Introduction

The term, huaren daoshi (华人导师), refers to doctoral supervisors who are of Chinese ethnicity (either born in or outside of China) and work in Western countries, especially those situated in historically White institutions (Ford, 2011, p. 445). This term becomes popular as the number of academics from China or of Chinese ethnicity working in Western higher education institutions (HEIs hereafter) has been on the rise (Oishi, 2017; Open Doors, 2023; Universities UK International, 2022), and ethnic Chinese academics are becoming an important group of potential doctoral supervisors for prospective Chinese Postgraduate Research (hereafter PGR) students.

The image of Chinese doctoral supervisors in Western academia, however, is riddled with stereotypes in urban myths. In Shen’s (2018) research about visiting Chinese doctoral students and their host supervisors in developed countries,Footnote 1 he reported a visiting doctoral student of botany to the US revealing that their ‘Chinese boss’ (i.e. host supervisor) made them do experiments in the lab every day and did not allow them to audit classes. This doctoral student thus cautioned others to ‘stay away from Chinese bosses’ (p. 227). This doctoral student’s ‘caution’ represents some of the stereotypes established of ‘Chinese supervisors’ that are rife in communities on the Internet.

Such communities on the Internet can play crucial roles in shaping prospective students’ higher education decision-making. Research has shown that when applying to study abroad, international students tend to use ‘the Internet as the primary information search tool for making university application decisions’ (Gai et al., 2016, p. 184). Galan et al.’s (2015) study on European postgraduate students who studied in Australia finds that these students extensively consulted information shared on social media such as YouTube and Facebook to gather information for their decision-making. Studying how Korean postgraduate research applicants make decisions when applying to UK Higher Education Institutions (hereafter HEIs), Kim and Spencer-Oatey (2021) highlight that.

there are numerous online communities, forums, as well as personal blogs, including those for Korean students seeking help and advice for studying abroad and which allow dynamic interaction. Nevertheless, these online data have rarely been used previously for analysis, although they reveal fascinating insights into the genuine issues and uncertainties that students are facing (p. 923).

Kim and Spencer-Oatey (2021) analyse social media data obtained from questions and comments on two Korean online forums, namely 04UK (www.04uk.com), and GOH (www.gohackers.com). They uncover a host of mismatches between Korean PGR students’ expectations and what UK HEIs offer. Their study pinpoints the untapped potential of data from online communities and forums which can provide insights into ‘the genuine issues and uncertainties’ confronting international PGR applicants (2021, p. 923).

In a similar vein, Gai et al. (2016, p. 181) investigate ‘how Chinese applicants make decisions during their application journey for Master’s…programs in business schools’ in America. They analyse user-generated content posted in a virtual forum called ChaseDream.com, and find that ‘Chinese students not only use this forum for school information and alumni reviews, but they also collect suggestions from fellow applicants in their decision-making process’. Crucially, Gai and colleagues (2016) pinpoint that ‘student-generated information exchange data’ (p. 184) on such forums provide ‘real-world, real-time information’, and that such data are obtained in a ‘natural setting without the bias of survey studies’ (p. 182).

Echoing Gai and colleagues (2016), Bolat and O’Sullivan (2017) argue that the electronic Word of Mouth (eWOM) research on consumer behaviour can be applied to the higher education context where social media ‘content created by students is more likely to resonate with other students, and result in higher engagement levels’ (pp. 744–745). In the socio-technological processes of fostering electronic Word of Mouth, social media play pivotal roles in reinforcing and perpetuating stereotypes.

Some notable empirical studies that illuminate these important roles of social media in relation to stereotypes include Ahmed et al.’s (2021) study which analyses data collected during the COVID-19 outbreak in Singapore. They reveal that ‘disease risk perception is positively related to stereotyping and prejudice against Chinese immigrants. Individuals who used social media for news were more likely to stereotype and express prejudice’ (p. 637). Another pertinent example is Serrão’s (2022) research which compares social media posts after the 2014 and 2018 presidential elections in Brazil. Serrão demonstrates how ‘racism directed by social media users against nordestinos (Northeastern Brazilians) is part of a historical continuum of oppression fostered by regional stereotypes’ (p. 181).

In view of these, other researchers advocate leveraging social media to challenge stereotypes and foster desired collective identities. Onyango and Bowe (2019) draw on social media movements (e.g. #ILookLikeASurgeon) to argue that social media can effect incremental and substantial changes to stereotypes when disconfirming evidence is accumulated. Khazraee and Novak (2018) analyse online campaign pages on Facebook like ‘My Stealthy Freedom’ (p. 1). They reveal how personal photos and adjoining narratives can ‘contribute to a collectively and incrementally constructed narrative’ as well as ‘contributing to the formation of group identities’.

