International Sociology and International Sociology Reviews

This month enjoy free access to the article by Zizhen Wang (Xiamen University, China) published in International Sociology, Fresh off the boat again? The conversion of cultural capital and distinction-making among Western-educated returnee scholars in China, which is the winning paper of the Annual SAGE International Sociology Best Paper Prize’s 2025 edition (Vol. 40). Read on to know more about the author’s trajectory and work.

Zizhen Wang

Why are you working on this topic? Could you share an experience, a fact or a person who made you get engaged on that research? 

Z. Wang: How academic knowledge is produced, and how particular forms come to be defined as valuable, correct, and meaningful to the nation, have long been central to my research interests.

I started working on this paper in September 2023 and it comes directly from my own experience. I received my doctoral training from Dublin, Ireland and returned to China in 2020 to work at a Chinese university, where I have now spent five years. At the time, I thought my European academic training would give me an advantage in Chinese academia and help me progress professionally. At least, this is what the existing literature taught us. The reality, however, turned out to be quite different. Instead of feeling recognised, I often found myself constrained by institutional rules that did not value overseas training in the way I had expected. One small but telling example comes from everyday academic life: in our department’s group chat, when someone publishes an article in a Chinese-language journal, the head of department and colleagues routinely send congratulatory messages. By contrast, publications in English-language journals—even well-regarded international ones—are never acknowledged or celebrated.

These everyday interactions reflect a broader nationalist discourse that has become increasingly visible in academic settings. Overseas returnees are sometimes jokingly referred to as ‘spies’ or treated with subtle suspicion—comments often framed as humour, but which nonetheless signal boundaries around trust, loyalty, and belonging. Experiencing this repeatedly made me question both my professional standing and my original decision to return to China.

These experiences pushed me to look beyond my own situation and ask broader questions about Western-educated returnee scholars in China: how their cultural capital is valued, how distinction is made in academia, and why returning ‘home’ can sometimes feel like starting again from scratch. This research is therefore not only academically motivated, but also deeply personal.

What would you emphasize about your academic trajectory? Can you highlight which have been your academic positions, universities, awards, departments and research centers please?

Z. Wang: My academic trajectory has been shaped by a series of institutional moves that gradually deepened my interest in ethnicity, migration, and nationalism.

I completed my undergraduate and postgraduate studies at Minzu University of China, China’s leading university serving ethnic minority communities. Living and studying alongside many ethnic minority classmates was a formative experience. It sensitised me to everyday forms of ethnic difference, cultural negotiation, and structural inequality, and it was during this period that I first developed a sustained interest in ethnic, racial, and migration studies.

From 2014 to 2018, I pursued my doctoral degree at University College Dublin, where my research focused on immigrants’ labour market outcomes in Europe. This period provided rigorous training in sociological theory and quantitative methods, while also exposing me to comparative and international perspectives on migration and inequality. Between 2018 and 2020, I worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded project Effective Nature Law at the UCD Law School. This interdisciplinary experience broadened my research horizon beyond sociology and strengthened my engagement with policy-oriented and cross-disciplinary research environments.

In 2021, I returned to China and joined Xiamen University as an Assistant Professor in Sociology, where I continue to work today. While I initially expected my overseas training to translate smoothly into the Chinese academic system, my experience of returning has been far more complex than anticipated. This disjuncture between expectation and reality—shaped by institutional rules and nationalist academic norms—became the original motivation for writing the paper discussed above.

Overall, my academic path reflects a continuous engagement with questions of mobility, belonging, and the social construction of valuable knowledge across national and institutional fields.