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This paper draws attention to the current and possible effects of COVID-19 on the mobility trajectories of mainland Chinese students studying in Asia. By drawing on 35 biographical interviews, this paper focuses on their decision to study in Asian countries and regions. Particularly, it calls for more attention to Asia in global student mobilities and discusses whether COVID-19 has changed the position of Asia in the global landscape of student mobility. Results show that even if COVID-19 provides an opportunity for Asian universities to embrace more international students, Asia still lacks the capability to attract great numbers of them. Finally, the study argues that college students' choice of mobility destinations is shaped by their perception of the central-periphery structure of higher education, which is hard to be shaken by the pandemic.

Based on a conceptual framework of college impact, this article studies the impact of gender, graduation paths, family cultural capital and disciplines on undergraduates' self-reported learning outcomes of general education courses. The conclusions are as follows: female students report significantly higher learning outcomes of general education courses than male students; students who will enter the labor market after graduation report significantly higher learning outcomes of general education courses than students who will enter graduate school; students majoring in social sciences report higher learning outcomes of general education courses than students from other disciplines. Familial cultural capital has no significant influence on undergraduates' self-reported learning outcomes of general education courses. This article makes exploratory explanations of the above results from two perspectives.

China is an important player in global university ranking exercise. Nevertheless, existing studies have not adequately explored how the legitimacy of adopting university ranking outcomes has been chronologically established on Chinese soil. This paper attempts to fill this knowledge gap drawing on interviews with 37 stakeholders between 2003-2021 and an analysis of 2086 articles and reports published between 1984-2022 concerning university rankings. It first analyses the process of institutionalization of adopting university ranking outcomes in China, and discusses how the policy initiatives such as the '985 Project' in 1998 and the 'Double First-Class' Project in 2016 intertwined with university rankings over the time and provide opportunities for establishing such legitimacy. Secondly, it analyses the mechanisms through which university ranking outcomes gain legitimacy, and suggests that interactions among the stakeholders are one of the key mechanisms, whereby the central government plays a pivotal role in legitimizing adoption of international university ranking results. Furthermore, we argue that the universities have responded actively to adopting the ranking outcomes and use them as strategic tools to achieve their own goals. As such, this paper sheds a new light on the impact of university rankings in China and beyond.

The cross-border movement of people in higher education has been attracting scholarly attention for decades, but the definition of 'international academic mobility' bears ambiguities. This article reviews the literature on international academic mobility published in the journal "Higher Education" and beyond. By bridging the literature on international academic mobility from higher education studies and other disciplines, this article proposes to redefine international academic mobility, which highlights the integration of both international student mobility and international faculty mobility. Furthermore, this article outlines a new conceptual framework and research agenda, on the role of international academic mobility in the national, regional, and global knowledge systems. The framework highlights the relationship between international academic mobility and worldwide knowledge acquisition, production, transfer, circulation, networks, and the geopolitics of science. The article also proposes further methodologies for future research on international academic mobility.

As Asia's largest host country of international students, China's digital placemaking is impacting on international students' experience whilst studying and living in the country. This qualitative study addresses the issue of international students' transition to the digital environment in China. It draws on the theoretical perspectives of international students' digital journeys and miniaturised mobilities to inform thematic analysis of artefact-mediated student interviews and social media posts. Findings show that international students' digital journeys in China are characterised by three modes of digital adaptation including "digital shock," "digital border crossing" and "digital approachability." We argue that engaging in these modes of digital adaptation has reconstituted international students' subjectivity through empowering miniaturised mobility, but also a sense of digital in-betweenness as they operate between two different virtual worlds.

This article extends Bourdieu's convertibility of different forms of capital to understand the patterns of study abroad by elite graduates from Peking University, China. We draw upon empirical data from a first-hand survey study involving 1,417 graduates from Peking University. The statistical analyses suggest a pattern of the conversions from political and economic capital to cultural capital. Students from leading cadres and managerial families up the prestige game by actively pursuing study abroad opportunities, thus creating a 'hard currency' which combines elite status at home and abroad. This prestige game locks out even elite graduates without adequate economic resources. The formation of the new 'hard currency' reveals the inherent inconsistencies between the State's meritocracy discourse and its ambition of competing for global talents. We argue that the State's recent pursuit of global talents effectively excludes the working class and agricultural families without providing an inclusive and convincing meritocratic rationale.

