Internationalization of HE in Malaysia

Traditionally, the major outbound flow of international students has been towards European-American-Australasian countries. A plethora of research has thus attended to the movement of international students to these geographies. As a matter of fact, aspiring to become globally competitive, governments in Asia have strategically internationalized their HE sector, which somehow diversifies the previous unidirectional East-West or global South-North mobility as a growing number of students in Asian countries now choose to further their study in other Asian countries (Mok & Yu., 2014), with ASEAN members being popular destinations. Recent studies have shed light on international students’ flux to ASEAN, such as Singapore (Chacko., 2020), Vietnam (Tran & Marginson., 2018), Thailand (Rhein & Jones., 2020), and Indonesia (Sutrisno., 2019). Comparatively, a scarcer body of scholarship elucidates other countries that take even more peripheral positions, with limited studies looking into Myanmar (Channon., 2018), the Philippines (Adeyem., 2019), and Cambodia (Sok & Bunry., 2021). Generally, the current literature concurs that although internationalization of HE is on these governments’ agenda, as a result of and aspiration for national capacity development and regional socioeconomic engagement, inequality among ASEAN countries persists.

Malaysia is a special case warranting deeper discussion. As outlined above, the disparity or inequality between ASEAN countries in terms of internationalization of HE stands real. And it is saliently reflected in the enrollment number of international students, of which Malaysia enjoys a dominant advantage. Atherton et al., (2020) evinced that inbound students were unevenly distributed across the ASEAN region, with Malaysia being the leading country with the highest number in 2018, taking up 50% of inbound students in this area. An emerging body of studies scrutinized possible contributing factors. For example, recent work undertaken by the British Council placed Malaysia among the leading countries globally in terms of policy frameworks conducive to international HE (Atherton et al., 2018). Another reason relates to visa arrangements that can act as a constraint or booster on international student mobility flows. As a separate body, Education Malaysia Global Services (EMGS) issues student visas and promotes Malaysia as a study destination, which is fairly unique across ASEAN. By providing intensive visa support for students, EMGS presumably plays a significant role in establishing Malaysia as a leader of inbound international students’ mobility in ASEAN (Atherton et al., 2020). Despite these developments, except for a few recent efforts (e.g., Deni et al., 2021; Nachatar Singh., 2022), emic perceptions of educational experience in Malaysia from international students remain relatively rare.

The broad-brush investigation above brings into relief that a Western-centric international HE system is gradually challenged, if not yet nullified, by the burgeoning of non-Western geographies such as ASEAN where transformative entanglements of economic, technological, geopolitical, and cultural forces boost their huge potential, so much so that their peripherality appears increasingly invalidated. Despite scholarly efforts heeding to this change, exemplified by the preceding literature, research uncovering international student mobility is still dominated by studies reflecting a Western orientation, discourse, and understanding, leaving these non-Western international education geographies largely unexamined, thus serving to reproduce a circumscribed, partial, and hierarchical understanding of international student mobility as if the “international” is a proxy for the Anglophone west (Brooks & Waters., 2022). More voices from outside the global North are in urgent need to portray a full landscape. Bearing this critical asymmetry in mind and given that Malaysia sets a salient example of emergent regional hubs, we believe it serves a good point of departure to contribute to this critical gap. To facilitate an in-depth and focused investigation, this study chose to scrutinize Chinese doctoral students in Malaysia. Following, we tease out the reasons why Chinese doctoral students in Malaysia were chosen and presented with pertinent scholarships.

Research on international Chinese doctoral students

The decision to focus on Chinese doctoral students in Malaysia was made primarily for two reasons that appear a paradox. On the one hand, according to EMGS (2022), Malaysia saw a doubling of international student applications for PhD in 2021 when many other countries suffered from a declining intake due to ramifications of COVID-19. Notably, of Malaysia’s top 10 source countries of international students in 2020–2021, Chinese students were the dominant group, contributing 97.68% of the increase, with 10,326 out of 10,571 new international students from China. Unsurprisingly, Malaysia benefited from this pandemic as a geographically closer alternative to farther destinations such as the USA and Australia where geopolitical tensions further restricted student mobility (Xu & Tran., 2022), although it remains debatable to what extent these shifting dynamics would persist in a post-pandemic world (Huang et al., 2022). On the other hand, although other degree levels such as masters also witnessed the skyrocketing popularity, the PhD cohort seemed to bear the brunt when wide circulation of media reports in China questioned the rigor and quality of doctoral programs in some Southeast Asian universities undertaken by Chinese doctoral students. Despite emerging salience, neither such popularity nor questioning has been investigated, making it valuable to conduct an investigation into this topic.

