“I became increasingly committed to appreciating research not at but on universities, research that engages universities as complex institutions.”Footnote 1 Nancy Abelmann wrote that statement in 2002 while introducing the Ethnography of the University Initiative (EUI), a program that she co-founded as a space for conducting research on the university at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. EUI became home to classes where undergraduate and graduate students study the university's institutions and cultures, ranging from a history course on immigration in the state of Illinois to an education course on higher-education organization to a composition course on the environmental sustainability of the university. EUI also serves as an archive of research projects by students and researchers, and as a forum for critical conversation on the university. EUI offers a glimpse of Nancy's interest in and devotion to the university. It was an object of her anthropological inquiry, a community in which she strived to be a good citizen, and a society for which she envisioned new ethics of living with others from vastly different backgrounds—and in particular with the increasing number of East Asian students.
As both a scholar and a member of the university, Nancy was a keen observer and earnest listener who often found surprises in seemingly routine conversations with students, staff, and colleagues. In retrospect, Nancy's curiosity and caring attention was always an important source of her incisive and original work on South Korean society, family, and globalization. I met Nancy in 2004, when I was a graduate student at the University of Illinois. Even though I was in Communication Studies, Nancy readily took me on as a protégé, as she did with numerous others who studied South Korea, East Asia, and Asian America across disciplines. Like many, I collaborated with Nancy—a natural outcome of her learning from others and her way of mentoring junior scholars—and we investigated the topic of study abroad in South Korea, the People's Republic of China (hereafter China), and the United States. She and I were preparing for a comparative work on international undergraduate student mobility among these countries, what we call the “global circuit of higher education.”
The university is, as Nancy illuminates in her research, a window to personal desires and anxieties, to substantial yet underarticulated norms of citizenship, and to national belonging. Nancy examined South Korea's experiences of education from the 1990s into the first decade of the twenty-first century, exposing the national experience of compressed modernization. During the ten years I collaborated with her since 2007, I had glimpses of Nancy as an unorthodox thinker and philosopher. In her unfinished work on the globalizing university, she was working toward “new civilities”—referring “not to mere politeness but to the transforming social and ethical norms of coexistence that are emerging in campus communities.”Footnote 2 With this, she interrogated the power of existing educational ideals in Western higher education and began envisioning how to share the same space with members from heterogeneous backgrounds. Even though Nancy was unable to complete this original project, her works on Korean family, higher education, and globalization leave us with valuable questions to further pursue. This reflection and new case study are a tribute to Nancy's research and to her unending passion as a scholar, citizen, and visionary thinker.
Education in Globalizing South Korea
Education was at the center of Nancy's efforts to understand the experience of South Korea's rapid social change. Nancy describes this in her 2003 book The Melodrama of Mobility: “There is little that is more vulnerable and more volatile in the South Korean social imagination than education. That is, as education has so long captured the aspirations and dreams of South Koreans, even slight changes in its meanings are felt in seismic proportions.”Footnote 3 Nancy developed education into an important category in understanding South Korea's modernization, family experience, and social mobility. In her work of the late 1990s and early 2000s, education illustrates the potent desires and considerable labor associated with the promise of social mobility, the uneasy acceptance of globalization, and the labor that the family (particularly mothers) took on as agents of navigating the ever-changing parameters of success.
The shift in Nancy's interest from social movements to family and education arose organically. In her 1996 book Echoes of the Past, Epics of Dissent, she studies a 1980s tenant farmers’ movement in South Korea's Chŏlla Province.Footnote 4 One of her informants was a farm activist committed to visions of a unified and postcolonial Korea. Nancy befriended her, which is typically what she did with informants during fieldwork. Then the activist moved to Seoul in the early 1990s with the intention of pursuing urban labor activism. By the time Nancy met her again in 2000, however, she had abandoned activism to focus on saving money to emigrate to the United States, where she believed she could “raise a creative child unfettered by the demands of South Korean schooling.”Footnote 5 This former anti-American activist's desire to move to America reveals how the survival in and the escape from South Korea's “rapid-fire economic development” of the 1990s were often in contradictory tension.Footnote 6 This woman's story became one of the eight that Nancy follows in The Melodrama of Mobility.
