Bourdieu and Sino–Foreign Higher Education: Structures and Practices in Times of Crisis and Change 2022047718, 9781032353968, 9781032353975, 9781003326694

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of illustration
Figures
Tables
Preface
Michael’s story
Karen’s story
References
List of contributors
Chapter 1: Bourdieu and Chinese higher education beyond the nation: Structures, strategies, and practices of advantage
Introduction
Theorising a changing empirical world of Sino–foreign higher education
Chinese higher education vis-à-vis the national field of power
Struggles of participation in Sino–foreign higher education
Linguistic power in higher education
Theorising education beyond the nation
Part 1: Structures and strategies of advantage behind institutional and individual action in Sino–foreign higher education
Part 2: Student participation in practices of Sino–foreign higher education
References
Part I: Structures and strategies of advantage behind institutional and individual action in Sino–foreign higher education
Chapter 2: Partnering for transnational higher education: A multiple correspondence analysis of university habitus and institutional action for ‘China–Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools’
Introduction
The development of CFCRS: The field of TNHE and field of power (moment 1 field analysis)
University habitus
The empirical study: Moments 2 and 3 field analysis
Axis 1: A space of domination and subordination
Axes 2 and 3: A space of oppositions within the dominated space: central provinces versus western provinces
Discussion
Elite/985 universities: CFCRS as one of the many options
Sub-elite/211 universities: Striving for national recognition
Non-elite universities: Making a virtue out of necessity
Conclusion
Notes
References
Chapter 3: Matching individual with institutional habitus? Students’ choice of transnational higher education in China
Introduction
Matching individual with institutional habitus? Resorting to reflexivity in modern society
Methodology
Findings
Discussion and conclusion
References
Chapter 4: Desire for cosmopolitanism and entrepreneurialism in the age of de-globalisation
Introduction
China’s middle class and its globality
Globality and cosmopolitanism
Self-development and suzhi education
Research questions
Research methodology
Sampling
Research design
Findings and discussion
Conclusion
Notes
References
Part II: Student participation in practices of Sino–foreign higher education
Chapter 5: Chinese international students in physical activity and physical education courses: A conceptual critique of the literature grounded in Bourdieu’s concept of bodily hexis
Introduction
Organisation of the chapter
Physical education/physical activity courses in the Canadian context
How do faculty and instructors perceive Chinese students as participants?
Review of related literature
Bourdieu, habitus, and bodily hexis
What is the value of bodily hexis for PE/PA researchers?
Implications for research methodology
Conclusion: Plausible and desirable pathways of research
Note
References
Chapter 6: Chinese international students’ mental health–related experiences and education engagement in Australia
Introduction
Mental health of Chinese international students
A Bourdieusian reading of Chinese international students’ mental health–related experiences
Methods
Stressors, help seeking habitus, and emotional capital in mental health
Habitus transformation regarding mental health
Cultural and linguistic capital in relation to stressors and mental health
Implications to education engagement in Australia
Conclusion
Note
References
Chapter 7: Power imbalance and power shift between Chinese international research students and their supervisors: Adaptation and resilience
Introduction
Literature review
Relationships versus relations: A Bourdieusian framework
Research design
Findings and discussion
Power imbalance
Supervisor authority
Selection of research topics
Selection of associate supervisors
Manipulation of academic progress and standard
Student consent
Conforming with supervisors’ decisions
Sustain a positive image in front of supervisors
Self-perceived student deficiency
Power shift
Empowerment by supervisors
Autonomy and authority claimed by students
Student resistance
Conclusion
References
Chapter 8: Immersion in the English-speaking university and the emergence of ‘China English’
Introduction
Methodology: A neo-Bourdieusian approach
Participants and data ccollection
The domination of native academic English in international higher education
A Chinese Illusio
Symbolic violence produced by the domination of nativeness
Transformation, disillusionment, and submission
The emergence of academic ‘China English’
Critical academic China English writing pedagogy
References
Chapter 9: Mobile international students in China: Immersion ‘in-between’
Introduction
Literature review
Bourdieu’s thinking tools
Research methodology
Sample
Data collection method
Analytical approach
Findings
Students’ perceptions of the value of capital accrued through HE in China
English as a medium of instruction and linguistic capital
Discussion
Conclusion
References
Part III: Conclusions: Reflexive re- appropriation of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu for research on higher education in the 2020s and beyond
Chapter 10: Re-appropriating Bourdieu for post-national research on Sino–foreign higher education
Introduction
On Bourdieu’s methodological autonomisation
Predictions and problematics for Sino–foreign higher education
The university organisation-as-field in a field of higher education organisations
Revisiting institutional habitus
Quantitative method for post-national research
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Bourdieu and Sino–Foreign Higher Education

Bourdieu’s sociology has traditionally been confined to the limits of its French national context. This edited collection seeks to challenge these boundaries, applying Bourdieu’s analysis of practice to Chinese education as it gains relevance and attention around the globe. This book stems from the conviction that empirical investigation and conceptual inventiveness are needed to understand the historical and contextual particularities of Sino–foreign higher education. It brings the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to the specificity of higher education in and for China and the multi-scalar complexity of higher education beyond the nation. Aggregating recent Bourdieu-informed investigations of empirical worlds of Sino–foreign higher education, the volume mainly considers two problems: structures and strategies of advantage behind institutional and individual action in Sino–foreign higher education; and student participation in the practices of that higher education. The volume probes the potential of Bourdieusian theory and methodology for understanding Chinese higher education beyond the nation. This book is written to engage with the intellectual work of both established scholars and higher degree research students within China and beyond. The empirical studies provide useful insights for educational leaders in Chinese higher education sectors and in the universities of English-dominant western countries where students and researchers from China have been a growing presence. The theoretical and methodological discussions will be pertinent to scholars who are interested in Bourdieu’s sociology and sociology of higher education. Guanglun Michael Mu is Associate Professor and Enterprise Fellow at the University of South Australia. His expertise includes sociology of resilience and relational quantitative methodology. He is the chief editor of the Routledge Book Series Bourdieu and Education of Asia Pacific and the co-chair of the AERA’s SIG Bourdieu in Educational Research. Karen Dooley is Professor and the Academic Lead Research Training Coordinator in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership (STEL) in the Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice (CIESJ) at Queensland University of Technology.

Bourdieu and Education of Asia Pacific Series editors: Guanglun Michael Mu University of South Australia

Karen Dooley

Queensland University of Technology

Hui Yu

South China Normal University

Bourdieu and Education of Asia Pacific capitalises on the intellectual and political bequest of the French sociologist to analyse and debate problems associated with education and social justice within, between, and beyond nations of Asia Pacific. The series welcomes theoretical, methodological, and empirical contributions—in the forms of authored books and edited volumes—that draw on but do not consecrate Bourdieu. It opens up an intellectual space for educational research to utilise, critique, and/or extend Bourdieu’s toolkits—including but not limited to his signature concepts of capital, habitus, and field—for the sake of educational equality and social change. The series does not take the economic and geopolitical classification of ‘the Asia Pacific’ as a given. Instead, it encourages contestation, deconstruction, and reconstruction of that classification—whether as a discursive or ontological category—by deliberately embracing the syntactic inelegance of the term, Asia Pacific. Bourdieu and Sino–Foreign Higher Education Structures and Practices in Times of Crisis and Change Edited by Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley

Bourdieu and Sino–Foreign Higher Education

Structures and Practices in Times of Crisis and Change Edited by Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mu, Guanglun Michael, editor. | Dooley, Karen, editor. Title: Bourdieu and Sino-foreign higher education : structures and practices in times of crisis and change / edited by Guanglun Mu, Karen Dooley. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2022047718 | ISBN 9781032353968 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032353975 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003326694 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Foreign study--China. | Chinese students--Foreign countries.650 | Transnational education--China. | Education, Higher--China. | Educational sociology--China. | Bourdieu, Pierre, 1930-2002. Classification: LCC LB2376.6.C6 B68 2023 | DDC 378/.0162-dc23/eng/20221107 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022047718 ISBN: 978-1-032-35396-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-35397-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-32669-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003326694 Typeset in Galliard by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

Contents

List of illustrations Preface List of contributors 1 Bourdieu and Chinese higher education beyond the nation: Structures, strategies, and practices of advantage

vii viii xiii 1

GUANGLUN MICHAEL MU AND KAREN DOOLEY

PART I

Structures and strategies of advantage behind institutional and individual action in Sino–foreign higher education

19

2 Partnering for transnational higher education: A multiple correspondence analysis of university habitus and institutional action for ‘China–Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools’

21

PENGFEI PAN, GUANGLUN MICHAEL MU, AND KAREN DOOLEY

3 Matching individual with institutional habitus? Students’ choice of transnational higher education in China

41

XIAO HAN

4 Desire for cosmopolitanism and entrepreneurialism in the age of de-globalisation XIN WANG AND YINGLING LIU

53

vi Contents PART II

Student participation in practices of Sino–foreign higher education

71

5 Chinese international students in physical activity and physical education courses: A conceptual critique of the literature grounded in Bourdieu’s concept of bodily hexis 73 LORIN YOCHIM, ERINN JACULA, LACEY KELLY-THOMPSON, AND ERIN WRIGHT

6 Chinese international students’ mental health–related experiences and education engagement in Australia

87

BONNIE PANG

7 Power imbalance and power shift between Chinese international research students and their supervisors: Adaptation and resilience

104

CONGCONG XING, GUANGLUN MICHAEL MU, AND DEBORAH HENDERSON

8 Immersion in the English-speaking university and the emergence of ‘China English’

124

YI HUANG

9 Mobile international students in China: Immersion ‘in-between’

140

KUN DAI, IAN HARDY, RESHMA PARVEEN MUSOFER, AND BOB LINGARD

PART III

Conclusions: Reflexive re-appropriation of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu for research on higher education in the 2020s and beyond 159 10 Re-appropriating Bourdieu for post-national research on Sino–foreign higher education

161

KAREN DOOLEY AND GUANGLUN MICHAEL MU

Index

180

Illustrations

Figures   2.1 Categories with contributions > 2.9% to Axis 1   2.2 Categories with contributions > 2.9% to Axes 2 and 3 10.1 A post-national Bourdieusian heuristic for research on Sino– foreign higher education

30 32 162

Tables 2.1 Variables on the CFCRS program arrangements 27 2.2 Explicable active categories and their contributions to Axes 1–329 4.1 Demographic information of the respondents 60 4.2 Odds ratios of logistic regressions on six variables of motivation61 4.3 Odds ratio of logistic regressions on cosmopolitanism and self-entrepreneurship62 5.1 CUE courses 75 5.2 Breadth and variety of activities in physical education 76 7.1 Demographic information of interview participants 108 9.1 Participants’ demographic information 145

Preface

This volume is a collection of research that reflexively re-appropriates the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) to investigate Sino–foreign higher education. It opens by locating that research in the extensive body of Bourdieu-informed scholarship on higher education that crosses and spans the national borders of China and other countries. It closes with predictions about future developments of international and transnational education, multi-scalar problematics that warrant investigation in those conditions, and an exposition of concepts of field and habitus and quantitative analytic method that might be useful to those ends. This work coheres around an argument about the necessity of strengthening the autonomy of sociology of education in times when heteronomous forces press powerfully on fields of education—forces that seem to have strengthened with responses to the COVID-19 pandemic which disrupted higher education world-wide, especially flows of students across national borders in pursuit of international education. The eight empirical chapters that form the larger part of the volume present research on (1) international education whereby students flow into and out of China, crossing national borders for their university studies, as well as on (2) transnational programs and institutions that span those borders but do not necessarily entail student mobility. In this research, China is both source and host of international students, and universities in China are partnered with universities around the world for the purposes of delivering education on a transnational scale. There are two major themes in this research: the pursuit of individual/familial and institutional distinction and advantage through consumption or production of higher education beyond the nation, and struggles for positions of strength and symbolic capital within the fields of that education. Concerns with equity and social justice run as sub-text through the research. The work of 18 researchers is represented in the volume. Many were present at a meeting for scholars interested in Chinese education and Bourdieusian sociology held in Brisbane, Australia, in December 2019. The meeting occurred the day after the close of the annual conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education. We had identified potential participants from the conference program, our professional networks,

Preface  ix our students from China, and members of a Bourdieu reading group that had been running with more or less regularity and formality since about 2014 (and persists to this day as a now primarily online transnational community that sometimes works collaboratively with a quantitative research community led by Michael). Most of us met that December day in person; a few Zoomed in from China and Canada. The aim of the all-day meeting was to continue and broaden a dialogue which had begun in 2015 and resulted in publication of a volume on Bourdieu and Chinese education (Mu, Dooley, & Luke, 2019a). That earlier volume arose from months, and ultimately years, of dialogue as Michael and several colleagues travelled around China together and then convened a meeting in hybrid mode with some of the contributors: face-toface in Beijing and by Skype (for Karen) in Brisbane. The conclusions of that meeting were that we would not work within the English language secondary literature on Bourdieu and education—an extensive and early literature that grappled with the utility of Bourdieu’s sociology beyond France and which schoolteachers and researchers such as Karen were trained on in the west from the 1980s onwards—because the use of that sociology to understand education in China is far from straightforward. The empirical realities of the new China are not those that Bourdieu’s sociology was developed to understand. The earlier volume argued for a reflexive re-appropriation of Bourdieu’s sociology for investigation of education in China (Mu, Luke, & Dooley, 2019b). Michael’s story illustrates some of the new realities with which the contributors to the early volume grappled.

Michael’s story I was born right after the Cultural Revolution in China. Since then, fundamental social changes have taken place in the nation. Deng Xiaoping came into power following Mao’s death and opened up the country to the world; marketisation was introduced to almost all systems of the Chinese society including economy, housing, and medical care; rapid urbanisation saw massive numbers of rural workers relocating to cities, creating the largest migration in human history; the nation-wide implementation of compulsory schooling and the massification of tertiary education have contributed to ‘widening participation’ overall but also induced competition for entry into elite education within and abroad; the three-decades-long Single-Child Policy was dismantled; the once lucrative shadow education industry dwindled away due to strict state regulation; the recent global outbreak of COVID-19 and China’s unwavering ‘zero case policy’ disrupted its connection to the rest of the world; and the geopolitical tension between China and the west has posed a significant challenge to the nation and the globe. Thanks to Bourdieu’s sociological bequest I am able to understand at least some of these complicated and difficult social and educational problems, which would have remained seen but unnoticed to me had I not read Bourdieu.

x Preface The past two decades have exposed me to transnational experiences in the academic field of three countries—Australia, Canada, and China. There have been important reworkings of the generated and generating grammar of my practices, seen in forms of habitus realisation, habitus adaptation, and habitus compartmentalisation. Putting Bourdieu to work, I realised that I won the ‘lottery of birth’ as someone brought up in a middle-class family; I realised that the privilege given to me by ascription is not something to which I am entitled but something that needs to be constantly contested. Not merely have I realised my habitus but also I have seen it undertaking regulated improvisions. While transnational mobilities have opened up many new opportunities for me, they also created conditions of discomfort. In the face of discomfort, I strategically modify my habitus in order to fit in. With habitus adaptation, those conditions of discomfort no longer bother me, at least not that much. But habitus adaptation does not completely erase history. Being a transnational literatus shuttling back and forth across different national contexts and academic systems constantly reminds me of my histories. Collisions and conflictions between different fields can generate subtle and complicated innerworkings of the habitus—whether a fluidity of in-betweenness, a sense of belonging to nowhere, or an internal tug of war leading to self-divide. While such habitus work has occurred to me, I have also learned to compartmentalise my past and present dispositions, shift between different field principles, and survive in diametrically different ecologies, leading to an ‘amphibious’ habitus. Since the publication of the first volume, we have been asked about how the work we are doing ‘fits’ with other traditions of Bourdieusian studies. The way in which we have framed this volume is a response to that. Karen’s story illustrates some of the issues with which we grappled in doing so.

Karen’s story As indicated previously, I first encountered Bourdieu’s sociology in the early 1980s when I was trained as a schoolteacher. At the time, teacher education provided student teachers, as we were then called, with a grounding in the foundations of education: philosophy of education, history of education, psychology for teaching, and sociology of education. The aim was to develop teachers as intellectual workers. The approach was similar to that found in England where it was written: the question is not whether the teacher has opinions on psychological, sociological or historical matters; for any educated person has these. It is rather whether he (sic) can defend his opinions in an informed and intelligent way so that he can hold his own in the welter of public discussion. (Peters, 1967, 153) I first encountered Bourdieu’s theory of reproduction in the sociological dimension of those studies in the foundations of teaching. Like others concerned with social justice and education, I tried to change the fields in which

Preface  xi I taught and to revalue the resources that marginalised students brought with them to my classroom. When I began my PhD, the sociology of education was a ‘natural’ theoretical home. But in the years since then, it has been necessary to struggle with the popularised and sometimes strawman versions of Bourdieu that have become part of public and professional discourse on education. Moreover, the empirical world of education has changed profoundly. This is evident in research on higher education. It was not only schoolteachers of my generation who found in Bourdieu a useful theoretical and conceptual grasp on the world of education. In the anglophone west where some of the studies collected in this volume were conducted, researchers have drawn on Bourdieusian sociology for research on higher education both within and across national borders (e.g., Robbins, 1993; Marginson, 2008; Grenfell & Bailey, 2014; Reay, 2019). Recently, one of these scholars (Robbins, 2019), who professed ontological affinity with Bourdieu, wrote of his intervention in capital exchanges to widen higher education participation in 1970s–1980s London, and of a subsequent exegetical turn. Musing on changes in logics of practice of the field of higher education, student educational dispositions, and the relative importance of sub-species of cultural capital, he speculated about the irrelevance of his problematics. He proposed, though, that the resources of Bourdieu might remain useful if social scientists allow a knowledge that is ‘constantly adaptive in immanent involvement with the changing situations which it analyses’ (10) rather than a cumulative and decontextualised body of evidence. In a similar vein, we have framed this volume to enable investigation of Sino–foreign higher education into the 2020s and beyond. The Bourdieu of my schoolteaching and early scholarly days is useful to me still, but a broader toolkit amenable to investigation of the complex multi-scalar worlds of higher education within which I now work and research is needed. In conclusion, in this volume we invite readers to reflect with us and our fellow authors on the complexities of their positioning as researchers, educators, and students in the present and in the past. We encourage ongoing dialogue about the utility of the post-national sociology of Pierre Bourdieu for investigating not only Sino–foreign higher education but education beyond the nation more generally.

