Education, Migration, and Cultural Capital in the Chinese Diaspora: Transnational Students Between Hong Kong and Canada
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Education, Migration, and Cultural Capital in the Chinese Diaspor ...

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the aggregate of the actual or potential resources which are linked to the possession of a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition—or in other words, to membership in a group—which provides each of its members with the backing of the collectivity-owned capital, a “credential” which entitles them to credit, in the various senses of the word. These relationships may exist only in the practical state, in material and/or symbolic exchanges which help to maintain them. They may also be socially instituted and guaranteed by the application of a common name [e.g., a family or of a school]… (pp. 248–249)

Through mutual recognition and exchange, social capital has the potential, therefore, to provide individuals with a variety of resources, including, as existing research has shown (e.g., Granovetter, 1973; Coleman, 1988; Garner, 1988), information on schools, access to jobs, and other significant opportunities facilitating the reproduction of social status (see Lin, 2001 for an overview of work on social capital).

Migration and Cultural Capital in the Chinese Diaspora

For middle-class Chinese families, the accumulation of cultural capital frequently includes the practice of sending children overseas for education. The overseas education offers more than a valuable academic credential, however–it is an essential part of what Mitchell (1997b, p. 230) described as the ‘self fashioning’ of Chinese elites. It also provides embodied cultural capital, inculcating children into the mores of a cosmopolitan and hypermobile middle-class lifestyle (Mitchell, 1997a; Ong & Nonini, 1997).

Integral to these practices of capital accumulation, Chinese migration is frequently transnational in nature.