Chinese education and Pierre Bourdieu: Power of reproduction and potential for change

Abstract

In the edited book “Bourdieu and Chinese Education”, a group of scholars in China, Australia, Canada, and the USA engage in a dialogue with Bourdieu and raise persistent questions not only about issues of equity, competition, and change in Chinese education, but also about the value, venture, and violence in using established Western intellectual frameworks for analysing Chinese education. In response to these questions, this special issue analyses and discusses Chinese rural education, teacher education, language education, health and physical education, and transnational education; and proposes a series of new conceptualisations, for example, regression- and network-based field analysis, Bourdieu-Chinese philosophy encounter, field of mediation, localised pedagogical capital, and new Chinese habituses (e.g., contemptuous habitus, diasporic cosmopolitan habitus, habitus (re)structuring). Such collective effort responds to the strident, and sometimes misleading, castigation of Bourdieu for determinism; and also disputes the non-reflexive, celebratory tone that consecrates the French sociologist and his canonical theorem, and hence reproduces the symbolic violence in the doxic academia. In this vein, the special issue is respectful for, but not restricted to, Bourdieu’s sociology, showing no timidity in questioning and contesting the framework of the famed thinker when research problems and findings demand so.

KEYWORDS:

• Bourdieu
• sociology of Chinese education
• sociology of resilience
• reflexivity

Bourdieu is a philosopher by training and a sociologist by choice. He prods and probes human existence and social relations in the French-colonised Algeria and the neoliberalised France from the 1960s onwards. He remains circumspect and certain about the dissemination of his sociological armoury across systems internationally. In Distinction, Bourdieu (1984, p. xii) confides,

That is why, though I am aware of the dangers of a facile search for partial equivalences which cannot stand in for a methodical comparison between systems, I shall take the risk of suggesting, within the limits of my knowledge of American society and culture, some guidelines for a reading that seeks to identify, behind the specific institution of a particular society, the structural invariant and, by the same token, the equivalent institution in another social universe. At the level of the “international” pole of the dominant class the problem scarcely arises, since the cultural products are (relatively) international.

Several decades of time have witnessed the real and persistent global spread and reception of Bourdieu. This can be seen in a review by Wacquant (2013) of the voluminous Bourdieusian literature concerning Portugal, the UK, the US, Norway, and post-soviet societies, each of which warrants an analysis in its own right due to its richness. Interestingly, the scholastic and political engagement with Bourdieu has different fates and trajectories in different national fields. In Australia for example, there has been a shift from the early ignorance of Bourdieu in favour of cultural Marxism to the increasing popularity of Bourdieu due to the need to challenge the historical Australian mythology of classlessness and egalitarianism (Woodward & Emmison, 2009). In Germany, the spread of Bourdieu coincides with the seek for an alternative social critique to orthodox Marxism, the structuralist battle against critical theory, the rising theoretical discourse of social inequality, and the European movement against neoliberal politics (Gemperle, 2009). In Finland, despite the dominance of North American sociology, wide application of Bourdieu may be attributed to Finnish turn to post-Marxism and empiricism coupled with the rise of sociology of education, consumption, and lifestyle (Rahkonen, 2008).

In contrast to the aforementioned national fields, Bourdieu remains strikingly silent in Italy where there was an existence of many competing sociological theories in Bourdieu’s times, an resistance to political left-wings with which Bourdieu was associated, and an absence of any influential Italian students of the famed sociologist (Santoro, 2009). In Israel, Bourdieu has been recognised across disciplines over time due to the historical deep connections between Israeli and European sociology, but serious, systematic engagement with Bourdieu remains absent due to the priorities of Israeli sociology on army and ethnicity, which happen to be Bourdieu’s weakness (Gelernter & Silber, 2009). In a similar vein, in Argentina, there is nothing resembling an enshrined school where Bourdieu’s sociology may be considered hegemonic (Baranger, 2008). In the Chinese context, Shi and Li (2019) summarise a three-stage dissemination of Bourdieu’s sociology, from initial introduction, through broad exploration, to in-depth discussion.

