Abstract
This article explores the exam-oriented, ritualistic, and exemplary Chinese education system through a double-layered historical and ethnographic analysis. Firstly, I examine three aspects of the educational governing complex—exemplarity, ritual, and examination. Historically, education has been a key locus to craft exemplary subjects through rituals and imitation of models, and this is reinforced by exams to justify social hierarchy. The production of subjectivities in Chinese schools has never been too far removed from these aspects of exemplarity, ritual, and examination. Secondly, I offer an account of the contested “quality curriculum reform” in rural China. While the reform aims to foster creativity and criticizes the overemphasis on exams, classroom rituals, and exemplary icons, its implementation renormalizes the tripartite governing paradigm and produces a contradictory mix of subjectifying discourses in everyday school lives. The study shows that contemporary pedagogic discourse is still rooted in traditional elements, even if the reform aims to do away with, however partially, these elements. In the multi-layered field of Chinese education, pedagogical actors both abide by and react against the historical and contemporary visions of educational governing with hybrid subjectivities. The study sheds light on why China’s curriculum reform is far from an easy task.
Situating the educational problems within a tripartite lens
The cultural base of Chinese schools draws primarily from the Confucian heritage with distinct features of learning practices, expectations, and interpretations. The cultural-historical foundation of Chinese education is an important topic of scholarly concern, especially given China’s rapid social change and Chinese students’ stellar performance in the global testing regimes such as the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). On the one hand, China’s leading position in league tables of student assessment provokes curiosity and controversies regarding the so-called “chopstick culture” of Confucian learning that emphasizes discipline, hard work, and testing performance (Cheng, 2014). On the other hand, educational commentators and critics have also denounced aspects of Confucian tradition for producing unthinking test-takers without innovative and leadership abilities (Mathews, 2014; Ravitch, 2014; Zhao, 2009, 2014). Researchers from different sub fields of education have also attempted to understand the distinct Confucian influence on classroom policies and practices, as well as the attitudes and orientations of Chinese learners (Clark and Gieve, 2006; Grimshaw, 2007; Jin and Cortazzi, 2006; Watkins and Biggs, 1996). In a sense, existing literature provides a comprehensive lens to the multifaceted character of Confucian educational heritage, and echoes the culturally sensitive approach to learning (Ladson-Billings, 1995) in a global context.
Through a tripartite lens of exemplarity-ritual-exam in the Confucian framework, this article attempts to historicize Chinese educational discipline to shed light on the complexity and challenges of China’s contemporary curriculum reform. It is important to clarify that it is not my intention to assess the merit or demerit of the three features of exemplarity, ritual, and exam in any normative manner. The values and roles of ritual education, exam-orientation, and learning through exemplars are historically situated and intertwined in the cultural, social, and political systems of reasoning that underlie the Chinese society. In a sense, the three disciplinary features are open to debate and continually evolving with China’s ongoing self-reflexivity and global encounters. As I have argued elsewhere (Wu, 2015), Confucian heritage has become a convenient proxy used to mark the distinction of “what is on the Chinese radar yet off the Euro-American screen, and vice versa” (p. 256). What is of interest to me is not to essentialize Confucian heritage as an explanatory variable of things Chinese; rather, I focus on three features as the apparatuses of educational governing and examine how they produce a complex assemblage of discourses, practices, and subjectivities to both anchor and hamper China’s contemporary curriculum reform.
Governing through exemplarity
China has arguably one of the most centralized and bureaucratic educational systems in the world. With many aspects of schooling regulated by the state, public schools across the nation share a number of common features, noticeable both in metropolises and in remote mountain villages. This can be seen in the weekly flag-raising ceremony as the tribute to the state; the young pioneers’ initiation when first-grade pupils pledge dedication to communism; the participation in the communist youth league by politically aspiring adolescents; the learning via a curriculum suffused with state-sponsored memories and dictums. In addition, with wall exhibitions of portraits and quotations by political and scientific dignitaries (such as Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, etc., see Figure 1), the Chinese schools are standardized ritual spaces replete with exemplars and models that sanction what is thinkable and permissible (Wu, 2016: Chapter 2). The use of models is also seen in the importance of mimicking the teacher and memorizing exemplary textbook paragraphs in preparation for entrance exams (Jin and Cortazzi, 2006: 11), as well as in the political socialization of students through exposing them to larger-than-life heroes (such as the young People’s Liberation Army solder Lei Feng) who they would learn to respect and emulate (Reed, 1995: 99).
Wall exhibition of portraits and quotations by political and scientific dignitaries in a rural primary school.
Chinese contemporary educational spaces pulsate with exemplary displays and nationalist sentiments, and this has its roots in classical Confucian China. Historically, cultural heroes and role models work as the means for the transmission and continuity of Chinese culture over the centuries. Emperors, teachers, and parents widely employed prototypes (such as the loyal bureaucrat, the scholar-sage, the chaste spouse, the filial child, etc.) to inspire virtues deemed conducive to an orderly society (Reed, 1995: 99). Education, in particular, has been a key locus for individuals to cultivate their proper places in the society through acquiring essential rituals. It is above all the crafting of exemplary subjects who embody propriety; imitation of exemplars is upheld as the core of learning and the maintenance of social order. The use of exemplars has to do with the belief that the cultivation of human goodness must not be left to the haphazard forces of nature but by carefully planned direction and signposts.