With its rising economic might and imprint in the past two decades, the validity of China’s membership in the Global South category seemed to be open to debate. While acknowledging the complexities and alternative perspectives, this paper opts for its Southern positionality, given that China consistently aligns itself with the interests and identities of the Global South (Cooper, 2020). Since the 1990s, China has been the biggest source country of international PhD students (Shen et al., 2016) and the student mobility concurs with a universal pattern practiced elsewhere favoring Europe, North America, and Australasia as desirable destinations that are positioned at the top of a global hierarchy (Brooks & Waters., 2022). Many scholars have attended to issues shaping this cohort’s doctoral trajectory and beyond. Academic socialization has attracted most scholarly attention, covering supervisory interaction (Wu., 2017), academic adaptation (Xu et al., 2020), identity negotiation (Wang & Parr., 2021), etc. These discussions roughly reveal that despite challenges due to unfamiliar academic norms, linguistic barriers, cultural heterogeneities, and inadequate support, Chinese international doctoral students are not deficit sojourners; rather, they are active agents who endeavor to steer a doctoral course shaped by their desires and action towards achieving divergent purposes. Some take an ecological perspective, looking into non-academic sociocultural dimensions that are intricately intertwined with the academic domain, for example, Ding and Devine’s (2017) study on Chinese doctoral students’ religious experience in New Zealand. Others examined a post-doctoral trajectory, such as career decisions made at the interplay of personal aspirations, familial expectations, and societal constraints (Lee et al., 2018), and working experiences in China as returnees (Li & Xue., 2020).

The above literature undoubtedly provides insightful perspectives based primarily on a pattern of global South-North mobility. Having said that, more efforts are needed to delve into other patterns. Casting light on Chinese doctoral students in Malaysia, this study aimed to contribute to the conceptualization of global South-South student mobility, with two research questions on its agenda:

  1. 1.

    How do Chinese doctoral students perceive their doctoral sojourn in Malaysia?

  2. 2.

    How do these perceptions reflect sociohistorical forces underpinning the experiences of Chinese PhD students in Malaysia as a salient case of global South-South student mobility?

In the next part, we present the theoretical framework in which the study is anchored.

Theoretical framework

This study situated its analysis in a pair of theoretical concepts, recolonization and decolonization. Recolonization denotes that despite living in a post-colonial era, operational logics of many enterprises replicate the old norm and model established by the colonizer (Brock-Utne., 2000), thereby reinscribing an exploitative pattern perpetuating the Western dominance. As a constitutive component of modernity, coloniality was foundational to the knowledge formation of many aspects of international education (Takayama et al., 2017). In particular, even in the post-colonial era when this field was underpinned by shifting rationales of public policy and development discourses, student mobility and the broader eduscape were embedded in a colonial logic whereby Eurocentric conceptions of HE were strategized in the guise of soft power or a gold standard for civilization (Ploner & Nada., 2020). For the past three decades, despite that the rise of some semiperipheral countries such as China has complicated the global power asymmetry (Mulvey., 2020), the boost of global neoliberalism has fueled marketization of international HE that increasingly strives for competition, revenue, and branding (de Wit & Altbach., 2021), escalating the center-periphery divide. This divide is operationalized through the push-pull model, with many developing countries at the push end stimulating students to undertake international study and their developed host counterparts at the pull end attracting international students for numerous reasons (Mazzarol & Soutar., 2002). Structurally and institutionally, manifestation of recolonization in international HE abounds. For example, it is salient in epistemic injustice that advantages Northern researchers in international publishing domain (Altbach., 2011); in neoliberal governance of hierarchizing universities based on world university rankings that primarily center on the global North and use the criteria that prevail in elite US universities (Connell., 2016); in the predominantly unidirectional flow of international students from non-Western to Western nations (Stein & Silva., 2020); and in normalizing the Anglo-Western paradigm as the way to access global capital that non-Western others should aspire to and invest in (Xu., 2022).

