Study gods – How the new Chinese elite prepare for global competition

Abstract

The sociology of education as a field has contributed significantly to understanding how social inequalities are replicated, promoted and inter-generationally sustained in education systems. Scholars have explained how this occurs through everyday education processes and education practices. Over the years, we see this understanding developed through the theories such as Class, Codes and Control by Basil Bernstein (1977) and subsequently through the theorising of socio-educational inequality from the lens of Capital and Class Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu (1984). Much of this empirical investigation and conceptual theorising has been limited to understanding educational inequalities in anglophone countries, focusing particularly on the citizens of these nations. As such, we don’t know much about what is happening in, for example, non-anglophone and Asian countries (with a few exceptions, see for example, Carrasco et al. 2021; Gupta 2020; Xu & Montgomery, 2021) and among those who hold citizenships of these countries but frequently move around, living and working transnationally during their life course. Yi-Lin addresses the latter in Study Gods. In this book Yi-Lin Chiang documents crucial events occurring in the lives of 28 elite students between 2012 and 2019, to demonstrate the ways in which the new Chinese elite students prepare for global competition, thus maintaining their ultra-privileged social status. Although the author documents these education-related events in the lives of Study Gods as mundane, they simultaneously clarify that while these events may be ‘everyday’ for the Study Gods and their peers, these are inherently classed and exclusive to this specific group of elites, thus alluding to the extent of educational—and by extension, social—inequalities in China. The book is organised across six chapters covering different topics—each of these topics offers unique insights into the lives of and the making of China’s global elite. Chapter one looks at the role of the education system in preparing the global elite in China. It provides insights into how specific groups of schools appeared to become ‘training grounds’ for a selective group of students and how students in these schools are uniquely prepared to take up their place in typically highly competitive elite higher educational institutions. The concept of training here was particularly interesting as it demonstrates the significance of hidden curricula that specific schools follow because not only are they educating children academically, but this education involves deliberate and careful preparation to help pupils occupy high-status positions in the future (this resonates with cases in India, see for example, Rizvi, 2015). Here we also get a glimpse of how high the stakes are with exams for the students studying in these elite schools, encapsulated in the ways in which students ‘believed that high scores on these [college entrance tests such as Gaokao and SAT] tests, which led to top university placement, were tickets to engaging in global elite status competition’ (p.37). Interestingly we witness the politics of shadow education: many of these students can afford high-quality and remarkably expensive private tutoring to facilitate the transition from school to higher education. This observation signals that there is not just disparity at the school level between the privileged and disadvantaged groups but also in the form of outside-school shadow education—a feature which has also been observed among new middle classes in India (see for example Gupta, 2023). Review Symposium