China – Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM)

‘The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Shape Higher Education Mobility in China’ by Cora Lingling Xu

We are delighted to share the publication of a new book by our director Dr Cora Lingling Xu. Read this profile (in Chinese) with People Magazine 《人物》杂志 and blog post to learn about the personal stories behind this book.

Please find an abstract of ‘The Time Inheritors‘ and critical reviews below.

If you wish to order this book, you can use SNWS25 to get 30% off when you order from the SUNY Press website.

To learn more about the book talks and interviews visit this page. Listen to the New Books Network’s interview with Cora. 听’时差In-Betweenness’与Cora的对话（小宇宙链接）. Check out this page for frequently asked questions (e.g. what you should do if you wish to write a book review) about this book. Share your stories of ‘time inheritance’. If you wish to contact Cora about arranging book talks and interviews, complete this contact form.

Abstract

Can a student inherit time? What difference does time make to their educational journeys and outcomes? The Time Inheritors draws on nearly a decade of field research with more than one hundred youth in China to argue that intergenerational transfers of privilege or deprivation are manifested in and through time. Comparing experiences of rural-to-urban, cross-border, and transnational education, Cora Lingling Xu shows how inequalities in time inheritance help drive deeply unequal mobility. With its unique focus on time, nuanced comparative analysis, and sensitive ethnographic engagement, The Time Inheritors opens new avenues for understanding the social mechanisms shaping the future of China and the world.

Critical reviews

“Xu’s conceptually sophisticated monograph reveals how intersectional inequalities are constructed, experienced, and transmitted temporally, with special reference to education. Through the vivid stories of students in mainland China and Hong Kong, and Chinese international students, Xu brings to life different individuals’ ‘time inheritances,’ demonstrating the exciting possibilities time offers as a lens for innovative thinking about inequality. A must-read for sociologists and anthropologists of education, China, and time.” — Rachel Murphy, author of The Children of China’s Great Migration

“Innovative and ambitious, The Time Inheritors proposes a time-centric framework that brings together analyses of social structure, history, individual behavior, and affect. We often feel we are fighting for time. But, as Cora Xu argues in this important study of Chinese students, the scarcity of time is not a given or universal. Different experiences of time result in part from the varying amounts of time we inherit from the previous generation. Time inheritance is therefore critical to the reproduction of social inequality.” — Biao Xiang, coauthor of Self as Method: Thinking through China and the World

“Cora Lingling Xu offers a groundbreaking analysis of educational inequality and social mobility in contemporary China. Xu centers the voices of marginalized students throughout, providing poignant insights into their lived experiences of rural poverty, urban precarity, and educational alienation. At the same time, Xu’s comparative scope reveals how even seemingly privileged groups can be constrained by the temporal logics of social reproduction. The Time Inheritors is a must-read for scholars, educators, and policymakers concerned with educational equity and social justice. Xu’s lucid prose and engaging case studies make the book accessible to a wide audience while her cutting-edge theoretical framework and methodological rigor set a new standard for research on education and inequality.” — Chris R. Glass, coeditor of Critical Perspectives on Equity and Social Mobility in Study Abroad: Interrogating Issues of Unequal Access and Outcomes

“By centering the temporal dimension of who is advantaged or disadvantaged, how, why, and with what consequences, The Time Inheritors takes a unique and powerful approach. Not only does the book contribute theoretically and empirically to our understanding of class inequalities but it also resonates deeply. The inclusion of Chinese translations and characters will give Chinese readers a rich, nuanced cultural appreciation of her findings.” — Dan Cui, author of Identity and Belonging among Chinese Canadian Youth: Racialized Habitus in School, Family, and Media

“An extremely well-written, theoretically informed, and compelling volume that represents a major contribution to the study of education, migration, and social inequality in China and beyond. The Time Inheritors proposes a bold and innovative framework—that of time inheritance—to open the black box of social inequality’s temporal dimension. Whereas the relatively privileged classes inherit temporal wealth and strategies that enable them to bank and save time, facilitating their mobility, the time poor lack this inheritance, forcing them into a vicious cycle of wasting time and paying back temporal debts. Drawing from a rich palette of vivid and intimate longitudinal case studies, The Time Inheritors unpacks the complex intersections between familial, national, and global time inequalities.” — Zachary M. Howlett, author of Meritocracy and Its Discontents: Anxiety and the National College Entrance Exam in China

Release Dates

Hardcover: 1st April 2025

Paperback: 1st October 2025

Call for Participants: Exploring the Experiences of LGBTQIA+ Chinese Students in the UK

Haoxi Ou at the University of Warwick is seeking LGBTQIA+ Chinese international students in the UK to participate in a research project exploring their experiences and the kinds of desires that animate international mobility.

