Education modernization in rural China: exploring temporality in education policy

ABSTRACT

Temporality is a relatively new conception in the field of education policy. Drawing upon historical sociology, this article aims to contribute to the field by deconstructing China’s policy discourse – education modernization. It traces the history of the discourse (1904–2012) to analyze how Chinese rurality is interwoven into the nation’s pursuit of modern country status. Two temporal threads are identified: the rural as a problem and the rural as a modernization plan. The article reveals how the threads forms a paradoxical position of the rural in China’s current modernization agenda: the problematized rural as a potential empowering force. The findings illuminate how the policy constructs a history narrative thereby constructing a unified destiny of the nation for the future, which entrusts education policy with moral significances. China’s case demonstrates how education policy inherits and utilizes historical and cultural assumptions as a governing technique, while being shaped and constrained by them.

KEYWORDS:

• Education policy
• temporality
• modernization
• education modernization
• rural education
• China
• historical sociology

Modernization as a temporal discourse: a convergence of future and past

Within the field of policy sociology, there is an increasing emphasis on the concept of temporality (Lingard, 2021). Temporality in sociology of education aims to highlight the changing and messy interweaving of times: past, present and future (McLeod, 2017). The adoption of this concept in the study of education policy provides a critical approach to deconstructing the problem, context, and history that are assumed and constructed by a policy. This is because the development of an education policy is embedded in ‘social imaginaries’ (Rizvi & Lingard, 2009); that is, it is embedded in a certain historical social configuration. This means that an education policy can be analyzed as a particular historical formation of social practices, concepts, and inquiry (Seddon, McLeod, & Sobe, 2017). A policy offers not only a predetermined answer to the question of how an historical past and present have been constructed (Lingard, 2021), but assumes an anticipated future that the policy if implemented will achieve (Webb, Sellar, & Gulson, 2020). Given this, it is essential to recognize and investigate the temporal dimension of education policy in order to have a deep and alternative understanding of one policy.

This article builds on the above considerations to investigate education modernization discourse in China, with a particular focus on rural education. Modernization discourse has been regularly utilized in the main policy discourse to underpin Chinese social reforms; it is evident in the latest focus on the education strategy implemented in 2019: China’s Education Modernization 2035. Education modernization is an intriguing combination of discourses to examine. Education has always been significant to the building of a modern nation-state, including in the construction of nationhood and national identity included in the sociological term ‘modernization’. This intricate relationship between education and a nation’s modernization highlights the need to examine how discourse is manifested in China at different times. On the one hand, the discourse has a strong link with the historical memory of twentieth-century China, embracing the struggles associated with resisting colonialism and building an independent modern nation-state. On the other hand, it is associated with the future of the nation in the policy. Modernization thus becomes a temporal discourse where multiple times are conflated – the past and the future of the nation converge in the present discourse.

This intriguing time convergence underscores a need to go back to the history of China’s education modernization to examine the policy discourse of education modernization. In this article, informed by Bob Lingard’s (2021) theoretical work on the temporality in critical education policy sociology, I examined the temporal construction work of policies: ‘how policy constructs either overtly, implicitly or by neglect, a historical past, a present and a desired imagined future’ (Lingard, 2021, p. 347). With a focus on the historical memory involved in the discourse, I engaged with the concept in two main ways: first, the interweaving of the past, future and present – how the government manages different times through policy discourse to tell a story about the nation; second, it illustrates the multiplicity of the past, highlighting the complexity of single one modality – in what ways the layers of intersecting history shape the education modernization policy. I argue that modernization discourse is a governing technique that mobilizes history to construct a mission for the nation, thereby providing historical legitimacy for and adding moral meanings to the policy. However, on the other hand, I argue that the government is trapped in this underlying narrative of modernization because the hegemonic thinking of modernization marginalizes potential empowering voices, such as those of the rural.

