Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM)

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:

Hou, M., & Jam, A. (2020). International Education Equity for Doctoral Students: Duoethnographic Reflections from China and Cameroon. International Journal of Doctoral Studies, 15, 759-786.

Background and Research Questions

Over the past ten years, research on international student experiences has increased (Ammigan, 2019; Gautam et al., 2016; Kaya, 2020; Khanal & Gaulee, 2019; Rivas et al., 2019; L. Yan & Pei, 2018). Many studies have addressed the need for education equity in terms of gender, age, and socioeconomic status (Atuahene & Owusu-Ansah, 2013; David, 2012); however, few studies have related to international education equity (Tannock, 2018). While an overwhelming majority of these studies have focused on doctoral students, few have explored the internationalization of the curriculum for international doctoral students in the geopolitical context in the United States (Leask, 2015). In highlighting the current geopolitical context, such barriers include visa limitations, international students’ alienation and loneliness, discrimination and stereotypes (Pottie-Sherman, 2018), limitations in administrative, faculty, community cultural competence and financial concern (Zhu & Reeves, 2019). In review of the gaps presented, there is a critical need to explore the complex tensions of international education equity for students as it relates to the internationalization of the curriculum in doctoral programs in the United States. We address the following research questions: How do international students describe international education equity in their experiences as international doctoral students in the United States? How do international students articulate the factors to be considered for curriculum internationalization equitably?

Conceptual Framework and Research Methods

For the study, formal and informal curriculum is included in a variety of contexts, particularly in institutional and local contexts. In this study, Leask’s framework (2009) is combined with the literature on international education equity to fill the current literature gap. We postulated that involving interplay between the formal and informal curriculum in the internationalization of the curriculum is essential to achieve international education equity. In addition to the formal and informal curriculum, “resources; respect and recognition; love, care, and solidarity; power; and working and learning” (Lynch & Baker, 2005, p. 132) need to be provided to international students. Domestic and international students should have the same opportunities and resources. However, at the same time, extra resources should be provided to individuals who are “educationally disadvantaged by their social background” (Tannock, 2018, p. 17). International students have more difficulties in academic and social adjustment than domestic students (Andrade, 2006). They have suffered more severe emotional stress, fear, uncertainty, and racial discrimination in this unstable world (Rose-Redwood & Rose-Redwood, 2017).

Being born in curriculum theory, a duoethnography method is an appropriate fit for this study because it provides various topics across disciplines and forms of practices—curriculum of practice. The dialogue research of this method creates an informal curriculum or currere, which considers one’s life history to act and give meaning to actions and explore how the life history of individuals impacts “the meanings they give to those experiences by employing multiple voices in dialogue” (Sawyer & Norris, 2015, p. 2). International students tend to be considered as cash cows, objects, and intellectually unequal (Cantwell, 2019; Hayes, 2019). As a result, international doctoral students have been experiencing challenges based on cultural differences, limitations on sociocultural connections, language barriers, etc. (Xu & Grant, 2017; Xu & Hu, 2019). The utilization of a duoethographic method allows us, as international doctoral students, to explore four tenets— “its polyvocal/dialogic nature, the examination of life history as curriculum, the intent not to profess but rather to learn and change as the result of the conversation, and the importance of learning from difference” (Sawyer & Norris, 2015, p. 2). Overall, this process also allows us to examine our lived experiences and histories for the discourses that have shaped our views, perspectives, thoughts, and interactions (Sawyer & Norris, 2015).

Findings

We defined international education equity through our dialogues and emerging themes. The outline of the meaning of international education equity was described with three dimensions and emphasis: authentic inclusion, differentiated teaching strategies and assessments, and individualized resources including but not limited to financial resources and intercultural resources. Four prominent themes were identified related to international education equity for international doctoral students: (1) academic support (formal curriculum) related to teaching and learning strategies, language support, and mentorship; (2) financial support (informal curriculum) related to university funding and employment opportunities; (3) administrative support (formal curriculum) related to staff/faculty/community training on intercultural competence and training related to complexities of visa status for international doctoral students; and (4) community support (informal curriculum) in the context of geopolitical tensions due to unequal and stereotyped treatment, discrimination, exploitation, xenophobia, and maskphobia. Despite such encounters, the findings revealed that some faculty and staff are willing to support international students without knowing how to support them. As international students, we both shared the same needs to support our formal and informal experiences. For instance, we both needed financial support and mentorship. However, we also shared some nuances concerning academic support. Zhen, as a non-native English speaker, needed support on articulating and writing skills, whereas Victoria needed support on public speaking skills because English was already her primary language in Cameroon.

Author Bio

Minghui Hou is a second-year PhD student in higher education program from Old Dominion University, the United States. She is passionate about working with international students to build a welcoming and supportive learning environment. Her research interests are international education equity, internationalization of the curriculum, geopolitical tensions, neoracism, etc. She can be contacted via email: mhou009@odu.edu.