“Only 20 days left before classes start, and I still don’t have a visa or a plane ticket, let alone accommodation. With so little time, am I supposed to sleep on the street?” A recent comment on social media struck a nerve with Chinese international students.

On the first day after the Chinese New Year holiday, China’s Ministry of Education announced it would stop recognising overseas university qualifications obtained through online remote learning. For international students, the pandemic-era remote-teaching arrangement has come to an end. Tens of thousands of Chinese students who had applied to Australian universities and were preparing to attend online classes now have to rush to Australia before the semester begins.

For the Australian education sector, the arrival of Chinese students will be “the key to the country’s economic recovery.” This is particularly true in Victoria, the so-called education state, where Chinese students have returned to the top spot by number — in 2022, Indian students briefly overtook Chinese students and made up a quarter of the state’s international student population, but before COVID-19 China had always led.

Even before the education relationship was normalised, China had already eased its import ban on Australian coal. Over the previous two-plus years of trade sanctions, Australian barley, coal and wine — along with other goods — had been frozen out. With Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s new government taking office, the two countries are working to improve relations. The recovery in Chinese student numbers is widely seen as the most conspicuous sign of mutual goodwill.

Chinese Students Flooding Back — Logistics Struggling to Cope

“My life plans have been completely upended. I had already received an offer from a company and was planning to intern in Guangzhou — I’d even rented a place. But now I have to return to Australia before 20 February to finish my last semester.” Karen Zhang, 22, is from Huizhou in Guangdong. After the pandemic broke out, she applied for a Master of Accounting at the University of New South Wales and started attending online classes across the Pacific.

The trigger was a “special announcement” issued in late January by China’s Ministry of Education. It stated that overseas university qualifications obtained through online remote learning would no longer be recognised — a policy that had been significantly relaxed during the pandemic out of concern for students’ health and safety.

As countries have progressively reopened their borders — especially since 8 January this year, when China’s COVID-19 response entered a new phase — face-to-face in-person teaching is no longer out of reach. The announcement was also intended to protect the interests of students pursuing education overseas and to maintain fairness in education.

For many Chinese students still stuck at home taking online classes, however, the announcement came as something of a shock. On one hand, Australia’s higher education regulator last year set July 2023 as the final deadline for international students to return, and many Chinese students were not ready to leave for Australia immediately. On the other hand, most Australian universities begin semester one between late February and early March — meaning students have less than a month to sort out visas, flights, accommodation and a host of other matters.

“Right now everyone is still in Chinese New Year mode, and a lot of agencies are still closed for the holidays,” Karen says. Although airfares to Australia have dropped from pandemic-era highs, they are still close to 5,000 RMB, and tickets on certain dates are already sold out.

“What really gives me a headache is accommodation. Reputable Australian agencies don’t offer remote inspections, so I can only join more WeChat groups for Chinese students and see if I can find someone to flat-share with.” According to her, weekly rent for a typical two-bedroom apartment in Melbourne has risen from around AUD 400 two years ago to over AUD 500.

The Australian education sector was hit hard during the pandemic, with border closures forcing many international students to return home. Some universities moved to online delivery, but students still had to pay full fees. Recognition of cross-border remote qualifications was a special concession for pandemic conditions; the current change in rules simply returns to pre-pandemic practice. The Australian Department of Education estimates that at least 40,000 Chinese students, like Karen, need to arrive in Australia in a short window.

Australian Federal Education Minister Jason Clare welcomed China’s move, saying many universities have been preparing for students to return to Australia. He also conceded that the sudden decision could cause some short-term issues, and said he was discussing with Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil how to resolve them.

Oscar Zi Shao Wong, President of the Council of International Students Australia, told Phoenix Weekly that for some students the current situation is “extremely difficult” — they cannot return on time or smoothly begin their studies. “Generally, students from China, India, Pakistan and Iran may face longer processing times when applying for Australian student visas, with waits sometimes exceeding three years.”

Before the pandemic, there were around 150 flights a week between China and Australia. Now, only five mainland cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Qingdao and Xiamen — have direct flights to Australia, all operated by Chinese carriers. According to The Guardian Australia, in recent days most flights from China to Australia have been almost full, while return flights to China carry far fewer passengers. Australian airlines are actively handling enquiries from Chinese students and are expected to restore more direct services.

