Chinese Student Mobility to Finland and the Students’ Transnational Social Reality. Case study on Chinese degree students and their future plans at the University of Tampere and the University of Jyväskylä

Abstract

The Master’s thesis concerns Chinese student mobility to Finland and the transnational social reality of the Chinese students in the University of Tampere and University of Jyväskylä. I have studied future plans, social life as well as reasons to stay, return or move elsewhere by conducting 13 thematic face-to-face interviews. A majority of the informants were students of information technology and computer sciences.

In order to examine the current Chinese student mobility to Finland, I also shortly review the migration history of the Chinese since the end of the 19th century and present the development of governmental policies of the PRC, the EU and Finland toward the student mobility of higher education. The future plans and social and transnational reality of the Chinese degree students is compared with other international degree students in Finland.

The theoretical framework is based on migration theories, studies on so-called highly skilled migrants and studies on transnationalism. The study is linked to the research on new Chinese migration that refers to the Chinese migrants who have left China after the opening of the PRC at the beginning of the 1980s. A number of governmental reports are applied as background data on the studied questions.

The Chinese degree students interviewed were generally satisfied with the Finnish university studies and Finland as a study environment. However, a great majority of the interviewed students were planning to return to China following their graduation, either after gaining some working experience abroad or directly after finishing their studies. My findings suggest that female students are returning home more often due to familial reasons whereas male students stressed the opportunities to advance their careers in the developing labour markets of China. The students find that China can offer more opportunities than Finnish labour markets, which provide few chances for the Chinese to gain high social position and progress in the work career. The Finnish labour markets are still regarded indirectly discriminatory for foreigners.

However, many male students are willing to stay abroad due to more relaxed working environment, a relatively high salary, and various opportunities to develop professional skills. Some of the informants also stressed the significance of more societal and political freedoms in the Western countries.

The Chinese student mobility to Finland is evidently a phenomenon related to the opening of the PRC and increasing opportunities for the urban Chinese youth to travel abroad and obtain education in the Western universities. The Chinese university students in Finland are a spill over of the increasing Chinese student mobility to Europe after 9-11. Many of the students have been attracted by the high quality of the Finnish technology industry and the university education in the technical fields; information technology and computer sciences in particular.

Keywords: student mobility, Chinese migration, transnational social reality