Students' ambivalence toward their experiences in secondary education: Views from a group of young Chinese studying on an international foundation program in Beijing

China Journal

Volumn , Issue 65, 2011, Pages 101-118

  Cockain, Alex ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

STUDENT;

BEIJING [CHINA]; CHINA;

EID: 79551665472     PISSN: 13249347     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/tcj.65.25790559     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. Though there is no age restriction, the gaokao is taken mostly by students in their final year of senior middle school (gaozhong), and requires them to sit compulsory examinations in Mathematics, Chinese and English as well as tests in either Physics, Chemistry and Biology or History, Geography and Political Education, according to whether, at the end of the first year of senior middle school, they chose to specialize in Science (like) or Arts/Humanities (wenke) subjects.
2. In recent years, a range of texts have been concerned both directly and indirectly with the gaokao. The following examples represent only a very small selection: Chinese School, BBC 4, April 2008 (5 episodes of 60 minutes); China Prep, PBS (for information see http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/episodes/china- prep/introduction/810/, accessed 15 March 2010);
3. Xiaolei Jing, "Test under Test", Beijing Review, 21 June 2007, pp. 28-29;
4. Richard Mullins, "Test Fever: What the Gaokao Means to Today's Students, Teachers and Parents", China Today, Vol. 54, No. 9 (June 2005), pp. 34-36;
5. Gareth Davey, Chuan De Lian and Louise Higgins, "The University Entrance Examination System in China", Journal of Further and Higher Education, Vol. 31, No. 4 (2007), pp. 385-96.
6. Zhigang Xing, "Spotlights on College Admission Abuse", China Daily (19 August 2004), http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-08/19/ content-366660.htm, accessed 12 February 2010.
7. Raymond Zhou, "Migrating College Candidates Could Be Left Out in Cold", China Daily (3 August 2005), http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/ doc/2005-08/03/content-465764.htm, accessed 15 February 2010.
8. Andrew Kipnis, "The Disturbing Educational Discipline of 'Peasants'", The China Journal, No. 46 (July 2001), p. 11.
9. Benjamin Siegel, "Stressful Times for Chinese Students", Time, Tuesday, 12 June 2007, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1631854,00. html, accessed 14 February 2010.
10. It is quite common for newspapers and academic journals to consider the national and political significance and implications of the examination. See, for example, Haifeng Liu and Qiong Wu, "Consequences of College Entrance Exams in China and the Reform Challenges", Korean Journal of Educational Policy, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2006), p. 8;
11. Lin Qi, "'Gaokao' Is Over. Now What?", China Daily, 24 June 2009.
12. Newspapers state that neck injuries among students have increased as a result of the heavy backpacks which they carry. A rhyme popular among schoolchildren goes: "I'm the one who has the heaviest schoolbag; I'm the one who is the first to go out in the morning and the last to come home; and I'm the one who works the hardest, sleeps the latest and is the most pitiful". See Beijing Review, "Do Children Still Have Heavy Schoolbags?", http://www.china.org.cn/english/SO-e/21766.htm, accessed 20 January 2007.
13. Media also report increased rates of depression and other mental illness, and even suicide, among young Chinese. Approximately 250,000 Chinese die by suicide each year (Xinhua, "Suicide Claims 250,000 Lives in China Every Year", http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2006-09/12/content-5082039.htm, accessed 5 February 2007), making it both a leading cause of death for Chinese people in general and, according to Michael Philips (China's representative on the International Association for Suicide Prevention and a consultant with the Mental Health Department of the World Health Organization), the number-one cause of death for Chinese people aged between 15 and 34.
14. Vanessa L. Fong, Only Hope: Coming of Age under China's One-Child Policy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 124.
15. I have used a pseudonym for each student interviewed in order to maintain confidentiality, although I found that without exception students were eager to participate, curious about the aims behind my enquiries and in general rather excited about being a contributor, but not at all concerned to remain anonymous. Before commencing each interview, I explained briefly the nature and context of my enquiries, confirmed that the results were intended for publication in due course, and emphasized that I would like to be able to quote specifically from their communications wherever appropriate. Consent was given in each case. A great deal of data appearing in this essay was, however, either generated in situations outside formal interview contexts or taken from personal communications sent to me by students via email. With regard to this less formally obtained data, the students in question have also been given pseudonyms, and they are aware that I am using some of the information that they provided to me in these ways. I feel that the amount of time taken by students to write and to speak to me about research questions outside formal interviews is further evidence of their intention and general enthusiasm about participating.
16. See Robert J. C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 161
17. cited in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, [2000] 2007), p. 10.
18. Philip J. Koch, "Emotional Ambivalence", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 48, No. 2 (December 1987), pp. 258-59, notes that, "as experiences, emotions (as distinguished from moods) are intentional and complex. They are intentional in the sense that they have 'reference to a content, direction to an object', or are, putting it more grammatically, about or of or towards (etc.) something beyond themselves.
19. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994). See, in particular, his chapter entitled "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse".
20. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies, p. 10.
21. Bronwyn Davies, Suzy Dormer, Sue Gannon, Cath Laws, Sham Rocco, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Helen McCann, "Becoming Schoolgirls: The Ambivalent Project of Subjectification', Gender and Education, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2001), p. 167.
22. Kathleen Erwin, "Heart-to-Heart, Phone-to-Phone: Family Values, Sexuality, and the Politics of Shanghai's Advice Hotlines", in Deborah S. Davis (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (London: University of California Press, 2000), p. 165.
23. Vera Schwarcz, "The Pane of Sorrow: Public Use of Personal Grief in Modern China", Daedalus 1, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Winter 1996), p. 123.
24. Vera Schwarcz, "The Pane of Sorrow: Public Use of Personal Grief in Modern China", Daedalus 1, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Winter 1996), p. 123.Ibid.
25. Anne E. McLaren, "The Grievance Rhetoric of Chinese Women: From Lamentation to Revolution", Intersections: Gender, History and Culture in the Asian Context, No. 4 (September 2000), online at http:/intersections.anu. edu.au/issue4/mclaren.html, accessed 28 October 2010.
26. Kathleen Erwin, "Heart-to-Heart", pp. 165-66.
27. Anne E. McLaren, "The Grievance Rhetoric of Chinese Women". 21 See also Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times: Narrative, Representation, and Power in Modern China (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997);
28. Guobin Yang, "China's Zhiqing Generation: Nostalgia, Identity, and Cultural Resistance in the 1990s", Modern China, Vol. 29, No. 3 (July 2003), pp. 267-96;
29. Anne E. McLaren, Performing Grief: Bridal Laments in Rural China (Hawai'i: University of Hawai'i Press, 2008).
30. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. xvi.
31. Ibid. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. xv.
32. Eric Hobsbawm, "Peasants and Politics", Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (1973), pp. 3-22
33. cited in James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak, p. xv.
34. I have borrowed this wording from Mark Elvin, "Between the Earth and Heaven: Conceptions of the Self in China", in Michael Carrithers, Steven Collins and Steven Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 159.
35. Andrew Kipnis, "Education and the Governing of Child-Centered Relatedness", in Susanne Ellen Brandtstädter and Gonçalo D. Santos (eds), Chinese Kinship: Contemporary Anthropological Perspectives (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 204-22.
36. See, for example, Yushi Li, "The Challenges of Aging Toward Chinese Society", Public Administration and Management: An Interactive Journal, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2005), p. 263.
37. Charlotte Ikels, "Introduction", in Charlotte Ikels (ed.), Filial Piety: Practice and Discourse in Contemporary East Asia (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 3, writes about the multiple messages which the character conveys, stating that, although the officially preferred interpretation is that the older generation are supported by the young, there are other interpretations of the character, such as that the young are burdened, or even oppressed, by the older generation.
38. Jing Jun, "Introduction", in Jing Jun (ed.), Feeding China's Little Emperors (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 19.
39. As Charlotte Ikels, Filial Piety, p. 2, has noted, the actual practice, "both in its delivery and its receipt, is situationally dependent and shaped by local circumstances of history, economics, social organization, and demography and by personal circumstances of wealth, gender, and family configuration".
40. Delia Davin, "The Early Childhood Education of the Only-child Generation in Urban China", in Irving Epstein (ed.), Chinese Education: Problems, Policies and Prospects (New York: Garland Publishing, 1991), p. 50
41. cited in Jianguo Wu and Michael Singh, "'Wishing for Dragon Children': Ironies and Contradictions in China's Education Reform and the Chinese Diaspora's Disappointments with Australian Education", The Australian Educational Researcher, Vol. 31, No. 2 (August 2004), p. 35.
42. Andrew Kipnis, "Education and Child-Centered Relatedness".
43. Børge Bakken, "Norms, Values and Cynical Games with Party Ideology", Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 16 (2002), p. 127.
44. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
45. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 5, defines enlightened false consciousness as "that modernized, unhappy consciousness, on which enlightenment has labored both successfully and in vain. It has learned lessons in enlightenment, but it has not, and probably was not able to, put them into practice. Well-off and miserable at the same time, this consciousness no longer feels affected by any critique of ideology: its falseness is already reflexively buffered.
46. Slavoj Zizek, "How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?", in Slavoj Zizek (ed.), Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), p. 316.
47. Valerie Walkerdine, Schoolgirl Fictions (London: Verso, 1990), p. 87.
48. Bronwyn Davies, Suzy Dormer, Sue Gannon, Cath Laws, Sham Rocco, Hillevi Lenz Taguchi and Helen McCann, "Becoming Schoolgirls", p. 170.
49. Barbara Grant, "Disciplining Students: The Construction of Student Subjectivities", British Journal of Sociology of Education, Vol. 18, No. 1 (1997), page 111.