The intersection of history and education

Modernization is generally seen as a process of structural change. China’s modernization can be traced back to the late nineteenth century while the relevant academic discussion was not really established until the 1980s. Following the first systematic and integrated book Modernization of China (Rozman, 1982), in-depth and focused analysis grows rapidly which deepen the understandings of China’s modernity from the lens of different social sectors such as political science (Bakken, 1986), population policy (Greenhalgh, 2003), workforce and labor market (Rofel, 1999; H. Yan, 2003), and urbanization (Kipnis, 2016; L. Zhang, 2006). One common theme in the literature is that modernization discourse is highly politicized in contemporary China. This is particularly the case for the rural sector. Previous research has focused on how the relevant discourses played a role in justifying increased interventions in the private sphere as well as a state retreat from public sphere – regulating individuals’ conduct to accord with state-sanctioned teleology of modernization (Kipnis, 2011; Murphy, 2004); for example, teacher professional self-identification (Wu, 2016) and life aspirations (Harwood, 2009).

On the other hand, China’s modernization is a hybrid process where heterogenous ideas co-exist. In terms of the temporal dimension, researchers have identified a time mixture underpinning China’s modernity. Dirlik (2003) argues that contemporary China’s notion of modernity incorporates contested and competing conceptions, regardless of the time of the ideas, modern, pre-modern, or non-modern, which ‘share a common temporality and make equally plausible claims on the modern’ (p. 28). This mixture of times results in a mixture of ideologies. Similarly, Meinhof (2017) argues that China’s modernization discourse binds heterogeneous ideologies of different times together, ideologies such as nationalism, economic growth, socialism, and Confucian traditions, by a linear notion of time and progress. Temporality is therefore a critical dimension within which to make sense of and examine contemporary China’s social policies in relation to modernization discourse, particularly as that discourse is being increasingly used as a way to narrate and structure the history of the country under the current Xi Jinping government (Buzan & Lawson, 2020).

A closer look at history is thus needed to tease out the temporal entanglement, especially given there are still pieces of history missing from the education policy study about modernization discourse. There is however an emerging body of education studies that draws attention to history (Seddon et al., 2017; Zhao & Popkewitz, 2022). Regarding China’s rural education, there is a body of exemplary work both in Chinese scholarship (Fei, 1992; Xiong, 2009) and English (Hannum, 1999; Pepper, 1996; Thøgersen, 2002; Vickers & Zeng, 2017). Chinese sociologist Fei Xiaotong (1992) analysed the emerging tendency of schools down to village in the early twentieth century, and called for reflections on the deficit view on rural people. Xiong (2009) continued his work and examined the contemporary trend of losing schools in rural China and its detrimental impact on rural life and culture. The dramatic shift occurred in rural education agenda after the founding of the PRC and its association with the radical change of politics has been well documented (Hannum, 1999; Pepper, 1996). There are also nuanced and in-depth examinations in terms of local experience and history (Han, 2001; Thøgersen, 2002) and different education sectors (Vickers & Zeng, 2017). What is also worth noting is the historical research of modern China. Merkel-Hess’s (2016) book The Rural Modern and Zhang Yu’s Going to the Countryside (2020) provides innovative analyses of China’s rural social reforms in the twentieth century and their contribution to a new and inclusive vision of China’s modernity, which greatly inspired this article. Building upon previous work, this article attempts to investigate the relation of history and the present, and how history plays a role in the formation of present education modernization agenda.

In this article, I trace the history of how modern education developed in rural China from the 1900s to the 2000s and identify two temporal treads: the rural as a problem and the rural as a modernization plan. First, the rural as a problem illuminates the impact of the temporal construct of the modernization discourse in silencing and marginalizing certain voices. In other words, it shows how Chinese rurality has been alienated in the formulation of modern China. This echoes Roberts and Hannum’s (2018) call for nuanced investigations of China’s modernization experience to tease out the tension between rurality and modernity and to try to identify potential global implications. Second, I offer constructive ideas about rethinking rurality and re-imagining modernity: the rural as modernization plan. Informed by history, I reflect on the ways in which Chinese rurality is interwoven into the construction of a modern nation-state and the strategies of anti-colonization. The next section will first illustrate the theoretical perspective of this study – historical sociology in educational study – then discuss the four historical periods before elaborating on the implications for current policy discourse.

