Social Movements and Educational Change in China

• In Event: 63.068 - Asia as Method: Interreferencing Discourses of Culture, Politics, and Hegemony in Asia

Abstract

Objectives/Purposes
This study pays specific attention to China’s unique political and cultural structures, by laying out the conditions and circumstances leading to the formation and development of collective actions. Specifically, it lays out how the state has attempted to transform rural migrants and their children into new types of subjects by introducing policies that would monitor and discipline them. It then examines the organizational battles against social and political constraints, in addition to focusing on the mobilization of resources and social capital in the development of collective action.

Theoretical Frameworks
The author situates this study within a framework for analyzing civil society and social movements in the Chinese context. Contextualizing social movement theories by the reflective analyses of social relations and detailed accounts of structures of inequality provide spaces for a politics of recognition and redistribution that has been denied to migrant workers and their families for over three decades. The formation of migrant worker organizations and coalitions was a direct response to the lack of state regulation and welfare in certain areas such as migrant communities. These struggles are particularly true for those who have built special schools for migrant children under the complex and uncertain social and political environments.

Methods and Data
In addition to extensive archival research on population migration and state responses to changing educational needs over the past thirty years, the study was conducted in five different migrant communities in and around Beijing. As part of this research, ethnographic methods were used to complete a fourteen-month, multi-sited study, including in-depth interviews and participant observations at homes, schools, and community sites with migrant children, their parents and teachers.

Substantiated Conclusions
These schools in migrant communities often adopt strategies to chart out alternative paths for their children’s education, in ways that cannot be fully captured by the Western concepts of democratization. By documenting these communities’ efforts towards redefining the education they provide for their children, and by tracing out the ongoing impacts such efforts carry for the society as a whole and for individuals, the paper makes the argument that Western constructs such as democracy and social movements fail to illuminate the complexity of current social and political changes in China and the richness of the agendas that are developing at the grassroots level. Such an analysis offers insights into the nature of collective action in Chinese society and the reconstruction of social dynamics across its cities.

Significance
As one of only a few studies focusing on schools for the children of migrant workers, this research provides a timely and important contribution to a growing body of research aimed at understanding the challenges and suffering migrant workers and their children experienced as a result of social and economic inequality. One of the most distinct elements of this study is that it captures in rich detail an important and ongoing struggle taking place in contemporary Chinese society, making it relevant to other efforts at seeking a more complete understanding of mobilizations against entrenched forms of institutionalized inequity.

Author

• Min Yu, Wayne State University