Episode 10 | The Race for Education

For millions of children in China, life has been a race against time since the day they were born. They are blasted with advertisements that warn ‘Do Not Lose at the Starting Line’, and handed by their elders a checklist of tasks that should be completed by a certain age: diplomas, property, marriage, parenthood. Yet, being able to follow such a timeline indicates a degree of privilege. The less fortunate are forced to abandon their dreams and mortgage their futures to provide for their families. The more affluent, on the other hand, can purchase shortcuts, especially through an elite education in a Western country.

Time as a social construct is not equal. How do time differences manifest across borders and class divisions? What motivates Chinese children to study overseas, and how do they and their parents plan their futures against bureaucratic uncertainties? For this episode, Yangyang spoke with sociologists Cora Lingling Xu and Mengwei Tu on education and mobility in and out of China, and how we as a society might liberate ourselves from artificial temporal constraints.

Guest Bios:

Cora Lingling Xu is Associate Professor at Durham University. She is an executive editor of British Journal of Sociology of Education and an editorial board member of Comparative Education. Cora is founder and director of the Network for Research into Chinese Education Mobilities. Cora’s book The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Shape Higher Education Mobility in China (SUNY Press, 2025) won the 2026 Best Book Award from the Higher Education Special Interest Group of the Comparative and International Education Society.

Mengwei Tu is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Swansea University. Her research focuses on international student mobility, examining both Chinese students studying abroad and international students studying in China, with particular attention to their post-study career and migration trajectories. She also explores the familial dimensions of highly skilled migration by examining transnational families between China and the UK. Mengwei is the author of Education, Migration, and Family Relations between China and the UK (Emerald, 2018). She also led the funded research project Students and Graduates from Belt and Road Countries in China: Migration Networks and Career Trajectories (2018–2023).

Related Materials:

Cheng, Yangyang. 2025. ‘Beyond Representation: On Being a Woman in Science in China.’ Made in China Journal, 10(2): 232-245.

Tu, Mengwei. 2018. Education, Migration, and Family Relations between China and the UK. Leeds, UK: Emerald.

Tu, Mengwei. 2024. ‘Education mobility at the cost of widening gender gap? The silent women behind Pakistani male students’ success stories in China.’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 26(2): 336-353.

Xu, Cora Lingling. 2025. The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Shape Higher Education Mobility in China. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Full Episode Transcript:

Yangyang (00:00)

For millions in China, the month of June is known as Gaokao Yue, the month of the college entrance exams. I still remember that June 21 years ago when I took the gaokao. I applied for a specialized program, so I was only in my second year of high school at the time, and my own gaokao experience was not nearly as stressful. I was lucky enough to pass the exam, but had I failed, I could just take it again the following year with most of my classmates.

For many years after, I wondered if I had missed out on the rite of passage by skipping the final year of high school. On the other hand, I also knew I benefited from being slightly younger than my peers. Few pressured me to find a husband when I was in college. When I moved to the United States for graduate school, I felt I could take my time and still finish at a reasonable age.

Now, the older I get, the sillier I feel about my teenage self. What was this obsession with time all about? Who set the schedule? But I also understand that for countless people in China who came from a modest background like I did, time is the one asset we have, and academic excellence is the only way out.

Is time money, figuratively and literally? Can money buy a faster route to elite education and professional advancement? And how do the answers manifest over time across generations and national borders? I am so excited to discuss this topic that is dear to my heart and close to my being with two leading scholars of higher education and migration in China. First up, we have Dr. Cora Lingling Xu. Cora is an associate professor in the School of Education at Durham University, and the author of the new book, The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Shape Higher Education Mobility in China. Cora, thank you so much for joining us.

Cora (01:59)

Thank you, Yangyang, for having me today.

Yangyang (02:01)

So Cora, your book is called The Time Inheritors. Tell us a little bit what that means. Like how does one inherit time? Can time be put away in a bank or put on loan, like financial assets? And how did you come up with such a novel concept?

Cora (02:16)

Thank you, Yangyang, such a great question. When we think about inheritance, we almost always think about property or money, right? So what I argue in the book is that underneath all of those things, what families are really transmitting across generations is accumulated labour time, meaning that time that previous generations spent building economic wealth, social networks and cultural knowledge so that you do not have to spend it again from scratch. So if your parents are educated, well connected, and financially stable, you begin life with years effectively saved on your behalf. That is what I called banked time, a temporal cushion that allows you to explore, take risks, change direction, and wait for the right opportunity without catastrophic consequences. Now borrowed time is the opposite condition.

