Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM)

Yanbo Hao, Utrecht University, the Netherlands 

Abstract

This Master’s thesis (supervised by Dr Maggi Leung) unpacks how gender impacts on mobility aspirations of Chinese international graduates in the Netherlands. The value of a gender lens in immigration study is increasingly highlighted nowadays, but gender analysis is infrequently applied to research on international student mobility. Drawing on Risman’s ‘three-level’ framework of gender analysis (2004) and Findlay and his colleagues’ (2012) argument that the post-study status transition should be understood within the life course, this paper analyses gender intertwining with post-graduation mobility at individual, inter-relational and international level. Through an online survey, semi-structured in-depth interviews followed by the method ‘story completion’ with Chinese international graduates and some parents, the findings underline how gender identities shape the personal goals of mobility, how gender roles in a relationship and international settings confine or facilitate mobility desires and how these gender effects are intersected. This research also stresses how gender-role ideologies are diverse and dynamic in one’s life course. Therefore, beyond taking the transition as a career start, Chinese international students also attach gendered meanings and responsibilities to post-education mobility, considering social roles they are engaging or will engage in. This research conduces to depicting unequal gender patterns in international students’ after-study mobility trajectories.

Findings

Individual factors: Gendered Expectations and Personalities

Individual factors refer to the construction of gender selves and subjectivities that drives students’ mobility trajectories. The survey data show a relatively similar big picture which prioritises career-related factors and takes the least notice to political effects is followed by most respondents regardless of gender. Yet it is still visible that Chinese male and female students hold different gendered selves while making mobility plans. Male students rank averagely higher than female counterparts on career prospects and special national preferential policies usually attracting skilled graduates with economic incentives (Harvey, 2015). By contrast, female graduates assess this mobility decision by more than the quality of career, also the conditions of future residence. They spotlight more, than men, on life-work balance, living comfort, family duties and natural environment.

With the gendered motivations as the first step, the discrepant capabilities of multiple locations and labour markets to satisfy students’ aspirations are thus decisive to the mobility decisions of skilled Chinese graduates. In the Dutch-Chinese context, females remaining in the Netherlands are attracted by more reachable stability of jobs in the Dutch labour market. Male returnees catalyse their return for catching up on ‘guanxi’ (social connections benefiting to task completion) which is importantly needed as professional skills in Chinese working culture. These coupled features indicate that differences in the construction of gender selves usually exert influences through institutional contexts. Sometimes the institutional contexts require the same from both genders. For instance, employees in China generally experience less job stability and the importance of the social network to career development. However, differences in gender selves differentiate how men and women view the opportunities, interference and restrictions of those contexts and then drive Chinese students to different destinations.

Inter-relational Factors: Relationship, Marriage and Childbirth

International students with a background of communal cultures usually face challenges in making individualised decisions. Chinese students, as a typical example, show great concerns about important others in their own mobility choices. This study finds that gender identities mainly exert inter-relational impacts around intimate relationships, marriage and childbirth.

The concept of ‘linked lives’, indicating that couples negotiate the disagreement on moving aspirations and project moving at a household level, is tested on Chinese graduated couples in the Netherlands. By a unanimous scenario, women tend to follow their male partners’ mobile trajectories. Interestingly, the mobility projects of some couples highlight the influence of perceived ‘most appropriate marriage age’ in Chinese conservative perspectives. Marriage, to those couples, is a crucial juncture in the life course, separating life spans of being mobile and settled. In contrast to the stay-or-return decision which is often described as a one-off movement, they determine to return at ‘the best marriage age’ for taking care of parents and creating a period in-between graduation and marriage. In this period, the couples would exploit the benefits from staying overseas to professional growth and meanwhile pave the way for the later settlement in China.

For single graduates, unwanted stresses of marriage and childbirth from parents and peers are sometimes strategically buffered by remaining abroad. Echoing the ‘zone of suspension’ concept proposed by Martin (2018), continuing overseas life can somehow relieve intergenerational tensions on marriage and create a space for graduates to advance career and encourage romantic relationships taking place in a natural pace and process. In this study, both genders confess the geographical distance help escape the head-on clash with external pressures they think unacceptable caused by their Chinese marriage.

International Factors: Contrasts of gender ideologies and practices in China and the Netherlands

Students’ attitudes are always in a transformation because of exposure to foreign settings. The overseas education motivates students to experience western social rules and thoughts, and then compare them to Chinese social and institutional norms. These dissimilarities in national contexts, including contrasts of gender expectations and prejudices, inspire a continuous adjustment of the study-to-work transition. Narratives in this study underline the difficulties of practising gender identities outside of the social ‘norm’ such as being too old to become a good wife or mother and being non-heterosexual. Staying in the Netherlands or moving to another western country where their identities are accepted or appreciated becomes a softer approach to dealing with external pressures, compared to combating against the norms or reluctantly changing themselves. It’s noticeable that gender impacts at three levels usually interact with each other in the formation of students’ plans. For example, messages in international contexts could shape gendered selves; in turn, selves determine from which angles students read and acquire from the contexts.

