The Geopolitics of Transnational Higher Education: Strategic Rationales and Spatial Practices in China

• In Event: Sociology of Development Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 3: Development & Space

Abstract

Transnational higher education (TNHE) plays an increasingly important role in the production of space and the negotiation of geopolitical order, yet this dimension remains critically under-examined. This article investigates the geopolitical strategies underpinning China’s rapidly expanding TNHE sector. Drawing on policy documents, administrative data, and institutional cases, we identify three central rationales: first, the strategic diversification of international partnerships to mitigate geopolitical risk and strengthen multilateral alignments, particularly through Belt and Road–related partnerships and engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations; second, a pronounced shift towards STEM disciplines that facilitates technological sovereignty and recalibrates China’s position within the global knowledge economy amid heightened techno-nationalist competition; and third, an increased emphasis on geopolitical subject formation accompanying a discursive and operational shift from ‘Westernising domestic education’ to ‘localising international education’. These findings show that China deploys TNHE not as a passive host within a Western-dominated paradigm, but as an active agent in forging alternative geopolitical and geo-intellectual spaces. The study challenges TNHE scholarship dominated by market-oriented assumptions and contributes to a critical understanding of how the internationalisation of higher education is mobilised for grand strategic ends.

Authors

• Jingran Yu, Institute of Education, Xiamen University

• Ning An, Guangzhou Institute of Geography, Guangdong Academy of Sciences, China

• Yinger YANG, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor