Higher educational cooperation has long been central to China’s foreign relations. This article examines the political ramifications of the exodus of international students from China during the COVID-19 pandemic. China introduced some of the world’s most restrictive entry requirements for international travelers, forcing most international students at Chinese universities to study remotely between the Spring semesters of 2020 and 2022. This affected the 221,700 foreign students who were enrolled in Chinese universities, 81,600 of whom were from African countries (Mulvey Reference Mulvey2021; UNESCO 2022). Travel restrictions were barely eased until late in the spring semester of 2022, and the border was finally opened for most students during the fall semester of 2022 (Liu and Peng Reference Liu and Peng2024). Some students missed five semesters of in-person classes, and others gave up on their studies in China altogether. Thousands of students campaigned globally for the right to travel to China, attend classes in person, and get the educational experience they had envisioned.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, China’s border closure posed a risk of turning international students from an asset in its foreign policy into a potential liability. “Liability” in this context refers to the risk of damaging a country’s reputation and diminishing its global influence, especially when educational partnerships are used as a tool of soft power. The literature review introduces the concept of soft power and how different actors invoke it to advance their agendas. It briefly reviews the role of student scholarships in China’s foreign policy toward Africa. The analysis shows how the students challenged Beijing’s narratives about commitment to international solidarity, formed an organized self-advocacy group, and engaged bureaucrats and politicians in Beijing in their struggle to enter China. The conclusion underscores how China’s soft power aspirations afforded students the leverage to hold the country accountable for addressing their concerns while pointing to potential long-term challenges in accessing Chinese universities.
China’s border closure posed a risk of turning international students from an asset in its foreign policy into a potential liability.
SOFT POWER: INVOKED BY MULTIPLE ACTORS
The term “soft power” was coined by Joseph Nye (Reference Nye1990) as the world emerged from the Cold War. In this era of ideological reordering, attraction and persuasion appeared essentially equal to economic and military coercion as agents of change. Student scholarships and scientific exchanges were central to the soft power thesis, building on earlier ideas that hosting international students fosters cultural understanding and admiration for the host nation (Ziegler Reference Ziegler2008). Nye cited the children of Chinese leaders as examples of foreign elites who aligned their values with the USA while studying and promoted democratic ideas upon returning home. “Soft power depends more than hard power upon the existence of willing interpreters and receivers,” he wrote (2023, 18). International students represent one such kind of intermediary. Soft power assumes a chain of events where students have positive first-hand experiences living abroad, which lead them to appreciate the host country’s political system and subsequently influence the politics of their home country in a direction that benefits the country they studied in. With this complex sequence of events required for soft power to take effect, there are significant methodological challenges in establishing clear cause-and-effect relationships and outcomes (Heng Reference Heng2010). The variety of mechanisms involved has led critics to question the usefulness of soft power as an analytical concept (Hall Reference Hall2010). Instead of addressing the criticisms and refining the concept of soft power, Nye has declared that the term he coined naturally will be subject to both use and misuse, likening his approach to a parent trusting a grown child to navigate the world independently (2023, 38).
The influence of soft power can be established separately from questions concerning its analytical purchase in academic research. Soft power motivates and justifies actions for a variety of actors. The most evident case in point is national-level policy makers. From the United States and Europe to India and Japan, policy makers have drawn on the concept of soft power to stress the significance of a well-rounded foreign policy that includes cultural and public diplomacy (Hall Reference Hall2010). In China, soft power proponents found a particularly receptive audience. Wang Huning, a leading political theorist and Chinese Communist Party ideologist, published on soft power in 1993 (Wang Reference Wang1993). China’s central leadership adopted the term with Hu Jintao’s address at the 17th Party Congress in 2007, and Xi Jinping has since invoked the concept on major national and global occasions (Repnikova Reference Repnikova2022). Soft power is a flexible concept that can trace continuities in China’s foreign policy back to the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence and people-to-people exchanges promoted by Beijing from the mid-1950s (Haugen Reference Haugen2013). Chinese scholars have been engaged actively with the idea of soft power by proposing how it can be adapted for a Chinese context (Repnikova Reference Repnikova2022). Beijing has explicitly linked the advancement of higher education in China with its ambitions to enhance the country’s global ideological influence. In a 2010 strategy statement about the construction of modern higher education with Chinese characteristics, universities were said to have “unique advantages in cultural exchange and integration and […] promoting the harmonious coexistence of diverse civilizations” (Liu Reference Liu2010, p. 6.). A decade later, the plan China’s Education Modernisation 2035 reaffirmed the importance of education and openness in strengthening China’s position as a global leader in education and boosting its international influence (State Council 2019).
