Social inequality in a ‘hyper-mobile’ society: intra-national mobilities and formal education in China

ABSTRACT

This study builds upon existing research on educational mobilities in China by exploring how families from across the socio-economic spectrum have utilised various forms of spatial mobility practices to access educational opportunities and to achieve social mobility through education. We draw on data from forty interviews with Master’s degree students at an elite Chinese university from three social class factions: ‘non-affluent’, ‘lower-middle’, and ‘upper-middle-class’, and employ the concept of motility or the capacity to be mobile, alongside concepts from Bauman and Giddens’ work on mobility and modernity, to understand the socially classed nature of mobility. We argue that an often overlooked ‘educational mobility imperative’ in China shapes the trajectories of many, but manifests in markedly different ways along lines of social class. While students from various social backgrounds may be mobile, what is important is the level of control individuals and families have over the variety and frequency of mobility they undertake.

KEYWORDS:

• mobility
• education
• motility
• China
• social class

Introduction

The aim of this paper is to introduce a novel perspective on the relationship between social class, formal education, and mobility in the Chinese context. China is a ‘hyper-mobile’ society with a high level of social inequality, making it a useful case to examine this connection: as of 2020, 376 million people, or approximately 23 percent of the population, were officially classified as internal migrants in China (NBS 2021a). At the same time, China’s official Gini coefficient is 0.468 (NBS 2021b) meaning that is among the most economically unequal societies in the world. Individuals and families from across the social spectrum tend to be highly spatially mobile across the social spectrum, as this is increasingly necessary for social mobility and social reproduction (Giddens 1990; 1991), but the level of freedom of choice and resultantly the nature of this mobility differs along lines of social background (Bauman 1998; Cresswell 2006). We seek to examine differences in educational ‘motility’ (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004) or the capacity to be mobile to access educational opportunities, among students from three social class factions.

Access to the educational opportunities associated with social reproduction is dependent on mobility. A notable example of work on this topic is that which explores ‘circuits of schooling’ (e.g. Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz 1995; Smith and Higley 2012). These studies highlight how gaining access to ‘high quality’ schools is a key consideration in the long-term residential decision-making of middle-class families. There is also an emergent body of research on the relationship between social class, spatial mobility, and higher education choices (e.g. Donnelly and Gamsu 2020; Gamsu and Donnelly 2021). In addition, Corbett (e.g. 2009) and Forsey (e.g. 2015) also explore the role of schooling in the complex emplacement choices made by rural parents and their children. However, other than this limited body of work, the sociology of education as a field has largely overlooked the central importance of movements of people for various reasons (Forsey 2017). Existing studies on intra-national education mobilities in China tend to focus on the experiences of rural-urban migrants, or on residential relocation to access educational resources in urban areas, but have thus far overlooked processes of mobility: what is missing is a focus on the socially classed nature of mobility, conceived of as a resource in itself. There is also a sizeable body of literature on processes of international student mobility (e.g. Hu and Cairns 2017; Kim 2020). Yet recognition of the relationship between education and movement within national contexts has often been more implied than explicitly investigated in the academic literature (Corbett 2009; Forsey 2015).

As such, in this study, we seek to highlight how individuals from a range of social class factions have utilised spatial mobility as a means of achieving social mobility or reproducing social status. We argue that it is necessary to focus explicitly on processes of mobility in order to understand the mechanisms through which the significant spatial inequalities present in China are maintained. Specifically, this paper focuses on the level of freedom of choice that families have in their educational mobility decisions, as expressed through the concept of motility (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004), considering how this acts as a factor contributing to the growing inequality of educational opportunity in China (Gruijters, Chan, and Ermisch 2019). Such research has the potential to contribute to a broader understanding of how spatial inequalities between regions (Zhang & Xu, 2011), rural and urban areas (Rao and Ye 2016), and even within urban areas (Chen, Liu, and Lu 2018; Young and Hannum 2020), are maintained.

Literature review and conceptual framework

Education, movement, and social class

First, we provide a brief outline of how mobility for education has been understood in the extant literature on educational inequality in China. The relationship between educational mobilities and educational inequalities in China has been explored, albeit indirectly, through two bodies of research that have remained disconnected: first, on urban middle-class residential mobility for education, and second, on access to and participation education for the children of rural-urban migrants.

Access to and participation in education at all levels in China is highly unequal. Gruijters (2022) finds that educational inequality in China has followed a pattern of maximally maintained inequality: that is, as disparities at the level of basic education diminish, inequalities are maintained or increased at higher levels. Geographical inequalities in educational resources between different regions, rural and urban areas, and within urban areas (Wu, Edensor, and Cheng 2018; Xu and Wu 2022; Young and Hannum 2020) are crucially important factors that contribute to what we describe as an ‘educational mobility imperative’ in China.

