Equity and opacity in enacting Chinese higher education policy: contrasting perspectives of domestic and international students

Abstract Drawing upon notions of a global higher education policy field and recently theorised conceptions of ‘global-local’ imbrications in social space, this article explores the complex tensions that characterise the enactment of internationalisation policies in Chinese higher education (HE) and their contrasting effects upon domestic and international students. Ten domestic Chinese and ten international students attending an elite university in China were interviewed. The article reveals that although the Chinese government and universities ostensibly sought to introduce internationalisation policies that ‘managed’ domestic and international students ‘similarly’, comparisons of domestic and international students’ experiences revealed different ways of recruiting, educating, and hosting domestic and international students; these left the former feeling the system was inequitable and encouraged lower standards, and the latter feeling the system was opaque and difficult to navigate. The study cautions that the political imperative to increase the number of international students as a measure of internationalisation adversely influences efforts to develop sustainable international HE in China, even as the limitations of this approach are increasingly recognised.