by Stephen Matchett
Chinese students learn and grow when they study overseas – it’s what happens when they return home that really stresses them.
Deakin U’s Professor Ly Tran and colleagues report on how Chinese students don’t settle in when they return from overseas education and why they embrace Sang subculture.
In contrast to the common research emphasis on employability and jobs, it’s the human experience that interests the authors.
Sang is a funeral term for bereavement, appropriated by young people who repurpose images and texts to present themselves as defeated and dispirited.
In Sang, returned students who don’t find the sort of work they hoped for are called Haidai,
“job-waiting returnees.” Others who feel defeated by life are Haifei which translates brutally as “overseas returning waste.”
“Contradicting China’s state campaign of national rejuvenation that demands youths to perform assiduously to achieve upward mobility and serve the collective societal need, (Haidai culture) calls this out for exploitative labour practises leading to the youth’s prevailing sense of fatigue and wish to quit,” they write.
The authors explored Haifei through interviews sourced on a social media platform, with people who were family-funded to study overseas.
They found:
- Overseas graduates returning home confronted the same sort of problems as the generality of young people – tough job and house hunting, but with the extra burden of declining social status of their studies.
- Solidarity among returned students who do not feel they fit “the mainstream entrepreneur-of the-self” narrative.
- But while they may feel they are “waste’ for employability, their overseas study was “a transformative self-discovery.”
What it means:
It’s not just their problem:
“this cohort is living in a unique era of transformation where soaring economic growth accompanies intensified malicious competition, uncertain job markets, encounter dreadful social stratifications and conflicts between the old and new never ceases.”
They got to the study-party too late:
“compared with previous government-funded cohorts which were held dear as elite, capable and glorious this generation of self-funded returnees perceived themselves as devalued, not only in terms of human capital but also in terms of symbolic value”
… but they benefited personally:
Returned students look at their experience in terms of personal growth rather than just career. “We find the emerging cultural practice characterised by knowledge, cooperation, relationships and identity-building.”
Which is a new and less easy message to sell in convincing students to commit to future studies offshore in places like Australia.
