Category: Research Highlights

Lan, S. (2018). State-mediated Brokerage System in China’s Self-funded Study Abroad Market. International Migration. doi:10.1111/imig.12515

Dr Shanshan Lan, University of Amsterdam

Abstract

The thriving of China’s self-funded study abroad market is marked by the tremendous increase of students who use the services of educational intermediaries to facilitate their transnational journeys. This is largely due to the marketization of China’s higher educational system and the liberalization of state policy towards commercialized brokerage services. Based on multisited fieldwork in China and Italy, this paper examines the intersections between the regulatory, the commercial, and the social dimensions of the educational migration infrastructure in China. It identifies a tension between the neoliberal ideas of individual autonomy and freedom, which are promoted by the state and private intermediaries, and the self-perpetuating nature of the educational migration infrastructure, which facilitates and constrains different groups of
parents’ and students’ desire for international education.

 

Ping is a middle-aged woman whom I met in summer 2015, when she accompanied her 16-year old daughter Maggie to attend a mock SAT exam held on a university campus in Jinan.1 Like the majority of my informants, Ping identifies herself as middle-class, that is the middle stratum of Chinese society. Ping and her husband are both state employees in the railway sector and both have college degrees. Although Maggie is still in her first year of high school, she has already taken the TOFEL exam twice. Ping explained her obsession with Maggie’s education: “Since this is our only child, we want to provide her the best education we can afford. Now she is performing OK in school, but we know that she won’t be able to attend an elite university in China. In China your exam score determines what major you can choose. We want to send her abroad so that she can attend a better university and choose a major based on her interest.” Ping told me that she has been following the advice of a study abroad agent, Esther, to prepare for Maggie’s eventual entry to an elite university in the United States. After the mock SAT, Ping would travel with Maggie to Shanghai to attend a six-week intensive English training course hosted by a renowned English language centre. The total cost of the trip, tuition plus food and lodging, would be around 50,000RMB. Meanwhile, since Maggie wants to major in industrial design, Esther suggested she should attend the summer school of the Chicago Art Institute next year. She convinced Ping that this pre-college overseas study trip is an important investment for Maggie’s future application for universities in the US, because it will distinguish her from other applicants from China.

Ping is just one among many middle-class Chinese parents who invest extravagantly in their children’s dreams to study abroad. According to the Chinese Ministry of Education, about 544,500 students left China in 2016 to study abroad and 91.49 per cent of them were self-funded. In 2014, the estimated value of China’s study abroad market already reached 200 billion RMB (Er, 2014). While these statistics reflect the flourishing of the education-migration industry in China, they fail to account for the anxieties, hopes, confusions and determinations experienced by Chinese parents and children in their daily life interactions with educational intermediaries from both the state and non-state sectors. With the marketization of China’s higher educational system and the commercialization of international student migration, studying abroad is often framed in popular Chinese media as a special type of educational consumption and a matter of personal choice. This article contends that recent transnational student migration from China is in fact largely facilitated and structured by the state. The diversification of brokerage services in China’s self-funded study abroad market reflects the state’s deliberate efforts to relax its control over transnational student mobility in order to relieve the problem of uneven distribution of educational resources in the country. However, state attempt to liberalize the study abroad market ends up perpetuating social inequalities due to its tacit endorsement of neoliberal ethos such as self-responsibility and self-improvement.

Due to its highly commercialized nature, educational brokerage in China starts to bear some features of international labour brokerage in regard to transnational collaborations between multiple agents and the development of complicated agent chains (Xiang, 2012). The existence of agent-chains functions to maximize profits because  it broadens the scope of student recruitment for all agents, since they can always channel students who fall outside their service range to other agents. As collaborations between agents in China intensified, some intermediaries often group the application files of all students who apply for the same university together and send them to the Italian embassy in one package. The downside of this practice is that it may significantly increase the waiting time for students whose application materials have to go through multiple agents. The profit-driven nature of commercialized intermediary practices also prompted some agents to make presumptuous promises to parents such as guaranteed admission to an overseas university and full refund in case of failed applications. In order to fulfil these promises, some agents had to resort to unethical practices such as providing falsified information concerning the student’s language skills, social activities and personal talents. One of the negative consequences is that some students who got admitted by overseas universities had to drop due to their inability to follow the curriculum. In Jinan, I encountered several Chinese students attending universities in the United States, who had to switch majors or change universities after realizing that agents’ advice did not serve their best interests.