Study abroad occupies a particular space in Nancy's work as a documentation of South Koreans’ emergent structures of feeling amidst modernization and globalization. A number of works that Nancy produced during the decade following the 1997–98 Asian financial crisis capture the frenzy to acquire English proficiency, which permeates not only universities but also elementary and secondary schools and pushes teenagers and college students to private afterschool English academies and to foreign countries for study abroad. Between 1999 and 2009, the country saw a doubling of students headed to the United States to study, from 49,200 to 95,000.Footnote 7 As Nancy observed, raising a cosmopolitan child had become a joint project through which the entire family envisions “opportunities abroad” for its middle-class reproduction and imagines South Korea's participation in the global race.Footnote 8
However, the mass frenzy for a globally competitive Korea ironically “domesticated” study abroad, turning it into “an extension of South Korea's highly stratified and competitive education market.”Footnote 9 In her co-edited anthology, tellingly entitled No Alternative? Experiments in South Korean Education, Nancy, Jung-ah Choi, and So Jin Park observe that educational competition in neoliberal South Korea is absorbing an increasing number of fields, including domestic alternative schools and study abroad. Ironically, these efforts to escape the mainstream Korean education system are increasingly hailed as effective strategies for raising a competitive and entrepreneurial child, a new criterion for educational success in the neoliberal era.Footnote 10 In the constantly shifting and difficult path for the “success” of their children, these mothers are now expected to guide the children through the study abroad experience. Korean mothers are given the tall order to become an expert in designing an educational path and to imbue a sense of filial duty and patriotism while students are abroad.Footnote 11
In these works, Nancy establishes education as a heuristic for South Korean family, cosmopolitan desire, and global anxiety in the late 1990s and 2000s, continuing her effort to capture “the structure of feeling of lives lived in the vortex of transformation.”Footnote 12 As Laurel Kendall puts it, Nancy offers us a critical yet intimate portrayal of South Korea, “where personal character and historical circumstances are both at play, where personal acts and choices have profound and often unanticipated consequences.”Footnote 13 Nancy leads us to acknowledge the tremendous endeavor that her informants take up in navigating the changes even when they do not achieve the intended success in or escape from rapid social change.
The Global University and New Civilities
While students were leaving South Korea for study abroad, American universities on the receiving end were also transformed. With an array of works examining Asian American and East Asian students at the university, Nancy studied how the traditional ideal of liberal education and the new realities of a global educational market coexist in the modern university. Normative ideals of the university remain in American national imaginaries, shaping the expectation that international students will bring diversity to campus and become cosmopolitans prepared to thrive in the globalized world. However, the marketization of higher education also calls for a new ethical framework that conforms to the dictates of global market exchange. The term “new civilities” captures Nancy's effort to not only critique the old ideals but also reimagine the university as a space for transformative education and coexistence of members coming from heterogeneous backgrounds.
The civility question is already present in Nancy's 2009 book, The Intimate University : Korean American Students and the Problems of Segregation. In this work, she sheds light on the complex racial segregation of Korean Americans at the University of Illinois—a land-grant public university that has enabled Americans and immigrants to move up the ladder and achieve middle-class status. The university expects Asian Americans to add “color” to the campus and to evidence its “liberal ideals” that the university produces competent citizens regardless of race, nation, or religion. However, Korean American students are associated with the stereotype that they appreciate higher education solely for its instrumental value in terms of class mobility. Furthermore, their struggles with racial stereotypes and the resulting “(self-)segregation” are often considered to stem from the students’ voluntary decision to stay in their “comfort zone.”Footnote 14 In this study, Nancy keenly observed the tensions among the normative ideals of diversity, colorblindness, and liberal education. Vividly accounting for the Korean American students’ struggles with racial stereotypes, Nancy gives voice to the objects of American multiculturalism and brings awareness to the constraining power and internal contradictions of American (and Western) ideals.
After The Intimate University, Nancy's interests grew to include the mass arrival of Chinese international undergraduate students at American universities, which further transformed even routine interactions in classrooms, on campus, and in the local community. She particularly attended to two prominent changes. First, East Asian international students bring financial capital to American universities by paying out-of-state tuition fees and provide symbolic capital confirming the value of American education as worth traveling for. When South Koreans realized the difficulty of studying abroad and began withdrawing from US higher education in the late 2000s, universities turned to the “alluring China market.”Footnote 15 The American university and national media alike considered Chinese undergraduate students to be inevitable clients. With the country's population of 1.3 billion, the precipitous rise of its middle class, and its citizens’ escalating desire to send their only child for higher education in “developed countries,”Footnote 16 the number of Chinese undergraduates in the United States saw an 828 percent increase between 2004 and 2012 (8,000 to 74,600).
Second, East Asian students now choose between regional (intra-Asian) and Western institutions, defying the traditional parameters within which the West was the taken-for-granted educator and knowledge producer of the world. International students are no longer necessarily their home country's elites, nor aspiring cosmopolitans. The new undergraduate international student is instead an anxious global shopper, for whom a foreign university degree is often an easier route for securing middle-class status than managing the increasingly intense domestic competition. For instance, a growing number of Korean students flock to China, banking on the future of China and seeking a more modest goal of becoming regionally—not globally—experienced (the number grew from 16,000 to almost 63,000 between 2001 and 2012). In South Korea, the number of Chinese international students increased fifty-four-fold between 2000 and 2013 (1,200 to 65,200), and as of 2016 these students represented an impressive 58 percent of the country's international enrollment.