This essay hopes to respond to Marginson and Yang's article through an examination of Hu Shih's relevant ideas with an objective to reveal China's unique understanding of universities, private goods and public goods during the Republic of China. Marginson and Yang argued that the discussion of 'public goods', 'private goods', and 'common goods' of higher education should not be separated from the political, social and cultural background in which higher education is embedded, and should be fully integrated with one society's definition of these terms. They pointed out that Chinese culture has its own unique understanding of the relation between individuals, universities, private goods and public goods. China has a long tradition of higher education, but 'modern' universities only appeared in China in late nineteenth century as a product of transplantation from the West. In the early days, there were rarely research activities at these universities. Chinese modern university that combined teaching and research took shape in the next 30 years since the Republic of China's founding in 1912. To unpack the Chinese understanding of universities, private goods and public goods, it is necessary to go back to this period (1912-1949) and analyse how the academic elite at that time understood these issues.

This article explores how trust affects the nature and characteristics of civic engagement among university students in contemporary China. We draw upon empirical evidence from in-depth individual interviews involving 68 students born between 1993 and 1999. Four different types of civic activities, including associational membership with the Chinese Communist Party as well as self-organised town-fellowship associations, volunteering and digital activism, are analysed in relation to bridging, bonding and/or obligatory relationships. Generalised trust amongst university students seems to be low, but they do exhibit unquestioned trust in the State. The organisations with which they associate either are top-down through the Communist Party, which is ideologically narrow and socially distant among the members, or promote geographical origin-based bonding rather than bridging relationships. Our findings add new depth to our understanding of the relationships between the dominant modalities of trust and the typical form of civic participation in Chinese universities. We also highlight the effects of increasing meritocratic competition and stress on performativity on the civic attitudes and behaviour of students. We argue that the hybrid of neoliberal individualism and Confucianism seems to be a perfect match to reconcile the absence of civic traditions and to validate civic consciousness among university youth.

The idea and practice of liberal education has been shaped in two forms in its historical development: the American traditions and British traditions. The idea of liberal education in the United States was borrowed from the United Kingdom and it was deeply influenced by British traditions in terms of highlighting classics and intellectual training. Over more than one hundred years from its Independence to the First World War, Americans began criticizing the aristocracy of British liberal education and gradually developed their own traditions, which were innovative in the idea, interpretation, courses and structure. In terms of the idea of liberal education, Americans highlighted the purpose of liberal education to train free citizens and to meet the demands of the civil society. In terms of the meaning of liberal education, American traditions tended to interpret "liberal" as "free" or "liberating" other than "gentlemanly" or "learned". In course design, British traditions rarely emphasized broader range and multi-disciplinary. In contrast, course design in American liberal education is more encyclopedic, valuing both liberal arts and sciences and later developing a liberal arts course model combining humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.

University leadership is considered as a key factor in university development. In a competitive environment, the role of university leadership has become increasingly important. At present, China is committed to building world-class universities, and university leadership is one of the key factors. Thus, what is the ideal university leadership in China's institutional environment? What professional qualities should university leaders have? This study investigates this issue with in-depth interviews of 14 '985 Project' university leaders. Finding shows that the definition of leadership by Chinese university leaders reflects a relatively strong moralistic orientation, where morality and ability are considered important. Furthermore, morality is often supposed to be more important than ability. In terms of competence, the definitions of leadership by Chinese university leaders and the literature on Western university leadership have some similarities and differences. Chinese universities are managed by the two systems of the party committee and the administration. The division of labour between the two systems is unclear and prone to conflicts. Therefore, the attitude and ability to cooperate has become an important attribute among university leaders.

Drawing on a unique dataset that combines returnees' survey data and their information on research publications extracted from the Scopus database, this study systematically examines whether and how international doctoral mentorship for Chinese students in European countries promotes research collaboration before and upon the return of these Chinese PhDs to China. The results show that a considerable proportion of European-trained Chinese PhD returnees had co-authorship with their supervisors during their PhD study, and most of them maintained this research partnership after returning to China. In addition to the co-authorship during doctoral study, some individual characteristics (e.g., gender and marital status) and organizational factors (e.g., country of doctoral study and current work unit) were also found to contribute to international research collaboration upon the return to China of these Chinese PhD holders. This study sheds new light on the mobility and research collaboration of international students and provides policy implications for promoting Sino-foreign student exchange and research collaboration.

