International student mobility spurs scientific research on foreign countries: Evidence from international students studying in China

Highlights

• The impact of international student mobility on scientific research in china was explored.

• Fixed-effect negative binomial regression and instrumental variable approach were employed.

• The inflow of international students contributes to china's publications on origin countries.

Abstract

The international mobility of scientists fosters knowledge exchange by increasing cross-country research collaboration between destination and origin countries. To the best of our knowledge, the mobility of international students, most of whom are not scientists, has not been linked to knowledge production involving both destination and origin countries in previous studies. The question of this research is whether international student mobility (ISM) contributes to science in China. To address this research question, we determined the annual number of international students studying in Chinese universities from 1999 to 2018, from the Concise Statistics of International Students in China compiled by the International Exchange Department of the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China, and corresponding publication records including the source country names in the titles, from the Web of Science database of Clarivate Analytics. We then used the fixed-effects negative binomial model and instrumental variable approach to explore the linkage from ISM to knowledge production and found that ISM led to the destination countries’ scientific research on foreign countries. The findings shed light on the discussion of the global mobility of talent, and contribute to the understanding of ISM's influence on science, the measurement of which is promising in future studies.

Introduction

International mobility of scientists enhances the scientific process and scholarly knowledge production. This mobility is linked to knowledge transfer and exchange through international networks, learning new approaches, gaining knowledge, and more effective working environments (Bauder, Hannan & Lujan, 2017; Netz, Hampel & Aman, 2020). Therefore, it is a important topic in the field of Informetrics to measure the contribution of scientist mobility to science. Since most international students do not publish and are not scientists, it is worthwhile to explore the broader contributions of international student mobility (ISM) to science, which contributes to our understanding of global mobility and its influence on science.

Compared with the mobility of scientists, ISM is more prevalent and complex. According to statistics from UNESCO (2019), there were 1.17 million international students worldwide in 1990, 2.1 million in 2000, and 5.31 million in 2017. The flow of international students has traditionally been from developing countries to developed countries, with East Asian countries as the main sending region and North America and Europe as the dominant destinations (Choudaha, 2017). Take the U.S. for example, more than 54% of postdoctoral researchers working at research universities were on temporary visas (Stephan, Scellato & Franzoni, 2015). As highly talented individuals, international students have made significant contributions to knowledge production and innovation in host countries (Stephan & Levin, 2001; Chellaraj, Maskus & Mattoo, 2008; Hunt & Gauthier-Loiselle, 2010). In addition to filling research assistant vacancies, faculty members in host institutions have suggested that foreign students also help to establish connections with the source country and promote relevant research by taking advantage of students’ linguistic, cultural, and other embodied knowledge (Dunne, 2009; Harrison, 2015; Trice, 2003). These benefits are more obvious in the fields with context-specific components (Szanton, 2004; Williams & Baláž, 2008).

Skilled emigration, which has been labeled "brain gain" for the receiving countries, has been long a policy concern for sending countries (Beine, Docquier & Rapoport, 2001, 2011). As statistics have shown, China is now the world’s largest exporter of overseas students and has the highest global trade deficit in services for studying abroad. In 2017 alone, it sent 928,000 students abroad, almost three times as many as India, the world’s second largest sender, and twice the number it attracted in the same year (UNESCO, 2019). To cope with the severe “brain drain,” the Chinese government put forward an initiative called Several Suggestions on Opening Up Education in the New Era with the goal of promoting the return of domestic students and foreign students to study in China, and cultivate and attract more outstanding talent to serve the country (The State Council, 2016). With numerous “Study in China” initiatives and the increasing number of government scholarships, the number of international students studying in China has grown considerably. While in 1999, only 44,700 international students were studying in China, in 2018, 492,200 international students were enrolled in Chinese institutions, making China the largest overseas destination in Asia for study (Wen & Hu, 2018).

Although the global pattern of ISM is changing and China is emerging as a new regional hub for overseas education, few studies have evaluated international students’ contributions to China's science. Furthermore, for a non-western country with a “semi-peripheral” position in the asymmetrical structure of knowledge exchange, the influx of international students has created an environment of internationalization at home for Chinese domestic academics and students, giving them a better understanding of the outside world by increasing social diversity on campus (Bevis & Lucas, 2007; Mulvey, 2021). Hence, the expansion of international students in China is expected to broaden the geographic scope of what is being researched rather than merely impact on scientific productivity. However, this reciprocal knowledge spillover and its impacts on China's science has not been sufficiently addressed and appropriately assessed.

The main purpose of this study is to explore the influence of ISM on science by taking the international students studying in China as an example. It is intended to shed light on the theoretical and empirical understanding of the contributions of ISM to science. The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. After a review of the relevant literature in Section 2, we introduced the data, methodology, and empirical model of this study in Section 3. The estimation results are presented in Section 4. In Section 5, we discuss the mechanism of the linkage between ISM and science, and the policy implications. In Section 6, we conclude.