Scape Group is Australia’s largest owner and operator of student accommodation. Founder Craig Carracher told Phoenix Weekly that since last August, room bookings have been “extraordinarily strong.” Most of Scape’s 12,000 student apartments in Sydney and Brisbane are booked by Chinese students, and many have recently been booking rooms via international calls — but with very few vacancies, most can only be added to a waitlist.

Paul Fell, Chief Operating Officer of Cedar Pacific, another apartment group, also acknowledged that student demand has exceeded expectations. The company has recently developed three student accommodation towers in Melbourne. One newly opened building, near the University of Melbourne, has 51 storeys and 900 beds, with occupancy already at 74%; an apartment block near the Royal Melbourne Hospital is at 71% occupancy.

“Seven out of every ten Australian university students come from overseas, with Chinese students making up 18% and students from other Asian countries 14%,” Fell told Phoenix Weekly — though before the pandemic, Chinese students accounted for as much as 30%.

A message from the Property Council of Australia has added to students’ anxiety: vacancy rates in some capital cities are already near zero this year. At the same time, according to publicly released data from the Australian Department of Education, between 1 January and 25 January 2023, more than 3,500 Chinese students had already arrived in Australia.

“72% of Chinese students choose to study at eight elite Australian universities such as UNSW and the University of Melbourne. We estimate that 8% of Chinese undergraduates — and a higher proportion of postgraduates — will struggle to return in time for the start of the new semester.” Vicki Thomson, Chief Executive of Australia’s Group of Eight (Go8), said they are urging the Australian government to prioritise visa processing for all international students and minimise disruption.

Spokespeople for the University of Sydney and UNSW have also pledged that, given numerous unavoidable circumstances, they will continue to offer remote learning to overseas students who cannot return, until full in-person teaching resumes in semester two. A University of Melbourne spokesperson said that in semester one some postgraduate programs will continue to be offered online, but all undergraduate courses will be delivered in person.

Phil Honeywood, Chief Executive of the International Education Association of Australia, said that among all international students, Chinese students rank first by number. As of mid-November 2022, around 62,000 Chinese students enrolled at Australian universities were still outside the country. In the past month, Australia has accepted another 7,900 study applications. “Even as I’m giving this interview, many Chinese students are no doubt scrambling to board flights to Australia.”

“Reverse Study Abroad” — But Still Good Value?

Jackie Fang is a postgraduate accounting student at the University of Tasmania. She told Phoenix Weekly: “There are 80 students in my year in my program — 52 Chinese, 19 Indians and only two locals. When we do group assignments, sometimes Chinese alone is enough, and WeChat is our main communication tool. The president and most of the committee of the university’s international students’ association are also Chinese.”

It’s not just the students. Many professors in her program are from India and Southeast Asia, while their teaching assistants are native Chinese speakers. “To help Chinese students earn credits, the university even offers electives in classical Chinese poetry appreciation, Chinese literature and English-to-Chinese translation.” Jackie jokes that she has hardly any opportunity to speak English — instead, she has picked up Cantonese from her flatmates.

As Chinese living standards have risen, studying abroad is no longer a luxury. Students half-jokingly refer to this phenomenon as “reverse study abroad.”

In early October 2022, a video titled “A UK university classroom full of Chinese students” went viral online, with over a million views. The video showed a tiered lecture theatre seating around a hundred people — almost all of them Chinese students, with even the lecturer on stage having a Chinese face. If the video hadn’t specified it was filmed at the University of Nottingham, it could have been mistaken for a classroom at a Chinese university.

According to LinkedIn data, in 2022 some 207,000 Chinese students graduated from universities in the US, with China remaining the largest source country for the US for 14 consecutive years. Among all non-EU students on UK campuses, one in three is from China.

Australia is particularly coveted by Chinese students. At the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, UNSW, the University of Technology Sydney, the University of Adelaide, the University of Queensland and the University of Tasmania, Chinese students make up more than half of the international student body — a proportion higher than at any US or European university.

Jackie told Phoenix Weekly that she did her undergraduate studies in China, not at a top-tier “Double First-Class” university, and majored in business administration — which made finding a job after graduation difficult. Her parents had urged her to try for the civil service, but in 2021 the national civil service exam saw applicants surge to 1.576 million, with an average competition ratio of about 61:1 — the difficulty is obvious. “In my third year I had started preparing for the postgraduate entrance exam, but the pressure was too much. Five of the six people in my dorm were preparing for it, and the sixth was studying for IELTS to apply for a UK master’s program.”

