Chinese school teachers’ imaginaries of being intellectuals

ABSTRACT

This article presents an exploratory qualitative study that investigated a group of Chinese school teachers' imaginaries of intellectuals and self-perceived experiences of being an intellectual. The study was informed by the perspectives of critical pedagogy, that is, to transform technician-like teachers to organic, transformative, or society-involved intellectuals with an activist vision and emancipatory commitment. The findings were generated from textual analysis of in-depth interviews. Chinese teachers tended to distance teaching from their imagined intellectual work, which was deemed value-free and prestigious. Additionally, they rarely regarded themselves as critically engaged agents committed to challenging the oppressive structure in education. Their unreflexive acceptance of the intellectual-teacher divide and their depoliticised stance have largely been shaped by the instrumental approach of education, the pleasure-driven cultural industry, and the unique ideological landscape in China.

摘要

本文呈现一项探究式定性研究，考察一组中国学校教师对知识分子的想象以及他们作为知识分子的自我感知体验。本研究基于批判教育学的视角，即将技工般的教师转化为有机、变革性或参与社会的知识分子，具有活动家的愿景并追求解放。通过对教师深度访谈资料的文本分析，得出有关发现。中国教师倾向于区分教学和想象中的智识工作，并认为智识工作价值中立且具有名望。此外，受访教师很少将自身视作致力挑战教育中压迫性结构的批判性参与者。中国教师轻率地接受知识分子与教师之间的分化并采取去政治化的立场，主要是受教育工具化、娱乐导向的文化产业以及中国独特的意识形态环境影响。

KEYWORDS:

• Imaginaries
• intellectuals
• critical pedagogy
• media representation
• Chinese teachers
• hegemony

关键词:

• 想象
• 知识分子
• 批判教育学
• 媒体呈现
• 中国教师
• 霸权　

Introduction

The global spread of neo-liberalism, which is manifested in marketisation, managerialism and performativity, has shaped public thinking about what educators should do and who they are (Ball 2003; Ball and Olmedo 2013). Generally, the neo-liberal discourse, which highlights entrepreneurial control, has brought about an ‘audit culture’ in education (Taubman 2009). Teachers are subject to a myriad of judgements, measures, comparisons and targets, and take on the role of simply carrying out the predetermined content and instructional procedures (Ball 2003). To challenge the technician-like image of teachers, critical scholars (e.g. Freire 1970; Giroux 1988; Yogev and Michaeli 2011) assert that teachers could act as organic, transformative, or socially involved intellectuals who have critical and reflexive insights and are committed to facilitating students to be active citizens.

In China, the term ‘neo-liberalism’ has never been openly embraced in the Chinese policy texts. However, in this country, the tenet of hyper-surveillance has seeped into the economic and social policies (Duckett 2020; Yan 2003) and institutional environment of educational organisations (Qi 2011; Tan 2015; Yiu and Yu 2022). Over the past two decades, teachers have been required to assimilate increased demands for accountability and pressures around performance evaluations according to the Outline of the National Programme for Medium and Long-term Educational Reform and Development (2010–2020) (Wang 2015; Wang 2018; Zhao 2020). However, as Kipnis (2011) notes, it is too simplistic to attempt to understand contemporary Chinese education if we only see things through the lens of neo-liberal ideology. The reduced autonomy and a narrowly defined job remit on the part of teachers could also be attributed to the party-state’s centralised control of ideologies, curricula, pedagogies, and teacher evaluation and the intensification of surveillance (Cravens, Chu, and Zhao 2011; Kipnis 2011; Vickers and Morris 2022; Yiu and Yu 2022). Against this backdrop, Chinese teachers’ evolving identities and practices amidst the changing socio-economic and political contexts are worth studying.

