China – Page 6 – Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM)

Benefits of studying in China: International students from top-tier Chinese universities ‘spill the beans’

Research highlighted

Singh, J.K.N. (2022). Benefits of studying in China: International students from top-tier Chinese universities ‘spill the beans’, Journal of Further and Higher Education, DOI: 10.1080/0309877X.2022.2052822

International education is a fast-changing phenomenon in global higher education. For decades, China has been the ‘sending’ country of international students to English-speaking countries such as Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. By the twenty-first century, the role has reversed and China is one of the fastest growing ‘receiving’ countries of international students. In 2018, there were a total of 492,185 international students from 196 countries pursuing their studies in 1,004 higher education institutions; the majority came from Asia (59.95%) followed by Africa (16.57%), Europe (14.96%), America (7.26%) and Oceania (1.27%) (Chinese Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China, 2018). Given the exponential growth of international students in China, understanding the advantages of studying there is under-researched.

Given the expansion of international student numbers, limited scholarly articles have focused on the advantages of studying in China, an emerging international education hub, based on the voices of international students themselves (Jiani 2017; Wen and Hu 2019). To respond to this empirical gap, this paper investigates the benefits of seeking international education in China, based on the lived experiences of international students. The main research question is ‘What are the anticipated benefits of seeking international higher education for international students enrolled at two prestigious universities in China?’ Against this backdrop, 30 semi-structured qualitative interviews with international students from Asia, Africa and Western countries enrolled at two prestigious universities in Beijing and Hubei Province were conducted.

The study results have highlighted three main benefits from studying in China: 1) enrichment of future employment possibilities; 2) mastering Mandarin language; and 3) development of knowledge, skills and experiences. These benefits are not mutually exclusive; they have similar end goals to improve development of students’ home countries (mainly in Asia and Africa).

Employment prospects

The principal benefit of studying in China is employment prospects. Many students wish to stay in China upon graduation for employment purpose. International students are very confident that they will secure jobs in China as opposed to their home or third countries. They view that employment opportunities for them relatively poorer in their home countries.Some reasons include relatively low pay and limited prospects in gaining employment compared to China’s labour market. The growth of China’s economy brings more job opportunities with higher salary packages and requires highly skilled migrants to support that growth.

On the other side, many students, particularly from Asia and Africa, aspire to contribute to their home countries through employment opportunities. Many mentioned that they wanted to work in Chinese companies, the government sector or even return to their previous, home-country positions. This is because there are a lot of Chinese companies mushrooming in their respective home countries and these students want to contribute to their home countries by emulating China success especially in economy.

Mandarin language

The second benefit is learning Mandarin. Many students, especially undergraduates, are interested in learning this language. Firstly, students mainly from Asia, Europe and South America believe that Mandarin will an important business/trade language between their home countries and China. Students from Asia and Africa wanted to learn Mandarin because they perceived themselves as future ambassadors or leaders representing their country of origin in future trade dealings and business investments with China. For students majoring in Chinese, it is vital to learn Mandarin in a Chinese university to obtain in-depth assistance from native speakers and educators, as opposed to their home country. They also have the chance to immerse themselves in the Chinese community and understand Chinese culture.

Developing knowledge, skills and experience in China

The third benefit is to develop significant knowledge, skills and experience for their career development. Students, especially undergraduates from Africa, are amazed how rapidly China has grown in terms of economy, management, business and investment (Jiani 2017). Based on this rapid economic development, students wanted to learn the business ‘tricks of the trade’, economic policies, management and investment skills so that they could replicate that learning in their home countries. Singh and Jamil (2021) reported that international students especially from the under-developed nations in Asia and Africa wanted to contribute to their community via application of knowledge, technical and research skills acquired in Malaysia in positions such as university lecturers, researchers and trainers.