Exemplarity is further reinforced by exam-based meritocracy, which justifies social selection in building a unified national culture. Primarily concerned with moral cultivation, the classical Confucian education is based upon exemplification of ideal personhood, the so-called junzi (君子). Those who embody socially desirable virtues, such as benevolence (ren 仁), righteousness (yi 义), propriety (li 礼), wisdom (zhi 智), and truthfulness (xin 信), inspire pursuit of similar excellence among the general public. The nobleman junzi follows successive steps of self-cultivation to become the signpost of virtue, learnedness, and propriety for others to emulate. The exemplary figures, whether real or symbolic, are important vehicles and public representations of cultural ideals to define individual eminence as well as collective aspiration.
In contemporary China, the use of exemplars is also warranted by the fear of moral decline and the need for social control as the country pursues a modern technocratic utopia, even if beneath the surface of compliance, the populace often manipulates the political correctness of exemplars to advance their life chances (Shirk, 1982). The cast of characters who serve as moral exemplars changes with China’s sociopolitical climate, from the Confucian noble gentlemen to the revolutionary heroes and heroines to the contemporary resurgence of human-hearted models who are recipients of National Medals of Moral Labor (quanguo laomo 全国劳模). Exemplars remain a central feature of Chinese history and society. As Bakken (2000) observes, the Chinese answer to social disorder is the promotion of exemplary “quality” citizens. While what constitutes human “quality” is up for grabs, the technique of exemplary governing exhorts the individual to perfect the self as a way of paying tribute to the state and, ultimately, the Mandate of Heaven (tianming 天命). To discipline through promoting exemplarity is thus underscored by a belief in human and social perfectibility, which indicates a two-fold meaning of self growth and social engineering, individual endeavors and collective yearning.
The efficacy of exemplars depends on the Chinese personhood not as abstract, equal, and rights-bearing individuals but as based on “differential moral and social statuses and the moral claims and judgments of others” (Yang, 1989: 39, my italics). The Chinese self is always already relational, existing in webs of hierarchical intersubjectivity. The exemplary ideal legitimates what is called “holistic hierarchy” (Kipnis, 2011a: 93) in which status differentials are not interpreted as structural inequality, but recognized, and largely accepted, as a common order of things. As an illustration, in Chinese cosmological order of “Heaven, Earth, Emperor, Parents, and Teachers” (天地君亲师), teachers are given a very high social position commanding students’ veneration and emulation. Xiansheng (先生), the traditional appellation for a teacher, refers to one superior in age and wisdom. As the saying goes, “He who teaches me for one day will remain a father-figure for a lifetime” (一日为师， 终生为父), indicating the exemplarity of the teacher-scholar persona and the long-lasting status differentials among members of the society. It is such relational cultural logic that enables exemplarity to play out, measuring the moral distances and relative social positions among individuals, rendering one beholden to the ideal standards.
Even though it has worked to consolidate the prevailing social order, governing through exemplarity is not simply an ideological manipulation of the citizens—such a view misses China’s historical-cosmological nuances. As Ann Stoler comments in her study of Dutch colonial governance in the East Indies, statecraft is about the mastery of the affective, joining “the care and governing of the polity to the care and governing of the affective self” (2009: 71). Passions and sentiments are a crucial pedagogical tool actively deployed by the state to further its civilizing and pedagogical projects. Chinese exemplary society kindles certain affections—what Vanessa Fong (2004) calls “filial nationalism” that sentimentalizes the state and its populace in a kinship relation, and calls citizens’ self-perfection as the filial devotion to the imagined family of the nation. Such a politics of passion historically constitutes the art of governing and opens the space for individual teacher and learner to act on shared meanings that are ultimately associated with the political role of education in making particular kinds of citizen-subjects in service to the nation. Thus, governing through exemplars is steeped in the affective registers of patriotism and filial devotion, balancing personal development with consciousness of duty towards the state. Unlike the modern political theory that advances the idea of individual rights by limiting the power of the state, Confucianism emphasizes the role of the state as essential to a just and humane society (Hahm, 2001: 315).
From the Confucian ideal person junzi to the righteous scholar-official, from the chaste spouse to the loyal imperial serviceman, from the selfless party-member to the moral student, exemplars permeate the historiography of Chinese morality and politics (Reed, 1995). Through them, who embodied the prototypes for proper behaviors and values, the imagination of an orderly and harmonious society becomes possible. In the Confucian belief, the cosmos is a moral order, and a society and its people prosper by obeying the cosmic Way, or the Mandate of Heaven (Mote, 1971: 39). Exemplars are such pedagogical signposts to teach others how to develop proper understandings of, and act in accordance with, the cosmic order. Those who embody exemplary characters, such as the five Confucian virtues of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and sincerity, were called the sage kings (圣贤 shengxian). The sage kings pursue the highest ideal of the good and achieve sanctification by inspiring others. Through them, exemplarity is made a sacred duty incumbent on all members of the society.
The pedagogical techniques for promoting exemplars are diverse, including the use of arts, public discourse, exams, political propagandas, and self-monitoring to help the individuals, especially young people, internalize desirable outlook and behaviors. In late Imperial China, for instance, ledgers were widely used as a morality book to record one’s good and bad deeds (Brokaw, 1991). The ledgers of merits and demerits were popular not only among Confucian scholars but also in folk religions to foretell the divine rewards or penance in one’s afterlife. Through meticulous recording and monitoring of one’s merits and flaws, individuals employed a reflexive, calculative stance to cultivate morality, ethics, and exemplarity. In this sense, China might be one of the most evaluated and self-governing nations the world has ever known.
