Suzhi Jiaoyu Research Articles

Analyzing the Education Gap Between Rural and Urban Environments in China

Three major issues that widened the Education Gap in rural and urban environments in China are, 1) the lack of financial support in governmental funding, 2) the lack of qualified teachers in rural education systems, and 3) barriers in education after the National Curriculum Reform towards suzhi jiaoyu, human quality education. This paper provided details on the influences of educational investments and funding on reported rural school dropout rates, misconceptions about rural students ability and competence swayed by negative stereotypes, neglected rural students feelings and issues in rural ideology and values as burdens on rural students, and the mismatch in curriculum with examination as an assessment tool in the current education system. Along with current educational efforts at the core to increase literacy rates, quality of population, and promote human modernization, suggestions were offered on how society, government, and the field of education can take positive actions that have profound impacts on rural students life, such as to increase educational investments toward rural education in the maintenance of school functioning, hiring qualified teachers as well as raise their wages, and effective use of the internet as the access to high-quality courses to prepare rural students for future assessments. Doing so would help them attain quality education, have better academic, health, and life outcomes, and contribute to society.

Intended and unintended effects of student performance measurement reform in China

In the past few decades, the Chinese Ministry of Education has promoted “suzhi jiaoyu” (quality education) reforms. However, little is known about their impact. This paper evaluates an important component of the reforms that replaces using total scores with a letter grade system in high school admissions. I find that this change in student performance measurement achieved its intended goal of balancing learning across subjects but hindered high achievers with imbalanced performance. This paper also discusses how the measurement reform influenced the gender gap in achievements.

Game Theoretical Analysis of Educational Situation in China

The development of “quality-oriented education” (suzhi jiaoyu) has been a hotly debated issue in China in recent years. Many government policies are formulated to guide and hasten the development of this new form of education. Despite support and propaganda from the government, “quality-oriented education” did not reach expected success, only achieving limited recognition. It will be the focus of this paper to delve into the existing educational situation in China and examine the interest web impeding the popularization of “quality-oriented education” via game theory. In the end, the paper will seek to provide certain solutions to the dilemma through game theoretical analysis.

Shifting discourses from boy preference to boy crisis: educating boys and nation building in neoliberal China

ABSTRACTIt is well established that China has emerged as a major economic power, resulting from the nation’s neoliberal modernization. What is less understood is the socio-cultural and educational impact of this change on public institutions. This article focuses on the education system, which is currently seen as central to delivering the nation’s modernization project, particularly through suzhi jiaoyu (education for quality). More specifically, we engage with a pervasive public discourse of a boy crisis. We suggest the need critically to explore the local (national) meanings within a contemporary Chinese context of this assumed projected crisis that appears to be established as a western phenomenon. We argue that the discourse of a boy crisis can be read as a strategic move to re-inscribe an earlier discourse, that of the boy preference, that in turn is discursively linked to nation building at a time of globally inflected socio-economic transformations.

Governing Suzhi and Curriculum Reform in Rural Ethnic China: Viewpoints From the Miao and Dong Communities in Qiandongnan

This article examines the uptake of suzhi—roughly glossed as “quality”—in China’s recent curriculum reform called suzhi jiaoyu (Education for Quality) in the rural ethnic context of Qiandongnan. It engages with three layers of analysis. First is a brief etymological overview of suzhi to map out its cultural politics in contemporary China. Agamben’s theorization of People/people is invoked to elucidate how the keyword embeds the differentiation of bodies and the fabrication of the “others” through a civilizing mission. Second, the article surveys the genealogy of suzhi ideas‐practices as the historical project of making the ideal personhood. It examines how suzhi’s entanglement in Chinese historiography constitutes the moving target for the formation of educational subjects. Third, the article draws from my ethnographic research in southwest China to investigate suzhi’s enactment in compulsory schooling and current curriculum reform. It provides nuanced empirical accounts to illuminate how suzhi/quality is understood, contested, and reappropriated in everyday pedagogical practices; how the bifurcated front‐ and backstage maneuvering in two village schools trouble the salvationary overtone of the suzhi‐oriented curriculum reform. The lens of performativity is harnessed to move beyond the “loose coupling” theory and suggest undecidable interstices in the production of pedagogical subjectivity. Furthermore, this section explores how suzhi jiaoyu sits in a jarring relationship with indigenous cosmology to produce epistemic dissonance and disenchantment towards schooling. The article concludes with a call for provincializing the “universal” notion of quality and for a productive aporia in thinking about the limit‐points of schooling.

