Home away Home: CSP International Doctoral Students’ Community Cultural Wealth and Sociocultural Adaptation in China

Abstract

China Studies Program (CSP) is a high-calibre international exchange program launched by the Center for Language Education and Cooperation since 2013, which aims to attract overseas students, scholars, and elites from all walks of life to come to study in China through providing scholarships and high-quality training resources. The research site of this study was at a Chinese university in Beijing. Using the Community Cultural Wealth theory (Yosso, 2005), this study examined the sociocultural adaptation mechanism for international doctoral students of the CSP in China, especially how the students themselves, their families, and staff members of the host university help the international doctoral students to navigate their sociocultural adaptation by providing community cultural resources, which helped international students achieve academic success through accumulating aspirational capital, linguistic capital, social capital, familial capital, navigational capital and resistant capital (Yosso, 2005). Findings of this study suggest that the sociocultural adaptation of the international students of CSP was much facilitated by the host community cultural wealth which provided ample opportunities for the international students to acquire and mobilize their various capitals.