In 2022, 4.57 million people applied nationally for the master’s entrance exam — a record high. In contrast, total admissions that year were only around 1.1 million, giving a “success rate” of just 24%. The 2023 applicant count is expected to exceed 4.74 million.

China Education Online compiles an annual National Postgraduate Admissions Survey Report. Looking at the past two reports, more than 80% of exam candidates come from non-Double-First-Class undergraduate backgrounds, nearly half spend six to twelve months preparing, and the pass rate is below 18%. For Double-First-Class universities, the postgraduate admission rate is as low as 9%.

Low admission rates aren’t the only problem: under employment pressure, the applicant-to-place ratio for hot majors is striking — at Nankai University, for example, finance is 14.1:1, the law school 12.7:1 and the school of economics 10:1.

“At the end of my third year I discussed it with my parents and changed direction. Rather than be weeded out in the postgraduate exam — or end up with a job paying only 3,000 to 4,000 RMB a month after graduation — I’d take a gamble and study abroad.” Once she’d made up her mind, Jackie used her final-year internship period to consult agencies, compare countries, cram for IELTS, and ultimately chose the University of Tasmania as the best “value for money.” “It’s not a Group of Eight university, but relatively speaking, the two-year master’s only takes about a year and a half of actual study once holidays are deducted. The qualification is easy to obtain, there’s no thesis requirement, tuition is only 100,000 RMB a year, and living costs are lower than in the UK and similar places.”

In the latest QS World University Rankings, Australia has five universities in the global top 50 and seven in the top 100 — an impressive showing for a country with only 39 universities.

Another reason she chose Australia: compared with the US, entry requirements are slightly lower; compared with one-year UK master’s degrees, Australian programs are seen as less “watered down”; compared with other European countries, you don’t need to learn another language; and the pricing is moderate, the environment liveable, the time difference with China small, and there are multiple viable migration pathways — all of them pluses.

Accordingly, in education.com’s newly released “2022 Top Ten Countries to Study Abroad” ranking, Australia overtook previous champion Canada to claim the top spot for the first time.

In Jackie’s words, the only awkward thing is that she feels like she has gone abroad — and also hasn’t. Looking ahead, she is still optimistic: she is confident she will find a higher-paying job once she returns to China, and that she will be more competitive than her peers in the marriage market. “After graduating, I’ll try to work in Australia for a couple of years first to gain experience. The average annual salary for blue-collar workers here is AUD 56,000 (about 270,000 RMB) — it’s a paradise for workers.”

Education has long been Australia’s fifth-largest export industry, contributing value almost on par with gold. Before the pandemic, education generated USD 40 billion in revenue for the country; after the outbreak, that figure plummeted to USD 22 billion. Public data show that in September 2019 there were 165,149 Chinese students holding Australian student visas, but in the same month in 2022 that figure had dropped by 53% to just 78,234.

The Sydney-based Aus-China Study Group has long provided international education support services for Chinese students. Its head, Yvonne McArthur, revealed that their business has fallen about 70% compared with pre-pandemic levels — enough to “destroy the whole industry.” Kirk Yan, head of New Stars Education & Migration’s Melbourne office, admits that study applications over the past two years have been almost halved.

As Chinese student numbers have dropped, some Australian universities are going through serious financial difficulties — cutting salaries, reducing teaching and support staff and dropping some subject areas, which will seriously affect the country’s education and research.

Australia urgently needs international students, especially from China. PwC has estimated that for every AUD 1 a student pays in tuition, they contribute a further AUD 1.15 to the state economy.

Phil Honeywood, Chief Executive of the International Education Association of Australia, said it was only after Prime Minister Anthony Albanese met China’s head of state in Bali in November 2022 that applications from Chinese students began to rebound on a “large scale.” Even so, student visa application volumes have not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels — and over the past three years, new Indian student visa applications have, for the first time, overtaken Chinese ones.

On the topic of “qualification inflation,” Kirk Yan points out that although “reverse study abroad” and “watered-down master’s” have become buzzwords over the past two years, the situation is far from “rampant” — after all, only families at the top of the pyramid can afford to send their children overseas.

“If you look at the QS Graduate Employability Rankings, Australian universities perform very well. Two Australian universities are in the global top ten for employability — the University of Sydney is 4th and the University of Melbourne is 7th. Australian universities also rank highly in terms of employer reputation.” Kirk Yan told Phoenix Weekly that studying abroad is not just about earning an overseas qualification — it’s also about improving foreign-language skills, expanding social networks and broadening an international outlook. “Beyond the traditionally popular accounting and IT majors, we’re now seeing a clear increase in enquiries about nursing, social work, teaching and law, which shows that Chinese students coming to Australia are choosing from a more diverse set of options.”

