Student
- Wenjing Dou, Communication
Faculty
- Dr. Tu Lan, Geography
- Dr. Lin Zhang, Communication
Overview
The largest international student group (317,299 or 34.7%) in the US, the Chinese international students have recently been caught up in the crossfire of escalating geopolitical tensions between the US and China, provoking intense policy debate in American society (Fu, 2021). The conservative right advocated for restricting the number of student visas issued to the Chinese and barring them from STEM disciplines, stoking the fear that Chinese students and researchers are helping China steal technologies from the US (Pompeo, 2020; Sternlicht, 2020). The multicultural left, while decrying the right's blatant xenophobia, have also easily slided into a pecuniary argument to justify enrollment from China, emphasizing economic rationales and the fact that tuition money from Chinese students help public universities mitigate reduced state appropriations (NAFSA, 2020; Redden, 2020). Whether for or against the presence of Chinese international students, mainstream discourse in the US tends to emphasize economic rationales while downplaying their political and cultural agency.
The exclusion of Chinese international students from discussions of race and racialization is particularly problematic at a time when they have become a main target of anti-Asian racism in the US.During the COVID-19 pandemic, overt racism against Asian students, stoked by former President Trump’s casual pejoratives like “Kung Flu” and “Chinese Virus'', was widely reported on American campuses (Fan et al., 2020). And yet, Chinese student activists are often marginalized by the local anti-racist movements and receive little media coverage (Huang, 2021; Zhao, 2021). The increasingly hostile environment has led many Chinese students and scholars to leave and more to consider leaving the US, which prompted concerns about a reversed “brain drain” from the US to China and elsewhere (Silver, 2020). In the academic year of 2020-21, the total number of Chinese international students enrolled in American universities declined by 14.8%, the biggest drop in recent decades (Fu, 2021).
The proposed research addresses this missing link between international students and racial politics in the US by foregrounding the cultural agency of Chinese students and examining their international mobility as deeply embedded in the economic structure and cultural fabric of global racial capitalism. Building on our ongoing research about the history of racialization of Chinese international students in the US and the transnational pathway programs recruiting Chinese international students for Western universities, we ask: How do Chinese international students navigate the surging tides of anti-Asian racism in the US amid escalating US-China geopolitical tensions? How are their experiences informed by the history of Asian racialization in the US? What could university administrators, faculty, and international education industry practitioners do to go beyond economic rationalities and make the educational system more just for Chinese international students?
About Tu Lan, Lin Zhang,& Wenjing Dou
The two principal investigators Tu Lan (Geography) and Lin Zhang (Communication) have done extensive research in the field of international education focusing on Chinese students in the US. Between 2017 and 2020, funded by COLA’s Murkland Interdisciplinary Scholar Teams Program, they conducted interviews and collected documents to study the history and latest development of the international education industry. Their article studying the history of Chinese students in the US has received a revise-and-resubmit and is currently under review at Annals of American Association of Geographers, and they are revising a second article focusing on international pathway programs to be submitted to Studies in Higher Education. The proposed research builds on our ongoing research but takes a more student-centered, community-based, and public-facing approach.
Their student collaborator Wenjing Dou is a senior Communication major. In the spring of 2020 when the pandemic broke out in the US and courses moved online, she made the decision to go back to China temporarily. Since then, she has been stranded in China due to travel restrictions and the suspension of student visa applications at US consulates in China. As a result, she had to take a gap year for 2020-21 and has been doing an internship at a local media outlet. Her personal experiences of navigating the pandemic and anti-Asian racism in the US is an important source of motivation for participating in this research project. She hopes to use this opportunity to hone her research skills, better understand and support her fellow international students, and stay connected to the UNH community as she makes the transition back to the Durham campus in the spring and summer of 2022.