As Chinese doctoral education has grown dramatically in the past four decades and developed into one of the largest doctoral education systems in the world, it has become one significant and integral part of the global doctoral education landscape. However, in the literature, there is a lack of both a comprehensive understanding of the Chinese doctoral education system and of generic frameworks for understanding doctoral education in a global context, with an emphasis on the underlying value systems. This may not only hamper the research on doctoral education in China but also affect international comparison and collaboration with Chinese doctoral education. Using the theory of institutional logics, this study tries to bridge the gap by identifying the complex value systems underlying the context of the Chinese doctoral education system, through a qualitative study mainly based on interview data and complemented by documentary data. The interview involves 135 participants, including 45 university academic leaders, 33 doctoral supervisors and 56 doctoral students from 17 research universities, as well as one government policy-maker. We found that the context of Chinese doctoral education system consists of multiple logics of state, profession, family, market and corporation. The special constellation of institutional logics has shaped the current Chinese doctoral education system as a state-led model but meanwhile incorporating family characteristics, market orientation and regulated academic autonomy. The study also showed that Chinese doctoral education has been developing in line with international academic norms and global marketization trends, and has also been shaped by China's socio-cultural tradition and the strong state regulation. In addition to the institutional logics analysis of the Chinese doctoral education system, this study paves the way for developing a novel framework for analysing doctoral education systems in other contexts and for comparative purposes.

International experience during doctoral training is critical in improving the quality of research training and establishing international networks. This study makes an original contribution to the understanding of the research partnership between visiting doctoral students and their supervisors. The current research draws upon empirical evidence from a survey, semi-structured interviews and CV analysis of Chinese visiting doctoral students sponsored by the China Scholarship Council. Findings confirm the good quality of supervision and solid research mentorship for the recipient students, who are not officially enrolled in international host universities. This study also highlights research collaboration and networking, which have long-term international research impact.

The study finds that after 30 years of effort, China has gradually built a doctoral education and quality assurance system with Chinese characteristics and realized its strategic goal of training high-level talents based in China. The survey and bibliometric analysis show that the relevant groups are satisfied with the training of Chinese PhD students. Doctoral dissertation topics are on the leading edge, referenced works are relatively complete, the writing is fairly standardized, the research results are comparatively innovative, and the overall Chinese PhD quality is gradually approaching international levels. PhD students have already become an important force in academic paper production. However, Chinese doctoral education still has numerous problems, such as serious loss of outstanding student sources, differences in the quality of doctoral dissertation from varying institutions, and remaining gaps in innovative ability compared with global higher education superpowers. Policies should be adopted to increase the strategic position of Chinese doctoral education, improve the doctoral education quality assurance system, and strengthen the capability of doctoral education to adapt to socioeconomic development. [This article was translated by Jeff Keller.]

Data from a PhD quality survey and related interview materials are used to analyze the preferences of Chinese PhD students for different supervision methods, and the differences between disciplines of the satisfaction of PhD students under single-advisor model and joint supervision model toward their academic supervision are compared. The research results show that most PhD students, especially engineering PhD students, are generally inclined to choose a joint supervision model. However, there are no significant differences in the satisfaction toward the two supervision models with the exception of medical PhD students. Considering that in some disciplines even though some PhD students are under single-advisor supervision in name, they actually are under joint advisor supervision, the regression results may underestimate the actual results of the joint supervision. Furthermore, the study also found that if the supervision-model PhD students prefer matches the actual supervision model, their satisfaction is also higher. Looking at the education development trends for international graduate students and student expectations, China should further promote joint supervision systems and also maintaining the responsibilities of head advisors. [This article was translated by Jeff Keller.]

Of all the levels of education, doctoral education is the most internationalised. By selecting one key indicator (the proportion of international students among a country's doctorate recipients), the article presents an analysis of PhD students' international mobility. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s, many barriers to the international mobility of PhD students were removed, leading to an even larger flow of students. From 2000 to 2012, the international mobility of PhD students reached a new peak, with a significant increase in the percentage going to Japan, France, Canada, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia. Nowadays, China has become the largest source of international doctoral students. In that process, a number of excellent students go abroad to study for foreign doctoral degrees. On one hand, the loss of excellent students is harmful to China's PhD training system, but on the other hand, it is a great opportunity for China to change brain drain into brain gain by making full use of the knowledge diaspora scattered around the world.

