Inside the Chinese Student Experience

Names have been changed.

Nyx, a Chinese postgraduate, thought some Chinese students in St Andrews were cut off from the rest of the student body. She’d heard of some groups where “apart from […] professional communications, they don’t even speak English much in their daily life.” 

She doesn’t think that’s necessarily a problem: nobody’s “obligated” to hang out with Westerners, she said. I agreed. But I wanted to find out more. I felt a lot of Westerners didn’t know much about the Chinese student experience, so I talked to three Chinese students. Two, Lucia and Nyx, were born and raised in mainland China, while the third, George, was born to a Chinese family but moved to Europe when he was twelve. They each engaged with the Chinese community here differently: Lucia, a postgraduate, was an active member in one of the Chinese societies, while George, an undergraduate, only occasionally attended cultural events. On her part, Nyx tried to interact with other Chinese students as little as possible. She’s heard rumours about a spy in the Chinese student body. “I don’t know [who] I can trust and [who] I cannot,” Nyx told me.

When I asked Lucia if Chinese students were cut off, she was conflicted. “I do acknowledge the division,” she said. But, as she pointed out, it’s not just Chinese students who stick together by nationality in St Andrews. A lot of international students do. It’s “absolutely normal” to want to hang out with people who share your language and culture, she said. 

Where there is a division, it isn’t always from a lack of trying. “The language barrier is definitely a thing,” Lucia said. Nyx agreed. She remembered one former Chinese flatmate who wanted to make more non-Chinese friends but felt too insecure in her English. 

The cultural barrier can be as strong as the language barrier. Lucia is perfectly confident chatting to students from other countries, but her interactions tend to be surface-level. “We can talk about the weather, the seminar, the lecture, the schoolwork,” she said. “That’s cool, but when you actually want to make some friends, you might talk about your favourite TV show, and we watched different TV shows when we grew up.” It doesn’t help that conversation taboos differ, too. “We rarely talk about sex,” Lucia said. The West’s more “liberal” attitude, she thought, might surprise recent arrivals from China.

Nyx went further — she saw an “anxiety” in some Chinese students who worry they haven’t yet mastered Western social norms. Take restaurant etiquette. “How should they sit?” Nyx asked. “They’re even worrying about holding the cutlery elegantly enough.” The rules of small talk vary, too. In China, Nyx said, people tend to wait for their conversation partner to completely finish speaking before they reply. “When I came here, I realised that doesn’t work.” 

Speaking up in academic settings can be especially challenging. Chinese schools “don’t really encourage you to say things that you’re not sure about,” George said. Lucia agreed. She’s a lot more confident in her English than most of her Chinese peers, but even she has to psych herself up every time she speaks in a seminar.

Something that doesn’t help with the cultural divide are the stereotypes around Chinese students. Some Westerners assume Chinese students are “quiet [and] reserved,” George told me, “and probably incapable of making decisions in any group work.”

For Lucia, the stereotypes extend to subject choice. “They think that Chinese people should study maths, computer science, and law,” she said. When Lucia tells non-Chinese students she studies an arts subject, she often gets surprised reactions. “That’s a bit annoying,” she said. “They think we’re only good at [those other subjects]. We cannot do anything [in the humanities] or creative, I guess.” 

Lucia also thought there was a misconception that Chinese students hold strong political views “contrary” to that of most Westerners. Most people she knows, though, aren’t that interested in politics. “They’re just very absorbed in their world.”  

Beyond stereotypes, none of the interviewees thought there was explicit prejudice against Chinese students — in St Andrews, at least. Nyx has seen a lot online, and once when she was in Edinburgh, a Chinese friend of hers was accosted by a Scottish woman. “She just coughed in the face of my friend,” Nyx told me. 

However, in St Andrews, Nyx doesn’t believe there’s hostility. One friend was harassed by schoolchildren, but Nyx didn’t think that was related to nationality. “You know those teenagers on the streets, even their parents cannot control them,” she said. “They cause trouble to everyone.”

In fact, the group that Nyx described feeling most cut off from was not Westerners, but other Chinese students. As well as rumours of a “spy” in the student body, Nyx has heard of students reporting each other (and their tutors) to the embassy for making certain comments. Nyx is afraid of being reported because she’s critical of the Chinese government. For example, during the pandemic, she was involved with protests against China’s Zero-Covid policy in 2022. “It really, really gives me some anxiety when I [teach], especially if there’s other Chinese students around, because I don’t know if they will report me, as well.” 

She avoided raising politics in academic settings, but she wasn’t sure if keeping her head down would be enough. One student who was reported, she’d heard, had only posed a “really slight criticism.” It wasn’t about what he said, she thought, but rather the Chinese student who reported him was resolving a “personal conflict” and “taking revenge.”

George told me he hadn’t heard anything about spies or students being reported. “But I don’t think it’s a wise thing to do,” George said, “publicly talking negatively about any aspect of the Chinese government.” He saw a particular risk of social media backlash. “Someone could just take a picture or video [of] you and post it on any Chinese platform, and when it goes viral it’s definitely not [going to have] good consequences.” 

Lucia said she hadn’t heard of students being reported either. “I don’t know what they were thinking when they were making the reports, […] but I’m not surprised,” she said. “We’re told that if you ever encounter any trouble, you just go to the embassy.”

It's important to emphasise from these interviews the impression that, along with the culture shocks and stereotypes, the Chinese student experience in St Andrews can be extremely positive. There’s a reason why, in some British universities, Chinese student numbers have quadrupled in the past decade. For Nyx, the attraction was being somewhere with “academic freedom.” She felt “more respected” in St Andrews than in China. 

Lucia valued how St Andrews let her escape the sometimes all-consuming pressure Chinese students faced from their parents back home, “Telling them not to have fun, just to study.” In St Andrews, she said, you can have it both ways. 

Lucia isn’t sure if St Andrews’s cultural gap will be fully bridged, but recently, her society has been trying especially hard to reach out to non-Chinese students. “We’re definitely working harder and harder,” she said, “but that’s a long process.” 

What attracted George to Scotland was, as he put it, a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience a “completely different culture” to his own. He doesn’t regret the move — in fact, after he graduates, he wants to spend more time in the West. He’s thinking about the USA. “Everything big happens there,” he laughed.

Illustration: Grace Robinson