The making of a new generation of Chinese workers : marginalized youth, vocational education and class formation

Abstract

In the past forty years, China’s integration into the global capitalist system and pursuit of economic growth has resulted not only in rapid educational expansion, but also in the issue of class reproduction. Based on 123 interviews from seven vocational schools in East and West China, this study aims to scrutinize China’s working-class formation in vocational schools by using a multi-sited ethnographic approach and cross-regional comparison. Taking a Social Reproduction in Education lens, this study views vocational training as a transforming and contested process that cultivates new working-class subjects for China’s accumulation regime. The interaction between structural constraints and youth agency is an ongoing theme in this study to understand both the economic and cultural reproduction of class. Key findings reveal that the economic reproduction of class consists of three processes: classed educational tracking, fractured governmentality, and unsettled work transition. Structurally, the exam-based sorting system fails to compensate for class-based unequal resource allocation, which channels a disproportionate number of rural/migrant students into the vocational track. According to the state’s craftsmanship discourse, vocational schools should provide students with high-quality skills training, recognized skills certificates, relevant internships, and a smooth transition to work. However, many vocational institutions cannot deliver on their promises of skills formation and better employment, leaving vocational youth to face an increasingly flexible labor market without adequate institutional support. This gap between institutional capacities and the state’s discourse fosters a sense of delusion among vocational students who see through the myth of schooling and skill acquisition as a means of upward mobility. In terms of identity formation, rather than conforming to the tainted labels imposed by society, vocational students actively construct their own morality as independent, altruistic subjects with firm beliefs in practicality. They are not constrained by the ineffective educational institution, but seek out alternatives and self-growth in professional associations, peer groups and the workplace. Despite their proactive efforts to navigate schooling and work transitions, individual efforts are constantly plagued by frustration and anxieties, especially in a highly uncertain, deskilled, and informal labor market. This research contributes to social reproduction in education theory in three aspects. The first to extend class reproduction discussion beyond school-based instruction and into educational tracking and work transition. Second, it reveals that when transforming the state’s governmentality to horizontal power relations in pedagogy, vocational education is not a unified and hegemonic apparatus, but a battlefield with its own systemic problems. Fractured governmentality at vocational schools is a result of contradictions between the interests and capacity of vocational schools and the state’s expectation. Finally, this study broadens the scope of student resistance. It found that morals or ethics are key sources or weapons for vocational students to construct positive selfhood in the face of symbolic violence. Besides establishing a “detached practical” self, vocational students actively employ withdrawal as a form of resistance to seek alternatives in other social spaces, such as after-school professional clubs and the workplace. The new generation of China’s working class is rising, though amid hardship and uncertainty.