Gender: A Dynamic Concept

While unravelling how gender-role ideologies tangle with other social and economic domains, such as family, homosexuality and labour markets, this research notices the dynamic nature of gender inlaying in these scopes. Gender changes its meanings across one’s life phase. Expectations, duties and controls of gender are various and usually become more complicated while people are ageing and creating more interactions with individuals and institutions. The concerns shift from personal career aspiration to balancing career and family, from individualised choice to making a choice for (future) family, for instance. Gendered expectations and controls in society are also changing. Even in this research period, public policies targeting feminism in employment and discourses to LGBT acceptance witness some changes which might also somehow alter soon-to-graduate students’ aspirations of mobility. Leung (2014) argues ‘gender respects no boundaries’. What domains graduates accentuate and how gender exerts effects in these domains are changeable across time and space. Elucidating these questions is conducive to understandings of contemporary gender bias and inequality at an international scale.

References

Findlay AM, King R, Smith FM, Geddes A, Skeldon R. (2012). World class? An investigation of globalisation, difference and international student mobility. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 37: 118-131

Harvey, W.S., (2015) “Winning the global talent war: A policy perspective”, Journal of Chinese Human Resource Management. 5(1), 62-74.

Leung, W.H.M. (2014). Unsettling the Yin-Yang Harmony: An Analysis of Gender Inequalities in Academic Mobility among Chinese Scholars. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal. 23(2):155-182

Martin, F. (2018). Overseas Study as Zone of Suspension: Chinese Students Re-negotiating Youth, Gender, and Intimacy. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 39(6), 688–703.

Risman, B.J. (2004). Gender as a social structure: Theory wrestling with activism. Gender and Society, 18, 429–450.

Biographical Summary

Yanbo Hao obtained his Research Master’s degree in Urban and Economic Geography at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. He conducted research on urban fragmentation, urban spatial expansion, social housing and rural development in China. Currently, his research interest is centred on inequalities in migration issues, especially education mobility, around which he studied on the gendered patterns of international student mobility and presented one paper at an academic conference on Chinese mobility in Europe. Yanbo could be contacted via haoyanbo1994@gmail.com.

Guo, S., & Lei, L. (2019). Toward transnational communities of practice: An inquiry into the experiences of transnational academic mobility. Adult Education Quarterly, 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741713619867636

Professor Shibao Guo, University of Calgary, Canada

Ling Lei, University of Calgary, Canada

Transnational mobility characterized by multiple and circular movement of people and their simultaneous interconnections across transnational borders pose challenges to the conception of a closed boundary of community of practice (CoP). Through a qualitative case study of internationally educated Chinese transnational academics, who maintained academic and professional connections with their host countries of doctoral studies, this article demonstrates the building of transnational CoPs through their sociocultural learning in transnational space. It underscores tensions, negotiation of power relations, identity trans/formation, and potentials for change in transnational social space. It overshadows the significance of physical boundaries in organizing work, learning, and identities. The study highlights conceptualization of transnational communities of practice for understanding the experiences and identities of transnational academics.

This study explores the changing dynamics of Community of Practice (CoP) in transnational space by focusing on experiences of transnational academic mobility and connectivity. The concept of Community of Practice has been used widely by academics and practitioners to explore socio-cultural learning and identity development as a process for people to claim full membership to a community (Lave & Wenger, 1991). The journey from being a newcomer to becoming an expert as “legitimate peripheral participation” provides a way to speak about the relations between newcomers and old-timers, and about activities, identities, artefacts, and communities of knowledge and practice. It accentuates relations and prior experiences in shaping people’s identity formation and transformation through their participation in different communities of their life-worlds (Lave, 2008).

Yet, as multiple and circular movement of people across transnational spaces has become the norm in contemporary societies, the spatiality of CoP is facing new challenges. The geographically local boundary of the conceptualization of community (Wenger, 1998) needs to be re-examined vis-à-vis the new paradigm of transnational mobility. This paper, therefore, explores the changing dynamics of CoP in transnational space through academic migrants’ experiences of transnational mobility and connectivity.