References Grenfell, M., & Bailey, R. (2014). Pierre Bourdieu. Bloomsbury. Marginson, S. (2008). Global field and global imagining: Bourdieu and worldwide higher education. British Journal of Sociology of Education, 29(3), 303–315. http://www.informaworld.com/10.1080/01425690801966386 Mu, G.M., Dooley, K., & Luke, A. (2019a). Bourdieu and Chinese Education: Inequality, competition, and change. London and New York: Routledge. Mu, G.M., Luke, A., & Dooley, K. (2019b). Appropriating Bourdieu for a sociology of Chinese education in G.M. Mu, K. Dooley, & A. Luke (Eds.), Bourdieu and Chinese education: Inequality, competition, and change. London and New York: Routledge

xii Preface Peters, R.S. (1967) The place of philosophy in the training of teachers. Paedagogica Europaea 3, 152–166. Reay, D. (2019). Bourdieu and education. Routledge. Robbins, D. (1993). The practical importance of Bourdieu’s analyses of higher education. Studies in Higher Education, 18(2), 151–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 03075079312331382339 Robbins, D. (2019). The Bourdieu paradigm: The origins of an intellectual social project. Manchester University Press.

Contributors

Kun Dai is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Education, Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on international student mobility, transnational education, and intercultural learning. Dr. Dai is an associate editor of the Journal of International Students and an editorial board member of Compare. Xiao Han is the Beiyang Associate Professor at the School of Education, Tianjin University. Her research is trans-disciplinary, focusing on critical policy analysis, international/transnational higher education, and Foucauldian and Bourdieusian studies of higher education. Dr. Han has published in international journals such as Journal of Education Policy, Higher Education, and Policy and Society. Ian Hardy is associate professor at the School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia. Dr. Hardy researches the relationship between education and society, particularly the broader socio-political contexts that influence educators’ work and learning, and educators’ responses to the policy and political settings in which their work is undertaken. Deborah Henderson is an associate professor at Queensland University of Technology, where she lectures in history curriculum and social education curriculum. Her research interests include the development of historical thinking, intercultural understanding, global capability, and values education together with transnational/international education. She is the Australasian regional editor for Discover Education. Yi Huang is senior lecturer at the School of English and Education, the Guangdong University of Foreign Studies. Her research takes a Bourdieusian approach to the ‘social suffering’ of Chinese young people from neoliberal domination of contemporary education in China. Her work aims to elicit means to transform such domination. Erinn Jacula is a learning and development specialist at Valard Construction Ltd. in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Lacey Kelly-Thompson is an elementary teacher and teacher coach in Edmonton, Alberta. She graduated from Concordia University of  Edmonton with a Master’s in Education and Bachelor of Elementary Education.

xiv Contributors Bob Lingard is a professorial fellow at the Australian Catholic University. He is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and in the UK. He has been president of many academic associations across the world and is on the editorial board of eight international journals. Yingling Liu is assistant professor at Birmingham-Southern College. She teaches social gerontology, sociology of family, research methods, and statistics. Her research interests focus on aging, health, and community development. She has published work in Journal of Aging and Health, Research on Aging, and Journal of Scientific Study of Religion. Yingling also holds a law degree and is a licensed attorney in China. Reshma Parveen Musofer is a sessional academic at the University of Queensland. Her thesis explored spaces for change in the enactment of the Australian Curriculum using Bourdieu’s thinking tools. She is a science educator and researcher. She has published on curriculum enactment, transnational habitus, and Community of Inquiry approach in STEM education. Pengfei Pan is a PhD candidate in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership, Queensland University of Technology. His research focuses on Sino–foreign transnational higher education. Bonnie Pang is associate professor (Department for Health) at the University of Bath. Her research focuses on Chinese diaspora communities alongside contemporary issues in diversity, equity, and inclusion regarding health, sport, and education. Dr. Pang is an editorial member of Sport, Education, and Society, and an adjunct fellow of the Institute for Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. Xin Wang is an associate professor of China studies and the director of the Asian and African Languages and Cultures Division at Baylor University. His research interests include Chinese social transformation, especially the emerging middle class, and higher education policies in China. He is currently running a survey project on Chinese students in the United States. Erin Wright works at the Faculty of Education at Concordia University of Edmonton. Congcong Xing received her PhD in the School of Teacher Education and Leadership, Queensland University of Technology. Her research interest focuses on international higher education and sociology of resilience. Lorin Yochim holds a faculty position in Concordia University of Edmonton (CUE). His research interests include cultural sociology of education (especially of mainland China), critical ethno-geography, and cultural change. Prior to joining CUE, Dr. Yochim held a position in the Institute of International & Comparative Education at Beijing Normal University.

1 Bourdieu and Chinese higher education beyond the nation Structures, strategies, and practices of advantage Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic years notwithstanding, recent decades have been boom times for Chinese higher education beyond the nation. Transnational higher education (TNHE), which spans national borders by linking universities in China with those of other countries, has flourished, as has international higher education, whereby Chinese students flow into other countries for university and foreign students flow into China. Both forms of higher education beyond the nation are addressed in this volume. China is a major TNHE player. TNHE is integral to the country’s economic vision and geopolitical ambitions, and as such, has been an ongoing object of policy (Hu & Fan, 2020; Ministry of Education, 2020; Si & Lim, 2022). On the one hand, TNHE has been regarded by the government as a means of accelerating domestic economic growth through educational modernisation and internationalisation. On the other hand, TNHE is a means of extending China’s soft power globally, particularly through its ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (Si & Lim, 2022). China is also a major player in international higher education. Since the beginning of the reform and opening-up era, international education across China’s borders has grown and morphed. China has been a primary source and has become a major host of international students. After the government sent the first group of students overseas in 1978 and loosened regulations on self-funded international study in 1981 (Hu & Fan, 2020), the trickle of outbound Chinese students swelled, contributing to powerful expansive forces of higher education globally (Kauppi, 2020). A lucrative marketplace was created where entrepreneurial universities, especially from the anglophone west, positioned themselves as ‘international’ and ‘world-class’ destinations for higher education (Coates et al., 2021). On the cusp of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, the flow of Chinese students into some anglophone western countries seemed to be peaking (Education Rethink, 2019). Meanwhile, the number of international students studying in China was rising rapidly across an array of disciplines, especially at the postgraduate and doctoral levels (Sharma, 2018; Si & Lim, 2022). That many of these students, particularly those from bilaterally friendly countries and strategically DOI: 10.4324/9781003326694-1

2  Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley cooperative partners, receive generous scholarships from Chinese governments can be understood as a cultural diplomatic contribution to China’s geopolitical strategy. Global neo-nationalism, populism, protectionism, and geopolitical strife have been playing out in Chinese higher education beyond the nation. In the US, for instance, political tension with China and attendant anti-China rhetoric have fuelled Sinophobic sentiment and prompted visa restrictions and race hate targeting Chinese students (Altbach & de Wit, 2018; Peters, 2020; Yu, 2021). Politically charged investigation of Confucius Institutes in the US and other western countries, scrutiny of academic collaborations with China, and cancellation of federally funded Fulbright scholarly exchanges with China have dampened China’s ambition for internationalising its higher education. Pandemic-fuelled violence against ‘Chinese’ on the streets and in the halls of academe in the anglophone west (Saito & Li, 2022; Yu, 2021) did not go unnoticed in China. Nor did the exclusion of international students from student relief packages in Canada and the US (O’Shea et al., 2022) or the callousness of the then-Australian government, which told international students who did not meet eligibility criteria for income support during the national lockdown of 2020 that it was ‘time to go home’ (Coates et al., 2021; Mok et al., 2021). Early evidence shows that experiences of the pandemic such as these may have ushered in some reconfiguration of Sino–foreign higher education (Coates et al., 2021; Mok et al., 2021). Irrespective of the economic and political antecedents and consequences of the pandemic, the empirical world of Sino–foreign higher education has changed. Most noteworthy is China’s ascent in the global hierarchy of higher education. This has followed implementation of the national program for Constructing World-Class Universities and First-Class Disciplines, commonly dubbed the ‘Double First-Class Program’. These acts of state animated new national priorities and domestic imperatives for higher education and are reining in some of the universities of the anglophone west that were most active in China during the years of explosive growth in international higher education (Coates et al., 2021). This volume stems from conviction that empirical investigation and conceptual inventiveness are needed to understand the historical and contextual particularities of Chinese higher education beyond the nation at this time. The 19 unique authors who present their work in the ten chapters of the volume bring the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu to these tasks.

Theorising a changing empirical world of Sino–foreign higher education Bourdieu’s own empirical investigations prompted the observation that his had been ‘arguably the most sustained theorisation of higher education’ (Marginson, 2008, p. 303). Bourdieu both probed the particulars of the French field of higher education and speculated about the validity of his

Bourdieu and Chinese higher education beyond the nation  3 principles for other national fields (Bourdieu, 1988, 1996b, 1998, 2000; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1979; Bourdieu et al., 1994). For at least three decades, researchers have been using Bourdieusian theory to study higher education beyond France, especially in the anglophone west where educational researchers were among the first to appropriate the theory (e.g., Grenfell & Bailey, 2007; Reay, 2019; Robbins, 1993). The Bourdieusian literature on higher education is vast. Some time ago, a study mapping research on higher education world-wide found that Bourdieu was ‘unsurprisingly’ the sixth most frequently cited author in a corpus of 2,302 articles published between 2002 and 2011 (Kuzhabekova et al., 2015). In addressing the unrealised potential for ‘putting Bourdieu to work’ (Wacquant, 2018, p. 3) in research on Sino–foreign higher education, the current volume has two interrelated aims: • to capitalise on the research practice developed by Bourdieu rather than to simply ‘apply’ Bourdieu’s educational writings to Sino–foreign higher education; and, when demanded by the research problem, • to craft conceptual tools adequate to the empirical world of Sino–foreign higher education. We sought from the authors collected in this volume inventive analysis and interpretation adequate to the empirical complexities of Sino–foreign higher education. These relate not only to the multi-scalar complexity of education beyond the nation (which is the focus of Chapter 10) but also to the specificity of education in and for China. It is essential to consider particularities of habitus; of the interrelations of the fields of state, family, and education; and of the dynamics of education and capital exchange, including strategies for reproduction in fluid and transitional social space (Mu et al., 2019b). Accordingly, the volume is grounded in recent Bourdieu-informed investigations of empirical worlds of Chinese education and driven by an imperative to examine and conceptualise emerging problems and changing situations. In the remaining sections of this chapter, we first review recent investigations of Sino–foreign higher education, organising this literature through Bourdieu’s field analytical moments (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 104–105). We begin by looking at some of what is known of the higher education field of China in relation to the Chinese field of power (the first moment) and then turn to research on the positions and dispositions of agents (the second and the third moments) that shape access to, experience in, and exit from an increasingly stratified field. This lays a basis for the theoretical and empirical framing of the volume. We then introduce the themes by which the volume is organised: (1) structures and strategies of advantage implicated in institutional and individual action in Sino–foreign higher education, and (2) struggles of student participation in practices of that education.

4  Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley

Chinese higher education vis-à-vis the national field of power Bourdieu (1996b, p. 132) writes that ‘universities as a whole … form a field whose structure dictates to each of its member institutions the strategies befitting its position’. His analysis of 84 higher education institutions characterised by their students’ social origins and 21 schools of varying status showed the field of French higher education was differentiated ‘in its first dimension, according to a cumulative index of social and academic prestige’ and ‘in a second dimension, based on the amount of academic capital’ (Bourdieu, 1996b, p. 133). In other words, the field was differentiated with two opposite poles: ‘an academically dominant but economically and socially dominated scientific and intellectual pole’ and ‘an academically dominated but socially and economically dominant administrative and economic pole’ (Bourdieu, 1996b, p. 133). Notwithstanding abundant empirical variance across national fields of higher education, differentiation appears to be structurally invariant. For example, pre-existing prestige sustains the elite status of certain universities in Australia (Marginson, 1997) and the UK (Boliver, 2015; Papatsiba & Cohen, 2020). This exemplifies the way that a given national field of higher education may be comprised of stratified clusters of universities—a dominant elite, those that compete with them for domination, and those that struggle for survival. The actions of such universities are shaped by the ‘system of objective relations existing among them’ (Bourdieu, 1996b, p. 132). Objective relations exist doubly, first in differentiation among clusters of universities (the various university ‘leagues’, ‘groups’, and ‘networks’), and second, in collusion and collision within these clusters. Different universities within each cluster or corps of agents within each university, ‘despite the competition that sets them against each other within the field of power, are united by a genuine organic solidarity’ due to similar status and strategies (Bourdieu, 1996b, p. 142). Pan, Mu, and Dooley (Chapter 2) call this ‘university habitus’. For Bourdieu, one mechanism of the structural relations among French higher education institutions was “the opposition within the field of power between the intellectual or artistic pole and the pole of economic or political power” (Bourdieu, 1996b, p. 136). The contemporary Chinese system is similar given its relative autonomy in pursuing academic excellence, and simultaneously, its relative heteronomy vis-à-vis political and economic forces in the field of power. The structuring mechanism in this system entails an interplay of the logics of symbolic excellence, academic politicism, and academic capitalism. We now explain these. The Chinese higher education field is a highly stratified space with relative homogeneity due to state intervention (Li, 2019). It is stratified because the Chinese state has assigned symbolic capital to only a few selected universities. It is also relatively homogenous because the rarity of that symbolic capital draws all Chinese universities into the one competition with its state-defined rules of exchange. These two logics of practice contribute respectively to the

Bourdieu and Chinese higher education beyond the nation  5 stratification and homogeneity of Chinese higher education (Li, 2019). The common ground for the logics of stratification and homogenisation is competition amongst Chinese universities for symbolic excellence. The Chinese state exercises power in higher education by ‘statist capital’. For Bourdieu, this meta-capital allows the state to wield power ‘over the different fields’, ‘over the various forms of capital that circulate in them’, ‘over the rates of conversion between different species of capital’, ‘over the relations of force between their respective holders’, and ultimately over the reproduction of power in those fields (Bourdieu, 1994, p. 4; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 114–115), including the field of higher education. For Bourdieu, the state held a dominant position within the field of power. In China, however, the political field may tower over the state given the management of the whole society by the Chinese Communist Party. Here the political field refers to ‘the relatively autonomous world within which struggle about the social world is conducted only with political weapons’ (Bourdieu, 2020, p. 335). The ammunition of political weapons is political capital. Bourdieu conceptualised this capital as having ‘the capacity to yield considerable profits and privileges … by operating a “patrimonialisation” of collective resources’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 119). Bourdieu’s point, derived from consideration of the political systems of the Soviet Union and the established social democracies of Europe, was that the power of some political organisations is underpinned by their capacity to forge identity from impulses to the collective. In China, the Party Committee holds universal, core leadership within the field of universities. Shared governance with academic and student stakeholders is limited (Zhuang & Liu, 2020). In recruiting international students, Chinese universities often distance themselves from economic logic and follow the state’s policy directives in order to obtain political capital (Gao & Liu, 2020). Regarding the development of TNHE, some regions in Central and western China with proximity to Central Asian and Eurasian sites of the Belt and Road Initiative receive priority support (Si & Lim, 2022). The Chinese higher education field is thereby doubly heteronomous vis- à-vis the fields of both state and politics, demonstrating a logic of academic politicism. State control over higher education does not preclude economic logic. Yang (2008) long ago noted that TNHE in China was deeply rooted in market reform and the attendant commercialisation and internationalisation of higher education. As noted previously, for the Chinese government, TNHE boosts the capacity of Chinese universities through access to the resources of the world’s most advanced education systems in the interest of accelerating accumulation of human capital for national economic prosperity (He, 2016; Yang, 2008). Given that regional economic development is valorised by the state led by the Chinese Communist Party, economic capital is convertible into political capital. Consequently, subnational strategies of investment in higher education and TNHE often factor economic growth into their responses to state

6  Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley policy directives (Han, 2019). To clarify, economically advantaged regions benefit from brain gain, and their local governments encourage investment in higher education and TNHE. This not only retains locally educated talent but also attracts talent cultivated elsewhere. In contrast, economically disadvantaged regions suffer from brain drain. Their local governments show limited interest in supporting (transnational) higher education because the profits of their educational investments may well accrue to the more advantaged regions through internal migration of skilled labour. In summary, symbolic, political, and economic forces jointly shape Chinese higher education into a highly stratified field. This has implications for differential access to, and odds of success in, higher education. In what follows, we discuss struggles of participation in Sino–foreign higher education, with attention also to language and its symbolic power both locally and globally. This shifts the discussion from the particularities of the field of higher education vis-à-vis the field of power in China to habituses and capitals within specific fields of higher education in China and abroad and to other relevant fields such as that of the family.