The Chinese case study has important policy implications since much of the social inequalities in China’s higher educational system can be attributed to the uneven distribution of educational resources by the state. Reforms in China’s educational system should focus on democratic sharing of educational resources, and the cultivation of  independent thinking and problem-solving capacities among Chinese students. This will prepare them to handle the many challenges of studying abroad and also decrease their dependence on commercialized agents. To protect the interests of student migrants, the state needs to play a more active role in the professionalization of educational brokerage services. To the extent that agents can persuade parents to buy expensive training courses in preparation for elite university application, and to influence student’s  choice of study majors and universities, unethical intermediary practices can be detrimental to the future development of student migrants. This problem has already been manifested by recent examples of Chinese students being expelled from US schools due to low grades, academic dishonesty and breaking rules (Zuo, 2015). From the receiving  country’s perspective, host universities should advertise their services for international students more aggressively in China, instead of depending on recruitment agents. Once students learn that many of the overseas services provided by intermediaries in China can be freely obtained from the host universities’ international office, they are less likely to purchase expensive service packages from study abroad agents. This may help them to avoid some of the pitfalls in educational consumption covered in this article.

Author Bio

Shanshan Lan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include urban anthropology, migration and mobility regimes, comparative racial formations in Asia and Euro-America, transnational student mobility,  African diaspora in China, Chinese diaspora in the United States, and class and social transformations in Chinese society. Lan is the Principal Investigator of the ERC project “The reconfiguration of whiteness in China: Privileges, precariousness, and racialized performances” (CHINAWHITE, 2019-2024). For more information, please see www.china-white.org

Willy Sier, University of Amsterdam

This anthropological research, based on one year of fieldwork in Hubei province (2015-2016), focuses on the contradictory experiences of ‘education migrants’, which are the growing number of Chinese rural youth who migrate to the city via the country’s higher education system. These youth’ enrolment in universities has been an important contributing factor to the rapid expansion of the Chinese higher education system since 1998. Yet their limited access to high-quality education within this higher education system results in the reproduction of rural-urban inequalities in the urban Chinese labour market, where education migrants largely work under precarious conditions in informal, white-collar jobs.

The rapid growth of China’s education system is often celebrated as an ‘educational miracle’ that promises further economic growth and development as well as the mitigation of rural-urban inequalities in Chinese society. My work critiques the idea of education as a unequivocally positive force that has the potential to alleviate social problems ranging from poverty to gender inequality, and demonstrates that the blind pursuit of low-quality education sometimes makes for a wasteful journey with disappointing results. It shows that education migrants’ access to higher education is largely restricted to universities in the bottom segment of the highly stratified Chinese higher education system. The university degrees that youth obtain in these universities translate into poorly paid and unstable jobs that do not enable education migrants to achieve their main goals: building up stable lives in the cities and providing support for their family members.

This project is interested in the linkages between processes of educational expansion and urbanisation. It therefore studies the experiences of education migrants in the context of China’s rural-urban transition, and views educational expansion as an important tool for achieving state urbanisation goals as well as preparing rural communities for “agricultural modernisation”, the term the Chinese government uses to refer to processes of scaling up through land consolidation. In addition to a book manuscript under preparation, the first results of this project are expected to come out in the form of academic articles.

The first article, called ‘The price of aspirations: education migrants’ pursuit of a new stability through higher education in Hubei province, China’, brings an analysis of the structural condition of China’s social transformation and higher education system into dialogue with a discussion about the goals Chinese rural youth aspire to achieve. It analyses in detail how one families’ choices in relation to their children’s education are rooted in changing land policies and how students’ rural status inhibits their success within the Chinese higher education system. It also presents research data gathered among rural high school students that shows how students’ awareness of the challenges faced by their parents shapes their motivations.

The second article, ‘Daughters’ dilemmas: university-educated women in the rural Chinese household in Hubei province, China’, looks at education migrants’ experiences through a gendered lens and demonstrates in which ways the increased participation of rural women in higher education changes the role of rural daughters in the household. The cases presented in this paper show that highly educated women struggle to use their newly gained status as university graduates for the betterment of their families’ situations and their own position in the city without hurting their position on the marriage market, where they might be perceived as a ‘hero women’ who prioritise career over family. 

Author Bio

Willy Sier is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Her PhD-research focused on rural university students in Wuhan and the role of China’s higher education system in the country’s rural-urban transformation. Currently, she works on a project on whiteness in China (https://www.china-white.org). To see her in action, please see her short film “Empty Home”: https://vimeo.com/209590747. She can be contacted at w.m.sier@uva.nl and she tweets @WillySier.

Yuyang Kang, Lingnan University

Kang, Y. (2019). Institutional Social Capital and Chinese International Branch Campus: A Case Study from Students’ Perspectives. In Contesting Globalization and Internationalization of Higher Education (pp. 163-178). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Article Summary

In the special context of International Branch Campuses (IBCs) in China, which operate somewhat midway between Chinese and Western cultures, this chapter looks specifically at the role of institutional social capital and how it influences Chinese students’ university experiences, focusing in particular on what and how social capital is transmitted and accumulated by students within the IBC. Empirical data was gathered through in-depth interviews with current students, graduates and faculty members of one IBC in China (IBC-A, hereafter). This chapter argues that although certain aspects of institutional social capital may be curtailed, students still have many chances to cultivate their social capital in an IBC context. However, the most commonly addressed function of institutional social capital (that is, its role in students’ job-hunting) was not observed in this research.

Based upon findings generated from the interviews with students, this research finds that the assumption that IBCs can provide better institutional social capital is part of the reason why some Chinese students choose to study at an IBC. Some students believe that networking opportunities at IBC-A are better than other institutions in China, with gaokao (Chinese National College Entrance Examination) scores and high tuition fee as two compulsory requirements for entry. The university enrolls Chinese Mainland students only through the channel of the Ministry of Education (MoE), which means gaokao is the prerequisite. In 2014, the average gaokao score of IBC-A newly enrolled students majoring in science was 650, which was 18 points higher than that of Ningbo University and 49 points lower than the average of Zhejiang University. Ningbo University is neither a 985 nor 211 project university while Zhenjiang University is one of the top 10 higher education institutions in China. Although IBC-A usually avoids being compared with other universities in China’s public higher education system, the gaokao score indicates it is viewed as a good but not top university by Chinese students and their parents. Moreover, most of the students in IBC-A come from relatively well-off family. In 2012, IBC-A raised its annual tuition fee for undergraduate students from 60,000 Yuan to 80,000 Yuan, which was 15 to 20 times higher than the fees charged by a typical Chinese public university. According to the Statistical Yearbook of China, the per capita annual income of Chinese urban households was 24,564.7 Yuan in 2012 (National Bureau of Statistics, 2015). Therefore, it is reasonable to state only individuals from relatively rich families can afford the tuition at IBC-A.

Regarding cultivation of institutional social capital, this research finds that it might be difficult for IBC-A students to maintain long-term contact with faculty members. Both students and staff who were interviewed mentioned that faculty members tend to stay only for a few years at IBC-A. In addition to commonly known disadvantages of working in China such as blocked internet access, the interviews with faculty members reveal that IBC-A has two systems of faculty recruitment. The home University A directly recruits some of the faculty from the UK and those recruited are usually registered at both University A and IBC-A. The Chinese campus also recruits faculty members on a global scale on its own. Faculty members recruited via the latter channel are only signed as IBC-A faculty instead of University A. The differentiation or inequality in administration and management increase the tension within faculties and undermines people’s willingness to stay. As IBC-A is still running under deficit, it is also difficult for faculty members to get promoted. After two or three years at IBC-A, many faculty members find it difficult to be promoted and decide to move to other institutions for the development of their careers.  After a faculty member leaves for other institutions, some of the students find it difficult to keep in contact, as the teachers would change their contact information too. It also sets obstacles for those who need to find references for their further studies, which is very common among IBC-A students.

Although some institutional social capital might be curtailed by faculty turnover, students still have many chances to cultivate their social capital in an IBC context. Because of differences in higher education systems, IBC-A students need to take fewer courses than their peers in Chinese universities and students at the UK-style university are expected to be more independent in learning. Although the students interviewed tend to hold varied attitudes toward the reduced course hours, it is noticeable that fewer course hours allow IBC-A students to actively engage in extra-curricular activities and increase their sense of being members of the ‘corps.’ This paper reveals that fewer course hours together with smaller classes and students’ higher intention to build networks with each other are three factors that contribute to lasting social connections among IBC-A students and alumni.

