“Middling” African International Students in China

This chapter explores the migration experiences of international higher education students from African countries in China, highlighting the need to consider more comprehensively specific cultural and historical contexts when researching middling migration in the Global South. It draws on research which explores the experiences and migration decision-making of a group of university students from across the African continent in China, to understand how changing patterns of global mobility are challenging existing axioms within migration studies around the relationship between social class and international mobility. Specifically, the chapter focuses on how assumptions around the relationship between spatial and social mobility for middle-class migrants, constructed mostly with reference to Global South-to-North migration, do not hold in cases of migration from other destinations in the Global South to China.