While in Confucius’s time (551–479 BC), the personification of exemplarity enacts a sacred register, in contemporary China, it is also an apparatus of ideological control where the art of governing is intertwined with the art of pedagogy. The use of exemplars has been a pedagogical tool for political socialization in China’s recent history, as the use of models to moralize the masses reached its heyday in the revolutionary fervor of the communist party-state. The solder Lei Feng, who devoted his 22 years of life to the communist cause, was consecrated as a model citizen and the personification of altruism, loyalty, and ethics (Reed, 1995). His life stories and writings have been circulated in public media, school textbooks, and annual political campaigns to promulgate the collective ideal of “serving the people.” Despite the disputes about the truthfulness of his life accounts, Lei Feng as a cultural icon has survived decades of political changes and continues to resonate in China’s social and educational landscape. National campaigns for the promotion of heroic personas, such as “Learning from Comrade Lei Feng”—and occasionally, for denouncing anti-models—are frequent and plentiful. As the political saying goes, “The power of exemplars is inexhaustible” (榜样的力量是无穷的).
Bakken (2000) illustrates the regime of imitation in Chinese governing whereby the government labels certain schools, families, cadres as models, teachers are called upon to behave as exemplars (为人师表), and education appears to be producing citizens who will follow the lead of the government. However, learning through exemplars does not simply work as ideological control and reflect the authoritarian nature of Chinese society. It, to a large extent, carries a culturally rooted significance that historically has kept the populous and ethnically diverse country together and presently provides a moral compass (however tampered by the state) in the country’s ruthless pursuit of material wealth. And not all models are politically constructed, as the Confucian model junzi has been widely accepted as a symbolic icon for emulation for individuals striving for wisdom and human-heartedness. While the party-state is apt to deploy exemplars for ideological indoctrination, Susan Shirk (1982) coins the term “virtuocracy” to describe how people are also apt to manipulate the exemplary façade—while mocking it in private—for personal legitimation and advancement. As Bakken (2000) summarizes, China is “an exemplary society of a segmentary character,” (p. 412) where ideological control meets surreptitious back-stage resistance, a point to which I will turn in the discussion of the polemic “quality curriculum reform” in rural schools of Southwest China.
Governing through ritual performances
Ritual (礼 li), or rite, is one of the most important notions in Confucian educational, social, and philosophical visions. Initially referring to ethics and etiquettes for the aristocratic elites of the Xia, Shang, and Zhou dynasties (Berthrong, 2008: 38), li was later popularized by Confucian thinkers/rulers to cultivate proper conduct among ordinary folks. As a device for social cohesion, li includes various kinds of ceremonies (those of birth, marriage, death, ancestor worship, etc.) as well as quotidian codes of conducts (such as how to act in one’s appropriate role as a father, a teacher, a minister, etc.) to keep the society in a civilized order. These kinds of rites are described in detail in the three main books of ancient China, including the Book of Ceremonies and Rites (Yi li), the Rites of Zhou (Zhou li), and the Book of Rites (Li ji) (see Billioud and Thoraval, 2015: 228). Ritual is an embodied social order that allows one to observe one’s proper place in the world and enactthe dynamic process of becoming a junzi, the Confucian exemplary man.
The New Oxford American dictionary defines ritual as “a religious or solemn ceremony consisting of a series of actions performed according to a prescribed order,” such as the rites of Christian worship involving the institutional structure of the clergy, buildings, doctrines, etc. Thus defined, ritual entails a notion of “binding out” in which one is beholden to observing an externally “prescribed order” for fear of judgment and retribution. The Confucian ritual, I argue, contains an added dimension of “binding in” in which individuals are also intimately bound to an inner domain of self-cultivation. In other words, ritual is a common language through which the potentials of human virtues get articulated. The concept of ritual carries two meanings, of commitment and obligation. To embody rituals is not merely to acquire elaborate etiquettes so as to please or impress others; it is a duty as part of the Chinese collective ethos of social perfectibility and individual exemplarity.
Confucian exemplars (or junzi) are naturally ritual masters who have learned to observe the finest ritualistic components and achieved the ultimate autonomy in thoughts and actions. This can be seen from the following quotes of Confucius from the Analects. From fifteen, my heart-and-mind was set upon learning; from thirty I took my stance; from forty I was no longer doubtful; from fifty I realized the propensities of tian (tianming 天命); from sixty my ear was attuned; from seventy I could give my heart-and-mind free rein without overstepping the boundaries. (Ames and Rosement, 1998: 152)
Rituals also set up parameters by which everyone has a duty and responsibility towards others according to their differential positions. The eminent Confucian scholar Zhu Xi explained the importance of rituals in the moral education of children: Teach them the way of sweeping the courtyard, of dealing with things and the ways of getting along with people, and also teach them the rituals of loving their families, of respecting their parents, of holding their teachers in esteem and being on intimate terms with their friends. (Yan, 1989: 142) [N]ear a bench, a patch of grass or flower bed, learners stand upright or sit very straight, alone or spaced about a meter from others similarly engaged, and repeat aloud sentences and texts (in English or in Chinese, often in loud voices), while holding a book straight in front at chest level. (p. 11)
Another distinct ritual in the Chinese classroom is the expected role of the teacher relative to the students. Unlike the Western constructive model of learning where the teacher facilitates and the students take the center stage of the classroom, the teacher in the Confucian framework is often regarded as the parental figure to whom the student must pay tribute and respect. The teacher is like a conductor who stands in front of the classroom, explains, monitors, and summarizes activities, and engages the students to mimic her/him and the book in an orderly manner. Even though criticized in the recent curriculum reform that orients towards constructivism (Wu, 2012), this ritual still rings true in many Chinese classrooms today. Historically, such teacher-student relation is not conceived as authoritarian, however, but seen in an affective light where filiality and mutual caring is exercised and where proper roles of each party are reinforced.
