Naïveté may better explain my nostalgic take on schooling in small-town, working-class Alberta than does institutional reality. It may be said without controversy that school choice has little meaning where only one school exists or only one school is seen as an option, which isn’t to say that geography and class are conditions that determine absolutely the agency of some and constrain that of others. Upon deeper reflection, I recall my mother’s considerable ambivalence toward the values, content, and outcomes of the Alberta schools to which she delivered five of her seven children over the course of three decades. Indeed, the confluence of opposition and opportunity eventually led to her two youngest children joining the nascent home schooling movement. What’s more, the intervening years have demonstrated how an encroaching neoliberal policy regime can bring a measure of “choice” to what had previously appeared as an intractable sectarian divide.1 Personal reflection does not, of course, exhaust the range of experience in the social-historical-political context with which I have the most direct experience, that of post-1970 Alberta. Yet, for reasons that should become clearer in the discussion of methodology below, the inconsistent nature of my recollections seems highly relevant. Educational processes in my natal context have always been more complex than my common-sense understandings of them. Indeed, my struggle as a student of education has largely been a process of coming to grips with the personal effects of the méconnaissance (Bourdieu, 1990) so apparent in the statements above.
But these reflections on a taken-for-granted past do not erase the distinction upon which this research is founded. Nor have they closed the gap between the strange and the familiar such that it can now be said that little distinguishes the concerns of Canadian parents from those of China. The suspicion that all that seems strange is actually familiar reveals a habit of mind endemic to the dominant form of liberal education espoused in post-1970 Canada. After all, who would dare argue with the notion that Canadian and Chinese parents alike care about their children’s education and act accordingly? To say so is to engage in a wholly warranted if symptomatic universalism. An alternative claim, more palatable to the contemporary academic ear, might go like this: globalization is bringing about convergence in the material and ideational conditions in which people find themselves, and this accounts for the convergence of strange and familiar. This, too, is partly true. Still, it does not follow that the beliefs, values, and concerns of various groups and individuals “making [their] way through the world” (Archer, 2007) have come about as a result of precisely the same complex of structural-cultural conditions and processes, or will at some future point lead to a universal set of institutional circumstances, values, and behaviours. Indeed, a fundamental assumption of this research is that the content of Mainland Chinese parents’ concerns and the socio-historical conditions under which these have come to be present features that are quantitatively and qualitatively distinct.
The movement described above parallels the emotional-intellectual journey of both the thoughtful tourist-traveler and the ethnographer. For a visitor to a strange socio-cultural environment, moving beyond initial impressions can be a challenge. Where fascination or fear tend to dominate, for the generous of mind, these responses to experience of the strange are most often resolved through appeal to a universalism, through recognition of that which makes the foreign other “just like us.” For those disposed toward going beyond this humanistic impulse, experience of the strange can lead to heightened self-awareness, a recognition that what was previously known of the self was incorrect or at least less than clear-eyed self-awareness. These three steps – from strange to familiar to de-familiarization – model more or less precisely the process through which this study unfolded.
In the remainder of this chapter I describe this process in detail. I begin by defining a set of metatheoretical foundations for the study (see Morrow & Brown, 1994) based on the elements of research design suggested in Crotty (1998). Upon these, I propose a methodology capable of answering the questions posed in this chapter. Finally, I detail the specific methods and process used to collect data (Crotty, 1998).
Metatheoretical Preliminaries
The fundamental sources of any theory’s pictorial power are the selective or filtering effects of its ontological assumptions concerning what it is being used to look at, and its epistemological assumptions concerning how to go about gaining knowledge about whatever is being looked at. (Woodiwiss, 2005, p. 14)
The world exists independently of our knowledge of it. (Sayer, 1992, p. 5)
I ground this research in an ontological realism developed from my reading of Bhaskar (1998) and other advocates of critical realism (especially Archer, 1995, 1996 and Sayer, 1992), as well as through sustained reading of theorists who hold to a more general realist stance and have sought to dispense with the traditional opposition between structure and agency (Bourdieu, 1977, 1998; Morrow & Brown, 1994; Thompson, 1990). Holding to realist assumptions means that my attempt to learn something about China in part by inquiring into the perspectives of parents does not signal adherence to either ontological voluntarism or epistemological subjectivism. Rather, I suggest that what is called “perspective” might better be labelled “structured experience.” In this connexion, I validate the importance of subjective experience and at the same time hold that to “experience” implies something outside of the self. To the extent that an individual lives an internal, personal life, he or she does so in relation to things external to him or herself. Indeed, in this research, the very idea that human beings are classifiable in terms of a national-cultural identity (they are “Mainland Chinese”), class (they are “middle-class”), and geographic location (“a particular kind of contemporary Chinese city”) betrays a further premise. While people enjoy a significant degree of autonomy in terms of what they think and do from day to day, they are nevertheless situated actors who go about their business in a sociocultural sphere that pre-exists their perceptions of it. Corollary to this view, social worlds also consist of non-human elements (e.g., institutions, geographies, policy regimes, discourses) that retain powers and potentialities irreducible to the “saying, making, and doing” (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 37) of their creators, though it cannot be said that they are completely resistant to those efforts. Human agents are, put simply, always only relatively free and imperfectly efficacious in terms of their ability to realize their plans and projects.
People, in their conscious activity, for the most part unconsciously reproduce (and occasionally transform) the structures governing their substantive activities of production. (Bhaskar, 1998, p. 38)
Methodological Specifications
Ethnography is the work of describing a culture. (Spradley, 1979, p. 3)
Given these metatheoretical preliminaries, it follows that my concern with the educational culture of Shijiazhuang City will proceed as a critical ethnography. Ethnography presented itself to me as a way to make sense of a particular part of contemporary Chinese society given that, prior to my decision to take it up as an object of social scientific research, I had been fortunate enough to both experience personally and observe that society at close hand (O’Reilly, 2005). If ethnography seems a curiously active noun in the previous sentence, it is because I came to the understanding that I was – or wanted to be – doing ethnography long before I decided to do so. Having said this, the manner in which I have gone about this research has from the outset fulfilled the principal criteria of “conventional ethnography” (Taylor, 2005, p. 1), that is, I have pursued this research by placing myself in the study site for an extended period of time. Doing so is, I would suggest, unavoidable if one is to “respect the irreducibility of human experience” (p. 3). But fealty to the “truth of the insider” and the context within which he/she lives comes at a price; a relatively unstructured data collection process has been costly in terms of time as it has not involved “following through a fixed and detailed research design specified at the start” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 3). Indeed, constant assessment and adjustment replaced predictable plans as I immersed myself in the lives and worlds of Shijiazhuang’s parents in order to collect first-hand data in a setting as “natural” as possible (p. 4).
Conceived in this way as an immersive practice, ethnography – particularly that which does not attempt to be covert – involves more than mere presence. Rather, it entails a “presence plus” commonly known as participant observation. Before formally beginning this research, I had lived in Shijiazhuang for extended periods of time over six years, meaning that I had been practicing a kind of informal participant observation for some time. I have now lived and worked there for parts of 11 years, occupying a number of roles that have allowed me to watch, listen, ask questions, and generally gather “whatever data [were] available to throw light on the issues” that emerged and, through a process of reflection on these experiences and observations, became my central scholarly concerns (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, pp. 3–4, 15). During one uninterrupted stretch of two years from 2002 to 2004, I worked as a textbook compiler, editor, and teacher trainer in a Shijiazhuang-based publishing company. A seven month stay in 2005 allowed me to complete field work for my master’s thesis study into the perspectives of Chinese teachers on their lives in the context of market economic reform (Yochim, 2006, 2012). In the years since 2006, I have spent parts of each year ranging from one to five months working and socializing, interviewing and observing Chinese friends and work associates. The latter half of this period has coincided with my entry as a member into a Chinese family and, significantly, as father to an only-grandson.
Prolonged engagement in the research site and emergent design have allowed me to collect a wide variety of data using an inclusive “family of methods” (Willis & Trondman, 2000, p. 5). I describe and justify these in detail below, but mention them here to indicate the congruence of ethnography and the realist metatheoretical foundations above. As a general methodology, ethnography has allowed me to take into account what I referred to above as the “emplacement” (Kipnis, 2011) of social actors, to “[recognize] and [record] how experience is entrained in the flow of contemporary history, large and small” (Willis & Trondman, 2000, p. 6). This recognition of emplacement/entrainment is one of the features of a critical ethnography. In this connexion, “critical” refers to the capacity of ethnography for depth interpretation, that is, for investigation of the non-human and non-discursive aspects of the social world that structure the thoughts and activities of its human inhabitants.
