The (de)territorialised appeal of international schools in China: Forging brands,boundaries and inter-belonging in segregated urban space

Emerging patterns of (de)territorialised segregation in Chinese cities

Recent years have witnessed a shift in the research trajectories of Chinese urbanism; from exploring patterns of economic and spatial development, to identifying and understanding new patterns of social diversity that are emerging in the post-reform era (He and Qian, 2017). Whilst urban segregation is not a new phenomenon in China – enclave urbanism, for example, has ‘deep historical roots’ (He, 2013: 243) and continues to be a dominant mode of residential sorting along the lines of social, economic and legal status – it is taking on new characteristics in response to the structuring effects of the market economy. In this vein, Qian (2013: 3) explains how contemporary Chinese cities are marked by ‘both old and new forms of fragmentation. Different social groups are sequestered, either forcedly or voluntarily, into persisting work unit compounds, migrant enclaves, or gated communities.’ This has contributed to the ‘rapid proliferation of new forms of enclaves’ (He, 2013: 245) that are marked by ‘visible socio-spatial segregation, fragmentation and division’ (He and Qian, 2017: 836). As we can begin to see, the socio-spatial sorting of China’s cities is pervasive, persistent and contrasts (sometimes starkly) with the ideal of spatial openness and social fairness that has come to define many visions of the non-Chinese city (after Qian, 2013). Nuance is, however, needed. Market mechanisms have been seen to play an increasingly prominent role in structuring China’s urban fabric (He, 2015; He and Lin, 2015; Shen and Xiao, 2020) and, in some cases, have been co-opted through the policy regime of the central government. Combined, the legacy of enclave urbanism, the impulses of the market and the policy regime of the central government have caused the logics of segregation to become more (de)territorialised, and thus more problematic, constructs.

Whilst the government and market contribute to the ongoing territorialised segregation of urban spaces through their regimes of agglomeration, individuals can further problematise this segregation through their psycho-social attitudes and practices. Echoing this sentiment, He and Qian (2017: 839; original emphasis) recently argued that ‘insufficient attention’ has been paid to exploring the ‘lived dimensions … [the] everyday practices and embodied experiences’ that have come to subvert the logics of segregation that define Chinese urbanism. In particular, migrants – both internal and international – have been shown to play an important role in (re)producing forms of segregation that are unique to China’s cities. They are unique in that they are often based on the logics of deterritorialisation – as opposed to integration through territorialised presence – that come with migration. For example, Ling (2020) has recently demonstrated how container housing in Shanghai reveals the emergence of increasingly deterritorialised homemaking practices amongst hukou (or internal, rural–urban) migrants. Being ‘caught in the binary, place-specific hukou system’, these migrants are shown to

treat their physical residence in Shanghai where they live for years – even decades – as temporary and insignificant. They are compelled by institutional design to be removed from their dwellings in both time and space … The distance between migrants and what is physically close to them results in the deterritorialisation of homemaking. (Ling, 2020: 13)

Thus, whilst hukou migrants share urban spaces with non-hukou residents, they feel ‘removed’ from the urban environments in which they live and work ‘in both time and space’. In this view, deterritorialisation is an outcome of the dialectic between ‘distance’ and ‘physical closeness’. People can live in close physical proximity, but so too can such proximity foreground greater social and emotional distance between those marked – physically, culturally or legally – as different. Territorialisation can therefore have deterritorialising effects, which in turn reflects the uniquely Chinese expressions of neoliberalism, and their ‘alienating’ and ‘disorienting’psycho-social effects. Specifically, the mental and emotional sense of separation that emerges in response to the government’s illiberal planning regime is one indication of how (de)territorialisation affects the everyday lives of migrants and citizens alike (Xu, 2020). We develop this idea further by exploring below the sense of ‘inter-belonging’ felt by students of international schools. Before that, we highlight the need to consider how the experiences of individual migrants may be augmented by more structural processes of (de)territorialisation at play in China’s cities. International schools provide a useful lens through which these processes can be explored, as they encapsulate the complex interplay between territorialised presence and deterritorialised ideals.

