Between the Pearl River Delta and the Midwest: Transnational Student Mobility, Class and Racial Transformations

• In Event: Highlighted session: Educating Middle Classes: A Comparative International Investigation

Proposal

By 2017, international students in the US topped one million, of which one third are from China (Institute of International Education 2017). Unlike previous Chinese migrants who relied on multigenerational kinship networks to secure jobs and housing in the US (Takaki 1989; Louie 2012), contemporary Chinese transnational students were mostly middle and upper middle class, who actively use their socioeconomic capital to pave pathways to better educational opportunities, high-end housing, and global networks (Fong 2004; 2011). Western education, particularly, is seen as a means to achieve the upward mobility through a “flexible citizenship” that ultimately leads them to greater wealth, freedom, and prestige (Ong 1999; Fong 2011). In many US university towns, commercialized luxury housing has become a new way to attract affluent foreign students and their much-needed tuition dollars. While the rapid increase of wealthy international students and their pursuit of luxury rentals expedite gentrification and aggravated class divisions, international students’ experiences of educational and social marginalization indicate the persistence of racism that is intertwined with resurgent nationalism and xenophobia in university towns.
This research is a transnational ethnography that investigates the implication of elite student mobility on the transnational co-constitution of class, race and urban space. It specifically examines middle and upper-middle Chinese students migrating between Shenzhen--a rapidly urbanizing city in south China, and Madison--a predominantly-white city of the US Midwest. In China, middle class has also been used interchangeably with other terms such as “new rich” (furen), new rising social stratum (xinxing jieceng). Shenzhen—China’s fourth biggest metropolitan area, is a salient terrain to study middle-classesness and education, because of its high concentration of urban elites who are active consumers of luxury goods, and large student diaspora (O’Donnell, 2017).
Drawing from a theoretical framework of transnationalism of higher education, education and housing, and race and racialization, this 12-month ethnographic research reveals that the elite Shenzhen students’ access to prestigious schools in China, as well as their abundant experiences of overseas studies and travels, helped secure their educational opportunities in the US. When making housing choices, Shenzhen transnationals tended to connect their residential location and experiences to socially learned codes of elite status. Styles, newness, size, layout, and amenities were required to reflect the taste of the middle and upper middle-classes’. While the elite Chinese students were using socioeconomic capital to challenge the negative racialized images of the non-white, their experiences of educational and social marginalization, however, indicate the persistence of culture-based racism and rising xenophobia in the US.
This study brings much-needed attention to the Midwest, which has long been peripheral in the scholarship of international higher education. It is also timely as the increasing commodification of higher education accelerates real estate development and exacerbates affordable housing tensions in many US cities, and class inequalities in education access expands considerably in China. It closely engages with the current political moments, when debates about who are responsible agents for education inequalities, gentrification, and displacement are heightened, and racism and nationalism are reenergized across borders.

Author

• Shanshan Jiang, University of Wisconsin-Madison