3.1 Freedom of Movement between Home and Host Countries and Reorganization of the Curriculum

In February and March 2020, because of the increase in Covid-19 infections in France as well as other European countries, Chinese students who were studying abroad faced the difficult decision of whether to return to their home country to avoid infection. Many rushed to return to China, where they were perceived as disease spreaders and sometimes suffered from feelings of exclusion. But it would be simplistic to describe these decisions to return home as the result of a collective panic. Our respondents who returned to China at the beginning of the pandemic did not always experience the return as traumatic. On the contrary, it was an opportunity to develop a new way of learning, which enabled them to reconcile health considerations and their professional projects, while remaining close to their family.

Many young Chinese at French schools that offered “off-campus” training chose to relocate to Chinese campuses. Tom notes that about thirty Chinese students in his master’s-degree program made the same choice.

Another remarkable fact is that returning to China during Covid-19 is often thought of as temporary. By returning, some Chinese students were bowing to parental pressure, but they have not given up their plans to study abroad. This is the case for Alice, who finished her bachelor’s degree in international commerce at the ESCE Business School in July 2020. She would have started her master’s degree at the same school in September, but she gave in to parental pressure by asking for a gap year.

At first, I didn’t want to lose a year. I already lost two months during the lockdown, when online classes were poorly organized. But my parents begged me to stay in China. When I read the figures published every day on the number of infected people in France, I was finally “defeated by reality.”

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN CHINESE, OCTOBER 2020

However, Alice planned to be vaccinated in China and resume her studies in Paris, and after a year in China, she returned to Paris in September 2021 to pursue her master’s degree at the same school. Since May 2020, French higher education institutions, including the grandes écoles, have offered international students incentives for returning to the campus (Lombard-Latune, 2020). However, as shown below, because of the resurgence of the pandemic in Europe and the tightening of border controls at that time, resuming studies in Europe was not always easy.

Nonetheless, despite the outbreak of the public health crisis in France, most Chinese students remained in France to pursue their education. With the introduction of lockdowns and curfews, young Chinese experienced the loss of their usual reference points and were forced to adapt to new norms, such as social distancing and restrictions on travel. The narratives of our respondents differ based on their education background, their personal situation, and their migration plans.

The transition to online education, for example, was organized very differently at grandes écoles and universities. At the grandes écoles, such as Sciences Po, online teaching was set up very quickly, with students receiving prompt instructions and directions. Zoom accounts were set up for Sciences Po students two days after the French government announced a national lockdown. Students reported few technical difficulties in continuing their studies. Unlike the elite schools, French public universities struggled to adopt online education after the lockdown began, which greatly disrupted the learning process for some students. Yan, a twenty-six-year-old master’s-degree student in sociology at a public university in Montpellier, did not have any classes for four months. The experience of having her education disrupted led her to have doubts about the academic value of her diploma.

During the lockdown, my school was closed, and we didn’t have any online software to attend class. The teacher emailed us some PowerPoints to read, but there were no classes. In September 2020, we switched to half online and half offline, but the online teachers occasionally canceled classes because of technical problems, and I don’t have any confidence in my diploma even though I’ve now graduated and have a master’s degree.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN CHINESE, SEPTEMBER 2020 AND DECEMBER 2021

The move to online education can have a significant impact on efficiency, outcomes, learning motivation, and educational relationships (Bès & Demonsant, 2020). This is especially true for science and engineering students. Lily, an engineering student, had numerous negative effects of Covid-19 on her studies. First, normally, engineering students have a lot of practical experience, which enables students to use the knowledge learned through in-class experiments and to understand its concrete applications in social practices and production. Because of the pandemic, all laboratory experiments were canceled. Lily, like her classmates, had to write reports based on existing experimental materials. The inability to get their hands on the tools and materials for experimentation not only reduces students’ productivity—it took Lily more time than usual to complete a report—but also affects the development of practical engineering skills. Lily said: “Our knowledge is limited to theory. This is not good for an engineering education” (interview conducted in Chinese, February 2022). Second, unlike business or humanities students, whose courses are based on PowerPoint presentations, engineering students need the equations and graphs that their professors write on the board to better understand the course materials. They are deprived of this form of interaction if courses are taught on Zoom and Microsoft Teams. Lily reported difficulty in understanding her professors, who had no experience in teaching online courses. When she missed certain technical terms, Lily did not dare to interrupt her teacher, nor could she ask her classmates for help. Deprived of contact with her French classmates, Lily could only do group work with her Chinese classmates. For these reasons, Lily became unmotivated during the pandemic. She was not accustomed to working independently. Without having a teacher’s supervision, she had difficulty concentrating on her studies. During the online classes, she often did other things.