International students represent a second group of actors in higher education as a soft power strategy. Although students who travel abroad at a formative stage of their lives may turn into soft power intermediaries for the countries in which they have studied, they could also use their hosts’ soft power ambitions to further their own agendas by highlighting the gap between the values their hosts promote and the realities of their lived experiences. Quantitative analyses of international students’ experiences indicate that the host country may leave a negative impression on them (Bislev Reference Bislev2017). However, students’ agency and decision making in soft power accumulation have largely been overlooked in studies of soft power and higher education (Mulvey Reference Mulvey2020). Beijing has long been aware of the risk that international students express their frustrations by pointing out a gap between the ideal of international friendship and their lived realities, either while in China or upon returning home. Ghanaian student Emmanuel Hevi published a widely circulated book, An African Student in China (Reference Hevi1963), about his time at Peking University. He proposed that China, while sincere in its support for African countries’ struggles for political independence, held derogatory views of Africans that led to discrimination. Hevi and other African students left Beijing prematurely after a series of frictions between them and their Chinese hosts in 1962, and China subsequently gave up on initiating student exchanges for several years (Snow Reference Snow1988, 196–99). Internationally mobile students have faced greater pressure worldwide since the turn of the millennium. Financial incentives and security concerns have increasingly taken precedence in higher education strategies in wealthy countries. Students from other non-Western countries are increasingly denied student visas in the post–September 11 era (Johnson Reference Johnson2018). Countries have introduced fees for international students or widened the tuition gap between international and domestic students in response to economic slowdowns (Pick Reference Pick2006). Racialized educational migrants experience increased xenophobia and ethnonationalism (Mittelmeier and Cockayne Reference Mittelmeier and Cockayne2023). Even so, soft power remains a crucial justification for recruiting international students in the United States, Australia, and the UK (Mulvey and Lo Reference Mulvey and Lo2021), and the discrepancy between the espoused values and conditions on the ground gives students a rhetorical tool to articulate their concerns.
Individual bureaucrats and politicians can also use soft power to advance their interests. States combine soft and hard power strategies, influenced by not only national and international contexts but also internal political struggles between individuals and groups with conflicting agendas. Those who advocate for leveraging cultural influence, humanitarian aid, and educational exchanges to boost international influence contend with those who support investing resources in protective trade policies, military force, and other hard power tactics. Even when there is political consensus around soft power strategies, internal contestation shapes the mix of soft power tools employed. In China, international student stipends compete with initiatives in other fields such as schemes to promote “ecological civilization” as a source of Chinese strength and international competition (Hansen, Li, and Svarverud Reference Hansen, Li and Svarverud2018).
International Student Mobility in Chinese Foreign Policy
China has received international students from the early years of the People’s Republic, and South–South student exchanges have always been central to China’s political rhetoric (Gillespie Reference Gillespie2001). During Mao’s reign, the most significant impetus was for inviting students from other “Third World” countries. Students from Egypt, Cameroon, Kenya, and Uganda pioneered China’s strategy for locating its place in the world order by promoting people-to-people interactions (Li Reference Li and Rotberg2008). Since the early 2000s, economic growth and strengthened global ambitions motivated expanding China’s scholarship programs for foreigners (Mulvey Reference Mulvey2021). As Xi Jinping moved into his second term in 2017, a record-high number of Chinese scholarships was offered to students from developing countries, with pledges to provide Africa with 50,000 government scholarships and to train 50,000 professionals at the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC 2018).