The Horrific and the Exemplary: Public Stories and Education Reform in Late Socialist China

A certain kind of news story appears in the Chinese media every so often: a junior middle school student hung herself, a university student threw sulfuric acid at some zoo animals, a biotechnology student murdered his classmates. These media stories are extreme and sensational indeed. But they also do important cultural work. In the context of education reform in late socialist China, the collective interpretation of horror stories provides a moral arena in which truths about how to raise and educate children correctly are produced and naturalized. They constitute negative models, usually of “bad parenting,” in contrast to stories about children who, despite limitations or difficulties, manage to ascend to great heights thanks to “good parenting.” This article examines two well-known public stories that circulated in the early 2000s in relation to the reform movement known as suzhi jiaoyu gaige, which aims to cultivate well-rounded individuals with a spirit of innovation. The first story I will analyze concerns a teenager, an achieving student, who murdered his own mother. The second concerns a father, a factory worker, who transformed his disabled daughter into a genius child. While starkly opposite in content, one displaying errors to avoid, the other wisdom to emulate, I argue that these public stories provide the hinge on which education reform turns. Horror and exemplary stories provoke thought and make moral arguments for attending to the inner subjectivity of children, rendering the ideals of suzhi jiaoyu self-evident and common sense.

A public secret: 'education for quality' and suicide among Chinese elite university students

This article is based on anthropological fieldwork undertaken at two elite universities in Beijing. It addresses the paradoxical situation of the many instances of suicide among Chinese elite university students in Beijing, which constitute a public secret. The pressure of education weighs heavily on the shoulders of China's only child in each family, known as the generation of little emperors and little empresses. Since the 1980s, the suzhi jiaoyu reforms (education for quality) have involved various attempts to reduce the pressure of education. However, simultaneously the aim is to increase the competitiveness of individuals. Drawing on existential and phenomenological thought, I suggest that the discourse seems to objectify and quantify a concern for well-being, rather than recognising its intersubjective character. Finally, I argue that the suicides are controversial since they are seen as a form of social criticism.

Subjectification and education for quality in China

Education reform is perhaps the arena of discourse in which Foucauldian themes of subjectification are most explicit. Questions of what type of adult (citizen/subject) the education system should produce are directly articulated. From the point of view of social analysis, however, the actual production of subjectivities in schools remains a relatively opaque matter. Not only do many contradictory strands of political discourse exist side by side, but, even more importantly, the impact of these discourses on actual pedagogic practice is not direct. Moreover, it is doubtful that any pedagogic practice has the subjectifying effects that educators imagine. This paper examines educational rhetoric and practice in China's ‘education for quality’ (suzhi jiaoyu) reforms. It finds a contradictory mix of subjectifying rhetoric and practice in China's classrooms and suggests that discerning the types of subjects that are being produced in China's classrooms is far from an easy task.

Governing China's Children: Governmentality and “Education for Quality”

This article is a close study of the discourses and practices of suzhi jiaoyu or “Education for Quality” in contemporary Beijing. Through a study of efforts to raise the “quality” of the capital's children in order to raise the “quality” of the Chinese nation and its future, this article frames suzhi jiaoyu as a form of governmentality, dedicated to teaching children the “conduct of conduct” in postsocialist Beijing. Based on ethnographic research conducted in elementary schools, among families, and in public spaces in Beijing, the article focuses on how attempts to define and raise children's “moral quality” are linked to changing forms and practices of state power.

Curriculum reform and ‘Quality Education’ in China: An overview

This paper provides an overview of Chinese government attempts to promote a revised school curriculum reflecting a more holistic approach to education under the banner of suzhi jiaoyu (“quality education”), and positions the policies in the Chinese historical, educational, social and economic context. While the push has inspired innovative reforms in a number of schools and met with considerable in-principal support, on a wider scale implementation of the reforms is hampered by insufficient resources, conceptual ambiguity and conservative resistance. The goals of the new curriculum are still not reflected in the examinations and frequently conflict with teacher, student and parental goals in a society where examination outcomes have life long consequences.