But, as mentioned earlier, the effects of the pandemic were not completely negative. Going online had some benefits for students who prefer written rather than oral communication. This is the case for Fei, a twenty-four-year-old sociology student at the Sorbonne, who had to write her master’s research report with her French classmates. Because she is not a native French speaker, face-to-face discussion with her French colleagues is stressful for her, and taking notes is not easy. Having online meetings and working on a Google Doc enabled her to follow the discussions more easily and make better contributions to collective work.

Students whose training requires more introspection and independent work than data collection and contact with physical reality were hardly affected by the lockdowns. For example, Feng, a twenty-five-year-old student in a master’s program in communication and translation in Paris, found studying at home more convenient than going to the school.

I think the future of translation and interpretation might be more online, so we have a chance to try it out and see how to do it later. I think it’s normal to have more time for your own academic research, but I think I need more time to do what I want to do at home and learn to do what I want to do. For example, I also learned something new; I took classes on an online learning platform called Coursera and earned two certificates. When I had to go to the school, I wasted time commuting, so it was better to study at home because I had more time.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN CHINESE, OCTOBER 2020

During Covid-19, the sudden shift to distance learning was accompanied by significant changes in students’ relationship to knowledge: rules became more blurred, and success depended more on individual autonomy. But the public health crisis also had a tremendous impact on the daily lives of young Chinese people and their relationships to others.

3.2 Life during Covid—Emotions, Social Ties, and Temporal Experiences

The students interviewed all experienced a loss of human contact with the living society: this included outings, meetings, trips, parties, and celebrations, making for a solitary student experience. Although Wenxi (twenty-five, arrived in France in 2014) thought her online courses at Sciences Po went quite well, she still felt as if something was lacking and missed being able to wear her nice clothes to school and greet her teachers and classmates. Her biggest regret was in being unable to celebrate the end of her master’s degree with her classmates. “We said goodbye to each other when we turned off the camera. Nothing special happened that day” (Interview conducted in Chinese, February 2022).

Student life was further complicated by the fact that students had taken care of themselves during an unprecedented health crisis (Belghith et al., 2021). The hardest part was organizing their lives outside classes: those who lived alone described a heavy atmosphere. Many told us about their experience in dealing with moods, stress, and fear. Some saw their student life reduced to monotony, in a little studio. Wenxi confided, “In my whole life, I have never spent so long alone in 16 square meters. There is a tree in front of my window. Every day I took a picture of it. In a few months, the tree, which was bare in winter, became very leafy in summer.” Social isolation can greatly affect the motivation of young migrants, as well as their physical and mental health. Meng is a twenty-four-year-old studying film directing in Paris. She lives alone in a studio in Versailles. She describes her neighborhood as “very calm” and inhabited mostly by elderly French people. During the lockdown, she was alone in her studio: “I barely spoke for about two months, not even much Chinese. I felt as if I was in a state of aphasia.”

In this context, we observed a tightening of existing family and friendship ties during the lockdowns, perhaps to fill this social and emotional void. Those who were close became distant, and those who were distant became close. Some students got back in touch with former classmates in China and their friends in other foreign countries. Wenxi, who is very social, could only rely on online communication during the lockdown. She spent a lot of time calling her friends and became close with a Chinese friend in Germany during this time. Wenxi regularly cooked and worked out while chatting online with her. In addition, contact with her parents became very important and is best described as “living together, separately.” Wenxi’s parents were concerned about the mental health of their only daughter abroad, so they called her every day, watched TV shows with her, and played mahjong with her online.

