Envisioning futures: Primary school selection among upper-middle-class parents in Shanghai

• In Event: Creating an (un)equal playing field: parenting practices and educational strategies among China’s emerging middle- and affluent classes

Proposal

In this paper, I show how Chinese upper-middle-class parents strategize about a big moment in their children’s educational career: school selection. My findings from interviews with 80 parents with children at all stages of schooling (K-12) and observations of 20 households in Shanghai suggest that Chinese upper-middle-class parents aspire to raise flexible talents that can move up in Chinese society and outward to compete in the developed world. I offer the “logic of timely adjustment” as the organizing principle for how these parents raise children in a time of global integration. They plan ahead and work backward from these plans. In the short run, they help their children meet institutional expectations for “quality” (suzhi). In the long run, they prepare their children to compete in the global arena by acquiring cosmopolitanism as cultural capital. All the while, they assess, adjust, and readjust what they do for their children. Specifically, my account of Chinese upper-middle-class parents’ school selections at one point in time and over time show how they shape their children’s educational trajectories while being prepared to change the course of things as contingencies arise. Their educational practices challenges implicit assumptions that household strategies for social reproduction will be stable over time and organized around one fixed set of institutional arrangements. The logic of timely adjustment captures how, increasingly, privileged parents from the developing world practice flexibility and reflexivity as they envision multiple possible futures for their children.

Author

• Lily Liang, University of Wisconsin-Madison