In China, Peng and colleagues’ research (2023) reveals that the country’s largest community question-answering (CQA) knowledge-sharing platform, Zhihu, sheds substantial light on topics related to higher education, including at the postgraduate stages (e.g. doctoral). They highlight how ‘extensive discussions’ on Zhihu can ‘lead to the construction of a variety of portrayals’ (p. 754) of certain holders of doctoral degrees such as female PhDs.

Building on this extant research, this article contends that the online discussions about ‘Chinese doctoral supervisors’ in the West on social media platforms such as Zhihu can be likened to a process where the electronic Word of Mouth of these supervisors is constructed. Considering how social media can reinforce, perpetuate, or challenge stereotypes, and noting the instrumental roles that social media play in informing international postgraduate students’ higher education decision-making process, this article seeks to (1) investigate how the ‘Chinese doctoral supervisors’ working in Western academia are portrayed and debated over on such digital spaces as well as (2) uncover what shapes such perceptions and portrayals.

To this end, this article engages with qualitative data collected from Zhihu, which is China’s biggest question-and-answer (Q and A hereafter) knowledge-sharing website used by around 15% of the country’s Internet users (CNNIC, 2018), exceeding 220 million by the end of 2018. It is reported that over 80% of Zhihu users are under the age of 35, are educated to Bachelor’s or above levels, and are middle-class residents of China’s first- and second-tier cities (Zhao et al., 2022, p. 2221). Importantly, Zhihu boasts as a platform where professional and trustworthy answers are provided to question posers as the platform enables its users to provide ‘quality, argumentative and information-rich postings’ (Zhang, 2020, p. 96).

Specifically, this article seeks to address these two questions: (1) How does the online community of Zhihu portray and debate over the ‘Chinese doctoral supervisors’ working in Western academia? (2) What shapes this Zhihu online community’s perceptions of and debates over the ‘Chinese doctoral supervisors’ working in Western academia?

Theoretical framework: neo-racism and epistemic injustice through post-colonial lenses

The Zhihu comments (to be detailed later) examined in this study are particularly situated in ‘historically White institutions (HWIs hereafter)’ (Ford, 2011, p. 445) located in the West, especially countries that attract many Chinese international students and an increasing proportion of Chinese academics, such as the UK, the US, and Australia. There are four characteristics of such HWIs.

Firstly, even though such institutions may be in cities and communities that are culturally and linguistically diverse, they have ‘institutional leanings towards English and [] Anglocentricity’ (Fay et al., 2021, p. 105). Such leanings are deeply enmeshed in a global scholarly environment where academic research, publication, and dissemination have been overwhelmingly dominated by English (Erdocia & Soler, 2023). As such, the hegemonic status of the English language mutually reinforces the globally dominant positions of these HWIs (Marginson, 2008), attracting international students and academics from less dominant parts of the world, such as Asia, where China is located.

Secondly, these HWIs’ practices often uphold and reinforce what postcolonial scholars identify as Eurocentric and Western domination of former colonial subjects (Said, 2003 [1978]). As Spivak (2015 [1988]) powerfully asserts, such insidious colonial domination often takes the form of having the ‘subaltern’ subjects internalise this belief that they have nothing to offer, and ‘their only option is to blindly follow the “enlightened” colonisers, learn from them, adopt their worldviews and fit into the periphery of their world as second-class citizens’ (Fay et al., 2021, p. 108). In the context of HWIs, the ‘enlightened’ coloniser is usually embodied through the persona of a White academic having English as their native tongue. Especially for personnel holding positions of authority, such as being a doctoral supervisor, there is the image of an ‘ideal professor’ (Ford, 2011, p.453) that contradicts with any non-White bodies. As such, faculty members of colour (such as Chinese academics) who occupy such positions may be considered inherently ‘undeserving’ and needing to prove their worth.

A third characteristic of such HWIs is the practice of ‘neo-racism’ (Lee, 2020; Lee & Li, 2023). Neo-racism is ‘a new racism that is not based on the color of one’s skin alone but includes stereotypes about cultures in a globalizing world’ (Lee, 2020, pp. i–ii). Such stereotypes conveniently establish ‘a hierarchy of cultural preferences’ or ‘national ordering’ of immigrants or ‘internationals’. Concomitantly, certain immigrants are more welcomed and readily accepted than others. ‘Ultimately, neo-racism is rooted in White supremacy’ (Lee, 2020, pp. i–ii). Noteworthy, however, as this article will demonstrate, is that neo-racism is an attitude and approach that can become internalised and practised by the immigrants themselves. This article will show how the Chinese PGRs on this Zhihu community established a hierarchy of ‘cultural preferences’ and ‘national ordering’ which relegated the ‘Chinese supervisors’ to less legitimate positions when compared with their White, English-native speaker counterparts.