Recent developments have amplified the need for Beijing to identify measures that can demonstrate sustained support for the progress of developing countries and solidarity with people in the Global South. First, China has scaled back large-scale development projects overseas through which many people in the Global South have encountered China on the ground in a positive way (Sanny and Selormey Reference Sanny and Selormey2021). China’s 2021–2025 Five-Year Plan announced that the country would refrain from expanding its overseas investments, weakening infrastructure projects as a tool for China’s image-building abroad (Nedopil Reference Nedopil2022). Second, online xenophobia has become an emerging challenge to China’s global image. Blatantly racist social media posts and commercials, in particular targeting Black people, have regularly trended in China, with limited effort by the government to intervene despite heavy political censoring of other topics (Cai Reference Cai2023; Castillo and Amoah Reference Castillo and Amoah2020).
Although the above developments suggest a need for soft power tools, international student mobility may not remain Beijing’s primary instrument. China’s rhetoric at the FOCAC meetings indicates that higher education has been given a less central role in foreign policy after 2021. Xi’s speeches at FOCAC in 2021 and 2024 placed less emphasis on education than in previous meetings, with a notable shift from higher education to vocational training (FOCAC 2021b; Xinhua 2024). The sections on education were moved to the end of the speeches, indicating lower priority. Whereas the FOCAC action plans in 2012, 2015, and 2018 cited target numbers for the Chinese provision of both scholarships and “training opportunities” to Africans, the 2021 and 2024 FOCAC action plans did not offer targets for scholarships, though they still mentioned higher education (FOCAC 2021a; Ministry of Foreign Affairs 2024). This suggests a diminished emphasis on, but not a complete departure from, using international student mobility as a foreign policy instrument.
Methodology
Data for this study were collected by tracking the China International Student Union’s social media activity during the peak of the #TakeUsBackToChina campaign between August 2021 and August 2022, participation in online meetings hosted by the Union, conducting semistructured interviews with students advocating for their return to China, and assembling Chinese policy documents and official statements. A total of 33 international students from 21 countries, primarily based in Africa and Asia, were interviewed. The participants ranged in age from 18 to 34, with 12 female and 21 male students. At the time of the interviews, all participants were studying remotely at Chinese universities and awaiting entry into China. Twenty-six interviews were done via Zoom to the students’ home countries between December 2021 and January 2022, and the remaining seven interviews were conducted in person from July to August 2022 where the students lived or worked in Ghana. These in-person visits also allowed for observations of the challenges faced by the students during online studies, including infrastructural difficulties such as poor internet connectivity and attending classes at night. The collected screenshots, Twitter posts, policy documents, field notes, and interview transcripts of students and Chinese diplomats were organized and coded using the qualitative data analysis software NVivo.
Student Reactions to China’s Border Closure
China’s international border closure during the COVID pandemic created a mobility crisis for international students at Chinese institutions. The students’ pride in being admitted to a Chinese university was replaced by the humiliation of being stuck at home, especially when they remained in a state of waithood while life elsewhere resumed normalcy. Students highlighted their plight through public protests, media outreach, and direct petitions, organizing under the slogan #TakeUsBackToChina, reappropriating the language of soft power in their petitions to make this self-advocacy more effective.
Contesting Official Chinese Narratives
Very few international flights landed in China for the first two years of the COVID pandemic. The groups prioritized for entry into China included German technicians and managers and athletes for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games but not international students (Global Times 2020). The first organized return of international students to China finally took place in June 2022, with a flight from Islamabad chartered for students. The return of all international students took over half a year to complete because entry documents were issued unevenly, and most Chinese embassies in Africa acted relatively late. Barred from entering China, the students reevaluated their views on the country and its dedication to advancing their education. “We’re just collateral damage, I guess. I think we’re not that significant in the big picture,” a PhD student sighed (online interview December 16, 2021).
The students’ experiences matched poorly with the notions of China as a strong country and committed development partner. China’s strength was a point of attraction when students applied to Chinese universities. China offers prestigious and high-quality programs with affordable tuition, and its generous scholarship programs allow students to pursue their education regardless of their financial backgrounds. Several students I interviewed were set to become first-generation university graduates in their families or hometowns. As months and years went by with online classes—often held at night due to time zone differences—they faced growing social isolation and embarrassment that the announced departure to China was deferred. China’s promises that the students could return once it was safe rang hollow after the country successfully rolled out a COVID vaccination program and other countries lifted their travel restrictions. “They could take us back. They’re a world power. Superpower!” a student said (online interview December 16, 2021).
