Belonging otherwise: Chinese undergraduate students at South Korean universities

ABSTRACT

Between 2000 and 2020, the number of Chinese international undergraduate students in South Korea grew 59-fold to constitute about half of all international students in the country. We interviewed these students about how they form a sense of belonging amidst the newly middle-class, massified, and marketized undergraduate study-abroad experience. We found that the university often did not welcome them, and that Chinese students have not adapted to the Korean university in ways imagined by the normative framework. However, these students make studying abroad livable by constituting material, technological, and imagined modalities of belonging unconfined by the university and the host country. These modalities of ‘belonging otherwise’ reveal South Korea as a node of commercialised, non-elite, inter-Asian student mobility, and illuminate Chinese students’ strategies in this new regime of study abroad. The article ends with reflections on ethical terms of participating in this student mobility for universities.

KEYWORDS:

• International students
• study abroad
• internationalization of higher education
• inter-Asia
• East Asia

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by International Programs Summer Research Fellowship Award, The University of Iowa; Research Grant, Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, The University of Iowa.