A final characteristic is that, within such Western HWIs, ‘epistemic injustice’ (Fricker, 2007) is often exercised against the ‘subaltern’ subjects (Spivak, 2015 [1988]). Fricker (2007) defines epistemic injustice as ‘a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower’ ( Introduction, para. 1). Of the two forms of epistemic injustice (including testimonial and hermeneutical injustice) she identifies, testimonial injustice appears particularly relevant in this study. ‘Testimonial injustice occurs when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word’ (Fricker, 2007, Introduction, para. 1).

Applied to this study, if the identity of being a ‘Chinese supervisor’ renders an individual less desirable as a supervisor, then such individuals have been subjected to a form of ‘testimonial injustice’; this is because it is about how others (e.g. the Chinese PGRs) tend to hold prejudice and ‘give a deflated level of credibility’ to the Chinese supervisor’s word or behaviour, where their ‘capacity as a giver of knowledge’ is unjustly devalued (Fricker, 2007, Introduction, para. 13).

Methods

To answer the research question, I searched and identified Zhihu posts using a range of keywords and different combinations of these keywords, including but not limited to 华人导师 (huaren daoshi, Chinese supervisors), 海外 (haiwai, overseas), 留学 (liuxue, studying abroad), 美国 (the USA), 英国 (the UK), 澳大利亚 (Australia), 中国人 (zhongguoren, Chinese), 亚洲 (Asia), and 亚裔 (yayi, Asian). In total, I collected 9 Q and A posts, among which the top five questions had attracted more than 10 responses each, with 368, 43, 19, 16, and 14 responses, respectively. The latest comments were made in January 2024. The analysis focused on these top five Q and A posts and their comments (see Table 1 in the Appendix for more details), composing around 450 postings which are answers to questions on topics about how Chinese supervisors are perceived. This number of postings is comparable to existing studies of similar scales (Peng et al., 2023; Zhang, 2020; Zhao et al., 2022).

Thematic analysis was performed on the posts collected in Atlas.ti (Braun & Clarke, 2020). Data were analysed in the original Chinese texts, and only quotes that have been selected were translated into English by the researcher (Holmes et al., 2013).

Table 2 in the Appendix provides examples of codes that are a result of several iterative reading and coding rounds, which included the merging of certain initial codes. After this intensive coding process, I exported the quotes from Atlas.ti to read and analyse in detail. This process enabled me to identify themes either specific to certain codes or shared across codes. Examples of quotes are supplied in Table 2 in the Appendix.

Anonymity of posts on Zhihu

Research shows that the anonymity of users on such social media platforms as Zhihu can be an advantage as it allows the users to have more authentic and open interactions without fear of being exposed:

These online communities and forums allow users to pro-actively gather relevant background information about the application process, while also retaining anonymity in the cyberspace, thus allowing more open communication. (Kim & Spencer-Oatey, 2021, p. 923)

Among the Zhihu posts analysed, a significant proportion is by anonymous users, while the rest are by users who have revealed their identities, although there is no way to verify the veracity of such claimed identities. Aligned with this article’s focus on investigating how the electronic Word of Mouth (Bolat & O’Sullivan, 2017, pp. 744–745) of the Chinese supervisors is fostered on social media, I contend that it is not an aim to conduct a forensic investigation into how ‘real PGRs’ think of Chinese supervisors. Rather, by analysing the rich and vivid lived experiences and opinions shared among these posts, this article can generate new insights into the myths and stereotypes surrounding social media’s portrayals of Chinese doctoral supervisors in the West.

Researcher positionality

As a Chinese doctoral supervisor working in a historically White institution in the UK, when conducting this research, I became critically aware of my own positions in hierarchies of power relations (Gani & Khan, 2024), along axes of race, language, and class. This has shaped my critical stance and adoption of a post-colonial analytic lens in my interpretation of the Zhihu data.

Moreover, when engaging with the various portrayals of Chinese supervisors, I found myself constantly looking inward to reflect on my practices and understanding of being a supervisor. I interrogated myself with questions like, ‘do I do such things as a supervisor’? ‘Am I a bad/good supervisor’? At various points, my analysis of these portrayals brought to light how I had internalised certain structural impositions, e.g. my language inferiority in relation to English, and my dominated position as a non-White academic. At other times, I became conscious of my own ‘powerful’ position in relation to the vulnerability of Chinese PGRs. Still, at other junctures, I felt indignant about certain unjust portrayals of Chinese supervisors from poor and rural backgrounds. All these analytic and affective encounters have shaped my interpretation and presentation of data, and I find it pertinent to own up to my stances which may make my interpretations ‘imperfect’ yet more authentic.

