As the rapid development of internationalization in Chinese higher education, the number and scale of international scholars working in China has significantly increased. However, few studies have focused on international scholars’ cross-cultural encounters in the Chinese academic context. Based on 21 in-depth interviews, this article investigates international scholars’ subjective experiences in a cross-cultural setting through Bourdieu’s conceptual lens. After presenting an overview of participants’ major motivations for working in China, we find their vague and idealistic expectations engendered “false anticipation” of their possible career future in China, which left some of them unprepared to experience a sense of misfit when entering the new field of Chinese academia. Moreover, we identify the dual habitus–field disjunctures emerging from participants’ perceptions of misfit in the cross-cultural scenario, namely explicit disjuncture and implicit disjuncture, which reveal the underlying reasons for mismatch between international scholars’ previously generated habitus and the new field of Chinese universities.

In the Chinese context of a stratified higher education system and significant urban–rural inequality, rural students are generally facing constrained possibilities for social mobility through higher education. Despite these structural constraints, some exceptional rural students, like all the participants in this research, manage to get themselves enrolled in the urban university. Drawing on participants’ subjective narratives about their first encounters in the urban university, I argue that the rural students in this research were confronted with two levels of habitus–field disjunctures, namely, the rural–urban disjuncture and academic disjuncture. Then, through examining participants’ narratives about their hysteresis effects and emotional suffering, I suggest the sense of feeling lost and inferior reveals how various types of domination in the external structure of the field of the urban university play a part in affecting rural students’ inner emotional worlds.

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Oral insulin delivery is often limited by protease degradation. 2-(Dimethylamino)-2-oxoethyl 4-(4-guanidinobenzoyloxy)phenylacetate methanesulphonate (Camostat mesylate) is reported to have the ability to inhibit trypsin activity, which is the main protease responsible for protein degradation. This study attempted to form a novel nanoparticle by covalently conjugating 4-(2-(2-aminoethylamino)-2-oxoethyl)phenyl 4-guanidinobenzoyloxy (FOY-251), an active derivative of camostat mesylate, to the backbone of poly (γ-glutamic acid) (γ-PGA), in order to improve insulin stability against protease. Goblet cell targeting CSKSSDYQC (CSK) peptide was demonstrated to effectively improve the epithelial absorption of insulin. Therefore, the novel nanoparticle was prepared by mixing cationic peptide modified trimethyl chitosan (TMC-CSK) with anionic γPGA-FOY conjugate using multi-ion crosslinked method. Results showed that not only the γPGA-FOY conjugate but also the prepared novel nanoparticle could inhibit trypsin activity both in vitro environment and on the intestinal mucosal surface. This study would be beneficial for peptide modified nanoparticles in oral insulin delivery.

In the context of enduring urban–rural inequality in China, attention has been drawn to rural students’ encounters in the urban university. In this research, I elicit rural students’ narratives about their (classed) perceptions of clothing and style, as well as the bodily practices embedded in their subjective social mobility experiences in the unique social milieu of China’s context. I argue that participants’ transforming practices entail a nexus of challenge to and also compliance with the urban field. Through the theoretical lens of habitus, I illustrate how rural students strategically transform their ‘style’, as dispositions of habitus, in the urban field to obtain valued forms of embodied capital. At the same time, I emphasise the importance of viewing rural students’ embodied transformations critically, as it entails both their effective generation of valued capital to actively adapt to the urban field and their (involuntary) compliance to the oppressive social relations.