Political identities of Chinese international students: Patterns and change in transnational space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Amid the ongoing international tensions surrounding China, Chinese international students (CISs) in Western countries have become targets of political suspicion. Against discriminatory voices that make sweeping generalisations about CISs, this research argues that their political identities are in fact diverse and malleable. Using theories of postmodernism and transnationalism, this study applies thematic analysis and discourse analysis to interviews with 28 CISs, yielding four major findings. First, it identifies three distinct patterns of political identity: Chinese nationalists who endorse conservative politics in the West; advocates of liberal democracy; and transnational neoliberals who avoid political participation. Second, it argues that CISs undergo identity changes depending on a range of individual and social characteristics. Among these characteristics, third, it highlights the role of socioeconomic status in shaping the political identities of CISs, and in so doing, reflects on the inadequacy of race and nationality as identity markers. Fourth, it suggests that the political identities of CISs are transnationally hinged on both China and the host countries. On the practical front, the study may inform professions working with CISs such as education and policymaking. Theoretically, it suggests that the political identities of CISs are heterogenous, impressionable and transnationally contingent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".