Managing Editor: Tong Meng

Understanding Chinese International Students in the U.S. in Times of the COVID-19 Crisis: From a Chinese Discourse Studies Perspective

Yu, J. (2023a). Understanding Chinese International Students in the U.S. in Times of the COVID-19 Crisis: From a Chinese Discourse Studies Perspective. Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 18(1), 45-61. https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2023.2214538

Against the background of the harsh realities of a deeply unequal global landscape, international student mobility is highly asymmetrical and unidirectional from developing countries to Western universities, primarily to English-speaking destinations (Beech 2019; Marginson 2006). However, the flow of global knowledge is opposite from the American-Western metropolitan centers to the rest of the world, which has been reproduced by accredited higher education institutions and solidified in mass media, press, and publications (Shi-xu 2014). Such one-way academic student mobility not only satisfies host countries’ immediate demands of economic gains, but also naturalizes Western ways of knowing through language, pedagogy, and academic research.

When it comes to the research of international education, particularly among Chinese international students in European and North American universities, the given divergent conceptualizations of thinking between the East and West can be traced back to Hofstede’s cultural studies. In his cultural dimensions, the Eastern and Western people have simply been categorized into the seemingly ‘scientific’ categorizations of collectivism vs. individualism, indirectness vs. directness, egalitarianism vs. hierarchy, masculinity vs. femininity, etc. (Hofstede 2001). Building on the ‘Hofstedian legacy’ (Holliday 2013, 6), theories of cultures of learning in education (Jin and Cortazzi 2011) and cultural foundations of learning in psychology (Li 2012) are successively developed to account for Chinese students’ various shocks and examine students’ difficulties in a new sociocultural context. Traditional cultural attributes seem to serve as the trouble-free, innocent, and normative explanations for human behaviors, but, in effect, they are manipulated to produce and reproduce a systematic discourse of scholarly hegemony. This false cultural profiling not only provides a mechanism for freezing the traits of the cultural group but also strengthens particular knowledge about Eastern images of the inferior Other based on the West-controlled hierarchies of cultures.

In addition, Western colonial/imperial politics of knowledge production is still prevalent and persistent in education research. Through knowledge production and reproduction, the West has intellectual authority over the Orient at the expense of silencing other forms of knowledge. Thus, the differentialist discourses on ‘culture’ play a decisive role in constructing the non-Western as culturally and morally deficient. By the same token, they offer contrasted images of the idealization of the Western Self (Bhabha 1994; Said 2003; Spivak 1988). Epistemic dominance compels researchers of color to believe that Western scholarship of valid knowledge development is the universal standard and norm. Western-centric thinking and long-standing patterns of symbolic violence are not disrupted but reproduced and reinforced through academic practices. To be specific, when doing research on international students from Confucian cultures in Western universities, educational researchers tend to focus on students’ barriers, difficulties, problems, and struggles in a new learning environment (e.g. Ching et al. 2017).

In this article, I draw on Chinese Discourse Studies (Shi-xu, 2014) as a theoretical framework to explore how Chinese international students as cultural agents respond to the global pandemic and pandemic-related stereotypes. To begin with, the primary theoretical mechanism underpinning Chinese Discourse Studies is to seek, create, and maintain societal harmony through a dialectic lens (Shi-xu 2014). There is no denying that after the century-old humiliation of foreign aggression in modern history, the top priority for contemporary China and Chinese people is economic development and social stability. To pursue this goal, Chinese people are accustomed to employing cognitive and discursive strategies to rejuvenate ancient civilization and reclaim their voice on the world stage. Another essential principle underlying Chinese Discourse Studies is to express agreement and avoid extreme binary statements, which is premised on Confucian classics of the Golden Mean, zhongyong (中庸), and harmony, he (和). This salient feature is also reappropriated by the central government to strive to build a harmonious society in hopes of coping with social inequalities emerging in Chinese society (Han 2008). The third theoretical principle of Chinese Discourse Studies is ‘self-criticism first’ (Shi-xu 2014, 160). Chinese discourse culture operates under the rule of meaning production through self-retrospection and self-critique (自我批评 ziwo piping). Nevertheless, many symbolic characteristics, such as indirectness, vagueness, silence, complexity, and even contradiction, are often seen and heard in Chinese public discourse. They are often mistakenly interpreted as lacking in analytical or critical thinking and short of ‘I’ voice (Ramanathan and Kaplan 1996) from white Eurocentric perspectives in discourse studies.