So you start with what I describe as an empty tank already owing years of labor to your family before you have even begun your own trajectory. Because your education was made possible by someone else’s sacrifice. Perhaps a sibling dropping out of school, perhaps parents working multiple jobs, grandparents giving up savings. So you carry a debt pay mentality because a delay in earning money, It’s not merely inconvenience. It is a moral failure to repay someone, some of these family members, for example, to who gave up their own futures for yours. So that pressure steers people toward the immediate and the certain, right? Even when those choices are self-limiting in the longer term. So the distinction matters at two levels, right? Quantitatively speaking, it concerns how much time you have available as a buffer. But qualitatively speaking, it is about your entire relationship with time. Those with banked time develop an entitled temporal disposition, meaning a sense of ease, of entitlement and confidence that lets them plan strategically across years or even across decades. Whereas for those who live on borrowed time, they develop this sense of urgency and risk aversion which shape their decisions in ways that compound their disadvantage over years. And so because banked time tends to generate more banked time, whilst borrowed time tends to accumulate further debt, the gap widens over a lifetime and in and in fact across generations. And it is what you might recognize as the Matthew effect applied to time.

Yangyang (05:06)

This is such a profound yet also like really illuminating concept. And I know that your book focuses on people from a Chinese background, but you also do place this idea of time inheritance in a global context, right? In particular, you describe that students in Western countries enjoy, and I quote, a global level time advantage in terms of educational privileges or even just their ability to speak English. So can you explain some of that?

Like how does time manifest differently depending on where one is born and what kind of passport one carries?

Cora (05:38)

Yeah, that’s a such a great question, Yangyang. So the framework, the time inheritance framework in the book operates at three interlocking levels, the family level, the national level, and the global level. So people are relatively comfortable with the idea that wealthy families pass temporal advantages to their children, right? But what is less examined is how entire countries and language communities do the same thing for their citizens.

So drawing on postcolonial scholarship, in the book I argue that the legacy of colonial and imperial history has produced a global temporal hierarchy. So former and current imperial powers like the US, like the UK, particularly Anglo form countries are positioned as modern, advanced and destination toward which everyone else must aspire.

Right, countries positioned as developing, including China, are framed as lagging behind, as needing to catch up. So this linear developmental logic is not only a narrative, it has material consequences. It shapes which universities are treated as globally prestigious, which credentials carry purchasing power in international labour markets, and which passport holders move freely across borders.

Anglo-American universities have accumulated what I call institutional banked time. So reputational capital built over centuries the authority to define what counts as world-leading or world-class knowledge and the linguistic dominance through English as the global lingua franca. This is why a graduate of one of these institutions spends less time searching for employment, receives promotion more quickly.

And earns higher salaries. Their work time is, in the most literal sense, valued more than that of counterparts from universities in the global south. And English is the primary vector through which this global institutional time is transmitted to individuals. In my research, I found that for students from disadvantaged backgrounds in China, such as those from rural backgrounds or urban working class backgrounds, their English language proficiency could become what I call a time worth accelerator. It unlocked access to sought after degree programs abroad and opened trajectories that would otherwise have been unavailable. Take my own experience as an example. Although my my case was not used as an empirical sort of case in the book, I just feel that it’s probably closer and easier to understand. So I had almost no English when I arrived in Hong Kong for university because I come from a rural background in China. But following my cousin’s advice to major in English, the language became the single most consequential temporal accelerator of my life, eventually enabling me to study at King’s College London and then subsequently Cambridge University in the UK. So I want to flag the double edge of this, of course, because it matters that we understand, you know, what.

I mean later on you’re going to talk with Mengwei, Mengwei’s research, which she illuminates really well. So in the same system that promises to accelerate your future, the this same system can become a time trap. You know, when visa regimes, racial discrimination in hiring, credential dis discounting, and the emotional and financial costs of transnational migration can combine to extract time rather than.

Generated. So in restrictive UK post-study work environment, for instance, which Mengwei is going to demonstrate, has documented in her research. It’s a very good example of this. So the Western credential offers a temporal promise that it does not do or deliver equally to different people. And this is compounded in very specific way for the one child generation. Parents who have concentrated the entire families’ resources on a single child’s overseas education who cannot easily join that child in the UK because UK family reunion rules effectively exclude the middle class by requiring proof of absolute dependency. So they find themselves waiting in a different kind of temporal limbo. So I just wanted to qualify that. And also when I talk about a time inheritance framework, I remember that the time inheritance is on a continuum. So very few people actually occupy either one end or the other of this continuum. And most of us are situated somewhere in the middle. so you know I often have readers who come up to me and say, but I’m not all that, you know, all that privileged and and that’s why I usually respond is that most people are somewhere in the middle.