This article aims to make two contributions. First, it contributes to the discussion of under-theorized temporality in the field of education policy. It uses China’s case to exemplify how temporality can be a helpful concept for policy analysts. Second, it expands the scope for a consideration of rurality and rural education. Previous discussions of rurality focused on the social-cultural aspects of rurality, for example, the repository of national mythology, such as ‘soil’ in China (Fei, 1992) or ‘bush’ in Australia (Roberts, Bodycott, Li, & Qian, 2021). The article demonstrates how the social-cultural dimension of rurality can transform into social actions or even feed into political plans thereby placing rural education in the big picture of a country historically, politically, and culturally.

Historical sociology

There are a number of approaches to investigating history in educational research; among these approaches is the philosophical foundation of Foucault’s theory of archaeology and genealogy. Foucault (1979) challenged traditional definitions of history, establishing the notion of ‘a history of the present’ (p. 37). Foucauldian concepts have been widely adopted to identify the link between history and education policy (e.g. Gale, 2001), while policy documents have been the main research subjects. This study, however, is more interested in the contextual factors of each education reform, so historical sociology is adopted to examine the temporal regime in educational phenomena. A historical sociology approach emphasizes the ‘social embeddedness’ of education (Seddon et al., 2017); that is, a certain form of education can be unfolded as a particular historical formation of social practices, concepts, and inquiry. The formulation of educational discourse is basically anchored by a certain way of understanding society and the world (McLeod, 2017). Disentangling the historical ‘embeddedness’ of education is to reveal how history constitutes the anchoring framework of today’s policy agenda in order to push the constraining boundaries or reframe the path of inquiry. Previous studies using a historical approach offer key guidance for this study (Kim, 2022; Maire, 2023). Since historical sociology is not a common approach in educational research, the focus on history in this study can make a methodological contribution.

The subjects of this analysis are the historical reforms included in the contemporary narrative of education modernization; therefore, the ‘ingredients’ for this study are previous historical research and the history of education research. To clarify, this study is not intended to present an encyclopaedical review of China’s rural education history, the aim of the historical discussion is to provide a snapshot of history and lay a foundation for policy analysis. Following this, four educational reforms have been selected which are critical junctures of China’s rural education. The objective of case selection is to contrast four distinct historical configurations: China in imperial, republican, revolutionary, and reform time. The education reform periods include: (a) the 1900s, the establishment of the modern education system, imperial China, the Qing dynasty; (b) the 1930s, the rural construction movement, Republican China¹; (c) the 1960s, revolution PRC, the Communist Party of China (CPC) government; (d) the 2000s, reform PRC, the CPC government.

The 1900s: the establishment of the modern education system

The dominant rurality and emerging modernity

The first critical juncture is the 1900s. In 1904, the Qing dynasty introduced the Guimao School System, the first statewide modern education system. The objective of the reforms was to strengthen imperial governance and resist colonial powers. Important changes included setting up a nationally standardized curriculum which included subjects covering Western scientific knowledge and which used Japanese education as the model. The following year, the dynasty abolished the civil service examination which had existed for over 1300 years.

The process of embarking on education modernization was directly linked to colonialism. Although rural areas were not directly colonized by Western powers during that period, state-wide education reform inadvertently brought international conflicts such as war reparations and cultural clashes into the vast interior regions of rural China which contained over 90% of the population. Previously, these influences had been predominantly confined to cities, particularly coastal areas (Fairbank, 1978). Rural education thus became a crucial field where conflicting ideas and interests converged and power struggles unfolded. The wave of destruction of schools, which occurred across 17 provinces in rural China (Tian, 2007), exemplifies this point. Rural residents destroyed new schools and attacked school authorities. The conflict sometimes escalated into large-scale conflicts which could involve hundreds or thousands of people (Tian, 2007). There was a range of causes such as the Japanese-style curriculum and content, the increasing tax burden, and conflicts with local culture (Li, 2019; Tian, 2007); for example, a local festival celebration was canceled so that the funds could be saved for schools (Li, 2019). Here, education reform played a crucial role in introducing ‘modernity’ into vast rural China which made rural education an interface of contesting values, ideas, and norms.