Through a critical analysis of 21 Chinese international students’ narratives, this article identifies three culturally specific characteristics that pervade Chinese normative dialogues: (1) Chinese dialectics, (2) Chinese harmony, and (3) Chinese self-criticism. They are often employed to emphasize Chinese optimistic attitudes in times of crisis, avoidance of confrontation for harmonious communication, and moral character of self-introspection to conform to the social norm. These three culturally specific characteristics are interrelated and interconnected, and pervade Chinese normative discourses, which have long-time been mistakenly interpreted from Western-centric perspectives, theories, and approaches. This article offers new empirical evidence for the reconstruction of the Chinese paradigm of discourse studies and reveals the inappropriateness of Western scholarship for understanding non-Western linguistic and communicative events and practices.

In sum, this article demonstrates that Chinese discourse studies can be a potential decolonial option to depart from deep-seated scholarship in Western intellectual supremacy and a visionary framework to advance multicultural discourses about international education against the backdrop of geopolitical tensions and anti-Asian racism.

References:

Beech, S. E. 2019. The Geographies of International Student Mobility: Spaces, Places and Decision-Making. Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bhabha, H. K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge.

Ching, Y. C., S. L. Renes, S. McMurrow, J. Simpson, and A. T. Strange. 2017. “Challenges Facing Chinese International Students Studying in the United States.” Educational Research Review 12: 473–482. doi:10.5897/ERR2016.3106

Han, A. G. 2008. “Building a Harmonious Society and Achieving Individual Harmony.” Journal of Chinese Political Science 13 (2): 143–164. doi:10.1007/s11366-008-9021-y

Holliday, A. 2013. Understanding Intercultural Communication: Negotiating a Grammar of Culture. London: Routledge.

Hofstede, G. 2001. Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Jin, L., and M. Cortazzi. 2011. Researching Chinese Learners: Skills, Perceptions and Intercultural Adaptation. Houndmills. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Li, J. 2012. Cultural Foundations of Learning: East and West. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Marginson, S. 2006. “Dynamics of National and Global Competition in Higher Education.” Higher Education 52 (1): 1–39. doi:10.1007/s10734-004-7649-x

Ramanathan, V., and R. B. Kaplan. 1996. “Audience and Voice in Current L1 Composition Texts: Some Implications for ESL Student Writers.” Journal of Second Language Writing 5 (1): 21–34. doi:10. 1016/S1060-3743(96)90013-2

Said, E. W. 2003. Orientalism. 3rd ed. London: Penguin.

Shi-xu. 2014. Chinese Discourse Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Spivak, G. C. 1988. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by C. Nelson and L. Grossberg, 271–313. London: Macmillan.

Authors’ Bio

Jing Yu PhD, is an Assistant Professor of International Higher Education in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis and a Faculty Affiliate in Asian American Studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research interests include international student mobility, intersections of race, class, and nationality, and international dimensions of equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging. Her recent project on Chinese international students’ everyday racism and mental health issues has been successfully funded by the Spencer Foundation’s small research grants. She is on the editorial board of the Journal of Diversity of Higher Education, Journal of College Student Development (Research in Briefs), and Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice.

Managing Editor: Xin Fan

What Has COVID-19 Taught Us: Advancing Chinese International Student-Related Research, Policies, and Practices Through Critical Race Perspectives

Research Highlighted:

Yu, J. (2023b). What Has COVID-19 Taught Us: Advancing Chinese International Student-Related Research, Policies, and Practices Through Critical Race Perspectives. Teachers College Record, 125(6), 110-118. https://doi.org/10.1177/01614681231190165

“I’m not excited about ‘going back to normal,’ because normal was the place where all the failures were for the kids I’m concerned about.” ― Gloria Ladson-Billings (December 20, 2020)

As we are ramping up to the return of in-person events in the post-pandemic environment, Gloria Ladson-Billings, a critical race theory scholar, reminds us that the COVID-19 pandemic should be a transformative opportunity that forces us to break with the past and imagine the world anew. For the field of international higher education, this call is right on time. Due to the unprecedented pandemic, international activities, especially cross-border student mobility, have been disproportionately impacted (Mok et al., 2021; Yu, 2021a). As the largest international student group in U.S. higher education, Chinese students have been made particularly vulnerable due to the resurgence of anti-Asian racism and U.S.-China geopolitical tensions. There is therefore a pressing need to make sense of Chinese international students’ perspectives and experiences around U.S. higher education—and in doing so, to highlight the ever-present educational inequalities rooted in academic capitalism, global unevenness, and institutional racism.

