Student ratio matters: policy implementation, ethnic visibility, and effect on student interaction in China’s relocated boarding schools

Abstract

ABSTRACT The Xinjiang Class is a relocated boarding school policy launched in 2000 to recruit students from Xinjiang to receive senior secondary education in selected schools of China’s Central and Eastern provinces with local students. The policy has continuously expanded, amidst controversy and criticism. The existing literature on Xinjiang Class has mainly focused on the political motivations and students’ paradoxical experiences, while generally overlooking the difference of the policy’s administrative structure and its relations to students’ interaction in daily schooling. Drawing on fieldwork in two Xinjiang Class schools, this article discusses the differentiated policy implementations in two schools and their resulting effects on ethnic visibility of Xinjiang students and their everyday interethnic interactions. Our findings suggest that student ratios matter for bridging interethnic interactions: The more Xinjiang students in the classroom are correlated with more positive interactions and less are correlated with more negative interactions. By exploring the nuanced and important roles of ethnic visibility in shaping everyday school interaction, our study offers a new approach to explore ethnic relations beyond the current majority-minority dualism. It also contributes to the current debates on the complex dynamics of centralization and decentralization in China through an education perspective. The complexities and contradictions we have explored in China’s minority education offer useful lessons for other multi-ethnic countries.