Traditional Chinese Norms Shape Both the Pull Abroad and the Push Home for International Students

For hundreds of thousands of Chinese students, the decision to study overseas is often framed as a search for greener grass: better universities, broader horizons, and a chance to reinvent oneself in a more open society. But what happens when the students who embrace the host culture most enthusiastically come home and find that belonging has become a mirage? A new qualitative study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications suggests that the answer lies in an unexpected place: the very traditional Chinese norms that many students believed they had left behind.

The research, conducted by Xiao Wang of the University of Macau, Fengshi Ren and Ruining Jin of Beijing University of Technology, Yongqi Xu of Minzu University of China, and Jie Wei of Guangxi University and China University of Political Science and Law, examined Chinese international students who had developed a pro-host-nation cultural identity during their time abroad. These are students who, by conventional measures of acculturation, succeeded: they adopted the values, social styles, and everyday practices of their host societies, often feeling more at home in Melbourne, Toronto, or London than they had in Beijing or Chengdu. Yet the study reveals that their trajectories of departure, adaptation, return, and reentry cannot be understood without reference to Confucian values, pragmatism, and the pressures of contemporary individualization in Chinese society.

The team carried out in-depth interviews with 14 Chinese international student returnees, tracing how each participant moved through the full cycle of transnational mobility: the motivations that pushed them overseas, the acculturation strategies they adopted while abroad, the identity shifts they experienced, the calculations that eventually brought them home, and the challenges they faced when they tried to reintegrate into Chinese society. The study was reviewed and approved by the Ethics Committee of China University of Political Science and Law, with written informed consent obtained from all participants, who were assured anonymity through the use of pseudonyms and were offered mental health resources given the potentially sensitive nature of the topics discussed.

Acculturation research has long treated adaptation as a relatively linear process. Classic models, most famously John Berry’s fourfold framework, describe how migrants can integrate, assimilate, separate, or marginalize depending on whether they maintain their heritage culture and engage with the host culture. Return migration, when it is studied at all, is often framed as a simple reversal: the returnee readjusts to a familiar home culture. The new study complicates this picture substantially. Its central finding is that traditional hierarchical and pragmatic values can simultaneously prompt cultural alienation and the pursuit of autonomy abroad, while also shaping the motivations that drive students to return and the difficulties they encounter once they arrive back.

This dual role of tradition is the study’s most striking insight. Confucian norms emphasize hierarchy, family obligation, and the pursuit of achievement as a form of filial devotion. For some participants, these same norms generated a sense of alienation from Chinese social life, with its intense competition, rigid social ladders, and expectations of deference. Studying abroad offered an escape route, a chance to experience societies perceived as more egalitarian and to pursue personal autonomy that felt constrained at home. In other words, the desire to leave was not simply a pull toward the West but a push away from a normative order that these students found suffocating, even as that order had shaped their ambitions in the first place.

Yet the story does not end with liberation overseas. The pragmatic strand of Chinese cultural tradition, which treats education and mobility as instruments for family advancement and long-term security, reasserted itself in the decision to return. Career prospects, aging parents, and the sense that one’s ultimate obligations lay back home combined to draw even the most enthusiastically assimilated students back to China. The return was thus not a failure of adaptation but, in many cases, an expression of the same traditional values that had motivated the original departure. Tradition, the study suggests, operates on both ends of the migration arc, pulling students out and drawing them back.

The reacculturation phase proved to be the most painful. Students who had internalized host-nation norms of directness, individual choice, and flatter social hierarchies returned to workplaces and family structures that operated by very different rules. Their pro-host-nation identity, once an asset abroad, became a liability at home, marking them as different, sometimes as arrogant, sometimes as naive. The mirage of belonging in the study’s title captures this experience: the returnees discovered that the home they remembered no longer matched the home they re-entered, and that their years abroad had transformed them in ways that Chinese society was not always prepared to accommodate. Belonging, which had felt achievable overseas, remained elusive on both sides of the Pacific.

The study also situates these individual experiences within a broader sociological transformation. Contemporary Chinese society is characterized by increasing individualization, a process in which personal choice and self-development have gained legitimacy even within a collectivist framework. The returnees in this study were not simply caught between two static cultures; they were navigating a Chinese society that is itself in flux, where traditional norms coexist with, and are renegotiated by, individualized aspirations. This dynamic helps explain why the participants’ identities did not settle into any of the neat categories offered by classical acculturation theory. Their sense of self remained multi-dimensional, shifting with context and life stage rather than converging on a single cultural orientation.

Methodologically, the research demonstrates the value of qualitative depth in a field dominated by large-scale surveys. Fourteen interviews cannot establish prevalence, but they can illuminate mechanisms, and here the mechanism is clear: traditional norms are not a fixed baseline that migrants shed or retain, but an active force that shapes motivation, adaptation, and reentry at every stage. The authors argue that this finding calls for more nuanced, multi-dimensional models of acculturation and reacculturation, models that treat culture as a dynamic resource rather than a static inventory of traits, and that follow migrants across the entire transnational circuit rather than studying departure and return in isolation.

The implications extend well beyond academia. Universities that recruit Chinese students invest heavily in supporting their adaptation abroad but rarely think about their reentry. Employers in China hiring returnees, and families welcoming them home, may misread the friction these graduates experience as personal failing rather than a predictable outcome of deep cultural negotiation. As international student mobility continues at massive scale, and as geopolitical tensions complicate the calculus of studying abroad, understanding why students leave, why they come back, and why coming back can feel like arriving in a foreign country has never been more relevant. The greener grass, this research suggests, was never really the point; the point was the long, tradition-laden journey between two versions of home.

Subject of Research: The influence of traditional Chinese sociocultural norms on the identity and reacculturation of Chinese international student returnees

Article Title: Greener grass or the mirage of belonging: How Chinese traditional norms impact the identity and (re)acculturation of Chinese international students

Article References: Greener grass or the mirage of belonging: How Chinese traditional norms impact the identity and (re)acculturation of Chinese international students. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-09223-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-09223-3

Keywords: acculturation, Chinese international students, Confucian values, return migration, cultural identity, reacculturation, individualization, qualitative interviews, transnational mobility, cultural alienation, pragmatism, belonging