Navigating Geoeducational Dilemmas: Chinese Student Migration in Singapore

Zachary Moss Howlett

Pacific Affairs

In a post-pandemic world of escalating tensions between China and the West, increasing numbers of Chinese students are eschewing Western destinations for places in Asia, including Singapore. For these migrants, this Chinese-majority city-state has emerged as an important geoeducational hub between China and the West. A portmanteau of geopolitics and education, the term geoeducational refers to the reciprocal effects of both. Employing an anthropological approach, this article theorizes the geoeducational as a crucial subdomain of the geosocial—a concept proposed by geographers to analyze how social subjects and spaces are influenced by and impact geopolitics and geoeconomics. Using ethnographic interviews and observations, I argue that Singapore’s emergent junctional position helps Chinese student migrants navigate their geoeducational dilemmas. These dilemmas are conditioned by rising US-China superpower competition amid economic stagnation in China and growing xenophobia in the West. Under these conditions, many see Singapore as a safe liminal place from which they can pursue security, flexibility, freedom, cultural belonging, and family togetherness—by “springboarding” to the West, returning to China, or remaining in Singapore. This article contributes to the mobilities turn in education studies and enhances understanding of multiple migration—migration characterized by multiple changes in destination—by analyzing the interplay between domestic and transnational movements. The geoeducational lens it develops is useful for illuminating international student mobilities cross-culturally and comparatively as well as investigating their systematic interrelationships, including implications for demographic change, brain drain and gain, university financing and rankings, and hypercompetition in a time of eroding meritocracy.

Howlett, Z. M. Navigating Geoeducational Dilemmas: Chinese Student Migration in Singapore. Pacific Affairs. 2024.