Category: Research Highlights

Fran Martin (2022) Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West. Durham and London: Duke University Press

My Dad once said to me […]: do you want to stay in Chengdu forever? Or do you want to have your own dream? He said, if you stay in Chengdu, then after you graduate you’ll work here, and find someone to marry, and that will be your life. And then he said: do you have a dream? If you have a dream, then you should follow it: go off and realise your dream yourself. […] Actually, he said all that very casually, but at the time, I did take notice. I thought about that question a bit. And then I said: I don’t want to spend my whole life there. I don’t want to be like ordinary girls and just pass my life in a very ordinary way, so I thought: I want to go out, I want to take a look around, take a look at this world [laughs]. […] Yes, I really wanted to see what this world is like, so I started to consider going abroad for study.

Suyin, 2015, author’s translation

Suyin, then 22, told me this story a couple of months after she arrived in Melbourne, in response to a question from me about what had motivated her to study abroad. Her narrative is striking for the way it links together the concepts of personal dream, familial support, transnational mobility, and gendered expectation. Suyin describes a mobile dream, supported by her father and fuelled by the hope that study abroad would not only broaden her horizons beyond the city where she had lived since birth, but also re-script the standard female life course that seemed inevitable if she stayed put.

I interviewed Suyin as part of an ethnographic research project I undertook between 2015 and 2020, which saw me follow a core group of fifty Chinese women born around the 1990s on their overseas study journeys in Australia. The project tracked participants from pre-departure in China, where I interviewed them along with their parents; through several years of study at universities in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra; and finally on to their postgraduate working lives in Australia, China, and beyond. The project aimed to shed light on these students’ extra-curricular lifeworlds in Australia: their subjective and emotional experiences of how it feels to study and live abroad at this time in their lives. Dreams of Flight, due to be published early next year, is the result of this study. It examines these women’s motivations for studying overseas and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of Australian cities, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. The book illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.

Dreams of Flight’s core claim is that understandings and practices of gender are inseparably entangled with middle-class Chinese students’ experiences of educational mobility. A key focus is how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their gendered identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in China’s single child generations are encouraged by their parents and the wider middle-class public culture to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, moulding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Dreams of Flight asks how time studying abroad affects young women’s negotiation of the contradiction between these competing models of identity.

The chapters demonstrate that, broadly speaking, the experience of transnational educational mobility tended to decrease their identification with neotraditionalist femininity while correspondingly increasing their attachment to mobile enterprising selfhood. Some were initially motivated to study abroad partly by their emerging critique of social pressures pushing women in their twenties toward marriage and family, and their negotiations with sexuality and intimate relationships during their years in Australia involved elaborating alternative understandings of gendered time that directly contested key aspects of normative femininity in China. Finally, participants concurred, after graduation, that their experiences of overseas education had opened up a gulf between the gender neotraditionalism that they saw as constricting the lives of female peers who remained in China, and their own developing understandings of themselves as more independent, self-focused, ambitious, consumerist, career driven, reflexive, and mobility oriented. Even those who rejected or felt disqualified from the upward-striving dream of enterprising selfhood found that overseas study had strengthened their disidentification with neotraditional femininity and their mobile aspirations.

As well as exploring the gendered social life of the Chinese student diaspora, Dreams of Flight also considers some broader, associated questions. How does the Chinese educational exodus reflect China’s economic rise and the attendant in-process transformations in the world order? Within this new order, what will it mean to think of oneself, many of my research participants do, as a global citizen and simultaneously a patriotic Chinese one? How do the massive and ever-growing numbers of mainland Chinese students studying abroad impact on the societies overseas where they live and study? How will Chinese students living in multicultural Western cities be interpellated, construct themselves, and interpret others around them in relation to discourses of ethnicity and race? Around the book’s central theme of the entanglement of gender with educational mobility are woven considerations of concomitant questions concerning the lives of China’s new middle classes, students’ negotiations of the ideals of cosmopolitan selfhood and global citizenship alongside loyalties to the Chinese state, and the ways in which China’s intensifying transnational reach through educational mobilities reconfigures aspects of urban social life, including the workings of race (and racism), in the Western cities where these young people study.

What emerges most forcefully from the book is a vision of a new generation of Chinese middle-class women: women for whom multiplied potentials for mobility—their capacity for dreams of flight—is at the very core of what it means to live.

