“Whenever Dubai came up, the first thing that sprang to mind was a scene of giddy excess, all money and glamor, a life of nothing but luxury,” says Hu, a Chinese student in Dubai.

That image aligns with how mass media tends to portray Dubai. The Netflix reality show “Dubai Bling” offers a dramatized look at the city’s ultra-rich circles and their ostentatious lifestyles, and many people imagine the migrants and international students who come here in much the same way.

But after more than half a year in the United Arab Emirates interviewing Chinese students in Dubai, I found that the Gulf states are emerging as a new draw for Chinese students and that their lives bear little resemblance to the Dubai of the popular imagination. Many come because the Gulf offers international education at a relatively affordable cost. More intriguingly, the Gulf is becoming a place where they reimagine the global order and their place within it.

For a long time, the main destinations for Chinese students studying abroad were North America, Europe, and Australia. Over the past few years, however, the UAE has quietly emerged as a new option.

In Dubai alone, universities now host 741 Chinese students, and the numbers are also climbing at universities in Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, and elsewhere. Over the past 30 years, the UAE’s higher-education sector has become both more commercialized and more international, with globally prominent universities opening branch campuses and local public universities earning respectable international rankings. Relatively low tuition, available scholarships, and highly internationalized curricula have gradually put the UAE on the radar of students and study-abroad agencies alike. For many students, the UAE may not be the ultimate dream, but it can serve as a stepping stone.

Some students have parents whose work or business keeps them moving among Southeast and West Asian countries such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia, exposing them to the internationalized higher education on offer in the Gulf. Many come from northwestern China, whose longstanding ties to the Arab world make them grassroots bridges in China-Arab relations. Others come from middle-class families who, caught between the white-hot competition of the gaokao, the Chinese national college entrance exam, and the steep tuition of Western universities, discovered the UAE through study-abroad agencies.

While many parents still hope their children will study in the West and perhaps build careers there, students are increasingly making more pragmatic choices shaped by the current global situation and social change.

Perhaps surprisingly, many of the students I interviewed chose to study here on their own after learning about UAE universities through agencies and then persuading their parents. Li, for one, was drawn by the job prospects offered by the UAE’s position along the Belt and Road, a Chinese-led trade and infrastructure network. Both his parents are civil servants and had expected him to sit the gaokao and go on to a government job. But in high school, an agency sparked his interest in attending university in the UAE.

To win over his hesitant parents, he painted them a rosy picture: “I told them that economic cooperation between the UAE and China is booming and would give me better job opportunities than I’d have back home; that here I could learn Arabic and pick up a scarce skill. I even did the math. The University of Sharjah, which I chose, is a public university, and with a scholarship my total costs would come to around 150,000 yuan a year (roughly $21,000), far less than at a Western university.”

Hu, who studies electrical engineering at the same university, had more down-to-earth reasons: “I was a middling student and figured finding work in China later would be tough, so I went through an agency to find a university in the UAE.”

Like Hu, many Chinese students arrived picturing Dubai as a city bristling with skyscrapers and awash with the flashily rich. But they soon saw another side of the “elsewhere” they had imagined. Many say that studying and living in the Gulf has given them a sense of belonging and the possibility of a future there.

Migrants make up 88% of the UAE’s population, most of them from other Middle Eastern countries and developing nations across Asia. At universities, most students come from across Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. As Hu put it: “Once you get here, you feel that luxury is only a small slice of Dubai. There are a lot of migrants from developing countries here doing the labor, so the UAE is really a place of huge gaps between rich and poor.”

Studying here has also gradually dissolved their cultural prejudices about the Arab world. Li told me, “Before I came, Arabic music sounded to me like chanting scripture. But once, volunteering at a music festival here, I heard a famous Moroccan singer perform. The music was sublime; it shook me to the core and completely changed how I think about Arabic music.”

At the same time, many Chinese students have undergone a kind of reassessment of the West. News reports about anti-immigrant sentiment have left them feeling that these countries may not be so welcoming after all. Their changing aspirations reflect how movement toward the emerging economies of the Global South is reshaping young people’s understanding of the global order and their own place within it.

As Chinese investment reaches ever deeper into the Gulf, the language, cultural knowledge, and social capital these students acquire are becoming increasingly valuable. At a careers fair at Khalifa University, I learned that many Chinese-funded firms were already recruiting on local campuses across several sectors, looking for people who both speak Chinese and understand the Emirati market.

Compared with students in the West, who face the twin challenges of identity and employment amid strained international relations, Li has come to feel that the UAE offers broader room to grow and better job opportunities. Hui told me much the same: “A lot of new-energy-vehicle companies are going global now, and if you know Arabic, on top of my electrical engineering background, you can be a great bridge between China and this side.”

Yet the students also admit that they have not built a deeper understanding of local society and culture. Many have barely encountered local film and television; their cultural consumption remains confined to the Chinese-language internet and to Japanese, Korean, and American dramas. This reflects how proximity to Arab cultural life does not override established global norms of cultural consumption among Chinese students. Although many Chinese students expressed a desire to learn Arabic, their progress was limited by its difficulty and the lack of university provision, restricting how deeply they could engage with local and international students. As a result, they often see the UAE through an economic development lens and as an opportunity rather than the realities of everyday life.

Whether they choose the UAE as a place to study or to work and live in the future, Chinese students’ considerations are intensely practical. Yet these choices are also shaping their cultural outlook and social awareness, helping them cultivate a more open mindset toward non-Western cultures. For many of these students, studying in the UAE does not overturn established cultural preferences, but it does widen the map on which they imagine education, work, and possible futures.

This article is co-authored by Yuting Wang, Professor of International Studies at American University of Sharjah (UAE).

Translator: Dasha Cowley.

(Header image: Visitors take photos in front of the “I Love Dubai” sign at Dubai Mall in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, May 6, 2026. Altaf Qadri/AP Photo via VCG)