Class Work: Vocational Schools and China's Urban Youth - Hardcover

Woronov, Terry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080479541X ISBN 13: 9780804795418

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2015

Synopsis

Images of Chinese teens with their heads buried in books for hours on end, preparing for high-stakes exams, dominate understandings of Chinese youth in both China and the West. But what about young people who are not on the path to academic success? What happens to youth who fail the state's high-stakes exams? What many―even in China―don't realize is that up to half of the nation's youth are flunked out of the academic education system after 9th grade.

Class Work explores the consequences for youth who have failed these exams, through an examination of two urban vocational schools in Nanjing, China. Through a close look at the students' backgrounds, experiences, the schools they attend, and their trajectories into the workforce, T.E. Woronov explores the value systems in contemporary China that stigmatize youth in urban vocational schools as "failures," and the political and economic structures that funnel them into working-class futures. She argues that these marginalized students and schools provide a privileged window into the ongoing, complex intersections between the socialist and capitalist modes of production in China today and the rapid transformation of China's cities into post-industrial, service-based economies. This book advances the notion that urban vocational schools are not merely "holding tanks" for academic failures; instead they are incipient sites for the formation of a new working class.

About this title

About the Author

T.E. Woronov is Senior Lecturer of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Class Work

Vocational Schools and China's Urban Youth

By T. E. Woronov

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9541-8

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Numeric Capital, 
1. Vocational Schools, 
2. Vocational Students, 
3. Teachers, Teaching, and Curricula, 
4. Creating Identities, 
5. Jobs, Internships, and the School-to-Work Transition, 
Conclusion: Precarious China, 
Notes, 
References, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Vocational Schools

The taxi ground to a halt in the pouring rain. The bus behind us honked frantically. "Out! Get out now!" the taxi driver shouted. Emma Wang and I piled out of the aging taxi and landed in ankle-deep mud. Although this was the main street in this part of Nanjing, parts of the road were unpaved and not much wider than a single lane; buses, taxis, pedestrians, and carts selling fruit, snacks, and household items jostled for space on the narrow road. It was only a twenty-minute taxi ride from the genteel part of the city where our university was located, but we had arrived in the middle of an impoverished, working-class neighborhood, essentially a Nanjing slum. On one side of the street, narrow alleyways were lined with crumbling, six-story concrete housing blocks, typical of shoddy, 1970s socialist-era urban work-unit (danwei) architecture. Towering above everything on the opposite side of the street loomed one of China's engineering marvels: the massive bridge across the Changjiang (Yangtze) River. Our first research site was a school located almost directly beneath the pylons of this bridge, which marks one of the symbolic passages between north and south China. Acknowledging its location, we called this the Bridge School.

I HAVE OUTLINED THE IDEOLOGIES of numeric capital, economism, and human capital accumulation that constitute elements of education during China's current reform era. These ideologies about youth and education are inextricably linked to China's efforts to modernize its economy and society and connect China to the rest of the world. I now focus on how the two schools where we conducted research articulate with and explicate different aspects of contemporary Chinese life: educational and industrial, socialist and capitalist. A description of these schools highlights the ways multiple systems continue to coexist and intersect in China today.

A brief discussion of the history of vocational education in China highlights the ways that VE has long been a site of negotiation of some of the paradoxes and tensions of China's transitions to different kinds of modernities — industrial, socialist, and capitalist-style reform era. For over a century, vocational schools in China have been debated, promoted, and resisted as vocational education has been variously deployed as the skills-training sector of the educational system and a means to potentially solve myriad national problems. At different times, VE has been called upon to build the nation's industrial capacity, raise the skill level of the nation's labor force, and meet increasing demands by families for additional educational opportunities for their children. Vocational education was first introduced almost a century ago as a way to "save China" (Schulte 2013; Schwintzer 1992); it began as a means to mold generations of youth into the right kinds of (moral) subjects for the nation's (industrial) labor needs. Some of the issues first raised in the early twentieth century, when VE was introduced to China, continue to be relevant today. Many of the structural systems put in place to implement vocational training during the Republican and revolutionary eras are also still in place and continue to influence the ways that voc ed is carried out on a daily basis.

Because of these continuities with the past, vocational education highlights the regimes of value, within competing logics of production, that operate in China today. VE is a particularly interesting place to see how the fetish of the number mediates between (late) socialist and capitalist logics. One reason is that students are placed in voc ed, like in all schools in China, through the high-stakes testing regimes of hierarchical ranking systems established and managed by the state. But unlike the academic educational sector, some parts of the vocational system still feed directly into the former danwei system and the new urban service sector. The VE school-to-work transition thus illuminates the transition and overlaps from the (socialist) form of production to a newly precarious labor market, based in the growing urban service sector.