The cultural base of Chinese schools originates from the Confucian heritage, including specific rituals, ceremonies, and values that, rather than merely making students passive rote learners, socialize them into a historically meaningful condition for proper knowing. In recent decades, scholars have coined the phrase “paradox of the Chinese learner” (Watkins and Biggs, 1996) to describe the puzzle of how Chinese students can be both rote learners and high achievers. They argue that learning and teaching is embedded in cultural and historical perspectives, and the Western perception of submissive rote learners in Chinese schools may be a misinterpretation that fails to appreciate the deep-seated cultural beliefs of learning as both preparation for examination and cultivation of moral order through proper pedagogical rituals. It is through rituals, such as sweeping the floor and answering short questions in class, that “proper” conducts are imbued with cultural meanings to “transform the body into a fitting expression of the self … so that we can live in harmony with those around us” (Tu, 1985: 97). Through rituals, one moves towards self-polishing, cultivating, and becoming; the embodied movements then orient the existential dimension of being and imbue the day-to-day with a deeper sense of meaningfulness. The significance of rituals is never constant, however, as we shall see later in this article how rituals become the target of criticism and reform and generate competing subjectivities in rural schools.
Exam and imitation in Chinese pedagogical discipline
Chinese education stresses order through a pedagogy of imitation, repetition, and memorization. The Mandarin character for study, 学 xue, implies imitation in the process of internalization and memorization. As Kipnis (2011a) puts it: “Just as one ‘studies’ writing by tracing model characters, so does one ‘study’ how to be a person (zuoren) by imitating the behaviors and dispositions of one’s teacher” (p. 91). The character for education, 教 jiao, has the semantic bearings of “discipline,” “mold,” and “restraint;” it also connotes a specific doctrine of rituals, similar to the function of the Anglo suffix “-ism.” It can be inferred that education in the Chinese tradition has been foremost concerned with disciplinary rituals articulated by imitation. If we look further, the character 教 is made up of two radicals, with the left radical 孝 (xiao) indicating filial piety, and the right radical 文 (wen) implying literature or scholarship. In an etymological sense, one might infer that to be educated, for the Chinese, is to exercise one’s scholarly labor as a means of paying filial tribute to one’s ancestors, parents, and ultimately, the nation. One’s academic success and exemplary status, therefore, is linked to kinship and the psychological meanings of the state.
To facilitate the project of human perfection and social governing, rituals and exemplarity are further bundled with a system of examination. To educate, therefore, is to produce morally socialized people and maintain exemplary norms through a comprehensive evaluation system of exams. China’s traditional emphasis on exams as a pathway to officialdom dates back to its Imperial Exam System (keju 科举) first introduced during the Sui Dynasty in AD 603. For over 1300 years until the end of the Qing dynasty, keju system served as a mechanism to select imperial governors through a special exam called “Ba Gu Wen” based on Confucian classics. The Imperial Exam selected civil servants by way of their familiarity with Confucian canons and literature, with higher-level degrees leading to higher-ranking positions in the imperial service. Rising from the ordinary folk to the royal palace had been the dream of ancient scholars who pursued a life of text memorization and imperial examiniation as the only way towards officialdom. This was in line with Confucius’s exhortation to apply oneself to be a state officer after becoming learned (学而优则仕) (see Li and Li, 2010).
Many people spent years, decades, even their entire life trying to make their way up the bureaucratic ladder. More importantly, the successful became models for emulation, linking individual achievements to collective cultural desires. While imperial examinations served to select bureaucrats for dynastic rules, contemporary China’s myriad high-stake exams work to distinguish students by scores and channel them into different academic tracks and future career placements. Every year hundreds of thousands of students compete with great anxiety in the national college entrance exam, the infamous gaokao, a high-stake test that singly determines one’s college placement and occupational prospect. It is metaphorically called the “narrow log bridge” through which crowds of eager competitors shove and push to get ahead (千军万马过独木桥). While the exam system reflects an imagined meritocracy, it also legitimates social hierarchy formed through such a selection system, and inscribes rules and standards to govern the space of learning.
To sum up the above historical analysis, the production of subjectivities in Chinese schools has never been too far removed from the governing complex of exemplarity-ritual-exam, as students engage in various pedagogical rituals to compete in standardized exams in order to prove their academic exemplarity. Since the late 1990s, the Chinese general public has increasingly bemoaned the imitation-based, exam-oriented, and teacher-centered educational system for the inability to produce a modern, liberal, entrepreneurial citizenry. The concerns for Chinese children’s lack of independent thinking are also evident in popular works comparing Chinese pedagogical practices to those in other countries, particularly the United States. In the bestselling book Education for Quality in the US (素质教育在美国), author Huang Quanyu contrasts the “outdated” Chinese education and its emphasis on respect for authority with the American pedagogies that allow children to develop individuality, confidence and creativity (Woronov, 2007). Furthermore, rituals held as the a priori condition for Confucian knowing are criticized as prescriptive, authoritarian and contradictory to the constructivist ideal of learning through student-centered experience (Dello-Iacovo, 2009; Wu, 2012).
