Returnees’ Cultural Identity And Re-entry Culture Shock In Second-and Third-tier Cities

As China’s economy has enjoyed fast development over the years, the people whostudy abroad return to home country continually, and they are given a special name“returnee”. In this paper, returnees are restrictively defined as not only those students whojust graduated abroad, but visiting scholars who furthered their study there for more thanhalf a year. With the intense competitive job market in the first-tier cities and a series offavorable policies from local governments, many returnees chose to start their job career insecond-or third-tier cities and became strategic human capital to the local economy.Because of the unique characteristics in cultural perspective in Second-and Third-tiercities, returnees met even more serious cultural shock on returning than those in first-tiercities.This paper generally includes three parts: theories of cultural identity and re-entryculture shock, quantitative research and its result, and result analysis and strategies. Amongthem, the quantitative research and the analysis of its result are the most important parts.Although cultural identity, our cultural perspective on the world, is invisible, it shapeseverything we are. For returnees, after cultural transition process, they have changed theiroriginal cultural identity. Sussman, a cultural psychologist in America, concluded thatreturnees had four kinds of new cultural identity: subtractive identity, additive identity,affirmative identity and global identity. The interview and questionnaire parts in this paperare based on Sussman’s research on Hong Kong returnees. By strict screening criteria andthe “snowball sampling” method, the author recruited100respondents including50returnees and50participants who have no experience abroad and are all from second-andthird-tier cities in Hebei province. By comparing the statistics of the two groups (with thehelp of the SPSS predictive analytics software), most of the returnees were identified as theadditive identity. They would like to seek out opportunities to interact with members of theformer host culture rather than share their confusion with other returnees. In the analysisand discussion part, the author pointed out that, with the admixture of Chinese and westernphilosophy, additive identity, to some extent, was an inevitable consequence for returnees.Finally, according to the information that the participants gave during the survey, theauthor concluded their major difficulties and proposed some strategies on culturalre-adaptation.This paper is a preliminary survey to returnees in second-and third-tier cities in Hebeiprovince. It is hoped that this study could attract attention from both returnees and peoplefrom all walks of life and could bring their awareness on returnees’ re-entry culture shock.Although it involves considerable time and efforts to complete this systematic quantitativeresearch, it still has some limitations, which, I believe, will be perfected in the future study.