Yangyang (10:45)

Thank you so much, Cora, for the insights and also for sharing your personal experience. I remember I go I grew up in a provincial city in central China and when I was in middle school and high school, this was when I also took part in a lot of English public speaking competitions in China. And and so if you advance to the national final, and this was the first time when I was exposed to the educational and economic disparities across China in terms of there were my peers who came from a rural background who had like listen to one tape cassette and to death to learn English. On the other hand, there are also some of my peers who came from coastal cities or who just grew up bilingual, who might have even spent years abroad and we were competing on the same stage. So I think that like this is how like English ability and is manifested in a sense as a time of a kind of time inheritance. And I think also like we’re about the same age and we came from a generation when I think when I was growing up, the only way to go abroad was to get a full scholarship plus a stipend to study for a PhD overseas, or if you get a job offer at a foreign university or company. And I think I was about like in high school or in college, like in the mid-2000s, when I understood, there were Chinese students who could go abroad on self-funded pathways to get a bachelor’s degree or study for a master’s degree.

So, in that sense, if one’s goal is to move abroad and to get an overseas education, then if one had the financial resources, then one could literally like leap several years ahead compared with their peers. And on that note, and Cora, you also mentioned, I would like to bring in our second guest, Dr. Mengwei Tu is a senior lecturer in sociology at Swansea University, also in the UK, and the author of Education, Migration, and Family Relations between China and the UK.

So Mengwei, thank you so much for joining us as well.

Mengwei Tu (12:40)

Thank you, Yangyang, for the invitation and really glad to hear Cora’s research again. Always enjoy discussing Cora’s time inheritance concept. Yeah, so glad.

Yangyang (12:54)

So Mengwei, like a focus of your research, which Cora also mentioned, is on Chinese kids from the one child generation, or roughly like the late Gen X to the millennial generation, and who moved abroad to study, especially to the UK. So tell us a little bit about your findings. Why do these children, who are basically our peers, want to study abroad and do their own reasons differ from their parents’?

Mengwei Tu (13:17)

yeah, I did my research around 2014. And that’s probably about the time we were international students, speaking of a similar age, perhaps. And if you remember, it was a golden period of studying abroad. originally I was simply interested in looking at this vast number of fresh faces that suddenly appear on UK campuses, which also shocked by UK universities, by the way.

But I was interested not only about why did they come, but also what happened to their life and job after their study have completed. And very quickly I realized these Chinese graduates were mostly only child in the family. And one child generation basically can mean people who were born within the impact period of that policy, which can range from the 1970s up to nineteen 2015, we know it ended in 2016. So that’s a vast time span. But in my research, as and I think you probably mentioned, the cohort I’m looking at were mostly post eighties generation, and including some people who were born in the 70s and some in the 90s.

And it’s not a coincidence that this post-80s generation were mainly from were the main driving force of the the rapid rise of international student population, because from the 80s to the 2000s, Chinese families not only experienced the shrinking of family size to one child, but also experienced household wealth increase following Den Xiaoping’s reform opening.

So the three decades from the 80s to the 2010s is an incredible period of wealth generation and wealth redistribution in China. And that is followed by social stratification and the rise of middle class families. And with the rise of middle class families, the first thing they think about is to how to consolidate their social status. And usually the way to do so is either to invest in in properties or to invest in your next generation’s education. And so it just so happens that overseas education, that market was opening up to the Chinese youth. So in in the 2000s, especially after China joined WTO and so on, it started what we called the study abroad fever, Chu Guo Re. And I would say that this fever would not have happened so early if it wasn’t for the one child policy. Because like Yangyang you mentioned the families could concentrate their resource on one person. And it also makes makes it easier for parents, for family to plan financially in advance to save.

For the child’s education, now that they know they’re only going to have one child. And so here we have the people, the money, the channel, and of course let’s not forget the drive. As Cora mentioned, how the web, the so-called West, the global north, the Anglophone countries were constructed as the first world countries, the superior, where we need to go and learn the more advanced knowledge from.

So with all these at place, and it was the right time for the Chinese youth, for what we see, the post-80s, to go out of their doors to study abroad. And in terms of the reasons, in my research, the top two reasons for students to study in the in the UK.

Is usually mentioned as degree and employment advancement, as well as to broaden one’s view. They would say in their narrative something like kai yanjie, broaden my view. So actually, both would reflect some kind of time inheritance feature in Korra’s work. So first they come to the UK mostly because UK’s master takes only one year. And the master’s degree in in China takes 2.5 to 3 years. So that’s a straightforward way of buying the time. And secondly, it’s fascinating to think about one when broaden one’s view because we have to remember these are fee-paying students, the majority of fee-paying students. They come from a more affluent background.

So they have the leisure to think about. I can spend some money and time to go abroad to broaden my view. So that broaden my view is, I think, is actually a very middle class way of thinking, middle class way of upbringing. And parents and children do not differ greatly in terms of reason to go abroad. it’s almost as if in one-child families, the the the child, the only child, understood what parents want for them and that there’s almost like a established understanding. That so the three members work very closely as a like a transnational corporation to achieve this middle class capital consolidation or in some case capital expansion.