Nancy and I were planning a comparative analysis of the encounter between domestic and international students in the United States, China, and South Korea. This work, entitled New Global Civilities: The Mobile Undergraduate in the U.S., China, and South Korea, would investigate both national discourse and local “vernacular” discourses and practices surrounding Chinese students in the United States and South Korea, and South Korean students in China and the United States. The national discourse offers a glimpse into each country's response to the international students within its particular political, social, and global trajectory. Vernacular discourses, referring to daily social interactions and conversations that emerge from the local campus community, illuminate how students negotiate new norms of coexistence on the ground, even though these norms are not necessarily accessible or legible to the larger public.Footnote 17 We designed this comparative work to identify patterns shared across countries as well as specificities in each of the three nodes of global student mobility.
Following the model of The Intimate University, we attended to how the powerful ideals of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism had increasingly become “limited when it comes to understanding undergraduate mobility today.”Footnote 18 Multiculturalism is a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when America (and Western Europe) granted newcomers special protections and rights to facilitate their integration into civil society. As a historical variant of civility, multiculturalism celebrates the United States as the unquestioned destination for those who are impoverished, persecuted, or formerly colonized. The related ideal of cosmopolitanism envisions international students as elites who are ready to appreciate American culture and seamlessly integrate into the American campus while inspiring local students with global sensibilities. However, current undergraduate student mobility calls for reconsideration of Western and national models of civility to better fit the marketization and middle-class turn of study abroad.
It was Nancy's belief that we could identify transformative ethics of coexistence from the local, vernacular practices on the ground. This belief is also found in her effort in the American University Meets the Pacific Century Project (AUPC). She co-founded this interdisciplinary research team in 2010 to study the internationalization of the undergraduate student body at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Inviting undergraduate and graduate students to join the research team, Nancy created AUPC as a laboratory to foster dialogue between international and domestic students and to fashion ethics of coexisting on the globalizing campus.Footnote 19
Our preliminary analysis suggests that ideals of integration or incorporation are still upheld in national discourses but are increasingly challenged, albeit differently in the three countries. For instance, the United States initially admired the Chinese students as conveyors of much-desired diversity and as exemplary strivers, but soon decried them as impossible subjects of multiculturalism whose incommensurable differences range from a rote learning style to ignorance of the norms of intellectual property.Footnote 20 As I discuss later, the South Korean national discourse is interested primarily in the nation's status as a precarious second-choice destination for global student mobility, and offers an instrumental view of Chinese students as financial and cultural capital. South Korean students in China are frequently depicted as upstarts who have not awakened to the power of China. Through this comparative analysis, Nancy and I were planning to examine the constraining force of the old ideals and the search for a new model of civility—how to live with seemingly incommensurable others in an increasingly globalized world and in the shared space of the university.
This trajectory, I hope, offers a glimpse of Nancy's original scholarship on the university. Her research was truly interdisciplinary, drawing on and inspiring scholars of Korea, Asian America, family, migration, and higher education, to name just a few. It is noteworthy that her works were read not only as anthropology and Korean studies (which she primarily identified with) but also as “one of the most valuable referents in … issues of migration”Footnote 21 and as “useful to policymakers for multicultural education.”Footnote 22 This broad appeal stems from her in-depth anthropological account of the students, parents, and universities. Nancy gave voice to the minority and international students—and even dropouts—who were often represented by only the university in its institutional rhetoric. Furthermore, she used these struggles to reflect on the significant material impact of normative ideals—typically based on the historical experience of Western Europe and America—on campus interactions. Yet, she was not merely critical of existing ideals; local actors’ vernacular responses were inventive resources for her as she envisioned transformation at the university.
The analysis that follows represents my first attempt to return to where Nancy and I left off. I analyze South Korea's national and regional newspaper reports on Chinese international students from 2000 to 2016. Despite its propensity to highlight sensational perspectives and remarks, the circulation of media—as Jürgen Habermas and Benedict Anderson noted—offers a window to the South Korean public's imagination as they embrace Chinese international students and envision Korea's stature as a provider in global education.Footnote 23
Initially newspapers in South Korea portrayed Chinese students primarily as capital to be optimized for national gain. Korean universities, particularly non-elite and private institutions, have viewed Chinese students as institutional and national resources for maximizing the outlook of globalization and financial gain while minimizing the academic and cultural effort to accommodate these foreign undergraduates. However, after Chinese nationalist protests erupted during the Beijing Olympics torch relay in 2008, South Koreans have questioned the value of Chinese students. Reports between 2008 and 2016 increasingly depicted Chinese students as cultural Others uninterested in Korean culture or education, who artificially sustain weak Korean universities that are willing to trade degrees for tuition and enrollment. As such, the institutional and national effort to “optimize” the Chinese students as financial and cultural capital failed, revealing the insecure stature of the Korean university in the global higher-education market.
