Navigating structure and agency: disadvantaged Chinese students’ motivations for international education mobility

This study examines international student mobility (ISM) as a site where social structure and individual agency intersect, drawing on interviews with 39 economically disadvantaged Chinese postgraduates educated in the UK. Using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, it analyses why non-privileged individuals pursue ISM. The findings show that ISM serves as a reflexive strategy for navigating constrained opportunities across education, labour, and gendered social fields. For students, especially from rural and county-level backgrounds, it it is perceived as offering a more permeable route than China’s exam-centred system. In a volatile labour market, ISM comes to be understood as a temporary buffer for rebuilding transferable capital and professional identity. For women, it is mobilised and imagined as a socially legitimate means of distancing from gendered control and reclaiming autonomy. By conceptualising ISM as shaped by reflexive habitus under structural disadvantage, the study reframes mobility as a situated response to inequality rather than an expression of privilege.