Using Websites to Become Global Players in International Education: Insights from a Chinese University

Abstract

Despite the emerging scholarship on efforts of (semi)peripheral countries to take up internationalization of higher education (HE), little attention has been paid to how these universities market international education to prospective students on their websites. These websites are a multimodal space marketing internationalization that has been rarely investigated from a diachronic perspective. This study focuses on a Chinese university and uses a multimodal semiotic approach to unpack (dis)similarities of its present website from its other earlier websites to uncover how internationalization of HE has been integrated from a comparative point of view. The research also investigates how internationalization discourses, ideologies and practices are mobilized and disseminated through website design. It reveals that the university under scrutiny has kept utilizing the same salient modes in its layout, video, text, and image to communicate to potential students. The (dis)similarities were supported by an increase in branding and marketing, which shapes internationalization of HE in China and beyond. This paper ends by discussing the practical implications for countries seeking to claim greater competitiveness in international HE.