Mapping the Chinese Academic Diaspora in Higher Education Research

Chinese scholars working outside China have been extensively studied, yet scholarship remains concentrated on STEM fields and single hostland–homeland dyads, leaving unexamined how a dispersed social-science community sustains and reconfigures connection at population scale. Taking the Chinese academic diaspora in higher education (HE) research as a case, this article applies a scale-space lens to map its composition, geographical distribution, and modes of knowledge production. Drawing on Web of Science records between 1991 and 2024, we identify 9,276 diaspora authors and 12,195 diaspora-involved articles. The analysis reveals a range of configurations through which academic connectivity is enacted, manifested in relocation, collaboration, and research topic. The Chinese HE diaspora community expanded throughout the timespan and increasingly dispersed toward Asian systems without displacing the Anglophone centre. Hostland co-authorship continues to dominate its collaboration profile, while homeland ties and intra-diaspora networks have both grown. Studying China-related topics constitutes a distinctive route to homeland connection for social scientists. Interest in China as a research subject held steady before writing about China with homeland colleagues became more available in recent years. Different hostland systems see diverse levels of representation of China-related work in their HE scholarship. Cross-scale plural connectivity exists but is not always salient. Scalar primacy shifts contingent to hostland contexts and external influences.