Governing Suzhi and Curriculum Reform in Rural Ethnic China: Viewpoints From the Miao and Dong Communities in Qiandongnan

Abstract

This article examines the uptake of suzhi—roughly glossed as “quality”—in China’s recent curriculum reform called suzhi jiaoyu (Education for Quality) in the rural ethnic context of Qiandongnan. It engages with three layers of analysis. First is a brief etymological overview of suzhi to map out its cultural politics in contemporary China. Agamben’s theorization of People/people is invoked to elucidate how the keyword embeds the differentiation of bodies and the fabrication of the “others” through a civilizing mission. Second, the article surveys the genealogy of suzhi ideas‐practices as the historical project of making the ideal personhood. It examines how suzhi’s entanglement in Chinese historiography constitutes the moving target for the formation of educational subjects. Third, the article draws from my ethnographic research in southwest China to investigate suzhi’s enactment in compulsory schooling and current curriculum reform. It provides nuanced empirical accounts to illuminate how suzhi/quality is understood, contested, and reappropriated in everyday pedagogical practices; how the bifurcated front‐ and backstage maneuvering in two village schools trouble the salvationary overtone of the suzhi‐oriented curriculum reform. The lens of performativity is harnessed to move beyond the “loose coupling” theory and suggest undecidable interstices in the production of pedagogical subjectivity. Furthermore, this section explores how suzhi jiaoyu sits in a jarring relationship with indigenous cosmology to produce epistemic dissonance and disenchantment towards schooling. The article concludes with a call for provincializing the “universal” notion of quality and for a productive aporia in thinking about the limit‐points of schooling.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the Social Science Research Council and the Morgridge Foundation which have provided generous funding to the ethnographic research.

Notes

Notes

Guizhou boasts the presence of 49 of the 56 ethnic groups in China, with ethnic residents accounting for 37% of the total population, according to the 2004 census. See Guizhou ().

See Tamboukou & Ball ().

The difficulty of locating equivalences across languages is not just an issue of translation or vocabulary. It indexes a cleavage in frames of reference, a theoretical aporia in locating traveling discourses in cross‐cultural research, and the provincialism of particular concepts in the guise of a universal standard and reason. Dipesh Chakrabarty () and Bernadette Baker () speak elegantly about the limitations and inevitable theoretical aporia in doing transnational, cross‐cosmological research and the critiques of European ethnocentrism. Both works have provided considerable insights to my own thinking on the suzhi discourse‐practices in China.

As a New York Times article vividly depicts, wealthy parents in Shanghai take their children abroad for them to learn Western‐accented English and purchase private lessons of fine manners and lifestyle training, including ballet, golfing, polo, and even the Japanese finishing school. See French ().

Although their labor is forever implanted into the built environment of the city, they are viewed as social malaise creating overcrowdedness, poor hygiene, and security threats, and purged in periodic sweep‐cleaning efforts (such as during the Beijing Olympics in 2008) to preserve the city’s orderly and sanitized image.

See Zinn (). It is a widely claimed nonfiction by historian and political scientist Howard Zinn who presents American history through the eyes and voices of the working people—women, Blacks, Native Americans, war resisters, impoverished laborers, and so forth—rather than from political and economic elites.

The distinction of zoe and bio is also discussed elsewhere. See Agamben ().

“What Heaven ( tian 天) commands ( ming 命) is called natural tendencies ( xing 性); drawing out these natural tendencies is called the proper way ( dao ); improving upon this way is called education ( jiao 教).” See Wu (, p. 4).

In the early 1990s, a joint summer camp attended by Chinese and Japanese teenagers led to a mortifying tale of Chinese children’s low suzhi in comparison to their Japanese counterparts. The Chinese teenagers were inferior in terms of physical strength, mental endurance, and the ability to tolerate hardship and delay gratification. This brought the Chinese educational system the humiliation of seeming to only produce bookish learning rather than worldly citizens of adaptability and creativity. This episode spurred a national sensation and rounds of heated debates on the future of Chinese education and its citizenry. See Sun (n.d.).

Of course, the school‐based curricular reform is extended to family‐based childrearing and the larger social environment that are also targets of intervention to raise children’s quality.

China’s traditional emphasis on examinations as a pathway to officialdom could be dated back to its Imperial Exam System ( ke ju kaoshi zhidu) that was first introduced during the Sui dynasty and lasted for over 1,300 years until the end of the Qing dynasty. The Imperial Exam System was established initially as a mechanism to select imperial governors among civilians through a special exam called Ba Gu Wen based on classic Confucianism. Rising from the ordinary folk to the royal palace had been the dream of ancient scholars who pursued a life of text memorization as the only way toward officialdom. This was in line with Confucius’ exhortation to apply oneself to be a state officer after becoming learned ( xue er you ze shi). See Li & Li ().

In 2003, the strategic import of the “three rural issues” ( sannong wenti)—namely agriculture ( nong ye), peasants ( nong min), and rural communities ( nong cun)—was highlighted in the central government’s 11th Five‐Year Plan. In March 2006, Premier Wen Jiabao identified the historical task of the Chinese Communist Party as “building a new socialist countryside,” highlighting rural revitalization and poverty alleviation as crucial to the Party’s legitimacy.

The measures include increasing government funding in basic education, improving teacher training, financial support to impoverished households, consolidating underperforming teaching facilities, and above all, implementing student‐centered pedagogy.

Despite linguistic and geographic differences, the Miao and the Dong in Qiandongnan share a number of characteristics such as musical virtuosity, subsistence rice farming, shamanism, ancestor worship, and so forth.

In both villages, per the residents’ own rough calculation, nearly 90% of the households have had labor migration experience at one time or another. Although the recent spike of tourism has attracted a sizable number of returnees, an average household still has at least one family member working outside the village.