The concepts of organic and transformative intellectuals are defined and investigated mainly in the Western literature. The word ‘intellectual’ (zhishi fenzi 知识分子) itself is exotic to the Chinese language. It was introduced to China at the beginning of the twentieth century (Shao 2010; Song 2020). For more than a century, this term might have been ascribed to multiple layers of meaning as different interpretive schemata were made available and legitimised in China in different historical periods. The divergent interpretations of intellectuals may bring about an unexpected and nuanced understanding of critical pedagogy. Additionally, as Hung (2018) suggests, family piety and social harmony based in the Confucian virtues, condition teachers’ attitudes towards critically engaged citizens, who are actively committed to dismantling oppressive structures. This adds another level of complexity to the understanding and implementation of critical pedagogy in the Chinese context. As a caution against indiscriminate acceptance of the Western critical theorists’ perspectives, we remained open to any possible interpretations attributed to intellectuals and avoided using any pre-defined terminologies, such as ‘transformative intellectuals’, during the data collection process.

Teachers’ ways of categorising people and positioning themselves in the social grid are not fully informed by theories, but rather draw upon individual-felt experiences, which lean on daily socio-cultural practices learned over time. Such experiences extend beyond ‘awareness’ (Orgad 2012, 46), relying on ‘sensations, feelings, and emotions’ (Illouz 2009, 399). They are usually expressed in unstructured and less theorised stories/narratives and images, and nourished by a wide range of symbolic resources that are made available in given socio-cultural contexts. Informed by this theoretical perspective, we adopt the term ‘imaginaries’ rather than ‘understandings’, to capture Chinese teachers’ perspectives on and their identification with intellectuals. The study is guided by three research questions:

1. What are Chinese school teachers’ imaginaries of intellectuals?

2. How do they relate their imaginaries of intellectuals to their own identity as teachers?

3. What experiences and symbolic sources have contributed to feeding their imaginaries of intellectuals and their self-imaginaries of being intellectuals?

Theoretical perspectives on intellectuals, critical pedagogy, and imaginaries

This section reviews three major strands of literature that are pertinent to the issues examined in this study: critical sociology of intellectual life and critical pedagogy; literature related to intellectuals and teachers’ identities in the Chinese context; and theories on imaginaries and the construction of imaginaries in the mediated society.

Critical sociology of intellectuals and ‘teachers as transformative intellectuals’

The tenet ‘teachers as intellectuals’ is largely informed by a critical sociology of intellectual life. Traditionally, intellectuals are defined as thinkers and writers who engage mostly with academia (Nichols 1978) and differentiate themselves from ordinary people (Fatsis 2018). The intellectual sphere exhibits ‘exclusion, elitism and power’ (Harris 2005, 424).

However, Gramsci (1971) challenges such privileged ‘intellectual pedigree’ by arguing that ‘all men are intellectuals … but not all men have in society the function of intellectuals’ (Gramsci 1971, 9). What people need, especially the underprivileged masses, are organic intellectuals who are never detached from ‘the very thin fabric of public life’ (Yogev and Michaeli 2011, 316). Organic intellectuals do not give knowledge or theory to the masses, but engage with them to create conditions necessary for progressive social change. Informed by the Gramscian perspective, a number of critical scholars have introduced alternative insights on intellectuals. They argue that intellectuals could be ‘communicative’ (Habermas 1984), ‘embedded’ (Baert 2015), ‘transformative’ (Giroux 1988), ‘society-involved’ (Yogev and Michaeli 2011), and ‘inclusive and egalitarian’ (Fatsis 2018). To challenge the claim that intellectuals should be neutral experts (Benda 1928), the critical conceptualisation of intellectuals has an activist orientation, committed to playing an active role in changing the world and supporting the emancipatory struggles of the oppressed (Hammond 2019).

In the late twentieth century, gaining insights from the neo-Marxist theories and the Frankfurt school tradition, scholars of critical pedagogy launched a grand mission of transforming technician-like teachers to organic, transformative, society-involved intellectuals, hence teachers who speak out against social injustices both within and outside of schools, facilitate students to deal with reality in a critical and creative manner (Ross 2018).

