The solidification of Chineseness in academic mobility: Critical reviews of “intercultural ” research articles on Chinese students

[Abstract] Exchange and degree Chinese students are now familiar faces on the academic scene worldwide. As such, and according to the Chinese Ministry of Education, over one million Chinese have studied abroad since the late 1970s and more than 100,000 annually since 20021. These students are often seen as very different “others ” and solidified (i.e. turned into a generic Other or often “cultural robots ” who all share the same characteristics) by administrators, staff and other local and international students – but also by host societies in general. My paper is interested in how a selection of recent research articles within the field of intercultural communication deal with Chinese students. This article can be considered as belonging to the Rhetoric of Inquiry (Billig, 1988) which takes academic discourse as an object of study. Using a typology of the three approaches to otherness and interculturality that I have proposed [1) solid/culturalist; 2) liquid/hermeneutical and 3) Janusian], I will demonstrate how researchers themselves can “fetichize ” and “solidify ” Chinese students, and thus, contribute to creating a differentialist and often incoherent image of those they consider as “strangers”par excellence. My paper ends on a proposal for renewing approaches to researching the position of the stranger in the academia through the case of Chinese students. [Key words] Discourse analysis, strangeness, solidification, Chinese students A nation can hardly be seen as a collection of sequestered segments; with citizens being assigned fixed places in predetermined segments Sen, 2006: 16