Zachary M. Howlett
National University of Singapore, Singapore
Keywords: China, Singapore, education, geopolitics, international student migration, multiple migration, migration hubs
DOI: 10.5509/2024974-art4
应对地缘教育困境：新加坡的中国留学移民
关键词: 中国、新加坡、教育、地缘政治、国际学生移民、多次性移民、移民中心。
随着后疫情时代中国与西方之间的紧张关系不断升级，越来越多的中国学生避开西方留学目的地，选择包括新加坡在内的亚洲国家。对于这些移民来说，这个以华人为主的城市国家已成为中国与西方之间重要的地缘教育中心。地缘教育一词是地缘政治和教育的混合词，指的是两者间交互影响的效应。本文采用人类学方法，将地缘教育理论化为地缘社会的一个重要子领域——地缘社会是地理学家提出的一个概念，用于分析社会主体和空间如何受到地缘政治和地缘经济的影响。通过民族志访谈和观察，我认为新加坡新兴的交汇位置有助于中国留学移民解决他们的地缘教育困境。这些困境来自于中国经济停滞不前，而西方的排外情绪日益高涨之下中美超级大国之间日趋激烈的竞争。在这种情况下，许多人将新加坡视为一个安全的过渡地带——通过“跳板”前往西方、返回中国或留在新加坡—— 他们可以在那里追求安全感、灵活性、自由、文化归属感和家庭团聚。本文通过分析国内和跨国流动之间的相互作用，促进了教育研究中的流动性转向，并增强了对多次性移民—— 即以目的地多次变化为特征的移民——的理解。它所发展的地缘教育视角有助于跨文化和比较性地展示国际学生流动，以及研究它们的系统性相互关系，包括对在一个贤能统治日渐被侵蚀的时期的人口变化、人才流失和增长、大学融资和排名以及超级竞争的影响。
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.