The border closure also raised questions about China’s dedication to South–South solidarity. People in many developing countries have been heavily exposed to official Chinese rhetoric about equality and mutual benefits as a cornerstone of its foreign policy since the 1950s (Snow Reference Snow1988). Africans and Asians have historically been presented through tropes of friendship and heroism, united with China in the global fight against Western, and later Soviet, imperialism (Lefkowitz Reference Lefkowitz, Batchelor and Zhang2017). More recently, China has framed its support for African students as an act of solidarity and a gesture to aid Africa in catching up with China on its path toward progress (Mulvey Reference Mulvey2021). The discourses of friendship and solidarity were challenged by African students whose educational careers were cut off by the travel ban and their attempts to raise the issue were suppressed on Chinese social media platforms. “For foreign students, most of us are saying Chinese are xenophobic; they are racists. When this topic [students’ return to China] was raised on Weibo and WeChat, that thread was censored. And then they started blocking the account of some of the foreign students,” a Ghanaian student complained (in-person interview September 11, 2022). He referenced double standards that permitted posts on Chinese social media from Chinese students who campaigned to return to Japan while censoring foreign students with equally legitimate grievances. African students feared being the last to be allowed back into China. “Africans are seen as less; they are seen as the less continent […]. The Africans will be the last,” a Nigerian student predicted gloomily in 2021 (online interview December 10, 2021).
From Willing Interpreters and Receivers to Self-Advocacy
The students who campaigned to return to China might have been what Nye calls “willing interpreters and receivers” (Reference Nye2023, 18) under different circumstances. They described their advocacy as a political awakening instigated by necessity, not choice, and portrayed university studies as a time for freedom, play, and serious dedication to learning, not politics (online interviews December 10, 2021; December 14, 2021; December 16, 2021). Globally, the students organized around the cause of their return with the hashtag #TakeUsBackToChina, which amplified individual social media posts. Building from this online engagement, they created an organization with local chapters and boards—the China International Student Union (CISU). The CISU launched concerted campaigns, virtual meetings, and in-person demonstrations. After being expelled from Chinese social media platforms, the students converged on Twitter, which around 2020 saw a burgeoning interest from Chinese diplomats and other officials. The students tagged people of power from their home countries and China in posts, open letters, and messages.
The #TakeUsBackToChina movement gradually began to mirror diplomatic tactics. They created a hierarchical organizational structure, appointed press spokespersons, replied concertedly to media requests, and composed letters on official-looking letterhead to governments and international organizations to petition on behalf of all students locked out of China. The national chapters sent letters asking their governments to put their weight behind students’ demands for return. They published some carefully worded critical statements, such as when Chinese embassies announced a new round of scholarships in the fall of 2021 while students were still prevented from entering, and CISU also condemned censoring #TakeUsBackToChina messages on the Chinese social media platforms Weibo and WeChat, coaching their criticism in diplomatic language that balanced reproach with expressions of good faith and reiterating support for China’s official COVID strategy. On important national events in China, such as the Chinese Communist Party’s 110th-anniversary celebration and the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games opening, the union published long, formally worded congratulatory messages in English and Chinese. Their strategy recalls what Martin (Reference Martin2022) labels “performative ethics of national representation,” which refers to the idea that there are situationally appropriate ways of speaking about China that depend on who speaks, where, and in what capacity. The students established their right to speak about China by using the content of their communication to show themselves as firm friends of the country and adopting a form that proved them worthy interlocutors.
Students from Pakistan, the third largest group in China, were at the forefront of online activism. Their initiatives were copied and redeveloped by others. Ghanaian students admired the Pakistanis’ traction, but counting only about 200 students, they opted for traditional political organizing instead of a social media-based approach. They collected the contact information of Ghanaian students at Chinese universities through snowball recruitment and held online elections to appoint leaders. A significant challenge for the student organizers was rooted in a general suspicion of corruption among elected representatives in Ghana. Initial attempts to collect membership dues of around USD$3 to cover expenses failed, and the leaders felt they were suspected of exploiting the situation for financial gain. This changed after the group achieved some breakthroughs with media attention, high-level meetings, and, eventually, promises from the Chinese embassy to expedite returns. The members’ trust in the student body leadership was derived from their effectiveness, not their democratic mandate. Despite the students’ lack of political connections when they started, they eventually secured meetings with the Chinese ambassador to Ghana and their education minister and minister of foreign affairs. Once the students had direct communication channels with people of authority, they ceased their public activism and continued negotiations quietly.