We acknowledge that the role of schoolteachers portrayed in Western policy discourses (Ball 2003) and practiced in mundane life (Ball and Olmedo 2013) is hardly that of the organic or transformative intellectuals advocated by Gramsci (1971) and Giroux (1988). A major threat to teachers’ being transformative intellectuals could be the widespread adoption of the managerial and technocratic standards-based approach to education (Lin 2020). Recent education reforms across the globe have been largely impacted by the logic of accountability in the neo-liberal era (Jenlink 2017; Simkins 2000; Takayama 2009; Tsang and Qin 2020). Hence, curricula, classroom teaching, and teacher evaluation have become increasingly standardised, mandated, and narrowly defined for the ease of measurement and control.

How can teachers practically step outside the instrumental and technical ideologies and relate teaching practices to engage in the intellectual work proposed by critical pedagogy? As advocated by some researchers in the field of teacher education (e.g. Allen and Wright 2014; Yogev and Michaeli 2011; Zeichner 2005, 2010), by expanding knowledge sources and creating spaces for pre-service and in-service teachers’ social engagement throughout teacher education curricula and professional learning programmes, the existing gap between theory and practice, and the associated theorist-practitioner divide, would be challenged. With the theory-practice gap bridged, teachers would see the potential for themselves going beyond the prescribed job remit and challenging the assigned identities. Although these studies offer useful insights into alternative ways of perceiving teaching, they are mainly reports which promote specific teacher education programmes or school-university partnership projects, with a lack of robust theoretical or methodological frameworks to unpack teacher identities. There is a dearth of empirical studies and hence arises a need to investigate whether and how the proposed socially engaged teacher education could facilitate teachers’ identity transformation, especially in diversified socio-cultural contexts.

Education reforms in China have been driven by multiple and more complex discourses. According to Chen, Wei, and Jiang (2017), recent education policies appear contradictory, committed to increasing school autonomy and strengthening accountability at the same time. Specifically, on the one hand, the New National Curriculum Reform (NNCR) in 2001, which is inspired by the Western student-centred approach to education, has granted teachers more latitude to develop school-based curricula (Cravens, Chu, and Zhao 2011). On the other hand, the NNCR has had some, but only limited, success, as teachers’ autonomy and creativity are largely constrained by rigid mechanisms, such as highly centralised national curricula (Zhao 2020), uniform textbooks for nationwide use (Vickers and Morris 2022), exam-driven schooling and practice (Chen, Wei, and Jiang 2017; Liu and Dune 2009; Xu and Spruyt 2022), and performance evaluation of teachers (Pu and Hu 2015). As mentioned previously, some scholars (Anagnost 2004; Wang 2015; Wang 2018; Yan 2003) attributed the current impasse of NNCR and school education reforms to Chinese society’s submersion in the globalised neo-liberal context. However, other researchers (Kipnis 2011; Tan 2015) direct our attention to the Confucian learning culture and the long-standing authoritarian discourses rooted in educational administration (Yiu and Yu 2022). The increase in accountability demands and authoritarian control reinforced ‘the lock-step, time-on-task pedagogies’ (Lin 2020, 1922).

Literature related to intellectuals and teachers’ identities in the Chinese context

As previously stated, the use of the term ‘intellectual’ in the Chinese language emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. Since the fall of the last feudal dynasty (Qing Dynasty) in China in 1912, the Confucian scholar-gentry (Shi,士), who demonstrated a mastery of Confucian classics, has lost the opportunity to be selected by the imperial exam system as scholar-officials. Their control over ideology was also deprived (He 2014). Scholars like ‘Shi’ transformed to either pure specialists within modernised academic institutions (Yang 2006) or ‘enlighteners’ who were committed to challenging the feudal political regime (Barlow 1991). During the early twentieth century, the new concept of ‘intellectuals’ largely referred to these two identities (Yang, Xie, and Wen 2019). A group of left-wing socialist intellectuals were inspired by Marxism and founded the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1921 (Schwarcz 1986). The proletarian stance of these intellectuals has long been valued by the CCP since the founding of People’s Republic of China in 1949 (Nan 2018). Chinese intellectuals nowadays are given increased academic autonomy and professional recognition (Wei and Johnstone 2020;Yang 2006). However, as the role of the market has gained momentum in every aspect of social life in contemporary China, intellectuals tend to be driven by economic considerations (Mok 2021) and their ‘professional contract’ with academic institutions (Yang 2006, 213).

A body of literature is committed to comparing the normalised meanings ascribed to being socially and critically engaged intellectuals in the Chinese and Western contexts. First, in ancient times, Chinese traditional scholars like ‘Shi’ took the responsibility of promoting the ‘way’, the normative Confucian virtues and ethics, and cultivating the masses with the ‘way’ (Shao 2010; Xu 2010; Yang 2006; Yu 1997). Yet, such responsibility is viewed as distinct from responsible public engagement that is critically theorised in the Western critical literature (Freire 1970; Giroux 1988). This is largely due to the lack of politically independent space for scholarship in the Imperial Era in China (221 BCE −1912 CE) (Xu 2009; Yang 2006; Yu 1997).

Second, the intellectual quest for the radical social transformation during the first few decades of the twentieth century took a critical stance towards the oppressed feudal society. However, many Chinese scholars at that time upheld an elitist discourse, distrusting ordinary people’s agency in social transformation (Xu 2010).

Third, for the left-wing intellectuals, CCP’s favourable attitude towards an ‘intellectual-cadre’ and their ‘thought reform’ of intellectuals with feudal or bourgeois characteristics (U 2007) broke with the elite discourse, and hence were akin to Gramsci’s differentiation between traditional and organic intellectuals (Huang and Li 2012).

Fourth, in the face of the commodification of culture and communication in contemporary China, intellectuals’ social commitment via media has been ‘stigmatised’ to a considerable extent (Wen and Luo 2014, 79). By catering to public preferences or manipulating for media attention, some intellectuals lost their independent and critical thinking and became profit-driven (Yang 2006).

The idea of ‘teachers as intellectuals’ is also foreign to current educational theories in China. However, it should be noted that a teacher’s identity had long been more than a transmitter of prescribed knowledge. In the Confucian cultural heritage, teachers are highly respected because they are viewed as role models and mentors who cultivate people with the Confucian virtues (Tan 2015, 203). Confucius was regarded as a Grand Master and model teacher of every age (Huang and Asghar 2018). In this sense, the traditional Chinese teacher’s identity cannot be detached from the spirit of ‘Shi’.

Has this image of a teacher changed in contemporary China? For Tan (2015), teachers are still informed by the Confucian idea of the ‘moral exemplar’ identity to a certain degree, and in so doing, rely on teacher-centred teaching. However, according to other scholars (e.g. Chen, Wei, and Jiang 2017; Wang 2015), recent education policies oriented towards the value of competition and performance appraisal have exerted increasing pressures on teachers to hold them accountable for teaching outcomes. As a result, teachers tend to pay less attention to the cultivation of students’ moral and philosophical values.

Notably, some Chinese scholars (e.g. Hu 2008; Qi 2016) have introduced the work of critical pedagogy into Chinese academia in recent years. They argue that Giroux’s (1988) proposition of ‘teachers as transformative intellectuals’ would facilitate a shift from passive and rote learning to active and problem-based learning. However, these studies are primarily introductions and commentaries, lacking empirical data gathered from Chinese schools. Consequently, without contextualised analysis, we cannot know Chinese teachers’ understanding of, and responses to, the Western critical theories of the teacher-intellectual relationship.

