Previous research has reported on structural changes in Chinese families. However, questions remain as to whether/how social change has influenced family and gender values and how this differs across generations, regions, and gender in China. Drawing on 2006 data from the China General Social Survey, we find that values pertaining to filial piety are traditional, whereas patrilineal and gender values are less traditional. Historic events/policies provide the context for how social change can shape differential generational, geographic, and gender perspectives. Our hypothesis that generation, region, and gender associations will differ across the various ideational domains is confirmed. We find significant interaction effects in how generation and geography differ by gender in patrilineal, filial piety, and gender values; and higher education erodes patrilineal and traditional gender values but enhances filial piety. Such findings indicate that family values should be understood in the specific sociocultural contexts governing Chinese families across time and place.

This research contributes to the booming literature on the mobility of international students in higher education. We analyse university-level factors that affect the sorting of Chinese international students across British universities. We produced a unique data-set merging university-level data from the 2014 UK Higher Education Statistics Agency and the Higher Expectations Survey, supplemented by qualitative evidence from six focus groups for illustrative purposes. Our results, using nationally representative evidence for the first time, confirmed that university prestige is the most important driver for the sorting of Chinese students across British universities, together with further effects of the broader social and cultural offerings that the universities provide. Interestingly, the cost of study and marketing strategies deployed by universities do not seem to drive the Chinese students’ university choices. Our findings underline the importance of diffuse institutional factors such as university rankings and their taken-for-granted status by students themselves.

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and associated responses such as border closure, lockdown measures and flight curtailment have severely disrupted transnational infrastructures that sustain, channel, organize and condition international migration. This infrastructural disruption has led to the double exclusion of temporary migrants from both sending and host societies. In this context, we explore how Chinese international students in the United Kingdom and their parents in China navigate transnational (im)mobilities during the pandemic. In doing so, we develop the conceptualization of “family-mediated migration infrastructure” to elucidate the role played by transnational family relationships in brokering information, mobilizing resources, and coordinating disjointed acts of institutional players in order to sustain transnational (im)mobility. We also reveal a distinctive emotional double-bind in the process of family-mediated infrastructuring, which requires members of transnational families to strategically perform emotional engagement and detachment in complex ways. Our findings highlight the functional resilience and emotional vulnerability of family-mediated transnational migration infrastructure, and render visible the intimate fabrics that contribute to sustaining transnationalism during the pandemic.