Author Bio

Associate Professor Fran Martin is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Fran’s best known research focuses on television, film, literature and other forms of cultural production in contemporary transnational China (The People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), with a specialization in transnational flows and representations and cultures of gender and sexuality. She is currently working on a 5-year ARC Future Fellowship project that uses longitudinal ethnography to research the social and subjective experiences of young women from China studying and living in Australia (http://www.mobileselves.org). Fran received both her BA (hons) and her PhD from Melbourne University.

Fran is fluent in Mandarin, having begun learning the language in primary school in Australia. She later spent two years studying Chinese language and literature at Beijing Second Foreign Languages Institute and East China Normal University (1989 – 1991). She then spent a further two years researching in Taiwan, including at National Taiwan Central University’s Center for the Study of Sexualities. Prior to joining Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne, Fran lectured in the Cinema Studies program at La Trobe University (2000-2003).

Watch this interview and listen to this interview with Lena.

Rural-Urban Migration and Agro-Technological Change in Post-Reform China (open access) investigates how rural Chinese households deal with the conflicting pressures of migrating into cities to work as well as staying at home to preserve their fields as safety net. Since the 1980s, about one fifth of the entire Chinese population has migrated within China, most of them to the big cities on the east coast. This corresponds to more than one third of Chinese farmers. In their places of arrival, most of these migrants work under highly precarious conditions. It is therefore crucial for them to preserve their resources at home as a safety net, especially their fields. However, this is particularly challenging for rice farmers, because paddy fields have to be cultivated continuously and by a sufficient number of people to retain their soil quality and value. Farming households therefore pursue a range of social and technical strategies to deal with this predicament and to sustain both migration and farming.

The book sets out, in a first step, by analysing the important policy and knowledge transformations since the 1950s that have given rise to the particular situation that farmers currently face. In a second step, it describes farmers’ contemporary responses to these transformations. Special attention is paid to the widespread, although commonly overlooked adoption of post-Green Revolution farming technologies that have not only set free agricultural labour and contributed to inducing farmers to migrate, but also given farmers new options for dealing with their predicament. Methodologically, the book draws on ethnographic fieldwork, including participant observation in rural and urban China and interviews with staying and migrating household members, as well as on written sources such as local gazetteers, agricultural reports and statistical yearbooks. Moreover, it also draws on proverb collections as a channel of knowledge transmission.

The book argues, first, that paddy fields play a key role in shaping farmers’ everyday strategies. Scholars from various disciplines have repeatedly stressed that fields play a crucial role in, and for, migration. Yet, the specific socio-technical challenges in preserving this key asset and the knowledge needed to do so remain largely unexplored. This book scrutinizes these challenges in more depth, proposing the need to look at the repertoires of knowledge that both staying and migrating farmers revert to.

Related to this, second, it argues that ostensibly technical farming decisions are always also social decisions that are closely interlinked with migration decisions. In taking seemingly operational decisions, farmers are actually pursuing various long-term and short-term projects that best match their current, fluctuating household situation. What looks like simple technical ability is, in fact, multi-dimensional reasoning for potentially manifold purposes. Applying skills practically and economically always includes simultaneously performing social responsibilities. This means that farming decisions also take into consideration aspects like educational, career, or marriage aspirations, child or elderly care, long-term engagements and future responsibilities and, more generally, the social and economic reproduction of the household and the patriline.

Overall, the book argues for the need to pay more attention to the material world of migration and the related knowledge and skills. It proposes that socio-technical resources are key factors in understanding migration flows and the characteristics of migrant-home relations. In the case of China, for example, a focus on such resources helps to explain why there are so many divided households, why migration is often circular, why relationships with home remain important, and why most migrants envision returning to rural areas in the future.

The book is located at the intersection of the literature on the anthropology of migration, agriculture, and skilled practice. On an empirical level, rather than focusing on the well-studied phenomenon of migrants in their places of destination, it provides a rare qualitative-ethnographic study of migrants’ origins and, in particular, the rural side of Chinese migration. Since the reform policies of the 1980s, Chinese mobility has sharply increased, both domestically and transnationally. In view of this augmented mobility, the book provides new socio-material insights relevant to understanding the most widespread pattern of migration within contemporary China: rural-urban migration from the inner provinces to the large cities of the east coast, which often results in households whose members reside separately in different locations. Focusing on the role of farmland in migration, this book contributes a new perspective on why this pattern remains so common. This entails comprehensively examining both those who stay and those who migrate, and acknowledging that both are part of a rural-urban farming ‘community of practice’. The members of this community of practice are connected through circular migration, embodied farming skills and joint efforts to preserve home resources.