While the Western stance is praised, discussions over the lack of quality of life for Chinese children have also emerged in the broad context of China’s globalized economy. Wealthy elites hurry to send their children abroad for “greener grasses” in the developed world while denouncing the Chinese educational system as producing deadly knowledge and meek test-takers. Media and scholarly publications have taken up this anxiety, suggesting “creativity” outlets for children, advocating homework reduction, extracurricular activities, more free time to play, and fewer demands to imitate and memorize (Kipnis, 2011b: 292). In a sense, the tripartite governing principles discussed above have become targets of intense criticism, whereas open-ended, child-centered, non-authoritarian pedagogical approaches are upheld as the pre-conditions to improving the quality of life of Chinese citizens and the country’s global competitiveness. Various policy attempts have also been made to undermine the heavy focus on testing and revamp the singular assessment system of the college entrance exam in order to emphasize well-rounded capacities and equity in student evaluation. 1 However, efforts to reform the educational system have been far from successful. While the reform aims to foster child-centered learning and criticizes the overemphasis on exams, classroom rituals, and exemplary icons, its implementation has renormalized the historical governing paradigm and produced controversies in everyday pedagogical lives. The exemplarity-ritual-exam complex that historically constitutes the Chinese self also presently shapes the curriculum reform, even if the reform aims to do away with, however partially, these historical elements. In the following analysis, I illustrate the complex mix of rhetoric and practice that is co-present to govern pedagogical actors with hybrid subjectivities. I turn to the multi-layered terrain of a contested curriculum reform in rural ethnic Qiandongnan.
Ritual-exam-exemplarity complex in paradoxes: narratives of Qiandongnan
The empirical data presented below derives from the 16 months of ethnographic research I conducted in a Miao and a Dong village, pseudonymed Majiang and Longxing respectively, in Qiandongnan Prefecture of Guizhou Province between 2009 and 2010, in addition to several visits in previous summers from 2006 to 2008. The larger study aimed to examine the formation of educational disenchantment and the educational policy conflicts with the larger agendas of rural modernization in ethnic minority communities in Southwest China. The research methods include participant observation, informal interviews, oral history, and archival/document analysis. The length of time I spent in both villages afforded me formal and informal opportunities to participate in classroom learning, school activities, and local social lives in order to gain a situated understanding of how local agents interpret and act upon official curriculum reform policy and developmental programs. In this paper, I present a slice of the findings, illustrating the complex grassroots negotiation of the curriculum reform and shed light on how a plethora of subjectivities renders the reform far from an easy task.
Qiandongnan, the Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture situated in Southeast Guizhou Province of China, is primarily populated by two groups of non-Han ethnic minorities, the Miao (苗) and Dong (侗). China has 56 officially designated ethnic groups, including the majority Han that makes up more than 92% of the total population, and 55 ethnic minorities accounting for less than 8%. Among the 55 officially recognized ethnic minorities, the Miao and the Dong are generally perceived in pacifist, 2 yet economically, socially, and educationally “underdeveloped” terms. Given that the Miao and the Dong have their own ethnic cultures distinct from the Han with whom Confucianism is generally associated, it begs some clarification as to where the two communities stand in relation to the broader heritage culture of China. My oral history interviews have shown that both the Miao and the Dong have had generations of ethnic encounters and in particular, have acquired essential Han cultural literacy through inter-ethnic marriage, trade, and migration. Studies on Guizhou’s ethnic minorities have also pointed out their sustained assimilation into the Han culture through imperial governance, especially through education in classic Confucianism during the Qing dynasty (Hostetler, 2001; Rawski, 1979: 57–8). For instance, elders in the Dong community, who were educated in the Confucian classics, named the five communal drum towers in the village after the five Confucian virtues of ren, yi, li, zhi, xin (仁 、 义 、 礼 、 志 、 信). Suffice it to say, the Confucian heritage is highly relevant in ethnic minority communities in Guizhou.
What role, then, does ethnicity play in China’s education policy-making? As noted by existing literature on the education of ethnic minorities in China, the need to promote culturally diverse and locally relevant education is often eclipsed by the political discourse to socialize a populous and diverse country into an imagined Chinese nation through state schooling (Wu, 2016: Chapter 2; Hansen, 1999; Harrell, 1996; Postiglione, 2008). In a largely top-down, centralized mode of educational provision, school curricula across the country are primarily urban-bound and oriented towards the mainstream-Han linguistic and cultural practices, while ethnic cultures and histories are mostly hollowed out from the content of school textbooks. The civilizing mission has long been a subtext of public schooling to cultivate children’s habitus and subjectivity in alignment with China’s urban expansion and modernization. In the Miao and Dong villages, the rise of ethnic tourism has prompted the local government to implement an inclusive education policy by incorporating ethnic customs and histories into the curriculum. However, because ethnic classes are not part of the standardized exams, village schools have little incentive to teach them. In addition, lack of funding and qualified teachers also poses major challenges in the meaningful incorporation of multicultural contents in school curricula. The rhetoric of multiculturalism for expanding human liberties is still a long way from the lived realities of students and teachers observed in this research.
Part of China’s south-western frontier, Guizhou and Qiandongnan are depicted in social reports and media narratives through languages of poverty and isolation. In order to revitalize the countryside, the state has implemented a series of pro-growth strategies 3 and brought about drastic social, economic, and educational transformations in Qiandongnan. Relevant to the discussion here are two schemes decreed by the national Ministry of Education as anti-poverty measures: the Two Basics Project (TBP, 两基工程) aimed to universalize nine-year compulsory schooling and eliminate adult illiteracy, and the quality/suzhi curriculum reform focused on raising the suzhi/quality of the rural ethnic population through promoting suzhi/quality education.