Concurrently, within the field of international HE, a decolonial perspective has gained concern, referring to a process of delinking from the colonial matrix of power and embracing a vision toward a world where many worlds can co-exist (Mignolo., 2007). Decolonization is underpinned in propositions that highlight pluriversality, a horizontal strategy of openness to diversity among different epistemic traditions (Mbembe., 2016). In Stein and Silva’s (2020) conceptualization, this could be enacted via a system hospicing approach which means to “disinvest and learn from the false and harmful promises” (p.561) in the dominant global system, to “activate exiled capacities” (p.562) and to consider viable alternatives that are invisible from within the colonial imaginaries. In specific practical terms, some structural efforts encompass relativizing values, traditions, or styles of Southern theories and indigenous knowledge systems in (in)formal educational contexts (Connell., 2016). Others relate to transform the curriculum featuring more inclusivity and equality, preparing international students to be global professionals and citizens who value and respect difference for its intrinsic worth (le Grange., 2016). Notably, many of the decolonial practices have been embedded in a global North-South paradigm; global South-South student mobility as an emerging mode of South-South cooperation demands more analytic efforts from a decolonial lens, considering that the global South-South cooperation is a decolonial tool to change the global order (Caixeta & Santos., 2022).

As delineated above, both recolonization and decolonization are embedded in macro-level factors that constitute historical, economic, ideological, and institutional conditions for their formation. That said, they are also intricately entangled with micro factors at the experiential level as they are subjectively lived by, thus exerting affective consequences on individuals. For those who are subordinate to and victimized by the power inequality of recolonization, feelings of anxiety and insecurity, contempt for local culture, and internalized oppression (Prilleltensky., 2003) are salient. This has been widely discussed in the deficit discourse around international students who are prone to internalize imposed negative associations as a perceived personal weakness (Ploner & Nada., 2020), thus feeling vulnerable and inferior. Conversely, decolonization is intertwined with affective qualities of empowerment, liberation, and enrichment as a result of epistemic delinking from colonial domination (Mignolo., 2005). For example, Xu et al., (2020) argued that as international students exert self-reflexive and proactive agency to pluralize a monolithic Eurocentrism educational culture, both they themselves and host interactants have been instilled positive energies. Altogether, conflating macro and micro factors, the above theoretical underpinnings help to unpack the current study. Before presenting findings informed by the above theoretical concepts, we delineated the methodology below.

Methodology

Given that the nature of the research questions is in more alignment with exploration than confirmation, to facilitate a deep exploration, this study adopted a qualitative methodology that allows for a nuanced and contextualized probe into meaning-making that could not be achieved by any standard measuring instrument. Two Malaysia universities were chosen as research sites. As representative research-intensive institutions expected to perform promotion of the Malaysia Higher Education Blueprint 2015–2025 in which improving research for innovation remains a strategic goal (Dumanig & Symaco., 2020), they constitute great places for disclosure of research-oriented doctoral experience. More importantly, sitting at the top two places on QS World University Rankings by country since 2020, these two public institutions’ emerging international reputation amounted to great attractiveness for international students, making them ideal sites for investigating this cohort, the recruitment of which is prioritized in the blueprint.

Semi-structured interview was employed for data collection due to the large degree of relevancy it provides to the topic while remaining responsive to the participant (Bartholomew et al., 2000). After ethical approval was sought and gained, the third researcher circulated the recruitment request using a purposive snowballing strategy. We targeted different Chinese students enrolled in two Malaysian universities for doctoral research as suitable participants who were encouraged to help identify other potential participants. As a Chinese seeking doctoral degree in one of the two research sites, the third researcher’s insider position could facilitate rapport and openness that are significant to qualitative studies. Concurrently, being aware of the potential drawbacks instigated by an insider stance, the study incorporated an outsider perspective, believing that the other two researchers’ non-groupness boosted relative emotional and experiential distance that is conducive to mitigating pre-formed biases possibly held by the third researcher as an insider. The recruitment sought participants’ informed consent regarding research aims, procedures, and voluntary participation and was circulated via email and social networking media. The process lasted 2 months when recruitment stopped at the number of ten, reaching a point of data saturation where the researchers found further data collection did not necessarily make the overall story more insightful in relation to the research questions (Saunders et al., 2018). All the participants are on full-time doctoral programs although some of them were temporarily taking online courses in China by the time of interview due to the pandemic interruption. Despite neither generalization nor representativeness intended, the sample manifested diversity regarding lengths into doctoral candidature and disciplines, which benefits a fuller exploration into complexities that underpin the topic. A deep probe into a small number of participants provided valuable insights into international students’ navigation of doctoral sojourns within the under-explored global South-South student mobility and enabled a thick description of contextualized meaning-making that achieves a type of external validity (Lincoln & Guba., 1985). In order to protect privacy, the university names were coded with U1 and U2; and the students were coded from S1 to S10 based on the chronological order of their interviews. For detailed demographic information, please refer to Table 1.