The structuring effects of international education marketplaces

Whilst the agglomerative, territorialising logics of urban space provide a compelling reason for cities to become hubs for international education, their transformation into marketplaces can both augment and expand the segregated nature of these spaces. (De)territorialisation occurs when international education marketplaces reflect a lack of integration into the socio-spatial fabric of the urban, creating a paradox of being physically located in, but symbolically and socially dislocated from, the cities in which they operate. In Elden’s (2005) terms, they are territorialised in place, but spatially deterritorialised, the effects of which implicate their schools and universities, students and staff, and the wider socio-spatial environments in which educational marketplaces are located. To date, research has tended to focus on the demand side of the equation, exploring the ways in which international students serve to (de)territorialise the ‘exclusive geographies’ (Chatterton, 1999; also Leung and Waters, 2017; Waters, 2006) that are reproduced by educational marketplaces more generally. Collins (2010), for example, shows how South Korean students in Auckland, New Zealand, become ‘urban agents’ that trigger growth in territorialised educational services (such as English language schools) and student housing, but also more deterritorialised ethnic economies of food, service and leisure. Studies like this reveal the (de)territorialising ways in which everyday practices of studying and living overseas can contribute to the ongoing segregation (and sub-segregation) of urban spaces. Yet, there is a need to expand the discourse beyond international students, whose transience can call into question the extent to which socio-spatial territorialisation is ever really achieved during the period of study. Expansion thus calls for closer consideration of the wider institutional structures of international education marketplaces and their segregating effects.

In this vein, international schools provide important, yet hitherto underexplored, sites of empirical examination. They are important because they can increasingly be seen to reflect the supply of education moving to meet localised demand (a reversal of the logic that underpins most international student movements) and with the movement of supply come more significant forms of embeddedness, and therefore negotiation, with the pre-existing structures of a locality. International schools thus comprise an influential part of the urban structure; they ‘denote a space of physical and structural separation’ (Collins, 2011: 324) that both mirrors and inflects upon their socio-spatial environments in more disruptive ways than the (de)territorialising effects of international students alone. To this point, Kong (2013: 13) has suggested that ‘analysis can be undertaken of the transnational influences … on the making of the physical environment, and the cross-cutting influences of home and host cultures on the architecture, design and layout of the schools’. These distinctions (and others) mark the school as different, thus generating competitive advantage and appeal. Indeed, the effects of such distinctions go beyond what can be seen, and include the mental and emotional forms of separation that are reproduced through the worldviews embedded within these schools’ curriculums and pedagogy (De Silva et al., 2020; Woods and Kong, 2020). Thus, whilst international schools provide a physical and symbolic indication of the ways in which international education marketplaces are (de)territorialised, their influence on the urban structure is also played out in more subtle ways through the everyday attitudes and behaviours of their students and staff. Such influences are pronounced for international schools based in China’s cities, which have become fertile empirical sites through which understandings of urban segregation can be expanded.

The (de)territorialised distinctions of international education brands

By choosing to locate within Suzhou, schools embed themselves within the territorial logics of agglomeration. Schools are needed to meet pre-existing patterns of expatriate demand; as such, their locational choice causes them to become territorialised entities. Whilst this dynamic holds true in a general sense, it becomes more nuanced in relation to international schools; particularly those located in China, and especially those located in SIP. Dulwich College Suzhou, SSIS and EtonHouse are all territorialised within the resolutely deterritorialised urban configuration of SIP. This means that their distinctiveness is somewhat eroded, which in turn means that in order to gain a sense of competitive advantage they have to reassert their distinctiveness through the implicitly deterritorialised nature of the educational brands that they represent. International school branding, then, is one of the clearest ways in which the dialectic of (de)territorialisation manifests. Branding is used to enforce the notion of distinctiveness, and attempts to evoke a place and, simultaneously, a broader sense of placelessness, that is distinct from the locality in which an international school is situated. In other words, the branding of international schools encourages them to be perceived as deterritorialised entities that are implicitly different, and often divorced, from the locality in which they operate. Such distinctions are pronounced amongst the satellite schools of long-established Western educational brands. For example, the branding of Dulwich College Suzhou is based on the idea of recreating Dulwich College London both within, but also distinct from, Suzhou. As the principal of one of the other international schools in Suzhou explained:

Dulwich is a brand of British [sic]; Dulwich is a beautiful school in London, and this is what they’re exporting. If you look at all of their branding, it’s about putting them in very distinct European traditions – they have their badge with the Latin on, they have their school buildings that look like they’re university buildings in Europe; they are projecting a very particular image … [of] who they are.

The ‘Britishness’ of Dulwich College manifests in various ways – from the name, to the buildings, to the uniform, to the headmaster and the values that are inculcated amongst students. Combined, these symbols are ‘how they sell the school’ (kindergarten teacher, Dulwich College Suzhou). Branding encourages a reimagination of the role of the school; it gives it an expanded meaning that goes beyond education provision and is embroiled with broader notions of deterritorialised place association and identity instead. The distinctiveness of Dulwich is that it evokes the ‘British tradition of doing everything right, and in a normal order. If you want that, you go there’ (administrator, SSIS). The parent of a student at SSIS echoed such sentiment, commenting how:

Dulwich, of course, UK [makes a serious face]. They are very strict; you see from the kids’ uniform. Their younger kids will be asked for a tie, which I think is … it’s a good part. But you can feel that parents send their kids to Dulwich, first of all they will focus on their UK system more, and second of all they will more focus on their kids to be a gentleman or lady because they want them to have the British standard.

In this case, the attraction of a British school is that it provides not just an international education but it also teaches ‘kids to be a gentleman or lady’ in accordance with ‘the British standard’ as well. Thus, the replication of a broad-based sense of Britishness – one that is anchored by, but goes beyond, academic learning – is one of the attractions of the school. To maintain its standards, Dulwich College London would regularly inspect its Suzhou satellite, causing it to be ‘more than just a franchise … they have to meet Dulwich’s expectations [in London]’ (principal, British School of Guangzhou). Indeed, the effectiveness of Dulwich College Suzhou’s branding in attracting students has forced other international schools in Suzhou to attempt to distinguish themselves in a similar way. For example, the principal of the SSIS Western Academy spoke of the need for SSIS to respond to growing competition amongst international educational providers by adopting a more placeless, ‘international’ identity. Such an identity lacks the place-based associations (and distinctiveness) of Dulwich College Suzhou but nonetheless enables it to become deterritorialised. It does this by rescaling the idea of distinction; whereas Dulwich imports the placed-based associations of one locality (London, UK) to another (Suzhou, China), SSIS pursues a more generalisable sense of ‘the global’, as we demonstrate below, in order for the school to contrast with the local environment in which it operates. In both instances, deterritorialisation is most visible through the physical spaces of the school.

Physical spaces of the international school relate to its buildings and the uniforms that students are required to wear. The physical symbolism of ‘placeless’ international schools differs from that of ‘place-bound’ international schools. In the first instance, a senior manager described how, when walking around EtonHouse, ‘you’ll expect to see what you’ll see in any IB school … I mean, all these IB schools around the world and I don’t see anything significantly different.’ The underlying idea here is that an international (or ‘IB’) school is a model that can be recreated anywhere in the world, and is therefore as distinct from the local contexts in which it is found as it is similar to its international counterparts. SSIS, for example, has a nondescript physical appearance, the ensuing effect being that it could fit in with any context or environment: ‘I think you could take this building and put it in any country’ (principal of SSIS Western Academy). In the second instance, Dulwich College Suzhou sought to recreate distinctly British spaces. Describing the appearance of the school, the headmaster of Dulwich College Suzhou described how

the architecture was based on the school in London … The clock tower, for example, echoes Big Ben, and the buildings are … actually, in the beginning, the design didn’t get approved by the Chinese government because it ‘wasn’t British enough’… so now the buildings are more … imposing.