There is a second sense in which this is a critical methodology. While critical ethnography is at present most commonly associated with empirical inquiries that attempt to make a “contribution to equity, freedom, and justice” (Madison, 2005, p. 4), such critical normative stances toward, for example, social exclusion, are often less skeptical with respect to epistemological questions. This lack of criticality is most obvious with respect to the accuracy imputed to an agent’s explanatory account of his social positioning. The critical eye, in other words, ought also to be turned toward matters of ontology and methodology, those discussed under Metatheoretical Preliminaries. In this sense, “criticality” is an extension of those efforts at social theoretical “underlabouring” that attempt to establish the metatheoretical foundations of “practical social theory” (Archer, 1995).
Important as these are, in this work I focus on third and fourth senses of critical, neither of which is obviously connected to the alleviation of particular social ills or the pursuit of immediate political causes (Morrow & Brown, 1994). With the third sense of critical I hold that where ethnography is critical, it has a capacity for “ideology critique and defamiliarization” (Morrow & Brown, 1994, p. 256). Defamiliarization is concerned not with the kind of cultural critique suggested in the critical normative stances of an alien other suggested above but, rather, with “a form of cultural critique” of that which is most familiar to the researcher (Marcus & Fischer, 1999, p. 1). It is self-reflection of this kind that I model in the opening paragraphs of this chapter.
A final claim to criticality lies in the practice of an epistemic reflexivity most closely associated with Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology, but also of a kind considered central to critical realism. For Bourdieu and Wacquant (Bourdieu, 2003, 2004a, 2007; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1993) there is more than one mode of inquiry commonly described as reflexive, but it is those concerned with the social conditions of knowledge production that ought to be of most concern to critical researchers. Reflexivity of this kind is different from “narcissistic” and “egological” varieties central to “postmodern anthropology” and phenomenology, taking as its objects “not only…the private person of the enquirer but also…the anthropological field itself and…the scholastic dispositions and biases it fosters and rewards in its members” (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 281). Woodiwiss (2005) also promotes epistemic reflexivity as the most crucial form of reflexivity, but describes it in a less daunting manner: “The three main…reasons for engaging in reflexive activity are: to spot gaps and jumps in one’s reasoning…; to check the consistency of one’s reasoning; and to understand the relations between theoretical work and power” (p. 89). For critical realists, epistemic reflexivity is fundamental to the work they do as “it performs a crucial underlabourer role,” pointing “the researcher to ways of conceptualising what there is to study and for setting up productive and exciting research designs” (Sharp in Archer, Sharp, Stones, & Woodiwiss, p. 12). In this research, I see myself as practicing this kind of reflexivity both in the field – most consciously and obviously at moments when I use field notes to work through problems like those in Woodiwiss’ list – and afterward during the production of this manuscript. By tying one chapter to the next with personal reflections, I attempt to represent not only the experience of doing the research, but also the epistemological significance of my positioning in the field.
Data Sources
Social theory is not simply an intellectual means of manipulating visualities but also a process of work involving things, namely tools, materials, instruments, and workplaces. (Woodiwiss, 2005, p. 69)
Guided by the concept of “data triangulation” (Denzin, 1978; see also Flick, 2006; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007; Stake, 2005) and consistent with a realism that “counts a far wider range of materials as observations” (Woodiwiss, 2005, p. 37), I collected data from a number of different data sources. The aim of doing so was to produce a detailed and accurate portrait of Shijiazhuang’s educational culture that takes into account its “embeddedness” or entrainment in a broader structural and cultural environment. I relied on personal engagement in the field, combining participant observation with probing methods such as semi- and un-structured interviews and documentary research. In addition to descriptive adequacy, triangulating data in this manner helped me to clarify meaning by locating and including diverse perspectives (Stake, 2005). It also helped me to “tease out what deserves to be called experiential knowledge from what is opinion and preference” (pp. 453–454, 455). The “truth” of the case was revealed through an iterative process of data analysis as I looked for “relationships across the entire corpus” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 163). The following sections provide detail and rationale for the use of particular data sources.
Fieldnotes. I kept a written account of the things I saw, heard, and experienced while gathering and reflecting on data in the field work phase of the study (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007). For Bogdan and Biklen, the category of “fieldnotes” in participant observation is given the broadest possible definition, taking in all data, including hand written notes, interview transcripts, documents, photos, and other materials (p. 119).
Popular press, policy documents, & public statements: I compiled a time-based series of corpora consisting of magazine articles, policy documents, speeches, editorials, posters – any material that contained guidance to its consumer in terms of what kinds people might be considered “good,” what forms of knowledge and activities ought to be pursued in order to rear such people, and how the fostering of a population comprising them could bring about a developed, just society. I constructed four corpora, each comprising documents in and around the years 1950–1955, 1966–1975, 1978–1989, and 2000–present, that is, articles published within a few years of the expressions of jianfu statements discussed in Chapter 2. The normative orders I propose in this section are the result of an investigation that is partial due to its reliance on documentary sources. Using Raymond Williams’ (1998) term, what I access is a “selective tradition” (p. 54), and the insight provided is necessarily limited by the biases and absences that obtain in any selection of documents.
One of these sources was back issues of China Reconstructs/China Today, a propaganda/current affairs magazine largely intended for consumption outside of China. The choice of this publication might seem unusual given the intended audience, but it proved valuable for a number of reasons. First of all, the purpose of this component of the research was not to ascertain the actual state of Chinese society at a given point in time. Rather, it was to develop a sense of the prevailing vision of what Chinese society and its constituent parts ought to be like at a given moment in time. Detailing this image that the nation sought to project outwardly was as useful as the actual ways and means it employed to create that society. Second, many of the documents, stories, and exemplars presented in these magazines were also used internally, so they can be seen as indicative of the kinds of materials used inside China to promote particular conceptions of the good. I read through all issues of each of these long-running magazines, the former comprising thirty-eight volumes (366 issues in microform and print), the latter thirty-six volumes to date (∼400 issues). I identified articles that addressed educational matters. Some of these, such as “In a Peking Primary School” (Staff Reporter, 1954), deal explicitly with formal schooling and take some aspect of school reform as their topic. Others are less explicitly focused on educational matters, but have an overtly pedagogical aim, as in “My Husband is a ‘Model’” (G. D. Liu, 1954).
I found other documents in a wide range of venues. Many policy documents included in the four corpora are available on official websites of the Chinese government (e.g., www.moe.edu.cn) or through educational research organizations (e.g., China Education and Research Network – www.edu.cn). Others have been published in translation, such as those made available by Hu and Seifman (1987) or indirectly in the form of analyses by others (e.g., Andreas, 2002, 2004; Pepper, 1978, 1996). Given the importance of the formal representations of Mao’s thought (Martin, 1982), The Selected Works of Mao Zedong (Mao, 1957, 1966, 1967 [1942], 1977 [1957], 1997 [1953]) also provided insight.
Photographs, media reports, and urban planning documents: In order to document and interpret the process transforming Shijiazhuang, I took photos of public places, construction sites, da zi bao (大字报 – big character posters) announcing san nian da bianyang, and of the many posters and billboards advertising housing and commercial developments. With these data sources, I was concerned with recording san nian da bianyang in terms of both spectacle – i.e., the massive scale and scope of change and the impact on the city’s residents – and visual indications of the city as re-imagined in planning documents. Figures 4.4 and 4.5, for example, provide a sense of the sheer scale of redevelopment, particularly when one considers that the photo captures only one of the hundreds of projects of this kind. Figure 4.8 shows the importance of cultural facilities to the aspirational city, but also indicates the tight connections between public investments and private commercial development.
I also collected maps of the city at different points in time, some available publicly, others supplied by contacts. Most of the latter were of proposed developments or those underway but incomplete. Finally, I collected news stories detailing plans for and discussing the progress of san nian da bianyang. These artefacts helped me develop a sense of the aims, nature, scope, and material effects of the process of the redevelopment of Shijiazhuang, as well as the connections between redevelopment in general and the precepts and propositions of the aspirational cité.
