Global scholars are welcome! A multimodal content analysis of Chinese universities’ recruitment posts targeted as overseas scholars

With the growth of China’s higher education industry, an increasing number of Chinese scholars worldwide have been embarking on new career chapters in mainland China as “returnee academics” in recent years. Meanwhile, China is becoming an emerging hub for international researchers as career development considerations. Numerous national, regional, and institutional talent attraction and retention policies have been implemented throughout this process to lure global talents, which drives the talent competition to an intense phase. As one type of discourse, job advertisements bridge recruiters and job hunters, hoping that potential applicants will be attracted and motivated to join the institutions based on the information communicated through the ads. A framework is developed by identifying verbal and visual resources presented in these ads as evaluative attributes to demonstrate the core competitiveness of universities, and a multimodal content analysis approach on global talent recruitment ads of 39 representative universities in mainland China was applied as a lens to interpret: (a) how institutions’ research capability and institutional support are presented; (b) how Chinese traits are spread to global academia, both Chinese and foreigners; (c) and how internationalization features are used to describe Chinese institutions capacity in the world market. These not only contribute to the pull factors of global recruitment of academics but also reflect the image that China’s academia is displaying to the world. It is also an opportunity to scrutinize spots that might be overlooked to elevate China’s international competitiveness and influence and demonstrate its soft power.