transnational education mobilities – Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities (NRCEM)

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

Research highlighted

Wang, Zhe. (2022). Chinese students at UK universities: transnational education mobilities as a stepping-stone to adulthood. Population, Space and Place. doi: https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2571

As the largest group of transnational students studying in the UK, Chinese students have drawn great research attention. Most scholarship analyses transnational Chinese students’ migration either as ‘strategic plans’ to secure employment opportunities and future economic gains, (for example, to gain university credentials and embodied competencies), or as non-strategic distinctive experiences for ‘positional advantage’ (Gu & Schweisfurth, 2015; Ma & Pan, 2015; Xiang & Shen, 2009; Zong & Lu, 2017; Zweig & Yang, 2014). Existing scholarly accounts further stress the political, social and cultural aspects of students’ migration by illustrating how it involves postcolonial discourses (Beech, 2014; Fong, 2011), government policies (Wang, 2021), middle-class habitus (Zhang & Xu, 2020), and Chinese family culture (Tu, 2018a, 2019). This study contributes to existing scholarship by attending to the adulthood transitions of transnational Chinese students studying in UK universities. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 43 transnational Chinese graduates from UK universities, I found that participants regarded their transnational education migration as a stepping-stone to adulthood.

Recent scholarship draws increasing research attention to the adulthood transitions experienced by students in migration(Robertson, Harris, & Baldassar, 2018). Investigating student migration through a lifecourse perspective, scholars illustrate how mobile youth experience their educational migration as ‘a rite of passage’ to adulthood (Harris, Baldassar, & Robertson, 2020, p. 9). As argued by Madge, Raghuram, & Noxolo (2015, p. 685), ‘student mobility for international study should not simply be thought of as a movement occurring at a discrete point in time, but as an ongoing process inherent to ever-changing mobile lives’. When students move across different locations to study, they experience separation from old social relations and unification with new ones. For example, disconnecting from familial social and cultural contexts and integrating into new social relations are processes that bring about situated experiences of taking adventures, overcoming uncertainties, experimenting, finding oneself, and then becoming an independent adult (Michail & Christou, 2016; O’Reilly, 2006). Moreover, researchers critically point out how this normative understanding of mobile transitions is socially structured by youth’s class positions, governments’ migration policies, and discourses such as cosmopolitanism and individualism (Holdsworth, 2009; Kim, 2013; Thomson & Taylor, 2005; Tse & Waters, 2013). Focusing on the social construction of mobile transitions, researchers thus elaborate on the complexities and unevenness of transnational students’ life transitions (Cairns, 2014; Collins & Shubin, 2017; Martin, 2018). But to date, far too little literature has situated the discussion of Chinese students’ transnational mobilities in their lifecourse. Although Xu (2021) explores the transnational Chinese students’ life events, her article mainly focuses on the interplay between students’ (im)mobilities and their study-to-work transitions. This paper advances existing literature by investigating how transnational Chinese students reflect on their studying experiences at UK universities through a lifecourse transition perspective.

Framed within the paradigm of mobilities, the findings illustrate how transnational Chinese students interpret their UK study experience as a stepping-stone to adulthood and how their transitions to adulthood are culturally and socially structured. For Chinese students, UK universities are more than a place to study: they are the sites of the creation of social webs where young people rehearse the roles and responsibilities of adulthood in everyday social interactions. Moreover,this paper exemplifies the importance of a cultural lens in the analysis of mobile transitions to adulthood (Arnett, 2007; Jeffrey & McDowell, 2004; Nelson et al., 2013; Punch, 2002; Stockdale, MacLeod, & Philip, 2013). Noticing that Chinese students construct their adulthood in ‘interdependencies, mutual support, and responsibility for others’ instead of ‘separation, self-reliance, and responsibility for the self’, a conventional transition model for western mobile youth, I explain how transnational Chinese students’ transitions to adulthood are structured by collectivism and group-oriented values (Holdsworth, 2009, p. 1861). Finally, this paper stresses the complexities of Chinese youth’s transitions to adulthood by showing how transnational Chinese students’ social class influences their transitions to adulthood.

To conclude, this paper illustrates how transnational education mobilities transform social networks, in which transnational Chinese students rehearse their role as an adult in everyday social interactions, and how the intersection of Confucian collectivism and students’ class background influences their experiences and understandings of transitions to adulthood. Therefore, this article advances existing scholarship on transnational Chinese students by proposing a lifecourse perspective and exemplifies the complexities of mobile youth’s lifecourse transitions by emphasising the cultural and social construction of transnational Chinese students’ adulthood.

Authors’ Bio

Dr. Zhe Wang is a postdoc researcher working in the Department of Education, University of Oxford. She holds a PhD from the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford. She has an interdisciplinary research background, and conducts both qualitative and quantitative research and ethnographic fieldwork. She can be contacted at zhe.wang@education.ox.ac.uk and she tweets @ZheWang_maggie. Her research interests can be described as:

International higher education and student (im)mobilities
International higher education and world development
Transnational education space
International Chinese students
Citizenship, urban inclusiveness and social reproduction in China

Managed editor: Zhiyun Bian