Event Details

LUCC research seminar with Dr Mengwei Tu (Swansea University)

China aspires to increasing its influence in knowledge production and soft power. Why does it pour extensive public resource into attracting foreign students from Belt-Road countries, while simultaneously making it extremingly complicated for them to remain in China? Based on ethnographic data (2018–2023) from China, this study develops an “infrastructural involution” approach - how competing logics in HE internationalisation and migration infrastructures introduce contradictions and intermediaries, thus obstructing, rather than enhancing, international student mobility. This approach disentangles the working dynamics behind a migration process that has become both more accessible and more cumbersome in many parts of Asia.