Guanxi and school success: an ethnographic inquiry of parental involvement in rural China

Abstract

This study examines the differential patterns of school success of rural students as a result of China’s market transition. The process dimension, how families from different social backgrounds within rural society get involved in rural schooling and how this contributes to the inequality of school success within rural society, is investigated. The data analysis suggests that schools as institutions provide few official channels for rural parents to participate in rural schools and help their children to achieve school success. This raises the importance of families’ strategic initiatives to employ guanxi within family, community and between school and family. These make the point that guanxi and their employment have become an important mechanism for social inclusion and exclusion in the competition for advantages in school success in post-socialist China.

Keywords:

• guanxi
• social capital
• school success

Acknowledgements

The authors want to thank Dr Jennifer Adams at the University of Drexel, Professor Yang Rui at the University of Hong Kong, and Professor Wu Zhihui at the Northeast Normal University for their comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The market reform in China has brought changes to its social. While maintaining advantages for such social groups as the cadres and the urban professionals who were traditionally advantaged in the pre-reform status hierarchy, it also created new advantages for an emerging economic elite group. ‘Cadre’ is not only a job category in the official coding system but also a status group (Bian 2002a). Cadre refers to a small group of people who hold prestigious managerial and professional jobs. The new arising economic elite refers to the private entrepreneurs, managers of township and village enterprises, household business owners and individual industrialists, and commercialists. They gained their power in post-socialist China because the returns to human capital became more and more important (Nee 1989; Xi and Xie 2014).