Chinese Citizen or Global Citizen? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism at an International School in Beijing

Abstract

International education is a popular educational strategy among middle-class and affluent families in China and is pursued at increasingly younger ages. Yet, we do not know the implications of this family strategy for the identities and worldviews of privileged Chinese youth and what this may mean for the future of the Chinese nation-state, given the important role of the middle and affluent classes in the trajectory of a nation. To investigate this question, the current study draws on data collected at two high schools that cater to socioeconomically advantaged Chinese families: an international school in Beijing and a standard curriculum school in neighboring Tianjin. Despite unusually high levels of international travel and contact with non-Chinese groups, students at the international school were markedly similar to their counterparts at the standard curriculum school in identities and worldviews. Overall, findings suggest that families that engage with international education for strategic purposes cultivate mundane and strategic forms of cosmopolitanism in their children, as opposed to moral-ideological cosmopolitanism or a sense of global citizenship. Consequently, this study raises issues with arguments that international education will result in more globally-oriented individuals, and with theories that pit the forces of globalization and cosmopolitanism against the nation-state.

Keywords:

• Globalization
• identities
• international education
• patriotic education campaign

Acknowledgments

I thank Emily Hannum and Guobin Yang for valuable feedback on the paper. I would also like to thank Yajie “Robin” Wang and Fengfeng “Dina” Gu, who served as research assistants during data collection. Finally, I am grateful to members of the International Chinese Sociological Association (ICSA) for comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 I define “international education” as 1) students pursuing education overseas (e.g. participating in a study abroad program; attending undergraduate or graduate school in a foreign country); or 2) students attending schools that offer the International Baccalaureate (IB) or teach the curriculum of a country outside of the one in which the school is located.

2 It is also possible that the more modest exposure to foreign culture, people, and ideas within an international school in one’s home country will be insufficient for cultivating cosmopolitanism.

3 This is a pseudonym.

4 Specifically, 90 percent of students indicated that they were “Chinese” (中国人), with just 10 percent of students reporting a different nationality, such as South Korean, Russian, or Canadian. Note that among the students who reported a different nationality was a student who was ethnically Chinese but who was a Canadian citizen (the student was born in Canada to Chinese parents).

5 For an in-depth discussion of motivations for enrolling in the school, see Young (2018).

6 Note that my assessment of students’ personalities (i.e., whether the student was outgoing; shy; etc.) was subjective, based on classroom observations and contact I had with the students and their teachers.

7 This is a pseudonym.

8 Key point schools are granted extra funding and privileges and are designed to attract top performing students.

9 It is possible that international education cultivates cosmopolitanism and tempers nationalism, but that this is also true of growing up in a professional family and/or having high academic ability. As a result, we might observe no difference between the two groups, since independent variables associated with heightened cosmopolitanism and reduced nationalism are operating within both groups. In this case, we would conclude that international education is no more important for shaping student identities and worldviews than family and student background characteristics.

10 The 2008 EASS survey instrument was distributed to a subsample (n = 3,010) of the CGSS sample (ages 18-98). More information is available at the following web address: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/ICPSR/studies/34607

11 The full Oxford Economics report is available at the following web address: https://www.ihgplc.com/chinesetravel/src/pdf/IHG_Future_Chinese_Travel.pdf

12 At both schools, less than half of all students reported viewing a foreign news sources in the past two weeks, while the vast majority had viewed one or more domestic news sources in the same time period. Further, 30-40 percent of students within each school viewed domestic news sources on a daily basis, while only about 10 percent reported viewing foreign news sources daily.

13 Native Chinese speakers who participated in pre-testing the survey instrument, as well as two Chinese research assistants, helped translate the term “global citizen” into Chinese. Consequently, it is unlikely that students’ lack of familiarity with the term derived from language issues.

14 It is possible that selection into the international school helps explain this difference.

15 Wright, Ma, and Auld (2022) independently conducted a separate study among international high school students in Shenzhen a few years after data collection was completed on the current study. The authors, whose paper was published while the current paper was in the publication process, independently arrived at some of the same conclusions about the implications of international education for students’ identities and worldviews, including students’ integration of nationalism into their expression of cosmopolitanism – what I term “nationalistic cosmopolitanism” and what Wright, Ma, and Ault call “cosmopolitan nationalism.” Overall, this provides further evidence in support of these arguments, since findings came from two separate studies of international schools in two different regions of China. Notably, Wright, Ma, and Auld did not compare the attitudes and identities of the Chinese international students they interviewed to those of standard curriculum school students. As such, the current paper differs from Wright, Ma, and Auld in that it reveals surprising similarities between these two groups, including in their expression of nationalistic cosmopolitanism/cosmopolitan nationalism.

Additional information

Funding

Fieldwork for this project was supported by a Gertrude and Otto Pollak Summer Research Fellowship (2014) from the Department of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, as well as by Student Research Grants (2014 & 2015) from the Center for the Study of Contemporary China at the University of Pennsylvania.

Notes on contributors

Natalie A. E. Young

Natalie A. E. Young conducted research for this project as a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also currently a research affiliate.