Table 1 Demographic information of participants
Full size table

To overcome physical constraints, online one-on-one semi-structured interviews were conducted, each lasting between 30 and 90 min. During the interviews, the participants were encouraged to share their experiences as an international Chinese doctoral student, answering questions such as “What are the motives behind your choice of Malaysia?”; “How do you comment on negative perceptions regarding doctoral education quality associated with Southeast Asia?”; and “How are your mobility experiences influenced by sociohistorical forces?” The interviews were conducted in mandarin Chinese, a shared mother tongue spoken by the interviewer and the interviewees. Transcripts were transported into NVivo 12. For data analysis, we adopted a thematic analysis that balanced inductive and deductive coding for a more complete understanding of the topic. Inductively, coding was driven by and emergent from the data; deductively, analysis was also informed by the theoretical underpinnings adopted by the study (Fereday & Muir-Cochrane., 2006). Data analysis was conducted following four steps: (1) reading and segmenting, (2) sorting and labeling, (3) comparing and synthesizing, and (4) categorizing and reporting. We started with reading each transcript several times to get familiar with the data. After that, the data was segmented into basic meaning units, from which some topical codes emerged and were then labelled, compared, and synthesized. In the third step, themes were generated, reviewed, and defined with a cross-code examination. Finally, two umbrella themes were categorized and reported. These were derived from the theoretical underpinnings of the study, under which several sub-themes were clustered. To ensure reliability and validity of the data and results, two strategies of triangulation were used (Denzin., 2009). Data triangulation was adopted, with sources of data collected from different locations and participants to gain multiple perspectives. Besides, bias was mitigated by three investigators observing the same data and cross-examining the interpretation as a type of investigator triangulation. The findings are detailed below.

Findings

Firstly, this study reveals that part of their perceptions underpinned decolonization of international doctoral education, which was manifest in the following two aspects. For one thing, challenging the traditional Anglo-Western dominance, Malaysia grew to be a popular destination as a Southern niche that took advantage of its unique pull factors; for another, commensurate benefits were evinced being yielded from the South-South educational mobility, which dissolved the Southern inferiority myth and delegitimized the Western supremacy.

Redirecting the pull: choosing Malaysia as a budding niche

Speaking of motives, most participants revealed that Malaysia has unique attractiveness that played an important pull role in their decision making about doing an overseas PhD, lending weight to Klemenčič’s (2017) suggestion that universities would benefit by finding a unique niche and sharpening their destination attraction and visibility. Malaysian universities seemed successful in this regard, capitalizing on its low cost, and geographical and cultural proximity to China, as evinced by the following views:

I think doing a PhD in Southeast Asia has its strength. Like Singapore and Malaysia, they both blend eastern and western cultures, making them easier to understand Chinese culture and Western culture. (S3)

Online search appeared that communication there (in Malaysia) is not very difficult. Even Mandarin is okay. I feel like staying there is more or less like remaining in China. (S10)

It’s closer to China, also the cost is relatively low, including its tuition fees, living expenses, very cost-effective. That’s why I chose here. (S4)

As disclosed above, the budding educational market is partially linked to Malaysia’s economic competitiveness, echoing with Singh et al., (2014) who contended that Malaysian universities benefited from low tuition fees and low cost of living when compared with Western HE providers. Except for a short 4-h flight duration, which is more time- and money-saving, as a multi-ethnic society in which Chinese constitute one of the three major ethnic groups along with Malays and Indians (Ibrahim., 2007), Malaysia’s attraction also lies in its proximity to China, both physically (S4) and culturally (S3, S10). Due to these advantages, Malaysia redirected the pull of international HE to its own benefits, exemplifying that global South players have their unique competitiveness and the proper capitalization on these advantages might help to increase their visibility and destabilize the current dominance occupied by their Northern counterparts. Such recognition and strategic leverage of these unique destination attractions have the potential not only to enhance the diversification of student mobility destinations but also to shift towards decolonization and reduce global inequalities which are indicators of colonialism (Stein & De Andreotti., 2016).

