The Nation-state, public education and the logic of migration: Chinese students in Hungary

Public education remains the nation-state's foremost instrument of forging citizens. But the emergence of 'international education', a system explicitly based on the ideology of globality and outside the purview of national curricula, provides a way to circumvent the citizen-making machine. This article, based on fieldwork among Chinese secondary school students in Hungary, considers the interaction between 'international education' and transnational migrants in a nation-state whose public education, as the state itself, has little interest in the 'integration' of non-natives.