Learning to serve: Urban youth, vocational schools and new class formations in China

China Journal

Volumn , Issue 66, 2011, Pages 77-99

  Woronov, T E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

LEARNING; URBAN SOCIETY; VOCATIONAL EDUCATION; YOUNG POPULATION;

CHINA;

EID: 79961190348     PISSN: 13249347     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/tcj.66.41262808     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Paul Willis, Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981);
2. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977).
3. Jonathan Unger, Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
4. As discussed below, our research was conducted entirely in urban schools, and this essay focuses on urban phenomena. Rural vocational schools cater to a different student demographic, and prepare students for different kinds of work than do urban schools.
5. Ann Anagnost, "From 'Class' to 'Social Strata': Grasping the Social Totality in Reformera China", Third World Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 3 (2008), p. 501.
6. Ann Anagnost, "From Class to 'Social Strata'", For a summary of recent Chinese analyses of social strata.
7. Chris King-Chi Chan and PUN Ngai, "The Making of a New Working Class? A Study of Collective Actions of Migrant Workers in South China", The China Quarterly, No. 198 (June 2009), p. 288.
8. For works on the new urban poor, see, for example:
9. Ching-Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China's Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007);
10. Dorothy Solinger, Contesting Citizenship in Urban China: Peasant Migrants, the State, and the Logic of the Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
11. Luigi Tomba, "Creating an Urban Middle Class: Social Engineering in Beijing", The China Journal, No. 51 (January 2004), p. 4.
12. David S. G. Goodman and Xiaowei Zang, "Introduction", in David S. G. Goodman (ed.), The New Rich in China: Future Rulers, Present Lives, (London: Routledge, 2008), p. 6.
13. Stephanie Donald and Yi Zheng, "Richer Than Before: The Cultivation of Middle-Class Taste", in David S. G. Goodman, The New Rich in China, pp. 71-82.
14. Geng Song and Tracy K. Lee, "Consumption, Class Formation and Sexuality: Reading Men's Lifestyle Magazines In China", The China Journal, No. 64 (July 2010), pp. 159-176;
15. Li Zhang, In Search of Paradise: Middle-Class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010).
16. Ann Anagnost, "From Class to 'Social Strata'"; Luigi Tomba, "Creating an Urban Middle Class"; Jing Wang, Brand New China: Advertising, Media, and Commercial Culture (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
17. Luigi Tomba, "Creating an Urban Middle Class", p. 4.
18. Will Atkinson, "Rethinking the Work-Class Nexus: Theoretical Foundations for Recent Trends", Sociology, Vol. 43, No. 5 (2009), p. 898.
19. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956/1978), p. 927.
20. Gail Hebson, "Renewing Class Analysis in Studies of the Workplace: A Comparison of Working-class and Middle-Class Women's Aspirations and Identities", Sociology, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2009), pp. 27-44.
21. Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
22. Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956/1978), Vol. 1, p. 302.
23. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, p. 932.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., p. 937. Italics in original.
26. Will Atkinson, "Rethinking the Work-Class Nexus", p. 899.
27. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, p. 934.
28. T. E. Woronov, "Chinese Children, American Education: Globalizing Child-Rearing in Contemporary China", in Jennifer Cole and Deborah Durham (eds), Generations and Globalization: Youth, Age, and Family in the New World Economy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007);
29. Vanessa Fong, Only Hope: Coming of Age Under China's One-Child Policy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).
30. Jens Qvortrup, "From Useful to Useless: The Historical Continuity of Children's Constructive Participations", Sociological Studies of Children, Vol. 7 (1995), pp. 49-86.
31. For the best review of the testing system and its influence on contemporary families,
32. Andrew Kipnis, Governing Educational Desire: Culture, Politics and Schooling in China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
33. The literature on the university entrance examination is voluminous. A search on China Academic Journals yields over 17,500 results in fifteen years (1995-2010); searches on the popular press (including Renmin ribao and Guangming ribao) can yield over 100,000 articles. For extensive Chinese-language information, updates, articles and policies. http://www.gaokaoinfo.cn/.
34. Andrew Kipnis, Governing Educational Desire, for a review.
35. T. E. Woronov, "Raising Quality, Fostering 'Creativity': Ideologies and Practices of Education Reform in Beijing", Anthropology and Education Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4 (2008), pp. 401-422.
36. There has been a three-fold increase in the number of tertiary graduates between 1998 and 2005, while over the same period the percentage of high school graduates who pass the university entrance examination has risen exponentially, to over 40 per cent of applicants.
37. Li Yao, John Whalley, Shunming Zhang and Xiliang Zhao, China's Higher Education Transformation and its Global Implications (Cambridge MA: Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2008).
38. The resulting oversupply of educated youth has created increasing numbers of impoverished, unemployed university graduates, a phenomenon known in Chinese as the "ant tribe" (yizu), from a book by the same name by Si Lian. Si Lian, Yizu: daxue biye sheng juju cun shiji (Ant Tribes: A True Record of University Graduates Living in Villages) (Nanning: Guangxi Shifan Daxue Chubanshe, 2009).
39. Stig Thøgersen, Secondary Education in China After Mao: Reform and Social Conflict (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1990).
40. Increasing numbers of post-secondary students are also enrolling in new vocational tertiary institutions, which cater to high school (gaozhong) graduates who fail the UEE and do not gain admission into regular universities. In this essay my discussion is confined to secondary vocational education, which students enter after 9th grade.
