How are professional value and working conditions of China origin Canadian faculty perceived amid the geopolitical tensions?

• In Event: Geopolitics and migration: Universities in the center

Proposal

Canada and China used to have strong university linkages in the 1980s and 1990s, whereby many Chinese universities benefitted from enormous support provided by their Canadian counterparts with respect to developing the programs, curriculum and teaching personnel, which in turn facilitated higher education transformation in China. Since the 2000s, Canadian universities have enjoyed an increasing in-bound flow of Chinese students; now China constitutes one of the top sources of international students in Canada. Furthermore, Canadian universities are now benefitting from a pipeline of faculty of Chinese origin. To date, there are at least some 2,000 such faculty engaging research and teaching in Canadian universities.

Nevertheless, the currently escalating rivalry between the United States and China has led to the notion of linking research to national security or securitization, and even decoupling of university collaboration across the two sides. Caught in the Canada-China-US trilateral relations, Canada has followed the US and launched similar initiatives or strategies—in an attempt to address security concerns and combat possible intellectual espionage from China. A number of Canadians scientists of Chinese descent were charged for working inappropriately with China or with inappropriate Chinese partners or failing to disclose to the full extent of the relationship with Chinese partners. In July 2021, the Government of Canada imposed the obligatory national security risk assessments on funding requests from university researchers to the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) in order to “protect Canadian intellectual property from falling into the hands of authoritarian governments." Starting from early 2023, the Government of Canada instructed the Canada Foundation for Innovation and all federal research granting councils to screen funding requests from Canadian universities that are collaborating on sensitive research with China, as well as other hostile states. There are concerns, expressed principally by academics of Chinese origin in Canada, that new mandatory national security assessments for federal funding of university research could impact their career development, and lead to “racial profiling Chinese researchers as foreign agents."

Against such a backdrop, this study aims to shed light on the following queries: 1) overall value of those faculty members of Chinese origin in Canadian universities, their role in supporting collaboration with China, and their level of research engagement with the scholars and students in/from China, 2) impact of limiting collaboration with China on Canadian research community, and 3) other impact and cost of potential racial profiling among Canadian university faculty of Chinese descent. To a great extent, this study is to have the voice of Canadian university faculty of Chinese descent heard, concerning how the wider geopolitical and socio-political circumstances might limit their capacity to contribute and develop professionally.

In order to solicit information concerning aspects of those queries, a survey was conducted in November 2022--February 2023. Specifically, this study first generated, through web scraping, a full list of tenured and tenure-track faculty members in all fields in the top ranked Canadian research universities, i.e., those appearing in Maclean’s ranking lists of Canada’s best Medical Doctoral and Comprehensive universities 2022, 30 universities in total. A total of 2,184 Chinese name faculty members in those universities were invited to take this survey, and we received 197 valid responses, those self-identified as Chinese faculty. In order to compare the experiences and perceptions between the faculty of Chinese and non-Chinese descents, this survey was also sent to a random sample of non-Chinese name faculty in those universities, and 231 valid responses self-identified as non-Chinese faculty were received.

Methodologically, it draws on a survey conducted by the University of Arizona and the Committee of 100—with granted permissions. The American survey was administered between May and July 2021 among the scientists in 83 top US universities. This survey is largely a Canadian version of that study, albeit with some modifications in sampling and adaptations to the Canadian context.

The survey data were analyzed with a theoretical framework drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model, which has been widely adopted in the field of education, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding the complex interactions that influence students’ development and academic success. This model highlights the importance of environmental factors, personal characteristics, and contextual factors in shaping development, therefore offering a holistic approach to understanding the various dimensions of human development. Its strength lies in identifying crucial mechanisms that explain the reciprocal interaction between individuals and their surroundings. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model is composed of five socially organized subsystems that support and guide human development, namely, microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem, and chronosystem.

In this study, the microsystem represents individual Chinese faculty members in Canadian universities, encompassing their daily interactions with the immediate environment, e.g., colleagues, students, and staff. The mesosystem is about the connections and interactions between the various microsystems in Chinese faculty members’ professional life. This level of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model highlights the importance of understanding how different microsystems work together to produce influence on an individual’s development, and it is used here to refer to the university and its organizational structure that directly institutionalize Chinese faculty members’ career development. The exosystem encompasses the broader social and environmental contexts that indirectly impact Chinese faculty members’ career development. This level of the ecological model includes factors such as community resources, professional norms and regulations, and availability of professional services; thus, it concerns academic and professional organizations and associations in this study. The macrosystem accounts for the broader cultural, ideological, societal, and policy forces that shape Chinese faculty members’ career development, and so constitutes the state in this study. The chronosystem focuses on the role of time in shaping Chinese faculty members’ career development. This final level of Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model acknowledges the influence of historical events, societal, cultural and political changes on individuals’ developmental processes, and it is used here to denote the recent geopolitical shifts and their influence on political, social and cultural attitudes in Canada. Bronfenbrenner’s ecological model with its multiple levels of systems is employed in this study to analyze how the interrelated systems and contextual factors have impacted career development and life of Chinese faculty members in Canadian universities.

Authors

• Qiang Zha, York University

• Xiaojie Li, University of Arizona