Findings and discussion

Based on the comments analysed, these three images of the Chinese supervisors stood out: (1) ambitious and supportive, (2) sneaky and exploitative, and (3) colonised. While most comments on Zhihu appear to be from current and former PGRs from the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) subjects, other posts reveal experiences of those from the Humanities and Social Sciences. As such, the images discussed below are not discipline-specific.

The ambitious and supportive supervisors labelled as ‘pushy’

In these Zhihu comments, the most discussed strength of the Chinese supervisors is their ambition and the associated perception that they are ‘pushy’. In the most answered Question post (368 comments), the questioner asked if they should avoid those Chinese supervisors who were too ‘pushy’. While being ‘pushy’ can manifest in exploitative practices (see next section), having an ambitious and ‘pushy’ supervisor could also catalyse a productive academic career.

If you avoid so-called pushy and academically ‘ambitious’ supervisors, then you will likely avoid professors who can give you feedback to help you grow rapidly, avoid publishing a large number of papers, avoid many conference opportunities, avoid the advantages of finding a teaching position, and the faster route to getting a green card. (excerpt 1)

You can publish articles quickly, learn a lot, have money, and occupy the front line of scientific research. (excerpt 2) (my emphases)

Framed this way, the ‘pushy’ Chinese supervisor is a potential ‘goldmine’ who can help the PGR students yield substantial academic gains that most PhD researchers covet (Li & Shen, 2020), all in large quantity and at high speed. Apart from emphasising the ‘products’ that a ‘pushy’ Chinese supervisor can enable the PGR researchers to achieve, some other posts focused on the day-to-day life and concrete hands-on help that such ‘pushy’ supervisors can facilitate:

[Chinese] supervisors who have worked with big teams, their level is extremely high, they can help you correct every line of your codes. (excerpt 3)

When you are looking for a job, you will find out how supportive your Chinese bossFootnote 2 is, and how good the recommendation letters they write are. (excerpt 4)

Interestingly, although many commentators agreed that Chinese supervisors overseas can be ‘pushy’ and ambitious, there was a group who had Chinese supervisors that were not ‘pushy’ at all, albeit equally caring and helpful:

My boss…often says that I work too hard, and that I should have more fun and enjoy life. He also taught me that I can skip school and return to China during the Spring Festival. (excerpt 5)

My boss is super nice. She doesn’t push and doesn’t have demanding graduation requirements. She always tries her best to recommend students for internships. No matter how busy she is, she will give you enough guidance. Every paper you write, she will go over the details and help you revise it. Upon graduation, she will use her personal connections to recommend job opportunities (excerpt 6).

Excerpt 6 is representative of the highly positive images portrayed of the Chinese supervisors in this community. These supervisors are often academically strong but also pedagogically sound, pay attention to details, and are willing to devote time to guide the students through their academic journeys in a hands-on manner. Career-wise, these supervisors excel at facilitating internships, conference attendance, and job searches of their PGR students. Ultimately, as excerpt 7 succinctly summarised below,

A professor who is excellent and pushes is better than a professor who doesn’t care about the students, and better than a professor who is not smart and just pushes.

The ‘sneaky and exploitative’ supervisors

Contrary to the ambitious and supportive Chinese supervisors, on the other end of the continuum depicted were those who were exploitative (yazha 压榨). These supervisors commonly demanded long, often excessive work hours, and would sometimes assign unreasonable tasks that fall outside the purview of PGR researchers:

I have seen several Chinese supervisors who require 007 365Footnote 3 days, meetings at 9 pm and 10 pm, and have a terrible temper. On their WeChat Moments, these students are miserable, and some say they don’t want to live anymore. (excerpt 8)

The students who studied under Chinese bosses found them repressive: they would scold the PhD students all they want, and even ask the PhD students to pick up their kids or help with house moving on weekends. (excerpt 9)

Most professors now are just after tenure and treat students no differently than capitalists treat their employees…I am particularly disgusted with supervisors who treat students as scientific slaves. (excerpt 10)

These excerpts depicted a tendency among some Chinese supervisors who are purely after their own benefits and would go after their PGR students in instrumental and sometimes inhumane ways. More specifically, many posts revealed problematic authorship practices:

This [supervisor] uses his PGR students as his slaves to write papers and then publish them under his own name. (excerpt 11)

[Some Chinese supervisors] squeeze the fruits of students’ labour, steal the fruits of students’ labour, and then kick the students away. (excerpt 12)

Corroborating these comments, another Zhihu user shared their painful experience where they did all the work (including self-funding the experiments) and wrote the paper while their supervisors used the excuse of arranging their authorship in alphabetical order to demote this Zhihu user as the second author. Considering that academic publications are closely linked to the likelihood for successful job searches in academia, and often constitute part of the graduation requirements in certain disciplines (Aprile et al., 2020), depriving these PGR researchers of their rightful authorship can seem exploitative and unethical.