In this case, the school’s clock tower is not only a replication of the clock tower of Dulwich College London but also seeks to emulate one of London’s more iconic architectural symbols – Big Ben. The fact that the school design was initially rejected by the Chinese government for not being ‘British enough’ reveals the extent to which the top-down and bottom-up practices of the government and international schools, respectively, are aligned to ensure that international schools adopt a distinctly deterritorialised physical presence. Enforcing the idea of a British presence in China are certain encultured practices that are reproduced within the school, including singing the school song (in Latin) and hymns during assembly, the idea being to ‘retain the … Britishness’ (junior school teacher, Dulwich College Suzhou) of the environment. The strict uniform policy also enforced the notion of distinctiveness, as ‘they design[ed] the uniform based on their marketing, to make them look good’ (administrator, British School of Guangzhou). The overarching effect of such curation is one of being located within, but also being distinct from, both the local environment and that of other international schools in Suzhou. This sense of separation is often rooted within the school and extends outwards through various practices of socio-spatial boundary-making.

From brand building to boundary-making

International schools are distinctly bounded spaces that are often isolated from the local communities in which they are located. This sense of isolation contributes to the appeal of these schools amongst expatriate families but so too does it shape the ways in which students ‘understand the immediate environment in which they live and study’ (Woods and Kong, 2020: 146). Boundary-making can, in this sense, be seen to reify the socio-spatial distinctions that are associated with, and actively reproduced by, the branding of international schools. This branding relates not just to the spatial distinctions outlined above but also to the social distinctions that are reproduced by teachers and other school administrators, most of whom are expatriates themselves. In this vein, Cai and Hall (2015: 1) claim that many teachers are ‘insufficiently prepared for the structural and cultural differences’ associated with working in China. As a result, the social infrastructures of international schools would often form close-knit, and highly introverted, communities within themselves, which would serve to reproduce a sense of psycho-social isolation from the local community. For example, the headmaster of Dulwich College Suzhou stated how ‘we want to support the parents [of students], so there are places for them in the school [to socialise]; we’re not just a school, we are also a community’. This idea of social self-reproduction (i.e. of strengthening intra-school relationships) was often at the expense of developing ties with other local schools or other stakeholders within the community: ‘we don’t have any … we pretty much have no connections with local schools’ (Year 12 student, SSIS); ‘we only have interactions with the schools close to us, so it’s mainly just Dulwich and the international school down the road’ (Year 12 student, SSIS). Such separation emphasises the fact that international schools attempt to reproduce socio-spatially distinct communities:

it’s really difficult to … see yourself in China actually, because the concept in [an] international school is that you can pick it up and put it anywhere around the world and it’ll still function … [so] there is no … it’s not really strongly tied to China … [there have been efforts to] connect this international community to the Chinese community, but there is still a huge … divide. (Year 11 student, SSIS)

This ‘divide’ reveals how international schools often forgo connections with the local community, focusing instead on maintaining horizontal connections amongst internationally mobile families and places. Often, this division is not just a function of the school’s distinctiveness but also that of the non-school (i.e. residential and recreational) spaces that are occupied by students and staff. The vast majority of expatriates in China live in housing enclaves, or ‘compounds’. Compounds can comprise several blocks of flats, or a collection of houses, within a gated community. The effect of living in a compound is that it physically disconnects residents from the social, cultural and economic environments of China; it ensures that they are surrounded by people who are similar to them. In China, the effects of such enclaves are pronounced, as they cause students (in particular) to live mostly bifurcated lives between home and school and nowhere really in-between. Whereas China’s enclave urbanism has led to the creation of ‘enclosed urban spaces’ that ‘are not necessarily perceived as a detrimental urban form by urbanites’ (He, 2013: 245), this sort of enclosure – and the lifestyles it gives rise to – was something that international students struggled to get used to. School buses would shuttle students and teachers between their housing compounds and the school, causing extra-community interactions to be reduced to a minimum. Beyond this clear sense of spatial apartness, the bounding of communities within which students and teachers live and study/work was, in some instances, seen to limit their social lives. For example, a Year 11 student at Dulwich College Suzhou claimed that ‘normally we just travel here [to school] and hang out with people in the school’, whilst the parent of an EtonHouse student expressed her fear that such a restricted existence could compromise her child’s social development:

