language-learning in Brunei as a whole. With the continuing rise of China and increasing trade exchanges with Brunei, it remains an open question whether attitudes towards learning Mandarin will change in the future.

References

Li, W., & Zhu, H. (2010). Voices from the diaspora: Changing hierarchies and dynamics of Chinese multilingualism. International Journal of the Sociology of Language, 2010(205), 155–171.

Author bios

Sin Yee Koh is Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University Malaysia. Her work seeks to understand the causes, processes, and consequences of structural and urban inequalities, and how people cope individually and collectively under such conditions through the lens of migration and mobility. She is the author of Race, Education, and Citizenship: Mobile Malaysians, British Colonial Legacies, and a Culture of Migration (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and co-editor of New Chinese Migrations: Mobility, Home, and Inspirations (Routledge, 2018).

Chang-Yau Hoon is Director of Centre for Advanced Research and Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. He specialises on identity politics, diversity and inclusion, multiculturalism, and the Chinese diaspora in contemporary Southeast Asia. He is the author of Chinese Identity in Post-Suharto Indonesia: Culture, Media and Politics (2008, Sussex Academic Press), which was translated in Chinese and Indonesian; and co-editor of Chinese Indonesians Reassessed: History, Religion and Belonging (Routledge, 2013),  Catalysts of Change: Ethnic Chinese Business in Asia (World Scientific, 2014), and Contesting Chineseness: Ethnicity, Identity and Nation in China and Southeast Asia (Springer, Forthcoming).

Noor Azam Haji-Othman is Associate Professor in English language and linguistics at Universiti Brunei Darussalam, where he currently serves as the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. His main research interests include the indigenous languages of Brunei, minority communities, bilingualism and bilingual education, and more recently transnational education, involving English as Medium of Instruction. He is particularly interested in issues of language and identity in relation to those topics mentioned above in the context of inter-cultural encounters. He is co-editor of The use and status of language in Brunei Darussalam: A kingdom of unexpected linguistic diversity (Springer, 2016).