This article builds on the results of a critical qualitative research project investigating Chinese international students’ agency, decision-making, and perceptions of race, racism, and power (Yu, 2021a, 2021b, 2022a, 2022b, 2023a, Under Review ^abc). Drawing from interdisciplinary studies of international education, Asian American studies, sociology, and migration studies, this research project brings critical race perspectives to understanding Chinese students’ transnational mobilities and practices. It aims to unveil global hierarchies and racial inequalities in the field of international education in order to help advance future research and open new paths to practice.

Ideas for Critical Research

The COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that the neoliberal model of international education is falling apart (De Wit, 2020). There is a renewed interest in and urgency for educators, scholars, and practitioners to rethink the field of international higher education through a critical race lens. In considering the theoretical implications of this fact for research, ethical and political dimensions should be centrally incorporated to ponder the issues of rights, responsibility, justice, and equity within international higher education. In recent years, more and more scholars have reset the research agenda and have started to critically reflect on international student mobility (Stein, 2017; Yang, 2020) and academic knowledge production (Kubota, 2020; Shi-xu, 2014); however, theoretically sophisticated critical research on international students’ lived experiences with racism and racialization is still urgently needed. In response to this theoretical challenge, I put forward an innovative framework, Global Asian Critical Race Theory or GlobalAsianCrit (Yu, Under Review^a), as a contribution that combines the key tenets in Asian Critical Race Theory (Iftikar & Museus, 2018) and Global Critical Race Theory (Christian, 2019). In this creative framework that I proposed, I incorporated both a racial/ethnic and a critical global view into CRT to help understand how global white supremacy has shaped the racial realities of Asian individuals and how racial oppression works differently in different geographical contexts.

Ideas for Equity-Driven Policies

The COVID-19 pandemic and the related rise of anti-Asian racism have also revealed that international students of color are excluded from equity and social justice discourses in U.S. higher education. Thus, institutional policies should start by including disaggregated data on international students’ racial, ethnic, and national identities, which enables colleges and universities to acknowledge the heterogeneity within the highly reductive federal category of “nonresident alien” and to understand the diverse nature of these students’ learning experiences. Disaggregating the data and exploring the heterogeneity within this diverse group of students will be helpful for policymakers, institutional leaders, faculty, staff, and administrators to identify the specific needs of these international students and to support their sustained success and development in the U.S.

In addition, despite the fact that diversity and inclusion are continuously advocated in U.S. higher education, international students have been largely absent from debates and discussions of anti-Blackness and anti-Asian sentiment, due to their status as foreign students and temporary residence. Given this history of exclusion and ethnic discrimination, institutional policies should include global perspectives to uphold principles of educational equality and social justice for international students.

Ideas for Inclusive Practices

Finally, I propose three practical strategies for appropriately supporting Chinese international students. First, open discussions of race, racism, and power need to be included in institutions’ orientation sessions for international students. My research (Yu, 2022a) demonstrates that there is a great discrepancy in Chinese students’ understanding of race and racism before and after their migration to the U.S. It is necessary to equip international students with basic racial knowledge, such as how to identify racist comments and where to seek institutional help when discrimination and racial stereotyping occur. Administrators and practitioners can provide much-needed space for open conversations and transparent communications around racialized incidents on campus. Moreover, providing general education courses on the sociohistorical background of race, racism, and free speech in the U.S. can help international students better understand the complex racial reality of U.S. institutions and the wider society.

Secondly, administrators and staff should use an asset-based approach to designing services and workshops for international students on campus. While various activities are designed for international students to quickly adapt to U.S. campus culture, most available programs tend to be based on a deficit mindset of Chinese students or rooted in racialized logic. The asset-based practices that I recommend are intentional ways of acknowledging and leveraging the strengths of international students, including their everyday experiences, knowledge, and cultural practices to serve as resources for teaching and learning. Domestic students should not be excluded from these events and activities, for critical cultural awareness and cross-cultural communicative skills are essential qualities for all students to work with people from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds in future various professional situations.