In the remainder of this analysis, I first discuss the role of Chinese students in global undergraduate mobility and South Korea's place as their destination. In particular, I analyze two national newspapers, examining their representations of the students. These newspapers, Chosun Ilbo and Hankyoreh, are opinion leaders of conservative and liberal perspectives respectively, thus capturing the breadth of political and cultural views on the topic. In particular, as the largest newspaper in Korea, Chosun Ilbo has extensive regional sections that publish prominent news for local readers. I read more than 250 newspaper articles from between 2000 and June 2016 and have analyzed the 90 articles that emphasize the human dimension of international studies and go beyond statistics.
Chinese Students Meet South Korean Universities
South Korea joined the competition to attain global university status in the mid-1990s, when President Kim Young Sam (1993–98) emphasized the unique Korean project for globalization, so-called segyehwa, in top-down reform pursuing deregulation, competition, and marketization in the political economy. The reforms rapidly introduced both a market mechanism and a concept of global competition into Korea's higher-education policy, in which “global” university rankings determined government funding and the accreditation of institutions.Footnote 24
Recruiting international students served a dual purpose in these changes. First, it functioned as symbolic capital for Korean universities in the competition to attain the status of world-class institution. In 2003 and 2004, Shanghai Jiao Tong University's Academic Rankings of World Universities and the Times Higher Education–QS World University Rankings (respectively) began rating universities according to a set of universal criteria. This amplified the existing competition among elite universities, which used the rankings as both domestic and international markers of status. Among the criteria, the number of foreign faculty and students were relatively attainable targets, compared with other areas requiring long-term investments.Footnote 25
Second, for South Korea's private non-elite institutions in particular, international students became veritable lifelines for survival. An average of 60 percent of these South Korean universities’ budgets derive from tuition (compared with 30 percent in the United States), and universities cannot increase the number of domestic admissions, which is set by the Department of Education.Footnote 26 Furthermore, starting in 2011 the Korean government reduced both government subsidies and admissions quotas for universities that fell within the lowest 15 percent in the rankings. In light of a steep depopulation trend—in 1980 there were almost six million students in elementary schools, but in 2014 only three million—55 percent of Korean universities failed to fill the seats in their freshman class in 2010.Footnote 27 As such, struggling institutions increasingly view international students, whose numbers are not limited by the government-imposed quota, as sources of income or even “lifelines.”Footnote 28
For Chinese students, South Korea is an appealing option among those who desire to study abroad but cannot financially or academically achieve enrollment in developed, English-speaking countries. Korean universities are affordable, especially with fellowships designed to attract international students. Korea is only a short flight from China, and is home to the Korean Wave pop culture that has been gaining a broad-based fandom in Asia and beyond. In the decade since 2001, South Korean universities saw a twelve-fold increase in international students, from 4,682 to 59,000 (although the numbers have stagnated or declined in recent years).Footnote 29
Optimizing as Maximizing: Reviving Korean Universities and Culture
In the years immediately after 2001, when media first covered the arrival of Chinese students at South Korean universities, the news predominantly celebrated these students as a solution to multiple problems: they provided private universities with financial resources, filled empty seats, and boosted the school's global outlook. Reports during this early phase (2001–8) also celebrated the cultural exchange that Chinese students represented—Korean universities offered Chinese students the education they could not access at home, and Chinese students in return affirmed the value of Korean culture. The media representation was essentially of a market exchange, in which the Chinese students’ desire for higher education and the Korean universities’ need for student bodies were evenly matched.
A Resource for University Survival and Global Recognition
Private regional universities were the first to welcome the mass arrival of Chinese students in the early 2000s, before elite universities also discovered the benefits of hosting international students. The 2001 report “Recruit International Students! A Wave of Internationalization Is Coming” describes the efforts of a private university in Ch'ungch’ŏng Province to recruit three hundred Chinese students. The article praises the university for setting such an ambitious goal and for hosting a college fair in China to attract high-school graduates.Footnote 30 An article from Chŏlla Province similarly describes a regional private university's “overseas marketing strategies”: contracting recruitment agencies, prioritizing international students in assigning student housing, and offering a 50 percent tuition waiver.Footnote 31
Such recruitment was a critical survival strategy for regional universities facing a potential loss of accreditation. The 2002 article “Impending Crisis for Regional Universities, ‘We Might Have to Close the University’” notes that the number of university applicants would soon drop below the level of available seats, and quotes the president of a regional university as stating, “Universities don't have an option but to turn to the overseas market for their survival.”Footnote 32 A Chosun Ilbo article in the Ch'ungch’ŏng Province edition describes regional universities that had reached out to China, Vietnam, and Thailand after “having the worst year ever of domestic recruitment.”Footnote 33
This aggressive recruitment was an inevitable consequence of the broader demographic shift in South Korea. The growing college-age population reached its peak of 900,000 in 1990, with only 400,000 seats in universities. In 1996, the government liberalized private universities, allowing private foundations to establish universities outside of Seoul. Soon, new universities were opening in major cities in each province and in rural areas. However, the college-age population saw a steep decrease after 2000, and in 2008 the number of seats (667,000) exceeded the number of students (629,000) for the first time. In this new context, private universities were forced to compete with one another for students, especially regional schools that also fight against the concentration of higher education in Seoul and young people's preference to study in the capital. By the early 2000s, private regional schools were already aggressively recruiting domestic students, and declining enrollment eventually necessitated bringing in Chinese students for the survival of regional universities and local economies.
