Comfortably "Western": How Chinese International Students Imagine Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: How do students from Mainland China select Canada for their education? Beyond the customary push-and-pull explanations, we introduce a framework of comparative imaginaries that describes how students' rational strategies are imbued with the imaginaries of their host societies and migration aspirations. Based on longitudinal interviews with 36 Chinese postsecondary students in Vancouver, we find that these students imagine Canada as a safe alternative to the United States (perceived as the best country for higher education): Western, offering quality education, ethnically inclusive, and with a less politically fraught relationship with China. The students imagine Chineseness as recognized in Vancouver's mainstream society (not relegated to ethnic enclaves), allowing them to form Chinese-exclusive networks sprinkled with Western elements. The easy path to permanent residency and citizenship that Canada offers, compared with that of the United States, is also conducive to students' imagination of flexible citizenship. Our study illuminates how social imaginaries are intertwined with practical concerns to shape Chinese students' mobility. Résumé: Comment les étudiants de Chine continentale choisissent-ils le Canada pour leurs études? Au-delà des explications habituelles de poussée et de traction, nous introduisons un cadre d'imaginaires comparatifs qui décrit comment les stratégies rationnelles des étudiants sont imprégnées des imaginaires de leurs sociétés d'accueil et de leurs aspirations migratoires. Basés sur des entretiens longitudinaux avec 36 étudiants chinois du postsecondaire à Vancouver, nous constatons que ces étudiants imaginent le Canada comme une alternative sûre aux États-Unis (perçus comme le meilleur pays pour l'enseignement supérieur) : occidental, offrant une éducation de qualité, inclusif sur le plan ethnique et avec des relations politiques moins tendues avec la Chine. Les étudiants imaginent la chinoisité comme reconnue dans la société mainstream de Vancouver (et non reléguée dans des enclaves ethniques), ce qui leur permet de former des réseaux exclusivement occidentaux. Le chemin facile vers la résidence permanente et la citoyenneté que le Canada offre, comparé à celui des États-Unis, favorise également l'imagination de la citoyenneté flexible par les étudiants. Notre étude éclaire la manière dont les imaginaires sociaux sont entrelacés avec les préoccupations pratiques pour façonner la mobilité des étudiants chinois.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".