Vilma Seeberg

Access to Higher Education: Targeted Recruitment Reform under Economic Development Plans in the People's Republic of China.

In the early 1980s, the Chinese government introduced limited economic markets accompanied by educational reforms to counteract an internal “brain drain.” This article explores the effectiveness of four years of recruitment and enrolment reform in technical-professional higher education in meeting the objective.In view of the extreme scarcity of higher education places, the modest enrolment biases evident in the findings are unexpected. Through the recruitment reforms the planned proportion of students from the targeted marginal groups were enrolled. On the other hand, enrolment patterns showed aggravated social class reproduction at the upper and lower end of the stratification. Gender stratification in overall proportions was modest but strongly mediated by social class and subject choice. Though upper and middle class students were poised to gain greater socio-economic mobility than the lower class, nearly half of the latter would be upwardly mobile through technical-professional higher education (TPHE).The findings show that, though economic pull factors were in evidence, the recruitment reforms were effective in preparing a suitable pool of students to carry out macro-economic plans. The reforms advanced the historic function of technical-professional education-extending access to populations hitherto largely excluded.

Grounds for Prioritizing Education for Girls: The Telling Case of Left-Behind Rural China

This chapter reviews the status of Education For All (EFA) in China and identifies four gaps: between rural and urban residents, between residents of geographic regions, between ethnicity groups, and between the genders. It turns to examine the educational situation and interests of girls weighed down by the crushing burden of multiple disadvantages in “left-behind” Western China. Based on analysis of macro-level socio-economic and educational conditions, along with rich micro-level data on girls’ vigorous pursuit of education, the authors argue that the changing conditions of rural girls’ lives and their education can best be understood from a critical empowerment perspective. Summarizing the global discourse and cross national evidence on the benefits of girls’ education, the chapter and looks beyond a utilitarian perspective and argues for the cogency of a critical empowerment framework. Filled with telling stories and case studies of Han Chinese, Tibetan, and Muslim girls, this chapter proposes that prioritizing girls’ education in Western China is crucial and required for achieving the MDG of gender parity. Even though girls are often stranded by family financial conditions, their actions and ideas seeing education as their future reflect a changing gender identity and role in the family and society. The fieldwork suggests that educating girls promotes localized development, reduces dangerous levels of economic gaps and social instability, but also advances hard to measure effects: personal and civil empowerment, and sustainable, harmonious cultural change – as well as MDG.

Frictions that activate change: dynamics of global to local non-governmental organizations for female education and empowerment in China, India, and Pakistan*

Abstract This article examines how non-governmental organizations create resources and spaces for girls and women’s education and empowerment in China, India and Pakistan – in the context of global expectations and local state relations as well as cultural norms. We examine the dynamics that foster female empowerment associated with educational attainment. Analysis showed that the five NGO’s responses to enabling and constraining local needs and demands gave rise to productive friction that activated positive development. We conclude that engaging local individuals as managers, teachers or facilitators who can negotiate with international actors and with the state is an effective foundation for maintaining a balance between being accountable to local contingencies and norms and to global social justice principles of the projects. These models indicated that “effective scale” might better be defined as a collaboration between the local and global, rather than “scaling up” in size. International NGO partnerships with several of state organizations and local leadership can be a catalyst for fundamental change, subject to dynamic engagement with productive friction that activates educational empowerment and social change.

Migrating to the City in North West China: Young Rural Women’s Empowerment

Abstract China has one of the largest internal migrant populations of the world today, one third of them are estimated to be women. This paper, part of a long-term study, reports on young women migrants from remote villages of North West China who have only recently joined the “floating population” in the urbanization transition. These young female migrants have often been described as multiply deprived. Our approach differs in that we view young migrant women as capable agents and explore what they are able to do and be under admittedly severe constraints and dilemmas. We found that labor migration provided them with resources that they converted to protections and opportunities associated with obtaining paid work, maintaining close-knit beneficial social networks, enacting religious norms and behaviors. Their enhanced instrumental and constitutive capabilities include financial independence, flourishing aspirations, personal agency, remove from patriarchal confines, and personal well-being. This study provides a window into an under-reported, yet substantial demographic transition that constitutes gendered social change enacted by rural young women caught up in the maelstrom of the Chinese urbanization boom.

Book Review of Diasporas in the Contemporary World by Milton J. Esman

Diasporas form an ever-expanding segment of the world population. Therefore, it is important to try to understand the experiences of migrating peoples in their new homelands, whether in Europe or t...