In this context, the media discourse celebrated recruitment successes. For instance, a 2004 article entitled “University Sees Fruitful Years of International Students” praises a regional university for achieving a tenfold increase in international students over three years and “reaping benefits” from them. The article also notes that these international students are “of better value,” referring to the increase in degree-seeking students who pay tuition as opposed to students who enroll only at short-term Korean language courses.Footnote 34
In the national news, Chinese students came into the spotlight in 2006 when their number in Korea topped 30,000. These reports continue to present Chinese students as an important resource for the internationalization of Korean universities, helping them to climb the global university rankings. According to a 2006 op-ed called “Cater to International Students,” the foreign student population—which at the time constituted 0.3 percent of total Korean university enrollment—was still “embarrassingly low” compared with the average 7.3 percent among the thirty-four Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries.Footnote 35 A 2007 editorial entitled “Education Reform Must Begin with Establishing World-Class Universities” notes the same disparity: “South Korea is ranked twelfth in world trade and thirteenth in global economy.… However, we are last in the OECD in the number of international students. This attests to the low trust in Korean universities.”Footnote 36 A 2009 report examines Chinese students as a particular target for this effort. Entitled “‘Bring in Chinese Elite!’ Seoul National University's Strong Move,” it reports that the most prestigious Korean university was ranked forty-seventh in the 2009 Times–QS World University Ranking, lagging behind elite universities in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Japan. The article points out that the number of international students in Korea at the time was only one-fifth of the number of Korean students abroad, arguing that the elite Korean universities’ essential task is “to improve their status and environment to attract the world-class elite.”Footnote 37 In these reports, the number of international students represents a currency that determines the prestige of South Korea's higher education, and Chinese students are an easy market to tap into.
The optimal approach to this market is therefore seen as maximizing the number of students, which would revive economically struggling regional universities and serve as symbolic capital for elite universities. What is clear in these media representations is that the ideal of international student exchange is a market exchange, in which success is measured by financial benefit and rankings in global indices.
“Future Advocates of Korea”
Optimal globalization includes maximizing cultural exchanges with international students. Media reports in the early phase celebrate these students and emphasize the multicultural value of their presence. The mass arrival of international students also coincided with the emergence of considerable public concern about multiculturalism, with the precipitous increase in international marriages and resultant rise in multiethnic families. The international students were envisioned as evidence that Korea was paying attention to diversity and becoming “sensitive to international justice norms.”Footnote 38
In this discourse, regional universities are portrayed to extend support toward international students, who often come from poor and disadvantaged countries. In return, international students affirm the value of South Korea as a benevolent host with attractive traditions. A 2003 article reports on a series of end-of-year events for international students in Kyŏngsang Province, including one in which international students performed the traditional Korean play Hŭngbu wa Nolbu. In a Chosun Ilbo article, a Korean professor and member of the National Association of Female Professors stated, “We wanted to extend our warm compassion (chŏng) to international students facing difficulties arising from living abroad.”Footnote 39 The 2009 article “Foreigners Are Flocking to Student Clubs for Traditional Korean Culture” describes a scene in which an Israeli student is practicing p'ungmul, a traditional Korean percussion ensemble.Footnote 40 Similarly, a 2010 report from Taegu describes international students from a local junior college visiting orphanages during the Full Moon Festival. Detailed in the article is a spontaneous and genuine interaction between local citizens and international students: “Eighty foreign students dressed in colorful Korean traditional costumes (hanbok) went to the open market in the region, buying groceries for their visits to nursing homes and orphanages. Merchants at the market spoke warmly with them, asking where they were from and offering them samples of rice cake.” In the remainder of the article there are a number of interviews in which students testify to their memorable and transformative experiences. A student from Russia said, “The merchants at the market were so friendly, and I was overwhelmed by the holiday spirit and warmth.” A Chinese student noted, “Even though I'm away from home, I had a memorable day tasting Korean food and celebrating the holiday.”Footnote 41 In these reports, international students affirm the value by Korean culture by joining traditional clubs and celebrating Korean holidays. Their testimonies of being moved and having memorable experiences further affirmed the Koreans’ moral authority as hosts in the global community and their sensitivity to diverse cultures.