Moreover, perceiving migration in this way lets us rethink the implications of China’s hukou system of household registration, which has strictly divided the population into either rural or urban, agricultural or non-agricultural since the 1950s. This system has long prevented rural Chinese from gaining permanent settlement rights or any entitlement to the welfare, pension and education system available to registered urban-dwellers. The recent reform of China’s hukou system in 2014 increasingly allows rural people to move and obtain an urban registration. In this regard, the book is part of a new strand of scholarship that discusses not only the obvious constraints, but also the advantages of being registered as ‘rural’. Highlighting the central role of land and land entitlement, it contributes to understanding why many rural inhabitants refuse to change their status into ‘urban’ citizens despite having lived in cities for years, and why the peasant smallholder model remains important, despite massive urbanization.

On a theoretical level, the book contributes especially to a recently-established subfield of migration studies, materialities of migration. It contributes to the material turn in migration studies a perspective on things that stay – paddy fields – and the related embodied skills. The latter are important socio-technical aspects of migration that, nevertheless, generally escape our attention because they usually remain tacit and are mostly transmitted beyond formal educational structures. Nevertheless, as the book suggests, such a socio-technical perspective is highly valuable for studying migration phenomena, as a way to offer new understandings of migrant-home relations and dynamics.

Finally, the book challenges prevailing narratives about backwardness and progress. Challenging public discourse which portrays Chinese peasants as passive and backward, it shows that farmers are, in fact, forward-looking decision-making agents who are actively shaping China’s modernity. Overall, this book provides rare insights into the rural side of migration and farmers’ knowledge and agency.

Author Bio

Dr Lena Kaufmann is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Zurich, where she is a research associate in both the Department of History and the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies. Trained as an anthropologist and sinologist in Rome, Berlin and Shanghai, she holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Zurich. She spent four years in China and has conducted extensive research on Chinese migration in urban and rural settings. She is the speaker of the Regional Group China of the German Anthropological Association. Her current research project focuses on Swiss-Chinese entanglements in digital infrastructures. She can be reached via email at lena.kaufmann@uzh.ch.

Research Highlighted

Wang, C. (2020). Educating the Cosmopolitan Citizen in Confucian Classical Education in Contemporary China. Chinese Education & Society, 53 (1-2): 36-46, https://doi.org/10.1080/10611932.2020.1716613.

This article explores the connotations of cosmopolitanism and its role in citizen formation in the context of Confucian education in contemporary China. Since the mid-1990s, Confucian education has been rejuvenated throughout the country, demonstrating a trend of diversification in educational theories, methods and approaches. It is true that the revival of Confucian education is always sophisticated with complex nationalist sentiments, for instance, national superiority and inferiority. It also presents a distinct orientation of cosmopolitanism beyond national concerns, but this has yet received attention from researchers.

To uncover the meaning of cosmopolitan citizenship in the context of Confucian classical education, this article first goes into the theory of classics-reading education proposed by Wang Caigui who is popularly recognized as the leading figure of the Confucian education movement. Wang emphasized that contemporary Chinese citizens should not cast off their responsibility to carry forward Chinese traditional culture, arguing that the sense of national and cultural responsibility is derived from the common humanity that transcends racial, ethnic and national boundaries. Based on the common humanity, he stated that classics of all cultures in the world, regardless of which nation-state they belong to, are worth learning as they conform to human nature. Cosmopolitanism, associated with the thesis of human commonality and cultural universalism, is extensively distributed in the theoretical discourses on Confucian classical education. As classics are conceived to contain universal truth or eternal wisdom (changli) that surpasses national boundaries, reading classics is proposed to be the most reasonable approach to calling on human nature.

The cosmopolitanism espoused by classical education has exerted profound influences on the teaching and learning practice. In terms of teaching content, Wang Caigui strongly advised that students should not only read Chinese classics, but also engage in learning western great works, including English, German and Sanskrit classics. Mechanical memorization of classics is recommended as the principal way to cultivate cosmopolitan cultural talents in Wang’s theory. On the one hand, repeated learning is assumed to take full advantage of one’s memory, which is believed to be in line with the theory of children’s natural growth. On the other hand, the memorized classic texts are considered as the crystallization of the eternal and universal human wisdom, and this is argued in coherence with common humanity.