Struggles of participation in Sino–foreign higher education Massification has been a force in Chinese higher education over the past three decades. One unintended outcome has been depreciation of domestic degrees. Consequently, structurally advantaged groups have shifted their strategy from dominating higher education per se to dominating elite higher education (Jin & Ball, 2021) or investing in international higher education (Xiang & Shen, 2009) for advantage and distinction. These trends are indicative of what Bourdieu (1993b) described as the dynamism of a field as a space of positions and positionings. In this regard (international and transnational) higher education is perceived first as giving children an edge in the labour market and the home society more broadly, and second as an advanced cultural ‘taste’. With respect to labour market advantage, it is often taken for granted in the home society that cross-border experience confers superiority. Some Taiwanese international students in Australia took advantage of doxic (mis) recognition of all graduate returnees as good speakers of English (Hsieh, 2020). Despite knowing that their English was not adequate, the students engaged in deliberate ‘habitus improvisation’ (Hsieh, 2020, p. 840) to enable them to take up coveted jobs on their return home. This type of identity work meshes with stereotypes in home fields, conceals pre-existing doxa, and strengthens the labour market hierarchy between local graduates and international returnees. Students from an elite Chinese university who were pursuing doctoral and postdoctoral studies overseas, particularly in elite US universities, perceived their value similarly (Li et al., 2021). Their habitus had roots in a university culture, transmitted from senior to junior students, which valorised overseas study and was formed in a field in which government invested in overseas study and the criteria for elite academic appointments

Bourdieu and Chinese higher education beyond the nation  7 favoured returnees. These findings resonate with Bourdieu’s (1975, p. 20) observation about judgements of a student or researcher’s competence being ‘always contaminated’ by knowledge of their position in ‘instituted hierarchies (the hierarchy of the universities, for example, in the USA)’. With respect to taste, some Chinese international students overseas and foreign students in China cultivate a disposition that distinguishes them from others. To claim ‘transnational distinction’ (Zhang & Xu, 2020, p. 1254), Chinese female middle class students in the UK often selected less privileged peers back home as a reference group. They established a sense of distinction on grounds of their supposed freedom from gendered stereotyping in China (e.g., unmarriageable highly educated Chinese females, unpolished female nerds); their taste for elegant, modern British dress-styles and highbrow culture (e.g., galleries and the opera); and a global identity developed through exposure to, and understanding of, the wider ‘advanced’ world. US students in transnational higher education programs in China likewise claimed cosmopolitan distinction (Lee, 2022). Some deliberately lived ‘locally’ (e.g., food, apps) to distinguish themselves from immobile students at home, and other foreign students, including short-term exchange students. In a different context, cosmopolitan and entrepreneurial dispositions were found to underlie Chinese middle class families’ decisions about studying in the US (Wang, 2020). By dint of such Chinese habitus, these families distinguished themselves from those educated locally. The concept of transnational or cosmopolitan distinction sparks some COVID-related reflections. In Australia as in other countries, courses were digitised on the fly for international students unable to enter the country. The possibility of cosmopolitan distinction lost its footing as physical spaces of cross-border education gave way to the virtual. This created a disjunct between the expectations of international students and those of Australian universities, which assumed that online learning, which has long been used successfully with some domestic students, would work equally well with international students. Although virtual mobility entails the use of digital tools to enable ‘internationalisation at home’ whereby students have access to a foreign learning environment, desire for traditional physical mobility was not extinguished. Arguably, those previously able to claim cosmopolitan distinction are from a relatively privileged background. The questions around their educational strategies have been: Would they wait until borders opened so they could resume their cross-border trajectory and reclaim their distinction? Would they vie for other forms of distinction by investment in domestic higher education, elite or otherwise? If they did so, would this intensify domestic competition for higher education? To what extent would that entrench the disadvantage of those from modest backgrounds and aggravate stratification of the Chinese higher education system? In addition to struggles for distinction, extant research provides evidence also of habitus–field mismatch and habitus transformation in Sino–foreign higher education. Chinese students in a Sino–UK TNHE program favoured the international curriculum and pedagogy of the UK partner university (Yu,

8  Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley 2020). With such habitus, some became voluntary participants in the symbolic violence exercised by ‘superior’ western higher education while others felt uneasy in a campus culture they perceived to have been politicised by the Chinese government. In contrast, Dai et al. (2020) framed habitus-field mismatch positively when they studied Chinese students in Sino–Australia TNHE programs. Some students adjusted to the logic of Australian higher education through emergent habitus of in-betweeness and diasporic cosmopolitanism; others compartmentalised the logics of Australian and Chinese higher education, leaving their original habitus largely intact. Chinese doctoral students in New Zealand developed a complex publication habitus whereby they could survive and thrive in neoliberalised fields of education and research work, while also resisting the market logic of those fields and publishing for the sake of knowledge-sharing (Huang, 2021).

Linguistic power in higher education Participants in Sino–foreign higher education may occupy and take different positions when they are involved in the linguistic politics and competitions of specific fields of higher education. Different languages enjoy different levels of symbolic power in any given educational field with ramifications for stratification and struggle. English was hegemonic at an annual tri-nation doctoral workshop (Mu et al., 2019a). The Chinese participants, who were from China and Canada, reported on the dominance of English in global knowledge circulation, their subordinate position, and their unease in using English in the workshop activities. The linguistic hegemony of English is institutionalised in high-stakes English language testing, which may structurally advantage native English-speaking students who are not subject to language testing with its financial, emotional, temporal, and other costs. To unlock the gate of a top university in Canada, a Chinese student drew on habitus of tenacity and initiative to engage, negotiate, and comply with test structures, persisting and struggling for years (Sinclair et al., 2019). In a similar vein, high-stakes Chinese language testing positions ethnic minority students at a disadvantage in university entrance examinations in Hong Kong (Fang, 2019). To address their limited linguistic capital (modern standard Chinese), alternative Chinese tests have been developed. However, the results are not competitive with those obtained by native-Chinese speaking students on the mainstream language test. The high stakes and status of a given language may disadvantage some while favouring others. At a Hong Kong university, limited linguistic capital in English and Chinese created structural barriers for academic writing, reading academic literature, and participation in out-of-class group discussions for a Vietnamese international student; this was not the experience of a multilingual Malaysian peer (Sung, 2021). The linguistic habitus of the Vietnamese student made her ‘a fish out of water’ while that of the Malaysian student gave her ‘a feel for the game’ (Sung, 2021). This generated linguistic (dis)investment whereby the Vietnamese student felt inferior and

Bourdieu and Chinese higher education beyond the nation  9 disinterested in developing multilingual proficiency, and the Malaysian student felt superior and motivated to further develop her multilingual capital. At a prestigious Chinese university, language scholars whose academic work was conducted in and about languages other than English or Chinese were triply disadvantaged in academic publishing. Relative to their competitors, they had less linguistic capital in the language of the Chinese academy, the academic English of global scholarship, and the foreign language of their academic specialty (Zheng & Guo, 2019). In summary, there is considerable dynamism in the struggles for distinction played out through practices of Sino–foreign higher education. Participation in these practices involves mismatches and transformations of habitus, especially in the experience of relations of linguistic power within universities both in China and beyond.

Theorising education beyond the nation In the previous sections we used Bourdieu’s scheme of analytical moments to discuss recent research on the higher education field vis-à-vis the field of power in China, and the positions and dispositions of agents of higher education institutions within and across national boundaries. State agenda, political forces, economic markets, symbolic distinction, and linguistic power all have stratifying effects on higher education and stimulate struggles within it. As Eaton and Stevens (2020, p. 5) put it, higher education exists “at the interstices of state, economy, civil society, and private life, partaking form and function from all of them”. Higher education in the anglophone western nations involved in Sino–foreign ventures is likewise heteronomous. Writing from the UK three decades ago, one of Bourdieu’s contemporaries pinpointed forces of heteronomy that are salient still: It seems correct to observe that the autonomy of higher education institutions is extremely weak; that the boom in accreditation is in inverse proportion to the quality of what is accredited in spite of the huge smoke-screen of quality auditing; and that the consumer control of students over their studies in fact neutralises the possibility that they might acquire knowledge which would enable them to question the directions being taken by the societies to which they belong. (Robbins, 1993, p. 161) To gloss, the field of the production of higher education in the UK has a high degree of heteronomy vis-à-vis the fields of consumption and of the quality assurance of neo-liberalised education governance. The situation is similar in other anglophone nations involved in Sino–foreign higher education. To put Bourdieu to work to conceptualise Sino–foreign higher education, then, it is important to attend to heteronomies of national fields of higher education with social space in all its differentiation, and with powerful fields of state, economy, and politics.

10  Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley Informed by Ernst Cassirer’s distinction between substantialist and relational concepts (see Bourdieu, 1993a, p. 272; Cassirer, 1965), Bourdieu (1989, 1996a) made a particular concept of social space the cornerstone of his sociology. For Bourdieu, social space referred to a set of distinct and co-existing positions defined by their relations to each other, by nearness (proximity, vicinity, and distance) and by hierarchy (above, below, between). Fields, such as that of higher education, are relatively autonomous subregions of social space. Agents bring generative habitus from their locations and trajectories in social space, as well as empowering capitals, to the struggles for legitimacy and profit that are played out in given fields. Findings from Bourdieu’s theoretical-empirical analysis may not, and do not need to, hold up in different national settings or in the same national setting over time. Temporality and spatiality are contingent on historical and contextual variances. Such variances, however, do not stop systematic theorisation and analysis. With the thinking tool of social space, Bourdieu (1993a, p. 272) was able to probe ‘the invariant, the structure, behind each of the variations observed’. What is invariant is ‘the principle of differentiation which permits one to re-engender theorietically the empirically observed social space’ (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 32). Bourdieu continued: Nothing permits one to assume that the principle of difference is the same at all times and in all places, in Ming China and contemporary China … But with the exception of the least differentiated societies … all societies appear as social spaces, that is, as structures of differences that can only be understood by constructing the generative principle which objectively grounds those differences. The structural invariance behind observable variance enables ‘a comparatism of the essential’ because ‘the principles of construction of social space or the mechanisms of reproduction of this space … are common to all societies (Bourdieu et al., 1991b, p. 629). This relational and analogical mode of thinking is what Bourdieu meant by ‘homological reasoning’ undergirded by the concept of field to uncover ‘particularity within generality and generality within particularity’ and to discover ‘the universal laws that tendentially regulate the functioning of all fields’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, p. 75). Informed by Bourdieu’s model of ‘universal validity’ (Bourdieu et al., 1991b, p. 629), we acknowledge that the potential and the potency of Bourdieu’s relational thinking may transcend its context of origin. In fact, Bourdieu (1993a, p. 272) asserted: ‘I have never stopped transferring to my research on French society… the problems and concepts elaborated in regard to the Kabyles of Algeria’. Investigating Sino–foreign higher education also requires attention to the socio-genesis, morphology, and operation of fields beyond the nation. That is a focus of the concluding chapter in this volume (Chapter 10). Here we make two points. One is that fields are not necessarily constrained to the territorial borders of nation-states, and the other is that there is an extensive

Bourdieu and Chinese higher education beyond the nation  11 body of Bourdieusian scholarship which is identifying the multiscalar dynamics of fields of education and other social activity. The final chapter draws on that scholarship to suggest conceptualisation and methods for investigating those dynamics. The empirical research collected in this volume provides a window on that theoretical challenge. It is organised into two main parts that are followed by a concluding chapter: • Part 1: Structures and strategies of advantage behind institutional and individual action in Sino–foreign higher education; and • Part 2: Student participation in practices of Sino–foreign higher education.

Part 1: Structures and strategies of advantage behind institutional and individual action in Sino–foreign higher education The first part presents empirical studies of institutional and individual action in Sino–foreign higher education. It wrestles theoretically with strategies that cross and span borders, and struggles for advantage within the differentiating field of higher education and the structural forces in the field of power that come to shape these. This part comprises three chapters. Pengfei Pan, Guanglun Michael Mu, and Karen Dooley investigated officially approved Sino–foreign TNHE programs. They analysed how elite and non-elite Chinese universities occupied and took certain positions within and across spaces of oppositions objectively defined by different volumes and configurations of national, regional, municipal, and higher educational resources. They propose the concept of university habitus to theorise Chinese universities’ strategic choices of transnational partners in correspondence with state, market, and academic forces. Behind these choices lie co-existing logics of academic politicism, academic capitalism, and academic excellence within the Sino–foreign transnational higher education field. Different from Pan et al.’s analysis of institutional choices of Chinese universities, Xiao Han made sense of Chinese students’ choices of transnational higher education. She found in students’ decision-making process strategic alignment between their individual habitus and the institutional habitus of their transnational higher education institution. Xin Wang and Yingling Liu surveyed Chinese students and parents’ decisions around choosing higher education in the US. The capital portfolio of the study families enabled educational strategies for preserving social status and pursing social mobility. Behind these strategies were individualism and cosmopolitanism, both of which resonated with the Chinese national policy of promoting 素质教育 (sùzhì jiàoyù, quality-oriented education). This resonance is one of the many instances in which the policies of the state field are constitutive of decision-making within the family field. The three chapters in the first part of this volume suggest that Sino–foreign higher education is a social space of differentiation where there is constant competition for distinction among institutional and individual agents. The

12  Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley structural forces within the field are translated into strategies and struggles for positional advantage through institutional and individual habitus but are also defined by logics of the fields of power and of economy. This prompts questions about the nature and mechanisms of higher education beyond national boundaries. We return to these questions in the concluding chapter by looking at field and habitus as concepts for work at transnational range.

Part 2: Student participation in practices of Sino–foreign higher education The second part of the volume homes in on student participation in fields of Sino–foreign higher education. Our earlier discussion of exclusion and race hate in the context of geopolitical rivalry and the pandemic is indicative of the implication of Sino–foreign higher education in the politics of the nationstate. In this politics the nation-state is ‘a category of practice, a constitutive part of the social world … deployed in struggles to make and remake the social world’ (Brubaker, 2010, p. 62). The treatment of international students by governments in the west during the pandemic raises questions about the formal or legal status of the students in their host nations and implications for access to welfare services (Ramia et al., 2022). Similarly, quotidian violence against international students before and during the pandemic can be understood as an aspect of the politics of the nation-state, an informal aspect that is administered by ordinary people. For international students there is also a politics of membership and belonging peculiar to the university. The formal membership of the students in the university does not mean that they enjoy all the substantive benefits of the institution, nor does it mean informal acceptance (Brubaker, 2010). When the university as a site of social aggregation is viewed in terms of field, the international student can be understood as an agent of that field. As such, the student ‘is socially constituted and comes to be provided with a social identity’ (Bourdieu, 2021, p. 49). There are struggles over the identities so ‘provided’ that play out in the capital exchanges integral to the pedagogic work (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) of fields of higher education. It is this politics which is an object of the research reported in the five chapters in the second part of this volume. Lorin Yochim, Erinn Jacula, Lacey Kelly-Thompson, and Erin Wright challenged the dominant, cultural essentialist approaches to understanding Chinese international students’ capacity and desire to engage in higher education courses of physical education and physical activity (PE/PA). They argue for a conceptually nuanced understanding of how early-life experiences, stored in bodily hexis, impact student and instructor experience of PE/PA courses in the present. Their work provides a strong foundation for experimentation with pedagogical practices in PE/PA courses that takes account of students’ histories to promote health and wellness on higher education campuses. Bonnie Pang delved into mental health–related experiences of Chinese international students in Australian universities. Her findings showed that

Bourdieu and Chinese higher education beyond the nation  13 these students’ help-seeking habitus and habitus transformation in response to the demand of healthy lifestyle promoted their mental health. Their integrated cultural, linguistic, and emotional capital produced their positive mental health–related experiences in Australia. Congcong Xing, Guanglun Michael Mu, and Deborah Henderson teased out relations of power between Chinese research students and their supervisors in Australia. Student participants recollected their experiences of, and responses to the pedagogies by which their supervisors guided their theses. Power imbalance was reproduced through students’ perceptions of, and their consent to, supervisors’ authority. This was reinforced by students’ perceived lack of linguistic capital of academic English and cultural capital for their research project. Change was enabled by supervisor empowerment and students’ growing cultural capital over time. Yi Huang analysed the domination of academic English in international doctoral education and explored the pedagogic means to transform this domination. She revealed the Chinese illusio of acquiring native-like academic English proficiency through immersion in English-speaking universities and the internalisation of this illusio as a native-like academic English habitus. The complicity between the habitus and the illusio reproduced the domination of academic English through symbolic violence imposed on Chinese international PhD students in New Zealand. Interestingly, the emergence of academic ‘China English’ shifted the linguistic power at least to a certain extent. Kun Dai, Ian Hardy, Reshma Parveen Musofer, and Bob Lingard investigated international students’ learning experiences at a Chinese university. This is an example of a context of international education in a country in which English is used as an international language, that is, as a medium of instruction for (some) international students in a country in which the language is foreign. Dai and colleagues identified within the university field two language-based subfields, namely the English-mediated subfield for international students and the Chinese-mediated subfield for domestic students and international students with sufficient Chinese linguistic capital. The five chapters suggest that international students have been continuously challenged by complex and conflicting problems of affiliation and marginalisation, of identification and assimilation, of participation and categorisation, and of adaptation and transformation. This points to an invariant of Sino–foreign higher education as a field: When we speak of a field of position-takings, we are insisting that what can be constituted as a system for the sake of analysis is not the product of a coherence-seeking intention or an objective consensus (even if it presupposes unconscious agreement on common principles) but the product and prize of a permanent conflict; or, to put it another way, that the generative, unifying principle of this system is the struggle, with all the contradictions it engenders. (Bourdieu, 1993b, p. 34)

