China’s making and governing of educational subjects as ‘talent’: A dialogue with Michel Foucault

Abstract

As an imprint of Confucian culture, China’s education intersects state governance in making and governing educational subjects as ‘talent’, an official translation of the Chinese term ‘rencai’ (literally, human-talent). Whereas the English word ‘talent’ itself denotes ‘[people with] natural aptitude or skill’, ‘talent’ is currently mobilized in China not only as a globalized discourse that speaks to the most aspired educational subjects for the 21st century but also as a re-invoked cultural notion that relates to Confucian wisdom. Drawing upon Foucault’s biopower hypothesis and Confucian thought, this paper leverages upon China’s unique manipulation of ‘talent’ as certain skills and human subjects, both cultivable through education, to problematize China’s talent making and governing in two dimensions. First, it unpacks the various technologies of power entangled in China’s talent making and governing within its ‘state governance’ paradigm. Second, it unpacks Confucian thought as an archaeological prototype for China’s present talent appeal, meanwhile explicating their divergences in defining ‘human’, ‘talent’, and the human-talent interpellation. In so doing, this paper makes two arguments. First, the linguistic notion of ‘talent’ functions as a Foucauldian apparatus of biopower, making (up) new kinds of people and normalizing a certain population as the objective/object of China’s state governance. Second, CPC’s re-invocation of Confucian talent discourses is more of a rhetorical strategy than an authentic cultural renaissance gesture.

Keywords:

• Educational subjects
• talent making and governing
• biopower
• state governance
• technologies of power
• Confucian wisdom

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Weili Zhao

Weili Zhao obtained her Ph.D. in 2015 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. With intellectual training in both discourse analysis and curriculum studies, she is interested in unpacking China’s current educational thinking and practices at the nexus, and as the (dis)assemblage, of tradition and modernity, East and West. Specifically, her research explicates the historical-cultural-philosophical insights of Chinese knowledge, curriculum, and educational thinking, say, Yijing, Daoist, and Confucian wisdom, to hopefully dialogue with, for mutual informing and clarifications, the latest intellectual linguistic-body-cultural-study turns in the Western scholarship. Furthermore, she explores the possible challenges, new openings, as well as intervention strategies, of embodying and translating the above theoretical thinking into classroom practices in Hong Kong and Mainland China to enhance teaching and learning efficacy. She has published her monograph, China’s Education, Curriculum Knowledge and Cultural Inscriptions: Dancing with The Wind (2019) with Routledge, and ten articles over the past three years in the SSCI journals of Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, Studies in Philosophy and Education, and Educational Philosophy and Theory. She is co-editing a special issue on themes of learning, unlearning and study for Studies in Philosophy and Education (with Derek Ford and Tyson Lewis), a special issue on the themes epistemic translation on translational curriculum studies for Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education (with Thomas Popkewitz and Tero Autio), a book, Historicizing Curriculum Knowledge Translation on a Global Landscape (Routledge, under contract, with Thomas Popkewitz and Tero Autio), and writing her second monograph, Edusemiotics, (New) Materialism, and (Body) Governance: Flashpoints in 21st -Century Education in China and Beyond (Routledge).