Studying Between Pearl River Delta and the U.S. Midwest: Rethinking Race in Transnational Education

• In Event: The Janus-Faced Nature of Higher Education Internationalization: Racialization, Xenophobia, and Ethnic Exclusion

Abstract

For budget-constrained public universities, international student recruitment has become a common revenue generation strategy to counter the state disinvestment in education (Altbach and Knight 2007, Robertson et al. 2002). In many university towns, luxury housing has become a new way to attract affluent foreign students and their much-needed tuition dollars. As student populations become increasingly elite, high-end housing boom has not only expediated gentrification and intensified class divisions, but also revitalized historical legacies of racism and xenophobia in new ways that shape the lived experiences of individuals.

This paper is part of a larger transnational ethnography that investigates the implications of higher education mobility on the transnational co-constitution of class, race and space. Incorporating multiple scales (local, national, and transnational) and various sites (university, student housing, city), the research aims to highlight the variegated processes, such as globalization of higher education, student migration, as well as racialization, as “spatially interconnected sets of practices” that reshape class and racial relations (Hart 2002). Drawing on theories of transnationalism (Mitchell 2017), urban geography (Smith 2002, Soja 2010), and race and racialization (Ferreira 2007, Brahinsky et al. 2014), the project examines 15 upper-middle class Chinese students migrating between an urbanizing city in South China, and a predominantly-white city of the US Midwest. It specifically explores how elite Chinese students are racialized in the US Midwest, while simultaneously racializing local Black and Brown students and residents through education and housing consumption.

The ethnography shows that while elite Chinese students were using socioeconomic capital to challenge the negative racialized images of the non-white, their experiences of educational and social marginalization indicate the persistence of culture-based racism and rising xenophobia from both whites and minority populations in the US. Chinese upper-middle class students often find themselves stuck in the global market forces that stimulate US universities’ overseas recruitment and nationalist political calculations that portray them as threats—to intellectual property, educational equality, and national security. In particular, resurgent xenophobia demonstrates a nationalist desire to ensure that the commodity sold is only the access to US higher education, not the access to US citizenship, permanent residency, or domestic labor market (Tannock 2018).

While Chinese students are often grouped as Others in predominantly white university cities, these elite transnationals are also forming racialized ideologies based on media representations, schooling experiences, and family cultures in China. Since China’s economic reform in the late 1970s, the nation’s imagination of whiteness, blackness, and Chineseness shifted to a strong subscription to whiteness and anti-African sentiments (Dikötter 2015). In particular, Chinese transnationals often employ anti-blackness discourses to legitimize their educational and residential choices—to study and live separately from local Black and Brown students. My research illustrates how racialization intertwines with nationalism in the era of global higher education, as well as how China becomes a critical site for the production of racial ideologies. This research project is timely as the increasing commodification of higher education exacerbates affordable housing shortage in many US cities, and racism and nationalism are heightened and reenergized across borders.

Author

• Shanshan Jiang, University of Wisconsin - Madison