Seeking balance: Chinese middle-class parents’ choice imaginaries under Synchronous Admission Reform

Abstract

The Chinese government recently launched a new admission reform — Synchronous Admission Reform (SAR), to restrict parental choices. The values of educational equality, reducing academic burden, and students’ overall development are reiterated and heightened. This paper examines to what extent parents embrace the official rhetoric and how they conceive different values. Narrative interviewing is conducted with 10 middle-class parents who have chosen schools under SAR. This provides initial and vivid parents’ voices. A conceptual apparatus of “choice imaginary” is coined to explore how parents understand, negotiate, and mediate the admission reform. Thematic analysis is then utilized to unpack parents’ choice imaginaries. The findings reveal parents’ mentality of “seeking balance” between conflicting values of competition versus health, suzhi (quality) versus scores, and social equality versus self-development in the choice process. Shedding light on parents’ meaning making of policy values, this study provides the domestic and international audience with a micro and psycho-anthropological way of examining the effects of school choice reform.