Jinting Wu

In a nutshell

In the media spotlight, ruthlessly dedicated Chinese students and their superb performance in international testing continue to fuel global interest in China’s education system. This, however, tells only a partial story. On the flip side of an educational “China rising” is a vast rural ethnic landscape trapped in educational mediocrity, stagnation, and crisis. This crisis has been deepened by China’s economic boom and optimism about development that offers abundant manufacturing jobs while also enabling a school-to-the-factory pipeline. In scholarship and the popular press, the myth of China’s educational success seems to be quickly fading, as more and more youth find themselves schooled yet prepared only for factory sweatshops.

The book laces together accounts of how compulsory education encounters rural development to produce dilemmas and possibilities in village schools in Southwest China. The study draws upon multi-sited ethnography, oral history, and archival research to investigate conflicts between education policies and modernization agendas in rural China. It starts out with a central puzzle: how do we understand the profound disenchantment and high attrition rates among rural ethnic youth despite the nationwide educational desire for success, despite the state’s relentless efforts to enforce compulsory education, and despite the folk belief in “jumping out of the village gate through academic success?” Reasons behind the disenchanted sentiment are complex, and the book ventures into the domains of policy, audit culture, tourism, labor migration, and people’s contingent life choices (or lack thereof) to highlight the complexity. The volume provides a detailed account of how an educational miracle is fabricated in everyday maneuvers in rural minority schools; and how schooling becomes increasingly penetrated by development programs, audit culture, tourism, and translocal labor migration to produce unintended consequences.

A close-up

It is early May 2009, only a few days before the impending school inspection by the provincial delegate. The Dong village of Longxing has been selected as one of the sites on the delegate’s itinerary, an “unfortunate” event according to the teachers who have grown weary of frequent school audits by different levels of government officials all year long. Both the primary school and middle school (the only two schools in the village) have spent weeks and months preparing for this significant event, as the delegate’s grand tour in the region will declare whether the policy goals of universal basic education have been achieved. In my observation, the preparation entails several interlinked aspects involving school administrators, teachers, and students. Firstly, numerous forms regarding enrollment data need to be carefully doctored, as a 30% dropout rate will decisively invite official sanction and jeopardize the teachers’ and the schools’ future. Secondly, the dilapidated school compounds – in part due to the capricious tourism planning that threatened to take over the schoolyards for commercial purposes and thus delayed the much needed renovation perpetually – are to be carefully groomed to conceal the disrepair. Thirdly, the physical absence of dropout students needs to be filled by substitutes to match the now close to 100% enrollment data on the paperwork. Village schools assign full-time data administrators to prepare various forms and rosters, and deploy the strategies of borrowing students from each other or turning returned migrant workers into one-day students on the inspection day.

On the morning before the delegates arrive, both schools in Longxing cancel classes to enlist students’ labor in the final round of cleaning, mopping, and decorating. Red banners inscribed with welcome messages are hung up on the school walls. Science labs and libraries, rarely used and covered in dust, are wiped spotless. The usually dreary and congested teachers’ offices are freshened with flower bouquets. A steady stream of youngsters arrives to report their attendance; they are either summoned from nearby villages or sent by parents or guardians of dropout students to sit in for the day. A student performance team undertakes one last round of dress rehearsal to get ready for staging their welcome in the evening. Dinner banquets with ethnic specialty dishes and locally brewed rice wine are meticulously arranged. Teachers explain that these days they have to focus more on dinner tables than classrooms. That the student dorms are battered and crumbling, that the playground is dug up and at risk of becoming a tourist parking lot, that students are alarmingly disengaged, that the teachers are demoralized and attended to their job only half-heartedly are inconvenient truths quickly swept under the carpet. What is immediately at stake is the need to fulfill the planned quota (100% grade promotion and zero attrition) as set in the national policy agendas. This form of performance audit has its historical antecedent during the Maoist era when pre-set production quotas dictated local self-reporting. As a legacy of centralized planning, the audit rituals function to demonstrate accountability, yet conceal the painstaking work involved in staging a political spectacle.

Lastly

Through enforcing compulsory education and promoting rural tourism, the Chinese state joins hands with the market to transform the rural ethnic population into self-entrepreneurial individuals responsible for pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. Yet in doing so, ironies and unintended consequences abound. As I entered the labyrinth of Southwest China, I marveled at how the manifold and contradictory agendas captured rural ethnic schooling at a crossroads. I observed rural schools in two minority village-towns in Qiandongnan being turned into besieged workplaces, where teachers and students faced daily ordeals of discouraging, disorienting, and even deceitful practices. My ethnographic incursion into the classrooms, school yards, corridors, families, dinner tables, rice fields, and village markets afforded ample opportunities to understand what it was like to live, work, go to school, and drop out of school in a socioeconomically marginalized, ethnically-marked, geographically isolated region in Southwest China. Inside as well as outside schools, factors abound to shape the deeply distressed contour of rural education despite good policy intentions. What I present in this work in a sense resonates with familiar themes increasingly prevalent on a national and even global scale. Rural schooling is the sensitive reflector of larger social processes par excellence and the lens through which I investigate broader issues of school reforms, ethnic politics, migration, citizenship, and globalization, a scope that reaches beyond the immediate case of China.