Empowered By Procedures: Emergence Of School Admissions Protests In China

• In Event: Resilience, Resistance and Protest: Voices from Students, Teachers, and Parents in China

Proposal

Why, as de Tocqueville observed, do government reforms provoke political unrests? I develop a theory of fair process empowerment by documenting and explaining the emergence of school admissions protests in China. Analyzing policy documents, national protest data, and longitudinal fieldwork from 2010-2019, I find a school admissions reform in the early 2010s had the unintended consequence of empowering parent protests in Chinese cities. The post-reform procedures were more formalized and were perceived by parents as fairer than the pre-reform procedures. Unanticipated by the government officials, the fairer procedures enabled better recognition of substantive injustices, facilitated mobilization, and supplied information for claim-making. This study expands the social movement literature by identifying procedures as a novel determinant of protest emergence. It also contributes to the study of education in China by documenting parent-led school admissions protests and the nationwide school admissions reform in the early 2010s.

The manuscript contributes to the study of education in East Asia in three ways. First, it is the first paper, in English or Chinese, to document parents-led protests on elementary and middle school admissions in China. The existing literature has documented protests led by human rights advocates in Beijing between 2009-2013 (Zhou 2018), but not parent-led protests on school admissions. This paper reports 15 such protests across 2013-2019 in an anonymized primary fieldwork site and describes 35 media-reported school admissions protests across Chinese cities during 2010-2019. School admissions protests matter because they present a form of parent activism in response to inequality. Notably, all the 15 protests recorded in the primary fieldwork site and 19 out of 35 school admissions protests nationwide have been organized by migrant families, a social group who have suffered from inadequate access to local public schools. These protests, often attended by hundreds and sometimes by thousands of parents, sometimes succeeded in achieving their goals to expand education access.

Second, it is among the first English-language papers to describe the school admissions reform in China in the early 2010s, also known as the “Sunshine Admissions” reform by the Chinese government. This school admissions reform formalized public elementary and middle school admissions procedures across China, using formal procedures to substitute previously informal school choice avenues. This reform made the “school districts” (xuequ) the dominant institution for school admissions in China for the first time. Its implications for Chinese education are as far-reaching as the school choice reform in the United States. However, research on this reform and its impacts has been limited, except for a small urban studies literature on the rise of school district housing prices after the reform (e.g., Zheng, Hu, Wang, J Real Estate Fin Econ 2016). My paper provides an original and systematic account of the reform. My account of the reform synthesizes 53 central policy documents, 31 People’s Daily reports, interviews with 12 government officials and 41 parents in the primary fieldwork site, and additional fieldwork in three other fieldwork sites.

Third, the paper provides empirical evidence on the link between the school admissions reform and school admissions protests. Based on longitudinal fieldwork during 2010-2019 and nationwide media-reported protests database between 2000-2019, I found that school admissions protests emerged only after the school admissions reform. Using interviews and direct observations of school application processes and protests, I identified three mechanisms that the post-reform procedures empowered protests. Specifically, the post-reform procedures made it easier for parents to recognize substantive injustices, created shared experiences that provided a basis for mobilization, and supplied information for claim-making. These mechanisms explain why parents only started protesting on school admissions after the reform, even though both migrant and local parents had grievances on this issue long before the reform began.

To summarize, this paper adds to the study of education in China, by reporting two inter-related empirical phenomena that have been previously neglected by the academic literature: school admissions protests and the “Sunshine Admissions” reform. It also contributes to the study of educational inequality and its consequences in East Asia, by showing that institutional processes such as school admissions matter for people’s response to educational inequality.

Author

• Fangsheng Zhu, Duke Kunshan University