This paper adopts the theoretical framework of transnational social space (Faist, 2000), where those relatively stable social ties or the meso-level network structures that lead to sustained interconnections across borders become the foci of analysis. The multiple affiliations and attachments across borders form a conceptual boundary of one’s social life, irrelevant to the physical boundaries of nation states, and these affiliations and attachments constitute an integral part of the individual’s social life (Levitt & Glick Schiller, 2008; Tsuda, 2012). This study employs a qualitative case study as the research strategy to explore the central research question: How did Chinese transnational academics experience and perceive CoP in their transnational knowledge networks? Twelve internationally educated Chinese researchers currently working as university faculty members in social sciences and humanities in three universities in Beijing were recruited. Data were collected through individual interviews, field observations, and publicly available documents including participants’ academic CVs, and official documents gathered from their institutions’ websites.

Findings of this study demonstrate transnational academics’ work and learning experiences as newcomers and old-timers in different academic CoPs locally in China and transnationally, particularly with their former PhD supervisors and colleagues, as well as the formation of transnational CoPs, and the formation of collective membership, identity, and belonging.

Consistent with Wenger-Trayner and Wenger-Trayner(2015), transnational CoPs are characterized by three indispensable dimensions, including the domain, or shared competence; the community, or relationships of interaction and learning together; and the practice or development of a shared repertoire of resources. In this process, the prevalence of virtual communication technologies has enabled transnational academics to build and maintain transnational connectivity, thus challenging the importance of physical proximity to claiming membership to CoP (Wenger, 1998).

This study directs our attention to how individuals’ significant migration experiences and connections shape their inclinations toward and ability to engage in trans-migration, transnational engagement, and living in diaspora. From the transnational CoP approach, the focus of analysis shifts from local social relations to social relations formed and maintained through self-identification and negotiation in various transnational communities.

The study has important implications for international talent deployment. It demonstrates that talent deployment policies can shift its focus from the physical flow of people to the dynamic flow and creation of knowledge through people’s professional practice. It also sheds light on transnational academics’ multiple cultural identities as not only an ethnic Chinese but also a transnational academic. It is important that host countries’ settlement and adaptation policies allow room for transnational academics to entertain multiple cultural identities and belongings. Finally, this study calls into question the power relations in transnational CoP. It calls for further examination of transnational CoP as not only a space of building democratic collaborative relationships, but also a space for negotiating knowledge democracy.

Author Biographies

Shibao Guo is Professor in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, Canada. He specializes in citizenship and immigration, Chinese immigrants in Canada, ethnic and race relations, and comparative and international education. His research has been funded by a number of organizations, including the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada; Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada; International Organization for Migration; and Education International. He has over 150 publications including books, journal articles, and book chapters. His latest books include: Immigration, racial and ethnic studies in 150 years of Canada: Retrospects and prospects (Brill|Sense, 2018), Spotlight on China: Chinese education in the globalized world (Sense Publishers, 2016), Spotlight on China: Changes in education under China’s market economy (Sense Publishers, 2016), Work, learning and transnational migration: Opportunities, challenges, and debates (Routledge, 2016), Revisiting multiculturalism in Canada: Theories, policies and debates (Sense Publishers, 2015). He is former president of Canadian Ethnic Studies Association and Comparative and International Education Society of Canada. Currently he serves as co-editor of Canadian Ethnic Studies. He also edits two book series for Brill|Sense Publishers: Spotlight on China (https://brill.com/view/serial/SPOT) and Transnational Migration and Education (https://brill.com/view/serial/TMAE?lang=en).

Ling Lei is a PhD student in Adult Learning at the Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary. She has her previous research background in intercultural studies. Currently, she researches in areas of internationalization of higher education, transnational intellectual mobility, and transformative learning in the context of transnational migration. Her recent publication includes a co-authored journal article, “Transitions and Transformations: Extracts from a Duoethnographic Exploration of Gender Identities in Canada and China.”

References

Faist, T. (2000). The volume and dynamics of international migration and transnational social spaces. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press.

Levitt, P., & Glick Schiller, N. (2008). Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. In S. Khagram & P. Levitt (Eds.), The transnational studies reader: Intersections and innovations (pp. 284-294). New York, NY: Routledge.

Lave, J. (2008). Epilogue: Situated learning and changing practice. In A. Amin & J. Roberts (Eds.), Community, economic creativity, and organization (pp. 283-296). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1991). Situated learning. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Tsuda, T. (2012). Whatever happened to simultaneity? Transnational migration theory and dual engagement in sending and receiving countries. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 38, 631-649. doi:10.1080/1369183X.2012.659126

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Wenger-Trayner, E., & Wenger-Trayner, B. (2015, April 15). Communities of practice: A brief introduction. Retrieved from https://wenger-trayner.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/07-Brief-introduction-to-communities-of-practice.pdf