Infrastructural Involution: Evidence from Student and Skilled Migration to China

With its central position in the global economic landscape, China has shown ambition to gain an equal position in knowledge production and soft power influence. However, emerging evidence from international postgraduate students’ migration experience in China indicates a contradiction between Chinese state’s “welcoming” attitudes towards highly educated individuals and the extremely complicated route for postgraduate students to remain in China after graduation. Why does China pour public resource in attracting foreign students and highly skilled migrants and in the meantime make it so difficult for these individuals to remain in China?

My ethnographic data from 2018-2023 consists of interviews with student and post-student migrants, job agents, university officials in China, as well as analysis of migration policies and job advertisements. I extend the concept of “infrastructural involution” to discuss the competing logics within the nexus of higher education internationalisation and the regulated liberalisation of employment market for foreigners in China.

“Infrastructural involution” points to a trend in which the interplay between different dimensions of migration infrastructure make it self-perpetuating and self-serving, and impedes rather than enhances people’s migratory capability. By elaborating this analytical framework on the empirical study of student and skilled migration to China, this study responds to the “infrastructural turn” in migration and mobility research that introduces new angles that disentangle the working dynamics behind the migration process that has become both more accessible and more cumbersome in many parts of Asia.