The homecoming: an investigation into the effect that studying overseas had on Chinese postgraduates' life and work on their return to China

Abstract

For over a decade, 50,000 Chinese students have come to study each year in the UK, and the majority of them have since returned and settled back in China. An understanding of their return journey and how relevant their overseas learning is to their home life and work environment is a key to the re‐visioning of the internationalisation of higher education in the UK. Using in‐depth qualitative and narrative interviews carried out in China with eight Chinese postgraduates, this research explores these individuals' overall experience of homecoming, including what motivated them to return, their readjustments to life in China, and their perceptions of the impact of learning from studying overseas on their current life and work in China. This article looks particularly at the change in the graduates' sense of identity. The idea of intercultural identity is developed to explain the phenomenon of these returnees' emerging sense of self, one that is expansive and embraces sources of influence beyond the conventional cultural roots of the individual.

Keywords:

• Chinese returnees
• intercultural learning
• intercultural identity
• internationalisation of higher education
• overseas Chinese students
• UK higher education

Acknowledgements

I am most grateful for the reviewers' helpful and insightful comments and suggestions which I have taken on board and revised the article accordingly.

Notes

1. Lin's husband supported Lin's dream whole‐heartedly. During her pregnancy, Lin spent time preparing to become a mother while continuing to read books on her favourite subject. Recently, she had been employed part‐time by an NGO to carry out a small research project on education development in China.