The Geopolitics of Transnational Higher Education: Strategic Rationales and Spatial Practices in China

Transnational higher education (TNHE) plays an increasingly important role in the production of space and the negotiation of geopolitical order, yet this dimension remains critically under-examined. This article investigates the geopolitical strategies underpinning China’s rapidly expanding TNHE sector. Drawing on policy documents, administrative data, and institutional cases, we identify three central rationales: first, the strategic diversification of international partnerships to mitigate geopolitical risk and strengthen multilateral alignments, particularly through Belt and Road–related partnerships and engagement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations; second, a pronounced shift towards STEM disciplines that facilitates technological sovereignty and recalibrates China’s position within the global knowledge economy amid heightened techno-nationalist competition; and third, an increased emphasis on geopolitical subject formation accompanying a discursive and operational shift from ‘Westernising domestic education’ to ‘localising international education’. These findings show that China deploys TNHE not as a passive host within a Western-dominated paradigm, but as an active agent in forging alternative geopolitical and geo-intellectual spaces. The study challenges TNHE scholarship dominated by market-oriented assumptions and contributes to a critical understanding of how the internationalisation of higher education is mobilised for grand strategic ends.