Governing China's children: Governmentality and "Education for Quality"

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Volumn 17, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 567-589

  Woronov, T E ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 75849152159     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-2009-015     Document Type: Article

References (71)

1. Michael Schoenhals, Doing Things with Words in Chinese Politics: Five Studies (Berkeley: Center for China Studies, University of California, 1992)
2. Mayfair M. H. Yang, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994)
3. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 167
4. See, for example, Rachel Murphy, "Turning Peasants into Modern Chinese Citizens: 'Population Quality' Discourse, Demographic Transition and Primary Education," China Quarterly 177 (2004): 1-20
5. Yan Hairong, "Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow through Labor Recruitment Networks," Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2003): 493-523
6. Andrew Kipnis, "Suzhi: A Keyword Approach," China Quarterly 186 (2006): 295-313
7. Ann Anagnost, "The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi)," Public Culture 16 (2004): 189-208
8. E.g., Susan Greenhalgh and Edwin A. Winckler, Governing China's Population: From Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005)
9. Gary Sigley, "Chinese Governmentalities: Government, Governance, and the Socialist Market Economy," Economy and Society 35 (2006), 487-508
10. David Bray, Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005)
11. Lisa Hoffman, "Autonomous Choices and Patriotic Professionalism: On Governmentality in Late-Socialist China," Economy and Society 35 (2006), 550-70
12. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, ed. H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 220-21
13. Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3
14. Michel Foucault, "The Ethic of the Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom," in The Final Foucault, ed. J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 1-20
15. Rose, Powers of Freedom, 23
16. Akil Gupta, "Governing Population: The Integrated Child Development Services Program in India," in States of Imagination: Ethnographic Explorations of the Postcolonial State, ed. T. B. Hansen and F. Stepputat (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 68
17. See, for example, Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999), 27
18. This is not a new process, for since the early Republican era, the China State pedagogies has designed and carried out pedagogies intended to produce national subjects
19. See, for example, Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995)
20. Robert Culp, "Setting the Sheet of Loose Sand: Conceptions of Society and Citizenship in Nanjing Decade Party Doctrine and Civics Textbooks," in Defining Modernity: Guomindang Rhetorics of a New China, 1920-1970, ed. Terry Bodenhorn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002)
21. Fengshu Liu, "Constructing the Autonomous Middle-Class Self in Today's China: The Case of Young-Adult Only-Children University Students," Journal of Youth Studies 11 (2008), 198
22. Nikolas Rose, "The Politics of Life Itself," Theory, Culture and Society 18, no. 6 (2001): 3
23. Ibid
24. Sigley, "Governing Chinese Bodies"; Greenhalgh and Winkler, Governing China's Population
25. See T. E. Woronov, "Chinese Children, American Education," in Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy, ed. J. Cole and D. Durham (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007)
26. Susan Greenhalgh, "Planned Births, Unplanned Persons: 'Population' in the Making of Chinese Modernity," American Ethnologist 30, no. 2 (2003): 196-215
27. see also Ann Anagnost, "Children and National Transcendence in China," in Constructing China: The Interaction of Culture and Economics, ed. K. Lieberthal, S. F. Lin, and E. Young (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997)
28. Cui Xianglu, Suzhi jiaoyu: Zhong xiao xue jiaoyu gaige de zhu xuanlu (Suzhi jiaoyu: The Melody of Reform in Elementary and Secondary Education) (Jinan: Shandong Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1999)
29. See also Kipnis, "Suzhi."
30. Ministry of Education, People's Republic of China, ed., Shenhua jiaoyu gaige, quanmian tuijin suzhi jiaoyu (Strengthen Educational Reform, Fully Implement Education for Quality) (Beijing: Gaodeng Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1999)
31. See Børge Bakken, The Exemplary Society: Human Improvement, Social Control, and the Dangers of Modernity in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000)
32. See Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power
33. Gary Sigley, "Liberal Despotism: Population Planning, Subjectivity, and Government in Contemporary China," Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 29, no. 5 (2004): 557-75
