“Asians Are at the Bottom of the Society”: Chinese International Students’ Perspectives on Asian Americans in the U.S. Racial Hierarchy

• In Event: The persistent oppression of racism in global higher education

Proposal

Fueled by the new variants of the COVID-19 pandemic, the ongoing anti-Asian hate crimes, and mass shootings across the U.S., conversations around historically embedded racism and nativism have resurged in public dialogues to shed light on systemic social injustice and inequality experienced by racially minoritized populations. As the largest international student group in U.S. higher education, Chinese international students are not only subject to anti-Asian racism and violence resulting from the pandemic (Koo et al., 2021; Yao et al., 2021), but also are double alienated given escalating geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China (Ma & Zhan, 2020; Zhang et al., 2020). However, international students, especially students of color, are often viewed as a homogeneous group that “adds diversity” to campus climate and internationalization on the basis of nationality (Buckner et al., 2021; Stein, 2015), without acknowledging their racial identities and experiences with race, racism, and racialization. Recognizing this gap, this article aims to explore how Chinese international students perceive the racial identity of Asian Americans and how they position this pan-national, phenotypical-based racial group in relation to other oppressed minorities in the U.S. racial hierarchy.

As international student mobility is deeply embedded in the economic structure and cultural fabric of global racial capitalism and neoliberalism, the traditional one-way flow of talent from developing countries to Western countries, primarily to English-speaking destinations, has been duly noted (e.g., Beech, 2019; Marginson, 2006). Over the last decade, the face of higher education institutions in the United States has changed drastically, with the majority of international students from Asian countries (i.e., China, India, and South Korea) opting to pursue a degree overseas. According to the Open Doors Report on International Educational Exchange, more than 317,000 Chinese students enrolled in U.S. higher education institutions in the 2020-21 school year, accounting for 35% of the total international student population (Institute of International Education [IIE], 2021). Simply looking at the number of international undergraduate students, over 50% are from mainland China (IIE, 2020). Coming from a monoracial society, Chinese people are often not exposed to racial and ethnic diversity in their daily encounters. Consequently, before their arrival in the U.S., their perceptions of U.S. race and ethnicity heavily rely on global mass media and hearsay from family and friends (Kim, 2008; Roth, 2012). Hence, investigating how Chinese international students perceive the process of “becoming Asian” can better understand how race and racial stratification work in the transnational social fields (Gargano, 2008).

Compared to earlier generations of Chinese international students, the current wave has unique characteristics. First, due to the transformative context of social change in contemporary China, over 90% of Chinese students are funded by their own families instead of being supported by the Chinese government or U.S. institutions (Ministry of Education, 2019). In addition, they mostly live in coastal, metropolitan areas, and are from upper-middle-class or affluent families (Jiang, 2021); therefore, they are rarely aware of the unearned privileges they benefit from their home country. Moreover, those who send their children for undergraduate study prioritize education with a cosmopolitan perspective, so they prefer to choose a more well-rounded, high-quality higher education rather than exam-oriented learning (Ma, 2020). Lastly, in contrast to the master narratives that focus on their negative attributes, the current generation of Chinese students exhibits agency, self-determination, and resilience in navigating different sociocultural contexts (Heng, 2018; Yu, 2021b). Consequently, at this critical time of racial turbulence, this research seeks to offer new perspectives on how Chinese students become conscious of U.S. classifications and hierarchies as well as their own identity within such a world racialized system.

The convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Trump administration’s “white protectionism,” and the Black Lives Matter movement has made visible the two forces that govern the U.S. racial order: white supremacy and anti-Blackness (Gordon, 2005). And this is not simply a U.S. problem but a global phenomenon that empire spread (Bacchetta, Maira, & Winant, 2019; McElhinny & Heller, 2020). Since the virus has been identified as foreign, more specifically: “associated with China,” historical legacies of white nativism in the U.S. have produced xenophobia and hostility with the Chinese. Given that, this study examines the perspectives of 21 Chinese international students to address these research questions: how do they perceive Asian Americans and how do they view the racial positioning of Asian Americans relative to other racial groups in a multiracial America?

Drawing upon the theoretical frameworks of world racial system (Winant, 2001; 2004) and racial triangulation (Kim, 1999; 2023), I argue that Chinese international students’ ideological socialization in the home country and college experiences in the host country jointly contribute to their knowledge of Asian Americans and race relations in the U.S. To be specific, Chinese international students subscribe to the racial stereotype of Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners,” and insist that they are difficult to unite but they have more racial consciousness as a minority than Asians from Asian countries. The research finding further indicates, different from the perceived racial stratification that Asian Americans are positioned as a “racial middle” group (O’Brien, 2008) in relation to white and Black Americans, Chinese students subjectively state Asian Americans are positioned at the bottom in the U.S. racial hierarchy.

Understanding how Chinese international students make meaning of race, racism, and race relations before and after their arrival in the U.S. can contribute to the literature on racial identity formation and development from a transnational perspective. The COVID-19 pandemic, alongside the Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate movements, has made visible the mechanisms and pervasiveness of white supremacy, but the role of structural anti-Blackness is less discussed. The study goes beyond focusing on the victimhood caused by anti-Asian racism and extends to critical reflection on Chinese international students’ complicity with the racial subordination of Black Americans in the U.S.

Author

• Jing Yu, The University of Wisconsin-Madison