Studies of social capital, especially institutional social capital, are unequivocal about how institutional social capital helps students to find their first jobs after graduation. However, in this study, there is no strong evidence indicating correlation between institutional social capital and IBC-A students’ first jobs. The main reason is that most of the graduates go on to postgraduate study outside of China instead of finding a local job. Interviews with IBC-A students reveals that most of them believe there are fundamental differences between IBC-A and other Chinese universities and a mismatch between demands of local job market and the IBC graduates. Some students found it difficult to adapt to the local job market and the massification of higher education in China makes it increasingly difficult to secure a good job with a bachelor’s degree only. According to the participants, only a few students planned to go directly to work after their four-years’ study, and this group of students mainly intended to take jobs in foreign companies or jobs that their families found for them.

This paper has examined the role of institutional social capital in Chinese IBC students’ university experiences. It contributes to current institutional social capital literature by showing its special role in recruitment of Chinese students. Based upon findings generated from the interviews with students, this research finds that the assumption that IBCs can provide better institutional social capital is part of the reason why some Chinese students choose to study at an IBC. Because of historical and cultural circumstances, young Chinese individuals being educated in a Western-style university still attach special importance to being a member of certain institutions. It might be difficult for IBC-A students to maintain long-term contact with faculty members who tend to move to other institutions, which curtails accumulation of certain institutional social capital. However, fewer course hours together with smaller classes and students’ higher intention to build networks with each other are three factors that contribute to lasting social connections among IBC-A students and alumni. Despite these positive factors indicating the strong potential for developing institutional social capital, the job-finding effect of institutional social capital was not obvious in this research because a large portion of the graduates did not go to work directly after their graduation.

 

Author Biography

Yuyang Kang is PhD candidate in Sociology and Social Policy at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. This paper is developed from her thesis submitted to King’s College London. Her research interests are in the subfield of internationalization of higher education and the role of HEIs in local innovation development. Her current projects focus on graduate entrepreneurs in the Great Bay Area of China. Her PhD is funded by Hong Kong PhD Fellowship and she is also the awardee of Sino-British Fellowship Trust Fund and Fung Scholarship.

 

程猛博士，北京师范大学，中国

English Version

主要作品

1.程猛. 读书的料及其文化生产——当代农家子弟成长叙事研究. 中国社会科学出版社，2018。

2.程猛、康永久. 从农家走进精英大学的年轻人：“懂事”及其命运. 中国青年研究，2018（5）。

3.程猛、陈娴. “读书的料”及其文化意蕴.基础教育,2018（5）。

4.程猛. 农村出身：一种复杂的情感结构. 青年研究，2018（6）。

5.程猛、康永久.“物或损之而益”:关于底层文化资本的另一种言说.清华大学教育研究，2016（4）。

6.程猛、陈娴. “循规者”的文化生产. 青年研究，2016（2）。

作品简介

近四年来，我的研究聚焦于当代中国一群特别的农家子弟。他们在改革开放之后出生，历经种种风险和不确定性，最终进入了精英大学。这群农家子弟的特别之处，主要体现在以下三点。首先，作为建国以来第一代在市场经济大潮下成长的农家子弟，其成长经历伴随着中国社会几千年从农业社会步入商业社会的大变局。在这一过程中，原先的政治分层逐渐被经济分层所替代，城乡经济发展的差异更加显著，地域之差演变为经济社会发展的巨大差异。其次，他们有着共通的跨越城乡边界的求学和生命历程，城乡二元结构深刻嵌入其生命历程当中。城乡经济发展的不平衡致使教育资源的不平衡愈演愈烈，他们中的许多人在生命早期进入城市求学，深刻体验着城乡不平等。再次，在中国特殊的城乡二元社会结构影响下，这些农家子弟不仅在经济地位上处于社会底层，在政治身份上也处于底端。相比于城市社会底层子弟，农家子弟身上交汇着地域、身份和阶层三种结构性力量。

从空间上看，这群农家子弟的求学历程是以家庭为中心，从农村、县城、小城市到大城市一圈圈向外扩展的波纹型变动。从时间上看，他们的求学历程也是一次次从家返校，从校返家的候鸟式流动。与父辈不同，这个群体中的大多数人只是农村生活的过客，他们最终会在城市从事中产阶层式的工作，成为“走出农村、改变命运”的美谈。人们大多注意到了他们外在的学业成功，却不清楚这样一场漫长的“子不承父业”的阶层跨越之旅中特殊的内心体验与社会行动。某种意义上，他们就是特朗德曼（Mats Trondman）所言的当代中国的阶层旅行者（class travellers）（Trondman，2006；2018）。他们历经寒窗进入精英大学，最终是为了实现阶层突破，而这也同时意味着他们的大学生活最终会“不成为他们的母亲，他们的姑妈，他们的父亲。”（Hurst，2012）