In surmising why these Chinese supervisors act in such ways, some commentators highlighted Chinese PGRs’ vulnerable positions in Western academia:

Some Chinese supervisors especially try to trick the Chinese themselves, because they think you don’t understand anything when you first arrive, and you don’t dare to cause trouble. (excerpt 13)

Chinese students…are often held in the palm of their bosses because of their status, and they become helpless targets of exploitation. (excerpt 14)

The power and information imbalance between Chinese supervisors and their PGR researchers who have just arrived in a Western country to study can indeed become ‘convenient’ conditions for exploitation. However, it should be noted that such exploitative practices are not only limited to Chinese supervisors.

Cantwell et al.’s (2018) research, for instance, indicates that certain (non-Chinese) doctoral supervisors (i.e. advisors) in the US treated their international graduate students as ‘cheap labor’ for ‘their own gain’ and further exploited them based on these students’ fear of having their funding cut off or dismissed and thus deported. Xing and colleagues’ (2023) study on how Chinese postgraduate research students in Australia interacted with their supervisors (two-thirds were non-Chinese) reveals a significant power imbalance between the two, with the doctoral supervisors having dominant and sometimes exploitative positions over their Chinese students. In both studies, the non-Chinese doctoral supervisors certainly had an ‘unequal power relation’ with their PhD students, one that could be characterised as ‘exploitative’ as these international graduate students reported feeling ‘exploited and yet helpless to challenge their faculty advisors’ (Lee, 2020, p. ii).

What is noteworthy here is the emphasis on the familiarity of Chinese supervisors with Chinese PGR students’ experiences, fears, and hopes, and how some supervisors turn such in-depth co-ethnic understandings into a tool for exploitation. In such cases, they can be said to inflict neo-racism on students of their own ethnic group for personal gain (Lee & Li, 2023). Having witnessed exploitative acts of certain Chinese supervisors, one post author advised other students to ‘run away quickly’ from Chinese supervisors at all costs.

The ‘colonised supervisors’

A third characteristic is that some Chinese supervisors have displayed ‘colonised’ subject positions manifested in three ways. Firstly, some supervisors consider working in the West as better than returning to China and try to persuade their PGR students to follow suit:

My boss…often analysed the differences between China and the US with me. The central idea is ‘don’t go back, it’s so much better to be in the US’…When the epidemic was at its worst, I told my boss: Professor, look, I have written three articles. Can I graduate this semester? I hadn’t been back to China for four years, and I wanted to go back and spend time with my family…The boss said: ‘What’s the use of going back to accompany them? Are you going to stay with them for the rest of your life?…Don’t go back…after my project is approved, you can continue to stay with me as a postdoc’. (excerpt 15)

This is a Chinese supervisor who, having undergone considerable hardships to gain a teaching post in the US, rendered ‘making it’ in Western academia as an ultimate career success. This supervisor’s career ideal is arguably a colonised one as he seemed to deem the ‘master’s house’ as more polished than his own (Stein et al., 2017). Instead of respecting his PGR students’ career aspirations, this supervisor imposed his own ideal and thus can be argued as unwittingly serving as a tool of colonisation to shape his PGR students’ behaviour.

A Zhihu user observed in excerpt 16 below how some Chinese professors can be inculcated so much by ideologies about Western superiority that they consider themselves as more superior to other Chinese people:

[They] are likely to have experienced conflicted opinions and values [after arriving here]. To achieve so-called integration, many completely resist their original cultural values…Naturally, they are not interested in those who bring their original cultural values and have a mentality of ‘I am different from you’, feeling that they are superior to them…After entering the workplace, they are always from a minority group […and] face many transparent glass ceilings.

Excerpt 16’s perspective reveals how certain Zhihu users perceived these Chinese supervisors’ survival need to ‘integrate’ and break the ‘glass ceilings’ in their careers (Xiao et al., 2023). These supervisors’ now-established positions in the West are truly ‘hard won’, and this could have led some of them to develop a sense of superiority over those who have newly arrived. This evokes what researchers have found among longer-term immigrants from South Korea who felt more superior to those ‘fresh off the boat’ (Abelmann, 2009). Such superiority over the newer arrivals (i.e. Chinese PGR students), when coupled with internalisation of the superiority of the US academia over the Chinese one, can create an alienating environment for the Chinese PGR students.

Secondly, some (future) Chinese supervisors may internalise their own language inferiority as non-native speakers of English and concomitantly deem themselves unsuitable for supervising Chinese PGR students. Excerpt 17 below documents the views of a Zhihu user who was on the job market:

My supervisor (a White male) told me: ‘When you write an article, just write it clearly in the simplest language. Don’t try to write fancy, because as soon as you write fancy, you won’t be able to write clearly. After all, English is not your first language, and you will probably never be as good at it as me.’…in the future, I will probably still need a native English-speaking collaborator…So if I recruit a Chinese student, because my writing is mediocre myself, I cannot help her to make very good improvement in her writing.

