The migration of Chinese students to the UK has long been the focus of academic and policymaking attention. However, what happens to their transnational mobility after their education remains understudied. This article unpacks the migration decision-making process behind graduates' study-to-employment transition. We focus on individuals' on-going reinterpretation of capital convertibility between China and the UK and examine how the meaning of mobility changes in time and in the transnational socio-economic environment. In so doing, we draw on in-depth interviews with graduates who have remained in the UK, as well as with returnees. Our findings reveal our participants' periodic uncertainty about professional opportunities and attendant mobility choices in the context of fast-paced socio-economic change in China and in the UK. The article thus calls for a more supportive post-study work policy environment for international students in the UK, especially in the context of uncertainty about Brexit.

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In this intervention, we discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic has reconfigured transnational mobilities, connections, and solidarities, which reveals the fragility of transnationalism predicated on cosmopolitan ethics but rooted in nation-level politics. We show that as the pandemic severely disrupted transnational (infra)structures predicated on state-centric transnationalism from above, the survival and well-being of diverse transnationally mobile groups, such as refugees, transnational families, and international students, have been placed under unprecedented threat. In doing so, we reflect on the configurations of transnationalism in sociological understandings of globalisation, in and beyond the context of COVID-19. We advance an urgent call for action to address the consequences of the pandemic for vulnerable people who lead precarious lives in a transnational limbo caught in the gaps between nation-states.

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