The 1930s: the rural construction movement

The entanglement of modernity and rurality

The second period was the rural reconstruction movement in Republican China. This was a massive movement, emerged in the 1920s and flourished in the 1930s. There were over 600 social groups, and over 1000 experiment zones were established across China (Zheng, 1999). The various reform plans revealed a parallel with the nation’s self-identity. Two threads of the entanglement of China’s rurality and modernity became evident: the rural as a problem and the rural as a modernization plan. To unpack the threads, it is necessary to explain the global and domestic dynamics that shaped the movement during that period. The conclusion of the First World War prompted Chinese intellectuals to engage in introspection regarding Western culture and urban-industrial civilization, leading them to re-evaluate and acknowledge Chinese culture which had previously been dismissed as backward (Liang, 2012; Merkel-Hess, 2016). The rural became the place to reify this belief such that rural-centric terms and concepts proliferate, terms such as ‘new village doctrine’, and ‘rural governance’, and concepts such as ‘establishing the state through agriculture’ (Liang, 2012). These embraced the possibilities of a more inclusive Chinese modernity by incorporating Chinese rurality, viewing the rural as a modernization plan.

The first wave of urban-to-rural movement and rural reconstruction was embarked during which slogans such as ‘to the countryside’ and ‘back to the field’ dominated mainstream public opinion (Merkel-Hess, 2016; Y. Zhang, 2020). The integration of rurality into the modernization plan is apparent in some rural education reforms. A typical example is that of Liang Shuming who proposed using rurality as the foundation for a unique form of Chinese modernity. He argued that the rural stood for the substance of traditional Chinese society and culture, advocating for a local autonomous approach to modernization and ensuring that education reform plan maintained a strong Confucian feature (Alitto, 2000).

On the other hand, the notion of the rural as a problem was still prevalent at the same time. Since the end of the war did not diminish the threat of colonization, and the nation still confronted the threat of Imperial Japan, the survival of the nation was a major and pervasive concern for intellectuals at the time. The rural was regarded then as the weakest part of China; hence, rural education, rather than urban education, came to be viewed as central to the mission of national survival. This deficit construct of the rural manifested in some reformers’ plans as well, in the plan of Yan Yangchu (Jimmy Yen), for instance, who identified four main problems in rural China, ‘stupidity, poverty, weakness, selfishness’, and proposed four corresponding dimensions of education to address them: the arts, work, healthcare, and citizenship (Y. Yan, 1989). Yan’s plan for education was to use schools as vehicles for creating modern life in a village and the underpinning rationale was to bring (external) modernity to villages and thus to localize it.

In this movement, rural schools became an experimental site of different ideas that were not just educational but acquired heavy political significance. School was not just a place for transmitting knowledge and skills, but ‘an ideological showroom in which ideal images of citizens, communities and even the nation were put on stage’ (Thøgersen, 2002, p. 5). The distinct position of the rural in the reform plans are rooted in the different ways of envisaging a modern China.

The people’s republic of China: 1960s and 2000s

The same discourse, different plans

From 1949 to 2000, China’s education policy is directly linked with the communist party’s political priorities which oscillated between socialist egalitarianism, and the one favored competition and elite-focused (Hannum, 1999), which is the prominent feature of the two periods, the revolutionary period (The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution) and the reform period (the opening-up reform). The development of rural education modernization discourse was used in the two periods by the two leaders, Mao and Deng, but their plans were distinctive, as will be outlined below.

The revolutionary era: the rural as a modernization plan

In 1958, politics moved to the left as The Great Leap Forward sought rapid industrialization. Political goals became the dominant feature of educational policymaking, guided by the proletarian education ideas of Mao Zedong (Hannum, 1999), often summarized as the two ‘musts’: ‘education must serve proletarian politics and must be combined with productive labour’ (Mao, 1958; as cited in Ministry of Education, 2023). Driven by Mao’s socialist egalitarian idea of education, the number of rural school and students increased dramatically. From 1962 to 1976, the percentage of rural students in the enrolled junior secondary students rose from 37.1% to 75.2%, and the proportion of senior secondary students is from 7.8% to 62.3%. At the same time, rural primary school numbers increased from 637,000 to 1,008,000, an increase of 58.24% (State Education Commission Department of Planning and Construction, 1985). Another noticeable phenomenon was the occurrence of the second urban-to-rural movement following the first wave around the 1920s, this time organized by the government, which was called the ‘Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside Movement’. Based on Mao’s proletarian ideas, educated urban young people were sent to villages to be re-educated by lower – and middle-class peasants.

