Research has been widely conducted to understand international student mobility, particularly from Global South to North. However, there is little attention paid to international doctoral students’ research and learning experiences in non-traditional destinations, particularly in the Chinese context. Drawing upon the concept of Communities of Practice, we administered semi-structured interviews with six international doctoral students and their supervisors at a prestigious Chinese university to understand how they experienced intercultural research and supervision in ‘shi men’, a culturally and pedagogically informed collective and semi-closed learning community. Our research findings help elucidate how the different social and academic practices have created various types of ‘shi men’. Each of these academic families reflects the unique features of doctoral learning in China and has implications for international doctoral students’ overall learning experience. This timely study offers distinct insights into cross-cultural learning, research, and supervision practices in China.

International doctoral students are an influential group in knowledge creation and cross-national engagement. Existing studies have mainly focused on this cohort’s learning and research experiences in developed countries. However, relatively few studies have explored these students’ experiences in non-traditional learning destinations. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s concepts of field, capital and habitus, and the notion of global-national-local imbrications, this study explores international doctoral students’ academic learning experiences in what can be understood as the Chinese academic sub-field. By interviewing 35 international doctoral students in a Chinese university, findings suggest that these students encountered certainty and uncertainty initially before some were able to navigate the Chinese academic sub-field more strategically. As a result, students progressively developed an in-between cosmopolitan habitus; this included as a result of exposure to both Chinese and international academic logics through learning with Chinese academic returnees. Students’ experiences suggest that the Chinese academic sub-field can be understood as something of an in-between field that imbricates the global, national, and local within higher education contexts.

Transnational articulation programmes are one way China is attempting to advance its higher education (HE) system. We report a study of twelve Chinese students’ experiences in two China-Australia 2 + 2 articulation programmes. In our analysis of semi-structured interviews, we use Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus to understand the impact on the habitus of the students. We report the experiences of the Chinese students in the HE sub-field in Australia. Students were like fish in water with the logics of practice of Chinese HE. In the new sub-field of HE in Australia, their habitus was out of place. This field/habitus mismatch created a field-habitus dissonance that can be productive of change to the habitus. Some in the study strategised to overcome this field-habitus mismatch and to adjust to the logics of the new field. We designate this emergent habitus as an in-between, diasporic cosmopolitan habitus, while others were able to ‘compartmentalise’ the demands of the new field, indicating durability of habitus.

Considerable research has investigated Chinese students’ intercultural insights in different national contexts, where culture is understood as coterminous with nationality/regionality. However, few have explored the more micro-political aspects of Chinese doctoral students’ narrative experiences in national settings, within a more cultural framework. This article seeks to take such an approach through a reflexive narrative account of the first author’s experiences as a Chinese doctoral student in Australia. To do so, we draw upon Bhabha’s notion of ‘in-between space’, and work by Gill on intercultural adjustment. We show how the first author’s doctoral journey was characterised by a sense of ‘in-betweenness’ at the micro-political level, including in relation to the cultural boundary crossing associated with having to change fields of study and supervisors. This narrative provides a nuanced account of an international student’s experiences and reflects the usefulness of examining the particularity of international doctoral students’ learning experiences at a much more fine-grained level, via a more intercultural lens.