Interviews: Following completion of informed consent procedures, individual respondents were engaged in an informal interview whose purpose was to establish a trusting relationship, to sensitize me to their life circumstances, and to spur my thinking on productive lines of inquiry in subsequent interviews. Each of the respondents was interviewed on at least one further occasion about a range of topics that preliminary reading, observations, and interviews suggested might be of concern to parents, as well as matters of theoretical interest. The locations of these interviews varied. Some were conducted in private rooms in tea shops, where the interviewee and I shared tea and snacks. Others were conducted in the homes of the interviewees. One was conducted in my apartment.
Subsequent interviews were semi-structured and aimed to gain insight into the beliefs and activities of parents with regard to the education of their child. Other lines of inquiry related to the schooling of children. Still others probed for conceptual and/or evaluative responses. Finally, respondents were engaged in discussions of concepts drawn from existing literature of relevance to contemporary educational culture, what Bogdan and Biklen (2007) refer to as “[trying] out ideas and themes on informants” (p. 165).
Handwritten notes were taken during the initial interviews. Subsequent interviews were recorded and transcribed. Later, follow-up interviews were conducted on line using synchronous internet video/chat software, a technique that was particularly helpful in conducting member checks after recorded interviews were fully transcribed.
Sampling, Key Informants, and Recruitment
This study was designed to explore the thoughts and activities of parents in only one urban setting. But its implicit claim is that the observations I make are “transferable” (Guba, 1981; Denzin & Lincoln, 2005) to other similar urban contexts. Therefore, it is worth pausing to dwell on the kinds of restrictions that the phrase “similar urban contexts” implies. Such limitations flow in part from the multiple meanings ascribed to “urban” in contemporary China. Popular exposure to all things China in recent years has led to a relatively high awareness of that country, including the fact that it is fundamentally split along urban-rural lines. Yet to recognize this and to make too simple a division between the two is to fundamentally misunderstand that “urban” might designate, inter alia, distinctions of governance, where it implies “city,” a level of government that includes provincial capitals as well as those urban centres one step below; size of a locale (a “big” or “small” place) in terms of population or, more importantly, economic development and/or political influence; residence status, where one’s hukou (户口 – residence permit) literally inscribes a semi-permanent gradation of citizenship and the place(s) where the rights associated with xiang xia (乡下 – countryside/rural) and chengshi (城市 – city/urban) status obtain more or less fully; and/or a more generally implied social status, where the suggestion of or even proximity to rural origin can be particularly damning. As lived experience, these distinctions shift and increase in complexity as rural to urban migration proceeds apace, effects not diminished by the temporary status of much of the staggeringly large migrant labour population. The population of any given Chinese city is now surprisingly hybridized and undergoing constant change as a result.
For the purposes of this study, “urban” designates parents who live in Shijiazhuang, a city of moderate economic development and political influence on the national scene, and, thus, a not-prestigious but, on the whole, typical non-internationalized Chinese city. To the residents of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, or Guangzhou, even to residents of second-tier eastern coastal cities such as Dalian or Wuhan, Shijiazhuang is rather tu (土 – literally “soil” or “earth,” but inflected as a slight it connotes backwardness) and, by implication, much closer to “rural” than they see themselves to be. Yet it is, at the same time, the capital of a province of roughly seventy-million and the largest of that province’s eleven cities. By 2004, the city proper housed a relatively modest two million, but, as the centre of its own prefecture, it now governs more than nine million people. While it does provide a range of educational opportunities to the residents of Hebei, its post-secondary institutions are not in the same class as the relatively few well-known and nationally supported comprehensive institutions located in cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Xi’an. For all intents and purposes, then, while Shijiazhuang is most definitely a “city” and certainly not “rural” by the objective standards set out above, it nonetheless can be seen to be so by the subjective criteria described in the fourth of the categories of distinction. Put differently, for Shijiazhuang’s most aggressively upwardly mobile, true urbanity exists elsewhere, in Beijing, Shanghai, or overseas.
In contemporary, market-oriented China, class is an important dimension of unification and differentiation (Wang, Davis, & Bian, 2006). Taking into account “ownership of property, skill, and authority in the workplace” (p. 322), China’s emergent social structure can be seen to comprise three categories and eight subdivisions. Two of the eight, “private owners and administrative staff,” imply “control over property” (as opposed to ownership); two, “enterprise managers and government/Party officials,” indicate “control of organizations”; and four, “professionals, white-collar administrative staff, blue collar production workers, and service workers,” require “some kind of skill” (p. 322/326). Unfortunately, these three categories and their subdivisions exclude a crucial feature of the post-Mao urban landscape: the downward mobility and dispossession that is an outcome of processes of differentiation and dis-empowerment of the Mao-era urban proletariat (Bian, 2002). This once-privileged, now-fragmented proletariat significantly includes “a new urban poverty stratum” that has emerged from within the ranks of “layoff…and retired labor” (Bian, 2002, p. 96), not to mention from the ranks of employed or casually employed rural to urban migrant labourers. Inclusion of a fourth category of “structurally disempowered” gives one a fuller picture of the nature of contemporary urban society.
Class-occupational structure of contemporary China (adapted from Bian, 2002; Wang, Davis, & Bian, 2006, p. 326)
| Control over property | Control over organizations | Skilled & semi-skilled labour | Structurally disempowered |
|---|---|---|---|
| Private owners Administrative staff |
Enterprise managers Government officials Party officials |
Professionals White-collar administrative staff Blue collar production workers Service workers |
Laid-off labour Retired labour Rural to urban migrant labour |
This class-occupational structure suggests a more highly variegated social configuration than that implied in the research questions listed above. Having said this, in those questions, the term “middle-class” is a convenient placeholder at once suggested by the common sense self-positioning of respondents, popular literature that encourages people to examine themselves in terms of relative “middle-classness,”2 and the public discourse of the state and its research organs. Respondents were not purposefully recruited with respect to this typology, but sampling was “purposive” (Patton, 1990) in the sense that I aimed to recruit a group of respondents with the capacity to compile an information rich case “from which…a great deal about issues…central…to the purpose of the research” (p. 169). With respect to the aims of the research, the principal need was to assemble data representative of a broad range of Shijiazhuang parents’ views and experiences. The strategy of “convenience sampling,” like purposive sampling associated with “theoretical sampling” (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), was also important (Patton, 1990). I identified parents of children currently in the midst of their nine years of yiwu jiaoyu (义务教育– compulsory education) as well as those of children about to enter these years. When I initially interviewed them, they were parents to children ranging from youeryuan (幼儿园– preschool/kindergarten) to chu san (初三 – Lower Middle School Year Three/Grade 9), or approximately three to fifteen years of age. By the end of the period of study, the youngest of these children was in her last year of youeryuan, the oldest in the midst of writing gaokao (高考 – high school exit exams). Initial informants were drawn from an existing group of contacts that included past work colleagues and research collaborators. Subsequent informants were identified through referrals from this initial group, i.e., through “snowball” or “respondent-driven sampling,” an approach that provided access to respondents whose occupations, e.g., government/Party officials, made their recruitment problematic (Heckathorn, 1997).3 I recruited informants representing a total of fifteen families. Those introduced by name below were key to the data generation as I was able to interview them most thoroughly and spend the most time observing them.
Data Analysis
Three distinct modes of analysis were used to deal with the different kinds of data collected for the study. These forms correspond to the focus of each of Chapters 2 through 5. Tables A.2 and A.3 provide a brief overview of the structure of this tripartite analysis, including the objects of study, data sources, and modes of analysis.
Objects, data sources, and modes of analysis
| Chapter | Object (order) | Data sources | Mode of analysis |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2–3 | Jianfu (cultural system) |
|
Corpus Analysis |
| 4 | Shijiazhuang City (cultural system) |
|
Corpus Analysis |
| 5 | Parents’ beliefs and activities (socio-cultural interaction) |
|
Close listening/reading Focussed Coding |
Comparison of codes in different modes of analysis
| Code family | Code used in “scoping orders of worth” | Code used in “scoping the city” | Code used in “scoping parents’ beliefs and practices” |
|---|---|---|---|
| Process |
|
|
|
| Relationship and social structure |
|
|
|
| Ways of thinking about people and objects |
|
|
|
Before presenting the analysis of jianfu, I provide a reminder about data sources and methods of analysis. As discussed above, I compiled four discrete corpora comprising materials in broad circulation within a few years of the time that jianfu was formally proclaimed. I read these materials looking for indicators of the kinds of people, social relations, knowledge, and learning represented as valuable or praiseworthy at that time. Taken together, each of these collections of normative criteria comprise a more or less distinct order of worth, providing guidance to people on how to govern themselves publicly and privately, and especially to parents on how to proceed with respect to educating and getting an education for their children.
