Flying Kites: How Chinese International Students in New Zealand Reflect on Chinese Citizenship in a Third Space

Abstract

This exploratory study investigates how Chinese international students reconfigure their sense of themselves as citizens when they reflect on what Chinese citizenship means in the context of New Zealand. A case study approach is adopted to applyeverydaycitizenship theory to interview and focus group data fromChinese international doctoral students.Twenty individual interviews, two focus groups and my observations from my own experience informhow overseas study experience shapes Chinese international students’ views on citizenship.These views varied, and four metaphors emerged todescribethe various themes. The participants could not always articulate thoughts on the abstract concept ‘citizenship’coherently, yet their descriptions of everyday livesfitted into citizenship theory. To understand Chinese citizens holistically, I explored the metaphors they used in this research. The idea of using metaphorsto capture the implicit theories in Chinese international students’ personal experience appealed to me, since the students themselves used metaphors in their personal narratives.My study found thatparticipants’ experience of everyday citizenship is inflected differently by the political difference between China, their home country, and New Zealand, the democracy of their doctoral study period. To reconcile the political differences that affect participant’s everyday citizenship, I add to everyday citizenship the theoretical construct of the third space: the interview and focus group discussion between Chinese students and Chinese researcher, where we were safe to make sense of thesepolitical differences. The study found that the struggles of Chinese students in New Zealand lie between being individuals and submitting to the general will of the family, state, CCP, and guanxi(Chinese concept of interpersonal relationship). Everyday citizenship theoryshowed thatmy participants were enacting citizenship even if they did not really understand what the concept means until had a comparison in their Western country of study. This demonstrates that citizenship varies across political, social and cultural contexts, and shows the importance of not assuming that citizenship is not enacted just because it is not articulated as such. The advantages of democracy and citizenship so well understood in the West may not be self-evident to students raised in a system with different values. Traditional values continue to exert an influence on Chinese students despite the influences of New Zealand. The discomforting process of reassessing identity when citizenship values vary is not always appreciated by Western academics who study Chinese citizenship using Western criteria. Key words: Chinese international students, citizenship, case study, third space.