Negotiating National Imaginary and Individual Subjectivity: Belt and Road International Student Experience in China

• In Event: Identity, Advocacy, and Transnational Experiences for International Students

Proposal

With its fast economic development in the context of shifting geopolitical landscape, China actively utilises international higher education as ‘soft infrastructure’ to promote national soft power through instilling into human experience, imagination and subjectivity. Notably, recruitment and education of international students are imagined by the Chinese government as a means to spread China’s academic excellence and geopolitical influence. As China is shifting to the new era of State Developmentalism and Cultural Nationalism (Lin 2024; Zheng and Kapoor 2020; Rizvi 2019), in national policy discourse, international students play an important role in cultural diplomacy, as potential future specialised talents and ‘cultural ambassador’ of China.
China is now the top destination of international students in Asia and the third in the world, hosting 492,185 foreign students (MOE 2019), with 53% students from ‘Belt and Road (B&R)’ countries. The high-profile B&R initiative is built on the Chinese government’s regional imaginary of enhancing China’s geopolitical influence among B&R countries and cultural imaginary of public diplomacy, introducing measurers of attracting international students from B&R countries, such as establishing dedicated B&R scholarship and facilitating mutual recognition of academic credentials. As ‘invented’ knowledge and histories, imaginaries are ‘culturally shared and socially transmitted’ representations interacting with personal subjectivity (Salazar, 2020).
While studies have pointed out the regional imaginary of geopolitical influence behind B&R initiative, there is limited research investigating how students agentically perceive and reconstruct their own subjectivity while interacting with the cultural and regional imaginary of international education in China.
To investigate individual students’ agentic perception and responses, this study adopts Archer (2003) ‘reflexivity’ to delineate how different types of reflexivity is manifested while international students negotiate their subjectivity and the host expectations in the wider geopolitical context.
This study conducts semi-structured interviews with 20 Chinese-government-funded degree international students studying in Beijing. Purposive sampling ensures that they are from different types of institutions, disciplines and medium of instruction; and different B&R countries.
The findings indicate students’ different reflexivity when interacting with the national imaginary of international education. Adapted from Archer (2003), student reflexivity consists of host communicative reflexivity, autonomous reflexivity and intercultural meta-reflexivity. Students with host communicative reflexivity tend to internalise their role as bona fide cultural ambassador willingly promoting China. Students with autonomous reflexivity consider their roles as detached international researcher/learner while only attending to host expectations for personal utilitarian interests or out of necessity. Students with intercultural meta-reflexivity tend to engage in critical reflections of the concept of cultural ambassador and deconstruct the role of cultural ambassador and act to improve their intercultural surroundings. Importantly, the findings suggest different reflexivity is shaped by students’ predispositions related to their previous educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, as well as their everyday experience in China which may align or contradict national-level B&R-related imaginary. Consequently, different reflexivity results in students’ differing subjectivity, including future aspirations which may (re)produce, contest or reinterpret the regional and cultural imaginaries behind the national policies regarding international students.
This study provides indicative implications for Chinese government and universities to adopt a more attraction-oriented approach to cultural diplomacy and reciprocal and inclusive international education. Future research should further evaluate the effects of cultural-diplomacy-oriented policy on everyday higher education practices and various actors including but not limited to domestic/international students and academics.

Authors

• Jie Xu, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Kun Dai, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

• Yuxiao Jiang, Faculty of Education, The Chinese University of Hong Kong