An overarching benefit of studying in China, based on international students’ lived experiences, is relating to their personal intrinsic motivations and benefits which is geared towards improving and strengthening their career and employment opportunities through meaningfully contributing to their home country’s social and economic development by gaining employment in the government sector, in Chinese companies in home countries or returning to previous employment. Specifically, in home-country employment, students contribute by applying business/trade educational knowledge, management, investment and soft skills, as well as international educational experiences. Later benefits of international education include employment opportunities in China due its rapid economic development and wide job opportunities, as well as learning Mandarin for future business and trade dealings with China and reconnection to cultural identity.

Hence, the findings of this study have contributed to the international education literature as the findings have established important nuances of key personalised motivations and benefits of studying in China and therefore extended the modified push-pull theory in relation to economic, social, cultural, career (employment) and educational outcomes that mostly advantage home-country development. These findings are also opposing the framework of pull or push factors that only focused on external factors instead of personalised aspects to gain international education.

References

Jiani, M. A. (2017). Why and how international students choose mainland China as a higher education study abroad destination, Higher Education, 74 (4), 563–579. doi:10.1007/s10734-016-0066-0

Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (2018). Statistical report on international students in China for 2018. Accessed 19 October 2021. http://en.moe.gov.cn/documents/reports/201904/t20190418_378692.html

Singh, J. K. N. & Jamil, H. (2021). International education and meaningful contributions to society: Exploration of postgraduate international students’ perspectives studying in a Malaysian research university, International Journal of Educational Development, 81. doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2020.102331

Authors’ Bio

Dr Jasvir Kaur Nachatar Singh
La Trobe University

Dr Jasvir Kaur Nachatar Singh is an award-winning Senior Lecturer at the Department of Management and Marketing, La Trobe Business School, La Trobe University, Australia. In 2020, Dr Singh received an international teaching recognition from Advance HE, UK as a Fellow (FHEA). In 2018, Dr Singh received two La Trobe University Teaching Awards and Best Presenter Award at the Global Higher Education Forum, Malaysia. Dr Singh’s research expertise is in higher education with a particular interest exploring international students’ lived experiences of academic success, employability, career aspirations and learning experiences. Dr Singh also explores lived experiences of skilled migrants and international academics. Dr Singh has published numerous articles in high impact journals and has presented at various national and international higher education conferences. In 2021, Dr Singh was appointed as a Research Fellow at the Malaysian National Higher Education Research Institute. She can be contacted at j.nachatarsingh@latrobe.edu.au.

Managing editor: Lisa (Zhiyun) Bian

Rethinking Internationalization at Home from a System Perspective: Evidence from China’s Higher Education Institutions

Research highlighted:

Zhang, Y. (2022). Rethinking internationalization at home from a system perspective: Evidence from China’s higher education institutions. International Journal of Chinese Education, 11(1), 2212585X221095881.

Abstract

This study explores the strengths and more importantly the limitations of the current research of Internationalization at Home (IaH) in relation to equity. To do this, I draw on a survey of Chinese university students to examine 1) the relationship between their intercultural interaction with international students, partly operationalizing IaH, and their intercultural competence; 2) compares the effects of intercultural interaction and study abroad on students’ intercultural competence; and 3) examines the extent to which students’ opportunities for intercultural interaction with international students depends on the type of their institutional affiliation. It finds that study abroad, interaction with international students and learning foreign languages are positively associated with students’ intercultural competence. However, the effects of study abroad and intercultural interaction do not differ and are not additive. It also finds that students from prestigious universities are more likely to have high intercultural interaction with international students. The findings confirm the strength of IaH as an equitable approach at the institutional level. However, it raises questions on the impact of systemic inequities on IaH and calls for rethinking the objective of IaH for all students from a system perspective.

Equity and Internationalization at Home

Internationalization has long been recognized as an institutional imperative to promote international research collaboration, enhance global ranking and reputation, and improve students’ intercultural understanding. One of the most important activities in internationalization is student mobility, including outbound mobility, such as students studying abroad for degree programs or short-terms exchanges, and inbound mobility in the form of institutions recruiting international students justified by financial and cultural benefits brought by international students.

