Transnational academic mobility and capital accumulation:
Focusing on Japanese-trained Chinese scientists
MENG Shuoyang
April,2022
Abstract
The Chinese government has issued several preferential policies and programs to entice the foreign-trained top-quality scientists back to the homeland to reverse the trend of brain-drain. Despite the frequency of Chinese scientists’ transnational mobility to Japan, academia has not paid enough attention to the impact of academic sojourns in Japan on Chinese scientists. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s conceptual framework, this study attempts to explore how Chinese scientists benefit from their doctoral study in Japan. This working paper illustrates that returned Chinese scientists can accumulate cultural, social, and symbolic capital, and are able to convert cultural and social capital into economic capital. On the other hand, it also demonstrates the potential negative impact of mobility experience in Japan on scientists’ cultural and social capital. This working paper points to the further analysis of relatively unsuccessful establishment of academic collaborative relationships between Japanese and Chinese scientists, and of the differences of the Japanese and Chinese academia in terms of rewards and evaluation systems.