14  Guanglun Michael Mu and Karen Dooley In the third part of the volume we conclude by canvassing reflexive reappropriation of the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu for post-national research on higher education in the 2020s and beyond. The concluding chapter (Chapter 10, Karen Dooley and Guanglun Michael Mu), returns to the struggles for individual and institutional distinction investigated in Part I of the volume and the struggles for individual participation investigated in Part II. In that chapter, we consider how Bourdieu’s transformative intent was channelled variously into promoting the autonomy of the scientific field and scientific action on the one hand, and direct social action for transformation of inequitable field dynamics on the other. The conceptual and methodological suggestions that we explore in the chapter are directed towards bolstering the autonomy of sociological understanding of higher education beyond the nation. Our emphasis on scientific autonomy can be understood with reference to the heteronomy of fields of higher education with social space and with powerful fields such as those of the economy and the state. As we have noted in this chapter, the forces of heteronomisation, and hence, de-autonomisation of fields of education, have intensified in recent decades with what is known as ‘globalisation’ and ‘neo-liberalism’. In at least some contexts, including those from which we write in Australia, responses to the COVID-19 pandemic which affected the flows of higher education across and over borders around the world seem to have given further impetus to those processes. The challenge of winning a scientific object (Bourdieu et al., 1991a) in these conditions should not be underestimated. Researchers of higher education have a complex relation to their objects of study. Irrespective of the substance, researchers of higher education may well find themselves cutting through thickets of doxa, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy ontologised (Shahjahan & Grimm, 2022) with unusual depth into their own habitus. Qua researchers, those who study (higher) education have had a most extensive and intensive experience of the doxa, orthodoxy, and heterodoxy around their object. They bring to their research potentially decades as an ultimately highly successful student (Shahjahan & Grimm, 2022). Simultaneously, they may have quotidian experience of working as a university teacher within and sometimes beyond their nation of origin. As research students and then researchers, they have successful experience, likewise, in the world-wide system of scientific knowledge production (Marginson, 2016). In short, there is much that might be taken for granted, much ‘commonsense’ with which to grapple in finding and constructing an object of research. This challenge would seem to be exacerbated by the heteronomisation of fields of higher education and research which press the interests of non-educational fields onto educational agents—students, teachers, and researchers. It is our contention, then, that there is value in directing energies into crafting scientific tools adequate to the empirical realities of Sino–foreign higher education from which we create the objects of our studies. That was the impulse that drove this volume.

Bourdieu and Chinese higher education beyond the nation  15

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Part I

Structures and strategies of advantage behind institutional and individual action in Sino– foreign higher education

2 Partnering for transnational higher education A multiple correspondence analysis of university habitus and institutional action for ‘China–Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools’ Pengfei Pan, Guanglun Michael Mu, and Karen Dooley Introduction In this chapter, we look at how Chinese universities have ventured into transnational higher education (TNHE), asking who has partnered with whom, through what TNHE arrangements, and why they have done so. The aim is to understand the relations of power which dispose certain types of Chinese university to develop certain forms of TNHE partnership with certain types of foreign university. TNHE partnerships assume different forms in different countries: study abroad programs, twinning programs, online or distance education, and student exchange are only some of these (Knight, 2016). In China, TNHE involves joint operation of higher education institutions with foreign partners or joint delivery of education programs (Huang, 2007), where ‘program’ refers to a partnership involving a single major, and ‘institution’ to partnerships involving several majors in one or more disciplines. As a key global player in TNHE, China offers a unique opportunity for understanding the practical logics of TNHE partnering. Yet much remains to be learnt about the relations of power which enable the partnering decisions and motivations of Chinese universities. This chapter looks at the power relations underpinning TNHE by exploring partnerships formed under the aegis of 中外合作办学 (zhōng wài hé zuò bàn xué, China–Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools; hereafter, CFCRS). By definition, CFCRS refers to the officially approved cooperative partnerships between foreign and Chinese educational institutions that establish educational programs and institutions within the territory of China for delivery of higher education services mainly to Chinese citizens (State Council of China, 2003). TNHE partnerships that have not gone through the official approval process are beyond the scope of investigation of this chapter. To probe the power relations behind the officially approved CFCRS partnerships, we draw on the sociological concepts of Bourdieu. DOI: 10.4324/9781003326694-3

22  Pengfei Pan et al. Extant research has probed the role of interpersonal relationships between senior leadership and operational faculty members in sustainable institutional partnerships (Bordogna, 2017; Ma & Montgomery, 2019). Such research is what Bourdieu described as ‘substantialist’ in that it focuses on the substance of interactions amongst university staff without systematic treatment of the enabling relations of power. While we look at visible or observable interactions and transactions—the cooperative partnerships—between universities, we are interested also in the relations of power which enable these. We therefore probe structural and symbolic relations among the positions occupied and taken by the universities in what we conceptualise as the ‘organisational field’ (Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008, p. 2) of TNHE. In this field, agents in and of universities strategise TNHE partnerships, acting from positions of differential power and on beliefs and discourses shaped by, and potentially shaping, social structures. Bourdieu (2005) explored an organisational field in his study of housing in France. He showed how housing firms were positioned according to the composition and volume of their capitals, and how that field was affected by the field of power. Yet Bourdieu did not look at interactions among firms; he made the point that the firms which constitute a field do not necessarily interact with one another, and he was critical of analytic methods focusing on interactions which he saw as only exploring the surface of the social. In looking at CFCRS, we are interested in interactions among universities. However, in approaching these through three-moment field analysis (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992), we bring into view the underlying field of economic, political, and symbolic power that draws universities into CFCRS. We also explore the habitus of those universities as organisations tasked with that institutional work. For Bourdieu (2020, p. 344), habitus is ‘a system of schemas of perception, appreciation, and action produce by the socially instituted body’. We consider habitus as not merely embodied dispositions of individuals but also dispositional orientations of institutions as aggregates of individuals. In this chapter, we first describe the development of CFCRS to understand how the educational field within which Chinese universities have acted cooperatively with foreign universities has been shaped politically, economically, and historically. In this first analytic moment (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, pp. 104–105) we look at the relations between the specific field of TNHE and the field of power in China. Then, we ask: If universities are drawn into an organisational field through TNHE, is there a system of principles—university habitus—structured by and structuring this field? Having thereby constructed the conceptual object of the study, we then produce a national level dataset for purposes of verification of that object (Bourdieu et al., 1991) through the second and the third moments of field analysis. That is, we seek to map out the relative positions objectively defined by the capital portfolios of universities as institutional agents and delve into the university habitus that internalises social and economic conditions. To this end, we use multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to explore why certain types of

Partnering for transnational higher education  23 Chinese universities venture into certain types of CFCRS arrangements with certain types of foreign universities. We conclude the chapter by discussing Chinese universities’ different but coexisting habitus-informed strategies for their CFCRS arrangements. The study might be of three-fold interest. It seeks to contribute to (1) knowledge of TNHE partnerships, especially those involving China; (2) further development of the conceptual tool of organisational/institutional habitus, specifically in the form of university habitus; and (3) use of MCA as a quantitative method for exploring and describing both inter-institutional interaction in the form of partnerships, and relations of power that underpin these. We turn now to the first analytic moment of the study: an analysis of relations between the field of power and the field of TNHE.

The development of CFCRS: The field of TNHE and field of power (moment 1 field analysis) Existing studies identified several stages in the development of TNHE in China prior to the global COVID-19 pandemic (Gow, 2016; Liu, 2011; Mok & Han, 2016). These can be summarised as exploration, expansion, regulation and review, and resumption. These stages entail different forms of intervention in the specific field of TNHE by the field of power. •

•

•

•

The exploration stage (1980–1994) saw somewhat inchoate implementation of TNHE in the form of in-service training, which might be characterised as ‘education aid’. In this stage, TNHE was tailored to the professional development of higher education teachers through nonaward programs (Yin, 2014). The expansion stage (1995–2002) was a watershed in the development of TNHE, as it was officially recognised as a means of promoting China’s higher education; offerings burgeoned, especially in eastern provinces and in business, foreign language, IT, and economics; and there was a shift from aid to trade in TNHE as a service. Importantly, official documents emphasised the public welfare dimension of TNHE (Yin, 2014). The regulation and review stage (2003–2010) began with promulgation of the Regulations on Chinese–Foreign Cooperation in Running Schools (中华人民共和国中外合作办学条例) by the State Council in 2003. This saw TNHE subject to legislation (Chen & Zhu, 2015; Xue, 2017). Measures included a national review of pre-2003 partnerships, clarification of criteria relating to the required qualifications of foreign partners, suspension of new applications from Chinese vocational institutions, and creation of the Information Monitoring Platform of CFCRS and a mechanism to evaluate approved partnerships (Liu, 2011). Laissez-faire governance was superseded by regulation (Mok & Han, 2016). The resumption stage (2010–present) has entailed reassured expansion after the adjustments of the previous stage. Approvals resumed in 2010 following promulgation of the National Outline for Medium and

24  Pengfei Pan et al. Long-term Education Reform and Development (2010–2020) (国家中 长期教育改革和发展规划纲要 (2010–2020年)). This blueprint is a mandate to ‘actively encourage the exploration of various ways to make use of high-quality educational resources, and run several exemplary CFCRS programs and institutions’ (State Council of China, 2010). By the end of 2020, there were 1,364 CFCRS programs and 131 CFCRS institutions in China. As an instrument of the field of power, CFCRS carries responsibilities for importing high-quality educational resources, cultivating internationalised talent, opening up the education sector, serving the economy and social development, and meeting diversified education demand (Lin, 2016). CFCRS programs (rather than institutions) are the focus of this chapter. These programs are relatively divergent with respect to discipline, undergraduate or postgraduate focus, and the country from which the foreign partner is drawn (Fang, 2012; Gow, 2016; Hong et al., 2016). To understand this complexity of cooperative actions by Chinese universities and the relations of power behind these, we developed the concept of university habitus as a theoretical extension to the existing Bourdieu-informed concept of institutional habitus.

University habitus ‘University habitus’ is akin to what others have termed ‘organisational habitus’ and ‘institutional habitus’ (see a review of that scholarship in higher education in byrd, 2019). In specifying and developing the concept for our study, we draw attention to the particularity of the university as an organisation that does institutional work. As shown in the first analytic moment, universities that venture into CFCRS are tasked by the Chinese state with higher education responsibilities for the nation while incorporating a varying degree of market logic. Such logic was particularly conspicuous in the expansion stage discussed earlier and will become clearer in a moment when we discuss ‘academic capitalism’. University habitus recognises the necessity for a level of analysis of and above that of the biological individual agent. It is acquired and actualised both within and beyond the organisational field. In looking at individual agents of a university, Tian (2003) showed how the habitus of Peking University was reproduced through its students’ emotional ties to, knowledge about, recognition of, and aspiration for the university while taking into account its relation to the Chinese state over historical time. More recent research at the university (Li et al., 2021) showed how dispositions to pursue certain study experiences, made available through state investment and valued by employers, were intergenerationally transmitted from senior to junior students. Focusing on officials in subnational governments, Han (2018) discussed how their work, generated by institutional habitus, mediates national policies and TNHE implementation by universities. She argues that the institutional habitus is less influenced by the individual habitus of

Partnering for transnational higher education  25 provincial government officials than by exchange rates among symbolic, economic, and political capital for provincial governments. While the concept of institutional habitus has been criticised for treating institutions as acting independently of their individual members (Atkinson, 2011), the work of Tian (2003), Li et al. (2021), and Han (2018) indicates its utility in understanding the collective habitus of individual members of institutions, Chinese universities included. They also differ from the bulk of studies that have used the concept without situating it in a historical context or tracing it to the broader social structures (byrd, 2019). However, the full value of the concept of university habitus has yet to be realised. In this chapter we seek to make a contribution in this regard by conceptualising the relative positions occupied and taken by universities as institutional agents within a relatively autonomous organisational field vis-à-vis the field of power. Bourdieu-inspired organisational research carries promising implications for not merely analysing intra-, and extra-organisational relations of members (e.g., university agents and stakeholders) within organisations-as-fields, but also inter-organisational relations within fields of organisations (e.g., fields comprised of universities, central and local governments, the Ministry of Education [MOE], and local education departments) (Emirbayer & Johnson, 2008). We crafted the concept of university habitus to enable investigation of both intra- and extra-organisational relations (e.g., Han, 2019; Li et al., 2021; Tian, 2003) and inter-organisational relations within and across specific fields vis-à-vis the field of power. While acknowledging that the university is composed of individuals, we here probe university strategies and orientations that represent collective actions and perceptions. We conceptualise ‘university habitus’ to extend what is known about the university as a space of socialisation for its agents and stakeholders and also to recognise the development of university dispositions and practices that have effects beyond human agents. Three forms of university dispositions are of particular concern when analysing CFCRS partnerships and the power relations behind these: academic capitalism, academic politicism, and symbolism of excellence. CFCRS partnerships points to ‘academic capitalism’ in the habitus of Chinese universities, especially the non-elite (Fang, 2012). Universities were allowed to charge much higher tuition fees for TNHE programs than those of regular programs. Yet, where the development of TNHE in China was initially construed as ‘more akin to international business than traditional academic expansion’ (Yang, 2008, p. 273), subsequent studies suggest otherwise. With CFCRS, major driving forces for engagement in TNHE partnerships include non-commercial goals: increasing higher education enrolments and academic quality, as well as promoting competitiveness in the global arena (Hu & Willis, 2017; Huang, 2007). These differences reflect the particularity of CFCRS in China and the influence of the field of power in creating that. This is a point of difference from the more revenue-driven logic often found in educational programs from the UK (Hou et al., 2014), Australia (Ng & Nyland, 2018), and other anglophone western

26  Pengfei Pan et al. countries where the relevant fields of power have influenced the specific fields of education to different ends. It testifies to the responsiveness of Chinese universities to the central government’s imperative to address public interest through CFCRS (Hou et al., 2014). With respect to CRCRS, then, these universities demonstrate a disposition of academic politicism in response to the political agenda of the state. In addition, the logics of academic excellence or ‘status culture’ (Marginson, 2014, p. 45) are in play in TNHE also. Considerations of status influence the choice of international partners (Jie, 2010; Locke, 2014). In summary, university habitus internalises the structural forces of the market, the state, and symbolic power, respectively generating academic capitalism, academic politicism, and symbolism of excellence while externalising these orientations as certain TNHE strategies. With university habitus, we hypothesise that within the organisational field of TNHE, there are distinctions among the positions of universities given the stances they take with regards to CFCRS strategies, goals, identities, and symbols; and such positions and position-takings can be traced to the broader field of power historically, that is, over time. With this hypothesis, we move on to report our empirical work.

