Negotiating Responsibility and Power: The Competing Moralities of Student Government in High-Achieving Classes of Chinese High Schools

Abstract

Over the past four decades, China has been undergoing profound sociopolitical and moral transformations, especially in the domain of education. Much has been written about the rise and the control of the individual in Chinese education, including the rises of individual competition and child-centered pedagogies; the state’s promotion of its absolute political authority; and the revival of collectivist traditions and moral hierarchies. These changes have created multiple tensions for parents, teachers, and students. On the one hand, they are caught between competing regimes of value, the market-driven individualistic ethics and the Confucian- and communist-oriented collective ethics. On the other hand, parents and teachers struggle with the competing moral discourses of children’s autonomy and filial piety. However, there remains limited understanding of how Chinese young people experience and negotiate these competing moralities in everyday life. Drawing on about five months of ethnographic fieldwork following four high-achieving classes in two urban public high schools in Southwestern China during Fall 2019 and over 110 hours of in-depth individual interviews with 44 members of these classes in 2020, my dissertation contributes to this line of inquiry. Taking youth seriously as moral agents themselves, my dissertation explores how high-school students experience and navigate the competing moral demands associated with the class cadre system, a longstanding, nation-wide institution of student government in the classroom. Confronted by the competing demands of individual interest in competition and collective responsibility, students experienced heavy burdens as they considered and undertook cadre work. Meanwhile, student cadres also experienced powerlessness as they were caught between answering the demands of both teacher authority and of peer interest and relationships. In negotiating both sets of tensions, students pursued different configurations of balance that allowed them to creatively address and partially fulfill multiple demands simultaneously. Therefore, my dissertation depicts a complex state of moral contestations and dynamic searches for balance, rather than clear shifts in any one direction, as characterizing the sociopolitical and moral landscape of China and the moral negotiation of the young generation.