These students are also important internationalizers in the local community. The 2010 article “International Students Make Friends with Korean Children” reports on a group of foreign students from nine countries visiting a local elementary school in Kyŏnggi Province as substitute teachers. They gave presentations on their home countries, demonstrated Togolese traditional dance, and taught greetings in Urdu and Spanish. In an interview, the principal of the school noted that “the international student volunteers help Korean students learn about multiculturalism and respect other cultures.”Footnote 42
In 2008, when the international student population reached 60,000, Chosun Ilbo ran a three-part special report, “An Era of Sixty Thousand International Students,” envisioning how these students would rejuvenate Korean universities and become “pro-Korean advocates” after leaving Korea. The report cites two officials at well-respected Korean universities, who remarked, “We're educating future leaders of developing countries, as a way to repay the education we received from Western missionaries 120 years ago,” and “We are closing the global knowledge gap by educating students from developing countries and transforming them into ‘allies of Korea’ within global society.”Footnote 43 In these reports, the international students’ presence is interpreted as an affirmation of Korea's newfound status as a patron and educator of students from other developing countries. Furthermore, the students serve as exemplary local citizens who participate in the matters of their local community and inject a sense of internationalization to remote and less-prestigious nooks of Korea.
Unmistakable in these portrayals, however, is the relative absence of Chinese students, who nevertheless constituted 58 percent of the international student population. In contrast with the attention paid to Chinese students as a financial lifeline for universities, both the reports and accompanying photos on cultural exchange instead underscore the diversity of international students. Implicit in these reports is the normative ideal that international students serve (and must serve) as good local citizens and valuable international ambassadors in the region; a large group of students from only one country does not meet the ideal of global cultural exchange.
The early reports on the mass arrival of Chinese students thus view them almost entirely as a national resource—lifelines for the country's struggling institutions and advocates on the global stage. Optimizing in these reports refers to maximizing both the amount and the degree of contact with Chinese students. However, the two discourses reveal a contradiction. The market logic celebrates the achievement of Korean universities in tapping into the accessible and profitable Chinese market. However, this fits awkwardly with the logic of multiculturalism, as a large group of students from only one country does not promulgate the desired outlook of a multicultural society. As the broad absence of Chinese students in the portrayals of cultural exchange suggests, the project of optimization is a precarious one whose outlook can only barely be maintained.
Optimizing as Cautious Distancing: Unhealthy Codependence and Untrustworthy Chinese Nationalism
Since 2008, celebratory reports like those above have been increasingly eclipsed by more critical ones. That year, the significant presence of Chinese students was abruptly put before the South Korean public during the Beijing Olympics torch relay, when they took to the street en masse for protests against Tibetan liberation rallies. Around the same time, newspapers increasingly reported that lower-tier South Korean universities were indiscriminately admitting Chinese students to fill empty seats, and unmotivated Chinese students were using these universities as a means to obtain a visa—through which they often turned into illegal workers. Media discourses have thus become suspicious of the Chinese students’ quality as both students and members of the community, often urging Korean universities to distance themselves from the Chinese student market.
Cultural Suspicion: Chinese Students Are Serving Their Country and Themselves
The 2008 Olympics torch relay that passed through South Korea en route to Beijing was a national turning point for Koreans in noticing the massive number of Chinese students in the country. On April 27, 2008, Korean activists planned to stage a small protest along the relay route against the Chinese government's oppression of the Tibetan independence movement. However, the 180 protesters were met by 6,500 Chinese counter-protesters who waved Chinese national flags and violently overwhelmed the Tibetan liberation activists. The Korean national audience was shocked by the large number of Chinese students in the country and their intense expression of nationalism. The Chosun Ilbo article “Seoul Was Bruised by Chinese Mass Violence” documents Korean citizens’ surprise at the scale and intensity of the Chinese student protesters: “When the Five Star Red Flags covered downtown Seoul, citizens were struck by surprise and curiosity, ‘Where are all the young Chinese coming from?’” The article describes Koreans’ anger at the Chinese students’ violence towards reporters, activists for Tibetan liberation, and even Korean police, and argues that Chinese students had “systematically prepared for the disruption online.” The article ended with commentary by a Korean expert on China: “It's commonsensical to celebrate a torch relay abroad with the Chinese flag, the Korean flag, and the Olympics flag. The sea of the Five Star Red Flags and violence suggests that Chinese don't respect different opinions, a result of no democratic experience.”Footnote 44
The incident drew attention to the nationalism of China's “post-80s generation” (balinghou), those born after Deng Xiaoping took power and raised as only children in a period of unprecedented economic growth.Footnote 45 The Hankyoreh article “Post-80s Nationalism Lacks Reflection” notes:
This generation has no sense of the historical debt that the previous generation had toward the grim aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. For this new generation, China is a rapidly developing country and source of infinite pride…. The youth of the May 4 Movement in 1919 stood up against the outside powers and took on the task of reforming their homeland. The youth of Tiananmen Square demanded China's political reform…. However, the post-80s generation revealed blind nationalism.Footnote 46
In a Chosun Ilbo op-ed, a China specialist diagnoses the post-80s generation as “self-centered,” “impulsive,” and “nationalistic.”Footnote 47 Furthermore, the Chinese embassy in South Korea was suspected of mobilizing the Chinese students. A Hankyoreh article details a suspicion that the embassy “organized the student protesters and provided transportation” and that a Chinese educational consul led a group of 1,400 Chinese students from Pusan to Seoul.Footnote 48 In the media discourse, the 2008 incident is a turning point where the South Korean public recognized the significant presence of Chinese students in Korea. The reports portray these students as nationalistic, intolerant, and unappreciative of democratic values, thus questioning whether the Chinese students have values compatible with living in Korean society.
The following years saw increasing reports about Chinese students changing universities and campus towns, instead of being transformed by Korean culture. The 2014 Chosun Ilbo article “Chinese-Only Dorms on Campus and Mini-Chinatown off Campus” describes an evening at a Chinese-only dorm, where both Chinese and Korean students speak only Chinese, and five of six student leaders are Chinese. The article argues that the influx of Chinese students is “changing the culture of Korean universities,” including school cafeterias catering to Chinese students and campus towns turning into “mini Chinatowns.” The article ends with a comment that Korean students are discriminated against in registration and housing.Footnote 49 The 2015 report “Chayangdong Chinatown Is Bustling with ‘Little Princes,’ Yŏnnamdong Is for Young and Fashionable Chinese” zooms in on multiple “Chinatowns” recently formed in Seoul. Notably, these neighborhoods are populated by Chinese-owned stores that serve wealthy Chinese students. The owner of a Chinese restaurant is quoted as saying, “People driving expensive European cars are invariably Han Chinese international students. There are so many rich children that this neighborhood is called the ‘Street of Little Princes.’”Footnote 50
In these reports, Chinese students are portrayed as transforming university culture and even the landscape of campus towns. They do not need Koreans, but instead build self-sufficient enclaves in which Chinese are both the providers and the clients for services. Such often-sensational coverage of Chinese students’ nationalism, wealth, and cultural enclaves questions the value of Chinese students that was established in the earlier discourse of optimization.
Codependence Between Weak Korean Universities and Weak Chinese Students
Even in the pre-2008 era, occasional reports noted Chinese students remaining as illegal workers after their visa expired. Nevertheless, the theme of Chinese students coming to Korea for work and not for education has since become more prominent. These reports portray the presence of Chinese students as enabling unhealthy codependence between unqualified students and weak Korean universities that could not survive without them.
The 2011 article “Chinese Students Are Not Fluent in Korean Even after Four Years, and 50% Drop Out” argues that a number of Korean universities admitted Chinese students without adequate proficiency in university-level Korean. The article quoted a Korean professor who lamented, “How can we expect Chinese students to learn in class when they can't do basic greetings in Korean?” and a Korean student who complained, “I was in the same project group with a Chinese student. It is nonsense that we are expected to have a discussion when the person can't even engage in basic communication.”Footnote 51
Such reports suggest that Chinese students are not merely unprepared but also often completely unmotivated. A 2012 article with the sensational title “The Fall of a Chinese Princeling” introduces the case of a Chinese government official's son—a “princeling” (t'aejadang or taizidang in Chinese)—who fell into gambling after coming to Korea and frequented upscale casinos open only to foreigners, losing his stipend, tuition, and then eventually his three Shanghai condominiums.Footnote 52 Similarly, the 2014 article “Chinese Students Are Blatantly into Illegal Businesses, Living the Life of a CEO” tells the story of a Chinese student who began a moving company catering to fellow Chinese students, tapping into a market whose population had by then reached 55,000. The report notes, “International students were able to run a business despite the illegality because of the Koreans’ lenience toward it…. Korean law enforcement viewed them as ‘poor and hardworking students away from home.’”Footnote 53 Notable in this discourse is not only that Chinese students were unfit for academic pursuits but that their scale as a collective further aggravated the tendency. When a large group of Chinese students enrolled at a single university, they affected the quality of education for Korean students. Furthermore, they formed a large enough market for entrepreneurial Chinese students to divert them from their studies. Chinese students were not interested in availing themselves of Korean education and community, but rather were entrepreneurs taking advantage of unsuspecting Koreans.