Theorisation of imaginaries and their construction process

As previously discussed, the meaning of intellectual is not predetermined, rather, it is continuously constructed in particular social contexts. Teachers’ identification with the constructed social category could be viewed as a process of creating a link between oneself and an imagined community, either relating themselves to the imagined intellectuals or distinguishing themselves from such imaginaries (Calhoun 1991; Orgad 2012). The process of establishing a relation among constructed meanings is named ‘the articulatory practice’ by Laclau and Mouffe (1985). What helps to forge the meaning of the articulatory practice adopted by individuals? Although any imaginary work appears to be individuals’ personal and private mental work, it is nurtured fundamentally by collective cultural practices and social norms (Boltanski 1999; Taylor 2004). What could be imagined and how imaginaries are expressed, rely on a repertoire of representations, which are made available to be drawn upon in given social contexts.

The imagination process is consolidated in power struggles, serving the reproduction of discourses with hegemony. As defined by Gramsci (1971), hegemony is a form of power which depends on gaining people’s consent on particular discourses. When gaining hegemonic power, a particular imaginary is made possible and desirable, thereby having a widely shared sense of legitimacy. It is notable that any articulated imaginary could be a reduction of possibilities (Phillips and Jørgensen 2002). As certain relations between discourses – ways of representing particular aspects of the world (Fairclough 2003) – are established and fixed in an articulated representation, other possibilities of meaning articulation are marginalised or abandoned. This helps to account for why certain phenomena become ‘dead zones of the imagination’ (Giroux 2013) and why particular imaginaries appear monolithic. In the field of education, the ‘dead zones of the imagination’ could result from the instrumental and technician oriented discourses (Ross 2018). Instead of responding to public issues with critical reflexivity, teachers, in reality, are required to devote all their energies to survive in the drill-and-test modes of pedagogy underpinned by the values of performativity and accountability. Given this background, emancipative imaginaries are afforded great significance in critical pedagogy (Ross 2018), as they may foster resistance to the conventional social structure and organisational culture.

As articulated meanings, imaginaries are not naturally given, but are constantly reconstructed and found in the complex meaning matrix of images and discourses. A flourishing body of literature (e.g. Anderson 1983; Chouliaraki 2006; Orgad 2012; Wang and Wang 2021; Wang and Kuntz 2021) has emphasised the important role played by the media in feeding and shaping people’s imaginaries in a media-saturated world. From the perspective of literature on media which adopts a critical stance, the increasingly commoditised media solely caters for broad segments of users and advisers, which may drive public attention away from solemn perspectives and political news, and shift to news and perspectives of an entertaining nature (Fuchs 2016; Turner 2010; Youmans and York 2012).

We acknowledge that, although media plays a vital role in constructing people’s imaginaries, research on imaginaries should not ignore people’s daily practices in the educational and occupational fields. Referring to Bourdieu’s theorisation of field, Wang (2016) argues that individuals usually prefer traversing in relatively predictable ways with benefits brought about by the investment of accumulated capital and the match of acquired dispositions. Previous empirical research on how such experiences contribute to constructing people’s imaginaries is limited.

Methodology

The participants in this study included 14 full-time teachers from 12 public primary schools in Beijing. They were sponsored by the local school district as exemplary teachers to participate in a five-week in-service teacher training programme in 2019, with a total of 20 teachers enrolled. This training programme was delivered in an intensive mode by the Teacher Training Institute of University A in Beijing during the summer vacation from July to August 2019. During the first four weeks, all trainees were required to attend a series of lectures concerning educational policy, pedagogy, and an application of educational technology. The last week was devoted to writing a reflective paper which addressed practical issues they encountered in workplaces informed by theoretical perspectives. To offer the trainees additional academic support, University A assigned every three or four teachers a supervisor – a faculty member from the Faculty of Education.