34. Gupta, "Governing Population"; Judith Farquhar and Qicheng Zhang, "Biopolitical Beijing: Pleasure, Sovereignty, and Self-Cultivation in China's Capital," Cultural Anthropology 20 (2005), 303-327
35. The names of all schools, teachers, parents, and children have been changed to protect their anonymity
36. The name of the class is Sixiang pinde. Sixiang is translated as "thought; thinking; idea; ideology"; pinde is translated as "moral character." Chinese-English Dictionary, rev. ed. (Beijing: Beijing Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, 1997). Morality education has a very long history in China. Historians have looked at school-based pedagogies of morality during the Late Imperial era (see, e.g., Barry Keenan, "Lung-Men Academy in Shanghai and the Expansion of Kiangsu's Educated Elite," in Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600-1900
37. ed. B. Elman and A. Woodside [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994]), the Republican era (see, e.g., Robert Culp, "Rethinking Governmentality: Training, Cultivation, and Cultural Citizenship in Nationalist China," Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 3 [2006]): 529-54)
38. and the Mao era (see, e.g., Jonathan Unger, Education under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-1980 [New York: Columbia University Press, 1982]). A detailed discussion of the parallels between these historical educational forms (including, for example, self-criticism as a pedagogy and form of subject production during the Cultural Revolution) and contemporary Sixiang pinde classes is beyond the scope of this article
39. Sixiang pinde, vol. 8 (Beijing: Renmin Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1999), 21
40. Chairman Mao himself wrote extensively on the necessary link between physical fitness and the moral development of the Chinese people. See Mao Zedong, "A Study of Physical Education," first published in Xin Qingnian (New Youth Magazine) 3, no. 2 (April 1917)
41. Translated in Stuart Schram, Mao's Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-1949. Vol. 1: The Pre-Marxist Period, 1912-1920 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992), 113-28
42. See also Farquhar and Zhang, "Biopolitical Beijing."
43. Note that the term zijue connotes self-awareness, consciousness, and self-initiative. Chinese-English Dictionary
44. Bakken, The Exemplary Society, 411
45. These assessment categories were found in the Xiaoxuesheng zhiliang pingjia shouben for Haidian District, Beijing, for the academic year 1999-2000
46. Culp, "Rethinking Governmentality," 531
47. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977)
48. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 46
49. Jonathan Xavier Inda, Anthropologies of Modernity: Foucault, Governmentality, and Life Politics (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 9
50. Nikolas Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 59
51. Foucault, quoted in ibid., 153
52. Sixiang pinde, vol. 8, 39
53. See, for example, Bakken, The Exemplary Society; Donald Munro, The Concept of Man in Contemporary China (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan Press, 1977)
54. See, for example, Unger, Education under Mao. The institution of using models for students to self-assess moral actions is beyond the scope of this article
55. Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Little Friends: Children's Film and Media Culture in China (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 104
56. Farquhar and Zhang, "Biopolitical Beijing."
57. Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola, and Nabisco are all very popular brands among Beijing youth
58. Anagnost, "Children and National Transcendence."
59. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, I985)
60. There is extensive work on consumption and the production of contemporary subjects in China today. See
61. for example, Deborah Davis and Julia Sensenbrenner, "Commercializing Childhood: Parental Purchases for Shanghai's Only Child," in The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (Berkeley: University of California Press 2000)
62. Jing Jun, Feeding China's Litter Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press 2000)
63. Pun Ngai, "Subsumption or Consumption? The Phantom of Consumer Revolution in 'Globalizing China,' " Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2003): 469-92
64. China Education Daily, January 22, 2000
65. For an extended discussion of the changing values of children's time, see T. E. Woronov, "Transforming the Future: 'Quality' Children and the Chinese Nation" (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2003)
66. Donald, Little Friends
67. For extended discussion of the relationship between suzhi and class differentiation
68. see Tomba, this issue; Sun, this issue; Yan, "Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism"; and Anagnost, "The Corporeal Politics of Quality."
69. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, xi
70. See Gupta, "Governing Population."
71. Inda, Anthropologies of Modernity, 7