The concept of suzhi is roughly translated as human quality that calibrates one’s physical, social, cultural, intellectual, and moral values and capacities (Wu, 2012; Woronov, 2009). A general consensus among the Chinese is that “such a thing as suzhi exists, that its level is too low in the Chinese population, that the collective suzhi of individuals produces the suzhi of the nation as a whole, and that raising the suzhi of children is a particularly important step” (Woronov, 2009: 568). Since the early 1980s, the concept of suzhi gained popularity in the social and educational spheres, especially as the initiation of the one-child policy reinforced the need to control fertility and ensure superior birth and childrearing (优生优育). On the other hand, rural ethnic minorities are generally depicted as having “low suzhi” in the domain of media and policy because of their low education level, income, and social status. Improving their suzhi through educational programs becomes a particularly important anti-poverty measure for the state. The discourse of suzhi signals China’s conscious transition from a country of sheer volume (in terms of population size) to that of quality (with regards to citizen civility), as well as a reflexive critique towards its own educational system. In education, suzhi jiaoyu has been variously defined as “competence education,” “quality education,” “education for quality,” “quality-oriented education,” and “character education” (Dello-Iacovo, 2009: 242). Despite the lack of unified definition, the new curriculum reform is a nationwide policy decreed by the Ministry of Education as a progressive measure to promote creative, independent, constructivist learning and remedy the exam-oriented education system blamed for stifling China’s 21st-century talents. The purpose of the reform is two-fold: to move teachers and students away from subject-centered and teacher-directed pedagogies to student-focused, experiential, and interdisciplinary pursuit of learning, and to move towards a less exam-oriented and more holistic assessment of student development through reducing heavy academic burden and promoting well-rounded suzhi/quality personhood (Lou, 2011: 74).
The suzhi curriculum reform encompasses a wide array of contents and objectives, including homework reduction, removal of test-score-based ranking and tracking, elimination of supplementary after-school lessons, flexible provision of extracurricular activities, and the adoption of a child-centered learning approach. In particular, the suzhi curriculum reform is primarily concerned with the shift from teacher-centered to student-centered, authoritarian to participatory pedagogical modes (Wu, 2012). Curriculum reform advocates question the non-democratic principle of learning through imitating models (whether they are one’s teachers or cultural icons) and argue for learner autonomy, self-discovery, and student-based instruction to cultivate well-rounded talents. Governing through exemplars has seen many eager critics who frown upon the excessive use and ideological manipulation of models—model schools, model teachers, model students, model party cadres—for begetting homogeneity and stifling individual uniqueness. The critics tend to generally charge against the social and cultural barriers experienced by typical Chinese learners which result in reticence in class, deference to teachers, passive imitation, low ability, and academic stress (Zhao, 2014; Zhao et al.,2014). Despite the fact that Chinese students are never a homogeneous group and teaching approaches in Chinese schools are constantly evolving, the social anxiety about the disadvantages of the educational system continues to exist among parents, educators, and even policy-makers. At the core of the new curriculum reform is the stress on pedagogical flexibility and adaptability tailored to individual needs and a shift from “teachers teaching” to “learners learning” (Guan and Meng, 2007). The rights of teachers to scold-educate students no longer makes pedagogical common sense, and the cultural assumption of teacher-student relations as naturally hierarchical has become politically contentious (Sloane and Zhao, 2013: 9). Additionally, high-stake testing as the sole evaluative criteria of learning is also heavily criticized for encouraging spoon-feeding and rote memorization.
In a centralized mode, the curriculum reform is slated for implementation in a nationally unified way. Yet in my observation of the two middle schools in the villages of Majiang and Longxing, teacher-centered classroom rituals, exemplarity-oriented appraisal, and the focus on testing have not been revamped overnight. Suzhi curriculum reform becomes a terrain of polemicism that demonstrates multi-vocality in the interpretation of its meanings and the actual classroom practices. The tripartite governing complex is re-normalized in the new curriculum reform’s critique of the past, with exemplarity tempered by the discourse of human quality/suzhi, with exam legacy overtly criticized but subtly revived, and with school rituals changing rhetoric but not essence.
In Majiang and Longxing, teachers responded to the call for student-centered pedagogies with ambivalence. As the vice headmaster of Longxing Middle School once said: We are a poor school. We are still struggling with yingshi jiaoyu (exam-oriented education) and how to make students score better, how can we have time to deal with suzhi jiaoyu (quality-oriented education)? Let the rich urban schools worry about it.
In Majiang and Longxing, students were ranked according to their scores, and the names of high scorers were publicized on bulletin boards to showcase exemplars and models. The regime of examinations had not relented; instead, it remained the primary yardstick in evaluating students and teachers. As many teachers in Qiandongnan put it: “education for quality is still education for scores,” with quality (suzhi) rhyming with scores (shuzi) in mandarin Chinese. While exemplar test-takers were promoted, the schools also encouraged year-long inter-class contests—including athletic games, hallway cleanliness, wall decorations, and student conducts. The race towards exemplarity is a ubiquitous feature of Chinese education, linked to a symbolic economy of prestige and shame that metes out cultural sanctions to those implicated in the race.
A typical classroom I observed in rural Qiandongnan looks like this: the teacher is positioned on a raised platform in front of the blackboard. Above the blackboard hangs a map of China and sometimes a billboard that counts down the remaining days till various entrance exams. The opposite wall on the back of the classroom is decorated with charts and diagrams, academic timetables, exemplary essays, students’ resolutions, portraits of revolutionary leaders, and slogan banners that promote patriotism and the importance of education. These heterogeneous artifacts embody elements of exemplarity; they are things considered worthy of public display, as paramount symbols of the state and its pedagogical ideals, and as consistent products of the materiality of the schools (Lawn and Grosvenor, 2005).
