Exploring Chinese students’ issues and concerns of studying abroad amid COVID-19 pandemic: an actor-network perspective

Chinese students’ issues and concerns of studying abroad amid the COVID-19 pandemic have been largely neglected in the tourism and hospitality education research. Based on the actor-network perspective, this paper explores the network of issues and concerns of Chinese students who have planned to study abroad. In-depth interviews, observations, and open-ended questionnaires are employed with a purposive sample of 16 hospitality students from a university in Macau. We identify five major concerns and issues namely health risk, dissatisfaction with online study, feeling difficult to get into a top university, discrimination of Chinese in the West, and perception of restricted opportunity to make a cross-cultural exchange.