This excerpt author’s self-understanding about their academic English-writing ability was shaped by their White supervisor’s feedback, which reinforced a sense of inferiority about their inability to write ‘fancy’ and achieve clarity simultaneously. Instead, they deemed it necessary to rely on collaborating with native English speakers to produce competitive academic outputs. Such beliefs seem at odds with existing research evidence which has shown instead that academic writing is nobody’s native language, and even native speakers of English can struggle to write clearly or ‘fancily’ (Hyland, 2016). The author of excerpt 17 was not alone:

[Chinese] bosses generally don’t speak English well. If you go to the US and work with a supervisor who doesn’t speak English well, how can you improve? (excerpt 18)

Many went abroad…after graduating from a bachelor’s degree, so their (English) language still has some deficiencies. (excerpt 19)

Alarmingly, such posts about the language ‘deficiencies’ of Chinese supervisors were never challenged. The lack of contestation in this Zhihu community suggests that it is a well-perpetuated myth that exercises testimonial injustice on current and future Chinese supervisors. This is because of the prejudicial, negative view on their (own) English language proficiency (i.e. credibility) (Fricker, 2007).

A third manifestation is the differentiated treatments that some Chinese supervisors enforced among Chinese vs non-Chinese (often Western) PGR students.

His imposed graduation requirements vary by nationality and productivity. For his Americans PhD students, they can graduate with one article (published); For me I needed three articles to graduate. (excerpt 20)

The author of excerpt 20 was in plenty of company. Many other commentators chimed in:

Some supervisors are very good to local, White, and Black students, but are very pushy towards students from China. They don’t even give you good resources. You even need to take on some of the work that originally belongs to the local White people. (excerpt 21)

What I saw was an image of extreme servility (chanmei zhiji 谄媚至极). The professor was always nodding and bowing to the Black and White students. (excerpt 22)

Commenting on this tendency, another Zhihu user indicated that it was because these Chinese professors wanted to avoid being perceived as partial towards Chinese students due to their survival needs. Others agreed:

Chinese professors…have a strong spiritual need to integrate into the local society and gain recognition from their colleagues. When facing international students from their home countries…they will consider the opinions of society and colleagues…, and dare not fight for more benefits for their students. (excerpt 23)

[They] are discriminated against in North America...To integrate into the local society…exploiting you is just their way of conveying their sincerity (toumingzhuang 投名状) to the North Americans. (excerpt 24)

To avoid being perceived as biased towards their co-ethnic group (through the gaze of the colonisers), some Chinese professors would instead make the Chinese students suffer by demanding higher performances. This depiction points to an environment where the minority staff must actively demonstrate their impartiality by overly subjecting the students of their same ethnic/racial group to unfair treatments. The Chinese professors here are arguably assumed to take on this mentality and practice of a colonised subject who, in order to prove their worth to the colonial masters, tend to oppress their own racial/ethnic groups even more (Stein et al., 2017).

Unchallenged classist views

Noteworthily, there was a discriminatory trope of remarks against supervisors from working-class and rural backgrounds that went unchallenged in this Zhihu community:

Just like in China, professors from poor and rural backgrounds should be avoided…Their family is not rich to begin with…These people are extremely cruel to themselves, their parents, and their families. How much empathy do you think they can leave for you?…On the contrary, professors who come from the rich second generation（fu erdai 富二代）have much better human nature. (excerpt 25)

By relegating supervisors from poor and rural backgrounds, these comments portrayed them as cruel, ruthless, necessarily exploitative, and literally inhumane. In contrast, those from richer families were recognised as having ‘better human nature’. Some other comments fostered the image of supervisors who do research for fun and pleasure because of their better-off socio-economic conditions and are thus necessarily more ‘ideal’ supervisors.

Professors from wealthy middle- and upper-class families generally do scientific research purely for fun. They are rich and have good taste (pinwei 品位). Because they live a good life and have many fall-back options (tuilu 退路), they are also more open-minded and meticulous in their research. (excerpt 26)

Find a professor with old money…and who likes to engage in academics….This kind of people usually has the patience to explain ideals, beliefs, and principles to [students] (excerpt 27).

Through elevating those from ‘old money’, affluent family backgrounds as the ideal, fun, and patient supervisors, these commentators simultaneously demonised their counterparts from poor and rural backgrounds as exploitative. This blatant contrast, alarmingly, went unchallenged within this Zhihu community. It was as if the commentators had a licence to publicly discriminate against supervisors from marginalised origins in China (Lan, 2021; Xu, 2020). Such classist views also perpetuate the inequalities that have been repeatedly documented in Western academia where working-class academics have been sidelined and silenced (Hayes & Locke, 2024; Reay, 1997).

