Tag: knowledge mobility

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

The Foreign Bully, the Guest, and the Low-income Knowledge Worker: Performing Multiple Versions of Whiteness in China

Research highlighted:

Lan, S. (2021). The foreign bully, the guest, and the low-income knowledge worker: Performing multiple versions of whiteness in China. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

Dr Shanshan Lan, University of Amsterdam

With the rise of China as the world’s second largest economy, more and more white Westerners are moving to China to pursue better job or business opportunities. In addition to the so-called transnational elites, there is an increasing number of middle-stratum white migrants who work as English teachers, self-initiated entrepreneurs, locally hired staff in transnational companies, lecturers in Chinese universities, and artists or creative workers in China’s media and cultural sectors. Unlike the transnational elites who usually have limited social interactions with local Chinese (Yeo and Willis 2005), this new group often depends on professional and social networks with local Chinese to consolidate their business or career opportunities. Scholars have noted the decline of social privileges associated with white skin in many Asian societies (P.C. Lan 2011; Lundström 2014; Maher and Lafferty 2014). The diversification of the white population in China matches the expansion of job markets for “foreigners” from coastal areas to smaller cities in the interior of the country. Due to the recent tightening in immigration controls and the rising tides of popular nationalism in Chinese society, the lived experiences of non-managerial and non-elite white migrants are increasingly marked by considerable tensions between privileges and precariousness (Farrer 2019; S. Lan 2021; Lehmann 2014; Leonard 2019; Stanley 2013).  However, little has been written on how different groups of white migrants make sense of and try to cope with this daily experience of precariousness.

       This paper focuses on two research questions: What are the opportunities and challenges faced by white migrants in different fields of employment and different geographical locations under the evolving nature of multiple Chinese gazes? How do various groups of white migrants engage with, negotiate, or resist the Chinese gazes through quotidian racialized performances? Existing literature on international migrants in China mainly focuses on black Africans in Guangzhou (S. Lan 2017; Bodomo 2012; Haugen 2012). The relative absence of whites in migration studies literature points to the racialization of “migrant” as a category reserved mainly for non-white people (Lundström 2017). This research denaturalizes whiteness as an invisible norm by rethinking it in a context of international labor migration and cross-cultural interaction. The paper attends to social stratification within the white population in China by moving beyond the binary between transnational corporate elites, who are often considered as privileged migrants (Camenisch and Suter 2019; Farrer 2019), and foreign English teachers, who are stigmatized as occupying a lower status within the expatriate community (Leonard 2019; Stanley 2013). Instead, it focuses on a group of middling migrants (Lehman 2014), namely self-initiated migrants who are neither recruited by transnational companies nor by talent schemes of Chinese universities, nor by commercialized brokers (as is the case of many foreign English teachers). I argue that although these white migrants have little control of the multiple and contradictory ways that they are racialized in Chinese society, they still demonstrate a certain degree of agency in manipulating the Chinese gazes for their benefit through strategic performances of different versions of whiteness. In this vein, the paper highlights the situational nature of whiteness, which is mediated by nationality, gender, class, Chinese language skills, and length of stay in China.

Author Bio

Shanshan Lan is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam and a member of the Moving Matters research group. She received her Ph. D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She had worked as a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University and Connecticut College in the United States. Before joining the University of Amsterdam, she was a Research Assistant Professor in the David Lam Institute for East-West Studies, Hong Kong Baptist University. Lan is the Principal Investigator of the ERC project “The reconfiguration of whiteness in China: Privileges, precariousness, and racialized performances” (CHINAWHITE, 2019-2024). Funded by the European Research Council, this project examines how the western notion of whiteness is dis-assembled and re-assembled in the new historical context of China’s rise as a global superpower.