In a recent new volume on Bourdieu and Chinese education edited by Mu et al. (2019), a group of scholars in China, Australia, Canada, and the US engage in a dialogue with Bourdieu and rise up to the challenge of developing a critical sociology of Chinese education. The book raises persistent questions not only about issues of equity, competition, and change in Chinese educational policy and practice, but also about the value, venture, and violence in using established Western intellectual frameworks for analysing Chinese education. The book concludes with a call for a “reflexive reappropriation” of Bourdieu’s sociology in the study of Chinese education and initiates a research agenda that would include studies of:

• the theoretical, methodological, and epistemological attractions and distractions of using Western social scientific models, frameworks, and worldviews for studying Chinese education, culture, and society;

• the germinating development of contemporary Chinese “habituses” – new homo economicus and homo academicus – in response to academic politicism, academic capitalism, and edubusiness;

• the everyday lived experience, wisdom, and conundrum of Chinese students, parents, and educational professionals in the ordinary and extraordinary contexts of home, school, and community; and particularly,

• the structural restraint and resilience of rural teachers, parents, and left-behind children; and of rural-urban migrant workers and floating children; and,

• the status and education of non-Han, ethnic minorities in the context of increasingly visible multicultural politics and growing doxic urgency for social cohesion and nation-state building in rising China.

That agenda would immediately speak to the critical mass of the educational “market” (edubusiness), the mythical might of the state and institutional power in education (academic politicism), the stunning diversity in student populations and the teaching force, the dramatic disparity in educational quality, and the multi-layered tensions in educational equity. These historical and contemporary enigmas loom large in China and across the world, despite consistent efforts of policy makers and school professionals. To grapple with the Chinese enigmas and the “Chinese myth”, Bourdieu’s work has pertinence. On the one hand, Bourdieu’s sociological foray into, and beyond, the economics (e.g., Bourdieu, 1977, 1983, 2000, 2005; Bourdieu & Boltanski, 1981) has offered purchase on attendant understandings of Chinese education. On the other hand, Chinese education has strong potential to push the limit of Bourdieu’s sociological framing.

Over the past decades, Chinese sociology has shifted from the consecration of Western schools to the localised narratives of successful Chinese practice (Liang, 2018). Such a shift has strong potential to inform the disciplinary development of sociology locally and globally (Xie, 2018). Yet intact transplant of Western tools to China continues, and continues to fail in explaining the Chinese society thoroughly and in making any theoretical and methodological breakthroughs (Zhai, 2018). Therefore, it is dangerous for Chinese colleagues to presume and misrecognise the “dominant legitimacy” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990, pp. 22-23) of Western tools, and engage with Bourdieu without questioning the orthodoxy of “scholastic doxa” (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 381) and the “monopoly of scientific authority” (Bourdieu, 1975, p. 19). The tendency and expectation for Chinese scholars to frame their work through Western paradigms, but not vice versa for Western scholars with arrogance and ignorance, become a form of symbolic violence in the doxic academia. Struggle for surviving and thriving in the doxic academia does demonstrate resilience but habitual adaptations to the imposing field only help to obtain a better field position without shaking the field doxa.

To create a “solvent of doxa” (Wacquant, 2004, p. 101) requires a sociological resilience to symbolic violence (Mu, 2018, 2019; Mu & Pang, 2019). Authors in this special issue – we – engage in a sociological process of resilience through our collective responses to the non-reflexive, celebratory tone of some of Bourdieu’s disciples who consecrate the French sociologist and his canonical theorem, and hence reproduce the symbolic violence in the doxic academia. Engaging with Chinese rural education, teacher education, language education, health and physical education, and transnational education, we develop a series of new conceptualisations.

In the first paper, Pang (2020) argues for epistemic justice in health and physical education through a dialogue between Chinese philosophies of embodiment and Bourdieu’s habitus. The second paper by Mu (2020) engages with a Bourdieusian rebuttal to Bourdieu’s rebuttal, extending Bourdieu’s field theory to incorporate network thinking and regression analysis – the very two approaches that Bourdieu has criticised repeatedly. The next two papers are situated at borderlands of the rural and the urban. Yu (2020) focuses on habitus restructuring of rural-to-urban migrant children. Yin and Mu (2020) recognise localised pedagogical capital through their investigation of graduates from elite universities teaching in rural schools. The next paper by Li (2020) connects the historical power vicissitudes of English to the changing status and entrenched inequality in Chinese education. The final two papers are situated in the transnational higher education field where Wang (2020) features middle class families’ cosmopolitanism and entrepreneurialism; and Dai et al. (2020) suggest the plurality of an in-between, diasporic cosmopolitan habitus.

