Chinese students in Australia

April 26 2018

The Australia-China Relations Institute (ACRI) at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) welcomed a panel of scholars to discuss latest developments in the tertiary education sector for Chinese students, who comprise the largest cohort of international students on Australian campuses. Fran Martin, Reader in Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne; Wanning Sun, Professor of Media and Communication Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, UTS; and Merriden Varrall, Director, East Asia Program, Lowy Institute for International Policy explored the Australian education experience of Chinese students and the choices students make.

The discussion was moderated by Professor Bob Carr, ACRI Director, followed by a Q&A session with the audience.

Time: 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

Related links

'Expectations and experiences of Chinese university students in Australia - with Fran Martin', The ACRI Podcast, May 3 2018. Subscribe to the ACRI Podcast on iTunes.

About the panellists:

Fran Martin

Associate Professor Fran Martin is Reader in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. She is completing a five-year ethnographic study of Chinese university students’ social and subjective experiences of studying in Australia, with a focus on the gendered aspects of their educational ventures. Prior to her current work on international student mobility, her best known research has focused transnational Chinese youth and media cultures. She has published widely on television, film, literature, Internet culture and other forms of cultural production in the contemporary transnational Chinese cultural sphere, with a specialisation in representations and cultures of gender and queer sexuality. Fran's career-long focus on Chinese cultural worlds began in the 1980s-1990s when she spent several years as a student of Chinese language, literature and social movements in Beijing, Shanghai and Taipei.

Wanning Sun

Wanning Sun is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Technology Sydney. She is the author of Leaving China: media, migration, and transnational imagination (2002). Two of her edited volumes - Media and the Chinese Diaspora: Community, Communication and Commerce (2006) and Media and communication in the Chinese diaspora: Rethinking transnationalism (2016) - document the history and development of Chinese language media in Australia, North America, Europe, Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia. Her latest research on the history of the Chinese in Australia is 'From multicultural ethnic migrants to the new players of China’s public diplomacy: The Chinese in Australia' (co-authored with John Fitzgerald and Jia Gao).

Merriden Varrall

Dr Merriden Varrall is Director of the East Asia Program at the Lowy Institute for International Policy. Before joining the Lowy Institute Merriden was the Assistant Country Director and Senior Policy Advisor at UNDP China, where she worked for almost four years on China's role in the world, focusing on its international development cooperation policy. Merriden has spent nearly eight years living and working in China, including lecturing in foreign policy at the China Foreign Affairs University and conducting fieldwork for her doctoral research. Prior to that she worked for the Australian Treasury. Merriden has a PhD in political anthropology from Macquarie University, Sydney, and the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. Her dissertation examined the ideational factors behind China's foreign policy. She has a Masters Degree in International Affairs from the Australian National University, and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Technology Sydney.