Chinese Youth on the Move: from 'fantasy' to 'reality' through overseas study in the United States

The flow of Chinese international students to the US is a long-standing phenomenon that has lasted for more than a century. Such popularity has been growing on a larger scale in the last two decade until the Covid-19 pandemic. Wondering on such sustained and augmenting heat of migration and mobility to the US, this study takes a biographical approach to explore the lives and experiences of today’s Chinese international students in the US by examining their mobility motives, lived experiences, reflections and reflexivities on their international mobility, and their future imagining and projecting. Among the extant studies, very few takes a holistic approach to investigate the whole international mobility experiences of Chinese international students. Most of them only focus on their horizontal relocation but overlook their vertical temporalities. This study introduces two backbone theoretical frameworks of youth transition to adulthood and migration/mobility to construe the biographical experiences of today’s Chinese international students in the US with a central aim of inquiring into what role international mobility plays in their transitions to adulthood and how they wield agency to navigate their mobility trajectories against contextual and structural constraints. Through international mobility, Chinese international students experience ‘double’ social changes from the rapidly-changing China to the ever-changing America and from the past to the future. Therefore, by examining how Chinese international students make transitions to adulthood, this study can also reflect the changes to social conditions in both China and the US and even to the extent of the whole world. Assuming that today’s Chinese international students growing up in a fast-changing society could be vastly different from their predecessors not long ago, this research adopts a qualitative research paradigm using in-depth interviews to collect empirical data in order to provide a rich understanding of the multiplicity and breadth of participants’ individual experiences, with various reflexive representations of the individuals’ narratives at the core of the study. Following an interpretivist-constructivist approach to analyze empirical data, this study finds out that today’s young Chinese international students practice international mobility to the US mainly for escaping social control in China and for an alternative transition process in a different social condition in which they believe they will be able to enjoy the course of studying, living and exploring, and after years of mobile lives in the US they incorporate spatial mobility into their imagining and projecting for future transition outcomes-making. And the analysis reveals that they value mobility highly and display an acute awareness of both the advantages and challenges of their mobile lives and refer to their lived experiences in both China and the US for their decision-making process concerning their future mobility trajectories in the hopes of securing both ‘good’ transition processes and ‘good’ transition outcomes. The significance of this study reaches beyond offering a landscape of today’s Chinese international students in the US to the extent that valuable theoretical implications can be contributed to the currently vigorous debate on youth transitions to adulthood while being on the move.