While the material display of the classroom clearly enacts the exemplary pedagogy described earlier, it is soon met with another technique of exemplarity that sits awkwardly within the suzhi curriculum reform. One evening, I was asked to substitute a grade-nine English class in Longxing Middle School. 4 My instruction was interrupted by a group of teachers who arrived at the door and marched down the aisles of the desks, each armed with a pair of scissors, cutting off hair that they viewed as inappropriately colored, excessively long, or eccentrically styled. The operation led to some grumble, giggles, and commotions. “We can tell whether you are putting efforts into your studies simply by looking at your hairdos,” commented one teacher matter-of-factly. This unannounced ritual of housekeeping, I was later told, often took place before school inspections. According to the teachers, rural students are “wild little monsters” with little self-motivation and no exemplars at home to imitate. Therefore, the teachers needed to be extra assertive in ensuring students’ physical cleanliness, which was held to be an indicator of their academic seriousness. The cultivation of proper appearance is situated in the broader context of promoting the “Three Good” exemplary students (三好学生)—namely, good academics, good moral conducts, and good habits and health.
The haircut episode exists in an awkward relation with the quality curriculum reform. On the one hand, the deployment of specific disciplinary measures (with scissors acting as the tool of the housekeeping ritual), its stress on exemplarity (students’ aesthetic/hygienic virtues), and its linking of students’ proper self-fashioning of their academic performance remain fastened to the ritual-exam-exemplarity governing complex. Teacher authoritarianism in the background runs counter to the egalitarian, child-centered spirit of the suzhi curriculum reform. Yet, the use of force is to achieve another front of the suzhi reform—that of appropriately attired “suzhi” bodies, especially for rural students who are considered lacking in aesthetic and hygienic virtues. In Majiang and Longxing, students were still rank-tracked, even physically separated into different sitting areas based on their scores, even though tracking was prohibited by the suzhi curriculum reform. Teachers, whose evaluation and promotion in part depend on the exam scores of their students, reinforced the practice of tracking and labeling. Frequently heard in everyday conversations was the term chasheng (literally, underachievers) that derogatorily labeled students’ academic aptitudes. Students were quick to deploy youthful strategies to refashion themselves—by engraving the words chasheng on the desks or physically sowing/painting the words onto their clothes. The title chasheng pointed to the discriminatory school practices against the learner-centered, humanistic rhetoric of the suzhi reform. Meanwhile, as part of student sub-culture, it also reflects students’ own mocking of school rules and indicates that authoritarian classroom practices do not necessarily lead to the production of submissive, obedient subjects.
While students use body graffiti to contest authority, teachers also consciously maneuver the education policy mandates and the ritual of school inspections. In May 2009, a delegation from the Guizhou Provincial Ministry of Education conducted a round of school audits in Qiandongnan to inspect whether rural schools had successfully implemented the Two Basics Project and the Quality Curriculum Reform. One day in early May, the village Longxing received the provincial delegation, who arrived in two shiny vans to the sound of welcoming songs sung by fully attired school children. Following the hospitality ritual, the inspectorates patrolled the school yard, making brief stops to observe the classrooms, the teachers’ office, the library and the science lab, and the document room where binders of audit materials were neatly shelved. While the library and the science lab were seen as spaces of quality education where hands-on, student-centered learning took place, they were largely ornamental and rarely used. What seemed impromptu scenarios in the eyes of the inspecting officials—students concentrated in scientific experiments—were meticulously staged performances. Behind the curtain of the audit drama, teachers still teach to the tests, and class time is still consumed by teacher dictation and rote learning.
The high stakes involved in the ritual of school inspection—such as career promotion for the teachers and future resource allocation for the schools—produced not only escalating anxieties, but also conscious maneuvers to fabricate outcomes. In Majiang, for instance, classes were frequently cancelled so that teachers could have more time preparing for audit paperwork, catching dropouts, and entertaining inspectorates. Not only were school data 5 (such as enrollment and dropout rate) forged, the physical presence of students could also be orchestrated ad hoc. It was not uncommon that dropouts’ siblings or students from other villages would be “borrowed” to sit in for the inspection day. The ritual of inspection and the suzhi curriculum reform were interpreted as highly disturbing to the daily lives in rural schools. Off the records, village teachers and administrators described the reform and the inspection as a sore point, causing them many sleepless nights and strangling the already tight school finances. Teachers, whose professional life is thinly spread among audit paperwork, testing, catching dropouts, and entertaining inspectorates are its most acute critics.
The ritual of inspection is more appropriately understood through a genre of practice called formalism (形式主义). The way school agents respond to the suzhi education reform generates rhetorical window dressing rather than genuine compliance. The burden of reforms drives village teachers to cosmetic compliance while maintaining old practices as they see fit. On the one hand, the audit culture is premised upon the idea of self-accountability not dissimilar from the Foucaultian thesis of governmentality or “governing from afar” (Foucault, 1991). As Foucault argues, approaches to coping with changes and maintaining social order have produced a particular form of govern-mentality worldwide that governs through shaping people’s “mentality” and produces docile self-responsiblized subjects (see Schirato et al., 2012). In other words, instead of emphasizing the sovereign power and direct intervention of the state that wields top-down control over citizens and families, governmentality is concerned with a subtler form of governing in which the bureaucratic authorities retreat into the distance and where individuals and the population en masse endeavor to direct their own conduct to secure the good/advantage for the self and others. Governmentality is thus a productive form of power in that it has the health, education, and well-being of the entire population as its target and regulates through producing particular subjectivity and practices of the citizens. It is a form of governing from afar because it is concerned with the discursive production of the “conduct of conduct” in everyday life and allows the activities of the government of the self, of others, and of the state to be intertwined (Dean, 1999). In addition, “mechanisms of government … are found within state institutions and outside them … in fact cut across domains that we would regard as separate: the state, civil society, the family, down to the intimate details of what we regard as personal life” (Gupta, 2001: 68).