I was telling my husband, we have to think really hard, you know, because the girl is a teenager, and she has no social life, you know? It’s always school and home, school and home … In terms of friends, she will chat with them, or WhatsApp, but not going out physically.

The restrictions on student mobility outside of the school thus translate into restrictions on sociability, which in turn limit the extent to which students and teachers (and their families more generally) are able to engage with the communities in which they live. Whilst existing work has shown how intercultural friendships amongst international students are often unrealised (e.g. Fincher and Shaw, 2011), the international school setting can shape the terms of friendship and the ways in which other people are engaged with more generally. (De)territorialisation and the drawing of socio-spatial boundaries foregrounds various processes of othering, which, amongst young students in particular, was often targeted at local Chinese communities.

Many students expressed exclusionary attitudes towards Chinese people when the socio-spatial boundaries that they had forged were ignored. For example, a Year 12 student at SSIS lamented that ‘now there is [sic] Chinese [people] everywhere; Chinese are dominating the world … I go to Starbucks sometimes to get my decaf coffee, and I go there and all I see is Chinese, Chinese, Chinese, Chinese, and I thought “oh my god”.’ A similar sentiment was echoed by a Year 10 student at SSIS, who bemoaned the loss of exclusivity to the recreational enclaves once inhabited by the expatriate community alone: ‘a few years ago … the shops I went to, there were just foreigner[s] … But I feel now, I just can’t find a place where, like, only foreigners are interested in … [there are] a lot of Chinese people everywhere.’ Whilst the school (and, by extension, the housing compound) can be seen as a controlled space that is defined by a significant degree of (non-Chinese) homogeneity, the heterogeneous spaces of everyday urban life ‘demand negotiation with and accommodation of difference and otherness’ (Rosbrook-Thompson, 2014: 1617). Sharing public places with the local (Chinese) community provides the impetus for more exclusionary forms of separation to become apparent, thus undermining – and even rendering paradoxical – the cosmopolitan sense of global citizenship that many international schools claim to inculcate in their students. Indeed, it is attitudes like these that reveal the extent to which ‘other’ cultures are disfavoured by the students of international schools, which can cause everyday forms of exclusion to manifest (after Woods and Kong, 2020).

As much as the actors implicated within international schools in China may desire a deterritorialised lifestyle, the incursions of the local can limit its realisation. The distinction between categories is blurred, causing both to become more expansive, and potentially divisive, constructs. In more conceptual terms, we can begin to see the spatially segregated nature of SIP – and international schools therein – expanding to inform the emergence of social divisions as well. Combined, this forging of socio-spatial boundaries foregrounds the (de)territorialised sense of inter-belonging amongst students.

