Since China proposed its “Belt and Road Initiative” in 2013 to boost its influence on international affairs and “cultivate international contacts who are friendly toward China”, the number of foreign students in China has surge exponentially. Yet global political changes have added tensions and challenges to the education of international students. This book is one of the first works to discuss the educational experiences of international students in China. Using survey research and qualitative studies to study participants in degree-bearing and language programmes at regular universities and Sino-foreign universities located in different parts of the country, the book covers a variety of topics across education, including international students’ intercultural experience, teacher–student classroom interaction, learning and teaching Chinese as a foreign language, academic adaptation and identity formation in higher educational contexts. This book is essential for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers of international student education in China. It can also benefit prospective international students considering pursuing higher education in China.

Ban Wang traces the shifting concept of the Chinese state from the late nineteenth century to the present, showing how the Confucian notion of tianxia--"all under heaven"--influences China's dedication to contributing to and exchanging with a common world.

Over the past decade, a wave of Chinese international undergraduate students—mostly self-funded—has swept across American higher education. From 2005 to 2015, undergraduate enrollment from China rose from under 10,000 to over 135,000. This privileged yet diverse group of young people from a changing China must navigate the complications and confusions of their formative years while bridging the two most powerful countries in the world. How do these students come to study in the United States? What does this experience mean to them? What does American higher education need to know and do in order to continue attracting these students and to provide sufficient support for them? In Ambitious and Anxious, the sociologist Yingyi Ma offers a multifaceted analysis of this new wave of Chinese students based on research in both Chinese high schools and American higher-education institutions. Ma argues that these students’ experiences embody the duality of ambition and anxiety that arises from transformative social changes in China. These students and their families have the ambition to navigate two very different educational systems and societies. Yet the intricacy and pressure of these systems generate a great deal of anxiety, from applying to colleges before arriving, to studying and socializing on campus, and to looking ahead upon graduation. Ambitious and Anxious also considers policy implications for American colleges and universities, including recruitment, student experiences, faculty support, and career services.

In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women’s motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.

There is a World Heritage Craze in China. China claims to have the longest continuous civilization in the world and is seeking recognition from UNESCO. This book explores three dimensions of the UNESCO World Heritage initiative with particular relevance for China: the universal agenda, the national practices, and the local responses. With a sociological lens, this book offers comprehensive insights into World Heritage, as well as China’s deep social, cultural, and political structures.

This book picks up where author Vanessa Fong left off in Only Hope: Coming of Age under China's One-Child Policy (Stanford, 2004), and continues by telling the stories of the Chinese youth who left China in their teens and 20s to study in Australia, Europe, Japan, New Zealand, North America, or Singapore. Fong examines the expectations and experiences of Chinese students who go abroad in search of opportunity, and the factors that cause some to return to China and others to stay abroad.

As the number of international students in Chinese higher education increases steadily, this volume is one of the first to focus on their many and varied experiences. With contributions focusing on such topics as intercultural adaptation, soft power and interculturality, language learning strategies and the intercultural, and transformations in perspective, this volume provides the reader with a broad overview of the latest advances in the field of interculturality and study abroad. While the book will appeal to a global audience of researchers, practitioners and students with an interest in Chinese higher education, it will also be of interest to all those who remain intrigued by conceptual and methodological issues of interculturality.