This article focuses on the entanglement of trajectories of transnational education/work and religious conversion among
Chinese overseas students who move to the UK before returning to China. In contrast to the existing literature on returnees where the gaze
is only turned on highly prestigious schemes/trajectories of return, we look at those who become involved with Christian evangelical
congregations and bible reading groups in response to a general state of disillusion with social beliefs of global competition and success.
By drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in London and Beijing, we engage with literature on lived religion, migration and the care of
the self through a sociolinguistic lens. We take pressures for successful return as a technology of hope that shaped our participants’
experiences of Christian conversion, and examine religious practices as support-based subject-transformation projects whereby our
participants regulate their and others’ practices and feelings through daily semiotic activities as they operate within global spaces of
higher education and the labour market. In so doing, we detail a complex interplay of self-transformation experiences, collective practices
of refusal, and capitalist logics of market expansion.
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