Education, Inequality, and Intensive Parenting in China

Abstract

This dissertation addresses why education has remained intensive, unequal, and exam-oriented in China despite extensive government efforts at reform. Existing studies on these issues focus either on the top-down public policies or bottom-up family strategies, and therefore do not explain why one of them appears to have lost to the other. To fill this gap, I introduce an institutional framework that bridges the research on policies and family strategies. This framework focuses on the rules in the critical situations where education providers and families match, and traces how policymakers, educational providers, and families shape these rules of matching. By analyzing these rules and their origins, this framework explains why education providers and families match in ways that sustain intensive, unequal, and exam-oriented education. Through fieldwork in Chinese cities with a particular focus on Beijing, I find that families and education providers match in three institutions within education: access, selection, and exit. None of the three institutions was solely designed by top-down policy. First, after the government introduced residency-based school assignments in the early 2010s, families employed formal and informal strategies to gain new local citizenship for school access, thus rendering school access effectively based on a family’s capacity to gain local citizenship. Second, the government’s ban on selective middle school admissions that induced early intensive education was compromised by fragmented local education governance that allowed local actors to circumvent the top-down bans. Third, even without government policies, alternative education schools emerged and adopted pedagogies consistent with the state’s reform goal of reducing exam-oriented education, but a lack of state recognition constrained their development.