Jinting Wu

Governing Suzhi and Curriculum Reform in Rural Ethnic China: Viewpoints From the Miao and Dong Communities in Qiandongnan

Abstract This article examines the uptake of suzhi—roughly glossed as “quality”—in China’s recent curriculum reform called suzhi jiaoyu (Education for Quality) in the rural ethnic context of Qiandongnan. It engages with three layers of analysis. First is a brief etymological overview of suzhi to map out its cultural politics in contemporary China. Agamben’s theorization of People/people is invoked to elucidate how the keyword embeds the differentiation of bodies and the fabrication of the “others” through a civilizing mission. Second, the article surveys the genealogy of suzhi ideas‐practices as the historical project of making the ideal personhood. It examines how suzhi’s entanglement in Chinese historiography constitutes the moving target for the formation of educational subjects. Third, the article draws from my ethnographic research in southwest China to investigate suzhi’s enactment in compulsory schooling and current curriculum reform. It provides nuanced empirical accounts to illuminate how suzhi/quality is understood, contested, and reappropriated in everyday pedagogical practices; how the bifurcated front‐ and backstage maneuvering in two village schools trouble the salvationary overtone of the suzhi‐oriented curriculum reform. The lens of performativity is harnessed to move beyond the “loose coupling” theory and suggest undecidable interstices in the production of pedagogical subjectivity. Furthermore, this section explores how suzhi jiaoyu sits in a jarring relationship with indigenous cosmology to produce epistemic dissonance and disenchantment towards schooling. The article concludes with a call for provincializing the “universal” notion of quality and for a productive aporia in thinking about the limit‐points of schooling.

Disenchantment and Participatory Limits of Compulsory Education: Lessons from Southwest China.

Despite the state’s unrelenting efforts to enforce compulsory basic education, schooling in rural ethnic China remains an elusive ideal that leads to massive dropout and prepares many only for factory sweatshops. Based on 16 months of ethnographic research, this article examines the disjuncture between the official education policy known as the Two Basics Project (TBP) and the lived practices and beliefs observed in two rural ethnic communities. It investigates how students’ disenchantment and withdrawal from school challenges compulsory education as a fragile universalist attempt at social progress. Instead of merely examining what factors contribute to the policy failure, the analysis questions the very ‘progressive’ ideals and teleological visions at work in China’s educational programming, and challenges binaries such as literacy/illiteracy, cultured/uncultured, modernity/traditionalism.

Ethnic Tourism and the Big Song: Public Pedagogies and the Ambiguity of Environmental Discourse in Southwest China

Abstract The article examines two forms of public pedagogies in a rural region of Southwest China—tourism and ethnic songs—to illustrate their contested roles in transforming local relations with natural and built environment. While tourism development daily alters the village landscape by spatial intervention, demolition, and construction, the ‘landscaping’ is both a visual and conceptual device that produces a pleasurable environment as the ‘other’ and signifies what is tourable and what is to be seen. On the other hand, the echoes of the environment and human-nature relations are central elements in ethnic songs that have been sung for centuries as a major music genre to transmit ancestral, historical, and cultural understandings. Indigenous worldviews and ecological awareness are expressed in songs through imitation of nature and worship of various nonhuman forms of life. The paper argues that a nascent environmentalism and ecological significance of the ethnic songs are increasingly oriented towards instrumental development rationality, while at the same time revived and choreographed in staged tourism performances. Both tourism and ethnic songs offer powerful forms of public pedagogies through which to rethink how incommensurable discourses generate new environmental crises by drastically altering not only the vernacular landscape but also local cosmological beliefs. The short-lived developmental zest and the longstanding local ecological consciousness play out complex dynamics in ‘teaching’ the locals and the tourists about the changing environment of rural ethnic China, and the ambiguities and tensions that exist within the notion of sustainable development.

Macau higher education expansion in flux: a critical spatial perspective

ABSTRACT In the former Portuguese colony, Macau, higher education is gaining more importance in the post-1999 era in local talent-building and regional integration to safeguard its socioeconomic sustainability. This paper is based on a recent and ‘innovative’ development in the arena of higher education in the territory, a creation of new space in mainland China for a local public university. By adopting a critical spatial perspective, we examine this idiosyncratic Macau model in three aspects: (1) What kind of power/knowledge production occurs in this new creation of space? (2) How does this new space (re)configure Macau higher education development in both local and global contexts? (3) In what ways does this emergent space re-order the relations between the state, society and school? In employing this spatial stance, we aim to open up understanding of how spatiality affects diverse possibilities in the case of Macau, in global higher education movement more broadly.

Educational Discipline, Ritual Governing, and Chinese Exemplary Society: Why China's Curriculum Reform Remains a Difficult Task.

This article explores the exam-oriented, ritualistic, and exemplary Chinese education system through a double-layered historical and ethnographic analysis. Firstly, I examine three aspects of the educational governing complex—exemplarity, ritual, and examination. Historically, education has been a key locus to craft exemplary subjects through rituals and imitation of models, and this is reinforced by exams to justify social hierarchy. The production of subjectivities in Chinese schools has never been too far removed from these aspects of exemplarity, ritual, and examination. Secondly, I offer an account of the contested “quality curriculum reform” in rural China. While the reform aims to foster creativity and criticizes the overemphasis on exams, classroom rituals, and exemplary icons, its implementation renormalizes the tripartite governing paradigm and produces a contradictory mix of subjectifying discourses in everyday school lives. The study shows that contemporary pedagogic discourse is still rooted in traditional elements, even if the reform aims to do away with, however partially, these elements. In the multi-layered field of Chinese education, pedagogical actors both abide by and react against the historical and contemporary visions of educational governing with hybrid subjectivities. The study sheds light on why China’s curriculum reform is far from an easy task.

Erasure and Renewal in (Post)Socialist China: My Mother’s Long Journey

Through autoethnographic accounts, this chapter explores Mother’s long journey in China’s Cultural Revolution and present-day market reform to examine the fraught relations between the party-state and its youth, between education and political socialization, between public values and authoritarian limits that continue to tug the social fabric of today’s China. I argue that the state works as a powerful pedagogical node shaping people’s sense of self, social change, and their own place in the midst of it. Nevertheless, life is a performative space of self-making, where one receives whatever comes and gropes to make better meanings out of it. Mother’s narratives highlight the state’s shifting modalities of power and illustrate that post-socialist conditions are mediated by the continual assertion of political authority alongside people’s creative agency.

Ambivalent “Quality” and the Educational Sublime

In the global limelight, contemporary Chinese society is both troubled by and obsessed with “quality.” The ambivalent space of “quality” not only captures the quotidian life—seen in sensational media reports of worrisome water, air, and food safety—but also marks China’s international standing, with the “Made in China” label both invincible and frequently tainted by images of lackluster products.1