Yet, what concerns the field of internationalization is the elitist nature of student mobility. Globally, only 2.48% of the students in higher education institutions had the opportunity to study abroad (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2021). In response to this concern, the concept of Internationalization at Home (IaH) was proposed and implemented at the institutional level, in the hope to bring international experience to all students, including students who do not have the opportunity to study abroad. IaH is defined as “the purposeful integration of international and intercultural dimensions into the formal and informal curriculum for all students, within domestic learning environments” (Beelen & Jones, 2015). IaH is often regarded as an approach that equalize the field of internationalization. However, most research on IaH focus on single institutions or comparison of a few institutions. It might be true that the IaH approach addresses inequity issues in internationalization at the institutional level. However, institutions may differ significantly in their internationalization resources due to systemic inequity, which may result in students from various institutions benefiting differently from IaH.

The Chinese Context

China is a case that this article uses to illustrate that the current understanding of IaH in relations to equity may be limited at the system level. China’s higher education system is highly stratified. One example is the Double First-Rate project, only around 5-6% of the Chinese institutions are designated to receive ample financial resources from the government to achieve the goals of becoming world-class universities or housing world-class disciplines. These universities are also largely protected from enrolments expansion to ensure the quality of education at the universities. These universities tend to have more resources for their internationalization activities, which is closely linked to the goal of becoming world-class universities. Alarmingly, top universities in China also tend to enrol students from better social-economic backgrounds. This dynamic raises concerns that institutions differ in their capacity to internationalize the campus that benefit their students.

This Study and Implications

This article explores the strengths and more importantly the limitations of the current research of Internationalization at Home (IaH) in relation to equity from both institutional and systemic perspectives. To do this, a survey of Chinese university students was conducted with the following research questions: 1) What is the relationship between Chinese university students’ intercultural interaction with international students and their intercultural competence? 2) How does the effect of intercultural interaction compare to that of study abroad? 3) To what extent students’ institutional affiliation explain their opportunities for intercultural interaction? Chinese university students’ intercultural interaction with international students operationalizes one aspect of IaH. Comparing the effect of intercultural interaction and study abroad helps us understand whether IaH benefits students’ intercultural development from institutional perspective. Moreover, examining the impact of institutional affiliation on intercultural interaction helps us understand whether IaH truly equalizes the internationalization field from a system perspective.

Two important findings come out of this study. First, as seen in Table 2 from the published paper, intercultural interaction is positively related to student intercultural competence and its effect is not statistically different from that of study abroad. This finding confirms that IaH does benefit students’ intercultural development and there is no evidence that students’ intercultural understanding must be developed through the often-expensive study abroad opportunities. This finding suggests that students can alternatively choose to participate in IaH activities on campus for intercultural development, which is much more affordable. This study only focuses on intercultural interaction between domestic and international students, one aspect of IaH. Future research could consider how different aspects of IaH, such as international curriculum, relates to students intercultural understanding.

Another important finding is that students from prestigious universities are more likely to have more opportunities for intercultural interaction, as seen from Table 3 of the published paper. This corroborates with the hypothesis that system inequity issues may affect the objective of IaH benefiting all students. More prestigious universities tend to have more resources either financially or in terms of human capital to create opportunities for IaH and support the implementation of IaH. This finding is important as it raises concerns of how IaH can achieve its goals of benefiting all students, if operating in a system of inequities. This finding calls for research on IaH to consider incorporating systemic factors in the research and rethink IaH from a system perspective.

Authors’ Bio

You Zhang is a PhD Candidate at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), at the University of Toronto. Her current research focuses on international student mobility, higher education regionalization, China-Africa relations in higher education, and anti-Asian racism and international students. She has a geographic interest in the East and Southeast Asia region. She co-founded the East Asia Special Interest Group under the Comparative and International Development Education Center at OSIE, where with her colleagues, they organize activities and symposiums to raise awareness of educational issues related to the Asian Diaspora and the Asian region. Her recent research has appeared in Higher Education, Higher Education Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Higher Education, and the Journal of International Students. She can be reached at youzhang.zhang@mail.utoronto.ca or her twitter @YouZhangYoyo.

