Barbara Schulte

World culture with Chinese characteristics: when global models go native

Just as the world has increasingly been compressed over recent decades through transnationally engaged actors or ‘carriers’ such as mobile experts, international organisations, and seemingly globalised bodies of knowledge, so have Chinas politicians and academics increasingly ‘gone global’ in various fields of social action, including education. Chinas Open Door policy since the late 1970s is, historically, not the countrys first opening to the world but is preceded by earlier phases of opening and closing. Each of these ‘global’ phases is witness to two interrelated phenomena: the reconstruction of the local through the global; and the reconceptualisation of the global through the local. The article seeks to illustrate this dialectic process both in theory and in practice. The first part unpacks dimensions and paradoxes of the global–local nexus in comparative education, discussing both fruitfulness and shortcomings of the ‘world culture theory’ and complementary approaches. Based on the insights from this discussion, the second part showcases the local embeddedness of seemingly global paths by revealing how the Chinese educational field dealt with – and appropriated – ‘world culture’. I will exemplify this by looking at two different time periods: firstly, I will show how, in the Republican China of the 1920s, the idea of ‘vocational education’ was taken up, transformed, and meshed with socio-culturally grounded, both traditional and contemporaneous notions of how the individual should be socialised into working life. Secondly, I will trace how the idea of ‘neo-liberalism’ has been taken up by Chinese educationists since the 1990s and how it has been sinicised to justify – or oppose – equality in education. The insights from these two historical snapshots are two-fold: firstly, the development of Chinese education is not as nationally determined as is suggested by various actors and researchers but emerges at the interface of globally migrating ideas and nationally designed strategies; secondly, ‘world culture’ – or an educational ideology spreading worldwide – is not as uniform as is suggested by its apparent global ubiquity but is remade by local, if transnationally active agents and networks.

Social Hierarchy and Group Solidarity: The Meanings of Work and Vocation/Profession in the Chinese Context and their Implications for Vocational Education

The Chinese characters for culture, education, profession/vocation and work provide important information on the socio-historical background of the concepts represented by them. Particularly the concepts of work and education have profound implications for the idea of vocational education. Based on an etymological and semantic analysis of the characters, and through the introduction of a typical example of Chinese work organisation, the work unit or danwei, this paper shows correspondences between the past and the present organisation of work. It also shows that semantic analyses, when ignoring the socio-cultural context, may lead to a distorted picture of the society concerned. This is demonstrated by the example of the concepts of “order” and “harmony”.

Unwelcome Stranger to the System: Vocational Education in Early Twentieth-Century China

Both in China and internationally, educators and policy makers claim that vocational education and training (VET) is essential for the sound economic development of a country and the physical and social well-being of its population. However, China looks back upon a century-long history of rejection when it comes to popularising VET, despite attempts, both in the present and in the past, to invest in its implementation. Much of the literature attributes this lack of success to the failed, or distorted, transfer of Western educational models or simply to policy drift. The article approaches this history of rejection by tracing back the original Chinese encounters with Western-style vocational education. After an introductory discussion of different scholarly attempts at explaining failed transfers of VET, I look at how this transfer actually took place when VET was first introduced to China. Therefore, the focus will be on the first decades of the twentieth century and a group of Chinese actors who were pivotal in importing VET models from abroad and building up a nationwide vocational education programme (primarily members of the Chinese Association of Vocational Education). I will argue that vocational education, when introduced to China from abroad, was embedded in an existing framework of systematic and widely practised discrimination and segregation of the population. Therefore, it was less the Westernness of VET that made it undesirable to many Chinese, but its specific – and specifically Chinese – integration into existing practices of allocating cultural capital.

(Dis)Empowering Technologies: ICT for Education (ICT4E) in China, Past and Present

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are often presented as the cure-all for various problems: ICTs for education (ICT4E) are considered promising tools for promoting self-directed, creative learning and bridging various divides, such as those between developed and developing countries, urban and rural regions, and so on. While the lofty goals of ICT4E are continuously being highlighted, surprisingly little attention has been paid to how these technologies are embedded in sociocultural and political environments. China is no exception to this narrative of techno-determinism. In China, new technologies are being widely propagated as effective instruments for erasing differences between learners and learning communities, particularly with regard to transplanting “modern” education into rural communities. The novelty of twenty-first century ICT, however, tends to obscure the fact that these techno-optimist beliefs date back to attempts in the early twentieth century to uplift rural China through the implementation of modern technologies. The article will scrutinize this history of techno-optimism and will relate it to recent attempts at “transformation by technology.” Finally, I will discuss how the new keyword in both educational modernization and the knowledge economy – “creativity” – functions as the conceptual ideological heir to “production capacity,” the core ingredient of the industrializing societies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Europe Refracted: Western Education and Knowledge in China

European educational knowledge and practices have been deeply impacted by the colonial experience. While hegemonic knowledge was exported to the colonies, practices of teaching and governing colonial subjects were tested in the periphery and then reimported to the center. This contribution looks at a case of European education outside Europe that did not take place, at least not entirely, in a colonial setting: China. It argues that the (at least potentially) non-colonial encounter with societies that presented possible alternatives to European civilization was as important in refracting and reframing European knowledge, education, and identity as was the colonial encounter. European education outside Europe was enacted not only in settings of hegemony and resistance but also in more subtly nuanced spaces of encounter.