Dissolving the Southern inferiority myth: challenging the Anglo-West worship

According to the study, the doctoral sojourn in Malaysia facilitated accumulation of learning gains, the nature of which was similar to those benefits traditionally obtained from the global North, negating to some extent the superiority of educational values offered by center countries. Manifested as a process of personal accumulation, this project of negation in relation to Anglo-Western dominance was imbued with positive affective elements, subjectively constructed and lived by the participants.

To start with, many participants opined accruing emotional security and confidence as a result of being socialized into a research community. Academically operational competence and projected enhanced employability boosted their positive self-positioning. The following statements are examples:

The first semester I took a course related to methodology which was created by the instructor…I think it’s really helpful to a novice PhD student to know the whole process. (S7)

When I go job-hunting, I will be better positioned, with more freedom of choice…. My desired employment destination is a prestigious university, like one listed in “985” or “211” project. (S5)

I think after I graduate and resume teaching in my university, I will be able to identify many research points linking what I learn to action research…I think my doctoral study will have huge impacts on my publishing which is important for a university teacher. (S9)

S7 revealed benefiting from a process of academic socialization whereby a set of knowledge, skills, and resources is gradually furnished. The sojourn in Malaysia facilitated that purpose, which has been similarly identified as learning gains obtained by international Chinese students from Western doctoral education (Wu., 2017). In addition, the participants seemed optimistic about the cultural capital of a doctorate pursued in Malaysia, be it landing a position in a “prestigious university” (S5) or enhanced awareness and capability of publishing “which is important for a university teacher” (S9). Their confidence in the imagined career gains appeared to resist the wide discourse that associates competitiveness of international graduates in employability with holders of a Western degree (Kim., 2015). When optimistically projecting their value as a holder-to-be of a non-Western degree, they challenged the Western epistemic hegemony as an emotionally charged project in which a sense of empowered subjectivity emerged.

Besides, the study showcased that an overseas doctoral sojourn enriched the participants’ repertoire of values, beliefs, and norms, transforming their mentality towards cultural plurality, illustrated by and S1 and S6:

Open-mindedness is important. Malaysia is a relatively tolerant place. Look at Penang, a converging place of mainstream religions. Different places of worship co-exist harmoniously, with just hundred-meters in-between. (S1)

When you embark on a doctoral journey, it’s not just about making an academic innovation your whole mentality changes a lot. You know that you must stay optimistic, be perseverant, because otherwise you won’t accomplish the task, you can’t finish the journey. (S6)

Studying in Malaysia, for S1, strengthened his immersive understanding of cultural inclusivity, the significance of “open-mindedness”; for S6, it pluralized her conceptualization of a doctoral journey as cognitive growth that transcends “making an academic innovation” alone. This study lent weight that intercultural sensitivity and holistic personal growth accrued from South-North mobility (e.g., Xu et al., 2020) are also accessible by South-South mobility. In this regard, the study challenges a Eurocentric epistemic canon (Mbembe., 2016) that normalizes the global North as the ideal destination for nurturing a global citizen who can embrace difference and actualize the wholeness of one’s being, a misconception predominantly manipulated as a global imagery through which the Western way of knowledge production is regarded both superior and universal (Stein & De Andreotti., 2016). From a decolonial lens, this challenge was also intertwined with empowering affective dimensions. The delegitimization of student migrants’ deficiency dominating the adjustment paradigm (Ploner & Nada., 2020) was subjectively lived by the participants as positive self-transformation whereby they appreciated the significance of harmonious co-existence of differences (S1) and cultivated an interconnected mindset (S6).

Apart from the dimension of decolonization as analyzed above, the participants’ views reflect the recolonization of international doctoral education, which could also be explained from two aspects. Firstly, the students’ make-do mentality that regards Malaysia as an instrumental replacement for more ideal Western destinations mirrors and reinforces the center-periphery divide; besides, their resistance against the discriminatory discourse associated with Malaysian international education was performed by legitimizing the Anglo-West as a standard that other geographies should live up to, which may backfire on the intention as it inadvertently reinforces the Western dominance.