Managing editor: Lisa (Zhiyun) Bian

Subjectivity as the site of struggle: students’ perspectives toward Sino-foreign cooperation universities in the era of discursive conflicts

Research highlighted

Han, X. (2022). Subjectivity as the Site of Struggle: Students’ Perspectives toward Sino-Foreign Cooperation Universities in the Era of Discursive Conflicts. Higher Education. DOI: 10.1007/s10734-022-00840-w

Subjectivity as the site of struggle: students’ perspectives toward sino-foreign cooperation universities in the era of discursive conflicts

As an effective solution both to education surplus in developed countries and the lack of high-quality educational resources in developing ones, the number of international branch campuses (IBCs) has gained rapid growth worldwide. During this process scholars remain suspicious about curriculum design and delivery, faculty and student recruitment, and the suitableness of the imported teaching content to the host country. Wilkins et al. (2012) go further to emphasize not only the efectiveness of teaching and learning, but students’ (subjective) perspective should be taken into account for IBCs’ further development.

However, the traditional analysis of students’ experience is inclined toward the pre-social conception of individuals, locating investigation in a value-free vacuum. When zooming in on international education, it concentrates on students’ other-directed adjustment/acculturation and focuses on the differences among dominant discourses. From the perspective of critical theorists, such efforts have placed agency and constraints into two extremes of continuum rather than examining their interpenetration, the dangers alerted by both Bourdieu and Foucault, as freeing agency from power relationships. The “already formed” view of the person (Olssen et al., 2004) sidesteps the issue on how people’s subjectivities have been infiltrated and occupied by modern power during its changes from “explicitly overt forms or ‘oppression’” to “more covert forms…imbu[ing] with individuals’ own desires and active participation in the regulation and development of their selves” (Webb, 2011, p. 738). Based on existing critical studies of how neoliberalism realizes governance at a distance by subjectivity production and how individuals resist such politically imposed discourse, this article furthers the study of students’ self-formation and the resulted subjective evaluation toward their enrolled institutions in the era of discursive conflicts. Specifically, it adopts Foucault’s concept of ethics to empirically explore the permanent agonism in the subjectivity constitution of students who are situated between neoliberalism and authoritarianism in Chinese Sino-foreign cooperation universities (SFCUs) and the danger of their sense of lost.

The data reported were collected from in-depth interviews with sophomores and juniors in three selected SFCUs. The analysis was directed by Foucault’s ideas of power, discourse, subject/subjectivity, and critique. Special attention was paid to critique about the normalized neoliberal and authoritarian values prevailed in their enrolled institutions.

Specifically, neoliberal ideas have successfully penetrated individuals minds, demonstrated by the great faith of all the interviewees in the academic standards of the cooperation universities. Students believe SFCUs as the fair sites to “to utilize their powers of consumer choice and control” (Vincent, 1994, p. 263) and the world-class educational resources/good service they received worth the relatively high tuition fees charged. However, while neoliberalism discourse has obviously occupied the dominant position in SFCUs, China’s effort to shape authoritarian subjects has also been rewarded as the interviewees express their desire for clear instruction and direction from authority.

This study highlights the “equivocal nature” of the subject as representing “one of the best aides in coming to terms with the specifcity of power” (Foucault, 1997b, p. 212).Subjectivity is a site where power enacts and resisted/refused; it is ever-developing, instead of being “primarily or always identical to itself” (Foucault, 1997a, p. 290). THNE facilitates this process by providing students the accesses to various discourses (sometimes in conflict). While such developments change subjects’ perception/evaluation towards certain events/environment/experience, it also represents rethinking of the “critical ontology of ourselves”; students become suspicious about the “truth” and always feel “lost” as he submits himself “to ‘an experience…in which what one is oneself is, precisely, in doubt’” (Burchell, 1996, p. 30).