A growing practice of engaging students as partners (SaP) has been conducted to nurture values-based pedagogical relationships. Yet, SaP is contested with little known about how Chinese students understand their relationships with teachers in a sector shifting toward student-centred approaches. To advance the collective understanding of SaP practices in China, we interviewed 30 postgraduate students who reflected on their learner-teacher relationships as undergraduate and postgraduate students while considering the possibilities of SaP practices. While some SaP practices emerged, students evoked the language of family to describe meaningful interactions with teachers. They raised pragmatic (large student numbers), epistemological (knowledge accumulation before knowledge construction), and cultural (hierarchical construct of power and authority) concerns about the possibilities of pedagogical partnerships. We argue that the willingness of university communities to raise questions about assumed learner-teacher hierarchy, power dynamics and identities will shape how student-centred and SaP practices unfold in Chinese universities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cross-border movement of people in higher education has been attracting scholarly attention for decades, but the definition of 'international academic mobility' bears ambiguities. This article reviews the literature on international academic mobility published in the journal Higher Education and beyond. By bridging the literature on international academic mobility from higher education studies and other disciplines, this article proposes to redefine international academic mobility, which highlights the integration of both international student mobility and international faculty mobility. Furthermore, this article outlines a new conceptual framework and research agenda, on the role of international academic mobility in the national, regional, and global knowledge systems. The framework highlights the relationship between international academic mobility and worldwide knowledge acquisition, production, transfer, circulation, networks, and the geopolitics of science. The article also proposes further methodologies for future research on international academic mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay hopes to respond to Marginson and Yang's article through an examination of Hu Shih's relevant ideas with an objective to reveal China's unique understanding of universities, private goods and public goods during the Republic of China. Marginson and Yang argued that the discussion of 'public goods', 'private goods', and 'common goods' of higher education should not be separated from the political, social and cultural background in which higher education is embedded, and should be fully integrated with one society's definition of these terms. They pointed out that Chinese culture has its own unique understanding of the relation between individuals, universities, private goods and public goods. China has a long tradition of higher education, but 'modern' universities only appeared in China in late nineteenth century as a product of transplantation from the West. In the early days, there were rarely research activities at these universities. Chinese modern university that combined teaching and research took shape in the next 30 years since the Republic of China's founding in 1912. To unpack the Chinese understanding of universities, private goods and public goods, it is necessary to go back to this period (1912–1949) and analyse how the academic elite at that time understood these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing research capacity and rise of Chinese universities in global rankings, the number of Chinese students going abroad to pursue doctorate degrees is still large. Previous studies argue that a series of pull–push factors at systemic and individual levels affect the motivation and outbound mobility of students. However, the factors at the institutional level and the changing landscape of Chinese higher education have been rarely examined. To fill this gap, this study interviewed 31 graduates from the chemistry department of an elite university in China, which ranks among the top universities in the world. The insights offered in this study are based on the concepts of institutional habitus and career scripts in academic career research and highlight the motivations of students to go abroad for doctoral education. One of the arguments of this article is that students' motivation to go abroad is influenced by organisational factors (that is, institutional habitus) and career scripts, which are partly shaped by central government policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do Chinese elite graduates choose to study abroad? How do they construct boundaries of distinction? We first conceptualise distinction-making as a complex social process which connects individual agency and educational processes with organisational intermediaries. We use a case study of Peking University and draw upon original data consisting of 36 individual interviews, one-month documentation of a poster culture and observational data from eleven study-abroad events. We find a pattern of 'building triple halos', which encompasses dual processes of educational emulation and (mis-)recognition. By not recognising those from outside their 'halos' (i.e., elite schools, PKU and the Ivy League scholarship-holders), these elites signal superiority by gradually narrowing the circle of 'us' and excluding aspirational 'others'. This individual level of distinction-making is coordinated with collective 'consensus', and organisational intermediaries in seeking, justifying, and (mis-)recognising studying abroad as a pathway to distinction. We further reveal the complexity of the 'identities' of the PKU elites as both possessors and challengers of distinction. During this process, the agents of the study-abroad industry not only consolidate their client base in PKU but also pursue a new business route of accommodating the challengers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]