Research on Strengthening Management and Service
Strategies for International Students in the Context of
COVID-19
Taking the Example of Serving International Students Studying in
China in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin
Yuanshuai Niu1,*
1Development Research Center, Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, Yunnan 650500, China
*Corresponding author. Email: 19567574@qq.com
ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the current situation of Lancang-Mekong education and cultural exchanges in the
context of the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of Chinese studying abroad service and
management, then points out some of the problems, and puts forward the countermeasures and
suggestions to strengthen the service of studying abroad in China through full-cycle management,
including: systematically building the entire cycle — it is necessary to optimize preventive control
system, make the mechanism connection unimpeded and upgrade management system; the whole
process of connotation improvement — this requires to improve the quality of studying abroad,
strengthen connotation construction, and expand the income of studying abroad; the entire cycle of
service management — in this part, it is necessary to pay attention to the "temperature" of
management, enhance service awareness, and embody humanistic care; the entire cycle of enrollment
promotion — this means that it is necessary to expand enrollment channels, innovate the brand of
studying abroad, and increase the attractiveness of coming to China. The aim of this article is to
promote international education and cultural exchanges in the Lancang-Mekong River Basin by
improving the service and management of studying abroad in China.
Keywords: education and cultural exchanges, service for studying aboard, Lancang-Mekong River Basin,
COVID-19 epidemic
I. INTRODUCTION
The key to country-to-country friendly exchanges
lies in whether the people's friendship is deep, and to
establish a deep people's friendship, it is important to
connect people with one another. The most effective
way to connect people with one another is education,
especially higher education. Educational and cultural
exchanges, as an important bridge link to enhance
mutual understanding between the people of China and
the rest of the world, have become an important driving
force for realizing people-to-people bond and
promoting the progress of human society. China,
Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, and the Lancang-
Mekong Vietnam countries are geographically close;
their relations with people are close, and they are
culturally connected. In the context of the global spread
of COVID-19 epidemic and the normalization of
Chinese epidemic prevention and control in China,
providing service for studying abroad, strengthening
educational and cultural exchanges between Lancang-
Mekong, and promoting people-to-people bond of
Lancang-Mekong are not only the reality need to
prevent the importation of COVID-19 and the rebound
of COVID-19 from within, but also an inevitable choice
to steadily set foot in the pace of opening up of
education to the outside world, strive to create a new
situation of service for studying abroad, promote the
people-to-people bond in Lancang-Mekong, and
promote the construction of a community with a shared
future for mankind.
*Fund: The phased results of the research on the historical
evolution and driving mechanism of people-to-people bond in the
Lancang-Mekong basin since the reform and opening up of the
National Social Science Fund (19BMZ071).
CLC Number: D820; Document Code: A
Advances in Economics, Business and Management Research, volume 153
Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Management, Economy and Law (ICMEL 2020)
Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.
This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license -http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. 314
II. THE CURRENT SITUATION OF LANCANG-
MEKONG EDUCATIONAL AND CULTURAL
EXCHANGES AGAINST THE BACKGROUND OF
COVID-19 EPIDEMIC — BASED ON THE
PERSPECTIVE OF SERVICE FOR STUDYING
ABROAD IN CHINA
China is the world's third and Asia's largest study
destination country, and an important destination for
students from the Lancang-Mekong basin to study in
China. Educational and cultural exchanges, as an
important bridge link to enhance mutual understanding
between the people of China and the rest of the world,
have become an important driving force for realizing
people-to-people bond and promoting the progress of
human society. At present, more than 500,000 overseas
students from more than 200 countries and regions have
come to study in China. International students in China
in China have become friendly envoys who help to
promote the people-to-people bond and tell the story of
"the Belt and Road Initiative". They are China's
"booster" for cultural exchanges with countries around
the world, "displayers" for policy guidelines, and
"loudspeakers" for cooperation results. Since the
outbreak of COVID-19, China attaches great
importance to and pays close attention to all aspects of
the study, work and life of international students in
China. It gives top priority to ensuring the health, safety
of life and property of international students, and has
rapidly formed a crisis management mechanism that is
linked at all levels and coordinated by various
departments. The specific measures are as follows:
A. Unimpeded access to information
Foreign affairs departments at all levels combine the
location characteristics and the reality of frequent
exchanges with neighboring countries, give full play to
the advantages of translation talents, and transmit
effective and transparent bilingual epidemic
information in a timely manner through various
information release mechanisms such as websites,
official accounts, and WeChat groups. And the content
includes the latest epidemic information, prevention
and control measures, policy announcements,
prevention and control progress, prevention and control
knowledge, etc. In addition, foreign language micro-
videos of epidemic prevention and control are recorded,
which are widely disseminated through websites, new
media and television, to help international students in
China understand epidemic prevention and control
knowledge and better protect themselves.