A Brief History of Vocational Education: Foundations in the Early Twentieth Century

China was rapidly industrializing in the early twentieth century at the start of the Republican era (1911–1949). China's leaders at the time struggled with the dual problem of how to raise the quantity and quality of China's industrial products in order to compete in the global marketplace and how to educate a new generation of modern subjects who would increase the nation's wealth and power through industrial production (Bailey 1990; Schwintzer 1992). As historians have noted, intertwined questions of citizenship, morality, class formation, and the nature of labor were at the center of multiple political debates at the time (Culp 2007).

Educational policy and industrial development were both further complicated during the Republican era because of large-scale movements of people from rural to urban areas to work in China's newly industrializing cities. After migrant laborers arrived in the cities, social relations were quite different from traditional rural social formations, and factory-based workers' groups began to form a nascent urban proletariat (Yeh 2008). An ongoing problem for the state was how to manage this new, potentially revolutionary group of workers. One possibility promoted by the more conservative national leaders in the ruling Guomindang (Nationalist Party) government was vocational education, which was seen as a way to raise both individuals' industrial skills and their moral probity. Vocational trainees could thus simultaneously be educated to increase national productivity and to understand their essential role in building the nation. For this reason, as historian Barbara Schulte notes, two popular slogans in the early twentieth century, "education for saving the country" (jiaoyu jiuguo) and "industry for saving the country" (shiye jiuguo), were successfully combined into "vocational education for saving the country" (zhijiao jiuguo) (2013, 227; see also Schwintzer 1992).

One prominent Republican-era educational reformer, Huang Yanpei, founded the Chinese Society for Vocational Education (Zhonghua zhiye jiaoyu she) in 1917 to promote training in industrial skills. Influenced by John Dewey's concept of "pragmatic education" and vocational education programs he had observed during visits to the United States and Germany, Huang stated that the original motto of the voc ed movement was "to give work to the unemployed and to give joy to those working" (Huang Yanpei, 1931, cited in Schulte 2013, 143). However, as Schulte notes, this joy was:

less about individual fulfilment than about the joy to serve society. Vocational education was to provide a solution to the "social question" — to provide for the massive numbers of those who could not continue their education after primary school (or who should not continue lest they become graduates with useless degrees) and who were then graduated into unemployment. (2013, 230)

In addition, Historian Yeh Wen-hsin (2008) points out that China's elites identified several "problems" among the working classes around this time, including such traits as a general unwillingness to take on manual labor, too much interest in accruing educational credentials (rather than in gaining skills training that would improve China's industrial production), and an inability to tolerate the hardships associated with manual and industrial labor. VE was supposed to help overcome all these problems (Yeh 2008, 43). Vocational education in the Republican era was thus designed specifically as a way to tackle the social problem of the working classes by managing their aspirations for additional education and upward mobility (Schulte 2013; Yeh 2008). The "joy" that Huang Yanpei sought to create among the working classes increasingly became a goal of producing "happy" workers, content with their station in life. According to Schulte, voc ed was formed to "safely and productively store away the masses who aspired to climb up the social ladder through education in an increasingly non-agrarian economy" (2013, 230). The early days of vocational education were thus explicitly decoupled from revolutionary change and designed to train a quiescent industrial labor force.

Several aspects of vocational education dating from the system's foundations in Republican-era China are still relevant today. VE was established not only as a place to train skilled workers for the industrial economy but as a sector where national development goals were formulated and met and where individuals were supposed to learn how to slot into a national plan. Second, although there were moves at the time to develop rural vocational training, the origins of the voc ed system were clearly urban and industrial; it was a system modeled on and designed for industrial production. Third, vocational schools were developed in response to and in order to manage large-scale social transformations and dislocations, specifically rural migration to the cities. Finally, and most important, vocational schools were designed as places to manage working-class aspirations. Specifically, VE acted to dampen the aspirations of the working classes for more education and to manage their desires for upward mobility out of the industrial sector.

Revolutionary Era

China had no unified, national system of vocational education during the Maoist era (ca. 1949–1976), and, like all aspects of Chinese education, voc ed underwent many changes during this period. Rather than outline the many twists and turns the educational system took during these years, I focus instead on two interrelated aspects of vocational education established between the 1950s and 1970s that continue to have important repercussions today. One was the question of the vocational curriculum, which was part of the larger ideological struggle known to historians as the "red vs. expert" debates. The second was the question of the school-to-work transition, or how urban students moved into jobs after graduation, which was a function of the urban danwei system.

Structurally, by the early 1950s several different kinds of technical and vocational middle and secondary schools existed in China, as part of an enormous expansion of secondary education in the years following the founding of the PRC in 1949 (Pepper 1996; Thøgersen 1990). From the 1950s through the start of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, secondary education was divided into two tracks. On one track, academically talented students were funneled through an extremely competitive secondary system, then into limited university places, and from there into technical and professional jobs (Thøgersen 1990). On the other, the vocational system produced midlevel technical experts for the growing industrial and government sectors (Luo 2013).