The first author of this paper was invited to give a lecture about school culture in the first week of this programme and she was also appointed as a supervisor of four trainees. At the beginning of the programme, the first author contacted her supervisees, explaining the aims and proposed methods of the research project and seeking help from them to introduce herself to other trainees. At the end of her lecture, she further introduced her proposed research, and assured the trainees that data collected was for research purposes only and that their choice of non-participation would not negatively impact their achievements within the training programme. Fourteen trainees agreed to participate in this research project.

All participants were female teachers and had more than five years’ teaching experience. Table 1 summarises the demographic information of all participants and subject areas: seven Chinese teachers, four Maths teachers, two teachers of Moral Education, and one English teacher. All participants had served as class head teachers and were under the age of 40. Eleven teachers were in their 30s and three were in their late 20s. Ten participants had master’s degrees, one held a doctorate degree, and three had bachelor’s degrees.

Table 1. Demographic information of fourteen participants.

Participants	Subject	Age	Years of teaching experience	Educational qualification (degree)
Teacher A	Moral Education	30	5	master
Teacher B	Maths	33	8	master
Teacher C	Chinese	31	6	master
Teacher D	Chinese	28	5	bachelor
Teacher E	Maths	29	6	bachelor
Teacher F	Chinese	31	6	master
Teacher G	Chinese	34	8	master
Teacher H	Maths	35	10	master
Teacher I	Chinese	34	5	doctoral
Teacher J	English	32	7	master
Teacher K	Maths	31	6	master
Teacher L	Chinese	37	12	master
Teacher M	Moral Education	33	11	bachelor

A qualitative in-depth, face-to-face interview method was employed to obtain narratives on each individual’s terms. Initial interviews with each participant were conducted during the third and fourth week of this training programme, and each interview lasted 30–50 min. Interview questions were organised into four broad categories. The first category explored the participants’ personal backgrounds. The second category investigated images of those whom participants deemed to be intellectuals. Participants were also encouraged to imagine a link between themselves and their identified intellectuals. Other questions focused on evidence used by the participants to relate the imaginaries of intellectuals to their sense of self. After completion of this training programme, 21 follow-up interviews were conducted either in a face-to-face mode or via telephone. Eight participants had two follow-up interviews, four participants had one interview, and one even had three interviews. These follow-up interviews provided the participants with an expanded space to clarify or further elaborate viewpoints presented in previous interviews.

According to Burgess (1988), the significance of qualitative interviews is to enable participants to use their own concepts rather than engage them in responding to a set of ‘staccato questions’ (144). Informed by this approach, the preliminary general interview protocol outlined above was used as a primary reference. The overall conversation flow of each interview was less structured and open to change based on participants’ spontaneous responses. Additionally, the interviewer avoided using definitions in any given literature to confine the participants’ interpretations. All interviews were digitally recorded and then transcribed. Efforts were made to adhere to the principles of University A’s Human Research Ethics Committee. All participants were assigned pseudonyms to protect their privacy and confidentiality.

Adopting the approach to a multi-tiered coding strategy (Corbin and Strauss 2007), the researchers aggregated and assembled raw data into emerging condensed themes, and then further categorised the previously identified themes and mapped them into theoretical patterns. Qualitative software NVivo 10 was used to facilitate the thematic coding. Furthermore, in order to gain understandings on how participants either diluted or intensified differences between their imagined self and imaginaries of intellectuals, Fairclough’s (2003) approach to textually centred discourse analysis was drawn upon as an important point of reference. One focus was the choice of words in texts, because ways of wording helped to reveal perspectives of representations, thereby indicating discourses that underpinned participants’ imaginaries. The other focus was synonymic and antonymic relations between words and clauses. These semantic relations have the potential to reveal meanings that are included and/or excluded in articulating the images of the self and intellectuals.

Research findings

The analysis of the data revealed three distinctive but related themes on Chinese school teachers’ imaginaries of being intellectuals. The first theme represents the participants’ imaginaries of intellectuals. The second reveals how participants linked their sense of self to the desired images of intellectuals, and how they compared their teaching practice with the imagined intellectual labour. The third examines the construction of their sense of self and imaginaries of intellectuals.