The empirical study: Moments 2 and 3 field analysis The primary dataset for the study was sourced from the MOE’s Information Monitoring Platform of CFCRS (http://www.crs.jsj.edu.cn). By 2020, the platform had listed 1,364 approved CFCRS programs, including nine that had two foreign partners. Our analysis included 981 currently operational CFCRS programs involving 435 Chinese universities and 612 foreign partner universities. Programs involving a non-university Chinese partner or a partner located in Hong Kong or Taiwan were excluded. Programs with two foreign partners were counted as two separate cases. Information sourced from the MOE’s platform was converted into seven categorical variables: education level, area of study, year of approval, degree awarding institution, geographic location, city tier, and source country of the foreign university. To these we added the rank of the foreign partner (QS2021 result1), converting it into an eighth categorical variable. We consider these eight categorical variables as indicators of the arrangements of the 981 operational CFCRS programs. These arrangements help to gauge (1) provincial standing (i.e., geographic location with relative socioeconomic (dis)advantage); (2) municipal standing (i.e., city tier); and (3) higher-education standing (i.e., education level, area of study, year of approval, degree awarding institution, and QS ranking and source country of foreign partner). They objectively define a space of positions according to the overall volume and different configurations of provincial, municipal, and higher-educational resources. The position-taking actions of agents in the field is not ‘haphazard’ (Bourdieu, 1993, p. 154) but contingent upon ‘a sense of one’s place’ (Goffman, 1951, p. 297) and ‘a sense of the place of others’ (Bourdieu,

Partnering for transnational higher education  27 1987, p. 5). That sense is habitus. Inclusion in a national elite university construction project, specifically the 985 Project and the 211 Project,2 is a useful indicator of university habitus—a sense of distinction that internalises the state’s economic and political intervention and an instantiated, externalised identity marker for symbolic excellence. Therefore, inclusion in the 985 or 211 project or not was used as a ninth categorical variable in our analysis. We look at how Chinese universities with different standings take different positions within the space of CFCRS arrangements defined previously. To understand the position-taking of Chinese universities within CFCRS arrangements, we use MCA. This statistical technique focuses on relations among constellations of variables and categories and helps uncover latent structures in a large matrix of categorical variables (Hjellbrekke, 2018). Nine categorical variables and their corresponding categories are included in our MCA (see Table 2.1). Durkheim (1964) would call these categories Table 2.1  Variables on the CFCRS program arrangements Variables

Categories

Frequency

Percent

Education level

Postgraduate Undergraduate Business and Management Information Technology Engineering and Technology Art, Humanity, and Social Science Architecture and Science Pre-2003 2003–2009 Post-2010 Foreign institution only Conditional dual degree Dual degree Chinese institution only East provinces Central provinces West provinces Tier-1 city Emerging tier-1 city Tier-2 city Tier-3/4/5 city Top 200 201–500 501–1000 Unranked

151 830 262

15.39 84.61 26.71

64

6.52

343

34.96

194

19.78

118

12.03

78 134 769 109

7.95 13.66 78.39 11.11

277

28.24

208 387

21.20 39.45

532 334 115 167 363 247 204 90 135 126 630

54.23 34.05 11.72 17.02 37.00 25.18 20.80 9.17 13.76 12.84 64.22 (Continued)

Area of study

Year of approvala Degree awarding institution

Locationb City tierc

Ranking of partner university

28  Pengfei Pan et al. Table 2.1  (Continued) Variables

Categories

Frequency

Percent

Home country of partner university

US UK Australia Russia South Korea Canada France Germany Other countries Non-elite university 211 Project university 985 Project university

245 188 101 71 66 57 43 43 167 744 145

24.97 19.16 10.30 7.24 6.73 5.81 4.38 4.38 17.02 75.84 14.78

92

9.38

Chinese university status

a The exploration stage (1980–1994) and the expansion stage (1995–2002) were combined because the number of programs established in each of these two stages is too limited to fulfil the technical requirement of our analysis. The new category was called ‘pre-2003’ stage. b A detailed classification method can be accessed from http://www.nhc.gov.cn/htmlfiles/ zwgkzt/ptjnj/year2013/index2013.html c City tier is a widely used but not official category. This study adopted the result of the 2019 Ranking of Cities’ Business Attractiveness (https://www.yicaiglobal.com/news/hefei-foshanenter-china-list-of-emerging-first-tier-cities).

‘prenotions’—the everyday understandings of the social world formed by lay or powerful people through their common sense or arbitrary power. Prenotions fall prey to the naïve empiricism that Bourdieu called ‘spontaneous sociology’ which ‘abdicates the right and duty of theoretical construction’ (Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 38) in favour of self-evident explanations of the social world. To break with spontaneous sociology, we treat the prenoted categories as objects of analysis, wading into the classificatory schemata behind taken-for-granted schematic classifications. Our analysis was ‘a multiply repeated moment of inquiry’ (Wacquant, 2018, p. 5) through both individual and collective interpretation and reinterpretation, negotiation and renegotiation, construction and reconstruction of the sociological meanings embedded between and across the categories. We used Stata 16.0 to perform MCA. Eight variables on the CFCRS program arrangements are used as active variables to construct a social space of oppositions between different program arrangements. The eight active variables comprise 34 categories. In our MCA, we interpreted only explicable categories, that is, the categories contributing more than average to the construction of the space (Hjellbrekke, 2018). The average contribution by all active categories was 2.9% (1 ÷ 34). Categories with a contribution lower than 2.9% were non-explicable and removed from further analysis. In addition to the active variables and explicable categories, the variable on the status of Chinese universities was used as a supplementary variable to help explain how Chinese universities with different standings take certain positions in the constructed social space through university habitus.

Partnering for transnational higher education  29 In what follows, we present a three-axis solution to interpret our data. The three axes collectively explain 70.37% of the total variance of the data, with 54.97%, 9.14%, and 6.26% respectively loaded on the first, second, and third axes. Ten categories contribute more than 2.9% to Axis 1, 13 to Axis 2, and 11 to Axis 3. These categories became the explicable active categories for further analysis (Table 2.2). Our general observation was that Axis 1 constructs a space of domination versus subordination historically according to the overall volume of capital seen in different forms of provincial, municipal, and higher-educational standings, while Axes 2 and 3 construct oppositions within the dominated space according to those standings over time. In this vein, we take hold of three key dimensions of Bourdieusian analysis of spatial Table 2.2  Explicable active categories and their contributions to Axes 1–3 Categories with contribution > 2.9%, Axis 1 Negative coordinates

Positive coordinates

Educational level—Undergraduate: 2.9% Degree awarding—Chinese institution only: 3.5% Location—Central provinces: 6.4% City tier—Tier 3/4/5 city: 5.6% Total: 18.4%

Educational level—Postgraduate: 16.2% Degree awarding—Foreign institution only: 18.4% Location—Eastern provinces: 4.8% City tier—Tier 1 city: 11% Area of study—Business and management: 6.7% Year of approval—Pre 2003: 4.7% Source country—France: 3.1% Total: 64.9%

Categories with contribution > 2.9%, Axis 2 Negative coordinates Degree awarding—Conditioned dual degree: 5.1% Location—Western provinces: 6.5% City tier—Emerging tier-1 city: 8.5% Source country—Australia: 10.8% Source country—UK: 5.1% Rank of foreign university—Top 200: 3.4% Rank of foreign university—201–500: 9.2% Total: 48.6% Categories with contribution > 2.9%, Axis 3 Negative coordinates Year of approval—Pre 2003: 4.4% Year of approval—2003–2009: 7.9% Degree awarding—Chinese degree: 7% Location—Central provinces: 5.3% Source country—Australia: 15% Rank of foreign university—201–500: 7.2% Total: 46.8%

Positive coordinates Year of approval—Pre 2003: 3.5% Location—Central provinces: 4.2% City tier—Tier 3/4/5 city: 6.9% Source country—South Korea: 3.3% Source country—Russia: 8% Rank of foreign university—Unranked: 7.9% Total: 33.8%

Positive coordinates Year of approval—Post 2010: 3.4% Degree awarding—Conditional dual degree: 12.1% Location—Western provinces: 3% Source country—US: 4.7% Rank of foreign university—Unranked: 4.2% Total: 27.4%

30  Pengfei Pan et al. oppositions and structural (dis)advantage: the quantity and the composition of capital and the historical change of trajectory. In what follows, we present and analyse two MCA plots, with Figure 2.1 focusing on Axis 1 and Figure 2.2 demonstrating a superimposition of Axes 2 and 3.

Axis 1: A space of domination and subordination On Axis 1 (horizontal dimension; see Figure 2.1), there are two different and opposed clouds of categories. The cloud on the right-hand side shows that tier-1 cities and eastern provinces were ‘early birds’ with some of their CFCRS programs approved pre-2003 and France as a frequent partner. As for currently operational programs, these cities and provinces tend to host postgraduate level CFCRS programs in business and management that award degrees from the foreign partner only. Taking into account the supplementary categories, it appears that 985 and 211 universities are inclined to invest in such CFCRS arrangements. In contrast, the cloud on the left-hand side shows that low-tier cities (tiers 3, 4, and 5) and central provinces tend to accommodate undergraduate level CFCRS programs that award a degree from the Chinese partner. Non-elite universities tend to venture into such CFCRS arrangements. CFCRS programs have created ‘fundamental divisions of the field of positions’ (Bourdieu, 1983). These seem to be objectively defined by the overall volume of provincial, municipal, and higher-educational resources. Elite Chinese universities tend to take a position signified by abundant provincial, municipal, and higher-educational resources; non-elite universities demonstrate an opposite tendency. Here university habitus arguably steers Chinese

Figure 2.1 Categories with contributions > 2.9% to Axis 1.

Partnering for transnational higher education  31 universities to match themselves differentially, according to their status, with positions that are ostensibly available to all. For Bourdieu (1983, p. 313), ‘the space of possibles’ is realised through ‘the actual or potential position-taking corresponding to the different positions’. If we construe CFCRS programs as constructing a space of ‘objective probabilities (of economic or symbolic profit)’ (Bourdieu, 1983, p. 344), these objective chances only become operative and active through university habitus—the subjective basis for Chinese universities to apprehend and appreciate their position-takings in correspondence to their own dominant or subordinated status as elite or ordinary institutions. Our data also show that elite universities are more likely to operate CFCRS programs at postgraduate level as opposed to non-elite counterparts that favour undergraduate CFCRS programs. This may reflect differential pressures to pursue funding that is tied to enrolment. Elite universities, with more abundant funding from other sources, place more emphasis on TNHE as an opportunity to provide advanced degrees. In contrast, non-elite universities undertake the work of teaching the mass of students and tend to use TNHE to assist expansion of their undergraduate programs (Fang, 2012). In addition, our study found that elite universities differed from their nonelite counterparts in their tendency to orient towards the business and management disciplines historically predominant in TNHE. It should be noted that the QS ranking of foreign partner universities did not feature in the correspondences. Together, these findings suggest that Axis 1 does not represent a university habitus of academic excellence. Closer examination of Axis 1 identifies a division within the space of relative advantage on the right-hand side of the MCA plot. This is analogous to, but somewhat different from, what Bourdieu (1984, p. 438) calls ‘the dominant fractions and the dominated fractions of the dominant class’. In our study, the relative dominance of the dominant is defined by overall capital volume rather than the composition of capital (economic vis-à-vis cultural) as was the case in Bourdieu’s research. As shown in Figure 2.1, the dominant fractions of the dominant, located further from the origin,3 consist of 985 universities in tier-1 cities. Their relative dominance is defined by possession of more economic capital (which is interconvertible with cultural, social, and symbolic capitals) in forms of generous 985 project funding coupled with municipal resources of tier-1 cities. These resources are coveted by the dominated fractions of the dominant comprising 211 universities in eastern provinces located closer to the origin in the MCA plot. The dominant fractions of the dominant—985 universities in tier-1 cities—tend to have been early investors (pre2003) in CFCRS programs at postgraduate level that award a foreign degree only, a degree that is not necessarily from a prestigious university. Early scholarship found that the vast majority of TNHE programs that awarded a foreign degree involved partnerships between elite Chinese universities and non-elite foreign universities to provide courses in business and management (Huang, 2007; Mok & Xu, 2008). To recall, prior to 2003, Chinese universities began exploring and expanding TNHE as an international service before clearly defined regulations were put in place. At that

32  Pengfei Pan et al. time, the university habitus of the elite institutions active in the field exhibited a logic that was more economic in nature than political or academic. Adding nuance to that picture, our finding suggests that elite Chinese universities cannot be treated as a monolithic whole when it comes to CFCRS program arrangements. Compared with 211 universities, 985 universities—due to their more privileged status—seem to have enjoyed a structural advantage in reaping more economic benefits from CFCRS over a longer historical period. Marginson (2013, p. 356) asserts that, in the broader higher education context, a ‘full capitalist economic market remains fairly distant’ particularly for elite universities whereas non-elite universities land on ‘islands of commercial production’ (Marginson, 2013, p. 360). When we train a spotlight onto the CFCRS context, elite Chinese universities have expected their foreign partners to award a degree and had limited interest in commercialising their own degrees; non-elite universities have tended to do otherwise. Yet this does not preclude economic logic. As shown in our analysis, a university habitus of academic capitalism appears to be a generative principle of Axis 1 over historical time. In contrast, academic excellence and academic politicism would seem to be less evident.

Axes 2 and 3: A space of oppositions within the dominated space: central provinces versus western provinces Axis 2 and Axis 3 (see Figure 2.2) both construct oppositions between western and central provinces—the dominated fraction of the CFCRS sphere. This is the reason why we superimpose the two axes to reduce redundancy in

Figure 2.2 Categories with contributions > 2.9% to Axes 2 and 3.

Partnering for transnational higher education  33 our analysis. At first glimpse, the western provinces would be the dominated fraction of the dominated; and the central, the dominant fraction of the dominated. However, our analysis shows that this is not the case. Rather, the western and the central provinces need to be understood at different historical moments as different geopolitical spaces that draw Chinese universities with different symbolic standings into the larger CFCRS market. Axis 2 (horizontal dimension) constructs a CFCRS space of oppositions between four sets of categories, namely central provinces versus western provinces, low-tier cities versus emerging tier-1 cities, lower-ranked foreign partner universities (no assigned QS ranking) versus higher-ranked ones (top 500 QS-ranked universities), and the source countries of Russia and Korea versus the historically dominant TNHE players of the anglophone west—the UK and Australia. When the supplementary variable—the standing of Chinese universities—is projected onto the MCA plot, elite Chinese universities gravitate to the left pole, while the right pole is home to the non-elite. Elite Chinese universities tend to work with top 500 QS-ranked Australian and UK universities and stay away from low-ranked universities from Russia and Korea—the peripheral players in the global TNHE market. The opposite is the case for non-elite Chinese universities. Here university habitus establishes the correspondence between positions and position-takings. Every position-taking ‘receives its distinctive value from its negative relationship with coexistent position-takings to which it is objectively related and which determine it by delimiting it’ (Bourdieu, 1983, p. 313). The symbolic profile of elite Chinese universities and top 500 foreign universities shows good fit, which often results in dual degrees if certain conditions are met. This type of cooperation enhances the symbolic standing of both sides, and it is unlikely to have been motivated by economic factors. As Marginson (2013, pp. 354–355) argues, ‘Status competition in higher education is not capitalist’. For elite Chinese universities, it is their habitus of academic excellence that steers them to choose foreign partners that look like themselves and their habitus of academic politicism that echoes the government agenda for establishing CFCRS cooperation with prestigious foreign universities. Compared to non-elite universities, the elite are more driven to promote their institutional reputation through TNHE partnerships (Fang, 2012), particularly with high-ranked foreign universities (Hou et al., 2014; Huang, 2007). What comes to the fore is the symbolism of excellence—a disposition within university habitus, or what Yang and Xie (2015, p. 74) call a ‘catch-up mindset’ when partnering with dominant western peers. Looking closer, we see elite Chinese universities in emerging tier-1 cities in western China take positions opposite to their non-elite counterparts in low-tier cities in central China. The former are able to attract top 500 foreign universities to a CFCRS space with lower provincial but higher municipal standings. In contrast, the latter, with their slightly higher provincial but much lower municipal standings have no choice but to work with low-ranked overseas universities. A case in point is cooperation with low-ranked Korean

34  Pengfei Pan et al. universities, described by Marginson (2013, p. 358) as ‘fully profit-driven institutions … concentrated at the low value end of the tertiary education hierarchy’. This pattern is particularly evident for CFCRS programs established before 2003. To recall (see Axis 1), at that time, 985 universities were the most powerful in the field of CFCRS, uniquely able to take advantage of the most lucrative economic opportunities. It is arguable, then, that stratification started from the earliest stage of CFCRS. Moving from Axis 2 (horizontal) to Axis 3 (vertical), patterns both similar and different emerge. Similar to Axis 2, Axis 3 shows oppositions between central and western provinces. Adding nuance to Axis 2, Axis 3 shows that central provinces are the probable home to CFCRS programs approved before 2010 that award a Chinese degree only, a degree from non-elite Chinese universities partnering with lower-ranked Australian universities (ranked 201–500). In contrast, western provinces are likely to host post2010 CFCRS programs established between elite Chinese universities and non-elite US universities (unranked) with a possibility of awarding dual degrees if part of the students’ study is conducted on the foreign campus. Although both Australia and the US are regarded as historically dominant players in the global TNHE market, they fare differently when it comes to the CFCRS market. Most interesting is that since 2010, elite Chinese universities in western China have shown a propensity to work with low-ranked US universities, while non-elite Chinese universities in central China tended to favour higher-ranked Australian universities prior to 2010. Although our data do not directly explain this pattern, one possible reason is that the symbolic value of national status (of the US as a global superpower versus Australia as a mid-level power) trumps that of world rankings. This gives rise to a classificatory schema through which Chinese universities make a distinction between US and Australian universities. Elite Chinese universities in western provinces would rather work with low-ranked US universities given the symbolic value of the national status of the US than work with higher-ranked Australian universities.

Discussion It has been suggested that emerging forms of institutional competition should be analysed in dynamic global, national, and local contexts (Musselin, 2018). We take a similar view. Here we interpret our findings by sketching a scenario which shows how Chinese universities with elite, sub-elite, and nonelite standings engage differentially, and over time, in exchanges of economic (revenue), political (state), and symbolic (status) capitals. We suggest that the appeal of certain exchanges can be understood in terms of university habitus formed through experience of positions of relative strength in the field of universities in China. Given the pre-pandemic conditions in which our dataset was produced, it should be noted that our analyses and discussions do not take into account the uncertainties and any possible, probable, or inevitable morphing. That is a task for future research.