The vocational schools affiliated with the Ministry of Education remained virtually intact from the prerevolutionary Republican era. Starting in the mid-1950s, however, new "workers' training schools" became popular in urban areas. Designed on a Soviet model, these schools were administered by local governments and trained workers for specific industries. Many factories, hospitals, government bureaus, and other large work units opened their own worker training schools to train skilled workers, midlevel managers, and midlevel party cadres (Luo 2013; Thøgersen 1990; Unger 1982).

These schools were embedded in the danwei system, which was the primary form of social organization in urban China. A work unit was simultaneously an employer and the delivery system for a range of socialist welfare benefits. Urban Chinese were employed by and received a packet of social benefits from their danwei, which might include housing, food subsidies, children's day care, retirement pensions, and potentially others, depending on the size and relative wealth of the danwei (Bray 2005). A danwei could be a very large institution employing thousands of people, such as a factory, government agency, hospital, or university. They were often self-contained small societies within walled compounds. By the late 1970s, virtually all urban Chinese were affiliated with a work unit, which provided them with lifelong employment security. This was known as the "iron rice bowl" employment system, since the workers' livelihood, or "rice bowl," could not be broken over the course of their lifetime.

Throughout this era, graduates of danwei-affiliated vocational worker training schools were automatically assigned to lifelong jobs in their schools' work units. Graduates had no choice of work assignment; jobs were allocated by the work unit, and workers generally stayed at their units through retirement. Because virtually all urban residents were affiliated with work units and urban employment was managed by the danwei system, until the 1980s there was no private labor market where school graduates could sell their services. Because each of these workers' training schools was operated by the individual danwei and trained workers for the specific unit, the schools were operated and managed locally. National oversight was managed by the central Ministry of Labor rather than the Ministry of Education, which managed the regular, academic secondary schools. Some of these schools still exist today in an updated form.

Although school leavers were assigned jobs upon graduation, the question of the curriculum in vocational education — and indeed in all schools — loomed large in educational policy throughout the Mao era. The issue of the relation between labor and learning was central to Mao-era educational policy and ideology. The primary question was whether the role of education was to further the cause of class struggle or to develop and strengthen the nation (primarily by building China's industrial capacity). This question, debated at the highest levels of the Communist Party leadership, was part of what has become known as the "red vs. expert" debates, a set of ideological battles and power struggles that were partly fought over educational ideology and policy (Andreas 2009; Hoffman 2010).

The "expert" faction among the government leadership advocated for an educational system that could support and develop China's industrial infrastructure. The "red" faction argued that active, hands-on participation in production was an essential aspect of the learning process. The latter position was based on a statement by Mao Zedong: "Knowledge depends on activity in material production" (cited in Thøgersen 1990, 95; see also Hoffman 2010). Under red faction ascendency, students were sent to factories and farms to engage in productive labor to learn to love the party and not feel superior to workers and peasants. This, in turn, was supposed to eliminate the "three great differences" that still caused social fissures in China after liberation: between industry and agriculture, city and country, and mental and manual labor (Thøgersen 1990, 96).

Unger (1982), a noted scholar of education during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), argues that the Cultural Revolution was partly fought so that schools could actively transform, rather than merely reproduce, the nation's class structure. To do so, knowledge was geared toward the tangible and practical and directly linked to labor. This, he points out, was done both by vocationalizing the entirety of the education system and "moralizing education so that it was less technical, more practical, and more focused on character development through studying Mao Zedong Thought" (1982, 141).

In a move eerily reminiscent of the Republican era, by performing labor as part of their schooling, students not only prepared for the work they would do for the rest of their lives but were also supposed to be learning to accept their roles as part of the proletariat. The leftist leaders at the time felt this was essential to transform the political consciousness of the nation's (urban) youth and level their aspirations to upward mobility. Skills training was bourgeois and led to class divisions; those who performed "mental" work were positioned above the laboring masses of the workers and peasants. By removing education as a pathway to upward mobility, "they would be better positioned to reorient achievement-minded youth away from the 'corrupting' personal ambition they had absorbed from their parents" (Unger 1982, 142). "The radicals felt that by removing the educational ladder's reinforcement of the concept that there were 'higher' and 'lower' vocations, the virtues of working-class occupations could be better appreciated by students" (143). Schools were thus reoriented to remove academic competition among students and to focus instead on gaining practical skills linked to proletarian consciousness.

This was short-lived. After a decade of leftist ascendancy, at the end of the 1970s the red faction was overturned and the expert faction, led by Deng Xiaoping, took over China's leadership. One of the first ways they repudiated the Cultural Revolution was to overturn the leftists' educational policies. An essential first step was the 1977 reinstatement of the high-stakes UEE, which symbolized the state's revalorization of "expertise." The UEE brought academic competition back into education as well as the association of numbers (marks) with science and rationality. But, like those of the earlier Republican era, several legacies of the Cultural Revolution era continue to resonate in vocational education today. One of the holdovers from both these eras is the current association of vocational education with limited job aspirations, working-class futures, and poor pathways to upward mobility.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 080479541X
• ISBN 13: 9780804795418
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200