In this portrayal of a problematic trend, unqualified South Korean universities were often held to be more responsible than the Chinese students they admitted. The 2007 article “Two-Year College Found to Broker International Students into Illegal Work” details how a junior college had been admitting students from China and Vietnam and assisted them in finding illegal work while giving them grades and even a diploma without attendance.Footnote 54 A 2010 Chosun Ilbo editorial entitled “We Need an Exit Strategy for Unsustainable Universities” asserts that the problem is not confined to a few unqualified universities; rather, it is a broad pattern. According to the editorial, 55 percent of universities had failed to fill their freshman classes that year, and regional private universities—hit especially hard by the loss of students—indiscriminately admitted international students, mostly from China and Vietnam. Furthermore, some universities saw a 97 percent dropout rate among international students, while others knowingly allowed students to work illegally without attending the university.Footnote 55 Another 2011 editorial, similarly entitled “Unsustainable Universities Are Getting by with Chinese students,” reiterates this argument; in the article, Korean universities and unqualified Chinese students are accomplices that drain national resources. The editorial calls this a “codependence (kongsaeng)”—Chinese students provide the enrollment for which weak universities receive a government subsidy, and these universities in return provide an entry visa and diploma.Footnote 56
This critical and often sensational portrayal remains a prominent theme to date. The 2016 article “Automatic Admissions with Tuition, Chinese Students Are Coming Without Speaking Any Korean” cynically notes that Korean universities have spawned “an era of 100,000 international students by selling degrees.” In this article, a Korean student at a regional private university describes his experience of finding out that eighteen of thirty Chinese students enrolled in his class stopped coming within a month of the semester starting. These students gave up on class and instead took part-time jobs.Footnote 57
Such reports represent Chinese students as contributing to a vicious cycle in which weak universities provide paltry language education or support for adaptation to Korean society, leading unmotivated students to abandon academic work and stay in Korea illegally (even becoming involved in crime and gambling), which further worsens the quality of university education. In this discourse, optimization refers to finding “an exit strategy for unsustainable universities,” as one of the above editorials describes, and preventing unqualified Chinese students from artificially extending the life of these weak universities.
Reports between 2008 and 2016 largely question the value of Chinese students that was established earlier, arguing that the financial contributions of these students actually hinder healthy market competition in higher education, and that large Chinese enclaves offer minimal cultural exchange with Korean communities or culture. This significant shift in the discourse at the height of the Chinese student population defies earlier promises of internationalization and mutually beneficial exchange.
Conclusion
In The Intimate University, Nancy observed the “paradoxes of the American university,” where tension between the rhetorical embrace of diversity and colorblindness persists, as does the contradictory pursuit of liberal education and marketization.Footnote 58 The analysis presented here shows that the exchange between the university and international students is “quite precarious” not only in America but in South Korea as well.Footnote 59 It is predominantly a market exchange, but the old ideals of internationalization and liberal transformation restrain the host university and national public from refashioning the ethics of living with foreign students.
The case above further reveals South Korea's specificity in the circuits of global higher education. South Korean media are aware that Korea is a “second choice” destination for Chinese students whose academic aspirations are much more modest than those who head to the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia. South Korean media soon realized that the country depends on Chinese students for the survival of many universities, even when the nationalism and cultural difference of these students transforms the Korean university and community. The current state of study abroad thus requires a conversation about ethics to address both its new role as a global market exchange and the more traditional ideals of intercultural exchange or cosmopolitan transformation.
Nancy's blueprint for New Civilities directs me to the next stage—studying the vernacular narratives of Chinese students who opt for South Korea, and of South Korean students who opt for China. Nancy showed that the voices of students, including those who struggle and even drop out, offer an intimate understanding of campus civility—the students’ daily interactions and the normative ideals that foster or constrain their coexistence. I believe that the vernacular narratives of these students will lead to a deeper understanding of intra-Asian higher education as part of global higher education and as a circuit of its own with its particular desires and anxieties regarding the future of East Asia.
While working on this analysis, I reread Nancy's The Intimate University and was struck by how she concludes the book:
Finally, and perhaps most prosaically, but most intimately for the likes of me, a professor of the humanistic social sciences, I would like to remind the reader of the call that my student interlocutors made to the professoriates: that we make our classes meaningful venues in which young people can indeed grow and prepare themselves for a transformed and transforming world.Footnote 60
She viewed her interlocutor students as inventive sources and partners in imagining a more ethical and inhabitable space for them, and she herself was transformed by them. Perhaps this is why Nancy continually inspired me and other scholars and teachers. She listened to people around her and was willing to give them space to talk and teach her, as she did at the end of her book. The university, for Nancy, was an object of inquiry, a place for living and learning with others, and a space for intellectual and personal engagement.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the feedback I received from Nicole Constable, Ga Young Chung, and Agnes Sohn. I also appreciate the many comments and questions provided by the participants at the February 2017 workshop Korean Ethnography Now: Building on the Legacy of Nancy Abelmann, organized by Jesook Song, Eleana Kim, and Laura Nelson and held at the University of California, Irvine.