Partnering for transnational higher education  35 Elite/985 universities: CFCRS as one of the many options The competition in which elite universities are engaged has escalated from national to supernational level (Musselin, 2018). Previous research has shown that elite Chinese universities seek TNHE partnerships with highranked universities across the globe (Montgomery, 2016), while they tend to engage less in TNHE than their non-elite/teaching intensive counterparts, indicating risk aversion (Fang, 2012). The evidence from our study complicates this line of observation. When it comes to CFCRS programs, 985 universities, particularly those located in eastern tier-1 cities, are the ‘early birds’ in the market. They appear to be ‘omnivores’ in terms of partner selection, without an obvious preference to work with high ranked foreign universities as observed in previous studies. They particularly favour business programs at postgraduate level. These programs charge much steeper tuition fees than other CFCRS programs on average and often do not require national matriculation results for admission. These indicate a strong economic strategy to generate revenue by grace of the symbolic capital of the ‘985 brand’. Due to lucrative profits, 985 universities are not necessarily averse to TNHE altogether; yet, they do seem to have a concern about tarnishing their prestigious reputation through their omnivorous approach to partner selection. It may be that their higher level of risk aversion leads them to be reluctant to award their own degrees. Putting these together, we see an entanglement of academic capitalism and symbolism of excellence. This does not necessarily indicate an absence of academic politicism in elite Chinese universities. When it comes to international research collaboration, prestigious universities tend to work together, demonstrating a mutually reinforcing strategy that echoes the state’s agenda (Montgomery, 2016). However, such strategy is less evident in the CFCRS context, despite the state’s advocacy to import high-quality higher education resources through CFCRS. Our view is that the massive state funding largely succeeds in buying 985 universities out of the economic field and buying them into the global higher education field. With abundant state funding, 985 universities are less reliant than others on the CFCRS market to generate revenue. While they do not shy away from the economic benefits of CFCRS altogether, CFCRS is just one, possibly less prominent, option for their internationalisation. Sub-elite/211 universities: Striving for national recognition Different from 985 universities vying for standing in a global arena, sub-elite 211 universities are pressed to promote innovative thinking and compete for national status through achievement in internationalisation (Postiglione, 2020). As internationalisation including involvement in CFCRS is counted as a crucial indicator in the MOE’s national disciplinary evaluation, it is perceived as important in capacity-building in teaching, management, and disciplinary construction (MOE, 2020). This government policy can be

36  Pengfei Pan et al. particularly appealing to 211 universities, whose interest in CFCRS not only demonstrates a position-taking strategy that enables them to sail through national competition and assumes their identity as national leaders, but also shows a strong tendency of academic politicism to work in tandem with the state’s agenda. As discussed earlier, 985 universities treat CFCRS as only one of their many options and may not prioritise CFCRS. This can strengthen the role of 211 universities as realistic local partners for foreign universities. In relatively populous and economically developed eastern China, 211 universities adopt an omnivorous approach to partner selection, demonstrating an economic strategy to share student market. In western China, 211 universities in emerging tier-1 cities selectively work with high-ranked universities in line with the state’s agenda, while yearning for the symbolism of national excellence by empowering themselves in capacity building through CFCRS partnerships with prestigious universities. Since the state initiated the national Great Western Development Strategy in 1999, the government has put forward preferential policies to support the internationalisation of higher education in western provinces. These favourable policies may have nudged universities to develop CFCRS with high-ranked foreign partners. As shown by Li (2018), universities in western provinces have become pioneers in high-quality CFCRS growth. Nationally, they are notable for having the highest proportion of their TNHE partnerships with top 500 universities in the world. Non-elite universities: Making a virtue out of necessity Non-elite universities are in a dominated position in socioeconomic and symbolic terms. Compared to the coveted national funding available for elite universities, non-elite universities are supported by provincial or local governments, reinforcing the disparity in revenue sources (Yu et al., 2012). Being unable to compete with elite universities for public funding, non-elite universities carve out opportunities to generate revenue, showing academic capitalism and relative reliance on the economic field. Prominent in our data is the CFCRS engagement of non-elite universities in low-tier cities in central provinces. Although these universities are unable to attract top foreign universities as partners, they have expanded their student places in no small degree through CFCRS since the earliest stage. Despite not being able to work with prestigious universities through CFCRS, they are largely successful in implementing the government agenda of expanding higher education through CFCRS. They may make a virtue out of necessity because elite universities show little interest in higher education expansion or no urgent demand for CFCRS.

Conclusion In this chapter, we created the concept of university habitus as a variant on institutional/organisational habitus and used the tool of MCA to apply that concept to understand the institutional logic of universities in establishing

Partnering for transnational higher education  37 CFCRS programs. Our overall conclusion is that Chinese universities with different standings are enculturated into coexisting CFCRS strategies of academic capitalism, academic politicism, and symbolism of excellence, which constitute a system of dispositions, that is, university habitus. This habitus steers Chinese universities to capture opportunities historically and imagine probable futures through CFCRS. This habitus also establishes a correspondence between universities’ standings in the hierarchical higher education field, on the one hand, and three sets of power relations that help shape that field, on the other: (1) the influence of the logic of the field of power as the state pursues national higher educational goals through CFCRS, (2) the influence of economic logic as universities take up opportunities for revenue generation, and (3) status competition in the national and global higher education fields. These findings deepen understandings of the phenomenon of TNHE under the aegis of CFCRS in the period leading up to 2020. They contribute also to development of the concept of institutional/organisational habitus (byrd, 2019) to account for the particularity of the play of power within and upon the university as an institutional agent in a specific field of education. Our work adds variously to the empirical understandings and conceptual advances made in studies of Chinese higher education by Tian (2003), Li et al. (2021), and Han (2019) but is of wider applicability. We call for future research on the broader TNHE enterprise across the globe that involves both individual stakeholders (e.g., university students, academics, and staff; government officials) and organisational players (e.g., universities, governments, and third-party agencies). Regardless of the medium-to-long-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on TNHE, our triadic empirical–theoretical–methodological contribution may be of use to other researchers interested in institutional partnerships—and not only in relation to CFCRS specifically or TNHE broadly or even higher education.

Notes 1 Here we adopted the league table from QS World University Rankings 2021. QS ranking is one of the most influential ranking systems worldwide. The world top 1,000 universities are listed in the ranking. 2 The 985 and 211 projects were major funding programs that greatly strengthened the status of selected public universities. The 211 project included 109 universities, and 39 of these for the even more selective 985 project. Although project funding has now ceased, 985 and 211 institutions continue to be widely considered as elite or prestigious. 3 When the MCA plot is treated as a coordinate plane, the origin is the specific point with the coordinates (0, 0).

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3 Matching individual with institutional habitus? Students’ choice of transnational higher education in China Xiao Han

Introduction Habitus for Bourdieu is a set of schemes generated from particular conditions, functioning to shape individuals’ thinking and action (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Such concept highlights his point that it is not only the body that exists in the social world, but the social world also resides in the body (Bourdieu, 1977). To be more specific, Bourdieu considers the body as a ‘mnemonic device upon and in which the very basics of culture, the practical taxonomies of the habitus, are imprinted and encoded in a socialising or learning process which commences during early childhood’ (Jenkins, 1992, 75–76). Thus, habitus demonstrates the adaption to objective circumstances which emphasise the ‘virtue of necessity’—in encouraging the match between individuals’ tastes, desires, and expectations to what are realistically to be achieved (Bourdieu, 1984, 175). Seen from this prism, the reproduction of social structure could be at least partially explained by the notion of habitus: people act seemingly naturally to fulfil their destiny as members of a certain class when their habitus embodies the social arrangements and material circumstance (Sweetman, 2003). Drawing from Bourdieu, scholars incline to explain the pursuit of overseas education as a form of ‘capital work’ (Balaz & Williams, 2004). This perspective pays special attention to Bourdieu’s notion of institutionalised cultural capital—the educational qualifications, as the ‘certificate of cultural competence which confers on its holder a conventional, constant, legally guaranteed value with respect to power’ (Bourdieu, 1986, 248). In the education field, such credentials enable the superior class to increase its chance for social reproduction (Bourdieu, 1977, 1989). Based on this theoretical framework, not only physically studying abroad (Wang, 2020), but the engagement in transnational higher education (TNHE) within China’s territory is explicated by the middle-class people’s anxiety in cementing their social status (Fang, 2012). While the existing literature does merit for spotlighting the continuous inequality among different classes, especially in emphasising middle-class families’ advantage in wielding their capitals for social structure’s reproduction, Jenkins’s criticism that ‘it is difficult to know where to place conscious DOI: 10.4324/9781003326694-4

42  Xiao Han deliberation and awareness in Bourdieu’s scheme of things’ (1992, 77) calls for serious retrospection of the application of Bourdieu’s concept, especially in the late- or high-modernity societies (Giddens, 1991, 1992). Specifically, in the simple- or organised-modernity where Bourdieu’s conceptual tools developed, the ‘classed’ identities could be reproduced through unwitting determinancy in that the future was quite expectable; in Bourdieu’s words, this is the situation that ‘what they do has more meaning than they know’ (1977, 35). In contrast, accompanying the economic development and the ensuing ‘decline of traditional ties’ (Warde, 1994, 881), the society witness the trend of ‘de-traditionalisation’ that ‘the monitoring by the other of traditional conventions’ has been ‘replaced by the necessary self-monitoring’ (Lash, 1993, 5). Individuals are forced to make their choice in choosing the lifestyles and identities from ‘the range of possibilities on offer’ (Sweetman, 2003, 530). The differences among the traditional and modern societies require scholars to rethink Bourdieu’s emphasis on habitus as the ‘principles … beyond the grasp of consciousness, and hence cannot be touched by voluntary, deliberate transformation’ (Bourdieu, 1977, 94). Based on the empirical data about Chinese students’ motivation on choosing to study in TNHE, this article spotlights how the students demonstrate great consciousness during the decision-making process in realising and matching their individual habitus with the institutional one (Reay, 1998a, 1998b; Reay, Ball, & David, 2001), even before the real moving to a new and unfamiliar field (Bourdieu, 1999).

Matching individual with institutional habitus? Resorting to reflexivity in modern society Habitus as a durable and relatively stable ‘system of dispositions’, according to Bourdieu, could only be developed through ‘lasting experience of social position’ (1990, 131) and disproportionately weighted towards the past (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, 133). Such overemphasis on the former experiences engenders scholars’ concern about the restrained agency residing in Bourdieu’s conception of habitus (Mills, 2008), rendering it as arguably the most contested concept created by Bourdieu (Reay, 2004). Scholars argue that Bourdieu’s effort to ‘transcend the dualistic divide between “objectivism” and “subjectivism” … remains caught in an unresolved contradiction between determinism and voluntarism, with the balance of his argument favoring the former’ (Jenkins, 1992, 9), or ‘pseudo-determinism’ as Nash names it (1990, 445). In Jenkins’ words, Bourdieu’s model represents a closed loop where ‘structures produce the habitus, which generates practice, which produces the structures and so on’ (2000, 152). In response to the previous criticism, Bourdieu defends the notion of habitus through conceptualising it as ‘the generative capacities of dispositions’ (1990, 13). Specifically, he argues that habitus should not be taken as ‘a mechanical determinism [in governing practice]’; it operates within the constraints and limits initially set within and across fields (Bourdieu, 1990, 55).

Matching individual with institutional habitus?  43 In this vein, habitus functions as the ‘art of inventing’ with potential to produce diverse and emerging practices (Bourdieu, 1990, 55). Thus, within the objective structures ‘which are independent of the consciousness and desires of agents and are capable of guiding or constraining their practices’ (Bourdieu, 1990, 123), the notion of habitus illustrates the creative yet limited capacity for improvisation due to the dynamic structure of social reality and the constraint of social conditions (Bourdieu, 1990). Instead of a determinate construct, habitus should be understood as a ‘mediating’ one (Harker, 2000, 168; see also Hoy, 1999;). It works in relation to ‘a protensional field, or perspective, that contextualises all situations, setting the pre-objective framework for practice, without any express rules or codes that automatically and mechanically “tell” us what to do’ (Ostrow, 2000, 318). Again, such ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu, 1990, 61) is more appropriate when describing the situation in traditional societies when identities were relatively stable binding into ‘coherent and integrative social practices’ (Wagner, 1994, 170). Specifically, then the identity defining a person ‘was not by [his] own choice. Ambivalences had been eliminated by comprehensive classificatory orders and the enforcing of these orders in practice’ (ibid., 159). Reay (2004) goes further to illustrate another point which generates scholars’ contradicting argument on the concept of habitus: ‘It is not a lack of action that is problematic, but rather the focus on pre-reflective dimensions of action’ (437). In other words, when making decisions, individuals are not totally motivated by their subconscious understanding of the world; they cannot do so either, as there is no clear path to the preservation and reproduction of their social status in this ever-changing world. In fact, when choosing among various higher education institutions (HEIs), the agents take continuous comparison, discussion, self-monitoring, and retrospection to match themselves with the institutions. TNHE is not an exception. As defined by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in 2001, TNHE is ‘all types of higher education study where the learners are located in a country different from the one where the awarding institution is based’. Enabling students to pursue foreign higher education (HE) and obtain overseas qualifications without travelling abroad, TNHE not only appears as an effective and efficient way to satisfy the mounting demand for tertiary education and skilled labour force in the receiving countries (occupying around 10–20% of HE provision in Malaysia, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and almost half in Dubai; Knight & McNamara, 2017) (Altbach & Knight, 2007; Huang, 2007), but also functions to curb the severe brain and cash drain resulting from student mobility (Han, 2016). China was documented as the Number 1 source country with 1,061,511 internationally mobile students in 2019 (UNESCO, 2021). TNHE thus has witnessed thriving development ever since its first introduction in the early 1990s. The number of TNHE activities has risen from 2 in 1995 (Huang, 2010) to 1,146 in 2020 (MOE, 2020) while the accumulated number of graduates from TNHE had, by 2016, reached 1.6 million (Chinese News, 2016).

44  Xiao Han Characterised as a strong or developmental state, China refuses to introduce western educational resources indiscriminately (Lim, 2016) but tries to incorporate TNHE into the national provision of university education under its scrutiny and regulation (Huang, 2007). TNHE in China has been renamed as Sino–foreign cooperation (Zhongwai Hezuo Banxue) to confine the operation of such activities between foreign HEIs and Chinese universities, named as Sino–foreign cooperation program, secondary/subordinate (erji) college, and university. Among them, the Sino–foreign cooperation universities could enjoy relatively high autonomy with the label of ‘independent institutions with legal person status’ (MOE, 2020) when compared with transnational programs and secondary colleges in various perspectives, including curriculum design, faculty recruitment, and student admission criteria setting. Considering the positional advantages of TNHE mainly come from the elite degrees granted by the foreign partners (Marginson, 2006), Sino–foreign cooperation universities’ attractiveness could be partly explained by their capability to bring the original foreign education to mainland China (Han, 2016). Seen from this lens, students’ motivation in choosing TNHE in general, and Sino–foreign cooperation universities in particular, could be explicated by their desire in reproducing the ‘classed’ identity, embodied by the habitus in investing relatively generously in HE in a transnational context (TNHE costs up to 50 times when compared with the tuition fees in other Chinese universities). However, as the empirical data reveal, such a process is not totally subconscious but involves both clear comparison, self-monitoring, and matching between the individual’s interests and attributes of the institutions—the institutional habitus. Specifically, Reay argues that every educational institution has its own habitus, which may exert ‘the impact of a cultural group or social class on an individual’s behaviour’, demonstrating itself from ‘a complex mix of curriculum offer, teaching practices and what children bring with them to the classroom’ (1998a, 67), and the teachers’ expectations, prejudices, and biases (1998a, 98; 1998b, 524–525). This is the process whereby the students not only consciously realise their own individual habitus (see habitus realisation in Mu & Dooley, 2015) but also work hard to collect relative information from the target institutions—the predispositions, taken-for-granted expectations and schemes of perception—as the data demonstrate. But before discussing the findings, let us first illustrate the methodology adopted in this study in data collection and analysis.

Methodology ‘To enable detailed exploration and understanding of the central themes and puzzles which the researcher wishes to study’ (Ritchie et al., 2013, 78), purposive sampling was adopted to select student participants from two sampled Sino–foreign cooperation universities. Specific for this research, all of the 20 respondents were purposefully selected because they all obtained a Gaokao result (the National College Entrance Examination), which permitted them to make a ‘free’ choice between traditional Chinese top universities

Matching individual with institutional habitus?  45 (domestically ranked in the top 30) and Sino–foreign cooperation institutions. Background information is in order here to explain China’s HE system, which is notable for its hierarchies (Zhang & Bray, 2017). The hierarchy exists between the prestigious national universities historically included in the 211 and 985 projects and the provincially affiliated universities. Such phenomena started to emerge in 1995, when the central government launched the 211 project to enhance teaching, research, and management quality through the cooperation of the central government, local governments, and the HEIs; furthermore, in 1998, realising the low international rankings of Chinese universities, the central government initiated the 985 project, hoping to establish world-class universities and prestigious research-oriented HEIs. By the conclusion of these national projects, there were only 39 universities in the 985 project, representing less than 3% of nearly 2,000 full-time state universities in China but hosting over 50% of the nation’s doctoral candidates and state key laboratories (Ying, 2011; MOE, 2012). Currently, the ‘Double First-Class’ Initiative (including the establishment of world-class universities and first-class disciplines) is being promoted, based on the projects 985 and 211 with a slight increase in the form of 25 new members. Considering the concentration of high-quality educational resources in such key universities, students compete fiercely to attain high scores in Gaokao, as the determining factor in university admission. As noted earlier, all of the 20 respondents obtained a Gaokao mark that would permit them to study in the elite universities in China. Yet, they chose to study in Sino–foreign HEIs. The two selected Sino–foreign universities in this research vary in many aspects: overseas collaborators (the US and UK, respectively) and Chinese partner universities, enrolment criteria, Chinese/ international student ratio, faculty composition, curricula/subject design, and graduate employment. Specifically, University A, located in one of the most prosperous areas in China, is a newly established joint-venture university by a world-renowned Chinese HEI and a US HEI. With strong support from the local government, both financially and administratively, and the requirement of the foreign partner, the undergraduate admission of University A has been collectively determined by the application materials including recommendation letter, personal statement and the high-school transcripts, on-site interaction with faculty members, and the results of Gaokao. University B, on the other hand, depends heavily on the results of Gaokao and maintains a relatively weak connection with its UK partners. Of all the 20 respondents, 12 were from University A and 8 were from University B. Each of them was interviewed individually for about 40–60 minutes, talking about their choice-making over HEIs, specifically on how they narrow down the choice from multiple opportunities–going abroad, traditional Chinese universities and Sino–foreign cooperation universities to the specific institutions they enrolled. For ethical consideration, all the excerpts reported here were conducted with pseudonyms. Consent was obtained before the interviews either orally or through email. All the interviews were audio-recorded, and working notes were taken during the interviews. The data analysis

46  Xiao Han follows the five key stages proposed by Ritchie and Liz (2002): after familiarising myself with the interview transcripts, the themes were identified for indexing; the thematic framework was then charted and mapped; the last step of interpretation was directed by the concepts of individual and institutional habitus, with special attention paid to how the interviewees demonstrate consciousness during the decision-making process.