Scoping Orders of Worth
In this chapter and again in Chapter 3, I construct a history of orders of worth of China’s Communist state. The analysis is grounded in Boltanski & Thévenot’s (2006) and Boltanski & Chiapello’s (2007) concept of “order of worth.” An order of worth comprises a comprehensive set of criteria by which judgements are made about the value or “goodness” of people, things, and social arrangements and, at the same time, can provide justification for one’s participation in extant social order. Propaganda of various kinds are the primary vehicle by which an officially sanctioned order of worth is proposed and promoted, whereby “a series of novel political-cultural forms” is created to fulfill “the pressing need of the CCP…to consolidate its hold on China, justify its legitimacy, and instill a new socialist culture in the nation” (Hung, 2011, p. 2). An order of worth is also a set of precepts or prescription that orients – imperfectly, to be sure – the thoughts and activities of people who live in a given socio-cultural environment.
To maintain legitimacy – i.e., to be effective in providing justification – a order of worth must fulfill three criteria. First, it must provide for excitement or challenge, for “attractive, exciting life prospects” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007, p. 24). With respect to Chinese parents’ educational projects, the pursuit of educational success/attainment is in and of itself an extreme challenge in a system characterized by a scarcity – both perceived and real – of high quality opportunities and governed by an entrance/examination system with a significant degree of selective power. But for those not motivated by pure challenge, one finds all kinds of exciting promises on offer in contemporary Chinese schools, international travel/study, for example. Second, an order of worth must supply “guarantees of security” (p. 25) to those who engage with the world it aims to govern. For the middle-class urban parents who are the subjects of this study, the order of worth that orients their activities holds out the promise of success through dedication and hard work, that is, it offers the possibility of good jobs and happiness to those who readily submit themselves to the barriers it places before them. Third, an order of worth must provide a conception of the common good, some sense that one’s educational pursuits are not harmful to others, indeed, that the drive to competition and self-betterment characteristic of today’s educational culture somehow contributes to the good of the wider community to which one belongs. Justification of this kind can be seen most clearly, perhaps, in proposals that seek to identify, advance, and disproportionately reward “special talents” despite the manifest developmental imbalances (e.g, lack of social skills, physical frailty, etc.) such individuals might display. Where special talents are able to contribute to the overall development of society (e.g., a musician capable of uplifting the spirits of the people at large, a scientist with the intellectual capacity required to bring to market discoveries that improve the health of all), balanced or overall development can be set aside.
To specify the relevant orders of worth, I identified four distinct collections of documents as corpora grouped around the occurrence of a policy directive – jianfu – repeatedly forwarded as the solution to perceived flaws in the revolutionary state’s educational processes and systems. These calls to jianfu coincide with epochal moments in the history of the People’s Republic, some of them more with epochal moments in the history of the People’s Republic, some of them more familiar and, therefore, more easily recognized – such as the founding of the PRC or the launching of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution – and others less so, such as the present period, which coincides roughly with the elevation of Jiang Zemin’s Three Represents as a core component of the guiding philosophy of the Chinese Communist Party. I have not attempted to identify every potential order of worth. For example, the decade of the 1990s followed a crucial moment of transition following the shock of Tiananmen and the demise of European communism, not to mention Deng’s highly significant southern tour, but I have not attributed to this important decade its own order of worth and given it the detailed treatment it likely deserves. However, I would suggest that the orders I do present are sufficient for the purposes of explication and comparison.
at present the classes in junior middle schools take too much of the students’ time, and it would be preferable if they were cut down to suitable proportions. (Mao, 1997 [1953], p. 97)
Theoretical and technical knowledge is learned through combining study, productive labor and scientific experimentation. This is in sharp contrast to the old universities under the revisionist line where the students were divorced from proletarian politics, labor, and the workers and peasants. (Staff Reporter, 1975, p. 2)
Gone were the authoritarian, self-centred pedagogues I remembered from my own schooldays. Gone too was the reticence of the children toward the teachers…, based on fear of authority, and the individualistic spirit among the pupils themselves. In their place were warm friendliness and an atmosphere of cooperation and good teamwork. (Pan, 1955, p. 13)
Coding used in “scoping orders of worth”
| Code family | Codes used in “scoping orders of worth” | Examples of coded data |
|---|---|---|
| Process | De-ruralization | “The All-China Federation of Trade Unions survey suggested that the children of migrant workers newly graduated from high school are not confident or competent in setting concrete career goals, or handling the complex and fluctuating information and social environments” (Hou, 2010, p. 12) |
| Modernization | “As a rising modern country with an ancient civilization, it is fitting for China to make a special effort to develop its higher education… and to in turn improve the quality of world education” (CWI, 2011, p. 4). | |
| Relationship and social structure | Common good | “We do not really belong to cities. When we’re old we’ll go back to our village to live. In cities we just serve the people, and everything else is provisional. But we’re glad to do so, and have no regrets, since in many ways we are doing better than back on the farm” (Hou, 2010, p. 12). |
| Relations between persons |
|
|
| Ways of thinking about people and objects | Good persons | “The questions were difficult, for with only three years of schooling I lacked real theoretical knowledge.… He determined to work hard to make up what he lacked in theory” (Kao, 1966, p. 28). |
| Valued Knowledge |
|
|
| Modes of Learning | “Theoretical and technical knowledge is learned through combining study, productive labor and scientific experimentation” (Staff Reporter, 1975, p. 2). |
Once the various corpora were compiled, I began the process of discerning the dominant order of worth of each period. As I engaged in a “close reading” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007) of the documents, I made notes of frequently recurring words and phrases. Some of these (e.g., modernization) were identified as spontaneous codes in subsequent analysis. I created other codes (e.g., de-ruralization) to describe themes that emerged during analysis. I then used HyperResearch qualitative analysis software to code the entire corpus. I conducted keyword searches using the spontaneous codes, the purpose of which was to identify occurrences of a topic or theme and develop a rich understanding of it. Spontaneous codes were designated as a list of initial codes. As this process continued, a set of dominant codes emerged, that is, they occurred more often than others and aligned with one or the other of the aspects of Boltanski & Chiapello’s framework.
Of these aspects, the four identified in Chapters 2 and 3 emerged as powerful indicators of the shape and texture of orders of worth as they concern matters of education: reference to common good; reference to good persons and relations between persons; reference to knowledge; and reference to teaching/learning styles. To be sure, no order of worth is eternal, and the combination of excitement, security, and “moral reasons” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007, p. 25) that legitimate social arrangements at the same time provide for the possibility of its delegitimization. Indeed, the ways in which parents talked about rearing and educating their children in Shijiazhuang indicated that their relation to the dominant order of worth of their time is far from secure. It also confirms Boltanski & Chiapello’s claims of the special role of critique to the eventual demise of that order. An order of worth, that is, is at once an expression of the preferred way to live life and a critique or dismissal of some other, no longer desirable way of life. An order of worth offers a critique of the order it aims to supplant, pointing out how the kinds of people, relations between people, forms of education, and/or notion of common good proposed in the past is somehow insufficient. But it is also a normative template, a vision of the future by which the mistakes of the past can be corrected and a more desirable future realized. As a more or less comprehensive guide to living, a set of cultural resources that every day people live in relation to, and a collection of omnipresent and accessible exemplars, these orders of worth provide some indication of the moral universe within which every day people go about their lives.
Scoping The City
Maps of Shijiazhuang, government planning documents, photographs, and notes of my observations and experiences of construction and re-development in the city helped me create the descriptions presented in this chapter. In terms of the general precepts of san nian da bianyang, I read through speeches and news reports looking for repeated terms, exhortations of residents to embrace san nian da bianyang, and evaluations of initiatives proposed or underway, especially for those explicitly linked to improvements for the common good and/or to the creation of an urban environment capable of nurturing good people and positive relations amongst citizens.
“Process” codes (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007, p. 176) such as “de-ruralization,” “modernization,” and “beautification” were used to code data linked to notions of how the city ought to change. In development plans, I paid attention to potential changes in “spatial relations” produced in planners’ visions, in particular the ways in which these plans made private vehicle ownership a necessary condition of living the good life. In photos of advertisements on construction walls, I looked for indicators – both textual and visual – of “the good life” and the kinds of people who could be produced by this good life. The photos were categorized using codes belonging to the “relationship and social structure codes” (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007, p. 177) family, such as “common good” and “relations between persons.” These codes are discussed separately in the subsections under Tangible Effects of Renovation in Chapter 4, but are also linked to codes commonly used with interview transcripts. Table A.5 shows the relationships between these codes.
