‘You need three generations to nurture an elite student’: Mainland Chinese students in a Hong Kong university

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• Cora Lingling Xu, Faculty of Education
• Wednesday 26 November 2014, 13:00-14:00
• Room 2S5, Donald McIntyre Building, Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Heyi Zhang.

Set against the backdrop of the arguably disquieting relations between Hong Kong and mainland China, as can be partially ascertained through the recent student-led Occupy Central Movement, in this paper I consider the identity constructions of 31 undergraduate mainland Chinese (MLC) students in a Hong Kong university. Drawing on two rounds of in-depth interviews as well as written accounts of the participants collected in a nine-month ethnographic stint, in this paper I argue that there emerges a complex elite identity amongst these students. I explicate an array of attitudes and responses to the elite identity, from outright assumption to uncomfortable ambivalence to direct refutation; I then pinpoint the reproductive capacity of generational privileges as characterised by these students’ educational, inter-generational and cosmopolitan capitals.

This talk is part of the Faculty of Education Research Students' Association (FERSA) Lunchtime Seminars 2014-2015 series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• Faculty of Education Research Students' Association (FERSA) Lunchtime Seminars 2014-2015
• Room 2S5, Donald McIntyre Building, Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 8PQ

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