Justifying Particular Interest in Universalizing Terms

• In Event: 078 - Regular Session. Social Movements, Framing and Culture.

Abstract

This paper is an ethnographic study on the cultural formation of right and citizenship in China’s equal education movement. As the allocation of education resources in China is dependent upon the hukou system, migrant children’s access to schools at all levels has long been constrained. What I trace is a movement organized by a group of migrant parents in Beijing, who protest for their children’s right to attend the college enrollment procedure in the city. Employing Alexander’s framework of “social movements as civil translations,” I analyze the process of how a discourse of universal right has been formed, and how the movement has justified this universal right discourse confronting challenges in civil society. I discover that, although the participation of liberal intellectuals and activists has helped the movement to acquire an inclusive face, the movement’s impact on citizenship is still quite limited, because 1) the parents have sought to expand the “privileged population,” rather than reflect upon the system that stratifies people’s access to education by their hukou status; and 2) although the movement has mobilized a large number of working class to attend, the demand still has an obvious middle-class bias. I raise a hypothesis that, due to the particular institutional arrangement in China as a post-socialist regime, social movements are more likely to become “magnifiers,” instead of “transformers.” This paper not only offers an innovative approach for studying the “rights-defending activities” in contemporary China, but also contributes to a cross-culture project of the civil sphere.

Author

• Mujun Zhou, Brown University