Underlying structural forces and dilemmas

In portraying the above images of Chinese supervisors in Western academia, this Zhihu community confronted two main underlying structural forces, including (1) the steep ethnic/racial hierarchy and (2) the unequal classed sphere. The term structural forces in this article stems from a relational and positional sociological understanding of social structure. This perspective deems ‘the social structure to be, above all, an ordered or hierarchical distribution of positions that share certain attributes and that affect people’s social relations and interactions’ (Bernardi et al., 2006, p. 169). Informed by this perspective, existing social theories, especially the post-colonial theories rehearsed in the theoretical framework section, have identified race/ethnicity, class, and gender, as some of the prevailing ‘units or elements that make up the social structure’ (Bernardi et al., 2006, p. 169), i.e. ‘structural forces’. Following this theoretical tradition, this paper argues that this Zhihu community displayed profound yet only partial recognition of the steep ethnic/racial hierarchy in Western academia and perpetuates epistemic injustice over supervisors and PGR researchers from working-class and rural backgrounds.

Regarding the ethnic/racial hierarchy, one Zhihu user referred to the academic job market as an ‘involuted’ one where Chinese supervisors belong to an ethnic/racial minority having to ‘work harder and publish more articles than others in order to gain offers’ (Xiao et al., 2023). Another Zhihu user pointed to the decisive role played by supervisors’ ‘power’ in helping PhD graduates secure jobs in academia. Given the dominance of White middle-class academics in Western academia, the Chinese supervisors become ‘less attractive’ because of their marginalised position.

[Western] academia is a world dominated by White men. No matter how good you are, and how hard you work…it is nothing compared to a recommendation or an email from someone else. Hugging (White male professors’) thighs (bao datui 抱大腿)Footnote 4 may be cowardly but useful (excerpt 28).

A further Zhihu user noted below how PGR students under Chinese supervisors may potentially be disadvantaged:

It is more difficult [for Chinese supervisors] to get promoted, and the pressure is high, they have no status in the academic circle, and there are few opportunities to obtain various funding…Following such a boss, there is a high probability that life will not be as comfortable as following an old white male with academic authority (excerpt 29).

Such consensus and sentiments are corroborated by existing research which reveals how non-White academics find it harder to get hired and promoted, and having to publish more and obtain more funding than their White counterparts in historically White Western academia (Bhopal, 2022; Ford, 2011; Kim & Ng, 2019).

Such ethnic and racial inequalities faced by Chinese supervisors in Western academia may or may not make certain Chinese supervisors become ‘sneaky and exploitative’ due to the mounting pressure to perform better than their counterparts or internalise a colonised mentality and act harshly towards students from their co-ethnic group; it is also possible for such inequalities to serve as a catalyst for some Chinese supervisors to be more empathetic towards the hardships that Chinese PGRs experience, thus becoming very patient, hands-on, and supportive of their students. No matter what, this ethnic/racial hierarchy in Western academia and the unflattering positions that Chinese supervisors and PGR students occupy is a critical condition that this Zhihu community has developed a profound recognition of.

Nevertheless, this recognition is only partial because the community also readily bought into their own English-language inferiority in relation to their White native English-speaking counterparts. This Zhihu community failed to recognise that linguistic colonialism is, too, part and parcel of the White colonial hegemony in Western academia (Fay et al., 2021; Hyland, 2016). Instead, they collectively internalised their own English language inferiority and relegated the legitimacy of Chinese supervisors, thus exerting testimonial injustice on the Chinese supervisors. This is arguably a representative case where an oppressed group conducts neo-racism (Lee, 2020) against their own group members.

Secondly, this Zhihu community’s discussion also highlighted how doctoral supervision is an unequal classed sphere. This manifested in both the differentiated class positions among PGR researchers and among Chinese supervisors. One Zhihu user pointed out the plight faced by prospective PGR students who are from disadvantaged backgrounds:

Who doesn’t know that when looking for a supervisor, you should look for someone who is reasonable and emotionally stable? Yet, in most cases you can’t ask these questions. If you ask the students under the supervisor, will they be reliable? People may not dare to tell you the truth. What if you spread the word? Therefore, only a direct or indirect personal relationship with a supervisor or a supervisor’s students can guarantee reliable information, but most people don’t have such a relationship…People who come here to ask questions must be desperate. If their father is the best friend of the potential supervisor, or if their best friend is studying under the prospective supervisor already, they would have already gathered all the necessary information. Why would they still come to Zhihu to pose this question? (excerpt 30)

Indeed, while Zhihu serves as an important forum where multiple sources of information can be solicited, we are reminded by the author of excerpt 30 that some prospective PGRs have fewer familial and social resources to rely on. Their lack of social and familial resources is further compounded by the opaque PhD admission and advising processes (Kier-Byfield et al., 2023) which make it particularly difficult for international students due to their different cultural and linguistic backgrounds (Kim & Spencer-Oatey, 2021).