Grounded in the empirical Chinese problems (re)analysed and (re)framed through resource to Bourdieu, the seven papers complement, complicate, and challenge Bourdieu through Chinese education. The new conceptualisations – necessary not redundant Bourdieusian notions – extend Bourdieu within the remit of a Bourdieusian lens and take Bourdieu’s work to the limits through the mutual deconstruction and reconstruction of Bourdieu’s sociological conceptualisations and Chinese educational contestations. In so doing, we create a field of mediation (Yin & Mu, 2020) – an intellectual space that seams traditional chasms to generate new knowledge about Chinese education and respond to the strident, and sometimes misleading, castigation of Bourdieu for determinism and fatalism.

Our work engages with rigorous and scrupulous empirical applications; grapples with extensions of many of Bourdieu’s canonical premises and principles; comes to grips with historical and cultural, political and geopolitical, social and economic, as well as local and global dynamics and tensions rippling through Chinese education; and comes up with a reciprocal building of new critical theory, method, and epistemology to frame the unprecedented phenomena and problems of power, politics, and participation in a globalised era of pronounced change, conflict, and challenge. We work against simply riffling through Bourdieu’s oeuvre and cherry-picking the most useful for explaining our empirical problems; rather, we suggest addressing urgent educational issues and sociological problems through a Bourdieusian lens, and most importantly, plumbing the limits of such. The effort here, therefore, does not fall prey to what Atkinson (2011, p. 344) calls “pragmatic empiricism” but align with what Stahl (2016) means by “doing Bourdieu justice”.

Rahkonen (2008, p. 7) cites Niilo Kauppi’s description of his apprenticeship in the Bourdieusian circle:

We were like a sect, a group of few, whom Bourdieu himself had chosen. Bourdieu was our leader…We believed what he said and trusted him. Without doubt, following Bourdieu’s teaching changed irreversibly our worldview. We collected and read all his texts. We tape-recorded his seminars and lectures. We started to despise his rivals in Paris and inside the EHESS. Many of us dreamed of becoming his right hand. In the eyes of others in the Parisian academic world we were seen as a group of our own; we gained ourselves some of his charisma.

The self-ironic tone here naturally invokes a reflexive question: “Are we any similar to the youthful Kauppi?” The answer can be both “Yes” and “No”. This is because we are respectful for, but not restricted to, Bourdieu’s epistemological enterprise. We aim for “fruitfulness rather than faithfulness” (Atkinson, 2011, p. 337) without timidity in questioning and contesting the sociological framework of the famed thinker when our research problems and findings demand so. As Baranger (2008, p. 15) argues:

the mere appropriation-repetition of his concepts and proposals in the hands of disciples might be judged as a distortion of his legacy: It seems a shame to work on Bourdieu purely from the teaching angle, which totally deforms him.

Indeed, Bourdieu himself asserts: “I believe it is possible to think with a thinker and to think, at the same time, against him or her” (Bourdieu et al., 2011, p. 114). Bourdieu has also shown us to “use Weber against Weber to go beyond Weber…and be an anti-Marxist Marxist” (Bourdieu, 1988b, p. 780). Here Bourdieu is encouraging us to become new homo academicus. On the one hand, we are enculturated into a system of academic habitus (Bourdieu, 1988a) that venerates and inherits Bourdieu’s sociological bequest, and hence engages in the intergenerational reproduction of sociological knowledge. On the other hand, we make a valiant attempt to vie for academic capital and intellectual capital in the scholarly field (Bourdieu, 1988a) not through unconscious submission to the symbolic violence of academic authority of Bourdieu, but through reflexive “habitus realisation” (Mu & Dooley, 2015; Mu et al., 2019; Mu & Hu, 2016) that buttresses “academic interventions” on the relation between academic power and academic knowledge. These academic interventions are “heretical breaks with the artfully intertwined knowledge and power of academic orthodoxy” (Bourdieu, 1988a, p. 105), constituting a sociology of resilience to question the “dominant cultural arbitrariness” and its “legitimate agency of imposition” of “objective truth” (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990, pp. 22-23).