B. Being well-coordinated and inter-connected
The foreign affairs departments at all levels
combine their actual work and cooperate with
education, culture and tourism, transportation, health
and medical institutions and other departments to form
a joint force. They use cross-border joint prevention
and control mechanisms, and weave dense border
control and protection networks and other methods to
jointly prevent and control foreign-related epidemics,
and help international students in China solve practical
difficulties such as visa extensions and traffic
coordination combined with actual situations.
C. Grid management
All relevant departments earnestly implement the
main responsibilities, find out the basic statistics in
time, keep abreast of the basic situation of foreigners in
China, implement grid management, adopt methods
such as dividing up the work and assigning a part to
each individual, and full coverage registration and
investigation and so on, comprehensively strengthen the
epidemic prevention and control work for foreigners in
China, and do a good job in epidemic prevention
services, rescue and resettlement work.
D. Policy implementation by classification
All relevant departments focus on deploying the
prevention and control of COVID-19 epidemic in
schools that recruit foreign students, and do a good job
in the management of high-risk groups based on actual
conditions. In the process of dropout rehabilitation, the
online teaching method is adopted to achieve "stopping
classes without stopping teaching, and stopping classes
without stopping learning", and various measures
should be taken to help international students overcome
the problems of time difference, region, technology,
basic network, etc., and establish a teaching model of
"online course resources + live teaching platform +
WeChat group + homework before and after class".
III. THE MAIN PROBLEMS EXISTING IN
LANCANG-MEKONG EDUCATIONAL AND
CULTURAL EXCHANGES AGAINST THE
BACKGROUND OF COVID-19 EPIDEMIC —
BASED ON THE PERSPECTIVE OF SERVICE FOR
STUDYING ABROAD IN CHINA
The global epidemic situation is severe. Overseas
study service departments and institutions, including
universities, focus on epidemic prevention and control
on the one hand, and dropout rehabilitation on the
other. The original pace of service work for studying
abroad in China has been disrupted and faced many
new challenges.
A. Different problems have emerged at various stages
in terms of response to the epidemic
During the outbreak of the epidemic, various plans
such as the management of international students in
China and the delayed return of teachers and students to
school were formulated and implemented intensively.
Insufficient and unbalanced information has caused
problems in the connection of plans. In the
development stage of the epidemic, the problem of low
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315
information sharing is more obvious, and the
responsibility for epidemic prevention and control is
heavy. In order to achieve zero errors, relevant
departments and institutions of studying abroad can't
ignore any link and detail. Repeated investigation and
verification of data will inevitably lead to duplication
and redundancy of statistical work, resulting in
improper use and underutilization of precious human
and material resources.
B. The life of international students in China has been
affected to varying degrees
Some international students are stranded in schools.
Although each school has formulated a specific
emergency management plan for international students
based on a unified working mechanism and combined
with the actual situation, the survey shows that
compared with before the COVID-19 epidemic, the
lives and communication of international students have
been affected to a certain extent. In the prevention and
control of the epidemic, strict self-isolation,
complicated daily reporting procedures, and limited
behavior in many aspects have objectively increased
tension, fear, and anxiety for overseas students in
foreign countries, and even extreme cases of emotional
breakdown have occurred.