Coding used in “scoping the city”
| Code family | Codes used in “scoping the city” | Examples of coded data |
|---|---|---|
| Process | De-ruralization | See Figures 4.7, 4.9, 4.13, 4.15 |
| Modernization | See Figures 4.1, 4.8, 4.11, 4.18 | |
| Beautification |
|
|
| Relationship and social structure | Common good | “In order to accelerate the process of urbanization with the consequence of building a moderately prosperous [xiaokang – 小康] society in our province as a whole in the long-term, we must continuously emancipate our mind and develop innovative new ideas, initiatives, and leadership” (Hebei People’s Government, 2007, “Promote Urbanization and Institutional Renovation”) |
| Relations between persons | ||
| Ways of thinking about people and objects | Good persons | “We set it our goal to educate our students to be qualified personnel who are patriotic, sociable, cooperative, polite, healthy and creative and who can meet the global challenges of the world” (SFLEG, 2013d). |
| Valued Knowledge | “Students energetically use brooms to sweep leaves and scrape off the small ad stickers. See how much our small labour can accomplish? See how the residential environment can be changed with only our small hands?” (SFLEG, 2013a). | |
| Modes of Learning | “…the development of children’s language, art, science exploration, group games,… the ability to help your baby learn to be independent and live in groups” (Gymboree, 2013). |
Following these more generalized processes of change, I focus on a specific instance of change in the form of one new neighbourhood currently under construction. Linyin Dayuan is a large new neighbourhood taking the place of Beijiao Village in north central Shijiazhuang. What makes this development an interesting object of analysis is the particularly heavy layer of promotion taking place around it in the form of advertising. These advertisements provide examples of the kinds of promotional materials on display throughout the city, whether on the construction walls of new developments or in the hallways of shopping malls throughout the city. The images and slogans contained in the ads were compiled and coded using the same code families and specific codes as other documents in this section and are included to given a sense of the kinds of projects that residents of the city are confronted by on a daily basis.
For the third part of Chapter 4, Educational Institutions for the Aspirational City, I conducted a corpus analysis of the kind described above using materials available on the websites of Shijiazhuang Foreign Language School (SFLS) and Jinbaobei/Gymboree China. Because my interest was in connecting elements of Shijiazhuang’s educational institutions to the order of worth identified in the Chapter 4 corpus analysis, I focused on materials that addressed the domains of common good, good persons and relations between persons, knowledge, and teaching/learning styles. These schools’ promotional/communication materials proved particularly useful in this regard as they provided insight into how the school and its staff wishes to be viewed by parents, teachers, and visitors. For example, I looked at descriptions of its facilities to get a sense of what kinds of knowledge are valued as well as what kind of students the school aims to produce. I read through dozens of staff introductions and compiled a list of characteristics that describe the kinds teachers seen as “good” and worthy of teaching at such a school. I read articles on student volunteer activities looking for depictions of model students, including the personal qualities such students are expected to exhibit, how they ought to dress and address teachers, and what the purpose of such students might ultimately be. Finally, I looked carefully at how the school conceives of “good parents,” including the kinds of knowledge it views as essential for good parenting, how it attempts to establish good relations between parents and the school, and the kinds of parent role models the school publicizes.
Scoping Parents’ Beliefs and Practices
Hammersley and Atkinson (2007) recommend “close reading” of data as a way of finding concepts with which to understand what is “going on” and as a way to develop fresh insight into the phenomena under investigation (p. 162). For me, this process began in a slightly different way – with repeated close listening during the period in which I conducted interviews. I loaded interview recordings into a portable listening device and listened to them repeatedly over an extended period of time. From a purely practical perspective, repeated listening both relieved the pressure of immediate transcription and made eventual transcription easier. More importantly, I developed a familiarity with the interview recordings that allowed me to, (1) remain attuned to prosodic4 elements not easily represented in transcriptions5; (2) to pick up on potentially productive lines of inquiry while still in the field; and (3) to expedite the process of “initial coding” (Lofland, Snow, Anderson, & Lofland, 2006, p. 201). Together with close reading of transcripts, close listening helped me to think with the data; to search for “interesting patterns” and “surprising or puzzling elements”; to make connections to expectations based on “common sense knowledge, official accounts, or previous theory”; and to seek out variations and contradictions in the views, beliefs, and attitudes of individuals or within groups, or between what people say and what they do (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 163).6
During repeated listening and reading, both “spontaneous” (i.e., taken from the usage of participants) and “observer-identified” (i.e., created by me) concepts arose (p. 163). The former – such as jiating jiaoyu, suzhi, zonghe/pingheng fazhan, and mianzi – are discussed in Chapter 5, as are examples of the latter (e.g., negotiating, navigating). In identifying these concepts, I drew on common sense, personal experience, and pertinent theory (p. 163).7 Concept formation of this kind is typically imprecise, akin to Blumer’s “sensitizing concepts” (in Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 164). Such concepts are a contingent product of a preliminary analysis that “suggest directions along which to look,” to give “a general sense of what is relevant,” and to provide “reference and guidance” (Blumer, 1954, p. 7).
Coding used in “scoping parents’ beliefs and practices” All quoted material is from interview data
| Code family | Codes use in “scoping parents beliefs and practices” | Examples of coded data |
|---|---|---|
| Process | Cultivating suzhi | “I taught my child, when he finishes something to just keep the garbage and take it home to throw out. So now he remembers ‘Don’t throw it on the ground, mama! Take it home for me and throw it in the garbage!” I think that shows one’s suzhi.” |
| Family education (jiating jiaoyu) |
“First, it involves simple living, looking after basic needs. Another is to teach him to know his environment and society, not only how to get dressed, how to study things…not only those things. Another thing is to teach him a way of thinking, like how to tackle problems he faces, how to think.” | |
| Relationship and social structure | Treating others well | “Like when we are on the bus, I teach him to give up his seat to old people.” |
| Mianzi/lian | “I think I am the kind of person that cares a lot about what others think of me and my child. If she does well, it makes me look good.” | |
| Fairness | “For example, look at how highly students in Hebei or Henan have to score on the exams. For students from Beijing, it’s much easier.” | |
| Ways of thinking about people and objects | Good persons | “I think a good person is someone is useful, who has value to society.” |
| Valued knowledge | “She should learn some technical knowledge, but also learn how to solve problems.” | |
| Modes of learning | “I just want him to do well in the end, and that will be good enough. In the end, if he can test in the better half, that is good enough for me.” | |
| Beautiful places | “One thing I do is try to take her to scenic areas so she will understand that the world is full of different kinds of places, not just the city.” | |
| The good life | “There is a little girl who lives next door to us, and I guess she has probably never even been to KFC for a meal.” | |
| Good schools | “For primary school, I think a common school nearby is good enough. Later, I hope he can go to a better one, like SFLS.” |
With repeated readings, certain topics and concepts came to the fore as they were either, (a), repeatedly returned to and/or imbued with explanatory significance by interviewees, or (b), because they offered insight with respect to the research questions. These initial topics and concepts were the foundation of an initial list of “coding categories” (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007, p. 173). One family of codes, for example, dealt with the concept of pingheng fazhan (all-around/balanced development), and comprised discrete codes such as facilities needed for balanced development, schooling is about teaching-learning creativity, and schooling is about teaching-learning to be cooperative. These categories and codes organized subsequent rounds of “focused coding” (Lofland et al., 2006) during which all of the interview transcripts were coded using the QR software HyperResearch. I used the software to perform manual and automated key word searches.
The types of codes of most concern in this research are usefully described by Bogdan and Biklen (2007) under a number of family names. Crucially, interview data yielded insight into “perspectives held by subjects” (p. 175) in terms of their understandings of the purposes and aims of “education.” In terms of considering how parents go about getting the kind of education they envision for their children, a number of the codes that emerged to organize the data belong to the family of “strategy codes,” those that refer to the “tactics, methods, techniques, maneuvers, ploys, and other conscious ways people accomplish various things” (p. 177). They also revealed “subjects’ ways of thinking about people and objects” (p. 175), perspectives that helped me explore links between informants’ perspectives and the aspirational cité.
