Universities and communities around Europe should work together to help students

A dilemma that has long vexed governments, community groups and academics is the fragmentation of overseas Chinese communities, resulting in their marginalization and poor integration into mainstream society.

To tackle this challenge I have spent the last few years developing the notion of Chinese Community Building - a novel process that brings together all local community stakeholders, both Chinese and non-Chinese, to develop constructive relationships.

The globalization of higher education has built a new momentum behind this process. We have witnessed an unprecedented growth of Chinese students in all higher education institutions around the world, including at my own institution - the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. This continuing trend calls for a renewed effort to improve Chinese community cohesion and integrate the Chinese into local society.

There are now nearly half a million overseas students at UK universities. There is no doubting the huge contribution they make to the national and local economies. But higher education providers, university lecturers and student support officers are struggling to ensure that overseas students enjoy fulfilling social lives, to the benefit of not only themselves but also overseas Chinese communities and UK society as a whole.

Students from the Chinese mainland have come to symbolize poor integration among the millions of international students worldwide. This issue has even inspired the term "Chinese phantom", defined by the Urban Dictionary as: "International university students usually from China or East Asia (but can also be from other parts of the world), who live in halls of residence with other students and stay in their rooms all day, don't socialize (apart from at Phantom gatherings) and often don't even introduce themselves to fellow flat-mates."

This phenomenon is not limited to Chinese students but is a common feature of the Chinese diaspora, which has prevented the Chinese from becoming a true part of mainstream society in many host countries. Local people often perceive Chinese overseas as invisible or impenetrable communities.

As a Chinese scholar who has worked in UK universities over a decade, and witnessed an explosion in the number of Chinese students coming to study in this country, I have seen firsthand how Chinese students' inability to integrate has impacted negatively on their learning, well-being and, in some cases, mental health. It is vital we seek a deeper understanding of how interested they are in developing friendships with other students, ask why most ultimately fail to do so and come up with new approaches to improving integration.

Standard theories link a failure to integrate with limited language competence, social-psychological barriers and cultural differences between individual students. While these are significant factors, in reality things are more complicated. The term "integration", in this context, has at least three dimensions: classroom communication; interaction within the campus; and integration within local communities.

Furthermore, Chinese students can hardly be treated as a homogenous group. The social characteristics of Chinese students from the Chinese mainland are wildly different from Chinese from other countries or regions such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia, even though they share a common culture, history and, for the most part, language.

Last summer we surveyed the Chinese student population in Nottingham, a city that has witnessed an eight-fold increase in Chinese students over the last decade. This has resulted in an increase in Nottingham's Chinese population from less than 2,000 in 2001 to more than 10,000 in 2011, with the proportion of students in the wider Chinese population rising from 15 per cent to 40 per cent.

The survey analyzed the social networks of 162 Chinese students, 70 percent of whom were from the Chinese mainland. It found that on campus, there were extremely strong ties between students from the Chinese mainland - more than 80 per cent confirmed their main friendships were with fellow Chinese from similar backgrounds. Only a quarter said they were friends with UK students.

Perhaps the most striking statistic, though, is that only 25 percent of Chinese mainland students said they had friendships with ethnic-Chinese students from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and Malaysia. This lack of communication between Chinese groups clearly impedes a wider understanding of each other's cultural and political differences, and has implications for future relations between, for example, people in Hong Kong and on the Chinese mainland.

Chinese students from outside the Chinese mainland were far more successful than their mainland counterparts in establishing friendships with local and international students, suggesting that a lack of integration cannot be attributed to cultural barriers alone.

In my opinion, this is partly due to a decline in trust that has afflicted Chinese society in recent decades. The rise of commercialization and the fall of spirituality have fostered a sense of distrust among mainland Chinese, which has filtered down to its students overseas.

But the results of our survey also showed that there is a real interest among Chinese mainland students in work experience and opportunities to communicate with local people; in fact, it topped the wish lists of those Chinese we interviewed. Their motivations are both practical - it will look good on their CV - and intellectual, in that they believe they can learn something valuable from Western society and apply it to a Chinese context. However, the majority does not know how to go about it - only 40 percent had managed to find some form of work experience, either paid or voluntary.

This is the gap that our universities and local communities around Europe must work together to fill for the benefit of student integration, our academic institutions and society as a whole. We need a new approach: more structured volunteer schemes where university students are given unpaid internship opportunities in local authority departments and community organizations during the course of their studies. Academic staff could do more to tie in their teaching modules with what is happening on the ground in the community, bringing the local context into the classroom.

These schemes could involve pairing up domestic and overseas students in the same organization, encouraging them to work together and support each other in forming relationships in a professional environment. One Chinese social science student and one European student may be given the opportunity to work together in a local authority department that has responsibility for housing or benefits. This would complement their program of academic study and allow overseas students to return home with a different, firsthand perspective on how universal social challenges are tackled in other countries. Surely, this is the essence of what we mean by the globalization of higher education.

At a recent workshop I organized at the University of Nottingham, officials from Nottingham City Council responded positively to the possibility of introducing these structured programs. After all, in the face of sweeping cuts to local authority budgets, it stands to reason that councils would welcome the assistance of well-educated university students, both from the UK and overseas, to take up the slack.

Chinese students have another vital role to play: to bridge the gap between local Chinese community groups and the wider community. If they are given opportunities to become more socially active in their host countries, then they will be in a position to reach out to Chinese from poorer socio-economic backgrounds and connect them to mainstream society.

This idea lies behind the development of the Nottingham Chinese Community Forum, a regular round-table meeting that includes local council officials, civil society organizations, Chinese community representatives, and university staff and student representatives.

A challenge to integrate should not be a burden for international students to bear alone. It is time for a new relationship between global universities and local communities that can support the integration of both international students and overseas communities into the societies of host countries. This will serve to improve cross-cultural understanding, which can only benefit our collective economic, social and cultural lives in the years to come.

The author is a senior research fellow at the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies and coordinator of the Centre for Chinese Migration Studies, University of Nottingham. The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.