C. The original service management system for
studying abroad has been tested
The education, teaching, enrollment and
employment of foreign students are facing new
pressures. Affected by the epidemic, schools can't focus
on offline teaching. In precision to do a good job of
epidemic prevention and control at the same time, how
to overcome the problems such as the time difference
between countries, implement effective online
education and teaching for international students in
China scattered around the world, strengthen
ideological guidance, improve the enthusiasm of
learning and engagement, and guarantee the effect of
teaching progress so as to let overseas students study at
ease and efficiently are new problems and challenges
faced by educational institution. International students
are not allowed to return to school together with
Chinese students to participate in the study, especially
for international students who are about to graduate,
their return to school, job hunting and going through the
formalities of leaving school are all affected.
International students from various countries have
different channels for understanding information about
the fight against the "epidemic" and different levels of
understanding and recognition of China's anti-epidemic
stories. Especially in the early stage of the epidemic,
many countries evacuated their overseas Chinese from
China, which once had a greater impact on the
mentality and their future expectations of international
students in China, and even caused some negative
sentiments to China. With the complex evolution of the
international situation, how to make good use of the
situation to tell the Chinese story, highlight the
advantages of China's overseas education, and do a
good job in the admissions publicity of studying in
China urgently need to be solved.
IV. COUNTERMEASURES AND SUGGESTIONS
FOR STRENGTHENING THE SERVICE OF
STUDYING ABROAD IN CHINA THROUGH FULL-
CYCLE MANAGEMENT
Establishing the awareness of "full-cycle
management" has important guiding significance for
strengthening the service work for studying abroad in
China against the background of COVID-19 epidemic
and for the improvement of China's study abroad
management system in the future. It's important to
prevent the importation of COVID-19 as well as the
rebound of COVID-19 from within. The current
situation of China's epidemic prevention situation not
allow carelessness, and the cycle of the epidemic from
the outbreak to the end is still unpredictable. However,
the education and management of international students
in China has its own cycle. The graduation of
international students directly affects employment.
Failure to carry out the enrollment work as scheduled
may lead to long-term losses after the epidemic ends.
The "full-cycle management" of the service for
studying in China must be based on the status quo, aim
at the problem, make overall layout, and carry out the
work with focus step by step:
A. The whole cycle of system construction —
optimizing the prevention and control system,
unblocking mechanism connection, and upgrading
the management system
1) Establishing files and filling in cards, and
carrying out joint prevention and control: It's necessary
to establish a card and file for each foreign student in
China, do a good job in the account registration, and
report work status and monitoring and investigation on
time every day. The cycle of entry management and
epidemic prevention and control for international
students in China must be fully grasped, and the whole
process management before, during and after the event
should be realized: for international students entering
China and returning to school, it's necessary to make
pre-arranged planning and take precautions
beforehand;during the event, it's necessary to ensure
that all measures are implemented in place without
leaving hidden dangers; afterwards, it's necessary to
summarize and accumulate experience for future work.
For example, in the stage of entering China and
returning to school, the small cycle of foreign students'
individual entry — isolation-testing-returning to class
should be considered together with the big cycle of the
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316
first international student's entering China and returning
to school — the last international student's entering
China and returning to school. All stages and links in
the cycle must be coordinated and arranged in place
under the premise of maintaining the overall situation to
ensure the stable and orderly progress of work.
2) Optimizing the epidemic data reporting system
for international students in China: It's needed to
connect with foreign affairs offices, cultural and
tourism, transportation, education, and medical and
health institutions at all levels across the country,
establish an information platform for sharing epidemic
data of foreign students in China,reduce repeated
investigations and submissions, practically achieve
precise prevention and control as well as optimal
prevention and control, and rely on the platform to
establish an efficient and smooth coordination
mechanism between departmental systems with
different functions.
3) Upgrading the management system of service for
studying abroad for educational institutions: Each
educational institution can independently establish a
leading group office for the prevention and control of
international students, formulate regulations on the
prevention and control of foreign students in China
based on school-based conditions, and establish and
improve a unified data interface to seamlessly connect
with the shared data platform. Focusing on
"guaranteeing supply, stabilizing emotions, building
bridges, emphasizing interaction, solving problems, and
disseminating information", the management system for
foreign students in China that focuses on epidemic
prevention and control will be upgraded. It's necessary
to clarify the health and education administrative
departments, epidemic disease prevention center, and
designated hospitals for the treatment of COVID-19.