Engaging Beijing
The international students’ online relationship with Chinese diplomats was fraught with difficulties in the initial months of their campaigning to enter China. The students poured out their frustrations and spammed Chinese ambassadors and institutions, which in turn elicited equally crude responses from “wolf warrior” diplomats who adopt an assertive and confrontational approach in international interactions. The deteriorating discourse prompted the student union to intervene. “We want to clarify that we do not condone anti-China speech, and most of all, we do not want to politicize our cause,” the CISU declared in an attempt at damage control in February 2022, asking members to avoid harsh language. Online interactions changed in the spring semester of 2022 when Counselor Ji Rong from the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs began engaging with the students on Twitter, replying respectfully and sympathetically to their posts. A symbiotic relationship developed between Ji Rong and the students in which they tagged her when they had grievances and good news and she amplified their messages with practical information and responded to queries.
The students’ strategic support for China’s political leadership was mixed with outspoken criticism against university managers. Students shared screenshots of hostile communication from administrators in response to queries concerning financial struggles, accommodation, time difference in online classes, and worries about the quality of online education. When China’s border opened, students needed to present a “no-objection certificate” from their universities to get a visa. Many institutions were reluctant to issue such certificates, as petty bureaucrats feared making errors that threatened China’s zero-COVID ambition. The students named these universities in online petitions, hoping for help to make the schools act. Ji Rong appeared to take a more hands-on approach at this point. She promised to approach the Chinese Ministry of Education and individual schools on behalf of students who complained online that getting no-objection certificates proved difficult. In the fall semester of 2022, international students returned to China in significant numbers, posting photos online thanking Ji Rong.
The online traces of the international student campaign are now all but erased in China. First, the #TakeUsBackToChina campaign was removed from Chinese social media, and later, Counselor Ji Rong’s messages about international students were deleted from her Twitter account, which featured only bland diplomatic messages from late 2022.
Discussion and Conclusion
This article has discussed the challenges that arise when a country incorporates soft power into its foreign policy and faces shifting circumstances. China’s efforts to increase its global appeal through student exchange programs were disrupted by the COVID pandemic and the country’s strict zero-COVID response. Foreign students used China’s rhetoric to argue that the country had a moral obligation to prioritize their return. Rather than being passive conduits for spreading China’s values, they organized to hold Beijing accountable for their difficulties through the language of Chinese power, all-weather friendship, and solidarity via social media and their national politicians. Interactions with confrontational diplomats online further emboldened international students to criticize China, whereas expressions of solidarity and goodwill from Chinese diplomats helped to temper the debate. This sequence of events shows that countries opting for soft power in their foreign policy may find themselves committed to this strategy, as it gets adopted by various actors and thereby sets the parameters for subsequent engagements.
The students’ global activism presented a political challenge for Beijing and exposed the fragility of soft power in foreign policy. This might have influenced the reduction in scholarship pledges at the 2021 FOCAC meeting. Other events also suggest a decreasing commitment to offering affordable education for international students in China. The Chinese government has commissioned a study of the true cost of educating foreign students, suggesting that international student fees should be increased manifold from the current level to cover expenses, including language training and cultural accommodations (Liu, Hu, and Yan Reference Liu, Hu and Yan2023). The team behind the study argues that high fees will improve university education in China by attracting “higher-quality international students,” a message that starkly contrasts with the language of South–South solidarity (Chen Reference Chen2023). If China’s commitment to welcoming international students from the Global South wanes, young Africans may come to see the pandemic-related entry barriers not as an isolated incident but as an early sign of more enduring obstacles to accessing higher education in China.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am deeply grateful to the international students who shared their experiences for this research. The analysis benefited from feedback at the conference “Migration Brokers in (Im)Mobile Times,” co-convened by Brenda Yeoh, I. Rajan, and Anna Triandafyllidou, as well as from the editors and two anonymous reviewers. Mina Moghadam assisted with the transcriptions.
This project received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 802070).
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST
The authors declare no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.
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