The education movement demonstrated Mao’s ideas of combining the experiences of the peasant revolution with the modernization objective of rapid industrialization; it reflected Mao’s vision of the rural as a modernization plan, but it differed from previous plans. Modernization here translated merely as heavy industry and steel production, and the ‘rural’ had dual meanings. First, poor peasants were at the center in the proletarian class in Chinese communist ideology due to the legacy of peasant revolution. Second, a rural-oriented way highlighted Chineseness or ‘Chinese way’ in order to break out of the Soviet model against the backdrop of Sino-Soviet split (Pepper, 1996).

The reform period: the rural as a problem

After the ‘opening up’ reform in 1978, the policy agenda changed. The objective of economic development replaced the socialist political revolution as the center of the nation’s plan. Education policy transformed correspondingly. Quality replaced the goal of quantity, and equity was the central concern. A more elite-focused and hierarchical model of education was gradually established in the post-Mao time (Pepper, 1980). One example of this system is the proliferation of well-funded key schools which received national funding, with the vast majority located in urban areas (Hannum, 1999). By contrast, in the 1980s, the cost and risk of education for rural parents rose due to the decentralization of finance to local areas, as well as the rising opportunity cost associated with the widespread mode of for-profit family farming. Meanwhile, the rural education curriculum had an increasing focus on vocational, technical and agricultural content, which created barriers in the academic path (Hannum, 1999).

In the late 1990s, the School Consolidation Policy started in some places as local attempts, and in 1999 it was embarked nationally, which brought about a dramatic change in China’s rural education. The initial intention of the policy was to offload the overloading capacity of rural education resulting from the massive expansion in Mao’s time. A shortage of students, teachers, funding difficulties, and unqualified teachers were major problems at the time. However, this policy fundamentally changed Chinese education’s spatial mapping. From 1978 to 1999, the Chinese education system was mainly composed of rural schools, with around 80% of primary schools and over 50% of junior secondary schools in China being situated in rural areas. During 2000–2010, the number of rural primary school dropped from 440,284 to 210,894, which was a decrease of 52.1%. For general junior secondary school, the number also dropped from 39,313 to 28,670, which was a decrease of 27%. The number of general senior secondary schools² dropped from 2611 to 1428, decreased by 45% (State Education Commission Department of Planning and Construction, 2001, 2011).

The diametrically opposed trends apparent in rural schools in the reform and revolutionary era are rooted in distinct understandings of what was ‘modern’: economic growth and urbanization became the dominant preoccupations of ‘modernity’. Although one of the objectives of the policy was to improve education quality and equality of access to education, researchers found that economic issues carried more weight in policymaking and implementation. ‘Scale economy’, an economic theory, became the fundamental supporting rationale for the policy. The theory suggested that expanding the scale of education could increase education efficiency (Ding, Wang, & Ye, 2016; Lei & Zhang, 2010; Ye, 2017). Based on this economic rationale, quantitative factors outweighed qualitative considerations. Quantitative indicators such as school scale, population size, and school service range became priorities in deciding whether a school should close or not, while a school’s history, its facilities, and student travel distances and times were rarely mentioned in policy texts (Lei & Zhang, 2010). Under this economic rationale, the rural was problematized as inadequate, and incompatible with the trend of future development.

Another critical factor was urbanization. Ding et al.’s (2016) group identified two direct benefits to local government in pushing school consolidation. One was reducing educational expenditure through expanding schools’ size; another was encouraging rural-to-urban movement to facilitate the process of urbanization. They argued that the broader national plan of ‘peasants into city’ of the central government was the major incentive for local government to push ‘schools into city’ (p. 13). Labor, land, and other resources were leveraged by school consolidation which then led to populations flowing to urban areas since the movement of schools directly facilitated demographic movement (Ding et al., 2016; Ye, 2017).