Thirdly, colleges and universities should structurally facilitate international students’ engagement with domestic students and wider local communities. My research (Yu, 2022b) shows that Chinese students may express prejudicial attitudes toward other people of color, especially African Americans. More interracial contact can help both international and domestic students disrupt their stereotypes about one another. Hence, this form of support for international students can foster their sense of belonging or cohesiveness in a specific campus organization or activity. U.S. institutions should take shared responsibility to reinvest some of the income generated by international student tuition toward creating and supporting inclusive student clubs and extracurricular activities.

Conclusion

It is clear that Chinese international students are “raced” in the U.S., so instead of demanding that students conform to the oppressive social norms and meet the academic expectations of the (white) host learning environment, social justice efforts should be made to interrupt hegemonic thinking and complicate notions of race and racism by looking beyond the limited understanding of these concepts within U.S. borders. As Gloria Ladson-Billings reminded us, the COVID-19 pandemic can be a portal, a gateway to imagine a new world for K-12 schools as well as international higher education.

References:

Christian, M. (2019). A global critical race and racism framework: Racial entanglements and deep and malleable whiteness. Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, 5(2), 169–185.

De Wit, H (2020). Internationalization of higher education: The need for a more ethical and qualitative approach. Journal of International Students 10(1), i–iv.

Iftikar, J. S., & Museus, S. D. (2018). On the utility of Asian critical (AsianCrit) theory in the field of education. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 31(10), 935-949.

Mok, K. H., Xiong, W., Ke, G., & Cheung, J. O. W. (2021). Impact of COVID-19 pandemic on international higher education and student mobility: Students perspectives from mainland China and Hong Kong. International Journal of Education Research, 105, 101718.

Stein, S. (2017). Internationalization for an uncertain future: Tensions, paradoxes, and possibilities. Review of Higher Education, 41(1), 3–32.

Yang, P. (2020). Toward a framework for (re)thinking the ethics and politics of international student mobility. Journal of Studies in International Education, 24(5), 518–534.

Yu, J. (2021a). Lost in lockdown? The impact of COVID-19 on Chinese international student mobility in the US. Journal of International Students, 11(S2), 1-18.

Yu, J. (2021b). Caught in the middle? Chinese international students’ self-formation amid politics and pandemic. International Journal of Chinese Education, 10(3), 1-15.

Yu, J. (2022a). The racial learning of Chinese international students in the US context: A transnational perspective. Race, Ethnicity and Education. Advance Online Publication https:// doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2022.2106878

Yu, J. (2022b). “I don’t think it can solve any problems”: Chinese international students’ perceptions of racial justice movements during COVID-19. Journal of Diversity in Higher Education. Advance Online Publication https://doi.org/10.1037/dhe0000457

Yu, J. (2023a). Understanding Chinese international students in the U.S. in times of the COVID-19 crisis: From a Chinese discourse studies perspective. Journal of Multicultural Discourses. Advance Online Publication https://doi.org/10.1080/17447143.2023.2214538

Yu, J. (Under Reviewa). Exploring Chinese international students’ experiences in times of crisis through Global Asian Critical Race Theory.

Yu, J. (Under Reviewb). “Asians are at the bottom of the society”: Chinese international students’ perspectives on Asian Americans in the U.S. racial hierarchy.

Yu, J. (Under Reviewc). #YouAreWelcomeHere? The two faces of American higher education toward Chinese international students.

Authors’ Bio

Managing Editor: Xin Fan

The Reconstruction of the Cosmopolitan Imaginary: Chinese International Students during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Liu, Q. T., & Chung, A. Y. (2023). The Reconstruction of the Cosmopolitan Imaginary: Chinese International Students during the COVID‐19 Pandemic 1. Sociological Inquiry.

Although viewed as belonging to both Asian and Asian American communities, Chinese international students’ experience of discrimination in the U.S. during the pandemic is distinct from those of both long-term immigrants and native-born Asian Americans. The traditional scholarship on Asian/American racial citizenship does not fully explain the intersectional interplay of race and nationality on their sense of non-citizen “Otherness” between nations and the impact on their worldview. We want to highlight that the societal reception to specific immigrant groups has been influenced by not only the social standing of the group within the host nation but also by the geopolitical positioning of their sending nation to the host nation within the world order (Le Espiritu, 2003; Ong, 1999).