Yangyang (19:20)

One thing I really appreciate about your research in terms of the underlying motivations for Chinese overseas education is that it’s not just about one’s own desires, right? There are also material conditions and national level policies that enable it. And one of the things that is really striking that I noticed from your book is that you pointed out is that basically for the first time in the history of Chinese international migration.

Money is flowing out of China into Western developed economies in a form of sending kids abroad to study. And also this outflow does not necessarily stop once the kid graduates. Chinese parents are also funding their kids’ property purchases later on, even if the children are fully grown and even working well-paid jobs. And so I’m kind of curious, can you unpack that phenomenon a bit more for us?

Especially like I think most of the families you study, they are affluent, but they’re not extravagantly wealthy. And China doesn’t have a great social safety net in terms of elder care and medical expenses. And so I’m kind of wondering whether the parents are spending this money on their children not just out of a sense of like pursuing an elite education or realizing their own dreams on the next generation, but it was also a sense of that is a safer way for them to move some of their assets abroad to broaden their own possibilities on one hand. On the other hand, they are somehow also counting on the children to repay them in the future, that by investing in their children now, they are somehow creating a certain safety net for themselves in the form of their children when it comes to elder care and medical expenses down the road.

Mengwei Tu (21:06)

Yeah, it makes perfect sense for people to think this way. Perhaps that’s an investment for a safety net in the in the future. however, we have to recognize that within the large group called Chinese International Student, there’s high diversity in terms of social economic background. So what I just described largely for into the middle class and perhaps a little bit upper middle class cohort. And these and also another feature I want to emphasize is the students who come to the UK are different are somewhat different from students who go to Australia and the US because UK is not a traditionally immigrant country. So some parents, some perhaps super wealthy families They would have a a larger plan in terms of asset relocation. Perhaps they would put their pa that their child child overseas in Australia or Canada, for example, as a potential green card holder who then would pursue a a green card, a foreign citizen foreign citizenship so that parents can transfer their wealth overseas. That was actually the the strategy found in in a lot of wealthy Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwanese families in in the 90s. So in in terms of Chinese mainland families, especially those who come to the UK, families didn’t think that count that it was actually a quite simple motivation to get the one-year master’s degree. And a lot of the middle class parents they they didn’t think in terms of okay I’m gonna let my child to pursue the immigrant route so that in the future our family might be able to relocate overseas and so on. So that that also makes the UK cohort quite interesting because for a lot of the families it was a sudden change of family plan. Because you know what I come across in my research, the most frequently said words is one step at a time.

Because as a migration researcher I always ask, so what’s your future migration plan? Are you gonna settle in the UK? I ask all these annoying questions and for participants, they mostly both parents and and adult children. So that reflects a quite accurate profile of migrants mindset anyway, because there is a great uncertainty once you step out of the traveled path, let’s say, and expose your future in a unknown country. So in terms of the wealth transfer, as you mentioned, those those UK graduates who graduated and a lot of them found quite well-paid jobs actually.

They’re all working in as professionals. So they’re making enough money not just to sustain a decent middle class life in the UK, but they in theory they will be able to pay back to their parents. But none of the family, none of the participants did it, and none of the parents requested it, and none of the participants articulated their willingness or awareness of doing that because

Again, there is a taken for grantedness that resource and wealth goes to the next generation, not the reverse. So that again, like Yangyang you mentioned, is the for the first time Chinese migrants in the UK are transferring wealth into continuously into the UK rather than like previous waves they would send remittances back to Hong Kong, back to Guangdong, for example. So those transfers I wouldn’t is a mixture of obviously family financial investment and also a way of parents to show continuing care. And you may ask, okay, so that the only child is showered by those wealth transfer continue don’t they feel guilty? Don’t they feel like they have to pay back at some point? but what’s the main theme coming through of those narratives is that there are deep gratitude among the adult children but they’re also very clear that the way to pay back my parents inverted comma is for myself to make the most of my opportunity overseas. I interview the migrant children, I interview the parents. It’s incredible that they are all saying the same thing. And I I don’t think they’re lying or just saying it to sound good. I I genuinely think there is this established understanding between the two generations. When the adult children continue to work and live in the UK, they form families. They have children. So the wealth actually continue to flow to the grandchildren. And not just wealth, but also care flow. So parents in China would immediately volunteer to come to the UK to provide child care.

And that is found in most most of the cases where the migrant child actually had children. So parents would come here to to to provide very intensive child care for their grandchildren. And in doing so, they buy grandchildren clothes, toys, for example, sometimes even pay for activities. So again, the material and care transfer just continue to flow to the younger generation. But the one-child families are not old enough for us researchers to observe in terms of what happens later on in their life stage. So that is yet to be observed. But the oldest one-child migrants are pushing to their four 50s. So their parents are pushing for their 80s. So very soon we will observe what happens after that stage of family life and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a a return wave of older one child migrants who would have finished their childcare in the UK and perhaps ha have the money and resource to retire early. Again, money, class and time that you can you can get to go back to China to spend with your elderly parents.