Notes
The divide I refer to is the Catholic-Public/Protestant division in Alberta’s government funded school system. While changes to funding formulas, demographics, and a group of policies that allow for “choice” have to some extent broken down the barriers that once made crossing sectarian boundaries rare, the objective fact that only one school exists in many small communities means that the “right to choose” remains a limited and largely abstract possibility.
The best of example of this literature is Xu Haifeng’s (2003) ni “zhong chan” le ma? (你中产了吗？– Are you part of the middle-class?).
Questions such as those that follow will helped me to identify further respondents. To whom do you go for to help you make decisions about your child’s education? What kinds of people and sources do you trust/respect (or not)? Do you know others who might be interested in discussing these topics with me?
Here I refer to elements such as pitch and stress (Prosodic, 1998). More generally, recognizing that an informant was angry or joking, i.e., recognizing the spirit of an utterance, is greatly enhanced by access to original recordings.
For the same reason, I later transcribed the interviews using Transcriva (http://transcriva.en.softonic.com/mac), software that allows for synchronized listening and reading.
In Glaser and Strauss (1970) this process is described as a search for “categories and properties” (p. 105).
In Glaser and Strauss (1970), these are categories the researcher “has constructed himself” and “those that have been abstracted from the language of the researcher situation” (p. 107).
Corpus 1 – The Early Revolutionary Period
1952
Chang, W.-S. (1952, July–August). Doctors serve, teach and learn. China Reconstructs, 1(4).
Chen, S.-M. (1952, March–April). A place the children love. China Reconstructs, 1(2).
Chien, C. (1952, November–December). Private enterprise grows. China Reconstructs, 1(6).
Ching, C.-H. (1952, September–October). Clearing the decks for industrialization. China Reconstructs, 1(5).
Fei, X. (1952, May–June). China’s multi-national family. China Reconstructs, 1(3).
How Workers. (1952, January–February). How workers move industry forward. China Reconstructs, 1(1), 24–25.
Hu, H.-C. (1952, January–February). University trade union. China Reconstructs, 1(1).
Jen, T.-Y. (1952, January–February). The children’s own theatre. China Reconstructs, 1(1).
Marriage Law. (1952, July–August). Marriage Law brings happiness. China Reconstructs, 1(4), 46.
Mei, L.-F. (1952, September–October). Old art with a new future. China Reconstructs, 1(5).
New City New People. (1952, May–June). New City New People. China Reconstructs, 1(3).
News of CWI. (1952, January–February). News of CWI. China Reconstructs, 1(1).
Shih, C.-C. (1952, July–August). Worker’s clubs and cultural groups. China Reconstructs, 1(4).
Soldier Writer. (1952, May–June). Kao Yu-Pao Soldier Writer. China Reconstructs, 1(3).
Soong, C. L. (1952, January–February). Welfare work and world peace. China Reconstructs, 1(1).
Sports Athletics. (1952, September–October). Sports and Athletics for all. China Reconstructs, 1(5), 16–17.
Workers’ Inventions. (1952, May–June). Workers’ Inventions and innovations. China Reconstructs, 1(3), 12.
1953
A Teacher. (1953, May–June). A Teacher housewife. China Reconstructs, 2(3).
Chien, T.-S. (1953, September–October). Higher education takes a new path. China Reconstructs, 2(5).
Ching, C. (1953, July–August). World’s biggest elections. China Reconstructs, 2(4).
Chou, J. (1953, May–June). Women workers and their children. China Reconstructs, 2(3).
Hinton, W. (1953, September–October). Two ordinary girls. China Reconstructs, 2(5).
Li, P.-T. (1953, March–April). New day in child care. China Reconstructs, 2(2).
Liu, N.-I. (1953, May–June). What Chinese trade unions do. China Reconstructs, 2(3).
Liu, O.-S. (1953, November–December). My experience as an industrialist. China Reconstructs, 2(6).
Lo, C. (1953, March–April). Women are equals. China Reconstructs, 2(2).
The Peasants Get. (1952, May–June). The Peasants Get new implements. China Reconstructs, 1(3), 10–12.
Three Children. (1952, November–December). Three Children and a cow. China Reconstructs, 1(6).
TOC. (1952, January–February). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 1(1).
TOC. (1952, March–April). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 1(2).
TOC. (1952, May–June). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 1(3).
TOC. (1952, July–August). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 1(4).
TOC. (1952, September–October). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 1(5).
TOC. (1952, November–December). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 1(6).
Travels in China. (1952, July–August). Travels in China (new culture). China Reconstructs, 1(4).
Tze, K. (1952, March–April). Chinese women and children. China Reconstructs, 1(2).
Village Teacher. (1952, March–April). A Village Teacher fights illiteracy. China Reconstructs, 1(2).
Weapon Against. (1952, September–October). Weapon Against illiteracy. China Reconstructs, 1(5).
Workers Education. (1952, November–December). Workers’ Education. China Reconstructs, 1(6).
Workers Get. (1952, November–December). Workers Get new homes. China Reconstructs, 1(6).
1954
Chen, C.-H. (1954, September–October). Wide horizons for students. China Reconstructs, 3(5).
Chi, F.-Y. (1954, July–August). Peasant girl to farm leader. China Reconstructs, 3(4).
China Reconstructs. (1954, November–December). China Reconstructs moves to monthly issues. China Reconstructs, 3(6).
Huang, T.-P. (1954, November–December). Peasant hunters of fukien province. China Reconstructs, 3(6).
Li, P.-T. (1954, May–June). Wang Chung-Lun who out-distanced time. China Reconstructs, 3(3).
List of China. (1954, November–December). List of china reconstructs worldwide distributors. China Reconstructs, 3(6).
Liu, G. D. (1954, September–October). My husband is a ‘model.’ China Reconstructs, 3(5).
Liu, S.-T. (1954, March–April). At the ferry. China Reconstructs, 3(2).
Lu, P. (1954, November–December). Labour party delegation. China Reconstructs, 3(6).
Lu, Y.-S. (1954, November–December). One peaceful night. China Reconstructs, 3(6).
Pai, H. (1954, November–December). What the hani girl said to me. China Reconstructs, 3(6).
Staff Reporter. (1954, July–August). In a Peking primary school. China Reconstructs, 3(4).
Sun, H.-C. (1954, March–April). Girl dispatcher. China Reconstructs, 3(2).
TOC. (1954, January–February). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 3(1).
TOC. (1954, March–April). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 3(2).
TOC. (1954, May–June). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 3(3).
TOC. (1954, July–August). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 3(4).
TOC. (1954, September–October). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 3(5).
World Youth. (1954, November–December). World Youth in Peking. China Reconstructs, 3(6).
Yang, G. T. (1954, July–August). Books and people. China Reconstructs, 3(4).
1955
Alley, R. (1955, March). At the school again. China Reconstructs, 4(3), 18–20.
Li, S.-M. (1955, May). The Hui people’s academy. China Reconstructs, 4(5), 12–13.
Lin, T. K. (1955, August). Broadcasting for the people. China Reconstructs, 4(8), 2–5.
Pan, Y.-J. (1955, June). A school that leads the way. China Reconstructs, 4(6), 13–15.
Tien, T. (1955, February). Better books for children. China Reconstructs, 4(2), 25–27.
TOC. (1955, March). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 4(3).
TOC. (1955, May). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 4(5).
1956
Chen, H.-S. (1956, September). Training teachers for middle schools. China Reconstructs, 5(9), 18–19.
Pan, Y. (1956, April). Meeting new needs in education. China Reconstructs, 5(4), 2–5.
Yang, K. T. (1956, June). Growing boy. China Reconstructs, 5(6), 24–26.
1965
Epstein, I. (1965, August). Biggest export fair at Canton. China Reconstructs, 14(8), 9–12.
Ho, C.-C. (1965, October). China builds her own chemical fibre industry. China Reconstructs, 14(10), 40–41.
Corpus 2 – The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
1966
Books. (1966, April). Books for the countryside. China Reconstructs, 15(4), 20–20.
Animated Cartoon. (1966, March). Animated Cartoon films teach the young. China Reconstructs, 15(3), 24–24.
Chang, C. (1966, January). Open-book examinations bring good results. China Reconstructs, 15(1), 14–15.
Chen, C.-H. (1966, February). Across the grasslands with a mobile theatre. China Reconstructs, 15(2).
Chin, P.-S. (1966, August). Making a transistorized ultrasonic thickness gauge. China Reconstructs, 15(2).
