Moralised reputational governance in transnational higher education: relational aggression in Chinese female co-national peer networks.

Introduction: This study examines how relational aggression functions as a form of informal regulation within Chinese co-national peer networks in transnational higher education, with particular attention to its processual and networked dynamics. Unlike conventional approaches that treat relational aggression as isolated interpersonal conflict, this study conceptualises it as a networked and processual phenomenon that shapes access to social belonging and peer-mediated resources. Methods: Drawing on qualitative interviews with Chinese female international students in multiple host-country contexts, the study adopts reflexive thematic analysis to explore participants' lived experiences within transnational mobility trajectories. Results: The study develops and theorises the concept of moralised reputational governance. This concept illuminates how everyday social frictions are reinterpreted through shared moral codes, reconfigured into reputational cues, and enacted through indirect relational practices such as coalition alignment, narrative control, and information gatekeeping. These dynamics generate forms of harm that remain systematically less visible within institutional systems organised around discrete, evidence-based incidents, producing a structural legibility gap. Discussion: By linking micro-interactional processes with network conditions and institutional logics, the study advances a process-oriented theorisation of peer governance in transnational student contexts and contributes to research on international student experiences and higher education governance.