Yangyang (28:41)

This is really fascinating, Mengwei. Thank you for unpacking that, both on a temporal scale and also on a horizontal scale, like just even for Chinese kids moving to an Anglophone country to study their motivations and a lot of their family planning can differ based on the destination country’s immigration schemes and education policies. And I remember when I was in my senior year of college in China and applying for graduate school in the US, and I would run into neighborhood aunties or like family friends who would tell me it was like, Yangyang.

Tell your mother to spend your dowry. Take out the money saved for your dowry, and spend it on your grad school application. Now is not the time to skimp. And of course, like like marriage was not anywhere like near on the horizon at that point. But I also knew by saying my dowry,

What the friends, family friends and relatives were referring to was indeed my mother’s life savings, which was used for my graduate school application fees and visa fees, right? But that was just to get me out of the door into the US. And after that I would be on my own, like I would be financially independent. And so it is quite interesting to read about some of these children in Mengwei in Your research who seemed like somewhat entitled to their parents’ wealth.

And so Cora, I would like to come back to you and since you also mentioned earlier and in your book that there are class differences that shape the attitudes towards the sense of entitlement or not, towards the their parents’ educational investment, right? Children from more affluent backgrounds may feel more entitled, while children from more modest backgrounds may feel a sense of guilt and a sense of indebtedness towards their families’ investment on their education.

So can you unpack a bit more of that kind of difference, especially how does that difference of perception in terms of whether they’re they are entitled to their family’s money or they are indebted to their family shape their career and life choices, shape their perceptions of time?

Cora (30:36)

Yeah, absolutely. So the core insight here as articulated in my book is that education is not constructed the same way across different social classes and the construction has profound temporal implications. And Mengwei’s illustration earlier really gives us a very intriguing sort of foray into the middle class mindset and the the middle class perceptions and choices. So in my study I draw on research with about more than a hundred young people and their families from China, and they are across a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds, ranging from the from the rural and deprived bank families to urban working classes to the urban middle class and upper middle class backgrounds. So for single child families from urban middle class and upper middle class backgrounds in my research, investing in a child’s education is precisely like what Mengwei said, is simply What good parents do. It is a non-negotiable provision offered without expectation of repayment. Right? The child grows up feeling that their time belongs to them. They can take a gap year, they can switch majors, they can try and fail and try again. And so they have what I called an entitled temporal disposition, the sense of ease, of confidence, the capacity to plan strategically across years or even decades.

And this produces better outcomes in general, not because these young people are more talented, but because their temporal structure permits them to make better decisions. They can afford to wait, for instance. For students from rural and deprived backgrounds or urban working class backgrounds, especially the multi-child families, however, education is constructed as a collective sacrifice. So a sibling may have to drop out of school.

The parents may have to take on debt. Like my own parents, they had to take on debts. Everyone who helped becomes a creditor to the child. So the child’s time in education feels like borrowed and not owned. So there is a constant pressure to justify the sacrifice by earning quickly and repaying not just monetary repayment, but also social and moral debts.

So one of my participants, whom I called Meng in the book, was sending most of her income home while still a university student. And over a decade after completing her PhD, she was still suffering from nightmares in which she would dream of her father demanding money. And she would struggle and you know wake up in tears. So this debt pay mentality does not end when the financial debt is cleared.

It becomes habitual orientation towards time itself. Now, what Mengwei’s research on the one-child generation and transnational families adds is a fascinating complication to this picture. As she has shown, even when parents have concentrated enormous resources on a single child, and even when that child grows up feeling broadly entitled to family wealth, the transnational context introduces a new layer of obligation and ambivalence.

So one child migrants in the UK remain deeply embedded in the Chinese family system, even as they establish themselves in their British professional lives. And the financial transfer from parents to adult children continues not as a simple gift, but what Mengwei calls in her publications as a medium of care and belonging across this distance. So from the parents’ point of view, it is a continuation of of governance the Chinese concept of care, guan, which when physical presence is impossible they continue to transfer such wealth but also care you know digitally for instance and from the child side accepting that money is often felt as both entitlement but also responsibility simultaneously right so you’re the only one who can carry the family dream abroad and you carry that weight even as you benefit from the resources.

And I find this particularly resonant through the lens of time inheritance, because what Mengwei is documenting is essentially how the banked time of the one child generation is also encumbered time. So these young people have significant material advantages, but they are simultaneously living out their parent unfulfilled aspirations, managing parental anxieties from a distance, and navigating a host country whose immigration system does not facilitate the family reunion that might resolve the intergenerational tension and the the need for intergenerational care. So the time gained professionally in the UK is real, but the time lost to distance, to worry, to the impossibility of ordinary filial care is also real and largely invisible in the standard account of international student lives and success.