To conclude, Foucault’s observation that “human beings are made subjects” (1982, p. 208) cautions the danger of either taking neoliberal criteria/values for granted to explore international/transnational education experience or focusing on cultural aspects as constraints for students to respond to. From the prism of Foucault, individuals’ values, perceptions, and self-knowledge are “linked to the ways in which [they] are governed” (Dean, 1999, p. 14), simultaneously by others and by themselves: their evaluation/satisfaction is subjectively shaped by (various and conficting) discourse(s) which confne(s) “what will be known” (Mills, 2003, p. 70) and what counts as natural/true. As Foucault further alerts, “nowadays, the struggle…against the submission of subjectivity–is becoming more and more important, even though the struggles against forms of domination and exploitation have not disappeared. Quite the contrary” (1982, p. 213).

Authors’ Bio

Dr Xiao HAN earned her B.A. (Economics) from Jilin University and Ph.D (Education) from the Education University of Hong Kong. She worked for two years as a postdoctoral fellow at Lingnan University and then took the position of Beiyang associate professor at the School of Education, Tianjin University. Her research is trans-disciplinary-based, focusing on critical policy analysis, international/transnational higher education, and Foucault/Bourdieu studies. Her works have been published in international journals such as Journal of Education Policy, Higher Education, and Policy and Society. Email: hanxiao0309@hotmail.com

Managing editor: Lisa(Zhiyun) Bian

Cultural Capital and Elite University Attendance in China

Research highlighted

Anning, Hu. & Xiaogang, Wu. (2021). Cultural Capital and Elite University Attendance in China. British Journal of Sociology of Education 42(8): 1265-1293.

Despite a plethora of research, the association between cultural capital and educational inequality does not appear to follow the same pattern. Against this backdrop, an increasing number of scholars have shifted attention to the socio-institutional context in which the consequences of cultural capital vary. This is a necessary enterprise since the concept of cultural capital was proposed in the first place in the French context. In this article, we make contributions to the literature by investigating how cultural capital, among college attendees, relates to the likelihood of attending an elite university when most students are subject to standardized tests.

The research environment is China, where the standardized National College Entrance Examination (NCEE), commonly known as gaokao in China, is institutionalized as an annually-held prerequisite academic examination for the entrance into almost all higher education institutions at the undergraduate level. It is standardized in the sense that both examination subjects and examination questions are highly structured and oriented toward the evaluation of cognitive skills. Hence, what we are interested in is: under the NCEE, how cultural capital relates to one’s chance of attending an elite university. For the purpose of comparison, we also examine how cultural capital is associated with elite university attendance by virtue of exempting the NCEE, a supplementary pathway to college that is geared to overcome the NCEE’s partial emphasis of cognitive skills by taking into account the exceptional or special talents of students.

Drawing on data from the Beijing College Students Panel Survey (BCSPS), we show that (1) on average, objectified cultural capital is negatively associated with the likelihood of attending an elite university whereas embodied cultural capital shows a positive effect; (2) both types of cultural capital enhance the proficiencies of extracurricular activities, which are negatively associated with all quantiles of the NCEE score so as to curtail the odds of getting into an elite university; (3) both types of cultural capital cannot guarantee the attendance of an elite university by improving one’s learning capabilities, since learning capabilities only raise the middle and lower quantiles of the NCEE score; (4) finally, only embodied cultural capital helps one attend an elite university by virtue of exempting the NCEE.

This study highlights how a standardized examination system could come into force to affect the association between cultural capital and the formation of horizontal stratification. Under the NCEE, at least based on the experiences of China, objectified cultural capital is a damping factor for people’s likelihood of getting into a selective university. Although it has the potential of improving students’ learning capabilities, such an improvement does not seem to affect the high end of the NCEE performances. In this regard, the theory of cultural reproduction seems to be hard to maintain when the access to selective educational resources is more structurally determined. Since objectified cultural capital differentials in a population has always been an indicator of the existing class stratification, the negative effect under the NCEE implies that standardized examination could play the role of the “equalizer” in societies with a holistic evaluation system.