In PRC time, rural education experienced distinct policies in Mao and Deng’s period due to different views on the rural and the state plan. However, what is fundamental to their views was a similar instrumental vision of rural places, sources, and population. In Mao’s period, while poor rural people were given a high status by ideology, modernity was only equal to heavy industry. The government made massive investments in heavy industry while manipulating agricultural commodity prices to remain at rather low levels. This unequal intersectoral exchange was achieved by the rural-urban dual structure which fed industrial growth by starving the rural sector. The similar instrumental ‘use’ of the rural sector can be found in Deng’s reform as well. The reform was criticized for being achieved on the backs of peasants, draining labor, land, and capital from rural areas (Chan & Wei, 2019; B. Li & Piachaud, 2006). Hence, at a fundamental level, it can be argued that Mao and Deng’s view on the rural was largely tactical rather than ethical.

In sum, the history overview shows that rural education in China experienced dramatic changes due to the changing modernization agenda. Table 1 (below) is a summary of the history of China’s rural education modernization discussed above. The table outlines the ways of understanding what is ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ in different education policies implemented by different governments. This shows the differences in education reforms, demonstrating the historical inconsistencies and continuities which lays a foundation for the later discussion of China’s contemporary education policy.

Table 1. The summary of history.

Time	Context & needs	Education policy	The understanding of ‘tradition’	The understanding of ‘modern’	The rural
The 1890s Imperial China Late Qing dynasty	Defeated in wars	Established the modern schooling system (Japanese-style)	Imperial regime Traditional culture represented by Confucian culture	Japanese-style school and curriculum	The rural problem
The 1930s The Republican China	The end of First World war. The threat of Japanese imperialism	Rural education reforms as part of rural construction projects	Imperial legacy The fixation on western culture	The rural modern versus an urban modern	The rural modern
The 1960s The revolution era The CPC government	The cold war	The Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution (Up to mountain down to village)	Republican legacy Confucianism	Communism Rapid industrialization (Steel production)	The rural modern
The 2000s The reform era The CPC government	The open-up reform	School consolidation policy	Revolutionary era legacy The Planned economy regime	Urbanization Market economy reform	The rural problem

Notes: The last column is to highlight the newly emerging thread, but it does not mean that each period only has one way of viewing the rural, rather, the two ways of seeing the rural co-exist throughout the last century.

The temporal assemblage of modernization discourse

The tensions and conflicts in China’s modern history were effectively managed by the discourse of modernization. The CPC government shows a clear intention to systematically bring the entire history of China and the party under the umbrella of modernization (Buzan & Lawson, 2020). However, such a homogenous historical narrative of modernization can be problematic. In fact, the country experienced different governments and regimes, with diverse voices and plans emerging in its modern history. As Table 1 shows, the understandings of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ in each period discussed are distinctive. What is considered ‘tradition’ in a certain period is based on previous ideas about ‘modernity’. Mao’s revolutionary plan to realize rapid industrialization, for example, turned into a tradition that later needed to be repositioned and redefined in Deng’s modernization plan; thus, the perception of what was modern in China was created by a multilayered process in which past, present, and future ideas intertwined, and the legacies of preceding reforms or revolutions were layered upon one another.

The adoption of modernization discourse in contemporary policies not only constructs a unified narrative by concealing regimes and leaderships differences, but importantly, extends CPC’s policy goal to be the mission of the nation, imbuing policy goals with moral significance. First, the multilayered history structure renders considerable flexibility of modernization discourse in accommodating distinct or even conflicting ideas, helping to cloak the discursive contradictions among different governments and regimes. In this sense, for contemporary CPC leadership, the revitalization of modernization discourse (which was used in both Mao and Deng’s periods) helps bridge the rupture between two distinctive development paths taken by Mao and Deng, reconnects to Mao’s tradition, and takes China forward based on the synthesis of the two paths (Buzan & Lawson, 2020). Moreover, the modernization discourse encompasses a unified and thematic historical narrative of China’s modern history. One important meaning implied by this narrative is that it was the goal that had been pursued by different governments in the past and had been a long-standing dream of the country. This adds moral significance and obligation to the policy, yet the subject of the obligation is not explicit. The policy goal of the government was extended to be the mission of the nation. The collective history memory provided legitimacy for the policy on the one hand, however, on the other, this moral value might have obscured the subject of the policy, the government, or the nation (people).

