Panel: Political engagement among Asian Australians
Scholarship on Chinese international students’ political agency has largely followed two paths: homeland-oriented mobilisation, including nationalism and pro-China activism, and civic incorporation into host-society democratic norms. Both privilege publicly visible action and risk leaving the political agency of less active and ‘inactive’ students under-theorised. Drawing on seven focus groups with 33 Chinese-background international students in Melbourne, this study examines safety-related claim-making as a site of political socialisation, exploring how students assess their entitlement to safety and evaluate collective action as a means of making claims in the host society. We identify three linked dimensions of political reasoning that shape these students' orientations towards collective action: (1) commodified entitlement to safety, frequently articulated through student-consumer language; (2) ambivalent evaluations of protest as morally legitimate and expressive yet instrumentally uncertain; and (3) risk calculations surrounding public visibility, visa precarity, racialised backlash, institutional uncertainty and transnational traceability. Through these everyday encounters and processes of political learning in the host society, students develop and revise their understandings of political entitlement, effective action and the risks of public visibility as temporary residents. We argue that this process of mundane political socialisation generates contingent nonparticipation, ranging from online support and observation to cautious attendance and deliberate abstention. Political agency among Chinese international students develops and evolves through situated reasoning about entitlement, efficacy, exposure and legitimate claim-making, producing selective and conditional orientations towards participation in the host society.
