Authoritarian Policies and a Global Pandemic: Investigating Shifts in the Post-Graduation Migration Plans of Chinese International Students Studying at American Universities

Abstract

The primary aim of this thesis was to determine how return decisions have or have not changed for Chinese international students studying at American higher educational institutions since the Covid-19 pandemic and increasing state of authoritarianism in the People’s Republic of China. The pandemic resulted in unprecedented amounts of repression for many segments of the Chinese population, potentially reducing their trust in the Chinese Communist Party. Further, there is a lack of scholarship on how censorship in China has impacted students and their plans to return or stay abroad after their graduation. The topic of brain drain is especially important given the wide range of benefits that these students provide to the American economy, workplace, and educational and intellectual spaces. Indeed, for decades the Chinese government has worked to incentivize Chinese born, foreign educated students to go back to China, hoping to see economic and intellectual contributions from the returners. This thesis used a qualitative approach of interviewing Chinese international students at different universities across the country; an approach which allowed for nuanced and personal answers. The majority of interviewees were third or fourth years in their undergraduate studies, making this study unique as many existing works solely focused on graduate or Ph.D. students. The results of this study build upon previous research in a number of ways. For one, it supports previous findings that economic, career oriented and cultural and familial pull factors play the strongest role in students’ decisions. Secondly, it provides a basis for future research by highlighting the effect that one’s own identity, such as being a woman or LGBTQ+ individual had on their return decisions and the impact that political censorship has in deterring some students from returning to China. Covid-19, despite being a focus of this thesis, was a minor push factor, as it appears to have had a strong, but short-term emotional effect on the interviewees, who ultimately are guided more by their career paths and socio-cultural factors than the government’s oversteps during the pandemic. Moreover, exposure to Western media, the A4 protests, and internet censorship also had a negligible impact on students’ return decisions. To conclude, this thesis provided policy implications for the US and China. For the US, this thesis highlighted immigration policy changes as a means to better attract Chinese students, while for China, policy implications touched upon topics of workplace reform, hukou, and repressive policies.