41. "Academic" high schools are hierarchically-stratified high schools that range from "regular schools" (putong gaozhong) to extremely competitive "key" (zhongdian) schools at the district, municipal and provincial levels. All academic high schools focus on preparing students for the UEE in Year 12. At some élite high schools, all instruction is condensed into Years 10 and 11, so that teachers and students can spend all of Year 12 preparing for the UEE.
42. Stephanie Donald and Yi Zheng, "Richer Than Before".
43. I am condensing and simplifying the potential options. For example, technical (zhiye jiaoyu) and vocational education may exist side-by-side in some educational districts, although technical education has increasingly moved out of cities and into rural areas. In addition, there are many different kinds of vocational education, which offer education over 3 to 5 years, and which grant different degrees. A detailed description of the structures of this very complex and rapidly-changing system is beyond the scope of this article.
44. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, p. 934.
45. As discussed above, there is growing research on the ways that consumption produces appropriate middle-class citizens.
46. Ann Anagnost, "Class or 'Social Strata'"; Luigi Tomba, "Of Quality, Harmony, and Community: Civilization and the Middle Class in Urban China", positions: east asia cultures critique, Vol. 17, No. 3 (2009), pp. 592-616;
47. PUN Ngai, "Subsumption or Consumption? The Phantom of Consumer Revolution in 'Globalizing China'", Cultural Anthropology, Vol 18, No. 4 (2003), pp. 469-492; Li Zhang, In Search of Paradise.
48. Distance-learning universities exist at every level in China, from districts within municipalities to the provincial level. Admission to their courses is relatively easy, and the degrees earned there carry very low prestige.
49. Stephanie Donald, "Education, Class and Adaptation in China's World City", Chinese Journal of Communication, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2009), pp. 25-35.
50. This school offered a 5-year vocational program, which granted students a dazhuan degree called a "32" (san jia er). This was a regular three-year zhongzhuan degree with two additional years of internship (shixi) and classroom training added on.
51. In 2007, a top-level administrator in the Nanjing Municipal Education department (Jiaowei) told me that only about 2 per cent of "self-study" candidates in Jiangsu Province passed the exam and entered university.
52. My research assistants and I tried repeatedly to pin down the exact tuition payments required by each school, but school administrators and the students repeatedly rebuffed our efforts. We learned only three things for certain: that parents had to pay for three years of schooling upfront; that the tuition frequently changed over time (requiring additionalpayments as students moved through their courses) and across different courses, and that tuition was generally lower than the amount charged by "regular" high schools.
53. Andrew Kipnis, "The Disturbing Educational Discipline of 'Peasants'", The China Journal, No. 46 (July 2001), pp. 1-24.
54. Cf. PUN Ngai and Chris Smith, "Putting Transnational Labour in its Place: The Dormitory Labour Regime in Post-Socialist China", Work, Employment and Society, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2007), pp. 27-45.
55. Differences between urban and rural Chinese were once so fixed and naturalized that anthropologists Sulamith and Jack Potter compared the household registration system to a caste system (Sulamith Heins Potter and Jack M. Potter, China's Peasants: The Anthropology of a Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). Since the early 1990s, this bilateral division has been replaced by a trilateral one (urban/rural/migrant) and social analysis of contemporary China proceeds from the assumption that individuals or groups fall into one of these three categories. My point, however, is that this trilateral division may no longer be adequate to describe the lives of China's urban youth.
56. PUN Ngai and Chris Smith, "Putting Transnational Labour in its Place".
57. I was unable to contact the students' parents because of restrictions placed on our research. In June 2007, the Chinese government revoked multiple research permits across China in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. I arrived the following month, and, although we were granted permission to conduct participant observation research in two schools, we were notallowed to gather any statistical or questionnaire data or contact families outside of school.
58. Geremie Barmé, "China's Flat Earth: History and 8 August 2008", The China Quarterly, No. 197 (March 2009), pp. 64-86.
59. I thank Mette Halskov Hansen for reminding me of this.
60. Paul Willis, Learning to Labour, p. 2.
61. T. E. Woronov, Transforming the Future: "Quality" Children and the Chinese Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago, Department of Anthropology dissertation, 2003).
62. Luigi Tomba, "Creating an Urban Middle Class"; PUN Ngai, "Subsumption or Consumption"; Ann Anagnost " Class or 'Social Strata'"; David S. G. Goodman, The New Rich in China.
63. Børge Bakken, "'Never for the First Time': 'Premature Love' and Social Control in Today's China", China Information, Vol. 7, No. 3 (1993), pp. 9-26.
64. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, p. 934.
65. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, p. 934.
66. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
67. Cf. Susan Willis, "Teens at Work: Negotiating the Jobless Future", in Joe Austin and Mike Willard (eds), Generations of Youth (New York: New York University Press, 1998), pp. 347-360.
68. Susan Willis, "Teens at Work".
69. Si Lian, Yizu.
70. Kevin Smith, "Operationalizing Max Weber's Probability Concept of Class Situation: The Concept of Social Class", British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 58, No. 1 (2007), p. 6.
71. Kevin Smith, "Operationalizing Max Weber's Probability Concept of Class Situation".
72. David S. G. Goodman, The New Rich in China;
73. Jing Wang, Brand New China;
74. Luigi Tomba, "Creating a New Middle Class".
75. For a look at the importance of generation among workers of an earlier era,
76. Lisa Rofel, Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
77. PUN Ngai and Chris Smith, "Putting Labour in its Place".
78. Li Zhang, In Search of Paradise.
79. I thank Diane Austin-Broos for her assistance with this analysis.
80. Max Weber, Economy and Society, Vol. 2, p. 930.