Drawing the sketch of the cosmopolitan civility suggested by Wang’s theory, I come to three points. Firstly, the Confucian-inspired form of cosmopolitan citizen is essentially a cultural subject, rather than a civil or political subject, whose fundamental quality is the sophistication in both Chinese and western classics. Secondly, the type of cosmopolitan citizen in Confucian education is responsible to carry forward Chinese traditional culture and also assumes the obligation to grasp western culture and promote global cultural integration. The sense of cultural responsibility derives from her/his examination and interrogation upon self, whereby s/he involves her/himself with the wellbeing of common world and humankind. Finally, learning classics, both Chinese and western, can be understood as a cultural and civic action that is associated with the broad revival of Chinese nation and the imagined fusion of Chinese and western cultures. This cultural and civic action manifests in a private and individual form but is also intimately connected to national and cosmopolitan concerns. To sum up, cosmopolitan citizenship in contemporary Confucian education is imagined to be a subject of culture, responsibility, and action, requiring one to substantiate his civic identity through memorizing both Chinese and western classics.

All the above are reflected in the teaching practice of cultivating Confucian cosmopolitan citizen at Yiqian School, where I conducted fieldwork. First of all, the School claimed to cultivate cosmopolitan citizen through classics learning and highlighted the dimension of ethical virtue. The image of cosmopolitan citizen drawn by the School referred to a moral subject with civic qualities, for instance, the obedience to social order and the spirituality of public participation, all of which are respected as the foundation to become a true human. Second, Yiqian School adopted the memorization-based pedagogy recommended by Wang Caigui and regarded it as the fundamental approach to transform students into cosmopolitan citizens. While Wang Caigui asserted that memorization is in line with the law of human development, the actual teaching practices encountered difficulties and contradictions. 

The international literature on cosmopolitan education highlights a moral imperative upon educators and educational institutions to promote students a cosmopolitan attitude, an “other-oriented” character, a disposition of tolerating and respecting different cultures, and the moral obligation for the word community. To a large extent, what lies at the center of cosmopolitan education is the moral and cultural form of cosmopolitanism, rather than the political or the legal. Owing to the moral inclination of cosmopolitan education, the international implications of the Confucian school case could be identified. Confucian education regards one’s moral endeavor and cultural competence as the most essential to overcome restrictions of patriotism and nationalism and to become citizens of the world. Confucian virtues such as spontaneous reactions to everyday life and affective connections share much commonality with those derived from ancient-Greek such as self-examination and narrative imagination. Mechanical memorization serves as a holistic approach to impart comprehensive knowledge of western and Chinese classics, insofar as to intensify learners’ moral awareness of cosmopolitanism. Nonetheless, the discord between teaching theory and practice implies the potential impairment of generalizing the memorization-based pedagogy for the nurture of cosmopolitan citizen.

Researcher’s bio

Canglong Wang is a lecturer in Chinese Studies at the University of Hull. His research explores the cultural, social and political implications of the revival of Confucian education in modern China. He is working as a co-guest editor for two special issues: one is about Confucian education revival for the journal China Perspectives, and the other is about Chinese education and civic actions for the journal Social Transformations in Chinese Societies. He is also leading an international collaboration project about the reemerging spaces of Confucian cultivation. His monograph entitled Cultivating the Confucian individual: Subjectification and classical schooling in China can be expected in 2022.  

Research highlighted:

Xu, W., & Knijnik, J. (2021). Critical Chinese as an Additional Language education in Australia: A journey to voices, courage and hope. British Educational Research Journal, 1-17. doi:10.1002/berj.3747

Languages education plays a central role in constructing hegemony and boundaries, while also being commodified as a technical skill with symbolic added value in the globalised new economy (Heller & Duchêne, 2012). In spite of the continuous politicisation of the Chinese language in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and internationally in the western countries, Chinese is still being recognised as a central language for Australian students (Weinmann, Arber, & Neilsen, 2021); hence, in 2019, the NSW Department of Education invested substantially in a substitutional program and is committed to delivering ‘first-class Chinese-language and cultural programs’ in NSW public schools (Baker & Chung, 2019). This ambiguous discourse has paralleled with the status of foreign language education in China.

