![Sample our Education journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5932/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Education.jpg"})
Abstract
This paper theorises how politics, economy and migrant population policies influence educational policy, utilising Bourdieusian theoretical resources to analyse the Chinese context. It develops the work of Lingard and Rawolle on cross-field effects and produces an updated three-step analytical framework. Taking the policy issue of the schooling of internal migrant children as an example, it analyses how a range of fields – political, economic and public policy – ‘export’ their logics of practice into the educational policy field (as a sub-field of the public policy field) and consolidate the changes. The cross-field effects shape the state school enrolment policy and the relative positions of agents and the relative value of their capital in the educational policy field. This paper demonstrates the analytical capacity of Bourdieusian theoretical resources for policy analysis in the Chinese context, by illustrating how the inequalities experienced by migrant families have been intensified in education by cross-field effects.
Acknowledgement
I would like to express my appreciation to Professor Carol Vincent and three anonymous referees for their valuable comments on the drafts of this paper!
Notes
1. In the existing literature, there are different names for children from low-income migrant worker families without local household registration: ‘migrant children’ ‘immigrant children’ ‘children from migrant workers’ families’ or ‘floating children’. Although different names are used in academic literature, scholars are referring to the same group of children. In this paper, I will use ‘migrant children’.
2. The ‘state school’ (公办学校) is the fully government-funded school, which does not charge for tuition fees. Yet the private-funded school (私立学校 or 民办学校) does charge. In spite of their different funding sources, both state school and private school follow the national curriculum and are under the direct supervision of the local government municipality of education.
3. Data resource: government unpublished data, reported by Officer B (Beijing Municipal of Education) in my interview.
4. This phenomenon is reflected by the amount of unregistered and informal private schools in that city. In Beijing, the number of these schools was 263 in 2005 and 128 in 2010.
5. In another paper, Rawolle has summarized cross-field effects as ‘effects that result from the interrelations between fields’ (Rawolle Citation2005, 709). But this summary is still a literal explanation rather than a conceptualization.
6. It is important to note that ‘field’ is a theoretical concept, a way of thinking through the social world, instead of a social reality (Ladwig Citation1994). Therefore, the use of the term ‘export’ here is in a metaphorical sense to present how the agents transfer the logic of field A into field B, which will be elaborated in more detail below. Yet the social actors may be aware that the social life can be divided into certain sectors or aspects, such as politics, economy and education. Thus they see the existence of these sectors/aspects as reality. Both the perspectives of the researcher and the actors are presented in this paper.
7. According to the National Bureau of Statistics’ (NBS) definition, ‘migrant rural labourers’ are ‘those who have their household registers (hukou) registered in rural areas but are working outside their villages’. Admittedly, this is a heterogeneous group with striking inner-group differences with regard to people’s social economic status (such as occupation). In my fieldwork, I follow the NBS’ definition and I do not differentiate people’s occupations when selecting rural migrant interviewees. It turns out that the majority of my migrant interviewees are working as manual labourers while a small number of them are not. Regardless of their various differences, they share some common situations in their children’s education, as I elaborate in this paper.
8. In the Chinese context, the organisational resource refers to the political and/or social resources derived from the political and bureaucrat system, or broadly, from the state sector. Those who work in government departments or as state entrepreneurs tend to find it easier to access the organisational resource than people working in the private sector (see Lu Citation2002).
9. Two axes figure is frequently used in Bourdieu’s work to present the chiasmatic structure of the positions of the agents in particular fields and fields in the broader social space (see, for example, Bourdieu Citation1996, 267, 268, 269).
10. It is important to note that the three levels are conceptual, and in an empirical investigation there is no sequence of from where the analysis starts (see for example, Hardy Citation2012).
11. The term ‘population’ here refers to the migrant population because this policy does not require that people with local household registration move out.
12. In this document, the ‘reform’ refers to the ‘Opening up and reform’ since 1978.
13. The ‘Five Documents’ include: Proof of Employment, Proof of House Renting/Ownership, Proof of No Guardian in the Hometown, Temporary Residential Permit, and Household Registration Card.
14. The years 2012–2013 can be seen as the ‘transitional period’ of political leadership: the leadership position of CCP (General Secretary & Chairman of the Central Military Commission of CCP) were transferred from Jintao Hu to Jinping Xi in 2012, then the leadership position of the state (President & Chairman of the Central Military Commission of the State) were transferred from Jintao Hu to Jinping Xi in 2013.
15. Xi said this sentence in his speech in the closing ceremony of the 12th National People’s Congress assembly, in which he was selected as the President of P. R. China.
16. One might argue that this model is unidirectional without exploring the effects from the educational policy field to other fields, which is another aspect of the complexities of field exchange. While acknowledging this potential research gap, I would note that this is not the interest of investigation in this paper, which focuses on how politics, economy and migrant population policies influence educational policy.