This temporal arrangement underpins China’s recent educational plan, China Education Modernization 2035; it is through a particular narration of the past that a ‘modern’ future of a country or a field becomes desirable. The main objectives of the policy include: ‘serve the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation as an important mission of education’; ‘serve the consolidation and development of the socialist regime with Chinese characteristics’; and ‘serve the open-up reform and socialist modernization [emphasis added]’ (The CPC Central Committee and The State Council, 2019, para. 1). The vision for the future cannot pre-offer new things or ideas, however; it can only repeat habits and memories (Webb et al., 2020). In this case, the history link is explicated in the alignment of the discourses of modernization and rejuvenation where three different temporalities bind together: a glorious past, a humiliated past, and a bright future. And the present is always situated between the two ends of historical memory – the chosen glory and the chosen trauma (Wang, 2012), frames an ongoing history cycle. The country is therefore placed ‘in the middle of a history’ (Meinhof, 2017, p. 52), between the two prescribed ends of glory and trauma, with a destiny for the nation to develop, prosper, and avoid colonization. This circular temporal construct underpins the policy goal: it is because of the humiliation, crisis, and threats in the pre-modern past that the future of modernization assumed in the policy is desirable. Here, the legitimacy of the policy goal is rooted in the traumatic past of the nation, a constructed collective memory. And one potential implication of this association is that people are obliged to accomplish the policy goal in order to move the country forward to the prescribed destination.

The two temporal threads: problem or power?

By examining the history of rural education modernization, the two temporal threads surface: the rural as a problem and the rural as a modernization plan. History shows how the rural has been problematized in the modernization agenda – the rural as a problem. In the late Qing dynasty, it was a ‘battlefield’ where rural people were the rebels who had agency to initiate resistance. In the Republican period, the rural became a site for experiments where different reconstruction plans were tested under a consensus that the rural was the problem of the country. Under the PRC, the rural largely ‘used’ instrumentally for the state modernization plan. It was entrusted with a proletarian class identity, considered as a resource to finance heavy industry in the revolutionary era, and later became a place to leverage land, funds, and labor for urbanization in the reform era. In this process, rurality was gradually objectified and lost agency, while the inequity inherent in this is overshadowed by the optimistic historical narrative of modernization. The moral meanings embedded in the discourse also play a role in justifying the social injustice issues brought by the instrumental use of the rural. This can be seen in the influential discourse about ‘catching up’ ideas, such as ‘Never forget national humiliation’, ‘Backwardness brings on beatings by others’, which is closely associated with a certain interpretation of China’s modern history (Wang, 2012). Arguably, the mobilization of historical memory not only legitimates a state plan but apotheosizes it, placing the state over individuals, which conceals injustice problems experienced by individuals. The thread of the rural as a problem demonstrates that a temporal construct of policy is done ‘explicitly or implicitly through silence and negligence’ (Lingard, 2021, p. 348).

Another seemingly conflicting temporal thread, the rural as a modernization plan, complicates the current modernization discourse and underlines the political dimension of Chinese rurality. This thread particularly manifested in two waves of urban-to-rural demographic movement. The first wave occurred as educated urban young people went to rural areas to reconstruct the rural and save the country in the 1920s and 1930s. During this time, rurality was associated with the mission of countering colonial power, a strong symbolic representation of indigenous culture and national identity. The second wave was the Chinese Communist peasant revolution and Mao’s proletarian politics which sent educated urban youth to rural places to be re-educated. Rurality is the proletariat class in the socialist ideology which is fundamental to the party’s legitimacy and signifies its distinctiveness from the Soviet communism mode. The different positions of the rural in China’s modernization plan have always been associated with the different answers to the question – what is modern China and what is the path? In many ways, the oscillation of the rural in modernization agenda mirrors how the state positions itself in the world and engages in modernization, a social process largely modeled by the West (and the Soviet Union later).

