Negotiating Everyday Transnationalism: A Qualitative Inquiry Into the Marital Lives of International Students in China and Their Chinese Partners

ABSTRACT This study explores how transnational marriages between international students in China and their Chinese partners foster everyday transnationalism. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, it examines how everyday transnationalism is continually negotiated in the transnational social fields developed through long‐term friendships, emotional bonds and intercultural negotiations. Everyday transnationalism in these marriages is characterized by religious adaptation, fluid translingual communication, hybrid domestic routines and expanded transnational identities. Unlike economically driven migration marriages, these unions are voluntary, emotionally grounded, educationally embedded, culturally conscious and gender‐intersected. By highlighting love, adaptability and mutual respect as defining features, this study challenges dominant narratives that frame transnational marriages as strategic or transactional. Theoretically, this study contributes to transnationalism and cultural hybridity debates by foregrounding education‐based mobility and marriage. Empirically, it offers new insights into the post‐graduation lives of international students by focusing on family formations, identity transformations and intercultural negotiations within the globalizing context of Chinese higher education.