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Educating the Chinese Individual

Life in a Rural Boarding School

By Mette Halskov Hansen

PUBLISHED: August 2016
SUBJECT LISTING: Asian Studies / China, Education, Anthropology
BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION: 240 Pages, 6 x 9 in
ISBN: 9780295994093
Publisher: University of Washington Press

Format:

Paperback
- Hardcover

$32.00

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Description

In twenty-first-century China, socialist educational traditions have given way to practices that increasingly emphasize the individual. This volume investigates that trend, drawing on Hansen's fieldwork in a rural high school in Zhejiang where students, teachers, and officials of different generations, genders, and social backgrounds form what is essentially a miniature version of Chinese society. Hansen paints a complex picture of the emerging “neosocialist” educational system and shows how individualization of students both challenges and reinforces state control of society.

Authors & Contributors

Mette Halskov Hansen is professor of China studies at the University of Oslo. She is the author of Lessons in Being Chinese: Minority Education and Ethnic Identity in Southwest China and coeditor of iChina: The Rise of the Individual in Modern Chinese Society.

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Chinese Education and Processes of Individualization

1. Discipline and Agency: Quests for Individual Space
2. Text and Truth: Visions of the Learned Person and Good Citizen
3. Hierarchy and Democracy: Controlled Rise of the Individual
4. Motivation and Examination: The Making and Breaking of the Individual
5. Dreams and Dedications: Teachers’ Views and the Construction of a Generation Gap

Conclusion: Authoritarian Individualization

Notes
Glossary of Chinese Names and Terms
Bibliography
Index

Reviews

Educating the Chinese Individual is an ethnographically rich and stimulating study. It enriches our knowledge about a relatively under-studied group—rural youth and young teachers—in a marginal setting. It challenges some common assumptions of the changing landscape of school education and everyday cultural practice of the younger generations in post-socialist China. . . . This book will attract a wide readership in educational studies but will also appeal to audiences in sociology and anthropology who are interested in social change and youth culture in contemporary China.

- Xuan Dong, The China Quarterly

[E]xcellent. . . . [T]his ethnography is a fine depiction of a slice of life in China today. The important issues it handles show the value of having more ethnographies of Chinese secondary schools, including studies of first-tier, vocational, and urban high schools from many parts of the country.

- Andrew B. Kipnis, The China Journal

Advance Praise

An outstanding and original contribution to the anthropology of education and a penetrating and vivid analytical picture of how contemporary Chinese society is changing and why.

- Peter Cave, University of Manchester

Groundbreaking. . . . Engages in inspiring dialogue with various social theories on the individual-society relationship as well as the cultural construction of the self. . . . A landmark in China studies and the anthropology of the individual.

- Yunxiang Yan, University of California, Los Angeles

Powerful. . . . [Illuminates] the diverse practices that go into subject formation processes in contemporary China.

- Lisa Hoffman, University of Washington Tacoma