Everyone stays, should I return? - Disentangling the decision-making on mobility of Chinese knowledge diaspora

Normally referring to highly skilled expatriates, knowledge diaspora is regarded as an important asset to both home and host countries in today’s knowledge-based economy, particularly so given their strategic roles in bridging cross-border collaboration regarding the internationalisation of higher education, research, and innovation. Since the 1980s, China has made continual efforts to design and implement systematic and flexible policies to make good use of its large talent pool of knowledge diasporas, one of the significant contributors to China’s development. This is extensively examined in (inter)national literature. However, the majority of such research adopted the conventional ‘brain drain/gain/circulation’ concepts derived from human capital theory (Cai, 2012; Hao et al., 2016; Yang & Qiu, 2010). This substantial perspective conceived skills bounded within human bodies, thereby failing to capture the dynamic and relational dimensions of skills formation and application embedded within the actor-network/diaspora knowledge network (Meyer, 2001, 2011; Meyer & Wattiaux, 2006). Meanwhile, the few studies (Lin, 2023) utilising this network approach focused on master’s graduates, leaving knowledge diasporas, typically composed of PhD holders and/or senior professionals, unexamined. Different from other types of diasporas whose cross-border mobility mainly relies on kinship ties, knowledge diaspora undertakes migration-related activities drawing upon their professional networks consisting of alumni, colleagues, fellows, etc. For example, in an empirical survey conducted in an elite Chinese university, the institutional habitus collectively moulded by generations of alumni and staff exerted an implicit yet coercive influence on shaping a homogeneous education trajectory to pursue overseas doctoral degrees among its current students and staff (Li et al., 2021). This sociological concept of institutional habitus closely aligns with the conceptualisation of universities’ identity (Fumasoli et al., 2020), sourced from disciplinary traditions, university culture, academic professional values, and national patterns. In other words, one of the factors determining knowledge diasporas is where the PhD studies were completed. Against this backdrop, this study adopts the theoretical frameworks of diaspora knowledge networks and universities’ identity, attempting to disentangle the decision-making process on return or stay among the Chinese knowledge diaspora, represented by Chinese PhD graduates at overseas institutions. Specifically, transcending and intersecting the temporal and spatial scales, the study examines 1) how Chinese knowledge diasporas develop their actor network after migration and 2) how their actor-network impacts their decisions to stay in host countries or to return to China, with particular attention to the interactions between actor-network and universities’ identity of their home and overseas alma maters. This study is of great significance. First, it expands the conceptual work of knowledge diasporas, linking networks and universities’ identities by applying them to culturally and educationally diverse contexts (Chinese PhD graduates abroad). Second, it broadens the knowledge base regarding the mobility of Chinese knowledge diasporas from a network and institutional perspective with an individual level of analysis. Finally, given the current global geopolitical conflicts, our study provides new perspectives in the recent discussion of knowledge power and/or diplomacy (Chou & Demiryol, 2023) in relation to China’s evolving role (soft power) in international order through higher education.