Making do with the next best thing: choosing Malaysia as a competitive peripheral player

To begin with, most participants explicitly stated that Malaysia was not their first choice when deciding on an ideal destination, mirroring a long-standing conceptualization that in a stratified international HE landscape featuring a center-periphery dichotomy, Anglo-Western countries are positioned at the international academic center (Uzhegova & Baik., 2020), with “the rest of the world trailing behind” (Stein & de Andreotti., 2016), p. 226). The following views are examples:

UK and America were on my list, but they were too expensive. Then I considered New Zealand as an option, but COVID-19 made travelling difficult…I heard that Malaysia offers online PhD programs, which was a big attraction for me. So I decided to apply for one. (S8)

Isn’t it true that when we start to look for a PhD destination European countries and America are on the top of a wish list? …always begin with checking these developed areas…There is a chain of contempt. (S5)

S8’s evolvement of decision-making serves a miniature of many participants who disclosed a similar hierarchy of choices in which Anglo-Western countries were ubiquitously prioritized. The perceived superiority attached to these geographies were succinctly encapsulated in S5’s remark of “a chain of contempt,” a concept widely circulated across China that extends the notion of food chains, which considers developing and emerging countries such as Malaysia less desirable than “these developed areas” in international education. These views echo previous scholarship that the overall attractiveness of HEIs to foreign students is subject to the countries where they are situated, resulting in a divide that favors developed ones as centers of civilizational and economic attraction and disadvantages their developing counterparts as peripheries lacking international status and visibility (Klemenčič., 2017). S8’s make-do mentality discloses an unfavorable self-positioning entrenched in a sense of deprivation due to economic and travel restrictions; for S5, complying with the biased “chain of contempt” in choosing a “contemptible” study destination reflected internalization of deprecation and oppression. In both cases, the decision-making process was saturated with unknowingly mental working in which undercurrents of negative feelings overflew.

Besides, the participants’ fixation with world university rankings that served a decisive factor in their choosing a specific university in Malaysia showcased their compliance with and engagement in university prestige competition, the rules of which are normalized by, and mostly served the interests of the global powers (Pusser & Marginson., 2013). For example, S6 and S7 mentioned that:

I applied to X University and Y University in Malaysia. I didn’t consider other universities here. If I had failed, I would have given up coming to Malaysia because I cared about ranking very much. (S6)

I compared the current university with another one in Malaysia which although is better ranked by university yet is worse by subject. I noticed that my university was ranked 202 on QS, and its ranking has been ascended for these years. Subject ranking is prioritized among universities of top 200. That’s why I am here. (S7)

Institution status has been well documented playing a significant role in international students’ decision making (Nachatar Singh et al., 2014). Interestingly, despite an inclusive concept subjected to assessment of quality, reputation, and service of education and beyond, institution status was reduced to ranking position in this study, with many participants such as S6 mentioning that “I cared about ranking very much.” Also, some explicitly stated that being in the top 200 on QS was an important pull factor, as S7 has commented above. Needless to say, from the perspective of institution, this denotes that Malaysian HE institutions have yielded a growing force in the global system of HE and benefited from their strategic exploitation of the branding effect. At a student level, a ranking-oriented decision-making nevertheless betrays the worship of world class, the measure of which is politicized and governed by values and criteria set by those existing academic elites that have an accumulated history of privilege, power, and money (Lynch., 2014), which may further exacerbate the power inequalities.

Self-approving via an “othered” lens: resisting discrimination by Western standards

Based on their lived experience of studying in Malaysia, all participants opposed the association between Southeast Asia and shoddy doctorates, denouncing it as “geographical discrimination” (such as S5 and S9) or a “wrong and one-sided label” (such as S1, S4, and S10). Nevertheless, their resistance against this discourse was entrenched in the conceptualization that normalizes Anglo-West as a standard that others should live up to, which in a sense equates to self-subjugation.

To begin with, their self-approval as “not shoddy” was linked to Anglo-West-related prestige possessed by the faculty and the institution, manifested in the following views:

Some say doctorates from Southeast Asia are shoddy, take a look at the faculty of my university, they are graduates from Stanford University, UCL, etc. Can you call them shoddy?… My university offers credit exchange programs, take a look at the partnership universities, based in Euro-America, Australia, Japan, etc. It’s evident that teaching quality here is recognized. (S1)

I think faculty here are of high quality. Firstly, I think their academic qualifications are very good, like 70–80% of them have overseas study experience in European countries and America. (S7)