However, students’ subjective experiences with the pandemic vary, depending on how they envisioned their stay in France (temporary or long-term, etc.), their housing conditions, social networks, and the nature and intensity of their ties to the living country. For students who planned to return to China immediately after their studies, the pandemic left a gap in their time in France that they could not recover. For example, Lily, who found a job in Montpellier and began working for a petroleum services and equipment company in October 2021 after graduating from an engineering school in Paris, regrets not having taken full advantage of her stay in Paris. She thought about all the missed opportunities to meet new friends, about her canceled trips. Her experience in Paris is missing something: “It’s a shame that my two years of living in Paris was spent in a pandemic.”

We did not see this kind of regret among Chinese students who planned to remain in France after their completing their studies. These students project themselves into a long-time frame that is not limited to the duration of their residence permit, especially since the French government extended the residence permits of foreign students that expired between March 16 and June 15, 2020, for a period of six months. Rather, the lockdown period gave them time to rest, reconnect, and explore new opportunities for learning and leisure. Often, these graduates formed marital ties or romantic relationships with natives in the living country. They did not feel very confined during the lockdown.

For example, Feng, who is in a relationship with a young Frenchman of Chinese descent, plans to start a family in France. During the lockdown, she considered her life in Paris full. “I live with him, and our apartment is quite big, 45 square meters, so I am quite comfortable at home. I had plants, and I was home every day. I had a few online classes, and I thought all things would come to an end, that it would end soon. I wasn’t that nervous.”

4.1 An Unlucky Generation?

Many Chinese students see working in France as an integral part of their study-abroad plans, as they want to gain professional experience at French companies during or after their university studies, which is valuable in the Chinese job market. However, Covid-19 greatly disrupted their access to employment and internships.

In particular, this disruption concerns the classes of 2020 and 2021, which had their first experiences in the French job market during the public health crisis. Of all the graduates in France, those from the grandes écoles are the best tracked, thanks to the regular surveys of the Conférence des Grandes Écoles (CGE), which interviews graduates of the 193 grandes écoles in France six months after their graduation. According to the results of the 2021 survey on the labor market integration of graduates in the class of 2020, the health crisis had a clear impact on young graduates (Allain & Bouyer, 2021). The net employment rate less than six months after graduation is 79.1 percent compared with 88.1 percent for the class of 2019, knowing it was 76.5 % during the subprime crisis. The impacts were manifested in multiple ways. Among the respondents, regardless of their field of study, 59.9 percent stated that they had resorted to telework, 54.6 percent said that they had received fewer job offers, 19.1 percent had lowered their salary expectations, and 16.6 percent had encountered difficulty in their final internship. In this global landscape, we can posit that Chinese graduates, like other foreign graduates, experienced even greater disruption because of their status as foreigners. Being subjected to French immigration policies, as well as the ethnic and racial discrimination they might encounter from French employers, makes them more vulnerable in seeking employment and less able to negotiate with their future employers.

Many of the graduates in the class of 2021 experienced the negative effects of the pandemic in 2020 during their studies and their search for an internship and then again in 2021 during their job search, when the effects of the crisis were still being felt.

Lily’s biggest concern was not the lockdown, but the internship and job search. Because they attended a prestigious engineering school, Lily and her Chinese classmates never thought they would face so many difficulties in their search for an internship.

During the lockdown period, I wasn’t particularly stressed because it wasn’t a problem that couldn’t be solved, and I didn’t feel as if it would last long. But I encountered a lot of difficulties in finding an internship. Because of the pandemic, many of my classmates’ offers were canceled. Many people did not get internships. Finally, I found a remote internship in Montpellier—otherwise, I would have had nothing. I started looking for a job in February 2021. The job search was very stressful, and the job market hadn’t recovered very much.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN CHINESE, FEBRUARY 2022

Many in the class of 2020 struggled to navigate the health crisis. They graduated in June 2020, experiencing the full impact of the pandemic. Many had to alternate between internships and periods of unemployment and did not find steady employment until 2021. The shock of Covid-19 on the labor market was first reflected in the severe reduction in job offers, as mentioned above. In the face of uncertainty, many companies froze their recruitment plans. Covid-19 also wreaked havoc on traditional job search channels and weakened institutional support normally available during a job search.