At one end of the mobility spectrum are families with an urban household registration (户口hukou) who employ residential relocation as a means of accessing educational resources. Intra-urban inequalities manifest in these patterns of urban relocation, which result from competition for school places. In China, school-aged children are allocated to a nearby public school to receive nine years of free and compulsory education from grades one to nine, based on household registration. Therefore, household registration is critical in determining the educational resources an individual can access, (Roberts and Hannum, 2018). School-aged children whose family own a residential property in the school catchment area and who have a local hukou are granted priority entry. Importantly, this does not include rental properties (Xu and Wu 2022). Therefore, the limited ‘high-quality’ educational resources provided by the most renowned ‘key schools’ have become the centre of the battle for the accumulation of positional goods, especially for middle-class urban families, who scramble for limited xuequ fang (学区房), housing located in ‘key school’ catchment areas (Wu, Zhang, and Waley 2016; 2018). Liu, Yu, and Sun (2021) highlight the importance of access to ‘key schools’, a crucial factor in subsequent access to elite higher education institutions, in urban middle-class parents’ residential mobility decisions. However, the process of fighting for these limited educational resources results in the displacement of less affluent residents in urban areas by the middle-class (Wu, Zhang, and Waley 2016). Childhood inequality within urban areas in China remains poorly understood (Young and Hannum 2020), but these processes clearly represent a means through which it is reproduced.

At the other end of the spectrum, rules around household registration also create difficulties for rural families that have migrated to urban areas. These are relatively well documented in existing literature. These families hold a rural household registration while residing in an urban area, meaning they have to either pay extra fees (择校费 zexiao fei) for public schooling in an urban area, or attend a private school specifically catering to rural-urban migrant children (农民工子弟学校nongminggong zidi xuexiao) during their nine years of compulsory education. However, due to a lack of funding and poor teaching quality, privately operated schools for the children of rural-urban migrants are widely thought to provide a lower quality of education relative public schools. In short, the children of rural to urban migrants have limited access to education in urban areas – enduring what could be described as a form of educational segregation – as a result of China’s household registration system (e.g. Chen and Feng 2017; Young and Hannum 2020).

To summarise, the purpose of this outline of the relationship between spatial and education in China is to demonstrate that mobility for education at all levels is deeply ingrained in society, in China, as elsewhere (Corbett 2009). The remainder of this article seeks to make this an explicit focus, by considering how mobility has been employed as a resource by students from a broad range of social backgrounds at an elite Chinese university.

Theorising the relationship between spatial and social mobility

In this paper we develop a conceptualisation of contemporary education mobilities in China by drawing upon the work of a number of theorists of modernity and mobility. The ‘hypermobility’ of people, goods, and ideas has become imperative to the functioning of society and the economy in China (Xiang, 2020). The educational mobility imperative we seek to explore here is one part of manifestation of this compelled hypermobility. Xiang (2020) conceptualises China’s economy as ‘gyroscope-like’, in the sense that it cannot balance unless spinning rapidly (a metaphor for various forms of mobility). He describes how China’s economy is ‘simultaneously differentiating and integrating’: The gap between geographical centres and peripheries is widening as centres attract more resources, but at the same time, peripheries are ‘always in motion’ and therefore tightly linked with the centre – all of this necessitates human mobility. The mobility which is made necessary because of this process is inevitably socially classed: as Cresswell (2010, 22), among others, suggests, mobility is ‘one of the major resources of twenty-first-century life’, and it is unevenly distributed across society, thus contributing to social inequalities. This observation seems to have particular relevance to a hyper-capitalistic, hyper-mobile society such as China’s.

The notion that society is stratified partly through the degree of ‘freedom to choose where to be’ (Bauman 1998, 86) suggests that one means of exploring the dialectical relationship between power and mobility is to view the potential or capacity to be mobile as a socially-classed resource. We aim to do this through the concept of motility (Flamm and Kaufmann 2006; Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004). Kaufmann and Montulet (2008, 45) describe motility as ‘the manner in which an individual or a group appropriates the field of possibilities relative to movement and uses them’. Credentials, as an example, are a means to achieve ‘distinction’, and ultimately, to legitimise access to dominant occupational positions within the social structure. The crux of Kaufmann and Audikana’s (2020) argument is that career success (and thus social reproduction/mobility) in the twenty-first century requires ‘being able to play with and master space in the form of mobility’ (2020, 42).

Motility is divided into three constituent parts: access, competence, and appropriation. 'Access' refers to the range of possible mobilities. 'Competence' refers to the skills and abilities that enable individuals to act upon access. 'Appropriation' refers to ‘how agents act upon perceived or real access and skills’ (Kaufmann, Bergman, and Joye 2004, 750). In other words, it encompasses aspirations for mobility and strategies carried out by actors. Motility also plays a vital role in accumulating other forms of capital, for example, to access employment opportunities, gain educational credentials, or expand one’s social network. Here, we focus specifically on motility as mobility potential, examining how it is distributed among the participants.