Chu, P.-C. (1966, April). Boxwood carvings of children. China Reconstructs, 15(4), 36–37.
Fang, C. (1966, June). Weaver who looks behind the cloth. China Reconstructs, 15(6), 36–38.
Fighting Spirit. (1966, February). Fighting Spirit in songs. China Reconstructs, 15(2).
Four New. (1966, June). Four New track and field records. China Reconstructs, 15(2).
Ho, W. (1966, April). Commerce serves the countryside. China Reconstructs, 15(2).
Hsin, P. (1966, May). A young fighter-Wang Chieh. China Reconstructs, 15(5), 10–13.
Kao, H.-C. (1966, March). Man with fortitude. China Reconstructs, 15(3), 26–28.
Kao, Y.-W. (1966, April). Revolution in machine designing. China Reconstructs, 15(4), 26–32.
Kumara, A. (1966, September). My third visit to China. China Reconstructs, 15(2).
Lake, R. (1966, February). A day in Yenan. China Reconstructs, 15(2), 25–28.
Li, P.-Y. (1966, October). Serving the mountain people. China Reconstructs, 15(2).
Man of Iron. (1966, May). The ‘Man of Iron’ Wang Chi-Hsi. China Reconstructs, 15(5), 2–5.
Mu, C. (1966, May). County party secretary-Chiao Yu-Lu. China Reconstructs, 15(5), 6–9.
Pa, C. (1966, May). Defeating the U.S. flying bandits. China Reconstructs, 15(2).
Peng, H.-C. (1966, April). A model reservoir manager. China Reconstructs, 15(4), 24–25.
Shi, T. (1966, July). Land wrested from the sea. China Reconstructs, 15(2).
Soong, C. L. (1966, January). Sixteen years of liberation. China Reconstructs, 15(1), 2–9.
Tai, S.-E. (1966, April). Mass efforts to extend improved seed. China Reconstructs, 15(4), 18–19.
Tao, T.-C. (1966, March). Ancient corner towers. China Reconstructs, 15(2).
The Old Woman. (1966, November). The Old Woman and the needle. China Reconstructs, 15(2).
The Students Go. (1966, January). The students go to the peasants. China Reconstructs, 15(1), 39–41.
TOC. (1966, July). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 15(7), 1.
Wang, K.-C. (1966, March). The 100,000 whys. China Reconstructs, 15(3), 16–17.
Yu, C.-H. (1966, April). We don’t turn down a difficult order! China Reconstructs, 15(4), 12–14.
Yu, W.-H. (1966, February). How I won the peasants’ trust. China Reconstructs, 15(2), 16–18.
Yuen, H.-Y. (1966, July). Our summer vacation. China Reconstructs, 15(7), 55.
1967
A Long March. (1967, February). A Long March to Peking. China Reconstructs, 16(2), 11–14.
Chang, P. (1967, May). Wipe out the poisonous influence of the book on self-cultivation. China Reconstructs, 16(5), 9.
Chen, Y.-K. (1967, March). How we won the bumper harvest. China Reconstructs, 16(3), 20–21.
Chi, T. (1967, February). ‘The east is red’ rings out over Shanghai. China Reconstructs, 16(2), 10.
Ching, C. (1967, March). Speech by comrade Chiang Ching. China Reconstructs, 16(3), 5–6.
Jutseniu Long March Detachment. (1967, March). Not a single comrade fell behind. China Reconstructs, 16(3), 34–34.
Li, J.-N. (1967, January). We bend nature to our will. China Reconstructs, 16(1), 36–39.
Liu, S.-J. (1967, January). Heroic drilling team battles a sea of fire. China Reconstructs, 16(1), 26–31.
Pien, H.-T. (1967, February). The red guards – Shock force of the great proletarian cultural revolution. China Reconstructs, 16(2), 6–9.
Red Guards. (1967, January). Red Guards on a trolley bus. China Reconstructs, 16(1), 43–43.
TOC. (1967, January). Table of contents. China Reconstructs, 16(1), 1–1.
Corpus 3 – Reform and Opening up
1975
A Lesson. (1975, April). A Lesson for the teacher. China Reconstructs, 24(4), 46–46.
CCP Central Committee. (1983). Circular of the CCP Central Committee and the state council on some questions concerning the strengthening and reform of rural school education (1983)*. Chinese Education and Society, 12(12), 71–76.
CCP Central Committee. (1985). Reform of China’s educational structure – Decision of the CPC Central Committee: Higher Education (p. 22). Beijing: Foreign Languages Press.
Chang, T.-L. (1975, November). A factory-college graduate. China Reconstructs, 24(11), 6–8.
China Reconstructs Correspondents. (1975, February). Graduates from three year medical school. China Reconstructs, 24(2), 29–31.
China Reconstructs Correspondents. (1975, April). Higher education in Shanghai ‘walks on two legs.’ China Reconstructs, 24(4), 42–45.
Chu, H.-Y. (1975, March). How I acted a boy revolutionary hero. China Reconstructs, 24(3), 32–33.
Chung, T. (1975, December). Sports in new China. China Reconstructs, 24(12), 2–10.
Cover. (1975, February). Cover. China Reconstructs, 24(2).
Hsiao, P. (1975, November). The children’s own newspaper. China Reconstructs, 24(11), 9–11.
Hsin, H.-W. (1975, May). A new type of college. China Reconstructs, 24(5), 6–10.
Hu, S., & Seifman, E. (1987). Education and socialist modernization: A documentary history of education in the people’s republic of China, 1977–1986 (p. 229). New York, NY: AMS Press.
Soong, C. L. (1975, April). Confucianism and modern China. China Reconstructs, 24(4), 2–4.
Staff Reporter. (1975, November). Factories run their own colleges. China Reconstructs, 24(11), 2–8.
The Shining. (1975, March). The Shining red star. China Reconstructs, 24(3), 27–31.
They Battle. (1975, February). They Battle with their poems. China Reconstructs, 24(2), 32–33.
Yung, H. (1975, May). Education in China today. China Reconstructs, 24(5), 2–5.
State Education Commission, 1987–1999
State Education Commission. (1994). 国家教委关于全面贵彻教育方针, 减轻中小学生过重课业负担的意见 [State Education Commission Commentary on a Comprehensive Approach to Reducing Primary and Secondary Students Heavy Schoolwork Burden]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.chinalawedu.com/news/1200/22598/22615/22794/2006/3/we407315187121360028310-0.htm
State Education Commission. (2004 [1998]). Provisional regulations on schooling for migrant children. Chinese Education & Society, 37(5), 7–9.
State Education Commission. (2005a [1987]). 国家教委 1987 年工作要点 [Main Working Points of the State Education Commission for 1987]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/moe_gong_zuo_493/20060323/t20060323_135938.shtml
State Education Commission. (2005b [1988]). 国家教委 1988 年工作要点 [Main Working Points of the State Education Commission for 1988]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/jybgz_9336/20100121/t20100121_443600.shtml
State Education Commission. (2005c [1989]). 国家教委 1989 年工作要点 [Main Working Points of the State Education Commission for 1989]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/moe_gong_zuo_493/20060323/t20060323_135957.shtml
State Education Commission. (2005d [1990]). 国家教委 1990 年工作要点 [Main Working Points of the State Education Commission for 1990]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/moe_gong_zuo_493/20060323/t20060323_135965.shtml
State Education Commission. (2005e [1991]). 国家教委 1991 年工作要点 [Main Working Points of the State Education Commission for 1991]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2005, from http://www.edu.cn/moe_gong_zuo_493/20060323/t20060323_135970.shtml
State Education Commission. (2005f [1992]). 国家教委 1992 年工作要点 [Main Working Points of the State Education Commission for 1992]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/jybgz_9336/20100121/t20100121_443596.shtml
State Education Commission. (2005g [1993]). 国家教委 1993 年工作要点 [Main Working Points of the State Education Commission for 1993]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/jybgz_9336/20100121/t20100121_443595.shtml
State Education Commission. (2005h [1994]). 国家教委 1994 年工作要点 [Main Working Points of the State Education Commission for 1994]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/moe_gong_zuo_493/20060323/t20060323_135985.shtml
State Education Commission. (2005i [1995]). 国家教委 1995 年工作要点 [Main Working Points of the State Education Commission for 1995]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/moe_gong_zuo_493/20060323/t20060323_135999.shtml
State Education Commission. (2005j [1996]). 国家教委 1996 年工作要点 [Main Working Points of the State Education Commission for 1996]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/moe_gong_zuo_493/20060323/t20060323_136004.shtm
State Education Commission. (2005k [1997]). 国家教委 1997 年工作要点 [Main Working Points of the State Education Commission for 1997]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/moe_gong_zuo_493/20060323/t20060323_136008.shtml
Ministry of Education. (2005f [1999]). 教育部 1999 年工作要点 [Main Points of the Ministry of Education for 1999]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/jybgz_9336/20100121/t20100121_443590.shtml
Corpus 4 – Post-2000
2006
CWI. (2006, November). China to introduce overseas academic talents. China Today, 55(11), 9–9.