As disclosed above, the participants’ opposition was premised on a favorable portrait of the faculty due to their possession of desirable cultural capital which is produced in/by the West. Elite Western qualification obtained from “Stanford” and “UCL,” or generally “overseas study experience in European countries and America,” reinforces the desirability of Western education in the global knowledge production system. This notion is also reflected in S7’s perception that benchmarked his host university’s good teaching quality against “partnership universities” located in developed areas. These understandings and practices valorized different geographies based on a hierarchy that renders Anglo-West more legitimate and valuable, whereas denying non-traditional geographies such as Malaysia an equally autonomous footing as a knowledge creator. While practically benefiting from partnering with Western powers, peripheral countries are prone to intellectual recolonization (Brock-Utne., 2000), given that the operation is driven by a logic that prioritizes Western cultural capitals. As a consequence, it sustains colonial residues from the past that work to benefit those in power.

As well, their resistance against the disparaging discourse emanates from the capability of producing a strong publication record, not least publishing in certain databases, as revealed below:

Publishing two or more SCOPUS-indexed or one or more SSCI-indexed papers during the doctoral candidature… In academia, your strength speaks for you. I don’t think people care about locality. So I think if we have publications, and if doctors from our area are producing many publications, it may change others’ opinions, right? (S6)

Malaysian doctorates are not shoddy. Personally, I have published five SCI-indexed papers during my candidature, and I expect one or two to come…Be it doing a PhD in mainland China or the US, it’s not good without publications…As long as you have publications, nobody can look down upon you. (S7)

Since the 1990s, China has witnessed an upsurge of worship prioritizing Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) journals, which are part of the Web of Science Core Collection, as core evaluation criteria for funding allocation, career advancement, and institution ranking (Li., 2020). Despite a recent reform initiated by the Chinese government calling for a shift away from the prevailing “papers only” climate (Li., 2020), the participants such as S6 and S7 still manifested resigned or subliminal compliance with these “international” norms that feature Anglo-Western dominance to make a voice and further establish their legitimacy. By self-identifying as researchers capable of producing international high-quality outputs indexed in SSCI and SCI databases, they delegitimize the stigmatization imposed upon international doctoral education offered by peripheral systems. At an affective level, this disassociation from deficit and negative constructions instilled positive feelings, elevating the participants to restore their collective esteem and professional identity, manifested in S6’s view to “change others’ opinions” and S7’s assertion that “nobody can look down upon you.” Ironically, their agency to resist the disparaging discourse by “producing more publications” observes gatekeeping mechanisms stipulated mostly by the Anglo-West, thus inadvertently reinforcing the Western hegemony in an already unequal publishing sphere where Western gate-keepers control the publishing companies, the editorial boards, and the refereeing system (Brock-Utne., 2000). Affectively, as a means of self-approval via an “othered” lens, this resistance was underpinned by internalized oppression and exploitation, which may further exacerbate their sense of inferiority and anxiety.

Discussion and conclusion

Based on Chinese doctoral students’ emic perceptions of their doctoral sojourn in Malaysia, this study reveals some deep-seated ideological and operational forces that underpin experiences of Chinese PhD students in Malaysia as a salient part of global South-South student mobility. This is captured in the notions of decolonization and recolonization.

Firstly, this study exemplifies that the non-traditional global South-South educational flow has a unique attractiveness and can offer benefits to international students, encapsulated in those positive perceptions prior to and during their doctoral sojourn. For one thing, it reveals that with desirable competitiveness, Malaysia presents a niche in the international education market that has the potential to diversify the flow of international doctoral students. This lends weight to heeding to decentring of international student mobility (Mulvey., 2020) and agency outside the “center” countries (Marginson & Xu., 2023). By strategizing unique economic and geocultural pull factors, Malaysia has engaged in shifting power dynamics that have the potential to destabilize the center-periphery power hegemony, echoing Glass and Cruz’s (2022) recent observation of the growing influence of planned and emerging education in providing a counterbalance to the long-standing power of traditional destinations. More importantly, the study illuminates that despite an emerging movement, the nature of gains accrued was on a par with what the dominant South-North educational mobility could offer (Xu et al., 2020), lending further weight to the decolonial lens that delegitimizes coloniality of knowledge that negates, excludes, and occludes the possibilities of other knowledges (Mignolo., 2007). As shown in this research, a study sojourn in Malaysia unfolds as an accumulative process of academic socialization and personal transformation. This supports that South-South mobilities are viable alternatives (Stein & Silva., 2020) to the South-North counterparts that dominate the current international HE system and that the South should be actively sought as a source of intellectual inspiration (Takayama et al., 2017). Furthermore, the accumulation of self-perceived learning gains out of the South-South mobility that mirrors a delinking from hegemonic belief systems (Mignolo., 2005) of Anglo-West worship is also constructed and lived by the students as a mentally empowering process. From a decolonial lens, the South-South mobility is imbued with positive experientiality, manifested in the students’ optimistic self-positioning in regard to enhanced academic competence, future employability, and cultural plurality.

Having said that, this study flashes a warning beacon about recolonization. According to the findings, although Malaysia as a peripheral yet emerging country was finally chosen, it was a next-best choice which was only made when the most desirable choices were practically unachievable. This make-do mentality reflects strong operational impacts of the hierarchy discourse, which in turn validates the desirability and superiority of certain geographies over others vis-à-vis educational mobility. Choosing Malaysia as a realistic compromise reflects and reinforces the ingrained legacy of colonialism that attaches more symbolic power to credentials obtained from former colonial metropoles (Mulvey., 2020). Furthermore, despite the denial of the discriminatory discourse improperly associated with Southeast Asian doctorates, the students’ resistance was shaped by and subject to forms of “othered” self-approval, saliently manifested in their pursuits of world-class prestige that perpetuates hegemony of the global North (Connell., 2016) and targeted publication endeavors that strengthen epistemic injustice (Altbach., 2011). For one thing, as Pusser and Marginson (2013) poignantly noted, regardless of the heterogeneity of educational contexts, ideologies, norms, and policy objectives, global rankings perpetuate convergence and cross-national normalization tailored to the interests of the globally strongest states, making it an imperial project that sustains global hierarchy. Following this line of logic, the participants’ engagement in world-class ranking pursuits mirrors a kind of grassroots recolonization conspired by their willing obedience to this project that defends power inequalities. For another, given that publishability of international research outputs is mostly circumscribed by the interests, concerns, and scientific norms prevalent at the center (Altbach., 2011), effective resistance is thus unavoidably achieved via satisfying the center’s needs, which again may serve to reinforce the center-periphery divide. By virtue of this, their resistance, albeit appearing enactment of agency (Tran & Vu., 2017), may widen the existent divide and buttress recolonization in international HE. Echoing with Xu (2022), this study reveals that by naturalizing Northern values and interests as a global cultural capital that all should aspire to and invest in serves to reinforce colonial assumptions and supremacy. Furthermore, it shows that recolonization is interwoven with complex affective dimensions. While superficially they may feel uplifted by self-initiated resistance against discrimination, their make-do mentality, voluntary enactment of the “chain of contempt,” and an “othered” lens of self-approval signify an unfavorable self-positioning as a result of internalizing oppression, deprecation, and exploitation imposed by the center, which in the long run and at a deep level would consolidate their sense of inferiority and anxiety (Ploner & Nada, 2020).

Shedding light on a case of global South-South student mobility, this study contributes to international HE literature by unpacking the trickle-down effect of decolonization and recolonization as sociohistorical structure on international students’ approach to and perception of the study sojourn. The intertwining effect of decolonization and recolonization was manifest impacting their prior-to decision-making process and the in-the-moment navigation of a doctoral trajectory. Adopting a theoretical framework rarely utilized to analyze students’ personal experiences, this study, via bridging macro and micro discussions, offers new insights into global South-South mobility, the most valuable one being the disclosure of contesting effects. While taking advantage of the Southern niche to yield commensurate benefits, thus delegitimizing the Western supremacy, the students’ make-do mentality and self-subjugating resistance reinforce the Western dominance. As well, these macro effects generate interlocking and conflicting affective consequences, instilling simultaneously positivity and inclusivity, inferiority, and anxiety. Altogether, decolonization and recolonization are concretely registered at emotional level and bear a broader social significance as structures of feeling (Scott., 2019). It is our hope that the notion of contradiction borne out of this study can bring scholars’ attention to the covert yet compelling forces that shape the current global South-South mobility. More importantly, the study calls for future efforts to address these inequalities in international HE so that a more equitable post-pandemic world that benefits all actors engaged in diverse forms of international student mobility could be established and sustained. However, a fine-grained articulation of these efforts is neither the emphasis of the current study, nor can it be succinctly elaborated in a piece of this length. Future research may consider exploring these issues further.