Yangyang (35:46)

Thank you so much, Cora. It was actually only after I had arrived in the US that I learned that my mother not only spent down her life savings in the name of my non existent dowry, but also she had to borrow money on from her colleagues in order to complete this this process of sending me abroad. And I think one thing one dimension that’s actually shared in both of your works is this role of gender.

And I’m quite curious in terms of like how women might face different expectations and demands on for education or for their perceptions of time. And in that sense I also recall like for example when I was a young child, and I do not know whether you have like similar experiences, I was always told that I must hurry up and excel early because like girls will get dumber after puberty while boys have more potential.

And it’s like menstruation would like drain our brains or something like that. And it might sound silly, but actually like I think a lot of my peers actually believed in that and made educational or life choices based on it. And so, Cora, are women placed in a time deficit compared to men, not because of biological differences or perceptions, but because of different social expectations and demands.

Cora (37:00)

Such a great question, and I really resonate with your sharing, Yangyang, because I myself, when I was growing up, I was also told that you, okay, now you are good at math, but you know, a few years later you’ll become dumber. Yeah, because boys are bound to be better than you. So it’s like this kind of destiny that was really striking and very frightening for me. And so, but I wanted to be transparent at the outset. That gender was actually not a dedicated analytical chapter in my book.

It runs through the analysis as a thread, and in the conclusion chapter, I explicitly highlighted that gendered time inheritance is one of the richest avenues for the what I call the global time inheritance studies agenda that I propose. And and some reviewers of the book have actually also pointed this out. And so, what I have been developing since the book’s publication is also a along this line. So for instance and what I’m going to share it has drawn on some of the interviews that have been carrying out and some public discussions as well as some engagement with existing research including Mengwei’s work which she will probably touch on later. So the structural argument begins with with families, right? Girls’ time is more readily treated as negotiable than boys’ time. So when resources are scarce, it is disproportionately Daughter schooling, that is the first to be reallocated. For instance, daughters need to do domestic work, they need to care for elders, perform farm labor or family chores, the daily maintenance of the household life. I dedicated the book to my aunt, for instance. My aunt is a rural woman who never spent a day in school. So her education was not simply missed, it was systematically displaced by family need and gendered expectations.

And that displacement was dressed in the language of love and duty, which made it almost impossible to name as injustice. And she’s not an exceptional case. She is the analytic origin, you know, of a lot of my thinking. And more broadly, women in many contexts inherit what I’m calling a time ethics oriented towards others before self, right? Instilled early and reinforced constantly you should be the one who coordinates family time, who is available to others first, whose needs can always wait until later. And this is not experienced as oppression in most cases. It is often dressed up or experienced as virtue, as being good, responsible, mature. Right? So this moral framing is precisely what makes it so difficult to contest. When a woman finally does try to claim time for herself, She faces an internalized sense of guilt, as if she has suddenly become selfish, even though she has simply stopped redistributing her time to others on demand. Yangyang, in your own essay, Beyond Representation, which was published in the Made in China Journal, you have touched this directly when you pointed out that women scientists’ lower publication rate and slower promotion reflect a time deficit rather than inferior ability.

And you cite the the my book in that context. And the statistics that you have cited are really striking, right? The promotion of women among doctoral supervisors in sorry, the proportion of women among doctoral supervisors in in China is less than seventeen percent. And female professors were required to retire five years earlier than men until very recently, a policy that He Zehui herself challenged in nineteen ninety one.

So these are not numbers that reflect talent or commitment. They reflect the cumulative effect of time being extracted from women at every stage of their professional and personal lives. In the conclusion chapter of my book, I cited some statistics from the UK, and the research found that women professors, women academics in the UK spend on average, 14.5 years more than male academics to reach the title of full professorship. Yeah. So it’s really striking when we think about this cumulative effect of of this sort of time penalty on women. So I I would say yes, women inherit time deficits in in this sense. And in Mengwei’s own research on privileged daughters, for instance, her collaboration with with her co-author, you know, as to this particularly important aspect. So for instance, they draw on even women who you know benefit from concentrated one-child family investment or and women who are in class terms very, very clearly this you know very advantaged time inheritors, they still face what they call a gendered twist in the family expectations at the moment they step into employment and marriage. So the parameters of success shift because

Academic attainment which had previously defined them is suddenly no longer sufficient. So a successful marriage becomes the additional criterion and the weight of that expectation is carried almost entirely by the women. And mothers travel between China and the UK to provide childcare, for instance, when their daughters have children of their own. So so you know this gendered burden is transferred back up, back up, you know, the generational line rather than dissolved.

