ABSTRACT
This chapter locates the scholarship collected in this volume in a burgeoning body of Bourdieu-informed research on Sino–foreign higher education. It considers neoliberal and geopolitical impacts on China as both the source and destination of flows of students for education beyond the nation, as well as the reconfiguration that was occurring before the COVID-19 pandemic. The analytic moments of Bourdieusian field analysis are used to organise a review of literature on (1) the field of higher education vis-à-vis the national field of power; and (2) struggles of student participation in higher education in Sino–foreign higher education in China and the anglophone West. The review suggests that Chinese higher education involves an interplay of logics of symbolic excellence, academic politicism, and academic capitalism. Furthermore, struggles for advantageous position and distinction by universities, and by students and academics, occur at and beyond the national scale. This portrait, drawn from the extensive corpus of Bourdieusian empirical studies, informs the organisation of the volume into two parts: (1) structures and strategies of advantage behind institutional and individual action in Sino–foreign higher education; and (2) student participation in the practices of that higher education. The chapter probes the potential of Bourdieusian theory and methodology for understanding Sino–foreign higher education.
