International Journal of Chinese Education

Drawing on a qualitative study of a group of professional Chinese women navigating their career lives between China and Canada, this paper addresses how Chinese transnationalism is constituted within global capitalism. It starts by mapping the career lives of the Chinese immigrant women. Their experiences point to the emergence of a transnational field between Canada and China where skill/labor and capital conjoin in distinct ways. The study further shows that this transnational social field is comprised of a complex of social relations reticulated through multiple institutions, organizations, and actors. Although the interest of economic accumulation and Western-centric social and cultural orders are predominant in shaping the women’s career spaces, this transnational field also provides conduits for alternative flows of power, privileging the entrepreneurial quest for social, cultural, and economic capitals. Despite its elitist façade, the transnational field is itself also vulnerable, fractured, and prone to crisis.

This paper examines transnationalism and identity construction among Chinese immigrant youth in Canada, an often-ignored population and inadequately addressed research area in transnational studies. I argue that the transnational practices within immigrant families have nurtured transnational orientation and identification among Chinese youth. I also interrogate simply using the frequency of homeland trips to evaluate the degree of second-generation transnationalism, by highlighting the different lens that Chinese youth engage in framing their perception of homeland.

The internationalization of higher education has led to the influx of Chinese international students in Canada. Much of the literature on this subject has focussed on the factors that drive them to Canada, their academic learning experiences, and the impact of North American stereotypical constructions of “Chinese learners” on their English language learning. This paper is based on a narrative study investigating the mobility, English learning and test-taking experiences of ten Chinese international students, and the complex connections among their past and present experiences and imagined futures. Informed by theories on globalization, neoliberalism, and Bourdieu’s concepts of social power, in particular, on sanctuary, this paper presents selected findings relating to the paradoxes and dilemmas of the student experiences of leaving China for their higher education, imagining a better future.

Even though more and more studies have been reported in the literature about international undergraduate students’ learning experiences in North America, little research has been done to study international graduate students on North American campuses. The university where this study took place has recently established a cohort-based Master of Education (M. Ed.) program for international students. This study was designed to investigate the adaptation of the international graduate students (all Chinese) who were enrolled in the M.Ed. program with a focus on their learning experiences, the challenges they encountered, and the suggestion they had for improvement of the program. Data analysis reveals that while Chinese international graduate students shared some common challenges with international undergraduate students such as language and cultural challenges, they had unique perspectives and expectations on curriculum and pedagogy. Suggestions for curriculum development for Chinese international graduate students are highlighted.

Chinese international students are vital to internationalization development in Canadian higher education, providing immediate and significant social and economic benefits to Canadian society. The existing scholarly studies have primarily adopted a cultural approach, with a focus on intercultural adaptation or related cross-cultural perspectives. This study goes beyond the cultural approach and examines how race, gender, and class intersect in producing social inequality among Chinese international students in Canada. Through the narratives of five students attending higher education institutions in British Columbia, the study reveals that Chinese international students have experienced discrimination in relation to developing friendship, integrating to the learning environment, and accessing supports and resources on campus based on the color of skin, their gender, and misperception of their class. The color line divides them into the “dominant white” and “people of color.” Color blindness negates their racial identities and ignores the ways in which these affect their learning experiences. The findings of this research call for an intersectional approach to examine international students and their lived experiences by addressing students’ multiple identities and differences to enrich their lived experience in Canada.

This article discusses how teaching faculty in a western Canadian university respond to the growing number of Chinese international students in their classrooms. Interviews (n=21) and survey data (n=60) reveal that professors struggle to communicate academic expectations across language and cultural barriers; develop cross-cultural content; engage students in active learning in the classroom; and provide effective feedback on written work. This in-depth account shows how faculty negotiate demands to both adapt to and create an “internationalized classroom” in the absence of institutional supports. Unsurprisingly, we confirm that adaptation is a struggle. Faculty rely on a combination of personal experience, disciplinary grounding, and stereotyping to inform their efforts. We conclude with a discussion of the limited utility of “Confucian Heritage Culture” (chc) as a path to meaningful change. Though frequently invoked to describe the preferences and behaviors of Chinese students, the homogenizing and misleading assumptions of the chc framework prevent faculty from recognizing the contemporary reality of these students’ country of origin and leads them to neglect individual student learning styles and needs.

Traditional approach to the issue of “brain drain” and “brain gain” focuses on outflow and inflow of migration of academics and professionals between countries of origins and destinations. It is suggested that, in the international labor market, the developing countries have experienced the problem of brain drain while the developed countries have benefited from brain gain in the process of globalization and international mobility of talent. From this perspective, “brain drain” or “brain gain” is primarily measured by the number of talented people who have “moved in” or “moved out” of a country, but not the extent to which the “brain” has been utilized. This study redefines the notion of “brain drain” by focusing on the actual utilization of professional talents. Previous research findings show that despite attractive Canadian immigration policy and the increasing number of professional immigrants, Canada as a developed country has the problem of “brain waste” due to its systemic barriers such as the devaluation of foreign credentials and non-recognition of foreign work experience for professional Chinese immigrants. At the same time, China as a developing country has benefited from contributions made by highly educated professionals/students returning to their home country through its attractive and rewarding opportunities for those who have attained knowledge and skills from overseas. China has become a model of “brain gain” for developing countries by implementing a series of open and favorable policies to attract top-notch overseas Chinese and foreign talents to help promote the economic development and global competitiveness of the nation.