Studies on transborder migrants and western-born Asian return migrants suggest that resident citizens in their ancestral nation may also question the national loyalties, sexualities, opportunism, and even class-privileged positionality of nonresident migrants in the diaspora (Chung et al., 2021; Wang, 2016). During the global pandemic, transborder migrants have occupied this growing liminal space between countries in a manner that further distances them not only culturally but also, socially and politically from the worldview of resident citizens in both countries.

In the meantime, the scholarship on cosmopolitanism provides an analytical entryway for understanding the post-colonial features of the western global imaginary today, but they leave open the question of how cosmopolitanism can also be used as a way to reclaim a sense of identity and belonging for diasporic migrants who traverse the borders of developed and developing nations. Our article explores the possibility of a critical cosmopolitan imaginary among international students apart from its colonialist or Western imperialist roots (Mignolo, 2000) and instead, as a reclamation of the nationally liminal aspirations and identities of Asian international students throughout the processes of transnational mobility (Martin, 2021).

Methods

The data for this article come from 16 semi-structured interviews that were collected by phone, remote conferencing, and in-person meetings from spring 2020 through spring 2021 at a university in upstate New York. All the interviews were conducted in their native language–Mandarin. Given the changing disease control policy in China, the political transition from the Trump administration to Biden administration, and the shifting geopolitical dynamics between the two global powers, we later conducted six follow-up interviews in November 2020, January 2021, and May 2022 to track new developments and validate our main findings. The time period for this study is critical in understanding how the cosmopolitan identities and viewpoints of Chinese international students have evolved in response to unusual mobility restrictions and rising ethnonational rhetoric in both U.S. and China. Our interviews generally ranged from 30 minutes to 2 hours in length and we used the grounded theory approach to conduct data analysis.

Findings

The study explains how international students navigate their increasing racially and nationally liminal status between nations and national categories of belonging, particularly during times of crisis. First, the worldview of Chinese international students in the U.S. is conditioned by pre-migration cultural frameworks and geopolitical positioning within the global order–in this case, growing tensions between China and the U.S. that have the potential to create disjunctures between their understanding of race and the dynamics of racial formations in America. This historical disconnect explains some of the contradictions scholars have observed in the solidarity of foreign-born Chinese against anti-Asian hate yet indifference or opposition to affirmative action, Black Lives Matter, and President Trump–all of which were hotly debated during this period (Linthicum, 2016; Poon & Wong, 2019). Our findings suggest that being caught within a “liminal” space makes it challenging for transborder migrants to make sound connections or establish broad solidarity with other Asians, Asian Americans, or other BIPOLC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) groups. All of this points to the urgent need for greater, not lesser, education on the multiple and interconnected histories of subjugated groups around the world. Future research may explore to what extent other white international students–such as Russians who themselves come from a country that currently has tense relations with the U.S.—fear backlash to the same degree as non-white immigrants.

Second, because of their nation-less status as diasporic migrants during this period, Chinese students unexpectedly encountered significant pushback from their home government and even hostility and resentment from many fellow citizens–all of which exacerbated their insecure positionality as in-between citizens. Consequently, Chinese international students interpreted and responded to hardening racial and national borders during COVID-19 from the perspective of both displaced racial minorities and transborder migrants. Recent events in China–particularly President Xi’s increasing authoritarian control over the country–may further distance Chinese transborder migrants abroad from their resident compatriots back home (Huang, 2022; Ni, 2022), even as their disconnect from the racial politics of America contributes to their further national liminalization. Future research may explore to what degree this increasing sense of dislocation may explain the conservative ideological bent of Chinese diasporic communities from local communities in the host countries as noted by other pundits (Jiang, 2021; Liu, 2005).

