China & Inner Asia: Table of Contents
Organizer: C. Montgomery Broaded, University of Pittsburgh
Chair and Discussant: Stanley Rosen, University of Southern California
In the past decade and a half, China’s "market socialist" reforms have progressively undermined virtually all of the major institutional structures of the Maoist era. In this panel, we assess the institutional transformations that are occurring in the education system and explore the implications of those transformations for several dimensions of social stratification in contemporary China.
Many of the changes in China’s education system are being driven by market pressures and the commodification of schooling. Schools are being required to generate increasing proportions of their operating budgets themselves through tuition, fees, contracts and other strategies. In recent years we have seen a proliferation of institutions and academic degree programs, as well as some mergers, at the tertiary level, and an increasing diversification of vocationally oriented schools at the secondary level. At the same time, the emergence of private schools is challenging the educational monopoly of the state. These changes have generated an expanded range of alternatives for students at the senior secondary and tertiary levels.
Drawing on extensive, recent fieldwork, the panelists explore the implications of these changes for several dimensions of stratification in China—the extent to which private schools may be providing the locus for the formation of a distinctive "new middle class"; the impact of gender and family background on the "streams" that students follow through the school system and into the labor force; and the role of state schooling in ethnic stratification.
Heidi Ross, Colgate University
"Market socialism" has altered the dominant narratives of Chinese schooling. The contentious stories of community, egalitarianism, and meritocracy are clashing with and being replaced by diversity, free enterprise, individual interest. Examination of the narratives that provide schools meaning sets the stage for this investigation of how several private and all-girls’ schools are responding to pressures for the distribution, consolidation, and reproduction of the political, economic, and intellectual-symbolic powers that constitute social class. Specifically, private schools fuel the dynamics of social group formation for a "new middle class," the driving force behind much educational innovation and reform. Contradictory in their stratification effects, private schools illustrate how educational functions, previously monopolized by the state, have been usurped by individuals and groups promoting innovative teaching methods, recognition of students’ rights, development of artistic technique and creativity, and a depoliticized curriculum. Likewise, girls’ schools serve diverse constituencies with divergent curricula and missions, raising questions regarding how class and gender intersect to make schools gateways or barriers to girls’ learning. Taken together, these schools are not uniformly contributing to increasing levels of educational stratification, precisely because they fill educational gaps left by a state unable or unwilling to provide sufficient resources for increased (and increasingly diverse) educational demands by the public. The entrepreneurial and civic values of administrators and the personal search for self-definition of donors, parents, and teachers conjoin to redefine the relationship between education and social responsibility and the distinction between education as a public and private good. The information and conclusions in this study are based on eight weeks of fieldwork conducted in Shanghai, Beijing, Dalian, and Nanchang, Jiangxi from to 1995–1997.
C. Montgomery Broaded, University of Pittsburgh
In urban China, the stream of young people flowing through the school system is decisively separated (fenliu) after graduation from junior high. To gain access to schooling at the distinctly stratified senior secondary level students must—in theory, at least—compete on city-wide entrance examinations. With increased commodification of schooling in recent years, the payment of steep tuition by "over-quota" students has become a common way to sidestep purely meritocratic placement. Students’ chances for further schooling and their career prospects are profoundly influenced by the kind of senior secondary schooling they attain.
I report here some of the results of a study of 600 students enrolled in 11 different senior secondary schools (keypoint and non-key academic schools, secondary specialized schools, and vocational high schools) in Wuhan. I gathered extensive questionnaire data from them in the spring of 1995, during their final semester in high school, and then tracked them after graduation as they made the transition into higher education or the labor force. I explore the association of family background characteristics and gender with senior secondary attainments. I also examine the influence of gender, family background, and high school type on aspects of students’ self concept and aspirations and on their post-graduation educational or occupational placements.
Gerard A. Postiglione, University of Hong Kong
The market economy has come more slowly to the western regions of China, through it has the potential to transform relations of education and social stratification between ethnic nationalities in China. Dependency on state subsidies for minority schools has reinforced cultural subordinance in education. Ethnic minority educational indicators remain below the national average, and cultural resistance is reflected in higher dropout rates. This paper examines the role of ethnicity and state schooling in the process of social stratification of ethnic minorities in the PRC and how it differs from stratification in other areas of China. The aim of the paper is to develop a framework that can encompass the diversity of factors affecting ethnic minorities within Chinese society. Attention will be placed on four levels of stratification: across minority groups, within a minority group, within a minority region, and across minority regions. The paper argues for a model based on cultural as well as economic factors to explain the effects of schooling on ethnic stratification. The research draws upon field work undertaken between 1993 and 1997 in Guizhou, Yunnan, Guangxi, Sichuan, Qinghai, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia.