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[Study abroad] has been a dream since I was an undergraduate.
I just felt like going and giving it a try. Because otherwise, you
know, for girls in China – the traditional view is that girls, when
they get to this age, should settle down. Work, get married,
whatever. But I felt that if I don’t make this decision right now …
I might never be able to do it. – Xiaofen, 24
I’m 21 now, and I know there are some girls around my age
[whose families are] like, you should consider getting married …
And their parents are already really worried that they won’t find
a boyfriend. If they don’t have a boyfriend, they worry about
what that entails for the future. So, I don’t want to be judged
like that. – Pingping, 21
Once they’re here, however, how do they feel about escaping
the ‘marriage trap’ or otherwise? Martin can’t make any sweeping
conclusions yet (her study ends in 2020), though she has some
insights. They include these students wanting to make local friends
but finding it hard, and therefore disappointing; being knowingly
but helplessly exploited by employers and landlords; and perhaps
not being as patriotic as you may think.
Campus Review spoke with Martin to find out more about her
research and the lives of these students.
ON CAMPUS
that might otherwise have gone to sons if they’d had brothers.
Their families generally encourage these young women to develop
themselves independently as successful professional women
through education.
On the other hand, there’s an opposite pressure on them,
which is what many sociologists in China have pointed to as the
re-traditionalisation of gender roles after the end of Maoism. We
see things like a widening gendered pay gap, and women being
encouraged ‘back to the family’ in times of unemployment in the
cities. We also see the rise of this really pernicious way of thinking
about professional, highly educated women in their late 20s: if
they’re unmarried, they’re called “leftover women”. It’s a common
term in Chinese media and public discourse, and obviously it’s
stigmatising women who aren’t married by a certain age.
So, this generation of women is facing immense social and
familial pressure to reorient themselves from self-focus and self-
development, and educational and professional development,
towards a more family-focused identity as wives and mothers,
basically before they turn 30. Their 20s therefore are a time of
strong contradictions, and they’re quite hard to manage for many
young women. I wanted to see how these women negotiate those
contradictions if they leave China for a few years to study during
their 20s, and how they respond after having been away for a
few years.
CR: Why do you think there is little previous research on this topic?
FM: The Australian higher education sector has become
increasingly reliant on the fees from international students to fill a
funding shortfall that’s been left by decreasing federal funding over
the past couple of decades. As a follow-on from that, international
students have been framed by universities mainly as consumers.
This is a point that’s been made in research by Simon Marginson
and other experts. So, there’s a concern by universities to maintain
the quality of the product that’s been sold, and that product is
education.
The research we do have has tended to focus on education and
education studies: How do the students learn? What problems
might they face in the classroom? What’s their experience like
in the classroom? But the research has tended to neglect a less
obvious question about the wider social experience of international
students while they’re here.
This question is important, not only for us looking at them in
their role as consumers – if we want people to keep coming, we
need to ensure they’re having a good general experience – but also
we have an ethical responsibility to think about the quality of their
overall experience and not just their educational experience while
they’re here. You said the women wanted to branch out of that societal
expectation, but did they mention any other reasons for coming to
Australia to study?
Why did you limit your focus to Chinese women? Most of them said they would probably go back, but if they had
an opportunity to stay and work, they might do that for a while or
might end up staying. There’s a perception in Australia that because
of our migration program and the graduate working visa, and the
opportunity to convert from a student visa to a skilled migrant
visa, that people come here with this very cold, calculating plan of
migration. But while a couple of people I interviewed wanted to
migrate, most were aware of how difficult that path is and were not
willing to say, “Yes, that’s my plan.” Instead, they would say, “Let’s
see what happens and take it one step at a time.”
It’s hard for this generation to have any certainty about where
they’re going to be in two years, in five years, in 10 years. It could
If we divide international students in Australia by nationality and
gender, Chinese women are the largest group. Students from
the People’s Republic of China make up over 30 per cent of our
international students. Within that 30 per cent, about 55 per cent
are female, so they’re the largest group.
Another reason is that I specialise in Chinese youth cultures and
gender studies, so I’m academically interested in these groups.
Specifically, I’m interested in the unique contradictions faced
by this generation of young middle-class Chinese women. On
the one hand, they were born during the one-child policy and
therefore benefit from resources and support from their parents
They did. I interviewed 30 of the students before they left
China, and for 10 of those, I also got to interview their parents
– particularly their mothers, who tended to come along to the
interviews. The mothers and the young women coming to study
at a master’s level – some of whom already had work experience –
said they were interested in study abroad because of the gendered
bias in the professional job market in China. They wanted to use a
Western university higher degree to level the playing field against
less qualified male job applicants.
They told stories like: “My good friend at university had the
highest GPA in our class, and she went for this job, but one of our
male classmates got the job, and we know his GPA was lower.”
Also, the mothers who had workforce experience knew about
women having trouble when they got pregnant, in the sense of
not keeping their job, not being offered maternity leave and things
like th at.
Did most of them plan to return to China once they had their
degrees?
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