Shifting discourses from boy preference to boy crisis: educating boys and nation building in neoliberal China

ABSTRACT

It is well established that China has emerged as a major economic power, resulting from the nation’s neoliberal modernization. What is less understood is the socio-cultural and educational impact of this change on public institutions. This article focuses on the education system, which is currently seen as central to delivering the nation’s modernization project, particularly through suzhi jiaoyu (education for quality). More specifically, we engage with a pervasive public discourse of a boy crisis. We suggest the need critically to explore the local (national) meanings within a contemporary Chinese context of this assumed projected crisis that appears to be established as a western phenomenon. We argue that the discourse of a boy crisis can be read as a strategic move to re-inscribe an earlier discourse, that of the boy preference, that in turn is discursively linked to nation building at a time of globally inflected socio-economic transformations.

KEYWORDS:

• Boy crisis
• China
• masculinity
• neoliberalism
• patriarchy
• schooling
• suzhi

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on the original draft of this paper and the support from the editorial team.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Here, we use an historian’s technique in applying a heuristic device, to suggest what is an ideal type. In practice, there would have been variation, for example, at regional and family levels.

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