Wenxi, finished her master’s degree in communication at Sciences Po in June 2020. She did not find a permanent position at a media agency until April 2021. This is quite different from pre-pandemic times, when many graduates of this prestigious institution received offers before graduation. Wenxi, referring to her own experience and that of her classmates, refers to it as “an unlucky generation.”

In my opinion, the keyword of the year of the pandemic is “shock.” Everyone was overwhelmed by this sudden event, and everything was immediately thrown off balance. I was working as a trainee at a large international company, a French energy company. My boss was very nice to me and helped me as much as she could. She sent my CV to all the people that she knew in every department. But they all said they were unsure whether they would hire this year. So, as a new graduate, you must accept it when you face this. You can only adapt slowly.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN CHINESE, FEBRUARY 2022

Between February and April 2021, Wenxi sent out about a hundred résumés. The job search process is always nerve-wracking. However, going through the Covid-19 ordeal collectively eased peer pressure. Because of Covid-19, respondents who found employment in France paid a heavy price. The largest consequence of the pandemic for Qin was the increase in the time it took to find a job. She feels as if she has lost a year in her professional career and has “freshman status” in the workplace. When she finally started work, she found that her colleagues were younger than she was. “I still feel as if I lost one working year; I should have begun a permanent job right after graduation.” Another consequence of the pandemic is that she is less likely to negotiate her salary with the recruiter. “I felt that I had to find a job quickly because I had reached the last round [of interviews], so I was not very forceful when I negotiated the salary; I really needed the job.”

Wenxi mentions two types of mismatches. The first is the mismatch between the graduate’s aspirations and the professional level of the job. In the context of the public health crisis, she had to accept a trade-off between the level of the job, the role itself, and the prestige of the employer.

Maybe with the same experience and the same level of professionalism, we could have obtained a better position in previous years, but with Covid-19 this year and so much turmoil in the job market, there is no way for us to find a better opportunity, and I think this is the biggest impact for us.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN CHINESE, FEBRUARY 2022

The second is the mismatch between the desire for freedom of movement and geographic limits on choices. With travel restrictions, canceled flights, and the tightening of visa policies in many countries, Chinese graduates who dream of working in a country other than France and envision a career without borders find that their range of choices is narrowing. They can no longer build their career path in a series of countries, in a cumulative logic. National spaces are once again becoming places where in which graduates can envision their professional careers.

Because of Covid-19, it’s already very complicated for everyone to move. It’s already very difficult, so we basically don’t think about other countries in Europe. And then you don’t have a broader choice, such as [going to] the United States, for example, or the United Kingdom. … In previous years, we might have looked at opportunities in Switzerland. But this year, due to the pandemic, we were forced to make a very hard decision—that is, in the end, whether to return to China or to remain in France. It feels as if we do not have another choice. For newcomers to the workplace, I think it is very cruel. That is, you must make a very difficult and tough decision at the beginning of your career. If you choose one thing, you lose another.

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN CHINESE, FEBRUARY 2022

Again, the pandemic did not have the same impact on the career paths of all Chinese graduates. The crisis has also had some unexpected effects: graduates with a health-related background have experienced a broadening of their career horizon in the context of the pandemic.

4.2 After the Storm, Hit the Road

To what extent did the pandemic alter the initial plans of our respondents? The interviews we conducted with graduates at the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022 enable us to assess, in hindsight, how they decided where to establish themselves in a context of uncertainty.

Despite the disruption of the pandemic, many graduates tried to carry on with their original migration plans. This is especially true for those who have a partner. For most of our respondents, maintaining their relationship remains the top priority and dictates their choice about whether to return to China after the completion of their studies. The strength of emotional bonds and marital ties seems to be particularly resistant to the upheavals in the outside world. Feng, who is in a relationship with a young Frenchman, plans to stay in France “for at least the next ten years,” even though she is worried about her professional opportunities: international exchange, the field in which she wishes to work, depends heavily on the political relationship between China and France.

