Tag Archives: Transnational

Privilege or marginalization: how Chinese youth from divergent class backgrounds make sense of racism in the U.S. and Australia

Posted on by

Guo, W., & Liu, Q. T. (2025). Privilege or marginalization: how Chinese youth from divergent class backgrounds make sense of racism in the U.S. and Australia. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2025.2519807

This study examines how Chinese youth in the U.S. and Australia perceive and respond to racism as temporary migrants, focusing on the influence of pre-migration class positions and host-country contexts. Based on interviews with sixty Chinese students in the U.S. and forty-five working holiday makers in Australia, we find that U.S.-based students, primarily from urban, upper-middle-class backgrounds, experience status shock as they encounter systemic racial hierarchies and institutional barriers, fostering heightened sensitivity to racism and strong racial consciousness. Conversely, working holiday makers, largely from rural or economically disadvantaged areas, experience status uplift and a sense of empowerment. Viewing multiculturalism and mobility opportunities in Australia as an improvement over class-based discrimination in China, they tend to normalize or downplay racism. These contrasting responses are further shaped by each country’s immigration policies and labor markets. This study advances racialization research through a comparative, intersectional approach to Chinese diasporas.

From engagement to detachment: divergent cosmopolitanisms among transnational Chinese students

Posted on by

Weirong Guo, From engagement to detachment: divergent cosmopolitanisms among transnational Chinese students, Social Problems, 2025;, spaf056, https://doi.org/10.1093/socpro/spaf056

What does it mean to be cosmopolitan, or a global citizen? Often perceived as a privileged state of cultural consumption and mobility, cosmopolitanism is frequently critiqued as a new form of social stratification and discussed in relation to nationalism. This article reconceptualizes cosmopolitanism by foregrounding its moral and affective dimensions, framing it as both an ethical, deliberate practice and a forced adaptation to structural constraints. Drawing on interviews with 60 Chinese international students in the United States, I identify two distinct forms: activist cosmopolitanism, marked by moral engagement and collective activism, and cynical cosmopolitanism, characterized by individual autonomy, skepticism, and emotional detachment. Both emerge from shared experiences of liberal arts education, community engagement, and relational assimilation, but diverge in response to discrimination, residential mobility, and gendered adversity across sending and receiving contexts, with consequences for mental health. Lacking communal support, cynical cosmopolitans adopt individualist coping strategies and may develop a stance of “non-identity” as a protective mechanism. This study challenges dominant views of cosmopolitanism as either elite capital or a natural outcome of mobility. It highlights how Chinese students, despite their privileged status, can cultivate varied forms of cosmopolitan orientations, offering new insight into their potential for global social change.

Echoes of silence: how student migrants navigate political taboos across borders

Posted on by

Weirong Guo, Echoes of silence: how student migrants navigate political taboos across borders, Social Forces, 2025;, soaf144, https://doi.org/10.1093/sf/soaf144

People migrate from authoritarian to democratic regimes seeking greater freedom of expression, yet many continue to avoid politics in their host country. This study examines how Chinese international students in the United States navigate political taboos across borders and why they still avoid political expression despite newfound freedoms. Drawing on participant observations and 93 in-depth interviews with Chinese students at two American universities and one Chinese university, I find that students develop three avoidance strategies—pragmatic disengagement, veiled allegiance, and closeted activism—as they navigate two distinct fields of political taboos. In China’s “forbidden zone,” where state-imposed taboos are intuitively understood but constantly shifting, avoidance is largely habitual—students perceive politics as dangerous and irrelevant, frame patriotism in apolitical terms, or engage in activism discreetly to avoid repression. After migrating to the US “landmine zone,” where political taboos are decentralized, scattered, and socially enforced, these tactics evolve—students pretend to be apathetic to sidestep ideological pressure, downplay nationalism to prevent conflict, and confine activism to trusted circles to evade peer, institutional, or transnational consequences. This study bridges political sociology and migration studies by challenging the activism bias in transnational politics and the assumption of unilateral political incorporation. It also calls for a reassessment of educational institutions’ roles in sustaining or challenging the culture of avoidance.