We also ‘think with’ concepts from the macro-sociological work of Zygmunt Bauman (1996, 1998) and Anthony Giddens (1990), which are useful in further fleshing out the relationship between the capacity to be mobile, conceived of as an unequally distributed resource, and social stratification. Bauman (1996, 1998) argues that access to certain forms of mobility is a major stratifying factor in modern societies:

The dimension along which those ‘high up’ and ‘low down’ are plotted in a society of consumers, is their degree of mobility – their freedom to choose where to be. (Bauman 1998, 86)

He identifies two cultural types with opposite positions on a spectrum. There are fundamental differences in terms of degree of freedom of choice (or agency) around mobility between individuals and groups at either end of the spectrum. At one end there are ‘tourists’, a privileged elite of globally mobile people who have a wide array of mobility options to choose from, and are mobile for pleasure, while also having the security of a permanent place to call ‘home’. At the other end of the spectrum are ‘vagabonds’, or people who are not mobile for the purposes of consumption, but because ‘they have been pushed from behind – having been first uprooted by a force too powerful, and often too mysterious, to resist’ (Bauman 1996, 14). Those who are immobile fall into one of two categories: the privileged, who could become tourists if they wished, and the unprivileged who are ‘trapped’, without the ability to become mobile. Put simply, Bauman contrasts the freedom and autonomy of privileged members of society to be mobile with the restricted mobility of those less fortunate. Critics have noted that Bauman’s metaphors ‘tend to polarise the world’ (Larsen and Jacobsen, 2009, p. 92), and we seek to emphasise that many of our participants fall somewhere between these two positions on a spectrum, being neither a ‘kinetic underclass’ or a ‘kinetic elite’ (Cresswell, 2006).

The compelling of all to be mobile described by Bauman is suggestive of what Giddens (1990) terms ‘disembedding’. This process is central to understanding the mobility capacities and appropriation of rural families in the Chinese context. Giddens describes how previously isolated locales become drawn into the contemporary ‘master culture’ of global capitalism through processes of globalisation. All locales are ‘thoroughly penetrated by and shaped in terms of social processes quite distant from them’ (Giddens 1990, 19), thereby cleaving apart space and place. Disembedding inevitably promotes out-migration from rural areas. Corbett (2009) highlights how formal education is a key institution in this process. In the following sections, we explore how disembedding as a structural process shapes the motility of those from non-affluent backgrounds in particular.

In conditions under which ties to communities have been weakened, the self is extracted from social life, and as a result, becomes a ‘reflexive project’ whereby people are responsible for asking themselves the question ‘how shall I live?’ (Giddens 1991, 14). The concept of the reflexive project is also useful for understanding the choices students and their families make around mobility. At the same time, Giddens also makes clear that the ability to make lifestyle choices is dependent on the socio-economic circumstances of different groups. Taken together with Bauman’s argument for a continuum of freedom of choice around mobility, it seems clear that the freedom and autonomy individuals have to employ mobility as means of ‘self-exploration’ differ along lines of socioeconomic background. This is one part of what we seek to explore in the following sections.

The study

The data presented in this paper is from a larger research project focusing on the relationship between education and mobility in China. We conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews (n = 40) with final-year master’s degree students at a prestigious university located in a metropolitan city in southern China. Given their near completion of a postgraduate programme at an elite university, we considered these students to represent ‘success stories’, able to reflect on and provide an understanding of how different forms of spatial mobility are employed to achieve social mobility. Interviewees were drawn from a range of subjects humanities and social sciences available at the case study university. These included: history, sociology, law, politics, management, economic, language and literature, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology. Focusing on students within these disciplines, and at one institution, enabled us to explore students’ mobility plans after taking the institution and field of study into account. The mobility plans of students in the field of medicine and engineering, as examples, may be different due to the specific nature of careers in these disciplines. Potential participants were recruited via advertisements on the social networking app WeChat and by word of mouth.

A screening questionnaire was used to recruit students from a broad range of socio-economic backgrounds (see Table 1). Students were divided into three class factions, rather than the more common two, in order to capture experiences within the upper-middle-class, which is distinguished within the literature on class and education in China (e.g. Goodman 2016). We also aimed to shed light on the experiences of individuals who do not neatly fit within the urban/rural categories often used in studies of social inequality in China, such as urban families of relatively low socio-economic status. The factions were as follows: non-affluent (n = 14), lower-middle-class (n = 13), and upper-middle-class (n = 13). Household registration is the strongest predictor of life chances in China (Rozelle and Hell, 2020), and as such, we sought to take rural/urban residency into account as one of four proxy indicators of social class. Household income, parental occupation, parental education level were the other three proxy indicators. Participants were classified as belonging to the upper-middle-class faction if they met three of the following four criteria: an annual household income of ¥197,000 or above¹; at least one parent employed in a field within one of the top four strata of Lu’s (2012) classification²; at least one parent with a bachelor’s degree or above; an urban household registration and both self and immediate family living in an urban area for the majority of the respondent’s life. If participants met three of the four following criteria, they were classified as ‘non-affluent’: an annual income of ¥79,000 or below; neither parent with an occupation higher than the fifth stratum in Lu’s (2012) classification; neither parent with an education beyond the high school level; rural hukou or household migration from rural to urban area. Participants that did not meet either set of criteria, thus falling between these two groups, were classified as ‘lower-middle-class’.

