Involuting Infrastructures of Aspiration: Chinese Education-Migration and the Pursuit of Elite Schooling in the United Kingdom
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.21814/rlec.7252Keywords:
education-migration, infrastructural involution, social involution (neijuan), China, elite boarding in the United KingdomAbstract
This article examines how China’s education-migration infrastructure, comprising State policies, commercial intermediaries, social media platforms, and international schools, sustains aspiration while simultaneously producing social and infrastructural involution (内卷, neijuan), a term widely used to describe the exhaustion generated by intensifying competition and diminishing returns. How do social and infrastructural forms of involution interact as mutually constitutive processes that intensify competition, emotional investment, and exhaustion within education-migration strategies? Drawing on longitudinal, multi-sited ethnography with families, children, and educators in mainland China and the United Kingdom (2021–2023), I argue that the China–United Kingdom education-migration infrastructure has become increasingly involuted: although it continues to operate through intensified effort, expanding intermediary systems, and growing emotional investment, its promise of distinction, security, and upward mobility has weakened. Once viewed as an exclusive route to global advantage, education migration has become saturated due to overcapacity, policy volatility, demographic decline, intensifying competition from Chinese international schools, and broader forms of social involution. Social and infrastructural involution are mutually constitutive processes: infrastructural saturation intensifies social competition, while social involution further sustains and expands the infrastructures through which competition is organised.
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