Discipline and moralise: gratitude education for China’s migrant families

ABSTRACT

The problems China’s rural-born migrants face in accessing urban public services, including education, are widely known. This article analyses how official discourse attributes migrant children’s vulnerability to their ‘problematic family background’ while exhorting them to show ‘gratitude’ to a benevolent state. Combining documentary analysis and insights from fieldwork, we examine how ‘gratitude education’ seeks to inculcate notions of a moral hierarchy in which migrants are subordinate or inferior. We further investigate parental beliefs and practices with respect to gratitude, and family participation in related educational activities. The findings indicate that such activities constitute just one aspect of a broader strategy that extends to initiatives focused on governance and philanthropy. Programmes of gratitude education are one tactic for concealing the deficiencies in government action on rural migrants’ behalf. By associating entitlement to public goods with individual or familial propriety, they aim to legitimate the institutional barriers that ensure migrants’ enduring marginalisation.

摘要

在中国，农民工在获得城市的公共服务，尤其是教育方面所面临的问题是众所周知的。本文分析了官方话语是如何将流动儿童的脆弱性归因于他们的家庭背景，同时督促他们向国家的关爱和保护表达感激之情。结合文献分析和来自田野调查的发现，本文探讨了感恩教育如何通过灌输一种道德等级观念，将移民置于更次要或较低的地位。我们进一步调查了家长对于感恩的认识和实践，以及他们的家庭在相关教育活动中的参与情况。研究结果表明，感恩教育的各类活动仅构成政府更广泛的策略实践的一部分，该策略延伸到涉及治理和慈善的各项举措。感恩教育成功地掩饰了在农民工支持和援助上的不足。通过将获取公共服务的权利与个人或家庭的行为联系起来，它的目标在于合法化现存的制度性障碍而导致农民工群体的持续边缘化。

KEYWORDS:

• China
• education
• gratitude
• migrants
• children
• families
• patriotism
• social and emotional learning
• social justice
• inequality

关键词:

• 中国
• 教育
• 感恩
• 农民工
• 流动儿童
• 家庭
• 爱国主义
• 社会与情感学习
• 社会正义
• 不平等

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback on the initial draft of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See an undated ‘retrospective’ of ‘Chinese-style gratitude education’ on sina.com, ‘Gratitude Festivals: looking back at ‘Chinese-style' gratitude education over the past few years’ (感恩节：盘点这些年‘中国式’感恩教育) (accessed April 29, 2023).

2 An alternative translation of 法治 is ‘law-based governance’; rule of law does not pertain in China.

3 Parenting schools are mandated in the ‘Five-Year Plan for Guiding and Promoting Family Education (2016-2020)’, jointly issued by the All-China Women's Federation and Ministries of Education and Civil Affairs, etc.. They operate out of existing educational premises.

4 The author (Wan) observed the awarding ceremony in Kunshan on 27 December 2019.

Additional information

Funding

Vickers’ work on this article was supported by JSPS [grant number: 19K02530].

Notes on contributors

Wan Yi

Wan Yi is a post-doctoral fellow at Beijing Normal University. She is currently working on a research project investigating the historical and cultural significance of the museums for rural migrants. Her research interests include education and culture, rural education, citizenship education, education for disadvantaged populations.

Edward Vickers

Edward Vickers holds the UNESCO Chair on Education for Peace, Social Justice and Global Citizenship at Kyushu University, Japan. He writes on the history and politics of education in contemporary Asia, as well as on public history and identity politics. He is the coauthor (with Zeng Xiaodong) of Education and Society in Post-Mao China (2017) and (with Mark R. Frost and Daniel Schumacher) of Remembering Asia’s World War Two (2019). He is President of the Comparative Education Society of Asia, and a core member of the War Memoryscapes in Asia Partnership (WARMAP).