This tension continues in China’s contemporary policy framework. The proposal of the latest policy discourse, ‘Chinese-style modernization’ and ‘rural revitalization’, is set against the background of the government’s efforts to re-introduce, re-tool, and re-mobilize the ‘traditions’ to boost the nation’s confidence (Buzan & Lawson, 2020). This can be observed in the link between rurality and nationhood. In Xi’s words: ‘If the nation is to rejuvenate, the rural must be revitalized’ (Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, 2021, para. 1). What is in parallel with the increasing weight of the rural is a recall of the colonial memory. Again, in Xi’s words: ‘Make sure the destiny of China’s development and progress holds firmly in our own hands’ (People’s Daily, 2021, para. 1); ‘We will not … accept sanctimonious preaching from those who feel they have the right to lecture us’ (People’s Daily, 2021, para. 16). The rural is positioned, again, as both a component of and a representation of national identity to counter Western influence.

In this vein, the current emphasis on ‘Chineseness’ indicates that current leaders have realized and attempted to overcome, at least at a linguistic level, the innate paradox of modernization: the constant comparison with the generic West alongside a unique Chinese development path. This seems to be a revival of a more positive view on the rural, yet whether this proposition is still out of the old instrumental vision needs further examination. The temporal threads reveal how the rural is paradoxically positioned in China’s modernization agenda – the problematized rural is actually a potential empowering force, and its potential role in overcoming the plight of China’s modernization, calls for efforts to really see the rural and hear the voice.

Implication

This study has several implications. First, it provides practical implications for policy makers and contributes to the field of Chinese education policy study. By revealing the paradoxical situation of the rural in China modernization agenda, it highlights the potential power that the rural may have, calling for a strength-based view to look at the rural issues. Methodologically, the analysis contributes to the exploration of temporality (Lingard & Thompson, 2017; McLeod, O’Connor, McKernan, & Davis, 2023) and the use of historical sociology (Maire, 2023; Seddon et al., 2017) in education research. It not only untangles the interweaving of times (Lingard, 2021), but highlights the multiplicity of the past itself to call for more attention on the careful examination of history of education policy – how the historical layers constitute the present tension and conflicts.

Theoretically, by illustrating the tension between rurality and modernity in China, this article invites future research to reflect on the idea of modernization which has been widely used in different contexts, such as East Asia (Harman & Bich, 2010; Yi, 2000) and Europe (Bates & Godoń, 2017; Hall et al., 2015). Considering how modernization has been one of the dominant themes in world history, education policy can be a meaningful comparative dimension. In China’s case, the rural as a modernization plan offers an alternative and inclusive imagination of modernity. Given this, although the analysis does not use post-colonial theory, its finding echoes the Barlow’s (1997) thought-provoking concept ‘colonial modernity’ (p. 3) to reflect on prevailing modernization projects in East Asia (Barlow, 2012; Lee & Cho, 2012) and onto-epistemic coloniality of modernity in and beyond education (Zhao, 2020; Zhao & Popkewitz, 2022).

Moreover, this analysis has significant implications on how the rural is perceived in education policy, joining the ongoing discussion about rurality and politics (Beach & Öhrn, 2023; Cruickshank, Lysgård, & Magnussen, 2009) and rurality and modernity (Beach, Johansson, Öhrn, Rönnlund, & Per-Åke, 2019; Roberts & Cuervo, 2015). The two contrasting positioning of the rural enables a reflection on the seemingly conflicting relation between rurality and modernity. This idea is significant, considering metro-centricity has been a global phenomenon (Beach et al., 2019; Corbett, 2010; Gristy, Hargreaves, & Kučerová, 2020). China’s experience, rapid urbanization and dramatic demographic change, offers an empowering, strength-based view to see rural education in the modern and metro-centric world, as well as a critical reflection to rethink modernization and modernity.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr Eric Fu, Associate Professor Gosia Klatt, Professor Hernan Cuervo, Dr Melyssa Fuqua, Dr Quentin Maire, and Xinning Mao for their help in the different stages of this article. I also would like to express my appreciation to the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their comments and suggestions which inspired me to think deeper and polish the arguments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project is supported by the Melbourne Research Scholarship (Faculty of Education; University of Melbourne).

Notes

1 Republican China refers to the time from 1912 to 1949, which is a turbulent time that controlled by warlords and different governments. The Kuo Min Tang government led by Chiang Kai-shek gradually gained the control of China after the Northern Expedition in 1927 and the Central Plains War in 1930.

2 General senior secondary school includes both senior secondary school and complete secondary school (including junior and senior levels).