This article also suggests that the process of cultural reproduction as described by Bourdieu could come into being if such a standardized examination system is lifted or circumvented. Embodied cultural capital, for instance, is noted to enhance one’s chance of getting into an elite university through exemption of the NCEE. Although the evaluations faced by those who are exempted from the NCEE are not identical with the holistic evaluations adopted in other societies, the gist is indeed similar. Unsurprisingly from the Bourdiausian perspective, this pathway to higher education significantly attracts those with higher endowment of embodied cultural capital, thus bridging cultural capital and educational outcome.

The mechanisms undergirding the link between cultural capital and elite university attendance under the NCEE are more nuanced than conventionally assumed. Metaphorically speaking, cultural capital is a double-edged sword: objectified cultural capital simultaneously raises and lowers one’s standardized test score. Nevertheless, the positive mechanism only works for the middle and lower quantiles of the test score, but the negative mechanism can be extended to the higher quantiles. These two mechanisms jointly lead to the overall negative influences of objectified cultural capital on the odds of getting into an elite university. As for embodied cultural capital, it also plays both a positive and a negative role: it reduces the odds of elite university attendance by weakening students’ performance in the NCEE on the one hand, but helps one get into a selective institution through NCEE exemption on the other hand. Relatively, the overall positive effect of embodied cultural capital suggests that the positive pathway overrides the negative one. Hence, the educational consequences of cultural capital are not a simple yes-or-no matter, but a combination of multiple possibly mutually competing forces. More mechanism-oriented research is called for to reveal the complex formative process in the educational consequences of cultural capital.

Authors’ Bio

Dr. Anning Hu is a Professor of Sociology and the vice Dean of Graduate School at Fudan University. His research interests include social inequality, education, religion, trust, culture, and social research methods. Hu has published over 90 academic articles and three monographs, with research appearing in major sociological outlets, such as British Journal of Sociology, Sociology, Social Science Research, Journal of Marriage and Family, Poetics, Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, Demographic Research, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Sociological Quarterly, Journal of Mathematical Sociology, and The China Quarterly, to name a few. He can be contacted by huanning@fudan.edu.cn.

Dr. Xiaogang Wu is the Yufeng (御风) Global Professor of Social Science, Area Head of Social Sciences, and Director of the Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) at NYU Shanghai. Wu also holds an appointment as Professor of Sociology in the Faculty of Arts and Science at NYU. Wu was the recipient of the US National Academy of Education/Spencer Post-doctoral Research Fellowship for 2006 to 2007, the Asia and Asian American Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association in 2007, and the Prestigious Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences by the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong in 2012. Wu is currently the President of the International Chinese Sociological Association and the founding editor of the Chinese Sociological Review. He can be contacted by xw29@nyu.edu.

“From ‘Sea Turtles’ to ‘Grassroots Ambassadors’: The Chinese Politics of Outbound Student Migration.”

Research highlighted

Liu, Jiaqi M. “From ‘Sea Turtles’ to ‘Grassroots Ambassadors’: The Chinese Politics of Outbound Student Migration.” International Migration Review, (November 2021). https://doi.org/10.1177/01979183211046572.

Jiaqi Liu, University of California, San Diego

Global student migration is on the rise. As of 2017, over six-million tertiary students were studying outside their origin countries. International students exert enormous economic impacts, contributing $45 billion to the US economy alone in 2018. On the other side of the migratory channel, China has steadily established itself as the world’s largest source country of student migrants since 1998, when the earliest UNESCO data are available, with the global percentage of Chinese student migrants more than doubling from 7% in 1998 to 17% in 2017.

