Ambivalence and transformations: Chinese rural students’ struggles for recognition and identity work in urban universities

• In Event: Inclusion in higher education: Use of data to ensure equity in policy decisions

Proposal

China’s social, economic and political environment has gone through significant changes since the Reform and Opening-up policy in 1978. One year before, in 1977, the College Entrance Examination was restored after a 10-year suspension, which marked the beginning of widening higher education access in China and the growing importance of meritocracy in enrolment. Since then, many rural students managed to enter urban universities and change their life trajectories through higher education (Lin and Wu, 2010). However, rural students are still underrepresented in the higher education system, especially in the elite universities (Bai, 2006). Few research has focused on rural students’ lived experiences in the urban city, and there is no research that has taken a generational and historical perspective.
This research aims to understand how social changes, urbanisation and broader neoliberal reforms have influenced rural students’ social mobility experiences, to examine how rural students make sense of their encounters with the dominant urban culture, and consider how their experiences have altered generationally. Specifically, the study seeks to elicit rural students’ narratives about their journeys, during and after higher education so as to better understand how the impediments of a disadvantaged family background, the hukou (household registration) system and its related issues (such as the unequal distribution of urban-rural educational resources) affect the potential for social mobility. A life history approach is applied to the qualitative data collection and analysis. Participants of this research is university graduates who have grown up in rural villages of Shandong province in China. A purposive sampling strategy has been followed to recruit participants of four age cohorts groups: university students who graduated in 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.
Bourdieu’s toolkits are applied to understand the constraints and disadvantages that rural students experience when compared with their urban peers after entering higher education and then moving into their professional lives. The analyses revealed the development of marketization and meritocratic ideology in the educational sector have reinforced the existing inequality between urban and rural students, and the rural students’ chances for upward social mobility have been increasingly squeezed. Moreover, the division of urban and rural in China is by no means straightforward and the rural educational field is not homogeneous but with contains hierarchies within itself. Influenced by different sources of power, rural educational field shapes rural students’ habitus and capital and then further generates rural students’ mobility trajectories before they access university.
After entering higher education, urban-rural differences perceived by rural students appeared in various forms with distinctive and historical features. Compared with urban students, rural students in China are disadvantaged in terms of those cultural capitals which are valued in the fields of schooling, and subsequently, in higher education. In addition, from Bourdieu’s perspective (1990), the process of upward social mobility involves the adjustment of habitus to field. When habitus encounters an unfamiliar field, individuals are supposed to experience ambivalence when having to deal with moments of misalignment and tension, which shares many similarities with rural students’ first encounter in the urban cultural context. For those rural students who are living in the urban context, transformation and alteration co-exist throughout their adaptation to the urban context and efforts have been made by rural students to reshape the urban field with rurality and guanxi.
In terms of the theoretical developments, this research aims to explore a more reflexive and critical application of Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts and other social class approaches in Chinese context. Considering the complexity and uniqueness of the Chinese social context, I am carefully localising, recontextualising and hopefully enriching those above mentioned theoretical framework with the reflections obtained from the data analysis. The policy implications of my work will be to improve the awareness of existing problems that rural students are encountering, in order to develop recommendations for schools and universities for how they can better support rural students who are academically able and motivated to improve their opportunities to access higher education and secure longer-term financial and professional futures.

References:
Bai, L. (2006). Graduate unemployment: Dilemmas and challenges in China's move to mass higher education. The China Quarterly, 185, 128-144.
Bourdieu, P., 1984. Distinction: A social critique of the judgement of taste. Harvard university press.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The logic of practice: Stanford University Press.
Harker, R. and May, S.A., 1993. Code and habitus: comparing the accounts of Bernstein and Bourdieu. British journal of sociology of education, 14(2), pp.169-178.
Lin, Z., & Wu, X. 2010. Institutional changes, class-structure transformation and income inequality in China. 1978-2005. Society, 6(1).

Author

• Jiexiu Chen, Shanghai Jiao Tong University