Abstract
This review examines The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Shape Higher Education Mobility in China by Cora Lingling Xu, a book that offers a conceptually rich and empirically grounded analysis of time as a structuring force in educational inequality. Drawing on nearly a decade of longitudinal and multi-sited fieldwork, Xu develops the concept of ‘time inheritance’ to theorize how temporal privilege or deprivation is transmitted across generations. The review highlights the book's contributions in several areas: the empirical depth and narrative sensitivity of its account of temporal inequality in China across multiple levels; its conceptualization of time inheritance and its extension of Bourdieu's theory of capital; and its reframing of educational mobility as temporal repositioning. Situating the book within broader discussions of time, modernity, and acceleration, the review suggests future directions for theorizing time inheritance in light of institutional pacing, shifting global conditions, and comparative contexts. Xu's work opens up a generative framework for research on the temporal politics of education and inequality in China and beyond.
Modernity has been associated with the intensification of temporal experiences: the speeding up of everyday life, the shrinking of decision-making windows, or the collapsing of temporal boundaries between domains of work, education, and private life (Rosa, 2013; Tomlinson, 2007). In contemporary societies, time has become a socially organized and unequally distributed condition. The capacity to control one's rhythm, to delay, or to refuse urgency has itself become a form of privilege and power (Vostal, 2016; Wajcman, 2014). Who has more time? Whose pace is recognized? Who bears the cost of being ‘too slow’? Against this backdrop, Cora Lingling Xu's The Time Inheritors: How Time Inequalities Shape Higher Education Mobility in China offers a conceptually ambitious and empirically rich intervention into the study of time in educational inequality and social reproduction. Drawing on nearly a decade of research with over 100 Chinese youth, Xu (2025) develops the concept of ‘time inheritance’ to theorize how temporal privilege or deprivation is passed down across generations. Her work contributes not only to the critical discussion on education and mobility, but also to a broader conversation about the temporal politics of modern life, particularly in the context of Chinese youth navigating globalized education systems.
The book is organized into three parts. Part I outlines the conceptual framework of time inheritance, drawing from a Bourdieusian lineage. Parts II and III apply this framework to empirical cases, showing how time inheritance both reproduces and, at times, transforms social inequalities. Time inheritance goes beyond simply having more or less time. It also refers to the intergenerational transfer of time wealth (banked time) or time debt (borrowed time), which manifests in the conditions that structure young people's educational and life trajectories. In Part II, Xu vividly demonstrates ‘the time privilege continuum’ with students’ life stories. On the one end, banked time allows advantaged students access to freed-up time that can be used to prepare strategically, explore options, reflect on choices, or take measured risks, knowing that fallback options are available. On the other end, borrowed time imposes constraints that lead to compressed decision-making, extra labour time, or accelerated transitions, often experienced as moral obligations to repay familial sacrifices. Importantly, time inheritance is not just external. It is embodied through dispositions: a sense of entitlement or ease among those with inherited banked time, or feelings of urgency, debt, or risk-aversion among those with borrowed time. However, Xu highlights in Part III that time inheritance is not deterministic but works with complexity. There is a chance that the student may rework or resist these temporal scripts. For instance, some rural-origin students creatively stretch their time resources, while some privileged students experience temporal paralysis or fail to make use of their banked time. Part III also moves the analysis beyond the family level to show how broader structures, such as China's city-tier hierarchy, the state's deployment of political time, and transnational context in educational mobility, reshape what time inheritance means in specific institutional and geopolitical contexts.
One of the book's key contributions lies in its empirical depth and narrative sensitivity. Xu reveals how inequalities operate beneath and beyond the often-mentioned markers of class, place, or cultural capital. Her work is richly grounded in contemporary China. It demonstrates how inherited temporal positions are shaped and made visible through local particularities, such as the Gaokao system, hukou classification, city-tier, and cross-border tensions between mainland China and Hong Kong. Xu vividly translates notions of ‘banked time’ and ‘borrowed time’ into observable patterns in young people's life stories. This is achieved through a carefully constructed, longitudinal, multi-sited, and multi-scalar study. The book provides a strong framework for understanding how multi-level temporalities intersect in shaping individual lives: familial cycles of accumulation or deprivation; national ideologies of development; and the global structure of educational stratification. These temporalities co-exist, compound, and produce sometimes contradictory pressures. What emerges most clearly is a sustained effort to connect individual biographies with larger temporal regimes. Xu conceptualizes time inheritance as operating both externally, through institutions, policy frameworks, and ideological narratives, and internally, as lived experience and embodied dispositions. This dual emphasis is also central to the book's contribution. Her attention to the body as a site where temporal hierarchies are absorbed and enacted gives the analysis a grounded, material dimension in discussions of time.
The notion of time inheritance deepens and extends Bourdieu's conceptualization of capital by emphasizing time as a foundational element in the formation and distribution of capital. Xu foregrounds time as the underlying logic through which all forms of capital – be it economic, cultural, or social – are accumulated. As Xu points out, Bourdieu (1986) conceptualized capital as ‘accumulated labour’, which necessarily requires time to build up. This means that capital is not a static possession, but something shaped by when and how one is allowed or able to act. This perspective is very important as it challenges deficit-oriented interpretations that attribute inequality to individual or a certain cultural lack. Rather than assuming that some students simply possess less capital, Xu highlights how unequal temporal inheritances shape the very condition to accumulate, mobilize, or convert capital.