I want to find a long-term job and then engage in some international exchange programs between France and China, which is one of the reasons that I am worried about the Sino-French relationship. If this relationship changes, then my employment opportunities will certainly also be affected. It’s like translation: the demand for translation is definitely something that appears only when there is an exchange. If this channel of communication is hindered …

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN CHINESE, OCTOBER 2020

The pandemic did not fundamentally change the working and living conditions in the home and host countries. The choice of our respondents to remain in France is linked to their perception of their advantages and disadvantages in the two countries and to their priorities. In terms of professional development, our respondents emphasize: (1) better professional opportunities in France, because their French diploma and their educational institution are better recognized in France than in China; (2) a better match between their training and their professional opportunities in France; and (3) industries that are more developed in their field of specialization in France than in China. As for the quality of life and lifestyle, our respondents agree that France is ahead of China in terms of work-life balance, social protections, medical coverage, and job security. In short, it offers a better living environment for personal development.

If we look at the long-term trajectories of individuals, we can better understand the effects of the pandemic on international students’ integration into the labor market. For many young graduates, the pandemic caused a diversion in their career paths, rather than an irreversible turning point. This is the case, for example, for graduates who returned to China at the beginning of the pandemic but returned to France to work. These zigzagging trajectories must be understood in the timeframe of the pandemic and in the contexts of the country of origin and the host country. In the context of the public health crisis and the ensuing difficulty in job hunting, these Chinese graduates reluctantly returned to China. Then, when life returned to normal, and the economic conditions improved in France, they tried to return to France, only to find that the virus was still actively circulating. The remarks of our respondents show that they are attracted by a decent salary in France as much as they are repelled by the “compressed modernity” in the Chinese context (Chang, 2010; Roulleau-Berger, 2021):³ this includes a high ratio between real estate prices and salary levels in big cities, an authoritarian labor regime, fierce interpersonal competition that depresses the average salary, and what the respondents call “involution” (nei juan). Originally used by anthropologists to describe self-perpetuating processes that keep agrarian societies from progressing, involution has become “the kind of competition that does not allow failure or exit” (Wang & Ge, 2020).

Alexander, from Zhejiang Province, arrived in France in 2016. He studied history at the University of Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne), before obtaining a master’s degree in communication at Sciences Po in June 2019. As the pandemic evolved and his understanding of China and France deepened, Alexander’s life trajectory took two turns. So far, he has not found a job in consulting, which is his preference in France. Faced with the explosion of Covid-19 cases in Europe and because his is single, he returned to China in March 2020, believing that it would be easier in any case to work in a Chinese-language environment. In China, he found a job as a product manager at an information technology (IT) company in Shanghai, near his home province. But over time, he began to feel increasingly dissatisfied with the social environment in China: “I don’t think there’s any hope, considering the high price of housing in the country, major medical care, childcare, mortgage rates. It’s not the same world as France at all.” He became nostalgic about his previous life in Paris: “I still miss the Orangerie Museum and the Tuileries Garden. Shanghai also has museums and parks, but I’m in a very different mood when I wander around” (interview conducted in Chinese, January 2022).

He started looking for a job in France. In July 2021, he received a job offer in consulting and returned to Paris in October 2021. Alexander lists several reasons that influenced his desire to return to France. First, having spent several years in France to complete his studies, he is older than most of his Chinese colleagues, who consider the Chinese so-called 996 work regime from 9 am to 9 pm a day, six days a week, a blessing: “At the office, I am older than my colleagues at the same level. I’m more zen and tend more to lay flat [tang ping],⁴ with no motivation to compete. Of course, more importantly, I lack the physical strength to compete.” Second, he hates the social relations game in the Chinese business world, which is very complex, and prefers to escape it. “My internship experience in France was quite friendly and even warm. So, I was just particularly naive and completely ignorant of the how things worked at home, not to mention office politics.” Third, his pretax monthly salary in China of RMB 20,000 (around 2,800 euros) would not be enough for him to afford an apartment in Shanghai, a prerequisite for getting married: “So, I think, in fact, in France, whether I buy a condo or not, although it is a major topic, is not a decisive and super important one as it is in China.”

Alexander’s story indicates that traditional factors, such as working conditions and the quality of life, still weigh heavily for Chinese graduates in their choice of destination. It also shows the importance of studying the long-term paths of Chinese students, to understand what is driven by circumstances and what is driven by individual values, aspirations, and motivations. He concludes: “I’m just an ordinary person; I saw two societies, two contexts and social climates. I would like to go to a place where I feel comfortable.”