The doxa of Chinese Human capital: An ethnographic study of a tutorial center in Beijing

• In Event: Chinese roundtable II (Sponsored by SIG: East Asia)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Educational policies and programs

Proposal

The scale of private supplementary tutoring (PST) market in China is estimated to be worth over 100 billion US dollars. And it will continue to grow. It is easy to explain this profit-making industry as an investment in children’s future or provide an account of the PST frenzy in theoretical terms using human capital theory. But in the context of China there is a deeper reason beyond PST as “investment”. This paper argues that a deeply embedded Chinese discourse on education known in local parlance as “Knowledge changes destiny” (知识改变命运) is the cultural logic that is driving the economics of PST. In making this argument, this paper introduces a fresh theoretical angle called the doxa of Chinese human capital to contribute to the now growing scholarship and research on Shadow Education. Drawing on the data collected from a pilot ethnographic study in one tutorial center in Beijing, this study will gather ethnographic evidence with a view to explore and understand the Chinese context of “human capital doxa” utilizing Bourdieu’s concepts of “doxa” in conjunction with human capital theory. As a pilot study, further considerations of fine-tuning the methodology used as well as theory building will be discussed for the larger study of a few tutorial centers in Beijing.

Author

• Zhen Tao, The Chinese University of Hong Kong