Formation of Aspects of Social and Sociocultural Adaptation among Students of the People’s Republic of China Using the Example of the Initial Stages of Training

The internationalization of education is one of the key vectors of development in modern education, embracing the exchange of knowledge, research results, and experience. The current geopolitical situation is changing the architecture of the global educational space, shifting the vectors of international educational flows of academic mobility toward the Asia-Pacific region, leading to an increase in the number of students from this region at Russian universities, where 48,000 students from China alone are currently studying. Therefore, one of the most important issues in the education of international students remains their adaptation to the educational process. Each international student faces a number of challenges at the beginning of their studies, including adaptation to learning and socialization. Moreover, the adaptation of first- and second-year undergraduate students who have not previously completed programs outside their home country is of particular importance. These students most clearly represent the cluster of students adapting to completely new, previously untested conditions, helping to better understand the necessary structure of the management model for such groups, which in turn will directly impact the quality of the specialty they master and their overall motivation for learning. Furthermore, to better un- derstand the adaptation processes of international students in their first years of study, it is important to understand what and how Chinese students are initially accustomed to in school. Without understanding the foundations of their adaptation to learning, it is difficult to develop a model for adaptation in Russian universities. The aim of this article is to demonstrate the thinking and learning patterns that develop in Chinese children from the first years of education and to analyze the usual adaptation mechanisms in order to further account for a number of characteristics of students in Russian higher education institutions, including cultural and linguistic differences.