This book examines the Singapore government's controversial practice of recruiting students from China and granting them full scholarships on the condition of a service "bond". It offers detailed ethnographic accounts of the Chinese "foreign talent" students' educational and cross-cultural experiences in Singapore to illustrate the complex intersections between international mobility and educational desire. In doing so, the book presents contemporary Singapore society's concerns over immigration and cross-cultural encounters from a unique perspective.

Autorentext

Peidong Yang is Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford, UK. His research interests include education and migration in the China-Singapore contexts as well as Internet and media in contemporary China.

Inhalt

1. Introduction.- 2. Contexts: Singapore's foreign talent programs and the Chinese middle school as a recruiting ground.- 3. Selecting scholars for Singapore: the SM2 program.- 4. Singlish and the Singaporean: cross-cultural encounter and othering.- 5. Being very China: self-consciousness and identity transformation.- 6. Desiring an education: scholarly idealism and anti-scholarly entrepreneurialism.