New Imperialisms in the Making? The Geo-Political Economy of Transnational Mobility in the UK and China

Higher education mobility programmes around the globe have been key initiatives over the past thirty years, driven by combinations of supranational and national state-led knowledge economy policies, university strategies, and decisions made by individuals regarding employability, credentials, or academic tourism. In this paper we argue that mobility too often is understood through the prism of internationalism, itself umbilically tied to and nourished by Enlightenment liberal thinking, such as Kantian cosmopolitanism, and the romantic figure of the wandering scholar. This has the effect of reducing our understanding of transnational mobility to individual actors, their desires, and experiences. Yet we can also see that transnational mobility in higher education is also shaped by macro-geo-political and geo-economic dynamics historically tied to empire-making and state building, whilst newer projects are aligned with market-making and could also understood following Luxemburg (1952) as a form of economic imperialism. In our paper we examine contemporary transnational mobility dynamics through the prism of two nations, the UK and China. How might we understand these two cases, and in what ways do notions of imperialism, coloniality and Empire help shed light on these socio-temporal and spatial dynamics?