Forging a (de)territorialised sense of inter-belonging

An important outcome of international mobility is that it can cause individuals to lack a sense of belonging that is grounded in their places of habitation. The (de)territorialised nature of international schools in particular, and of the SIP in general, augments this problem. It incorporates different layers and understandings of (non-)belonging into a distinct modality of (de)territorialised urban life. Indeed, the distinctly bounded nature of the school and non-school spaces that students and teachers inhabit on a day-to-day basis is caused by, and reproduces, the embryonic, work-in-progress nature of SIP as place. SIP is an outcome of a top-down policy of economic and urban development; it has not evolved organically. The place-based constituents of SIP reflect an onshoring of business, capital, people and schools; processes that can kick-start development but that require a more nuanced, and inter-connected, understanding of belonging that sidesteps the locality and focuses instead on specific sites of (de)territorialised existence. Belonging, then, becomes a state of in-betweenness that emerges from being embedded within structures of (de)territorialisation. Indeed, the sense of inter-belonging that emerges as a result is reproduced at multiple levels – through the international school (and its branding, pedagogy and boundaries), and from living as an expatriate in SIP, and China more broadly – each of which becomes self-reinforcing through the dialectic of (de)territorialisation (Woods and Kong, 2020). This causes students (in particular) to lead essentially placeless lives that are physically located in, but socially and emotionally disconnected from, SIP. A Taiwanese Year 12 student at SSIS explained the effects of such a (de)territorialised existence with perceptiveness:

I don’t know, it’s funny … we go back to Taiwan … about twice a year. And so, most of my life … was in Suzhou. But in Taiwan I do feel more comfortable exploring; I actually feel more freedom … In Taiwan, a lot of times I know where things are, so I know how to go to the post office and get my things done. And if I need to get something fixed, I know where to go. Whereas here, beyond my immediate surroundings … I don’t know where to go. In Suzhou, I have to drive, and I can’t drive, so I have to rely on my parents … So, there is [still] that ‘foreignness’.

SIP is described here as a ‘foreign’ place, even by someone for whom ‘most of my life’ was spent there. It is a place that is built out of foreign investment and involvement, and thus incubates a deterritorialised sense of belonging that is removed from everyday life. This sense of detachment was pervasive and in itself can encourage the dissociative and exclusionary behaviours discussed above to manifest. This offers new insight into the ongoing segregation of Chinese cities along new lines of ethnic, national and linguistic (amongst others) difference. Whilst He (2013: 247) observes how China’s enclave urbanism ‘does not necessarily mean that Chinese cities are suffering from a particularly high degree of social segregation and fragmentation, compared to their Western counterparts’, the perspectives of deterritorialised international migrants –especially students – complicate this assertion. For these groups, deterritorialised lives foreground the desire for, but also create a barrier to, forging a place-based sense of belonging. Students want to belong but structural forces – of which the international school is one of the most influential – prevent them from doing so. An American Year 12 student at SSIS echoed this sentiment and compared it with the sense of belonging she felt when visiting the USA:

We see the city, but I don’t have a chance to, like, walk by myself … I’ve only taken a public bus once, in my fourteen years here; only taken a public bus once. And, uh … it’s because, they [her parents] don’t really like it if I go around, but that’s sad because I actually don’t know a lot about the city … I almost feel like, some of the cities that I’ve visited in the [United] States, only for a month, I have a deeper connection with those places than I do here, after fourteen years, which is sad, but, you know … that’s how it is.

In this case the foreignness of Suzhou is enforced by her parents. The restrictions she faces limit the possibility to experience the place of habitation, and thus to form a sense of belonging. This feeds directly into the branding of international schools, which leverage their (de)territorialised sense of appeal and their embeddedness within international networks of similarly oriented schools to further strengthen their educational brands. Paradoxically, it also gives reason for the students and staff (and their families) to forge an even greater sense of attachment to the school as an enclave in which they feel like they ‘belong’, or to the country of origin, even if it has never (or rarely) been a country of habitation. Thus, as much as their sense of belonging is deterritorialised through processes of boundary-making at the local level, so too is it reterritorialised through their socio-spatial associations with the international school. The (de)territorialised appeal of international schools can therefore be seen to orient migrant communities away from the localities in which they live and to reproduce globally inclusive yet locally exclusive identities that are coming to define the ‘post-national’ age (Rosbrook-Thompson, 2014: 1617). International schools play an important role in structuring this sense of inter-belonging; it reproduces a sense of physical belonging to the school, of imagined belonging to the home country and of inter-belonging to the locality. They do, in other words, serve to actively reproduce the increasingly (de)territorialised nature of segregated urban space.