Table 1. Profile of participants.

	Total
Highest parental education
Postgraduate degree or above	3
Bachelor’s degree	13
Associate’s degree	3
Upper secondary or lower	21
Estimated annual household income
¥197,000 or higher	14
¥79,000–197,000	13
¥79,000 or below	13
Highest parental occupation
Strata 1-4: State and social administrators, managers, private entrepreneurs, professional and technical personnel	15
Strata 5-10: Clerical staff, self-employed persons, employees of commercial services, industrial working class, agricultural labourers, urban and rural jobless, unemployed and semi-employed	25
Ethnicity
Han 汉族	35
Yi 彝族	1
Uyghur 维吾尔族	1
Bouyei 布依族	1
Hui 回族	1
Tujia 土家族	1
Gender
Male	14
Female	26
Social class faction
Upper-middle-class	13
Lower-middle-class	13
Non-affluent-class	14
N = 40.

The interviews took place between November 2021 and March 2022, and were carried out remotely using VoIP software due to COVID-related entry and movement restrictions in China. They were conducted in Putonghua or English, according to the preference of the interviewee, and lasted for between one and three hours. Those conducted in Putonghua were transcribed by a Chinese-speaking researcher before being translated into English. They were reflexive and sought details about participants’ lifetime experiences of mobility, education, and post-graduation plans. An interview guide covered themes such as mobility for education, parental attitudes towards education, reflections on primary, secondary, and tertiary education experiences, and post-graduation plans. The process of data collection and analysis was iterative, with new areas of inquiry being added based on emergent patterns from the data. Interview transcripts were coded and then thematically analysed, following a five stage process based on Braun and Clark’s (2019) method. Pseudonyms are used to report the findings.

Findings and discussion

Non-affluent class: at the mercy of mobility

First, we examine the mobility trajectories of a group of students from non-affluent backgrounds. All 14 of these interviewees had either grown up in a rural area or migrated from a rural to an urban area during their childhood or adolescence. The range of educational opportunities that these families had access to tended to be quite narrow. Mobility was a necessity, but limited choice meant that it was often a haphazard process, sometimes leading to disruptions in education and family life. Education was not always a primary motivating factor for mobility. Rather, mobility was in most cases related to work and the need to provide for children financially, so the link between education and mobility was indirect. In most cases this mobility was arduous: long-distance, from rural to urban areas, and often between provinces. This stands to reason given the ‘gyroscope-like’ nature of the Chinese economy (Xiang 2020), which is ‘simultaneously differentiating and integrating’ in that the most developed eastern cities attract more resources, widening the wealth gap between economic ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, but at the same time, forcing peripheries (and the people residing there) to be constantly in motion and thus closely related to the centre. A case in point is Lijie, who was raised largely by his grandparents in a rural area of Sichuan province. He explained that his parents were ‘illiterate’ and worked as farm labourers for much of his childhood, until the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, which destroyed the family home and forced his parents to leave the village:

after the earthquake, our house was destroyed, so my parents and grandparents ran out of family savings to rebuild the house at the foot of the mountain. Maybe that’s the first time my parents realised the importance of money, I suppose … they knew that someday I will be admitted to some university, so they then thought about how to raise my college funds. After this, they had no choice to go to another place and be workers. I suppose the earthquake really changed the direction of our family and our family decisions. (Lijie, non-affluent, rural)

His parents subsequently moved to Guangdong province to work as construction labourers. In the following excerpt, Lijie explains his feelings about his parents leaving at the time, and his reflections in hindsight:

Sometimes I missed them, but I was used to it because they had no choice … because if they stay with me in a poor village, being farmers, they couldn’t raise my college funds. I’m really grateful for what they have done for me. Thanks to their sacrifice, I have enough financial support.

This decision, to move away from work, was an economic necessity. Inter-provincial labour mobility often came with a significant downsides for children: immobility and separation from his parents. There was no opportunity to bring Lijie along in order for him to access relatively ‘high quality’ schooling in urban areas. This was the case for several students from the non-affluent group, who had also been separated from parents for extended periods of time.

In other cases, students were able to move with their parents. Yunli was raised by her grandparents in a rural area until she joined her parents in a nearby city for primary school. She describes her parents’ motivations for moving from a village to a small city in Gansu province known for its heavy industry:

It’s two hours by bus [from the village to the city]. It’s in the mountains, there’s no running water there, until now there’s no running water … When they left the village, they were probably in their late teens or twenties. It was definitely for a better life, in order to make things better for the next generation … definitely the main thing they considered was the quality of education we would receive in the city (Yunli, non-affluent, rural to urban)

For families across within the non-affluent group, mobility choices were limited, and actual mobility was often arduous and fraught with complications. Familial mobility usually took place out of economic necessity, for the purposes of employment. As such, education was often a secondary consideration. However, in some cases, such as Yunli’s, access to what were perceived to be better educational resources was part of the logic underpinning mobility. Here, mobility was required in order to access education that was not available in the village, but it required her separation from her parents before primary school. Both accounts outlined here highlight a strong theme in the data: for non-affluent families, the only form of mobility available was to become a rural-to-urban migrant worker (农民工nongmingong). A common reflection was that, as well as the obvious economic rationale, parents considered that this mobility would allow children to attend better schools in cities. However, in some cases of inter-provincial labour mobility, such as that of Lijie’s parents, children were ‘left behind’ in villages, because China’s social welfare system discourages migrant workers from bringing children to cities (e.g. Gu 2022). Empirical evidence points towards a pronounced negative effect on the education and general wellbeing of ‘left behind’ children, when compared to children whose parents did not migrate (Zhou et al. 2015).