Relevant colleges and scientific research institutions of
the school must implement the main responsibility,
keep the line connected 24 hours a day, and establish a
smooth communication mechanism between multiple
institutions at different levels through the telephone of
the responsible person, WeChat and other contact
methods. It's needed to carry out teacher-student "1+N"
paired assistance to realize one-to-one or many-to-one
information transmission and feedback between the
school and international students. It's necessary to
further optimize the epidemic publicity and education
process and improve the "Guidelines for the Prevention
and Control of COVID-19 for International Students in
China". Colleges and universities can edit and publish
foreign language epidemic progress and publicity
materials through the International Office, and each
college is responsible for transmitting it to every
international student. At the same time, it's necessary to
strengthen public opinion guidance and guide
international students not to believe in or spread rumors,
scientifically prevent and control, prevent and control
according to law, and do a good job of publicity and
education in a chain.
B. The whole cycle of connotation improvement —
improving the quality of studying abroad,
strengthening connotation construction, and
expanding the income of studying abroad
1) Teaching in different groups and different time
to improve teaching effect: It's necessary to implement
the requirements of "stopping classes without stopping
teaching, and stopping classes without stopping
learning", fully consider the time difference of the
country where overseas students live, and divide class
students into multiple groups according to the time
difference and teach in time periods to effectively
enhance students' learning enthusiasm and
participation;it's needed to ensure that teachers and
international students in the teaching class establish
one-to-one contact, and strengthen the quality
requirements and achievement recognition of the online
learning process and multiple evaluations, so as to
ensure the teaching progress and teaching effect during
the epidemic prevention and control period.
2) Enriching teaching resources to ensure teaching
quality: It's necessary to make full use of MOOC and
high-quality online course teaching resources, aim at
the reality of overseas students, meet the diversified
language requirements, and select bilingual courses for
online education. It's necessary to fully consider the
differences in the network conditions of the countries
where foreign students are located, try a variety of
online teaching methods, and at the same time
cooperate with various teaching methods such as voice
explanations, live video, online answer, and resource
sharing to enrich the learning materials of foreign
students and ensure the quality of teaching.
3) Optimizing graduation management, and
implementing online approval and confirmation: It's
needed to explore electronic, contactless remote
graduation thesis defenses, graduation review,
graduation ceremony and graduation certificate
issuance. Through online graduation review and
recognition, in the short term, it will help to do a good
job in the graduation work of international students
during the epidemic period, and in the long run, it will
be beneficial to explore the new model of long-distance
training for international students studying in China,
and greatly expand the connotation and extension of
international students studying in China.
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C. The whole cycle of service management — paying
attention to management "temperature",
strengthening service awareness, and embodying
humanistic care
1) Paying attention to the interests of international
students through multiple channels: It's necessary to
guide international students to actively cooperate with
prevention and control arrangements, actively
participate in management, and help various
management affairs to be arranged and deployed
accurately. It's also necessary to strengthen the
guarantee of logistical services, and provide
environmental protection and convenience for
international students in China. In view of the
characteristics of international students, it is a necessity
to innovate psychological construction, strengthen
psychological guidance, and cultivate healthy
psychology. It's important to enrich cultural life,
regularly carry out "five ones" activities (one greeting
on WeChat, one heart-to-heart talk in the dormitory,
one care for the body, one gift package for health, and
one story telling well), and enhance humanistic care
through exchange activities. Setting up a volunteer
service team for international students is needed. With
the dual functions of serving and being served,
international student volunteers can become better
practitioners of prevention and control rules,
communicators of appeals, and disseminators of
Chinese spirit.
