Governing the middle-class family in urban China: educational reform and questions of choice

Abstract

This article analyses the relationship between educational reforms in China and the growing urban middle class in terms of shifting modes and techniques of governing through the family. Central to the production of an urban middle class in China are new forms and practices of family culture that are anchored in a market ideology of education. The article argues that the idea and practice of school choice among urban middle-class families is part of a naturalized consumerist dynamic in China wherein the transformation of education into a market-supplied commodity is legitimated and animated within a neo-liberal discourse of competition, meritocracy and self-determination. Family life and decisions, while seemingly afforded a new degree of autonomy from state intervention, are not outside the workings of official power, but intimately tied to state policies and agendas.