International Mobility and Educational Desire: Chinese Foreign Talent Students in Singapore (Anthropological Studies of Education)

This book examines the Singapore government’s controversial practice of recruiting students from China and granting them full scholarships on the condition of a service “bond”. It offers detailed ethnographic accounts of the Chinese “foreign talent” students’ educational and cross-cultural experiences in Singapore to illustrate the complex intersections between international mobility and educational desire. In doing so, the book presents contemporary Singapore society’s concerns over immigration and cross-cultural encounters from a unique perspective. Front Matter....Pages i-xiii Introduction....Pages 1-31 Contexts: Singapore’s Foreign Talent Programs and the Chinese Middle School as a Recruiting Ground....Pages 33-52 Selecting Scholars for Singapore: The SM2 Program....Pages 53-75 Singlish and the Singaporean: Cross-Cultural Encounter and Othering....Pages 77-96 Being “Very China:” Self-Consciousness and Identity Transformation....Pages 97-112 Desiring an Education: Scholarly Idealism and Anti-scholarly Entrepreneurialism....Pages 113-133 Back Matter....Pages 135-136