Where children did move with parents, they usually only had access to relatively less ‘well performing’ schools, and sometimes, for a period, only privately-operated migrant schools. These schools are marginalised within the education system, and as such, often lack necessary resources and facilities and are staffed by inexperienced teachers (Chen and Feng 2017). As Pengwei, whose family moved from a rural area to a large city in Liaoning province explains:

Because my household registration was not in [name of city], so according to local policies there was no way for me to attend any of the better middle schools in the area. So, my first middle school was a school for migrant children, with free admission … the teaching quality and general atmosphere were pretty poor. (Peng, non-affluent, rural to urban)

These cases demonstrate that, while educational mobility was common for non-affluent students, low motility meant that families tended to have little choice around the forms of mobility they undertook. The majority of non-affluent rural-to-urban migrants suggested that parents assumed urban schools would be better than those in the village, but lacked knowledge of urban ‘circuits of schooling’ (Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz 1995), and this made accessing the most ‘valuable’ educational experiences and credentials more difficult.

At the same time, these examples reflect the role of an ‘educational mobility imperative’ in China, which contributes to the disembedding of non-affluent families from rural communities in a forceful and often disquieting way. This imperative is underpinned by the concentration of resources in urban areas (Xiang, 2020), and results in the diminishing of any sense of attachment to particular locales. To further unpack this term, the imperative to be mobile for education appears to be written into discourses surrounding education and social mobility. Marginal ‘problem’ places (both rural and urban) of contemporary Chinese capitalism are framed in this discourse as reproducing academic failure (Popkewitz, 1998). Children attending school in these places are positioned as victims of them, and their only hope for educational success in the long-term is to go elsewhere (Corbett, 2010). The effects of these discourses are summarised by Lina, who explains why she attended boarding school in the capital city of her province, several hours away from her small semi-rural hometown:

in the place where we’re from, there’s a very simple kind of feeling that if we do well in school, we must get out [of the area]. How far we go, we don’t know, but we just have to go out. Everyone recognises this … if you look at some of the older students, they all went towards tier one cities, so you think these things are a matter of course (Lina, non-affluent, rural)

She also felt that she could not return home, and resultantly preferred onward mobility to another (larger) city:

You will face a lot of annoyances, getting married and having children, your children going to school in the future, your parents’ pension, these will be a lot of trouble. I think many young people don’t want to worry about these things anymore. The third thing is the value system. It's not the same. Many of my middle school classmates already have children, when I hadn't graduated from graduate school, and their children were already one year old. I will face such pressure if I go back. So for me, it doesn't have a high appeal, and I don't want to go back.

The sense of disconnection from one’s place of birth was common among respondents from this group. Similarly, Yuyuan, whose migrant worker parents moved with her from a rural area of an eastern province to a small city in China’s far west, explains her feelings about the city where she grew up:

We feel that [name of city] is just a place to live, not a hometown.

Interviewer: Why do you feel like that?

Because it's just … how best to say it? only my parents are there, and there are no relatives or friends or anything like that.

Interviewer: So where is home for you?

To put it another way, me and my brother don’t feel we have a hometown. We don’t miss home, and it’s okay for us to move anywhere.’ (Yuyuan, non-affluent, rural to urban)

In other words, as a result of the disembedding process, non-affluent students tended to relinquish a strong sense of attachment to place. This reflects findings from studies on rural Chinese parents’ views on education. Kong (2010) for example highlights the centrality of having their children ‘walk out’ of rural areas in the thinking of Chinese parents in rural areas. This loss of embeddedness in particular places and the lack of freedom of choice around mobility among non-affluent families is reminiscent of Bauman’s (1996, 1998) ‘vagabond’ metaphor. These families do not remain mobile because they desire to, but ‘because they have no other choice’ (Bauman 1996, 14). In other words, they are mobile due to a narrow range of possible mobilities (the access component of motility), and a relatively low level of skills related to access (the competence component). Crucially, it is important to see immobility as a sometimes desirable mobility choice that non-affluent families do not have access to. Further, while they may aspire to other forms of mobility, actual opportunities are restricted and perceived as beyond the realms of possibility. Future decisions around where to live are also determined by the mobility imperative, non-affluent families must remain spatially mobile in order to achieve social mobility. Thus, students such as Lina and Yuyuan expressed a lack of attachment or desire to return to their hometowns. For them, ‘the urge for mobility … prevents the arousal of strong affections’ to particular places, which are ‘no more than temporary stations’ (Bauman 1992, 695). This lack of freedom of choice includes the lack of freedom to be immobile. They are bound by limited motility and the imperatives of a hyper-mobile society to a path which necessitates feeling little attachment to a specific ‘home’. Young people within this group may be freer than previous generations to ask the question ‘how shall I live?’ (Giddens 1991, 14), but relative to their middle-class peers, the control that they have over mobility decisions is clearly more restricted. Students from the non-affluent class faction tended to express a sense of being at the mercy of China’s ‘gyroscope-like’ society, which compels movement for survival and progress.