The book also invites a rethinking of what educational mobility itself means. While not always explicitly framed as such, the book presents mobility as a form of temporal repositioning, where students move not only across space but between distinct timelines and temporal expectations. For some students, educational mobility provides access to futures that are already imagined and scaffolded by previous generations; for others, it demands navigating uncertain, compressed timelines shaped by urgency, instability, or the need to escape the doomed future. In this temporal repositioning, factors such as English proficiency function as accelerators, enabling some students to shift more quickly into globally recognized educational tracks. Yet for many, particularly those inheriting time debt, the repositioning demands extra layers of stoicism, determination, and might, which Xu framed as a ‘self-made activation mechanism’ of time inheritance. This lens offers a powerful corrective to instrumental framings of mobility, which often treat education as a neutral ladder. Xu shows instead that mobility is structured by deeply unequal timelines. Mobility, in this light, is simultaneously about the different temporal positions students occupy as they navigate between different situations and systems.
As demonstrated, The Time Inheritors offers a compelling and ambitious framework for understanding temporal inequalities in education. One of the key aspects is the wide range of temporal dimensions it brings into view, which meanwhile raises further questions about how these different forms of time relate to one another. Future work might sharpen the concept of time inheritance by engaging more directly with existing theories of time and temporality. In particular, it might help in demonstrating a historically and structurally produced temporal framework within which time inheritance operates. Rosa (2013) frames time as both a medium of social action and a measure of modernity. Similarly, Tomlinson (2007) identifies immediacy as a dominant cultural value in late modernity, one that compels individuals to constantly respond, adapt, and act with urgency. Seen through this lens, the empirical patterns that Xu presented invite further theorization of temporal regimes in contemporary China. Young people's timelines are shaped by systems such as Gaokao preparation, hukou-based educational access, and city-tier stratification. These institutional structures not only assign value to different educational pathways, but also regulate the tempo at which youth are expected to move.
Building on this, Rosa (2013) suggests that the acceleration of social life generates increasing ‘desynchronization’, which refers to the mismatches between the temporal rhythms of institutions, technologies, and individual lives. These misalignments produce what he calls a loss of ‘temporal sovereignty’, where individuals no longer control the pace of their own social participation. Yet The Time Inheritors also gestures towards these concerns. The young people in Xu's study confront institutional structures that compress their life trajectories while negotiating aspirations that do not align with these timelines. This is where the concept of temporal autonomy, developed by scholars such as McCann (2007), Claassen (2012), and Vostal (2016), becomes particularly useful. Rather than framing inequality as a matter of speed versus slowness, they emphasize the ability to choose one's pace as a key axis of privilege. In this sense, time inheritance is not only about whether one has “banked” or “borrowed” time, but about how much control one can exercise over that time.
In addition, the notions of ‘banked’ and ‘borrowed’ time already gesture towards a relational understanding of time, which could also be further explored. Beyond the emphasis on what individuals received or inherited from previous generations, future studies might examine how time is constantly being shaped through relationships, interdependencies between people, or even being collectively held. For example, one sibling's chance to study may depend on another's withdrawal from school; while a high-performing student becomes the focal point of school investment, a low-performing student could be marginalized, positioned at the back of classrooms (e.g. Yu et al., 2018); and at national or international levels, individual timelines are often stretched or suspended by migration policies or credentialing rules, forcing people to align with state-defined temporalities. These cases might suggest that inherited time can also be contested, suspended, or withheld.
While the concept of time inheritance leaves room for further theoretical elaboration, it already proves to be a generative and insightful framework for guiding future empirical research. Rather than treating time inheritance as a universally applicable framework, future studies could situate it more precisely within shifting historical and geopolitical conditions that are reshaping how time is valued and strategized. For instance, what happens when time that was once considered ‘bankable’ comes to feel less secure or less clearly convertible into anticipated outcomes? In the context of international education, new forms of uncertainty have emerged in both Chinese and international settings. Shifting visa policies, tightened border controls, post-pandemic restrictions, and heightened geopolitical tensions might introduce added unpredictability into the pathways and prospects of overseas study (e.g. Bailey and Gibson, 2024; Kapfudzaruwa, 2025). Within China, the perceived value of overseas education has become more ambivalent amid credential inflation and intensified domestic competition (e.g. Peng, 2025; Xiong and Mok, 2020). These developments suggest that the meaning and outcomes of time inheritance are not fixed. Future research could explore whether inherited notions of valuable time are being reimagined or reconsidered under these changing conditions.
Xu's framework could also be adopted for cross-group and cross-contextual reflection. Beyond youth and families, this framework might also be extended to different social groups and life stages, such as educators and scholars. Recent scholarship has shown that academic life is increasingly organized around acceleration, performance metrics, and fragmented schedules, which have raised concerns about their impact on well-being and intellectual work (Vostal, 2014). In the Chinese context, studies documented the emotional burden carried by Chinese PhD students, shaped by institutional structures, age-based performance expectations, and gendered norms around productivity and life planning (Bai et al., 2025; Horta and Li, 2024). While these discussions rarely engage with time as inheritance, they point to the need for conceptual tools that foreground time as experienced and embodied.
Finally, the book opens space for comparative and transnational research. While the book's empirical focus is grounded in China, the conceptual framework holds relevance beyond this national setting. Xu signals this in the conclusion by calling for a broader field of ‘global time inheritance studies’. Although this agenda is only briefly outlined, the book encourages scholars to consider how temporal privilege and deprivation are structured across diverse educational systems shaped by class, race, or postcolonial histories. In this sense, The Time Inheritors offers not only a rich account of Chinese educational mobility, but also a set of conceptual tools for rethinking how time is inherited, distributed, and valued across the global context.