Findings The empirical data demonstrates how conscious understanding of current situation and future plan intertwined with habitus in a relatively complicated way. On the one hand, students’ actions have indeed sometimes been directed by habitus as ‘more often practical sense’ (Bourdieu, 2000, 63–64) in ‘reproduc[ing] the existing practices and hence the existing structure of society’ (Elder-Vass, 2007, 327). With this habitus, participants considered investment in HE to be important to keep the advantages they currently enjoyed. On the other hand, their final decision was based on the conscious understanding of family status. For instance, Zhang Yun, who majored in interactive media arts, frankly stated: [in the context of China], we have to firstly choose whether to keep staying in the mainland for undergraduate education, physically. As if I want to spend my university time abroad, I need to give up Gaokao from Grade 2 in senior high school at the latest and turn to prepare Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) or IELTS … I do know some friends who start the preparation of English tests as early as in junior high school … So practically after Gaokao I have no chance to study overseas but you see, the TNHE offers such opportunities for me to accept relatively original English education, much similar to that of the overseas collaborator university … I could also apply for the exchange program to spend at most two years abroad. However, most of the respondents made the decision to pursue a bachelor’s degree within China when they were freshmen in senior high school. While they felt the overseas educational pursuit could place themselves in a more advantageous position, as ‘we could communicate with foreigners in fluent English and understand various cultures for broaden our horizons’, the parents may consider it as a little bit dangerous; as Wang Yang from an international business management major explained, ‘they [my parents] consider me as too young, lacking the capabilities and experience in self-caring … it may be better to study for postgraduate qualification overseas’. It was during the parent-influenced process of choice-making that a large proportion of the participants paid attention to Sino–foreign cooperation universities. These universities appeared as an alternative for such families to satisfy their desire to receive foreign education when their children were not

Matching individual with institutional habitus?  47 mature enough for independent living overseas. At the same time, these universities provided them the opportunities to avoid the ‘Chinese education trap’, according to Han Yun from electrical and electronic engineering. As she further illustrated: Before and after I joined this university, I constantly compare my university life with that of my friends and (high school) classmates … I really do not like the style in traditional universities as always under supervision of tutors … I need the freedom to allocate time. It is my time you know … I am a grown-up and there is no need to follow others’ dictation about when to sleep, which conference to participate or what kind of internship I should engage in … Besides the freedom for their body held out by TNHE, other interviewees mentioned the freedom for their mind. Nearly all of them appeared excited about the unblocked internet resources on campus. Zhang Li, who was majoring in urban planning and design, offered a more detailed explanation: I believe that I am capable in filtering multifarious sources of information … positive or negative … one of the determining factors motivating me to apply for Sino–foreign cooperation universities, frankly speaking, is the campus VPN as the enrolment brochure broadcasts … we are not that easy to be brainwashed … I understand the concern of the state, but again, I could discriminate different news … It is true that before making the final decision, all the interviewees and their families have undergone a very long process in information collection and analysis among Chinese and Sino–foreign cooperation universities and HEIs physically located overseas. The fast development of media/internet facilitates such searching process and offers more opportunities to collect information from various stakeholders such as enrolled students, employers of university graduates, and faculty members. Compared with information sessions held by the universities, the personal experience represents much more persuading power and elicits students’ introspection about their aspiration for further development. It is in this process, as most of the interviewees emphasised, that they became aware of ‘people like us’, those from families with relatively similar socioeconomic status and holding values alike to each other. Although there were some differences of detail, the interviewees were alike in all clearly articulating the advantages they enjoyed in TNHE and why they enjoyed these. For instance, Yang Kai from financial mathematics clearly stated: The benefits I enjoy in relatively ‘freely’ choosing both the university and the major I like are largely due to my family background … I have very little concern about the tuition fees and the employment prospects of different majors … it may be better to join a well-established

48  Xiao Han traditional Chinese university which has been recognised by the employers in the labour market, from the utilitarian perspective, but I, to some extent, do not need to pay priority to these factors … It is true that most of the students enrolled in Sino–foreign cooperation universities come from families with relatively advantaged social-economic status, as one interviewee clearly stated: ‘I have never encountered any student who are worried about the financial problem’. Actually not only the financial advantage, the respondents also demonstrate great consciousness in ‘self-awareness’, especially in matching what they desire and what the university could offer. For example, they are always quite concerned with the education quality, with Li Huan saying, for example: [One of the reasons why I choose TNHE] is the quality assurance system. For instance, in this university we comply with the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area. It is exactly the same criteria adopted here and in other European countries in the teaching content and examination requirements … Also the qualification of the faculty members matters. Wang Hu from computer science stated that ‘the faculty are recruited worldwide, most of whom obtained credentials from world-renowned HEIs’, and here he also demonstrated clear consciousness about the advantage brought by economic capital enjoyed by himself and the students in TNHE, by saying that ‘I believe the university could attract the first-class talents for the generous salary it could offer. I mean, when compared with other Chinese HEIs, here we could offer almost ten times …’ (Zhang Jing, international business management). Reay and her colleague, based on working-class students’ experience in elite universities, demonstrate how the sense of ‘self-awareness and a propensity for self-improvement’ have been incorporated into their habitus (1105). For the interviewees who come from well-off families, there is a relatively similar situation. They are quite aware about what the learning experience in TNHE could bring to them, for instance, to become ‘global competitive’ (Yi Hua, interactive media arts). Specifically, recognising ‘an international outlook is increasingly seen as a prerequisite for functioning effectively in a globalised economy’ (Pandit & Alderman, 2004, 127), the interviewees are quite open for various cultures, aiming to shape the ‘adaptive self’ (Zhao Kai, interactive media arts). Liu Li in English language and literature stated: I think the most precious lesson I learnt here is the tolerance to other cultures, and the people who hold different ideas … I could still remember the first two years when I started studying here. The Chinese culture emphasises on humility while western cultures pay more attention to innovation and individualism. When they coexist in one small campus, it is natural to have conflicts raised … but I learnt from the conflicts and I appreciated this experience.

Matching individual with institutional habitus?  49 This is not an easy process, as Zhao Kai frankly said: Before I submit the application materials to this university, I am quite acknowledged that it is a great challenge to me considering the difficulties of getting familiar with foreign culture and teaching styles … the biggest problem, is the requirement that I have to take a foreign roommate. I know it is good for English proficiency promotion but still a lot of conflicts happen in daily lives … sometimes you feel exhausted but no place to rest … It is something I do not like but I know the benefits it will bring. What makes consciousness in the decision-making process more salient and more crucial is the diversified HEIs. Not only among Chinese universities, TNHE, and physically overseas-located HEIs, such diversity demonstrates itself among Sino–foreign cooperation universities themselves. Although the well-off families achieve the consensus on investing heavily in international HE to preserve their social status, they still go through the repetitive matching process between such habitus and what an institution could offer. For instance, when talking about how to choose among Universities A and B, Li Yang from interactive media arts stated: The reason why I place University A before B is mainly because A has the major I am interested. It is a definitely new trans-disciplinary attempt, you know, in combining media studies with computer skills … I am not sure the employment perspective in China as it is a new field, but it represents the most cutting-edge development worldwide. Is that what we desire to obtain from international education study experience? Zhang Hua from electrical engineering offered another example to illustrate such conscious selection, saying: University A is a relatively new institution and it seems to encourage employment directly after graduation … but I treat TNHE more like a springboard and hopefully to continue my postgraduate study physically overseas … it seems that in University B I could have better opportunities in application as most of the former graduates made the same decision … they (the students and faculty members) know more about how to do this … While such comparison and selection definitely happen before the settlement of final decision, or in Bourdieu’s words, moving into another new field, the conscious comparison (and maybe rational calculation) may not be considered as the privilege exclusive held by scientists (Yang, 2013).

50  Xiao Han

Discussion and conclusion When interviewees in this study stated their decisions in choosing Sino–foreign universities because of the curricula offered or, even more specifically, the faculty members and their academic interests over the traditionally high-ranking Chinese universities where they could get admission, they did express clear self-analysis of (dis)advantages they suffered/enjoyed, their future plans, and how the institutions could facilitate such aspiration. From the prism of Bourdieu, this may because in the modern society individuals are always facing ‘the time of crisis’ (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992, 131), with full uncertainty and risk (Gidden, 1991). While this study highlights self-awareness during the decision-making process, it only represents a humble attempt in articulating Bourdieu’s concept in this fast-developing world. Further research on how to combine rationality and habitus may be able to bring new insights on explaining human behaviours.

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Matching individual with institutional habitus?  51 Giddens, A. 1991. Modernity and self-identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Han, X. 2016. Transnational higher education in China: Development trends, institutional autonomy, Student learning and policy implication. PhD diss., Hong Kong: The Education University of Hong Kong. Harker, R. 2000. On reproduction, habitus and education. Vol. II of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by D. Robbins. London: Sage. Hoy, D. 1999. Critical resistance: Foucault and Bourdieu. In Perspectives on embodiment: The intersections of nature and culture, edited by G. Weiss, and H. F. Haber. London: Routledge. Huang, F. 2007. Internationalization of higher education in the developing and emerging countries: A focus on transnational higher education in Asia. Journal of Studies in International Education 11 (3–4): 421–432. Huang, F. 2010. Transnational higher education in Japan and China: A comparative study. In Crossing borders in East Asian higher education, edited by D.W. Chapman, W. K. Cummings, and G.A. Postiglione. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong. Jenkins, R. 1992. Pierre Bourdieu. London: Routledge. Knight, J., and J. McNamara. 2017. Transnational education: A classification framework and data collection guidelines for international programme and provider mobility (IPPM). The British Council and the German Academic exchange service. Retrieved from https://www.britishcouncil.org/sites/default/files/tne_ classification_framework-final.pdf Lash, S. 1993. Reflexive modernization: The aesthetic dimension. Theory, Culture and Society 10: 1–23. Lim, L. 2016. Globalization, the strong state and education policy: The politics of policy in Asia. Journal of Education Policy 31 (6): 711–726. Marginson, S. 2006. Dynamics of national and global competition in higher education. Higher Education 52 (1):1–39. Mills, C. 2008. Reproduction and transformation of inequalities in schooling: The transformative potential of the theoretical constructs of Bourdieu. British Journal of Sociology of Education 29 (1), 79–89. Ministry of Education (MOE). 2012. The Notice on Reinforcing Administration over TNHE (in Chinese). Retrieved from http://www.MoE.gov.cn/publicfiles/ business/htmlfiles/MoE/s6491/201204/xxgk_133915.html MOE. 2020. The Information Platform of Chinese-foreign Cooperation in Running Schools. Retrieved from http://www.crs.jsj.edu.cn/index.php/default/index Mu, G. M., and Dooley, K. 2015. Coming into an inheritance: Family support and Chinese Heritage Language learning. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 18 (4): 501–515. https://doi.org/10.1080/13670050.2014.9 28258 Nash, R. 1990. Bourdieu on education and social and cultural reproduction. British Journal of Sociology of Education 11 (4): 431–447. Ostrow, J. 2000. Culture as a fundamental dimension of experience: A discussion of Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of human habitus. Vol. I of Pierre Bourdieu, edited by D. Robbins. London: Sage. Pandit, K., and Alderman, D. 2004. Border crossings in the classroom: The international student interview as a strategy for promoting intercultural understanding. Journal of Geography 103 (3): 127–136. Reay, D. 1998a. Class work. London: UCL Press.

52  Xiao Han Reay, D. 1998b. ‘Always Knowing’ and ‘Never Being Sure’: Familial and institutional habituses and higher education choice. Journal of Education Policy 13 (4): 519– 529. doi:10.1080/0268093980130405. Ritchie, J., and S. Liz. (2002). Qualitative data analysis for applied policy research. In The qualitative research companion, edited by A. M. Huberman and B. M. Miles (pp. 305–329). Sage. Ritchie, J., J. Lewis, C. M. Nicholls, and R. Ormston, eds. 2013. Qualitative research practice: A guide for social science students and researchers. Sage. Sweetman, P. 2003. Twenty-first century dis-ease? Habitual reflexivity or the reflexive habitus. The Sociological Review 51 (4): 528–549. UNESCO. 2021. Global flow of Tertiary-level students. Retrieved from http://data. uis.unesco.org/ UNESCO and Council of Europe. 2001. The UNESCO-CEPES/ council of Europe code of good practice for the provision of transnational education. Paris: UNESCO. Wagner, P. 1994. A sociology of modernity: Liberty and discipline. London: Routledge. Wang, X. 2020. Capital, habitus, and education in contemporary China: Understanding motivations of middle-class families in pursuing studying abroad in the United States. Educational Philosophy and Theory 52 (12): 1314–1328. Warde, A. 1994. Consumption, identity-formation and uncertainty. Sociology 28 (4): 877–898. Yang, Y. 2013. Bourdieu, practice and change: Beyond the criticism of determinism. Educational Philosophy and Theory 46 (14): 1522–1540. Ying, C. 2011. A reflection on the effects of the 985 project. Chinese Education & Society 44 (5): 19–30. Zhang, W., and M. Bray. 2017. Micro-neoliberalism in China: Public-private interactions at the confluence of mainstream and shadow education. Journal of Education Policy 32 (1): 63–81.

4 Desire for cosmopolitanism and entrepreneurialism in the age of de-globalisation Xin Wang and Yingling Liu

Introduction The number of Chinese students who studied overseas in 2018 reached 662,100, according to China’s Ministry of Education (China Daily, 2019). The United States has been the top destination for Chinese students to study abroad. In the academic year of 2018–2019, there were 369,548 Chinese students enrolled at American universities, compared to only 500 students accepted to study in the United States in 1979 at the initial stage of the education exchange agreement as a part of the renormalisation of diplomatic ties between the United States and China (IIE, 2020; Maeroff, 1978). In 2018–2019, Chinese students and their families contribute USD$13 billion to the US economy.1 Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant crises, a service industry was growing in China to help students to accomplish their dreams to study abroad. This industry includes test preparatory schools; intermediary agencies helping students apply for schools and universities overseas; and companies for managing studying abroad logistics, visas, and immigration services. Many of these services are tailored for affluent families aspiring to international education for their children. This chapter takes a sociological approach to situating the phenomenon of studying abroad within social class discourse to understand how middle-class Chinese families view education in the US as a way of pursuing their global mobility and social mobility. It uses Bourdieu’s theoretical framework to examine what factors affect Chinese parents’ and students’ decision to study in the US. Before we report on the empirical study, we portray some of the dispositions of the Chinese middle class, with a particular focus on their globality, cosmopolitanism, and entrepreneurialism, all of which are resonant with China’s 素质 (suzhi, quality) education.

