Peidong Yang is Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.  He received  his doctorate from the University of Oxford, UK. His research interests include education and migration in the China-Singapore contexts as well as Internet and media in contemporary China.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Contexts: Singapore’s foreign talent programs and the Chinese middle school as a recruiting ground.- 3. Selecting scholars for Singapore: the SM2 program.- 4. Singlish and the Singaporean: cross-cultural encounter and othering.- 5. Being “very China”: self-consciousness and identity transformation.- 6. Desiring an education: scholarly idealism and anti-scholarly entrepreneurialism.