Systemic and Non-systemic Facilitation and Restriction for African Student Mobility from Africa to China

Lin Chen , KU Leuven, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

As China’s development has led to the advance in higher education institutions, students from the South, especially those from African countries with strong relationships with China since Bandung Conference are increasingly finding their way to Chinese universities. Yet at the everyday life they are facing a manifold of obstacles turning their study period in China into a challenging endeavor. These constraints concern immigration regulations, educational program, access to health care, banking and financial services and the internship-labor market. This paper focuses on unveiling the history, development and current limitation of China-Africa higher education student mobility under the framework of Forum on China-Africa Cooperation in both Systematic and Non-systematic way, respectively in education, labor market, health care and social media sector. This paper seeks to gain insights in their life world through the theoretical lens of incomplete frontier mobility, conviviality and coping strategies. Adopting both conventional and online ethnography the findings demonstrate how African students reject taken-for-granted categorizations and in facing adversary and friction they find various ways to overcome them. Based on data from in-depth interview and ethnography online and offline, this paper investigates the coping strategies of African students when confronted with these systemic and non-systematic restrictions as incomplete frontier migrants with convivial disposition in the age of digital social connections, along with physical encounters online platforms are set up to discuss shared problems.

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 Presented in Session P1. Postercafe