China’s middle class and its globality As an economic and social force in contemporary China, the middle class represents a wide range of professions, including the majority of intermediate-level business professionals and managers, private business owners, so-called white collar office workers, a public servant stratum, entrepreneurs, DOI: 10.4324/9781003326694-5

54  Xin Wang and Yingling Liu and intellectuals. Different from rural residents, migrant workers, the urban working class, and laid-off laborers, the middle class possesses a relatively high level of education, professional skills, and income. This gives them an advantage in acquiring other social, economic, cultural, and political capital (Lu, 2004). Defining China’s middle class remains contested and confusing. Pierre Bourdieu’s tripartite conceptualisation of habitus, capital, and field offers a way to discuss class through the practices of everyday life. For Bourdieu, classes are symbolic and relational constructs, composed of ‘sets of agents who occupy similar positions and who … have every chance of having similar dispositions and interests, and thus of producing similar practices’ (Bourdieu, 1991, 231). For Bourdieu, class processes are captured in the everyday decisions and actions of individuals. Bourdieu’s view on classes enables us to see how individuals, in this case China’s middle class, are actively producing practices to reproduce their positions in social space through their activities in fields such as education and the economy. For Bourdieu, class is not something people have; rather class is ‘something to be done’ (Bourdieu, 1996, 21). Scholars have argued that the educational practices of the middle class have provided a key site for class relations to be played out (Ball, 2003). This article focuses on the educational dispositions of China’s middle class for studying abroad in the US and examines their educational practices and motivations by turning to Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas on education, capital, and habitus. It should be acknowledged, however, that educational dispositions and motivations for studying abroad may morph into a different pattern in the post-COVID era—a point to which we turn at the end of the chapter. Scholars have noted that a growing number of people within China’s middle class have an ambition to become a part of the global middle class (Gertz & Kharas, 2010; Kharas, 2017; Zhou, 2008). According to Pew Research Center, the global middle class refers to people with an annual income between $10,000 to $100,000 per person. About 25 percent of the global middle class lives in an advanced economy; around two-fifths lives in Brazil, Russia, India, and China (the BRIC countries), while the rest live in other developing nations.2 Koo (2016) argues that the global middle class is defined by their consumption patterns and social identity more than by mere income status. Members of this class are affluent and globally oriented in their lifestyle and mobility patterns (Koo, 2016). The global middle class usually enjoys the western style of life, speaks English, feels comfortable in foreign cultures, and exhibits a global orientation in their work and leisure. China’s integration into the global market and economy has provided members of the middle class with access to global commodities and services, including education, travel, media, and technology. TV programs, films, and books on global travels; study abroad; and global events have stimulated people’s imaginations about the possibilities and opportunities to be connected with the rest of the world. China’s middle class has embraced globalisation and aspired to live in globalised society on the basis of its consumption patterns and lifestyle aspiration. Members of this class have demonstrated growing interest in

Desire for cosmopolitanism and entrepreneurialism  55 traveling overseas and consuming transnational commodities, materials, and services. Such an aspiration to become part of the global middle class has shaped and formed the globalist views and outlooks of the Chinese middle class (Wang, 2015). Books on education at American Ivy League universities have created and promoted global imaginaries in China for global learning, living, and connectivity.3 The disposition for studying abroad of China’s middle class represents its globalist imaginaries and enables the formation of middle-class subjectivity and identification through global education.

Globality and cosmopolitanism The strong sense of ‘globality’ of China’s middle class has come to the fore in the affairs of their engagement and encounters in cross-cultural and transnational exchanges. Globality represents a set of cosmopolitan practices and outlooks, centred around global experiences and encounters (Robertson and Inglis, 2004). Cosmopolitanism is often defined as an orientation of openness to foreign others and cultures and recognised as a desirable quality needed in a globalised world (Calcutt et al., 2009; Saito, 2011; Szerszynski and Urry, 2006). These various understandings of cosmopolitanism can be conceptualised through Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, that is, embodied dispositions valued as cultural capital (1983, p. 243) in a globalised world. In these terms, cosmopolitanism includes both dispositions of openness to foreign others and cultures and competencies to enact such openness with ease. In addition, openness to foreign cultures can manifest in the consumption and appreciation of foreign cultural products (Molz, 2012). Cosmopolitanism has become a recognisable area of sociological inquiry (Delanty, 2012). It is often related to social stratification and perceived as more common for the middle and upper class than other groups (Peterson & Kern, 1996). Studies indicate that children of families with higher socioeconomic statuses are more disposed to pursue cosmopolitanism as cultural capital because their parents are more likely to possess cosmopolitan openness to foreign others and cultures through extensive international travels and experiences of studying or living abroad (Mau et al., 2008; Olofsson & Öhman, 2007; Pichler, 2009). In Bourdieusian terms, cosmopolitanism can also be viewed as a form of cultural capital institutionalised through the national and global education systems when it takes the form of ‘academic qualification, a certificate of cultural competence’ (Bourdieu, 1983, 248), the absence of which elicits “social exclusion … from jobs and resources” (Lamont & Lareau, 1988, 156). For example, national educational systems and policies have increasingly emphasised English language education, global awareness and world citizenship, and competencies needed to function in a globalised society (Apple et al., 2005; Brown & Tannock, 2009). In China, the pursuit of national competitiveness in the global economy has seen the field of education urged to upscale skills and produce human capital. The Ministry of

56  Xin Wang and Yingling Liu Education issued the policy Action Plan for Invigorating Education towards the 21st Century in 1998.4 The Action Plan envisioned a form of cosmopolitanism as a desirable attribute of the person who needs to thrive in the global economy. At a global range, non-western parents and students often associate university degrees from the west with higher and wider symbolic value and cultural distinctions compared to degrees from a home institution (Igarashi & Saito, 2014). For example, Chinese parents and students validate and amplify the symbolic value of higher education in the US (Cebolla-Boado et al., 2018). A degree from an elite university is not just associated with high symbolic capital (Rivera, 2011). It also facilitates—via alumni organisations— career contacts among its graduates (Lee & Brinton, 1996), helps them to acquire further prestigious educational credentials, provides access to better jobs, and allows them to earn higher average incomes (Brewer et al., 1999). In other words, a degree from a highly reputed university can be converted into economic, social, and cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1984).

Self-development and suzhi education In addition to cosmopolitanism, another important disposition in contemporary Chinese middle-class families is the desire for self-entrepreneurialism or self-development. In the process of China’s privatisation, marketisation, and globalisation, the neoliberal logic associated with entrepreneurialism and self-enterprise has filtered into a market-oriented neoliberalist economy (Zhang & Ong, 2008). Even in the post-socialist Chinese society still largely controlled by the state, neoliberal principles and values of entrepreneurialism have freed up and empowered people ‘to be entrepreneurs of the self’ (Zhang & Ong, 2008, 4). Self-enterprising citizens tend to be self-responsible and self-reliable, and relentlessly pursue self-enrichment and self-development. Both entrepreneurialism and cosmopolitanism intersect with the Chinese notion and discourse of suzhi (素质) and suzhi education (素质教育). Since the 1980s, China has promoted the idea of suzhi (quality) in official rhetoric in order to improve the overall suzhi of the nation’s population. The suzhi project is often regarded as an important part of China’s quest for modernisation, economic development, and a strong position in the world. Yan (2003) states that suzhi discourse emphasises ‘self-development’ and stresses individual behaviour, self-improvement, virtues, and responsibility. It aims at producing a strong correlation between the suzhi (quality) of the population and the strengthening of the nation, between the ‘responsibilisation’ of the citizenry and the goal of an orderly and productive market society (Tomba, 2009). This discourse of developing reliable, responsible, self-disciplined, and ‘high-suzhi’ citizenry fits well with not only the nation’s ambition to become a strong modern nation but also the individual ambitions of the middle class to gain advantage in the labour market. At the state level, in June 1999, the Ministry of Education codified a formal policy on suzhi jiaoyu (education for quality) (Woronov, 2009). This national curriculum reform oriented to raising the suzhi of the citizenry to

Desire for cosmopolitanism and entrepreneurialism  57 enhance the competitiveness of the nation and the moral quality of its citizens. It calls for preparation and development of all-round younger generations with morality, innovation spirit and practical skills, and humanistic and scientific spirit (Ministry of Education, 2001). Suzhi education was intended to cultivate a generation of children who will embody and enact China’s modernity and power on the world stage (Woronov, 2009). At individual levels, the middle and upper classes’ desire for cosmopolitanism and self-development has coalesced with the national drive for suzhi education. Though the term is often inadequately defined, people often associate the term with social classes. For example, the terms of ‘high suzhi’ and ‘low suzhi’ are often used to distinguish people of different social classes. The term ‘lack of suzhi’ often connotes that someone is from a lower social class. In post-Mao China, the low quality of an individual is not only associated with the notion of an ‘uncultured’ social class such as that of peasants but also referred to lack of creativity or well-rounded personality (Kipnis, 2001, 11). In contrast, middle classness entails the possession of ‘high suzhi’. China’s middle class is often recognised as those highly mobile, educated, and professional groups that constitute the backbone of what have been described as the ‘advanced forces of production’ (xianjin shengchanli, 先进 生产力). It is therefore ‘natural’ for them to endorse the state discourse of suzhi (Tomba, 2009). As shown subsequently, findings of the current study suggest China’s middle class families have internalised the suzhi discourse when making choices of overseas education.

Research questions International education is highly desired by middle-class families primarily for nurturing cosmopolitanism and self-development (Wang, 2020). In this research, we are particularly interested in the middle class’s acquisition of cosmopolitanism and self-development through the pursuit of post-secondary education in the US. The study examines the socioeconomic factors, such as household income, parental educational levels, gender, and location of urban residency, that make a significant impact on middle-class motivations for studying abroad. It contributes to the discourse and inquiry on how cosmopolitanism and self-development as new elements of cultural capital help the middle class gain advantage in a globalised world (Kim, 2012; Weenink, 2007, 2008; Igarashi & Saito, 2014). The analytical framework of the study is constructed through Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, habitus, and field.

Research methodology Sampling This study draws both quantitative data and qualitative data from a study of 166 international undergraduate students from China enrolled at universities in Texas from 2017 to 2018. Texas has one of the largest higher

58  Xin Wang and Yingling Liu education systems in the US, with a total of 84,000 international students enrolled at 148 post-secondary colleges and universities in 2019 (IIE, 2020). The questionnaire consists of 26 questions, including demographic information of the students and their family, their motivations for pursuing education in the US, their decision-making process for studying in the US, their academic interests, and extracurricular activities. The questionnaire also includes open-ended questions about students’ expectations for studying in the US as well as their perceptions of their parents’ objectives and expectations for their study. The questionnaire was made available online in Chinese in the US summer of 2017, remaining open until January 2019. The link to the questionnaire was disseminated to Chinese students at universities in Texas. They self-reported their household income on the questionnaire. Their household income was then categorised into different income groups. The result of the study further confirms our assumption that studying abroad is a self-selecting process based on household income. Families that can afford their children’s education tend to be middle- and upper-income households. The respondents participated in the survey voluntarily without receiving any compensations. Research design The initial stage of analysis paid close attention to descriptive statistics for the quantitative data and the textual meaning of the qualitative data (Wang, 2020). It identified some frequently used key terms in order to understand their contextual use with respect to middle-class students’ motivations for studying in the US. It delineated ideals and values expressed by the students and their parents in regards to their decisions and motivations for pursuing their education in the US. Based on the findings from the initial qualitative research, we used quantitative analysis to see how socioeconomic factors affect students’ motivations. In this current research, we undertook two levels of coding of the key terms. The first level involved identifying the key terms that are most frequently used by the respondents to describe their own motivations for their studying in the US. The most frequently used terms included ‘receiving education’ (接受教育), ‘broadening horizons’ (开阔眼界), ‘establishing social network’ (建立社会关系), ‘improving and mastering English’ (提高 掌握英语), ‘improve suzhi (quality)’ (提高素质), ‘enriching individual living experience in the west’ (丰富个人在国外生活阅历), ‘accumulating work experience overseas’ (积累国外工作经验), ‘learning about the western cultures’(学习西方文化), ‘learning and acquiring knowledge in specific fields’ (获取专业知识), ‘getting a degree from American universities’ (获得 美国大学的文凭). Therefore, in the second level of coding, we grouped the key terms into six sub-categorical themes: education, horizon, network, self-­development, culture, and working experience. We created six variables to gauge the six themes above. If a participant’s responses contain higher education

Desire for cosmopolitanism and entrepreneurialism  59 (高等教育), knowledge (知识), skillset (技术), diploma (学位), famous schools (名牌学校), language (语言), we code the respondent 1 in receiving education. Otherwise, we code 0 in education. Likewise, if a participant’s response contains horizon (眼界), broaden the horizon (开阔眼界), see the world (看世界), we coded them 1 in horizon, otherwise 0. If a participant’s response contains network (人脉), friends-making (交友), socialising (社交), we coded them 1 in network. If a participant’s response contains self-development (自我提升), ability (能力), independence (独立), quality (素质), we coded them 1 in self-development. If a participant’s response contains experiencing and learning western culture (文化), value view (价值观), philosophy and ideology (思想), tradition (传统), society (社会), and environment (环境), we coded them 1 in cultural learning. If a participant’s response contains living (生活经历), work (工作), and professional experience (职业 经历), we coded them 1 in living and working experience. Some terms, such as learning and mastering a language, can be categorised under multiple areas; we choose to classify them under a closely related category. For learning English as a language, we choose to put it under education instead of cultural learning. The coding terms show that students’ objectives and motivations were concerned with either (1) self-entrepreneurship and self-development, or (2) cosmopolitanism through living and learning. Therefore, during the second level of coding, we also classified the terms as dependent variables under the categories of either cosmopolitanism or self-development. The terms related to cosmopolitanism include broadening horizons, building social network, learning about western or American culture, living and working experience in the west and the US. Terms for self-entrepreneurship include improving suzhi (quality), and receiving and completing post-secondary education. During the analytical phase, we used three independent variables, namely household income, parental educational levels, and locations of urban residency to predict the variance in the dependent variables. We used a logistic regression model to analyse how independent variables, such as parental educational levels and household income, predict the probability of students’ motivations to study abroad. We first ran six logistic regression models by using the six dependent variables of motivations identified previously: receiving higher education, broadening horizon, building network, improvement of self, learning about western culture, and living and working experience in the west (the US). We controlled for students’ gender and residential city in all models. We then ran two logistic regression models for two combined categories of variables, namely cosmopolitanism and self-entrepreneurship.

Findings and discussion The findings show that although respondents come from relatively affluent families, they vary in terms of their socioeconomic status (see Table 4.1). About 85 percent of students come from families with annual household

60  Xin Wang and Yingling Liu Table 4.1  Demographic information of the respondents Variables

Categories

Frequency

Percentage

1. Age

18–22 >22 Female Male Freshman Sophomore Junior Senior Parents Scholarship Combined sources 2 people 3 people 4 people > 4 people < 200,000 RMB 200K to 500K RMB > 500,000 RMB Tier 1 cities New tier 1 cities Tier 2 cities Tier 3 and 4 cities High school degree College degree Graduate degree

160 6 72 94 62 49 38 17 123 21 22

96.4 3.6 43.4 56.6 37.3 29.5 22.9 10.2 74.1 12.7 13.2

3 99 47 17 25 84

1.8 59.6 28.3 10.2 15 56.6

57 40 99 47 17

34.4 24.0 56.0 12.0 8.0

42

25.3

84 40

50.6 24.1

2. Gender 3. Classification

4. Primary source of financial support 5. Size of immediate family

6. Household income levels

7. Home city classification

8. Parental educational levels

income of more than 200,000 RMB (US$30,000), compared to the national average urban household income of 36,396 RMB in 2017 (see Table 4.1).5 The data shows that disparity exists in household income among respondents (Table 4.1), ranging from lower middle income, through middle income, to upper middle income. The parental educational levels also demonstrate differences of middle-class family backgrounds (Table 4.1), with about 75 ­percent of parents having completed a college degree or above. The remaining 25 percent of parents without a college degree could be considered as economic middle class given their relatively favourable financial situation. This is much higher than the 12.4 percent college education rate in China in 2015.6 The finding does not show a traditional urban–rural divide among respondents but shows about 80 percent of students come from the four tierone cities, namely Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, and the 15 new tier-one cities (see Table 4.1).7 These cities represent the most developed areas of the country with the most affluent and sophisticated consumers. Only 8 percent of respondents come from lower tier cities.

Desire for cosmopolitanism and entrepreneurialism  61 In order to examine the effect of socioeconomic factors, we then used logistic regression modelling to analyse how independent variables (socioeconomic factors, such as annual household income, parental educational levels) predict the probability of students’ motivations to study abroad. We ran six logistic regression models by using the six dependent variables of motivation identified previously (see Table 4.2). The finding shows that parental educational attainment is negatively associated with students’ attitudes about the education value of studying in the US. The significant coefficient of 0.37 indicates that compared to students whose parents do not have college degrees, students whose parents do have a (bachelor-level) college degree or higher have a 63% significant decrease of odds in favour of education as one of their primary motivations to studying abroad. Students whose parents have a high school diploma or lower level of education are more likely to view and cite education as their primary motivation for studying in the US than parents with post-secondary education and higher. They may view the pursuit of post-secondary education as an opportunity for continuing to attain what their parents missed out on or lack. Another important finding from the logistic regression is the significant relationship between family income and student’s attitude toward working and living experience as their motivation for studying in the US (see Table

Table 4.2  Odds ratios of logistic regressions on six variables of motivation VARIABLES Parental educational attainmenta Middle incomeb Higher incomeb Second tier cityc Constant Observations

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) Education Horizon Network SelfCulture Working and development learning experience 0.37* 0.93 0.30 1.46 1.87 1.48 (0.16) (0.36) (0.32) (0.64) (0.85) (0.61) 0.83 (0.53) 0.78 (0.51) 0.74 (0.36) 8.57** (6.42)

3.03 (1.81) 3.06 (1.89) 1.12 (0.44) 0.19* (0.13)

1.35 (1.12) 0.22 (0.27) 3.31 (3.56) 0.04* (0.05)

1.31 (0.81) 1.12 (0.73) 1.04 (0.48) 0.18* (0.13)

2.45 (1.97) 2.97 (2.43) 1.50 (0.78) 0.05** (0.05)

2.70* (1.32) 2.92* (1.52) 1.35 (0.54) 0.64 (0.36)

166

166

166

166

166

166

a Compare to below college degree b Compare to lower income c Compare to first tier city * p