‘Car Talk’: automobility and Chinese international students in Michigan

ABSTRACT

The apparent conspicuous consumption of luxury vehicles by Chinese international students attending a public Michigan University provides an opportunity to examine the convergence of different ideas about automobility. Upwardly mobile Chinese families send their children to Michigan, a state with a tradition of auto-production, for educational opportunities not available in China. The resulting ‘car talk’ of local residents about Chinese students and their cars speaks to broader anxieties about Michigan’s shifting relationship to the global economy. However, the paper focuses on the meanings of auto-owning created by Chinese students who make decisions about the purchase and use of their autos within a social world oriented primarily to other Chinese students and societal ideas about auto-owning circulating among friends, family and society in China. For Chinese students, car owning encompasses meanings of status, safety and sociability that are created within the context of study abroad.

KEYWORDS:

• Chinese transnational students
• educational migration
• automobility
• cars
• class status
• Michigan

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Allison Berg, Kirsten Fermaglich, Mindy Morgan and Anna Pegler-Gordon for their comments on various versions of this article. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the associate editor for their constructive comments. Finally, we would like to thank the Chinese students who shared their stories with us.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Car Talk is the name of a popular National Public Radio talk show featuring MIT graduate and car mechanic brothers Tom and Ray Magliozzi (otherwise known as Click and Clack) discussing car repair issues.

2. Our survey data indicate that while all of the families could afford to pay for an MSU education, the financial background of MSU Chinese students is varied. When asked to compare themselves with other Chinese students at MSU in terms of family Socioeconomic status, 32% felt their families were not as wealthy, 64% felt similar to others, 2% felt their families were more wealthy than their fellow Chinese students. In response to the question of whether paying for their child to study at MSU puts financial pressure on their families, 11% reported that these expenses represented a high financial pressure on their families, 42% reported some pressure, 42% little pressure, 6% reported absolutely no pressure. In the same survey, 54% of our participants reported owning brand-name clothes more than $200 and 28% of students reported owning brand-name bags of more than $500. When asked about their monthly expenditures, 55% of students reported spending less than $500 a month, 28% $500–1000, 13% $1000–2000 and 5% more than $2000; n = 305.

3. A recent report from the National Bureau of Economic Research (Redden 2017) finds that universities have increasingly turned to foreign tuition dollars to maintain their revenue, in light of reductions in state appropriations. This is particularly true for public universities that do not attract high numbers of out of state students, such as Michigan State University. The University of Michigan, which attracts more out of state students, has not increased the number of international students to the same extent at Michigan State. There is a negative correlation between the increase in number of international students accepted by the Association of American Universities and research universities examined in the report, and the numbers of domestic students enrolled, such that for every two additional international student, there is one fewer in-state student (Redden 2017).

4. New York University, University of Southern California, Columbia, Arizona State, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Northeastern, Purdue, UCLA, MSU and University of Washington were among the top 10 institutions with Chinese student populations in 2014–2015.

5. Our data come from our ongoing projects on Chinese international students at MSU. Louie and her research assistant conducted a small pilot study consisting of 11 semi-structured interviews with Chinese international students at MSU focusing on their decisions to come to MSU, adjustment and perceptions of racism and discrimination. Qin and her research assistants conducted a mixed method study, in Chinese, with first-year Chinese students on the sending context, U.S. receiving context and Chinese students’ cultural, academic and psychosocial adaptation at the university. They collected survey data from 330 first-year Chinese students and conducted in-depth interviews with 50 students. Both researchers are involved in a larger project funded by the Spencer Foundation focusing on Chinese student adjustment.

6. This has also been well-documented in Vanessa Fong’s work (Fong 2004) and in Jun Jing’s Feeding China’s Little Emperors.

7. Chinese graduate students should be differentiated from the undergraduate Chinese student population.

8. Thank you to Anna-Pegler Gordon for this observation.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Spencer Foundation (US) [20160122].