The study focuses on flagship national programmes, referred to in the research as the SBDP and TNSP, which identify and nurture top undergraduates in China’s basic sciences, including mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. These programmes were launched as part of a broader national strategy to achieve breakthroughs in fundamental research, reduce dependence on foreign technology and secure China’s position in global scientific competition. The policy language surrounding them, the authors find, consistently fuses two ideas that are conceptually distinct: academic excellence and national loyalty. To be an excellent scientist, in this framing, is to serve the nation; to serve the nation is to pursue excellence.

Sun and Li analysed the discursive construction of this fusion through a critical discourse analysis framework, examining official policy texts alongside interviews with students enrolled in the elite programmes. Critical discourse analysis, as a method, investigates how language constructs social realities, power relations and subject positions—not merely what is said, but what ways of speaking make thinkable, desirable or unthinkable. The researchers traced how policy documents mobilise emotional and moral vocabulary, framing participation in basic science not simply as a career choice but as a patriotic calling. Students are positioned as bearers of national hope, recipients of privileged educational resources and, implicitly, as individuals who owe their talents to the collective.

The researchers found that this discourse delivers real benefits. Students in the elite programmes enjoy enriched curricula, mentorship from leading scholars, accelerated research opportunities and a strong sense of purpose derived from contributing to something larger than themselves. Many interviewees genuinely embraced the patriotic framing, describing pride in being selected to help the country achieve scientific self-reliance. The affective dimension of the policy—its appeal to emotion, belonging and moral duty—functions as a form of governance in its own right, what scholars of “affective governance” describe as the steering of populations through the management of feelings rather than through coercion alone.

Yet the study’s central contribution lies in documenting what the authors call a “paradoxical excellence regime.” When the lofty discourse of serving the nation is translated into the everyday machinery of university life, it produces tensions that the policy texts do not acknowledge. Evaluation metrics demand rapid publication output. Accelerated research trajectories compress the time available for deep, exploratory learning. Competitive selection mechanisms—eligibility reviews, ranking systems, and performance thresholds—push students into a relentless race for distinction. The moral aspiration of selfless national service collides with a lived experience of pressure, comparison and anxiety that echoes, in some students’ accounts, the notorious intensity of China’s exam-oriented secondary education, sometimes described in the literature as the “Hengshui Model” of militarised, high-pressure schooling.

In response to these tensions, the students do not simply comply or rebel. Instead, Sun and Li identify a strategy they term “negotiated loyalty.” As “active recontextualizers,” the students take the official discourse and adapt it to their own circumstances, values and aspirations. Some reinterpret national service broadly, arguing that mastering a niche field or pursuing curiosity-driven inquiry ultimately serves the country even when it does not map onto strategic priorities. Others balance the patriotic narrative with discourses of academic autonomy, insisting on the right to choose their own research questions. Still others weigh self-realization—the desire for personal growth, wellbeing and a meaningful life—against expectations of sacrificial devotion, and some factor in personal security, including the practical calculus of career stability and financial reward. Loyalty, in other words, is not rejected; it is bargained over.

This micro-level finding carries significant weight for the scholarship on scientific nationalism. Much existing work analyses nationalism in science at the macro level, tracing how state rhetoric, funding structures and geopolitical competition shape national research systems. Sun and Li’s study moves the analytical lens downward, to the formation of individual subjects. The research suggests that elite scientific identity in China is not a stable outcome of socialisation into a national mission but an ongoing, contested production—the continual negotiation of competing expectations of excellence and loyalty. The students are not passive vessels of ideology; they are agents who navigate, appropriate, deflect and rework the discourses aimed at them.

The study also situates itself within global debates about the purposes of higher education. Elite universities worldwide increasingly grapple with how to reconcile academic excellence with broader social purposes, whether framed as national competitiveness, societal impact or public good. China’s case offers an especially vivid illustration because the reconciliation is engineered explicitly through state policy: the Double First-Class Initiative, under which the participating universities are recognised by the Ministry of Education for excellence in both overall institutional quality and key disciplines, ties institutional status directly to national strategic goals. The result, the authors argue, is a nation-centric excellence regime whose logics extend deep into the everyday formation of young scientists.

Methodologically, the research combined policy document analysis with qualitative interviews, using thematic analysis to identify recurring patterns in students’ accounts. The interviews were anonymised, conducted with informed consent and stored on encrypted devices; the study grew out of the first author’s master’s thesis at Xiamen University and was reviewed through the university’s internal funding and evaluation processes. The authors report no competing interests, and the work was supported by the Xiamen University Fieldwork Fund for Graduate Students, including a grant tracking the family backgrounds and academic trajectories of top students in the basic sciences, and another examining how research universities are reshaping international cooperation networks amid China–U.S. strategic competition.

The implications of the findings reach beyond China. As nations around the world increasingly mobilise universities in service of geopolitical and technological ambitions—from semiconductors to artificial intelligence to quantum research—the tension between instrumentalising talent and protecting the autonomy that fundamental science requires becomes universally relevant. Sun and Li’s work suggests that policies which fuse excellence with loyalty may succeed in generating motivation and resources, but they also generate friction that shapes, and potentially distorts, the scientific identities of the very people they aim to cultivate. Students who internalise the call to serve may still carve out spaces of autonomy, but the constant negotiation exacts its own costs, and the contradictions embedded in the system remain unresolved.

What emerges from the study is a portrait of China’s elite science education that resists simple celebration or condemnation. The nation-centric excellence regime is neither a totalitarian machine that stamps out individuality nor a benign meritocracy that rewards talent transparently. It is a dynamic, affectively charged environment in which meaning is made, contested and remade daily by young people who are simultaneously beneficiaries, enforcers and quiet critics of the system. “Dreaming with the nation,” as the study’s title puts it, is a real experience for these students—but the dream, the research shows, is continually rewritten in the dreaming.