The role of intermediaries in transnational mobility from below (the case of Chinese students in Russia)

This article attempts to enlighten the role of intermediaries in educational migration from China to Russia. Prolonged fieldwork (2022-2024) among Chinese students in Irkutsk, Tomsk, and Moscow has allowed the author to gather intimate insights into informal processes of self-organisation within the Chinese community. Participant observation and semi-structured interviews in dormitories and airports have produced interesting ethnographic findings that have previously not been discussed in Russian-language literature. Students from China prefer to apply to Russian universities through Chinese intermediaries. Intermediaries (also called agents, brokers, and recruiters) can be both commercial companies and individual students, who provide paid support for enrollment into university, visa application, and arrival to the destination. As agents who act between the student-applicant and the receiving university, intermediaries use their informational privilege and cultural savviness to make money. Clients continue depending on help by intermediaries after their arrival to the host university; however, informational discrepancies and misunderstandings of obligations in the complex client-intermediary relationship may lead to disappointments and conflicts. By providing assistance to student-clients from families of different economic and social backgrounds in China, intermediaries at local and transnational levels represent a diversified informal system of interdependence, mutual benefit and, which is very important for an anthropological illumination of these processes, transnational academic mobility from below. Young students, who may have never been abroad and may not know Russian nor English, guarantee themselves the opportunity to go to another country and receive a foreign diploma, that may increase their chances in the Chinese labour market, With the continuing paid help of intermediaries their ensure themselves institutional security and well-being in an alien linguistic and social environment. The culture of intermediaries gets formed outside official infrastructures of help and educational institutions by Chinese students and companies. The domain of practical knowledge of how to survive in a foreign environment and success of services of help is negotiated by students, who work as intermediates, live at the destination, know the Russian language and are able to get quickly through bureaucratic procedures in the host society, and therefore can be considered cultural insiders. The author declares no conflicts of interests.

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