Transcending an Urban-Rural Divide: Rural Chinese Youth’s Resistance to Townization and Schooling

• In Event: Youth Resistance Across Neoliberal Contexts

Abstract

This paper takes a close look at the resistance of rural Chinese youth, a group largely overlooked in the existing literature. It aims at challenging the ubiquitous reproduction of urban-rural dichotomy in interpreting rural youth’s negotiations of educational and societal injustices. Instead, the author explores townization (Guldin, 2001), or big villages becoming towns and big towns becoming cities, and how such transition of rural China has altered rural youths’ perceptions about schooling and society, understanding about urbanity and modernity, their academic and career aspiration, and their actions and even resistance.

This paper draws upon cultural production literature (Levinson & Holland, 1996) as the main theoretical framework. Cultural production theory offers a close examination of how youths’ experience, perceptions and practices constitute and are constituted by a dialectical interplay between their agency and the powerful structural determinants of the wider society. The study is set against the context of townization which best describes the development process and stage of the rural countryside in China. The location of rural secondary schools in townships, hovering somewhere between the rural and the urban in both imagination and reality, creates ambiguities in the social relations of its residents, including students. Such ambiguities empower and disempower rural students with space and potential to develop a fluid subjectivity, the process of which this paper investigates.

The author has been conducting longitudinal research in rural schools in Northwest China since 2006. This paper is primarily based on a five month ethnographic study conducted in a rural middle school called Longman in 2007. Living with students in the school dormitory, the author collected data through observing students’ daily life in and after class, at and outside of school. The author also surveyed 163 students (grades 7-9) about their home, school, and community life. Selected students were later interviewed.

The study reveals how rural students criticize the chaos, pollution and corruption they have experienced during townization, which penetrate the school walls and become part of their daily schooling experience. The discrepancy in their experience with the immediate chaotic town society and their urban-centered school education about the greater society leads to their questioning and resistance to townization. Such questioning serves as a great moment of pause, which allows students to reexamine the cost of urbanization and modernization, reflect upon their academic and career aspirations in a way that movies beyond an urban-rural dichotomy, and reinterpret their schooling and life experience and their status stuck in between the rural and the urban. Students’ resistance to townization translates to their resistance to schooling. The study analyzes three groups of rural youth (conformists, reformers, and rebels), and how their resistance is limiting and even self-defeating, yet also has potential of being liberating.

This study enriches a long line of youth resistance theories that have been developed by Paul Willis (1977) and others by offering compelling examination of rural Chinese youth. Findings from the study also have implications for rural education policy makers in China as well as in other developing countries.

Author

• Jingjing Lou, Beloit College