Within the policy context of the curriculum reform, village teachers acted as self-responsibilized subjects who aligned their conduct with the reform discourse and agendas. On the other hand, the audit culture entails the creative power of the school agents who understood the superficiality of the ritual and responded in a self-optimizing fashion. Hence, a fourth element of “the performative” further nuances the tripartite educational governing in contemporary China. The performative practices might be seen as the “subtext” of schooling through which pedagogical actors experience the suzhi curriculum reform through counterstrategies. Formalism provides a technique of appearance management and perfunctory mimicry of the policy script. As many of the teachers facetiously described, they paid lip service for the sake of getting by.
Village teachers grew weary of the burden of the reform, and likened it to the hurried wind that fluttered and alternated directions haphazardly to make their life difficult. While the suzhi reform challenged the ritual-exam-exemplarity complex, at least rhetorically, by championing more adaptable, individualized, and learner-autonomous pedagogical mode, behind the closed classroom doors, teachers retained total control, dictating what was to be taught and how students would learn. They produced a façade of the suzhi education during inspections, while justifying teacher-centered, mimetic, and exam-based pedagogy on the account of enhancing students’ competitiveness—ultimately calibrated by test results.
The roles of teachers in historical and contemporary China show both continuity and rupture. The continuity lies in the cultural notion that teachers are knowledgeable exemplars for students to emulate and play a leading role in classroom learning. Still to this day, the authority of the teachers is culturally and historically assumed. The reform rhetoric of student-centeredness, arguably poses a distinct challenge to the professional self-perception of many teachers. On the one hand, the rituals of repetition, imitation, and examination practiced by generations of Chinese teachers are no longer seen as appropriate pedagogical tools for preparing 21st-century talent. On the other hand, new curriculum reform is like old wine in new bottles without changing the test-based assessment system or the centralized curriculum structure (Lou, 2011). This creates a double pressure for teachers and students to adapt to the demand for a new classroom environment featuring independent, open-ended inquiries, and at the same time perform to the testing standards. The result is often that the well-meaning reform initiatives ended up confusing already stressed teachers and students, who chose to continue the old practices in order to secure higher marks in exams. The top-down implementation of curriculum reform often generates rhetoric compliance and backstage complaints, which partially explains the resistance and leads to the discussion of how to motivate grassroots practitioners in the policy debates (Li and Ni, 2012).
Conclusion
Understanding Chinese educational discipline through the tripartite lens of exemplarity-ritual-exam calls for a historical sensibility to cast a fresh look at the contemporary educational ideals, relations, and practices. Chinese education is a particularly idiosyncratic case, as it governs through exemplars, a meticulous system of evaluation, and bureaucratic rituals of expectations and obligations. The tripartite elements are not to be essentialized or normalized as definitive characters of Chinese education, because the values and roles of rituals, exams, and exemplars are historically specific and intertwined with China’s changing cultural-social-educational landscape. In a sense, the tripartite lens provides a useful prism to the centrality of the state in educational programming, yet at the same time also indicates a form of governmentality that enables citizen-subject to orient their attitude and conduct to the discursive educational discourse of a particular era. The three features have historically worked as apparatuses of educational disciplining in China, yet all disciplines are inherently messy and may result in contradictory push and pull.
In recent decades, contemporary educational practices in China have been criticized for the emphasis on exams, teacher-centered classroom rituals, and exemplary icons. Despite the repeated reform efforts, the exemplarity-ritual-exam governing complex still holds considerable sway in Chinese schools today. As Ruth Hayhoe (2014) argues, the term “modern pedagogy” in contemporary China needs to be approached from a historical perspective because the legacy of Confucian pedagogy continues to persist even as modern epistemologies have surfaced to shape education in China today. The pragmatist influence from the West, notably the educational philosophy of John Dewey, hasn’t entirely drowned out the Confucian practices of learning but has to reconcile itself with traditional discourses when entering into Chinese educational and social lives. As the case study in Qiandongnan shows, contemporary pedagogic discourse is still rooted in traditional elements, even if these elements are given contemporary features, and even if the reform aims to do away, however partially, with these elements.
Through localized accounts of how educational actors interpret, negotiate, and maneuver policy scripts, I introduce a fourth dimension—the performative aspect—of educational governing in contemporary China. The ethnographic sensibilities show how the ritual-exam-exemplarity complex produces ruptures and discontinuities when met with the reform mandate of suzhi education. At the same time, a momentum of historical continuity also exists to both anchor and hamper the curriculum reform initiative. In the multi-layered field of Chinese education, pedagogical actors both perform and react against the historical and contemporary visions of educational governing with hybrid subjectivities. Rural teachers and students live under a variety of subjectifying discourses in their daily pedagogical practices, maneuvers, and decision-making, which shed light on why China’s curriculum reform is far from an easy task. The discursive field of Chinese education is choreographed by a bricolage of contradictory elements and actors, involving the state power, the cosmopolitan ideal of suzhi, the situated practices of pedagogical actors, and the negotiation between culturally specific and globally circulated ideals of knowledge, pedagogy, and authority. These factors constitute push and pull, movement and stickiness in the heterogeneous process of educational transformation in the 21st-century China.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The ethnographic fieldwork of the research was funded by the Social Science Research Council (USA).