Given that China is the world’s most populous country, it may not be surprising that China also has the largest number of overseas students. However, the mammoth size of the Chinese student population abroad is not a historical constant. In 1978, when China began promoting large-scale outbound student migration, it had only 860 overseas students. In less than four decades, this number ballooned by 535 times to 460,000 in 2014. Scholars attribute this dramatic growth to a constellation of domestic factors, including the rising Chinese middle class and their conversion of economic capital into cultural capital, China’s competitive domestic education system, the Confucian pursuit of better education, the brokerage of commercial education agents, and pull factors in destination countries.

Nonetheless, the existing literature on international student migration/mobility (ISM) pays scant attention to China’s changing policies toward outbound student migration. Constrained by the prevalent immigration bias in migration studies, scholars tend to focus on host countries’ international education and post-graduation employment policies regarding inbound student migrants, while casting less attention on sending countries. This article, by examining China, the largest origin country of student migrants in the world, illuminates how home countries regulate and strategize about overseas students.

Utilizing three qualitative methods, including a historical policy review, an ethnography in state-organized summer camps for overseas students, and interviews with student migrants and migration officials, I propose two main arguments. First, I argue that the Chinese outbound student migration politics – which I define as the collectivity of the homeland state’s policies, practices, and rhetorics toward overseas students – serves three policy objectives: economic, governmental, and geopolitical. These objectives, however, are not set in stone. Rather, their relative significance ebbs and flows, depending on the sending country’s specific socioeconomic and political conditions. As I show, following decades of prioritizing the economic and governmental impacts of student returnees (haigui, or colloquially “sea turtles”) in boosting the domestic economy and maintaining political stability, the Chinese state now gives growing weight to student migrants’ geopolitical value as “grassroots ambassadors” (minjian dashi) in expanding China’s global influence and enhancing national image abroad. This geopolitical reorientation has become particularly salient under the Xi Jinping leadership, as China adopts more assertive soft power strategies in pursuit of global supremacy.

Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, my second argument suggests that the geopolitics-focused reorientation of China’s OSM policy may not be well received among student migrants nor fully implemented by migration officials at the grassroots or local level. Whereas Chinese students faced surging espionage accusations across the world in recent years, I refrain from taking for granted the close political ties between the Chinese state and overseas students, as depicted in rhetorical flourish by the Western media and Chinese national strategies. Instead, I examine the on-the-ground disjuncture between the central Chinese state, student migrants, and frontline bureaucrats. Based on grounded empirical research, I shed new light on the OSM politics as a contentious field where state ambitions crosscut individual desires and where national grand plans are confronted with flexible local improvisation.

In particular, I conducted participant observation in three state-run, voluntary retreats for overseas students in an emigrant hometown in southeast China. Following my interviews with migration officials, I was invited by these trips’ organizers to participate in three such events. In the end, I carried out over 100 hours of participant observation in these trips over July and August 2019. The summer trips provided an ideal lens to closely examine the quotidian operation of outbound student migration policies, as well as the deep-running tensions between national grand plans, local bureaucratic improvisation, and student migrants’ own desires.

My tripartite model of outbound student migration politics – economic, governmental, and geopolitical – strives to facilitate scholarly dialogue between ISM and diaspora studies. While the burgeoning mobility paradigm emphasizes neoliberalism’s crucial role in promoting the transition from international education to labor immigration in destination countries, this article pushes China to center stage and examines the homeland state’s changing, yet-unabating, interests in regulating and positioning overseas students in both national policies and local implementation.

Author Bio

Jiaqi M. Liu is a PhD candidate at the University of California, San Diego, studying the political sociology of international migration. Building on multidisciplinary training and professional experiences in sociology, international politics, and law, Jiaqi adopts mixed qualitative methods to explore the crossroads between international migration, diaspora politics, citizenship laws, and transborder governance. His articles have appeared at International Migration Review and Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and won the 2020 Aristide Zolberg Distinguished Student Scholar Award from the American Sociological Association.