So and and this as Mengwei and the co-authors have noted, right, actually reinforce the next generation’s perceptions of what is expected of them as women. So through my time inheritance lens, what is what this means is that women are more likely to inherit encumbered time regardless of their class position. So even a privileged daughter’s time is pre-allocated to parents’ dreams, to future husbands’ career priority, to their own children’s well-being.

To the management of intergenerational emotional labor across borders. The entitled temporal disposition that banked time is supposed to generate is consistently undermined for women by these prior claims on their time. So men, in contrast, with equivalent material inheritance, are much more likely to receive what I call supported time. So time that is socially protected and recognized as theirs to direct women are more likely to receive time that is already spoken for before they have had a chance to decide what to do with it.

Yangyang (43:42)

Well, thank you so much, Cora. And thank you for mentioning my essay. And we’ll include these, including both of your fascinating books and research, in the show notes. And so, Mengwei, as Cora also mentioned, your work also touches on the subject of gender. In particular, it also plays across generations, right? You cite these names like study mothers, like trailing spouses, or flying grandmas who perform these very gendered labor. And more recently, your research also studies not just China as the origin country of international migration for students, but also as the destination country, as the receiving country of international students, especially from global south countries. And one of your recent papers was really interesting about this gendered disparity for Pakistani international students in China. So I was curious whether you could unpack a bit of this gender dimension and how like Say Pakistani students or students from global south countries study in China, how does that parallel or differ from Chinese students studying in the UK?

Mengwei Tu (44:44)

Yes, thank you very much for this question. It’s always fascinating to talk about student flow into China in the context of having talked about the waves of Chinese students out of China. and it’s especially I’ve I’ve I’ve tried to compare the two waves of directions of student mobilities. I always find it quite difficult to compare.

And now I finally realize why they’re difficult to compare. It’s because the the role that China plays in the international education landscape is very different from the what traditional Western countries role that they position them themselves as. So for international students to China, it’s a largely top-down state-initiated scheme that is more aimed at political and diplomatic impact rather than income generation and economic returns, which is what UK and US Australia higher education is doing. So that would have an impact on the kind of student China attracts. So like you said, China attracts mostly a global South Country student. That is absolutely true. And also if you look closely, those global south students tend to come from countries that is geopolitically very close to China. And especially these days, Belt and Road countries, for example. There are dedicated schemes and scholarship, especially for Belt and Road countries. and you mentioned Pakistan, and Pakistan is one of the largest student-sending country to China. So the student that comes to China, especially from Pakistan. They largely rely on student scholarship, which makes them a much, much less affluent coho compared to when we talk about Chinese students going out of China to the West. And that the the most the two most obvious feature of those Pakistani students is that they’re male, and they’re older. So they are male because i in Pakistan there is this incredible lack of higher education resource anyway. And when the resource is scarce, it always go to boys first. And also the Class background of Pakistani students to China tend to be sort of more rural middle income or lower middle income class, so that they tend to come across come from a family culture where sisters just become other people’s wife and then quickly become other people’s mother and married off. So there is a gender disparity within Pakistan to start with. So if you can imagine in Pakistan undergraduate education, you find mostly boys and a minority girls. And then when the scholarship from China reaches Pakistan, usually the the Pakistan students tend to come here for postgraduate study. So the student who will be eligible for masters and PhD degrees are naturally mostly males anyway. So there is also the rules in the the Islamic rule that forbidden women to you know travel easily outside of their their their home community. So mobility, physical mobility also become a large barrier for women students who want to go abroad by themselves.

So all these factors are contributing to almost non existence of Pakistani female students who could take advantage of this very good opportunity that China is offering. That is why I wrote that journal to argue that it is good that China is offering the large the vast amount of scholarship that helps less developed countries in the global South who would never have any opportunity to do a PhD or masters if it wasn’t for China’s help. But this help falls mostly on boys, simply because those sending countries do not have a very good gender supporting system. So if you so those very good intentions would perhaps end up widening the gender gap in countries like Pakistan and girls who are already falling behind will be full falling further behind because boys are now reaching out to to further opportunities that China is offering.

So that is why well, I’m not saying there’s no girl student in and no no female Pakistani. there’s no statistics about gender, which is also very interesting. So me and my other collaborator, we tried our best. my my collaborator, she’s actually Pakistani. So she also tried her personal and professional network to try to find any statistics. we couldn’t find any, but we were able to draw evidence from bits and pieces.

For example, we had this very clever idea of looking at media pictures. So in the Chinese scholarship send off, so for example, Pakistan Embassy or the sorry the Chinese Embassy in Pakistan would hold this China Scholarship sending off ceremony in Pakistan where all the scholarship recipients would form a group picture. And we managed to like count the number of girls.