我更愿意用一个中国本土的隐喻来指代这样一群农家子弟：“读书的料”（college material）。这项有关“读书的料”的研究的灵感来自于与保罗•威利斯(Paul Willis)的文化生产理论以及皮埃尔•布迪厄(Pierre Bourdieu)文化资本理论(Bourdieu 1986, 1990)的对话，但最终这里所呈现的研究结论又与这些理论非常不同。下面的文字是我最近出版的著作《“读书的料”及其文化生产——当代农家子弟成长叙事研究》的摘要：

在保罗•威利斯的经典著作《学做工：工人阶级子弟为何继承父业》中，“循规者”是创造“反学校文化”的“家伙们”的陪衬(Willis 1981a, 1981b)。国内研究者也大多沿袭这一范式，聚焦底层违规生的文化生产(熊易寒，2010；周潇，2011; 熊春文等，2013; 李涛，2014)。这种文化生产的逻辑是：底层子弟通过生产群体亚文化，主动放弃通过教育向上流动的可能性，最终陷入阶层复制的自我诅咒。在这类研究里，取得高学业成就、最终可能实现阶层突破的底层子弟被选择性遗忘了。这类底层子弟真的是《学做工》所刻画的“书呆子”吗？“循规”背后究竟有怎样的文化生产？他们的主动性和创造性绽放于何处？

基于以上疑问，本研究反其道而行之，将注意力转向底层子弟在取得高学业成就、实现阶层突破进程中的文化生产。在改革开放之后出生、最终进入精英大学的农家子弟，为我们在中国情境下探索“阶层突破中的文化生产问题”提供了理想的样本。本书将这样一群农家子弟称为“读书的料”。借助自传社会学和深度访谈的方法，本研究试图解释性地理解高学业成就的农家子弟在通过教育向上流动过程中的文化生产及其非预期后果。为此，论文拓展了文化生产理论的适用群体和时空范围，围绕“读书的料”的成长叙事，探寻他们的意义世界。

研究发现：（1）存在一种遵循“物或损之而益”逻辑并最终通往高学业成就的文化生产。“读书的料”创生出先赋性动力、道德化思维以及学校化的心性品质，所有这些有力地支撑着他们的学校生活。（2）“读书的料”的文化生产突显出中国底层特有的文化资本。据此可以认为，农家子弟取得高学业成就的关键不在于其弥补了自身文化资本的缺陷，而是充分利用底层特有文化资本的结果。（3）底层文化资本是一柄双刃剑，其局限性一直存在并在进入大学之门后愈发凸显。先赋性动力经常伴随着极大的后坐力，道德化思维潜伏着巨大的心理压力，学校化的心性品质则高度依赖及时激励的制度情境和强有力的公共教育体系；（4）底层子弟的文化生产具有复杂性，伴随高学业成就而生的是一个隐匿的暗面。在逐级跨越学业阶梯的过程中，他们生发出了一个复杂的、以农村出身为中心的情感结构，身心难得自如。“懂事”虽然让他们融入了家庭共同体，但也同时框定了他们的家庭角色，限制了他们的情感表达，衍生出与家人爱怨交织的关系结构。此外，他们还在阶层和文化穿梭的过程中成了村庄的边缘人，面临人际交往的双重高墙，缺乏文化归属感。（5）“读书的料”取得高学业成就的另一代价是基于个人苦修之上的片面发展，引发严重的成功焦虑，承受贤能主义的竞争风险，陷入异化与自我疏离的困扰，甚至走向成功与幸福相对立的道路。

由此可以进一步确认：第一，在反学校文化之外，创造性还有另外一种可能，即通过某种意义上的“循规”，进行主动的文化生产，最终走向生活重建和阶层突破。“读书的料”并非完全基于天生丽质，其背后有一个基于中国的文化传统、家庭和学校生活实践的道德世界，这样一个世界极大地激发了他们自身的能动性。由此可见，“循规”也是一个文化生产过程，家人关系则是探索高学业成就的底层子弟文化生产的重要面向。第二，文化资本不是均质化的存在，社会底层也有其独特的文化资本。底层文化资本即先赋性动力、道德化思维以及学校化的心性品质。这种文化资本不是自然之物，只有在文化生产中才能呈现自身。底层文化资本理论以其特有的方式将文化生产与文化再生产理论相连，沿着布迪厄与威利斯未曾料想到的方向发展了他们的思想，一定程度上也颠覆了“底层缺乏文化资本”这一为学界默认的观念。第三，对底层子弟而言，要么因抵制而被淘汰、要么被中上阶层文化同化和笼络而背叛原生家庭的二律背反并非铁律。阶层和文化穿梭促成情感定向的重叠交织。高学业成就的农家子弟并没有完全割舍与原生家庭的文化连接，而是情感上与家人爱怨交织，在行动中创造性地重建着家人关系。