In our paper ‘Critical Chinese as an Additional Language education in Australia: A journey to voices, courage and hope’ recently published in the British Journal of Educational Studies (Xu & Knijnik, 2021),we consider the discursive construction of politicised and racialised language ideologies and ‘profit’, or language as capital provides the cultural and social context for our research. We handled contradictions and recast Chinese as an Additional Language (CAL) education as a dynamic pedagogic space for critical language and cultural awareness. Though trumpeted as an open, democratic and multilingual society, inequity, social stratification and exclusion are perennial issues in Australia. Learning additional languages, often associated with elite education, is likely to afford students from disadvantaged families with valuable resources, such as employment, sustainable livelihoods, alternative ways of thinking and a sense of achievement (Piller & Takahashi, 2011; Xu & Stahl, 2021).

In our article we drew upon Freire’s conceptualisation of dialogic practices and conscientização to unpack a journey to voices, courage and hope of a cohort of socially, linguistically and economically disadvantaged students in Western Sydney, one of the most culturally diverse regions in the country. Their experiences, responses, dreams and understanding of CAL education in multicultural Australia were thus captured. For example, a girl named Ally, who came from a challenging background, expressed a critical awareness of the importance of Chinese language to her future capacity to have-white collar, high skilled jobs as opposed to more traditionally feminised roles or occupations that do not require strong educational background.

By arguing that emancipatory and critical practices could enhance students to achieve consciousness and collective self-transformation, we challenged the permeability of raciolinguistic ideologies that exacerbate social exclusion and inequality in linguistically diverse Australia, while making a contribution to the literature on CAL and languages education, which all too often isolate from broader issues in educational theory (Pennycook, 1990). We end with a call for broadening research and teaching imagination, and writing CAL and all additional languages more firmly into the social inclusion agenda in both Australia and beyond (Piller & Takahashi, 2011).

Author bios

Dr. Wen Xu is a post-doc research fellow at East China Normal University, China. Her research interests focus on language(s) education and society, socio-cultural studies of education, learner identities, and equity/inequality. Considering the worldwide growing upheaval and scepticism around Chinese language education, she writes extensively on how Chinese literacy can be theorised as a pathway towards equity and upward social mobility for Australian students, especially those from underprivileged backgrounds. She can be contacted via email: xuwen0826@gmail.com.

Dr. Jorge Knijnik is an associate professor in the School of Education and a researcher in the Institute for Culture and Society and the Centre for Educational Research at Western Sydney University, Australia. In the mid-1980s he was a student-teacher at Universidade de São Paulo (Brazil) where he was presented to Paulo Freire’s ideas by Freire’s core group of collaborators. In the late 1980s, he worked as an educator under Paulo Freire’s administration of São Paulo city educational department, when Freire’s concept of dialogic education spread rapidly across the municipality’s school, and an educational revolution took place in South America’s largest city.

References

Baker, J., & Chung, L. (2019). NSW schools to scrap Confucius Classroom program after review. Retrieved from https://www.theage.com.au/national/nsw/nsw-schools-to-scrap-confucius-classroom-program-after-review-20190822-p52juy.html

Heller, M., & Duchêne, A. (2012). Language in late capitalism: Pride and profit. In A. Duchêne & M. Heller (Eds.), Pride and profit: changing discourses of language, capital and nation-state (pp. 1-21). New York: Routledge.

Pennycook, A. (1990). Critical pedagogy and second language education. System, 18(3), 303-314.

Piller, I., & Takahashi, K. (2011). Linguistic diversity and social inclusion. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 14(4), 371-381. doi:10.1080/13670050.2011.573062

Weinmann, M., Arber, R., & Neilsen, R. (2021). Interrogating the ‘normal’: (Noting) discourses of legitimacy, identity and difference in languages education. In R. Arber, M. Weinmann, & J. Blackmore (Eds.), Rethinking Languages Education: Directions, Challenges and Innovations (pp. 84-97). Abingdon: Routledge.

Xu, W., & Knijnik, J. (2021). Critical Chinese as an Additional Language education in Australia: A journey to voices, courage and hope. British Educational Research Journal, 1-17. doi:10.1002/berj.3747

Xu, W., & Stahl, G. (2021). Working-class girls’ construction of learner identities and aspirations through engagement in Chinese language education in Australia. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education. doi:10.1080/01596306.2021.1918061

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.