Third, the current body of scholarship suggests that the younger generation of Chinese– whether at home or abroad–are instilled with a strong sense of nationalist loyalty (Wong, 2022), and other studies (Fan et al., 2020) do indicate that discrimination increases Chinese overseas students’ support for authoritarian rule back home. But we find that a broadly sweeping discourse of hyper-nationalism or alternatively, Western colonialist approach to cosmopolitanism oversimplifies their complicated and individualized relationships with their country (Martin, 2021; Wong, 2022) and how it may be taking shape within a post-national global context. Increasing exclusion and dislocation from both US and China have pushed students into a position that both straddles and transcends this nationally and racially liminal space between both countries. As a strategy to overcome this disadvantage, our participants have reappropriated and renegotiated their “cosmopolitan imaginary” in ways that have further alienated them from the official nationalist rhetoric of both countries but resisted “the will to control and homogenize” under the dictates of Western colonialism and modernization (Mignolo, 2000). In the process, they have reclaimed an ideal stripped of its colonialist connotations and used it to reassert their rights and privileges as transborder migrants. If these national divides persist, the question remains which countries will ultimately benefit from the incorporation of highly skilled migrants through greater social acceptance, flexible citizenship policies, and competitive work opportunities.

Overall, our study argues for a more critical approach to international education that does not merely reproduce the nationalist frameworks of the Global North or South nor overlooks the hegemonic effects of post-colonial legacies and global inequalities in shaping migrant experiences. This task will require greater scholarly and public attention to the wide range of transborder migrants and refugees who have been trapped in between competing nations, parties, and ideologies in the post-COVID era.

References

Chung, A. Y., Jo, H., Lee, J. W., & Yang, F. (2021). COVID-19 and the political framing of China, nationalism, and borders in the US and South Korean news media. Sociological Perspectives, 64(5), 747-764.

Fan, Y., Pan, J., Shao, Z., & Xu, Y. (2020). How Discrimination Increases Chinese Overseas Students’ Support for Authoritarian Rule. 21st Century China Center Research Paper, (2020-05).

Huang, K. (2022). ‘Runology:’ How to ‘Run Away’ from China. Council on Foreign Relations, June, 1.

Jiang, S. (2021). The call of the homeland: Transnational education and the rising nationalism among Chinese overseas students. Comparative Education Review, 65(1), 34-55.

Le Espiritu, Y. (2003). Home bound: Filipino American lives across cultures, communities, and countries. Univ of California Press.

Linthicum, K. (2016). Meet the Chinese American immigrants who are supporting Donald Trump. Los Angeles Times, May, 27.

Liu, H. (2005). New migrants and the revival of overseas Chinese nationalism. Journal of Contemporary China, 14(43), 291-316.

Martin, F. (2021). Dreams of flight: the lives of Chinese women students in the West. Duke University Press.

Mignolo, W. (2000). The many faces of cosmo-polis: Border thinking and critical cosmopolitanism. Public culture, 12(3), 721-748.

Ni, V. (2022). ‘Run Philosophy’: The Chinese Citizens Seeking to Leave amid Covid Uncertainty. The Guardian, July, 20.

Ong, A. (1999). Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. Duke University Press.

Poon, O., & Wong, J. (2019). The generational divide on affirmative action. Inside Higher Ed: Admissions Insider.

Wang, L. K. (2016). The Benefits of in-betweenness: return migration of second-generation Chinese American professionals to China. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 42(12), 1941-1958.

Wong, B. (2022). The Complex Nationalism of China’s Gen-Z. The Diplomat, June, 19.

Author bio

*Qing Tingting Liu, University at Albany*

Qing Tingting Liu (tliu20@albany.edu) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at SUNY Albany. She has been serving for AAAS Social Science Caucus Council as a Social Media Coordinator for more than 2 years https://sites.google.com/view/aaas-socsci/home. She is also affiliated with the University of Melbourne – Asian Cultural Research Hub (ACRH) https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/school-of-culture-and-communication/our-research/groups-and-resource-centre/asian-cultural-research-hub-acrh/our-members. Her research interests include migration, globalization, race and ethnicity, intersectionality and youth culture. Her dissertation project is about Chinese Working Holiday Makers in Australia, aiming to explore how temporal liminality affects their identity as Chinese diaspora living in Western society. For the detail of her profile, please see https://www.linkedin.com/in/qing-tingting-liu-251bb6181/ .

Angie Y. Chung is Professor of Sociology at the University at Albany, a 2021-2022 U.S. Fulbright Scholar, and former Visiting Professor at Yonsei and Korea University. She is author of Saving Face: The Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant Family Myth and Legacies of Struggle: Conflict and Cooperation in Korean American Politics. She is currently writing a book manuscript titled Immigrant Growth Machines: Urban Growth Politics in Koreatown and Monterey Park based on research funded by the National Science Foundation. She has published in numerous journals on race/ ethnicity, immigration, gender and family, ethnic politics, international education, and media.

Managing Editor: Tong Meng