Consuming UK Transnational Higher Education in China: A Bourdieusian Approach to Chinese Students’ Perceptions and Experiences

Abstract

Recently, the increased scale and complexity of ‘student-as-consumer’ discourse has become well-established within the intensifying neoliberal marketisation across higher education in the Global North. However, few insights have been generated within a transnational education context. This article is based on a case study of a UK transnational higher education institution in China, where market-based rationalities converge with a centralised statist agenda. It demonstrates that Chinese students’ perceptions and experiences of patriotism education and international education, as well as their own strategy of obtaining a transnational education as an investment, were shaped by the unequal power relations between China and the UK in the global classification of knowledge. They tend to highly value UK higher education in both material and immaterial forms, associating it with ‘humanitarianism’ and disinterestedness. This article concludes that the profit-making agenda of the UK is veiled by its symbolic power, while the nation-building effort of China has driven the students further away. As a result, Chinese students voluntarily participate in the reproduction of symbolic power of UK higher education in the hierarchically structured global field.