Educational trajectories and academic mobility within the Chinese-Russian partnership as drivers of knowledge transfer and the transformation of language practices in Indo-European countries

Abstract

The article examines the Chinese-Russian partnership in higher education as an autonomous epistemological pole that redefines conventional understandings of educational trajectories, academic mobility, and knowledge transfer; the aim of the study is to conceptualize these processes as an integrated ecosystem and to identify the mechanisms through which it influences the transformation of language practices in Indo-European countries. Methodologically, the study is grounded in an interdisciplinary qualitative design: comparative conceptual analysis (definitions and operationalization of > and < educational trajectory>> in Russian, Chinese, and Indo-European contexts), discourse analysis (scientific publications from joint projects, instructional materials, communication practices of mixed teams), and hermeneutics to interpret the value and ideological foundations of regulatory and strategic documents. The empirical base includes intergovernmental agreements, strategies of leading universities, corpora of joint scientific texts, and instructional cases; concept coding schemes and comparative matrices were employed. The results show divergence of ends and means: the Russian and Chinese models construe mobility as a tool of state strategy and technological sovereignty, whereas the Indo-European paradigm regards it as an individual human capital project; knowledge transfer is multilevel (explicit, implicit, sociocultural), with durable effects ensured by the transmission of tacit practices and value codes; linguistic transformation unfolds in the tension between language policy (institutional promotion of Russian- and Chinese-medium programs) and language practice (hybrid discourses, code-switching, terminological hybridization), gradually eroding the monopoly of English as the sole lingua franca. The discussion identifies the operation of sociocultural > (ideological, axiological, linguistic) through which knowledge is refracted in intercivilizational exchange, and substantiates the emergence of an alternative model of knowledge globalization with new requirements for internationalization strategies. The conclusions underscore the need for politico-pragmatic contextualization of borrowings, the development of bilingual/multilingual academic practices, and the design of trajectories that account for the implicit component of transfer.