Furthermore, PGR students from less affluent and well-connected families also have less space to quit when they find themselves in an unproductive supervisory relation.

If you don’t want to be exploited, you must have the capital to quit at any time. (excerpt 31)

If you come from a good family (jiajing hao 家境好), and pursuing a PhD is merely to have fun, then if you are not happy with your studies, you can just leave without being concerned by the sunk cost. (excerpt 32)

To these PGR researchers, therefore, the stake is much higher. However, their lack of social connections has made it harder to obtain valuable information. These thus combine to subject them to an even more disadvantaged position in selecting a doctoral supervisor overseas.

What is alarming, however, is that the community also portrayed unchallenged classist views (see previous section) that demonised Chinese supervisors from rural and poor family backgrounds as ‘cruel, ruthless, inhumane’, and elevated supervisors from affluent families as ‘ideal’. This blatant discrimination alienates Chinese supervisors from disadvantaged backgrounds and thus inflicts testimonial injustice through denying them their ‘level of credibility’ (Fricker, 2007). This collective ignorance of the classist nature of their comments thus further perpetuates class and rural–urban inequalities (Xu, 2020) across national borders.

Conclusion

This article set out to address the questions about how the Zhihu community portrayed and debated over the ‘Chinese doctoral supervisors’ working in Western academia and what shapes such portrayals and debates. It identifies three images depicted of the Chinese supervisors as (1) ambitious and supportive, (2) sneaky and exploitative, and (3) colonised. While the second and third images are more negative, the first image is overwhelmingly positive. In examining these portrayals, this article further highlights two key underlying structural forces that shaped such portrayals and debates. In particular, it pinpoints how this Zhihu community displayed profound yet only partial recognition of the steep ethnic/racial hierarchy in Western academia and perpetuates epistemic injustice over supervisors and PGR researchers from working-class and rural backgrounds.

This article makes contributions to the literature in three ways. Firstly, this article is among the first to demonstrate empirically how Chinese doctoral supervisors working in historically White Western academia are portrayed and understood by users of China’s largest CQA site, Zhihu. The range of images depicted by these Chinese supervisors is helpful not only for prospective PGR students from China and beyond, but can also be illuminating for university administrators and PGR admission professionals in Western HEIs when directing queries from international students (Kier-Byfield et al., 2023).

Secondly, the profound yet partial recognition of the ethnic/racial hierarchy in Western doctoral education sphere conveyed in this Zhihu community points to future directions for Equality and Diversity as well as decolonising work with an aim to fostering greater racial and ethnic equality (Doharty et al., 2020).

Thirdly, this article makes conceptual contributions by evidencing how neo-racism and epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007; Lee, 2020) can be exercised by an oppressed group on themselves. Importantly, combining neo-racism and epistemic injustice facilitates a critical and comprehensive analysis of the empirical accounts in two ways. First, neo-racism emphasises the construction of a ‘hierarchy of cultural preferences’ or ‘national ordering’ that is not based on the colour of one’s skin alone (Lee, 2020, pp. i–ii). In this article, this concept enables an analysis of practices among certain Chinese supervisors when they specifically targeted students of their co-ethnic group for exploitation or rendered these co-ethnic students as inferior. Second, the concept of epistemic injustice (esp. testimonial injustice) accentuates the unjust reckoning of the Chinese supervisors’ capacity as knowers and as knowledge producers. This specific emphasis on the knowledge and knower (i.e. ‘epistemic’) aspects of the Chinese supervisors’ identity is directly linked to their qualifications and authority as research and pedagogic experts in the doctoral supervision terrain. Undermining their epistemic legitimacy thus can be detrimental to their professional reputation and standing. This epistemic emphasis is therefore crucial in enabling a critique of some of the Zhihu portrayals of the ‘Chinese supervisors’, e.g. the internalised language inferiority and the discrimination against supervisors and PGRs from rural and poor backgrounds. Incorporating both concepts thus furnishes a nuanced and comprehensive analytical framework to engage with unjust practices and portrayals in the realms of racial and knowledge inequalities within this Zhihu community.

Future research can expand from insights in this article to explore empirically (1) how prospective Chinese PGR students engage with various social media platforms (including Zhihu) in seeking advice and (2) how Chinese supervisors interact with their Chinese PGR students and the wider academic community to provide more nuanced understanding about tackling epistemic and racial injustice in Western academia.