1. The Temporal Experience of Chinese Students Abroad and the Present Human Condition
- Author:
- Anders Sybrandt Hansen
- Publication Date:
- 09-2015
- Content Type:
- Journal Article
- Institution:
- German Institute of Global and Area Studies
- Abstract:
- This article examines the experiences of Chinese elite uni- versity students abroad through the lens of temporality. In the strug- gle to get ahead, elite students are expected to carefully deploy their time. Studying abroad, it is argued, has become one more step in a culturally idealised temporal arrangement of how one is expected to go about advancing. The downside to this ethics of striving is shown to be a pervasive sense of restlessness ( , fuzao). The article shows how relocating to a different life environment allowed a group of elite students to respond to their temporal predicament in existentially creative ways that registered socially as personal maturation. It is argued that these responses were set in motion by the students’ in- habiting an expanse of not-yet-purposeful time. Treating the tem- poral experience of Chinese elite students as a pronounced inflection of an increasingly global temporal mode of striving, the article en- quires into the temporality of the present human condition.
- Topic:
- Education, Globalization, Ethics, and Students
- Political Geography:
- China, Asia, and Global Focus