“读书的料”的高学业成就既受制于底层的客观经济条件，又同时受益于其主观意向状态的创造性力量。威利斯忽略了高学业成就的底层子弟可能具有的文化生产能量，布迪厄则忽略了行动者的个人意志与社会结构之间的复杂关系，“物或损之而益”的思想路径在他们的理论设想里没有丝毫的生存空间。“读书的料”的人生是披荆斩棘的旅程。对他们而言，客观的家庭经济条件不是宿命，底层文化资本不是永恒的达摩克利斯之剑，心理和情感结构的藩篱也并非不可逾越。在一个更加健全、公正、多元和开放的社会中，“读书的料”作为一个地位群体所体尝的痛苦将会得到减缓，其文化世界面临的风险也一定程度上可以化解。

部分参考文献

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986.The Forms of Capital In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, J. E. Richardson (ed), New York: Greenword.

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——1981b “Cultural production is different from cultural reproduction is different from social reproduction is different from reproduction”, Interchange, Vol.12.

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作者简介

程猛博士目前是北京师范大学讲师，教育社会学、教育人类学、教育管理与教育政策是他的主要研究领域。2017年，程猛博士在北京师范大学取得教育学博士学位。2017年至2019年，他在清华大学公共管理学院做博士后研究。2015至2016年，他还被选派至威斯康辛大学麦迪逊分校进行访学。他的研究成果主要集中在以下三个方面：1.试图解释为什么来自社会底层的农家子弟依然能够取得高学业成就。基于对大学生教育自传的分析，他提出了“底层文化资本理论”，认为这群农家子弟生产了一种特殊类型的文化资本——底层文化资本（清华大学教育研究，2016）；2. 取得高学业成就、实现阶层突破的非预期后果（中国青年研究，2018；青年研究，2018；基础教育，2018）；3. 进入精英大学的农家子弟在攀爬教育阶梯过程中的文化生产（青年研究，2016；中国社会科学出版社，2018）。他目前在进行的研究项目之一是“当代中国农家子弟的阶层旅行与文化生产”。此外，他还在结合医学人类学的研究范式，进行大学生心理和精神健康相关的研究。他的邮箱是chengmengbnu@126.com，欢迎来信！

Cheng, YE and Jacobs, JM (2019) Urban custodians and hospitable citizens: Citizenship and social actions of students at two liberal arts universities in Hong Kong and Shanghai. Space and Polity. DOI: 10.1080/13562576.2019.1670053.

 The article is published as part of a Special Issue on Youth Politics in Urban Asia co-edited by Yi’En Cheng and Sonia-Lam Knott, which will appear in print April 2020. 

Dr Yi’En Cheng, National University of Singapore

Article Summary

Drawing upon the cases of two liberal arts universities in East Asian cities, this article trains the analytic lens on higher education practices and cultural arrangements that give meanings to politics and the political, and in turn addresses two interrelated questions: Where is urban politics located as it relates to the everyday work that students do to manage and create change? What constitutes youth politics in the city? The research that informs this article is a study on the travel of American-style liberal arts education into East Asia resulting in both curricular reforms as well as brand new campuses being built. It investigates particularly into the citizenship projects that underpin these initiatives. Fieldwork involving interviews and ethnographic observations was carried out in 2018 at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and NYU-Shanghai in China.

By focusing on the two groups of Hong Konger and mainland Chinese domestic students at Lingnan and NYU-Shanghai, this article offers an account of how young people’s citizenship and social actions are produced across spaces of the university and the city. It demonstrates that young students’ civic and political subjectivities are being shaped by and informing their social actions, and in the process reveal the ways in which higher education spaces condition and mediate youthful urban politics.