Gao, S. (2006, October). Parental love cures net addiction. China Today, 55(10), 44–45.
Lu, R. (2006, April). High scores: Low ability. China Today, 56(4), 45–49.
Lu, R. (2006, October). Vying for the cream of China’s academic crop. China Today, 55(10), 40–42.
Xu, X. (2006, August). Advocate of cultural integration. China Today, 55(8), 64–65.
2007
CWI. (2007, June). Font of music prodigies. China Today, 56(6), 10–11.
CWI. (2007, June). Great expectations. China Today, 56(6), 4–4.
Dornian, P. (2007, June). Music education advances through sino-foreign exchanges. China Today, 56(6), 22–23.
Huo, J. (2007, December). Three pillars of traditional rudimentary education. China Today, 56(12), 60–67.
Li, Y. (2007, June). Musical upward mobility. China Today, 56(6), 15–17.
Liu, Q. (2007, October). Recharge before advancing. China Today, 56(10), 26–29.
Lu, R. (2007, October). Time to learn. China Today, 56(10), 14–17.
Lu, R., & Luo, Y. (2007, June). Music is a calling not a work skill. China Today, 56(6), 12–14.
2008
Cadieux, L., & Hu, Y. (2008, March). A devoted music educator. China Today, 57(3), 64–65.
CWI. (2008, February). China plans to send 12,000 state-funded students abroad in 2008. China Today, 57(2), 8–8.
Hou, R. (2008, June). The booming baby business. China Today, 57(6), 30–31.
Zeng, P. (2008, May). A sound principal underlying a good education. China Today, 57(5), 47–49.
2009
Chambers, R. E. (2009, August). Model students. China Today, 58(8), 54–55.
Jiang, P., Feng, J. (2009, October). Adhering to the values of an intellectual. China Today, 58(10), 24–27.
Lu, R. (2009, February). How to guide children: Family education consultancies take off. China Today, 58(2), 38–40.
Liu, Q. (2009, March). University graduates suffer “employment anxiety.” China Today, 58(3), 32–34.
Lu, R. (2009, May). A top Chinese university reaches out to migrant workers. China Today, 58(5), 55–57.
Liu, Q. (2009, August). Where’s my job? Job shortage for grads a national concern. China Today, 58(8), 15–18.
Liu, Q. (2009, September). Yu Shufan And her “children.” China Today, 57(9), 54–55.
Zhao, Y. (2009, August). When the office seems chilly, school seems hot. China Today, 57(8), 33–35.
Zhou, Xi. (2009, February). My neighbour’s American kids. China Today, 58(2), 41–41.
2010
Cheng, W. (2010, July). For the children of the grasslands. China Today, 59(7), 58–59.
CWI. (2010, February). The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue. China Today, 59(2), 70–71.
CWI. (2010, April). Educational funding to rise. China Today, 59(4), 8–8.
CWI. (2010, April). Xinjiang to exempt tuition and fees for teacher training. China Today, 59(4), 8–8.
Grossman, S. (2010, January). The world as classroom. China Today, 59(1), 70–72.
Hou, R. (2010, October). The in-between world: New-wave migrants. China Today, 59(10), 11–14.
Lu, R. (2010, August). Zhang Kailang: Putting the pop in popular science education. China Today, 59(8), 46–47.
Meng, Q., & Zhou, Y. (2010, April). An industry loses its shine. China Today, 59(4), 48–50.
Ministry of Education. (2010). Outline of China’s national plan for medium and long-term education reform and development, 2010–2020. Beijing: Ministry of Education.
Zhang, H. (2010, June). Brains unchained: Chinese education devolves to evolve. China Today, 59(6), 49–50.
Zhao, Y. (2010, August). Scholars on the run. China Today, 59(8), 50–51.
Zhao, Y. (2010, August). The price of parenthood. China Today, 59(8), 44–46.
2011
Admin. (2010). 究意什么是全职妈妈. www.qzmama.org. Retrieved May 9, 2012, from http://www.qzmama.org/article-1-1.html
CWI. (2011, September). Chinese education influences the world. China Today, 60(9), 4–4.
CWI. (2011, November). Private capital in kindergartens encouraged. China Today, 60(11), 8–8.
Hou, R. (2011, September). Chinese universities embracing the world. China Today, 60(9), 20–24.
Ling, J. (2011, September). Xi’An Jiaotong-Liverpool university: Exploring a new educational model. China Today, 60(9), 25–27.
Lu, R. (2011, September). Approach to higher education reform. China Today, 60(9), 16–20.
Lu, R. (2011, September). To build world-class universities calls for restructuring higher education. China Today, 60(9), 28–30.
O’Mahony, T., & Bravery, B. (2011, September). From gaokao to knowhow. China Today, 60(9), 40–41.
Ouyang, H. (2011, February). Top ten concerns of 2010. China Today, 60(2), 38–43.
Wu, W. (2011, March). Our expectations for education. China Today, 60(3), 35–35.
Xu, Y. (2011, January). Changchun invests in people. China Today, 60(1), 52–55.
Xu, Y. (2011, September). Daqing: Science giant. China Today, 60(9), 78–79.
Zhang, H. (2011, July). Changing education: One Tibetan family’s experience. China Today, 60(7), 49–50.
Zhao, D. (2011, April). Special love for a special individual. China Today, 60(4), 54–56.
2012
CWI. (2012, April). Free schooling for demobilized servicemen. China Today, 61(4), 9–9.
Ding, X. (2012, April). Remote county of abundant education. China Today, 61(4), 60–61.
Shen, H. (2012, June). Give children what is most valuable. China Today, 61(6), 28–30.
Zhang, H. (2012, June). Labor of love: Embracing the volunteer spirit in education. China Today, 61(6), 26–27.
China Ministry of Education, 2000–2010
Ministry of Education. (2005a [2001]). 教育部 2001 年工作要点 [Main Points of the Ministry of Education for 2001]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/moe_gong_zuo_493/20060323/t20060323_136016.shtml
Ministry of Education. (2005b [2000]). 教育部 2000 年工作要点 [Main Points of the Ministry of Education for 2000]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/20051229/3168313.shtml
Ministry of Education. (2005c [2003]). 教育部 2003 年工作要点 [Main Points of the Ministry of Education for 2003]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2005, from http://www.edu.cn/20050819/3147525.shtml
Ministry of Education. (2005d [2005]). 教育部 2005 年工作要点 [Main Points of the Ministry of Education for 2005]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/20050819/3147527.shtml
Ministry of Education. (2005e [2004]). 教育部 2004 年工作要点 [Main Points of the Ministry of Education for 2004]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/20040105/3096860.shtml
Ministry of Education. (2005g [2002]). 教育部 2002 年工作要点 [Main Points of the Ministry of Education for 2002]. China Education and Research Network. Retrieved May 13, 2011, from http://www.edu.cn/moe_gong_zuo_493/20060323/t20060323_136017.shtml
Ministry of Education. (2010). Outline of China’s national plan for medium and long-term education reform and development, 2010–2020. Beijing: Ministry of Education.
San nian da bianyang (一年一大步, 三年大变样) Documents
Hebei People’s Government. (2007). hebei sheng renmin zhengfu guanyu jiakuai tuijin chengzhenhua jin cheng de ruogan yijian [Hebei people’s government opinion on the acceleration of urbanization] (Ji Zheng [2007] No. 138). Retrieved from http://www.hebjs.gov.cn/zfxx/flfg/xgwj/200712/t20071223_88759.htm
Yao, Y. (Ed.). (2009, July 15). “一年一大步, 三年大变样” 石家庄迎来大发展 [“One year one big step forward, three years total change”: Shijiazhuang ushers in major development]. CRI Online. Retrieved from http://gb.cri.cn/27824/2009/07/15/3785s2563458.htm