By virtue of sociology of resilience, we make consistent attempts to decipher the matrix of reproduction and stratification, and propose approaches to emergent development and transformative change in Chinese education. These attempts, however rudimentary and polemical, with insights and oversights, have been long overdue. To address this urgency and its salience to Chinese education, the special issue proffers implications to Chinese and Western schools of sociology, and sparks debate and criticism from sociologists of education in and beyond the Chinese academic community. The special issue not only engages in a “reflexive reappropriation” of Bourdieu’s sociology in Chinese educational research (Mu et al., 2019) but also, in a broader sense, responds to the recent contestation on localisation of Chinese sociology (Liang, 2018; Xie, 2018; Zhai, 2018). The gist here, however, is not to participate in the debate of whether localisation of Chinese sociology is a pseudo-question (Xie, 2018) or not (Liang, 2018; Zhai, 2018). The gist is to encourage a dialectical dialogue between different schools of sociology for mutual critique and reciprocal learning. Such criticality is inspired by the “regulated confrontation” (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 384) or the “constructive dialogue” between Bourdieu and his frenemy James Coleman (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 373):

I believe that it offers proof that social scientists who belong to very different, if not antagonistic, theoretical and methodological traditions, who come from different countries and different intellectual traditions, who sometimes root for opposed political visions of social science, can s’entendre, as we say in French, that is, both hear one another and agree with each other, at least enough to enter into constructive dialogue…social science can avoid the false and costly alternative between, on the one hand, a cold war of position between opposed camps and, on the other, the anarchical exchanges of large national and international meetings, without relapsing into the fictitious and falsely progressive consensus imposed by an orthodoxy.

Constructive dialogue, as Bourdieu (1991, p. 373) believes, can enable “a transformation of the social organisation of scientific production and communication”. At the core of the transformation, according to Bourdieu (1991, p. 384), is to departicularise “particular points of view” and to decode the social determinants of particular differences by “countering the tendencies toward anomic fission inscribed in the multiplicity of modes of thinking” and “making possible the regulated confrontation of contending points of views”. To rethink, reanalyse, and reconceptualise contending points of views of Chinese education also requires “epistemological vigilance” (Bourdieu, 1988a, p. xiii; Bourdieu et al., 1991, p. 69) and “participant objectivation” (Bourdieu, 2003, 2013). These tools are sociologically resilient to scholastic bias – the naïve claim of the “ethical neutrality” of knowledge, which itself is “guilty of veritable abuse of symbolic power” (Bourdieu, 1988a, p. xvi).

One question remains, however, in terms of how to gain enough power to enable a sociology of resilience for transformational change. Burawoy (2018) discusses the three phases of Bourdieu’s ascendance to academic and political power: First, through his salvation of sociology as a moribund discipline in the then France and establishment of a sociology of symbolic domination as a scientific discipline; second, through his exalted professorship in the Collège de France and his position as a vanguard sociologist to make sociologists as the vanguard of intellectuals as a whole; third, through his presentation of intellectuals as the representatives of the interests of all to dignify the dominated groups rather than describing them as blinded by habitus and misrecognition, compelled by doxa and field, and bereft of cultural capital and agency. Would Bourdieu’s three-phase strategy have any reference to sociology of resilience that aims to evoke transformational change? We hope that the collective wisdom of the special issue can help find the answer, or at least part of it.

Acknowledgements

The work in this paper is sponsored by the Australian Research Council (DE180100107).

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Guanglun Michael Mu

Dr Guanglun Michael Mu is a Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Education at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. His publications straddle three areas of sociology of education, namely child and youth resilience in a multicultural, (im)migration context; Chinese identity in a diasporic context; and teacher professionalism in an inclusive education context.