Studying in Australia — Still Watch Out for Hidden Risks

On 25 January, a special farewell ceremony was held at the famous tourist site of Bruny Island in Tasmania. People placed white chrysanthemums — symbolising peaceful rest — along the shore of Lighthouse Bay, in memory of Harry, a 16-year-old Chinese boy who drowned there on 7 November 2021.

Before the tragedy, he had spent three years at a secondary school in Hobart, Tasmania’s capital. More than a year after the accident, his friends finally received the official coroner’s report, which confirmed that he had drowned while diving, after his ankles became entangled in a nylon line. After the accident, the local homestay family responsible for his day-to-day care was also investigated — why had they allowed him to dive alone?

For international students who are minors, if they choose to live off-campus they must stay with a homestay family. As international student numbers have risen, the quality of homestay families has varied, and differences in food, language, culture and lifestyle bring both visible and hidden risks.

In addition, the “reverse study abroad” phenomenon mentioned earlier has put international students in an awkward position. Like most prospective international students, Chinese students expect to meet Australian peers, experience local culture and have genuine cross-cultural exchange before they leave home.

In reality, because local universities need to generate revenue, some courses are designed from the outset to attract international students — particularly master’s programs in business, economics, finance and accounting. The scene Chinese students imagine — blending in with local classmates — often doesn’t materialise: many find themselves almost entirely cut off from non-Chinese students, which breeds disappointment.

Even when international and local students are placed together, friendships don’t form automatically. Mona, who did her undergraduate degree at a Sydney university, says that even in mixed classrooms socialising is completely split — Chinese students sit with Chinese students, and locals with locals. In private conversations each group complains about the other; Chinese students often feel sn\ubbed and excluded by local peers, while some locals are unhappy with the scale of the Chinese student presence.

That’s before considering the many day-to-day problems Chinese students face that Australian universities simply aren’t equipped to handle: disputes with employers while working part-time, disputes with landlords over rental accommodation, unfamiliarity with the country’s legal system, and difficulty accessing psychological counselling.

Even more “hidden” risks come from the “China threat” narrative that has become more prominent in recent years.

For example, in 2021 the Australian government proposed a draft set of “Guidelines to Counter Foreign Interference in Universities,” training domestic university students to identify and report “foreign interference threats” on campus. This was widely seen as targeted at China. UTS’s orientation program for international students includes guidance on how to report intimidation and surveillance by other students.

As early as before the pandemic, Salvatore Babones, an Associate Professor at the University of Sydney, published a paper titled “The China Student Boom and the Risks It Poses to Australian Universities,” arguing that some Australian universities were playing with fire by becoming increasingly reliant on revenue from international students — Chinese students in particular. Some Western media added fuel to the fire, claiming that “in order to increase revenue, Australian universities have sacrificed their own values and even national security.”

Australia is accustomed to branding itself as “the most successful multicultural society in the world.” However, as China-Australia relations have deteriorated, some politicians have politicised anything China-related — for instance, some Chinese students have been summarily deported for allegedly concealing prior military training, and some Australian research institutions have suspended collaborations with Chinese counterparts. During the pandemic, discriminatory rhetoric and behaviour towards Chinese and Asian people increased, making many Chinese students reluctant to come to Australia.

John Fitzgerald, Emeritus Professor at Swinburne University of Technology and a leading China expert, has warned that when bilateral relations are hostile, Chinese graduates of Australian universities may find it harder to get jobs back home.

In response, last May 15 academics from Australian universities issued an open letter to the federal government calling for an improvement in relations with China. The federal government subsequently introduced a series of measures to attract international students back, including waiving the AUD 630 visa application fee and scrapping the 40-hour-per-fortnight work-hour cap.

A former Vice-Chancellor of UNSW has also called for the focus to be on how to properly educate every university student — including the more than 100,000 Chinese students — rather than on producing sensational claims that “China is interfering in Australian universities.” “Misguided, biased and inflammatory violence and bigotry will lead us down a dark path. All of this is far removed from the integrity, kindness and ability we see in our Chinese students.”

All the more so because Chinese students have already become “the key to economic recovery” — a view shared not only by the Group of Eight, but across Australian society.