International students in China: regional distribution and macro-influencing factors

ABSTRACT

As a key player in intellectual migration, international students are affected by various micro-, meso- and macro-level factors when making their study destination choice. Existing literature on this topic mostly adopts a qualitative approach and limits to investigations of country choice. By applying exploratory spatial data analysis and spatial econometric modelling on a set of panel data, this study instead focuses on macro-level analyses of international students’ regional destination choice in China. First, we found that the spatial distribution of international students in China have changed over the course of our 1999–2018 study period. International students primarily concentrate in and/or around economic hubs or intellectual gateways although increase in semi-intellectual gateways are also observed. Second, international students in China has spatial effects and their study area choice is significantly affected by the number of international students studying there in the past, the quality of higher education, the availability of public infrastructure, touristic attractiveness, and the presence of policy incentives. These factors exercise greater influence on degree-seeking than non-degree-seeking students. Together, they represent persistence effect, learning and living environment effect, and spatial diffusion effect.

KEYWORDS:

• Intellectual migration
• international student mobility
• spatial distribution
• China

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The study area of this paper includes 31 provincial-level administrative regions in Mainland China. Hong Kong SAR, Macao SAR and Taiwan are not included in the analysis.

2 Chinese government scholarship (中国政府奖学金) refers to the scholarship to foreign students provided by Ministry of Education. MoE entrusts China Scholarship Council (CSC) to be responsible for the recruitment of Chinese government scholarship students and the management of daily affairs. In other words, Chinese government scholarship is a national-level scholarship provided by central government, and the data do not include scholarships provided by local governments and educational institutions.

3 This Yearbook only provides monitoring data of key cities, and most of them are capital city of a province.

4 Cluster maps for degree-seeking and non-degree-seeking students show similar features.

5 $\mathrm{C}\mathrm{V}=\sigma /\overline{X}$, of which $\sigma$ is the standard deviation of dataset $X$ and $\overline{X}$ is the mean. A higher CV indicates a larger regional disparity of international students’ distribution.

Additional information

Funding

A grant from the National Social Science Fund of China (21BJL097) funded the research project that this article is based upon.