Crossing Borders in Sports Education: International Mobility among Chinese Students
Abstract
Despite China still being the largest sending country of international students, the sub-stream of mobility in sports education has become under-theorized because of fragmentation between migration studies and sports pedagogy. The paper builds an integrated lifecycle model for Chinese sports students in which this paper combines the push–pull framework, cross-cultural adaptation theory, and Bourdieu's capital theory. The analysis was able to draw three conclusions regarding the mobility mechanism. To begin, outflow is prompted mainly by the structural limitation of the domestic Gaokao system rather than purely academic pull factors. Secondly, the students' adaptation abroad is identified as not just a linguistic adjustment but a fundamentally embodied struggle to navigate dissimilar physical cultures, which is termed as a pedagogical friction. Findings reveal a severe conversion crisis upon return, which is categorized as status discordance; in this case, the transnational capital accumulated does not get converted into value in the state-driven country's labor market, which is due to a lack of local networks (guanxi). The study highlights that with the volumes and flows of students becoming more important than before, internationalization of higher education institutions can no longer afford to merely focus on capital conversion.
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