50. Liu Xiaoyan's anxieties echo those of other youths who "feel as if they have been thrust headlong into shifting circumstances". See Amy Hanser, "The Chinese Enterprising Self: Young, Educated Urbanites and the Search for Work", in Perry Link, Richard P. Madsen and Paul G. Pickowicz (eds), Popular China: Unofficial Culture in a Globalizing Society (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), p. 190.
51. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (London: Routledge, 1993);
52. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990).
53. Terry E. Woronov, "Performing the Nation: China's Children as Little Red Pioneers", Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 80, No. 3 (2007), pp. 647-72, adopts this approach as a way of explaining why children failed to perform the nation appropriately at a Little Red Pioneers ceremony at Tiananmen Square.
54. Richard H. Solomon, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974 [1971]), p. 72.
55. Richard H. Solomon, Mao's Revolution and the Chinese Political Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974 [1971]), p. 72 Ibid.
56. Richard H. Solomon, Mao's Revolution, p. 73, writes: "Where one has learned through painful experience that nature is beyond one's control, or that powerful individuals are beyond one's influence, emotional mobilization can at best produce personal torment and frustration and at worst the increased pain of retaliation from those who seek to keep child or peasant 'in his place'".
57. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, p. 5.
58. Philip J. Koch, "Emotional Ambivalence", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 48, No. 2 (December 1987), p. 262.
59. Robert Halsall, "Sloterdijk's Theory of Cynicism, Ressentiment and 'Horizontal Communication'", International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2005), p. 169.
60. Robert Halsall, "Sloterdijk's Theory of Cynicism, Ressentiment and 'Horizontal Communication'", International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (2005), p. 169. Ibid.
61. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Studies, pp. 124-25.
62. Thomas A. Shaw, "Taiwanese Schools Against Themselves: School Culture Versus the Subjectivity of Youth", in Bradley A. Levinson, Douglas E. Foley and Dorothy C. Holland (eds), The Cultural Production of the Educated Person: Critical Ethnographies of Schooling and Local Practice (New York: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 193.
63. Alexander describes cultural trauma as occurring "when members of a collective feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories for ever, and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways". See Jeffrey Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser and Piotr Sztompka, Culture Trauma Theory and Applications (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004)
64. cited in Ron Eyerman, "The Past in the Present: Culture and the Transmission of Memory", Acta Sociologica, Vol. 47, No. 2 (June 2004), p. 160.
65. Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times, p. 28.
66. Ron Eyerman, "The Past in the Present", p. 161.
67. According to the Ministry of Education, 10.2 million people registered for the exams in 2009, which was 3.8 per cent fewer than in 2008. About 73.5 per cent of the exam-takers were high school graduates. See Lin Qi, "'Gaokao' Is Over. Now What?". 55 Yang Jiang, A Cadre School Life: Six Chapters (trans. G. Barmé) (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Company, 1992), p. 36.
68. I have attended many reunions and am familiar with several groups of friends whose relationships began whilst they were studying at secondary school.
69. Guobin Yang, "China's Zhiqing Generation", p. 271.
70. Kathleen Erwin, "Heart-to-Heart", p. 166.
71. Beverley Hooper, Youth in China (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985).
72. Julia Kwong, "Ideological Crisis among China's Youths: Values and Official Ideology", The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 45, No 2 (June 1994), p. 247.
73. Alan P. Liu, "Opinions of Youth in the People's Republic of China", Asian Survey, Vol. 24, No. 9 (September 1984), p. 976-77.
74. Alan P. Liu, "Opinions of Youth in the People's Republic of China", Asian Survey, Vol. 24, No. 9. Ibid., p. 976.
75. Luo Xu, Searching for Life's Meaning: Changes and Tensions in the Worldviews of Chinese Youth in the 1980s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. ix. Luo also describes youths as skeptical and critical (Chapter 1), disillusioned with past ideas (Chapter 2), optimistic (Chapter 3), yet also pessimistic, confused and nihilistic (Chapter 4).
76. Luo Xu, "Farewell to Idealism: Mapping China's University Students of the 1990s", Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 13, No. 41 (November 2004), p. 781.
77. Luo Xu, "Farewell to Idealism: Mapping China's University Students of the 1990s", Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 13, No. 41 (2004), p. 781.Ibid.
78. Luo Xu, "Farewell to Idealism: Mapping China's University Students of the 1990s", Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 13, No. 41 (2004), p. 781.Ibid.
79. Luo Xu, "Farewell to Idealism: Mapping China's University Students of the 1990s", Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 13, No. 41 (2004), p. 781.Ibid.
80. Luo Xu, "Farewell to Idealism: Mapping China's University Students of the 1990s", Journal of Contemporary China, Vol. 13, n. 9. (2004), p. 781. Ibid.
81. See, for example, Yan Wang, "Value Changes in an Era of Social Transformations: College-educated Chinese Youth", Educational Studies, Vol. 32, No. 2 (2006), p. 234;
82. Robert L. Moore, "Generation Ku: Individualism and China's Millennial Youth", Ethnology, Vol. 44, No. 4 (2005), pp. 357-76.
83. Vanessa L. Fong, Only Hope, p. 29.
84. Vanessa L. Fong, Only Hope, Ibid., p. 1.
85. Ann Anagnost, National Past-Times, p. 29.
86. Uradyn E. Bulag, "Models and Moralities: The Parable of the Two 'Heroic Little Sisters of the Grassland'", The China Journal, No. 42 (July 1999), p. 41.