Both Lingnan University and NYU-Shanghai identify themselves explicitly as liberal arts educational institutions with a core vision of promoting a well-rounded learning experience that would cultivate students into cosmopolitan and moral citizens. An important element of this vision is for the universities to encourage community engagement among students, through designing a range of curricular, extra-curricular, and pedagogical programmes as well as supporting student-led initiatives tied to civic interests. This desire to instill a social purpose and to bridge the university with the communities that it serves has meant that the city – and its districts as well as neighbourhoods – is key to how both liberal arts universities view their role as urban educational and cultural institutions.

Hong Konger students at Lingnan University craft a narrative of liberal learning as a journey for young people to find ways to contribute towards society and to serve the communities that they inhabit, reflecting the university’s strategic blending of Service-Learning into its approach towards liberal arts education. They see themselves as urban repairers and innovators who aspire to take custodianship of a city that is perceived to be decaying under the weight of an inept government. There is a strong desire among these young people to safeguard a series of post-materialistic values that underpin their idea of the ‘good city’. Students seek to innovate projects such as those aimed at protecting local arts and culture (example of Cantonese as a linguistic resource) through which the ‘Hong Kong’ identity is define, and the protection of vulnerable urban communities in the city such as that of the elderly. This brand of urban custodial civic politics does not challenge political authorities head-on but seek to make right the urban conditions in which they envision themselves having to navigate and to grow up in. In a way, this is a politics not of overt contestation and conflict but of redress through direct action.

Mainland Chinese students at NYU-Shanghai define liberal arts learning as a process leading to individual expansion of worldviews enabling them to question their own political and moral orientations, particularly those that lie beyond China and what is being endorsed by the state. Through both earlier national education and present liberal arts curriculum, students develop a certain brand of urban ethic emphasizing the values of diversity and cosmopolitanism as well as a habit of solidarity and conviviality. By framing their aspirations and social actions as urban ethic, Chinese students can bypass an explicit identification with anti-government politics and political activism that is largely an out-of-bound topic within the national context. They mobilize through social media platforms, university clubs and societies, and hall committee to design a range of small-scale projects that reflect their civic aspirations and proclivities. Through these engagements, students rehearse their role as hospitable citizens of the city and the country by imagining themselves becoming cultural mediators of difference. This style of urban ethic constitutes a form of civic politics in that it addresses the possibility of collective culture, of respect, and of civility, and more importantly serves as a form of viable political expression for these young people.

Key contribution of this article is two-fold. First, it demonstrates empirically how higher educational institutions are informing and conditioning young people’s understandings of civic and political citizenship in relationship with the urban and national contexts. Urban politics as it relates to higher education therefore can be conceptualized as unfolding in and through the multi-scalar relationships formed across the cities, the universities, and the students, and the circulation of power across these sites in the forms of discourses and resources. Second, social actions of these liberal arts educated students point the importance of recognizing youth politics beyond galvanized antagonistic and activist movements. Furthermore, students practise a kind of generative politics concerned chiefly with protecting and making resources they imagine as vital to the city, as well as with cultivating urban sensibilities and relationships that help navigate consensus and conflict.

Lastly, custodial and hospitable styles of politics are by no means the only political genre undertaken by students at the two universities or young people more broadly at the two cities of Hong Kong and Shanghai. The ongoing political situation in Hong Kong is a reminder of how mass demonstration and antagonism are still an integral component of young people’s political repertoire. As such, urban youth politics expressed in the forms of civic/non-contentious actions or insurgent/antagonistic actions are not binary opposition; instead both forms serve to invigorate young people’s realm of political action. It is vital to maintain such a supple and less circumscribed view in order to more fully understand the relationship between cities and youth politics.

Relevant article

Cheng, Y.E. (2018) Liberal arts educated citizen: Experimentation, subjectification, and ambiguous contours of youth citizenship, Area. DOI: 10.1111/area.12440

 Corresponding Author Biography

Yi’En Cheng is Research Fellow in the Asian Migration cluster at Asia Research Institute (ARI), National University of Singapore. His research interests lie in the intersection across education, youth, and mobilities in Asian cities. He is guest editor of Special Issues ‘Geographies of Citizenship in Higher Education’ in Area (with Mark Holton) and ‘Mobile Aspirations? Youth Im/mobilities in the Asia-Pacific’ in Journal of Intercultural Studies (with Shanthi Robertson and Brenda Yeoh). Prior to joining ARI, he was Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale-NUS College and Clarendon Scholar at University of Oxford where he completed a DPhil in Human Geography.