Student mobility has become a salient trend in higher education (HE) worldwide. Not only is the overall rate of international enrollment unprecedented, but notable is the growing complexities in the patterns of such mobility, as manifested by the increasingly diverse choices of study-abroad destinations and heterogeneous student body (including their differing dispositions, abilities, etc.). The ever-complex intercultural encounters in differing host contexts constantly call for up-to-date understandings of the intricate processes and outcomes of intercultural experiences.

However, there is limited systematic understanding on international student experiences in ‘unorthodox’ destinations such as China. This dearth of review contrasts with China’s rise to the top destination in Asia and the third in the world (following the US and UK), hosting 492,185 foreign students according to the latest statistic in 2018. Importantly, the distinctive Chinese context might lead to different patterns in cross-cultural experiences, making it an indispensable block within the global student mobility jigsaw puzzle. Specifically, compared to the neoliberal policies in countries such as UK and US, internationalization of HE in China is highly government-driven and outward-oriented with multi-faceted rationales such as enhancing cultural diplomacy, economic reciprocity especially towards neighboring and/or peripheral countries, as well as building world-class universities. These are likely to shape incoming students’ distinctive aspirations and cross-cultural experiences. As Dervin et al. (2018) warn, we need to unlearn prescribed imaginaries and representations about study-aboard when researching cross-cultural experiences in China. 

Furthermore, a review of existent literature on student mobility worldwide reveals a long-lasting yet still highly relevant debate between structure and agency. On the one hand, there is a dominant stress on the tensions between individuals’ incompetence and host context’s expectations. Though recognizing the difficulties international students face, this stream of research risks assuming cross-cultural adaptation as inherently problematic and uni-directional, accentuating individual deficits. This assumption is especially evident in some South-North mobility studies where initially ‘unskilled’ students from ‘the rest of the world’ are assumed to be passively adjusted by the academic and social norms established in the North. Devoid of agency, individual students (or individual teachers) are further held accountable for intercultural outcomes, leaving the vexed individual-environment relationship unexamined. On the other hand, scholars such as Matsunaga et al. (2021) call for a shift to a students’ agency-oriented approach, arguing international students are not passive reproducers of institutional practices, but active negotiators of the incongruence between the host environments and their previous habitus. Relatedly, there have been emerging research problematizing the simplistic and passive intercultural outcome of mere fitting-in. Gill (2007) examines how Chinese international students in the UK negotiate their intercultural experience, build a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994) to accommodate different views and eventually achieve distinctiveness and transformation beyond adaptation. This agency-structure debate in the wider global context informs the focuses of our review on the interactions between environmental and individual factors and their co-production of diverse cross-cultural outcomes.

Therefore, this review aims to synthesize empirical evidence on how environmental and individual factors interact and co-produce cross-cultural outcomes of international students in China, from an ecological and person-in-context perspective. While Bronfenbrenner's (1979) ecological model deconstructs different layers of the environmental factors, Volet's (2001) person-in-context perspective enables us to address the ‘experiential interface’ connecting environment-level affordances/constraints and individual-level enablers/blockers. Though focusing on the Chinese context, this review contributes to the wider debates on student mobility globally and a deeper understanding of the complexities of such mobility.

We conducted a comprehensive literature search in December 2022. We searched in two databases focusing on peer-reviewed English articles, Web of Science and Scopus. We searched publications from 1996 (when the China Scholarship Council was established marking a milestone in the systematic recruitment and administration of international students in China) to 2022. Informed by the ecological and person-in-context perspective, we included only empirical studies on interactions among environment and individual factors and intercultural outcomes in the Chinese context. As such, the selection criteria are: 1) peer-reviewed articles or book chapters; 2) written in English; 3) publication date is between 1996-2022; 4) empirical works on intercultural experiences of international students in China 5) specifically addressing the interactions among environment and individual factors and intercultural outcomes. Two broad key constructs of keyworks were searched in the abstracts to identify as many relevant pieces as possible: 1) “international student*" OR "overseas student*" OR "foreign student*" OR "incoming student*" OR "mobile student*"; 2) “China” OR “Chinese universit*”. The search yielded in total 1,488 (after removing duplicates) peer-reviewed English articles and book chapters, including 938 from Web of Science, 1062 from Scopus, with 512 duplicates. We firstly reviewed the titles and abstracts of each result to remove articles that fall out of the inclusion criteria. Here, we excluded articles focusing on international students in other countries; or focusing either on environmental/individual factor rather than their interactions; and other irrelevant topics. 219 pieces were left. We further downloaded and read full texts of the 219 pieces and further excluded those that only touched on the individual-environment interaction superficially or did not report intercultural/cross-cultural outcomes. In the end, 63 empirical studies were included in this review for in-depth analysis.

This review examines the vexed relationships between environmental and individual factors by deconstructing how they influence each other and co-produce the diversified outcomes of intercultural experiences of international students in China. In particular, It reveals 1) Environmental and individual factors are mutually shaping; 2) Both individual-level and environmental-level factors are subject to constant changes requiring “time-sensitive understanding” (Boccagni, 2017, p. 4); 3) Cross-cultural outcomes are produced via the (in)congruence between individual-level and environmental-level factors; 4) Intercultural outcomes are highly diversified in China. Referring back to the structure-agency debate, this review problematizes the structure-based approach’s assumptions of 1) linear and one-way process of cross-cultural adaptation which leaves the complex individual-environment negotiations unexamined; 2) the static measurements of factors influencing cross-cultural outcomes; 3) homogeneous cross-cultural outcomes. Accordingly, we propose several theoretical and empirical suggestions for future research: 1) Develop a more nuanced theoretical framework recognizing the diversified outcomes and the vexed structure-agency relationships; 2) More focused studies on sub-groups of international students (such as African students versus European students) which might reveal patterns behind diversified outcomes, and thus enable targeted support and empowerment for specific groups, though caution should be taken against essentialism and culturalization; 3) Recognizing the dynamic nature of intercultural experiences, more longitudinal studies are needed. Out of the 63 reviewed pieces, only 5 employed longitudinal designs; 4) More mixed-method studies are needed to capture the complexities of cross-cultural process but also to include larger samples of international students. Only a few reviewed articles utilize mixed-method design. This review also has practical implications for international student support in China and beyond. It calls for a recognition of students’ diverse needs, and interventions that not only ease international students’ stay, but also shape students’ motivations and competences and eventually enable adjustment and transformation outcomes.

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