Who were standing in the picture. So by that, we were able to draw a very rough gender ratio of one girl versus ten boys in the scholarship recipients. And we also noticed a trend of girls’ number gradually increasing in the group pictures. So that is the little evidence that we were able to gather.

Yangyang (51:42)

This is so interesting. Actually, I knew a couple of Pakistani international students when I was in college in China and they were all boys. And then it was after moving to the US that I got to know female Pakistani international students, but I also recognized that they come from a notably more affluent family background. And so we could talk about this forever. And unfortunately, we are running out of time on this episode. On a closing note, Cora, I would like to come back to you.

And when I was reading your book, The Time Inheritors, I was reminded of an interview the novelist Toni Morrison did for Time magazine back in 1989. During the interview, Morrison was asked about teenage pregnancies and whether, by becoming mothers, the teenagers were squandering their potential, that they, quote, haven’t had time to find out if they have special abilities, talents, if they could have become teachers. And Toni Morrison said, and I quote,

‘The child is not going to hurt them. Of course, it is absolutely time consuming, but who cares about the schedule? What is this business that you have to finish school at 18?’ In response to the interviewer, Toni Morrison pointed out that teenage mothers can also become teachers or brain surgeons if they wanted to and had enough support. Morrison said, and again I quote, ‘I don’t think anybody cares about unwed mothers unless they are black or poor. The question is not morality, the question is money. That’s what we’re upset about. We don’t care whether they have babies or not.’

And so, Cora, on the closing note, I would like you to respond to this. Are schedules indeed arbitrary? And if so, how do we as a society, not just as individuals, liberate ourselves from this sense of scarcity, this sense of precarity? How do we allow ourselves more time?

Cora (53:34)

That’s such a profound set of quotes from Toni Morrison and it l they really speak to some of the key issues that I have written about in the book, which a very important term is the temporal structures. And you are right, a lot of these sort of schedules, you know, these life milestones are made up. They are arbitrary. But they are arbitrary on the one hand they’re arbitrary, on the other hand they are so internalized to the extent that they be they become disciplinary. So we are constantly disciplined and it’s like someone is holding a whip, you know, driving us like hamsters on a wheel and we just feel that we cannot escape. And that is very powerless. You know, you feel powerless and you feel scared and stressed and all that. But I won’t do want to complicate the picture in the sense that it’s not just money, you know, you mentioned is there any scope for us to escape. There is scope, but it’s important first of all for us to bring to our conscious mind, bring it to our conscious mind that these schedules are really arbitrary and they are pernicious and punitive. And they are punishing people, you know, especially people and groups who are often marginalized and stigmatized like teen moms.

Because we tend to say, right, if you’re a teen mom, then then your life is done, you know, there’s no future for you. And then people tend to then live up to these so-called expectations, you know, and then they fail and and you know, sort of yeah, it’s like a a vicious circle or cycle, right? so yeah, so first of all is to for us to bring this to our conscious attention, right? Raise our critical consciousness that these are arbitrary. And then the second step is to think about what we can do to First of all, you know, in a sort of public space, like what we are doing today, to to bring alternative timelines and different milestones, different life trajectories, and to challenge this very linear understanding of what one should do in their lives. You know, for instance earlier on in in the beginning you you shared that you were really, really keen to finish your studies early so that you can feel that you are sort of a few steps ahead of others.

So we could probably begin to teach our youngsters, you know, alternative sort of life milestones and different life trajectories and challenge this linear narrative. and then you know as a society, we could probably think about right, so if teen moms are being so stigmatized, what are the supports that we could provide to them? You know, so and and this is really something that I’ve been trying to advocate is that when we say we are providing supports, right?

And this also resonates with what Mengwei was talking about in terms of scholarship money being spent mostly on boys. Is that when we are thinking about any government policies or interventions, we should try to take time into consideration. Right? So what you know, if you are providing some financial support and you require the the very disadvantaged groups to fill in forms after forms, a lot of documents, to provide a lot of documents, it means that you are you are

Basically placing even more time tax on them, right? So i instead, you know, maybe when we tack factor time into the consideration when we do policy interventions, we should think about how can we reduce the time cost, right? And also how can we make sure that the environment is such that, you know, girl teen moms don’t get don’t feel stigmatized and instead they feel that it’s actually very common you know, it’s very common to to have a child and then go to pursue your your dream of becoming teachers, doctors and whatever. Yeah. Thank you.

Yangyang (57:29)

Wow, Dr. Cora Lingling Xu, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us and congratulations again on the thought-provoking new book.

Cora (57:38)

Thank you, thank you, Yangyang.

Yangyang (57:42)

And Dr. Mengwei Tu, thank you for joining us and congratulations on your fascinating and timely research as well.

Mengwei Tu (57:49)

Thank you. Thank you both.