Lower-middle-class: mobility as a means of beating the ‘opportunity trap’

The nature of family decision-making among the lower-middle-class group differed significantly. 11 of these 13 interviewees had urban household registration. The two rural household registration holders had resided in an urban area since childhood. A common theme was that mobility seemed to be a manifestation of ‘concerted cultivation’ (Lareau 2011) or a tendency among parents to constantly monitor and intervene in their children’s education. Private tutoring and extra-curricular activities have been identified as new norms of concerted cultivation (Ma and Wright, 2021). For students from lower and upper-middle-class backgrounds – albeit in markedly different ways – spatial mobility in order to access a range of educational opportunities is another key manifestation of concerted cultivation (Yemini and Maxwell 2020). For parents of interviewees in these class factions, education appeared to figure much more strongly in household decisions around mobility, as opposed to the often haphazard and economically motivated mobility outlined in the previous section, highlighting a relatively high level of motility, both in terms of potential for and clarity of aspirations around mobility.

The lower-middle-class families in this study often engaged in mobility for education, work, or both. There are three main qualitative differences in the mobility of families from this faction, compared to their non-affluent peers: (i) the range of possible mobility options, (ii) the nature of actual mobility, and (iii) the educational opportunities resulting from this mobility. In contrast to the upper-middle-class, relocation often entailed sacrifice and enduring of difficulties on the part of parents. A typical case is that of Zhuo, who describes her own educational mobility as follows:

My mum moved to [name of city] when I was in year 3 of primary school, because she was considering my future education. She just switched jobs to move to [name of city], and my father still was in the village until my middle school. He joined us when I was in middle school.

Interviewer: So they actually lived apart?

Yes, for much of the time in primary school and middle school

Interviewer: What do you think was the main reason for your being apart?

Well, I think it was more for my education than for my mum’s work. (Zhuo, social sciences, lower-middle-class, rural to urban)

After junior high school, Zhuo was on the move again, as her parents took advantage of their social networks to enable her to study in a high-performing senior high school in a neighbouring city. This meant a bus journey of over an hour each way every day. She describes the process of accessing this school:

I needed to take an exam but I didn’t get good enough grades. So my parents found some connections, and then paid some money and I got in. So I went from [relatively small city in Guangdong province] to a school in another city, [large metropolitan city in Guangdong province] for senior high school… the education is better there.

Generally, families within this faction had a wider range of options to choose from: there were fewer contextual constraints for Zhuo’s family when compared to non-affluent families. In this case, Zhuo’s access to mobility was also dependent on parental competence, or in others words, skills and abilities relating to accessing mobility opportunities. Zhuo’s mother in particular understood the local educational ‘field’, which motivated her mobility from a village to the city, and also enabled her to navigate the local schooling circuit. There was more evidence of long-term mobility strategising in this group, which can be couched as a manifestation of concerted cultivation. A similar case is that of Weifeng, who describes his parent’s attitudes towards his education:

My mum is retired, and my dad is still working. They’re just ordinary working people. My family is not wealthy, it’s very ordinary, like the majority of families … because of this, since elementary school, I was always participating in different forms of after school tutoring, in almost every subject. When I was a child, private tutoring was the biggest expense for my family. (Weifeng, lower-middle-class, urban)

This highly intensive ‘concerted cultivation’ approach to parenting led his family to move several times for his education. His parents moved house in order to be close to the school he had entered:

My mum often mentions the story ‘Mencius’s mother moves three times’ (孟母三迁³). For convenience in going to elementary school, we moved once … After I got to high school, they thought I could save time, so we moved again, moved closer to the school, they bought a house there and lived there … As the eldest grandson of my family, my grandmother and my mother have attached great importance to education, thinking that at least one scholarly person (有文化的读书人）should be born in the family … So the idea at that time was to be able to go to university.