The notion of “culture” is further linked with suzhi to mark the superior and the inferior: having received education is called you wenhua (having culture) and gao suzhi (having higher quality), whereas not being schooled is called meiwenhua (having no culture) therefore suzhi di (with lower quality).

In a similar vein, Louisa Schein in her thought‐provoking article “ Performing Modernity” () invokes the notion of performativity to depict the on‐ and offstage practices by the Miao minority in China as a way to mark off their putatively “nonmodern” status. Schein contends that the Miao people engaged in what Victor Turner (, p. 24) calls “performative reflexivity” to meditate upon the codes, statuses, and legal rules that make up their public social positioning. “People not only position themselves vis‐à‐vis modernity through multifarious practices but also struggle to reposition themselves, sometimes through deploying the very codes of the modern that have framed them as its others” (Schein, , pp. 363–364).

This is a famous phrase coined by James Scott () in his widely cited Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance where he advanced provocative definitions of resistance through a classic ethnographic study of peasant rebellions in a small village of Sedaka in Malaysia.

In both Majiang and Longxing middle schools, evening sessions were commonly held after dinner break from 7 to 9 p.m. during weekdays for the teachers to provide additional instruction and drill their students on tests. Even though the practice was officially outlawed by suzhi jiaoyu reform to reduce homework burden, in Qiandongnan it was still widely used among village schools trying to catch up in the exam‐oriented race.

Market days occur once every 5 or 6 days in both Majiang and Longxing when vendors from neighboring villages gather to sell vegetables, candies, fruits, clothes, small household appliances, and electronic gadgets. Market days are popular among the youth and provide consumer goods to satisfy their consumptive desires.

For a detailed discussion of the effects and consequences that giving an account of oneself has on oneself, see Butler’s reading of Foucault’s later work in Butler (, pp. 111–136).

See de Certeau () for an influential use of the notion “tactical” in revealing the informal means ordinary people reappropriate languages, symbols, artifacts, and so forth, in everyday situations and in doing so subvert the representations that are institutionally imposed upon them.

Such disenchantment is seen in rampant student attrition/dropout. Like many other rural residents, villagers in Majiang and Longxing have traditionally considered education as a way to jump out of peasantry and into officialdom, as a way to secure future lifetime employment. To them, becoming a cadre, a state employee, eating the emperor’s rice, so to speak, is the kind of “quality” life that a person with higher suzhi lives and that a “quality” education should bring about. When education fails to provide a link to that superiority, when they find themselves schooled yet prepared only for factory sweatshops, they loose faith in education. A great number of middle school students drop out, often with the tacit consent of their parents, to work at low‐skilled and low‐paying factory jobs in the labor‐intensive manufacturing industry, seeking a self‐making dream that the school fails to bring to fruition. See Wu ().

In fact, the term indigenous is highly contested. It is associated with official and popular imageries that paint the Miao and the Dong with backward primitivity and as antithesis of the modern. The term indigenous also invokes a plea for cultural quiddity that nativizes the “other” as befitting a separate frame of reference and consigns them to the waiting room of modernity (Gaonkar, ). To that end, I use indigenous and folk interchangeably, focusing on the particular, the unassimilatable, and the incommensurable.

In many Miao and Dong villages, ethnic singing was interrupted during the national famines in the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s–1970s, and has been on the decline since the 1990s as a result of social encounters with the larger Chinese society.

Since the 1986 debut of the Dong polyphonic choir singing (Kgal Laox) at the Golden Autumn Arts Festival in France, the Dong and their musical talents have captivated Western audience. Recognized as a form of National Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) in 2006 and included on UNESCO’s Representative List of the ICH of Humanity in 2009, Kgal Laox is reputed as the “crystal creeks of oriental symphony” and has appeared in various forms of national and international media in recent years. Since 2000, Kgal Laox has received increased publicity in government‐sponsored tourism promotion as a symbol of the pan‐Dong identity. See Ingram ().

In recent decades, with the increase of labor out‐migration, tourist influx, and compulsory schooling, children are no longer expected to learn to sing, yet singing is still considered an important part of daily life.

Due to the courtship elements, Miao and Dong songs were targets of purge during the Cultural Revolution that castigated capitalist indulgence and personal abandonment. To the nation’s political elites, music performance of the ethnic populace represented an expression of cultural stagnation and anachronism and posed a threat to the hard‐won normative social order. Ideologically charged party music was then propagated as a regime of value to selectively ennoble particular music forms over the other and govern the aesthetic and moral conduct of the populace. For the ethnic people, however, the indigenous music forms valorize group affiliation and cultivate ethnic belonging.

Whereas both the Dong and Miao languages exhibit great linguistic nuances, only facility in the dominant official language (Mandarin Chinese) counts as legitimate criteria of social competency. Upheld as the language of independence and sophistication, Mandarin is juxtaposed with the Miao and the Dong that are considered as languages of parochialism keeping people in the backwaters of the mountain valley. Mandarin is the medium of instruction from kindergarten on for all subjects. Students, many of whom hear Mandarin for the first time in school, find it difficult to think and converse in the official language; having lessons in Mandarin contributes to their alienation from school knowledge. I was often told that ethnic rural children do not know how to speak properly compared to their urban counterparts because they are wild ( ye) and too engaged with hands and feet. School knowledge is resisted partially because of its irrelevance and great experiential remove from the means of livelihood.

A familiar refrain I often heard during my fieldwork in Qiandongnan goes like this: “Our village is too poor and backward. We have low suzhi and live like frogs at the bottom of the well ( jingdi zhiwa) and only see a small patch of the sky. Unlike us, the city people are well educated and able to travel, even abroad, and have seen a much larger world.” The local villagers share the popular interpretation of suzhi, and view their own positioning in the lower social echelon as a lack thereof.