Disentangling the intersectional field of education and housing in China: Genesis, strategies and discontents

Abstract

Drawing on the Bourdieusian concept of ‘field’ and the theorization of ‘intersectionality’, this paper proposes a concept ‘intersectional field’ to disentangle the complex interrelations between housing and education in China, where they mutually constitute and co-produce yet trouble and counteract with each other, whereby exerting simultaneous exclusion in cultural and economic (re)production. Drawing on policy documents and 38 in-depth interviews with various stakeholders in China, we first delineate the genesis and evolvement of this intersectional field. We then demonstrate how middle-class parents rationalize and strategize their heavy investment in cultural and economic reproduction against the most recent policies that seemingly aim to de-intersect/decouple these two fields. We show that the intersectional field of housing and education in China emerges from state-imposed rules while being increasingly self-reinforced. It was also temporarily counteracted and suspended responding to the escalated crises of housing unaffordability and over-competition over quality schooling opportunities, through policies like franchising key schools from the city centre to the suburb and random allotting enrolment. These changes in the ‘rules of the game’ indeed bring uncertainties to the intersectional field. However, while discontent to this intersectional field abound, these actions are self-constrained by the internal logic of the intersectional field and thus unable to bring fundamental changes. Those with limited socio-economic capacities remain extremely disadvantageous in both fields. The policy intervention turns out to be merely a spatial reordering that relocates and expands the fierce competition from the city centre to the suburbs while repositioning the suburbs to be the focal point for strategic investment in the intersectional field.