At the same time, however, the level of control and choice around mobility was limited for lower-middle-class students. That is to say, mobility remained a necessity for social mobility in cases such as Weifeng’s and Zhuo’s. Unlike many of the non-affluent students, these students’ families did not undertake arduous inter-provincial mobility out of financial necessity. Rather, mobility, both intra-city and inter-city, was a part of a strategy. However, Zhuo’s family was not part of a ‘kinetic elite’ (Cresswell 2006). Rather part of what might best be described as the ‘kinetic masses’ for whom mobility is a necessity in an ever-intensifying competition for the cultural capital to gain positional advantage over others. The level of motility that these families displayed tended to be far greater than that of non-affluent students. They had an array of potential mobility patterns and greater level of competency to act on this range of options, as demonstrated by the highly strategic intra-provincial and inter-city moves of Zhuo’s and Weifeng’s families. This ‘competency’ facet of motility resembles ‘concerted cultivation’. For example, mobility was one means of achieving social mobility by ensuring that Weifeng would be the first in his family to go to university. However, it is important to note that Weifeng’s family did not relocate as part of a strategy for gaining access to a ‘circuit of schooling’. Rather, the relocation took place after he had entered school, in order to make getting to and from school easier.

This mobility for education in turn allows families to gain marginal advantages in the context of a kind of ‘social congestion’ (Brown 2013) whereby ‘contestants’ within the education system vie for positional advantage over others. Xiaoxin Wu (2013, 37) describes how a path of attending ‘key’ primary, junior middle, and senior middle schools ‘seems to have become a guiding principle’ for middle-class parents in China, ‘even if it comes at a substantial financial cost’. Strategically employing the range of mobility options available in order to compete for positional advantage is demonstrative of the ‘competency’ element of motility, that is, the understanding of the ‘rules’ of the game, and how to use mobility to compete within it.

Upper-middle-class: immobility as freedom

What distinguishes the upper-middle-class from other groups is a sense of relative freedom from the educational mobility imperative. These students all held an urban household registration, and had resided in urban areas since birth. All had at least one parent in a professional occupation, such as the civil service, and at least one parent with an undergraduate degree. For these families, remaining immobile or returning ‘home’ carried less risk than for most families from other factions – other resources could be employed to ensure success in education and in their careers. Families had most often remained within one urban area for the duration of the interviewees’ lives, sometimes immobile, and sometimes moving within one city, specifically for the purposes of education. These moves were usually to properties within the catchment areas of the best-performing schools. Meng, the daughter of a high-ranking local government official, grew up in the same large metropolitan city that the case study university is located in, and had stayed in the same city throughout her education, other than for a short overseas exchange trip to Europe. She explains how her family leveraged mobility to ensure her access to a prestigious school:

The main factor that affected the decision was: in which neighbourhood is the education best? They chose a neighbourhood in [district of city]. In this neighbourhood, the primary school is the top one in [district of city]. So I think they were really serious about my education. (Meng, upper-middle-class, urban)

Families such as Meng’s could afford to be immobile in a hyper-mobile society that forces the ‘kinetic masses’ to be spatially mobile in order to achieve social mobility. In the large metropolitan city where Meng lived, her family had the pick of elite schools, as they were easily able to relocate within the city in order to move into the catchment area of a high-quality school, into an elite ‘circuit of schooling’ (Ball, Bowe, and Gewirtz 1995). Meng’s family residing in a larger and more ‘developed’ city also meant that number of elite schools her family could choose from was far greater. Thus, there is a discernible difference in both the level of strategising taking place (i.e. the ‘competency’ element of motility) and the range of choices that upper-middle-classes had relative to others (i.e. the ‘access’ element of mobility).

The key point here is that upper-middle-class students had a high level of education motility: that is, a broad range of potential educational mobility trajectories to choose from, as well as the skills, competencies and aspirations to act on opportunities. But crucially, it is the primarily the ability to remain relatively immobile without consequence for social reproduction strategies that distinguished the upper-middle-class from others in this study. This was done through urban relocation, one means of translating other forms of capital into educational resources for high-income urban families (Young and Hannum 2020).

This freedom of choice was also evident in students’ accounts of their post-graduation plans. Xizhe, for example, explains his plans to return to his hometown after university:

My family were always in [city], they never went anywhere else. I have a strong desire to move back there.

Interviewer: Why do you feel like that?

From my middle school, high school, I have lots of friends there, and they’re all working in [city]. Only if I go back to there can have time to maybe hang out with them or travel with them. I don’t have to stay in [location of university] to benefit from the best resources. I can move back to [city]. It’s all the same. Plus, there will be a little help for me if I move back to [city] because maybe my family have some influence. Maybe I know some people, maybe they are working in those kinds of positions, and they can give you some advice. (Xizhe, upper-middle-class, urban)

Xizhe’s account exemplifies the freedom of choice over future mobility that upper-middle-class students tended to have. The success of upper-middle-class students in the social competition relies upon their ability to ‘master space’ through mobility (Kaufmann and Audikana 2020, 42). Part of this mastery is that upper-middle-class students had the ability to choose to be mobile or immobile, to stay or to leave as they wished. The crux here is that power does not only enable upper-middle-class families to be mobile. Rather, it governs the level of agency that families have when they make decisions about moving or staying put. It is also important to note that for many within the upper-middle-class, international mobility may be an aspiration, as has been documented extensively in the literature on young members of the ‘global middle class’ (e.g. Robertson and Roberts 2022). Some interviewees from the upper-middle-class class planned to pursue further studies abroad, but had put these plans on hold due to the pandemic, and several had taken part in exchange programmes before.

