Exploring Chinese International Students’ Experiences of Racism in Times of Crisis through Global Asian Critical Race Theory

• In Event: Highlighted Session: New Issues on Research and Study Abroad and International Students

Proposal

Introduction

Chinese international students’ lived experiences have garnered substantial attention in US higher education research due to the ever-increasing numbers of such students as well as China’s love-hate relationship with the host country. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed underlying structural inequalities, reinvigorated old stereotypes, and unleashed new manifestations of Sinophobia. As a consequence of Donald Trump’s racist rhetoric during his presidency, hate crimes against Asian ethnic groups in San Francisco increased by 500% in 2021 (Li, 2022) and Chinese scientists who were accused of being a threat to US national security were criminalized (J. Lee, 2020). The COVID-19 pandemic combined with the US-China rivalry and anti-Chinese sentiment has made Chinese international students face multiple challenges and continues to affect their feelings of insecurity. Some particular tenets of AsianCrit (Iftikar & Museus, 2018) and Global Critical Race theory (Christian, 2019) can be acknowledged to illustrate their racial realities beyond national boundaries, but either theory is not sufficient to address their racial issues and experiences of racism.

Therefore, I propose to combine AsianCrit developed in Asian American Studies and the global critical race and racism framework from Sociology to take an intersectional approach to race and globalization in the lives of Chinese international students. Simultaneously considering the historical and global dimensions of this issue is crucial because it reveals how race and racism operate both between and within nations embedded in global white supremacy and academic imperialism. In this paper, I specifically examine Chinese students’ experiences of racism and racialization within US higher education in the times of the COVID-19 crisis.

Theoretical Framework: Towards a Global Asian Critical Race Theory

With its roots in critical legal studies, Critical Race Theory (CRT) was developed beginning in the 1970s by lawyers, activists, and legal scholars to accelerate the pace of racial reform (e.g., Bell, 1980; Crenshaw, 1993; Harris, 1994). The theory articulates how hegemonic structures and ideologies maintain systemic whiteness (i.e., white supremacy) across sociopolitical contexts. Building upon CRT and Asian American studies, Iftikar and Museus (2018) advanced an AsianCrit framework that provides a more complex view of Asian American racial realities, as much of the traditional scholarship on race had focused on the Black/white binary. The key insight of AsianCrit is Asianization, the particular ways Asian Americans as a monolithic group are racialized by white supremacy in the US.

CRT was also expanded beyond the confinement of US borders to include an international context that applies to migrant populations (Gillborn et al., 2012; Kitching, 2015; Vass, 2015). Since racism as a modern global project takes shape differently across geographies, it is necessary to consider how transnational connections and attachments inform racialization of non-white people. As shown in a conceptual piece (Yao et al., 2019), intersectionality and interest convergence are the most vital aspects for understanding how international students’ racialized experiences are embedded in global imperialism and academic capitalism in the US.

Taken together, combining the principle of Asianization in AsianCrit with intersectionality and interest convergence in Global Critical Race Theory, I attempt to put forward an innovative theoretical framework, Global Asian Critical Race Theory or GlobalAsianCrit, both to move the analysis of race and racism beyond US territorial boundaries and expand from the traditional focus on immigrants and their descendants to include Asian groups temporarily on the move within the global context—for example, Chinese international students.

Data and Methods

This study was conducted at a US research university in the University of California system. Through the WeChat accounts of the campus’s Chinese Student and Scholar Association and Chinese Student Association as well as my own social media platforms (i.e., Facebook, Twitter), I recruited 21 Chinese undergraduate students, spanning all class years: incoming freshmen (n=4), sophomores (n=6), juniors (n=5), and seniors (n=6). Each student participated in one individual Zoom interview with me in July 2020, which lasted approximately between 60 and 90 minutes. An online semistructured approach (Salmons, 2015) was used to acquire participants’ responses and probe more details to understand the role of racism and racialization in their overseas learning experiences. All the interviews were conducted in Mandarin and audio-recorded with the consent of participants for transcription. I employed the thematic analysis approach for recognizing themes in qualitative data (Saldaña, 2015).

Findings

Informed by the data and the theoretical concepts of Asianization, intersectionality, and interest convergence, four major themes were identified to encapsulate participants’ experience of racism and racialization in US higher education: racial ignorance, explicit racism, double alienation, and revenue generator. These findings indicated that the specific experiences of the Chinese international students in this study were illustrative of and consistent with general patterns of Asian international and Asian American students in the US. The findings also shed light on Chinese students’ distinct challenges in times of a global health crisis: 1) the intersectional stigma of racism and xenophobia and 2) interest convergence between international students and US institutions. That is to say, Chinese students’ racialized experiences are compounded by their foreign status which evokes xenophobic exclusion, as well as by their dehumanizing social positioning as a “cash cow” in the study-abroad market.

The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified the negative experiences of people of color in every aspect with far-reaching effects on their mental health and well-being (Anandavalli et al., 2021). Chinese international students have particularly been made vulnerable as they have been targeted in a time of the global pandemic and uncertainty. As revealed through GlobalAsianCrit in this study, Chinese students are subject to both implicit and explicit discrimination, intersectional stigma, and the derogatory image of themselves as mere cash cows. The findings of this analysis indicate that Chinese international students are in urgent need of institutional support and preventive strategies to protect them from these and other forms of racist hatred. To sustain their hard-earned reputations worldwide, US higher education institutions should proactively include the international student population in making policy decisions and intentionally work to improve the racial and cultural climate of the university and beyond.

Author

• Jing Yu, The University of Wisconsin-Madison