Studying the Sent-Down Internet: roundtable on research methods

WB: Rural people make sense of things in their own contexts, which researchers from urban areas usually do not understand in the first place. Back in 2002, when I was doing fieldwork in Renshou County, Sichuan Province, I was shocked to see the local cable TV channel “broadcast” online news. They cut and pasted pure text from Internet news sites such as Sina, and then showed it on a special channel 24 hours a day. Information from Sina thus entered the contexts of ordinary rural families, now all equipped with TV sets. This was something urban people wouldn’t understand without being in the field. A second challenge is, who sets the standard? Researchers often bring a rigid set of standards from cities, from their own experiences, about what’s “advanced technology” and what’s “backward.” They apply these standards with little respect for rural experiences, become judgmental, and miss important things. Rural people may also fabricate answers to please the researchers, telling them that they go online often when it is not true. A third challenge is gender sensitivity. The tremendous gender inequality that characterizes rural areas (in addition to other forms of inequality) is also beyond imagining for inexperienced urban researchers. All of these challenges boil down to one point: how can we recognize, in a way that remains true to its (rural) context, new modes of what I call “media convergence from below”?

Envisioned and enacted practices: Educational policies and the ‘politics of use’ in schools

ABSTRACT It is widely known that there is a discrepancy between educational policy on the one side, and teaching and learning practices on the other. Most studies have been focusing on the sociocultural and micropolitical frames that shape teachers’ understandings and enactments of teaching, and that cause the vast diversity of classroom practices around the world. This article wants to draw attention to the ‘politics of use’ in teachers’ work: how teachers mobilize larger political narratives when implementing curriculum reform. Arguably, these narratives provide a shortcut between the central government and street-level actors, thus circumventing the logics of these actors’ immediate institutional environments. In order to showcase the politics of use, the article uses the case of education for creativity as it is designed for and practiced at Chinese schools. The case reveals how education for creativity is compromised by requirements emanating from larger political programs when implemented in Chinese classrooms. The article challenges the view that educational policy necessarily moves through a trickle-down process, from higher to medium to lower-level actors. In cases of strong ideological alignment between street-level actors and central state actors, educational policy may in fact sidestep and hence neutralize important institutional actors.

Private schools in the People's Republic of China: Development, modalities and contradictions

Chinese private schools may come across as a contradictory phenomenon: why would an authoritarian and officially socialist government, that needs to rely on education as an instrument of national unification and ideological control, allow for private schools and profit-making in the educational sector? However, seen against the background of the far-reaching privatisation processes that have been shaping the Chinese economy and society since the 1990s, one might equally wonder why this seemingly all-pervading privatisation wave had for a long time stopped short of the educational realm. This chapter outlines the development, modalities, and contradictions of private schools in the People’s Republic of China.

Hochschulen Chinas – Zwischen Traditionen und Reformen im Kontext der globalen Wissensökonomie

Das chinesische Bildungswesen hat seit den 1990er Jahren eine Vielzahl von Veranderungen und Reformen durchlaufen, die auf die Anpassung an die Herausforderungen der globalen Wissensokonomie abzielen. Ein zentraler Begriff ist hierbei die ‚Innovation‘: die kreative Erneuerung von Bildungsinhalten, -praktiken und -management; sowie die Fruchtbarmachung dieser neuen Bildungsansatze fur die innovative Erneuerung von Wirtschaft, Industrie und Gesellschaft (MOE (Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China), Jiaoyubu Guanyu Tuijin Zhongdeng He Gaodeng Zhiye Jiaoyu Xietiao Fazhan De Zhidao Yijian [Leitende Ansicht des Bildungsministeriums zum Voranbringen der koordinierten Entwicklung der beruflichen Bildung im Sekundar- und Tertiarbereich], http://www.gov.cn/zwgk/2011-09/20/content_1951624.htm, Zugegriffen: 23. Juni 2016, 2011b). Der Beitrag beleuchtet die Innovationsfahigkeit des chinesischen Hochschulwesens und berucksichtigt dafur folgende Aspekte: Erstens wird das chinesische Schulsystem als Rekrutierungsbasis chinesischer Studierender in seinen wichtigsten Grundzugen dargestellt; zweitens wird auf die Organisation, die Reformen und die Leistungsfahigkeit des chinesischen Hochschulwesens eingegangen; abschliesend werden vier Dimensionen des chinesischen Innovationsdilemmas diskutiert: ideologische Kontrolle versus Kreativitat; staatliche Planung versus Graswurzelinnovation; Seilschaften versus Antikorruption; sowie die Rekrutierung durch das Prufungssystem versus flexible Rekrutierung.

Global Paths, Local Trajectories

In Chinese education and at Chinese schools, the global has become ubiquitous – at least in the urban areas. This is observable at different levels: at the micro level, school children wear Western clothes brands (or imitations of them); Christmas decoration is hanging from the ceilings; classrooms and school yards frequently feature large world maps and huge globes; and the school bells play Mozart or North American children songs.