Another notable element of Xizhe’s reasoning is that economic considerations appear to be secondary in choosing between potential mobility options – ‘hanging out’ with friends was the first reason Xizhe gave for wanting to return home. Shanshan, from an ethnic minority group, similarly expressed reasoning around education mobility that went beyond familial social mobility. She explains why she chose to attend a university in an area of China with a high population of people of Hui ethnicity:

I’m from the Hui ethnic group, my granddad is from the Hui ethnic group … although we’re not religious, I thought I would have a deeper experience if I go to a place with other Hui people. Seeing what they’re like, I could get a deeper understanding of this ethnic group, what their situation is, I thought I could more deeply understand my identity. So, considering it comprehensively at that time, [name of university] seemed a good choice. (Shanshan, Upper-middle-class, urban)

This reflects upper-middle-class students’ privilege relative to others, who, in the context of ‘social congestion’, usually prioritised opportunities for social mobility and employment over other factors. As both Giddens (1990, 1991) and Bauman (1996) acknowledge, social class plays an important role in determining the extent to which individuals have freedom of choice in relation to mobility, or are able to freely decide ‘how to be and how to act’ (Giddens 1994, 75). While in late modernity, self-identity becomes a reflexive project, severed from external contributing factors such as place, the extent to which this enables ‘control [over] one’s own life circumstances’ (Giddens 1991, 202) and by extension, self-exploration and self-mastery, differs according to the circumstances into which one is born. Upper-middle-class families tended to have a high level of motility, and this proved crucial in allowing them to use mobility as a means of shaping the reflexive project of self-identity to greater extent than those from other social class factions. For these families, relative immobility was an option in a hyper-mobile society which tends to penalise those who do not use motility as means of achieving social mobility or reproduction.

Conclusion

Mobility now occupies a central position in the practices of families from a remarkably wide array of backgrounds. At the same time, the mobility trajectories of the young people interviewed for this study varied markedly along lines of social class. The purpose of this article has been to highlight the importance of ‘motility’, or the field of possibilities relative to movement, and its useas a factor contributing to educational inequalities in China. Non-affluent families tended to have low motility, in the sense that the range of options for mobility was extremely restricted, but were nonetheless highly mobile. They tended to have little sense of attachment to particular places, due to a feeling that future mobility decisions would be made according to economic imperatives, as past ones had been. These narratives were contrasted with the more strategic but still constricted relocation of middle-class families. Education-related mobility strategies often involved mobility between urban areas, or from peripheries to centres of smaller cities. These movements appeared to be ‘taken-for-granted’ practices among lower-middle-class families which served as a means of competing in the context of ‘social congestion’ at all levels of the Chinese education system. Upper-middle-class families, in contrast, displayed high levels of motility, which ultimately meant they experienced both mobility and immobility as freedom.

The key point of our analysis, however, is not only that the experiences of intra-national mobility outlined here are different. It is also that the decision-making processes of all the families whose narratives were explored here take place within the same ‘gyroscope-like’ (Xiang, 2020) society. Thus, the familial mobility decisions of those at the ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ of the kinetic hierarchy are inevitably bound up in the same logic. Overall, the contribution of this study was to highlight the intertwinement of the ‘politics of mobility’ (Cresswell 2010) and the politics of education. It is axiomatic that social and political relations – such as class, race, and gender – matter in shaping educational outcomes and ultimately, processes of social reproduction. This paper serves to add the caveat that motility is an important socially classed, unequally distributed resource for positional competitions within formal education systems, beyond those that have been covered in previous work within the field. We propose that inequalities in motility between social groups are an important factor contributing to the growing inequality of educational opportunity in China (Gruijters, Chan, and Ermisch 2019).

At the same time, it is necessary to again highlight the limitations of this study in terms of scope. Here the focus was on the familial mobility trajectories of a group of students attending one elite university in a large southern Chinese city. All these students were studying subjects within the humanities and social sciences. Differences in academic and subsequent career paths, as well as more generally across the Chinese higher educational field, mean that this study must be read with these caveats in mind.

As a final point, in this paper, we have only examined the relationship between social class and mobility for education. Studies in other contexts have highlighted various ways in which race and gender inequalities manifest in educational mobility decision-making and experiences (e.g. Khambhaita and Bhopal 2015). While it is beyond the scope of this paper, our findings also highlight the relationship between mobility and these other axes of inequality as potential directions for future research in the Chinese context.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 This income threshold is based on McKinsey’s China Consumer Report (Ho et al., 2019). An income of above this threshold places interviewees within the ‘affluent’ category, the top ∼7 percent of the population.

2 These four groups encompass managers, professionals, and business owners. A more detailed exposition of each strata is provided in Lu (2012).

3 A commonly used ‘four-character idiom’ (成语 chengyu) which refers to a story in which Mencius’s mother moved house three times in order to find a location she felt was appropriate for his upbringing.