2) Doing a good job of ideological guidance for
international students in China: It's essential to make
every service link the main front of ideological
education for international students, and integrate
Chinese stories into every day of international students'
studying and living in China. The current epidemic is
spreading globally, and some Western media make
false statements about China from time to time. In this
complex situation, how to tell the story of China's
fighting against the epidemic and do a good job of
ideological guidance for international students in China
is particularly urgent. One is to use ideological and
political courses as well as international student
counselors and international student administrators, to
vividly explain the current situation through online
classrooms and online communication activities,
explain from multiple perspectives that the reason why
the foreign students stranded overseas can't return to the
school temporarily is because the school puts the life
safety and health of the international students at the first
place, share the typical characters and deeds of China's
fighting against the epidemic, tell a good story about
China's fighting against the epidemic, and display a true
China in a three-dimensional way; the second is to
organize international students in China to advise others
by using their own experience, write personal anti-
epidemic stories, produce small videos, promote safe
life in China, show the orderly resumption of work,
production and school in China, and spread true and
moving stories of China's anti-epidemic, so as to make
more present international students in China understand
the real situation and feel the power of China.
D. The whole cycle of enrolling publicity — expanding
enrollment channels, innovating the brand of
studying abroad, and increasing the attraction of
coming to China
1) Integrating resources to create an overall brand
for studying in China: The current epidemic is
spreading globally, but China has basically controlled
the epidemic and has become a "safe island" in the
global epidemic. The attractiveness of some traditional
study abroad destination countries has decreased, and
the situation of studying in China will undergo positive
changes. China's advantages in studying abroad
education will be demonstrated. It's needed to make full
use of favorable opportunities to explore coordinated
operations at the provincial level, change the situation
of educational institutions' fighting each other, promote
complementary advantages, integrate educational
advantages, provide policy support, coordinate
enrollment standards, implement strict admission
conditions,improve the quality of the source of
international students in China, build an overall brand
for studying in China, and highlight the unique
advantages of studying in China from the entrance.
2) Expanding the recruitment channels for overseas
Chinese students offline: It's important to overcome the
impact of the epidemic, carry out online and offline
dual promotion of enrollment publicity, accept
consultation online, strengthen information disclosure,
timely introduce China's anti-epidemic measures and
achievements, propagate China's prevention and control
measures and care for international students, and
strengthen the application confidence of international
students' studying in China; the offline promotion
should rely on platforms such as Confucius Institutes,
Confucius Classrooms, and alumni associations to
strengthen the recruitment and promotion of key time
periods, key regions, and key populations; for
international students who are unable to attend school
as scheduled due to the impact of the epidemic, careful
and patient explanations should be carried out to make
preparations for their postponement.
3) Innovating the training model for Chinese and
foreign students' studying in China: It's necessary to
actively develop new enrollment models such as
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"project classes", and on the basis of reducing the cost
of starting classes and ensuring the quality of the source
of students, separate classes according to nationality or
major; it's needed to fully share the achievements of
Chinese and foreign exchanges and cooperation
between universities and sign international student
exchange agreements;it's necessary to take the initiative
to make full use of the "Silk Roads" Chinese
Government Scholarship Program and other individual
scholarship applications to expand the enrollment scale
of international students in China.
V. CONCLUSION
The key to country-to-country friendly exchanges
lies in whether the people's friendship is deep. To
jointly build a "community with a shared future for
mankind", education should go first. It's needed to
strengthen the Lancang-Mekong educational and
cultural exchanges, and do a good job in the service for
studying abroad in China, which can add some bright
color to the people-to-people bond among the six
Lancang-Mekong countries. In the context of the
COVID-19 epidemic, it's necessary to maintain equal
emphasis on studying abroad and studying in China,
equal emphasis on up-scaling and quality improvement,
and equal emphasis on management by law and
improvement of services, establish full-cycle
management awareness, achieve the full cycle of
system construction, the full cycle of connotation
improvement, the full cycle of service management,
and the full cycle of enrolling publicity, and improve
the entire chain of educational and cultural exchange
management service system. And only in this way will
it be possible to promote mutual knowledge, mutual
trust, mutual learning and mutual reference among the
six Lancang-Mekong countries, and create a new
chapter in the educational and cultural exchanges of the
six Lancang-Mekong countries.
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