The imagined intellectuals: elites in the Ivory Tower

Although eleven participants initially stated that they could be counted as intellectuals as they all held bachelor or master’s degrees, all of them reversed their initial attitudes when citing specific examples to illustrate the images of their imagined intellectuals.

Out of 31 examples representing imagined intellectuals, 22 were well-known professors, writers, poets, and artists who were active in the Republic of China during the first half of the twentieth century. These scholars and social celebrities were referred to as ‘Intellectuals of the Republican Period’ (henceforth IRs) in the paper. IRs were depicted as ‘learned and refined’ (eleven times), ‘free from vulgarity’ (seven times), ‘erudite’ (four times), ‘conscientious’ (four times), ‘elegant’ (three times), ‘noble’ (three times) and having ‘integrity’ (twice). When discussing unique dispositions of the IRs, some participants attributed these to their family tradition of learning and privileged educational backgrounds, especially their overseas study experience at leading universities in the United Kingdom or the United States. Surprisingly, those perceived left-wing scholars and writers from the Republican period were mentioned only twice by the participants, even though their academic or social contributions had been exalted by the Chinese government and Chinese Communist Party for decades, such as initially introducing Marxism to China at the beginning of the twentieth century. As six participants clearly pointed out, in their minds intellectuals should never engage in politics. Otherwise, they can hardly remain neutral experts.

Seven examples of imagined intellectuals were scientists who achieved fame and prestige after the founding of PRC in 1949. They were revered for making irreplaceable contributions to Chinese society, such as cultivating a high-yield rice product to solve the food crisis in China at that time. While commenting on their outstanding contributions and self-sacrifice, participants also emphasised their family tradition of learning and kinship with social celebrities. For example, ‘although he (an agricultural scientist) himself looks like a poor peasant, his mother was born and educated in England … She could speak very good English’. The other three examples were renowned scholars in ancient times, who not only proposed philosophical viewpoints, but also acted as spiritual and moral models. Only Teacher L, a Chinese teacher, indicated that an idealised intellectual should be equated with the Chinese traditional image of ‘Shi’ (士) who demonstrated Confucian virtues, such as ‘commitment to Home Country’ (家国情怀).

Interestingly, idealised intellectuals in the participants’ minds did not include any contemporary Chinese scholars specialised in social science. In fact, this group of scholars was usually portrayed as a complete counter-model of their imagined intellectuals. Five participants even lamented that intellectuals are extinct in contemporary China. On the one hand, in five instances, participants contrasted the appearances and scholarly dispositions of the desired intellectuals and current Chinese scholars. Teacher F’s comment was typical:

When you compare the images of a famous professor in the current time and an IR, you will immediately identify their strikingly different dispositions.

On the other hand, in eighteen instances, by drawing upon their experiences of education, especially their experiences of interacting with some university faculties, participants showed contempt for contemporary scholars. In their eyes, in contrast to the imagined intellectuals who had an ardent passion for knowledge or an aspiration for serving the society, current scholars conducted research mainly motivated by anticipated material benefits. Teacher A considered her supervisor as ‘a businessman’:

My supervisor is more like a businessman, seeking research projects for his research team and allocating research work to his graduate students.

Participants also exhibited disappointment at some scholars’ activities outside the ‘ivory tower’, which involved serving as an instructor in in-service training programmes, serving the government-sponsored think tanks, acting as ‘guest experts’ in TV shows, and being ‘opinion leaders’ via social media platforms. Although some participants acknowledged that such ‘non-traditional intellectual work’ was undertaken in the name of ‘serving public agendas’, they regarded such work improper due to a sense of the increasingly politicalised and commercialised nature of intellectual work. As indicated by Teacher A and Teacher C, many instructors in training programmes and celebrity scholars in cyber space strive to earn more money by ‘selling’ their knowledge and expertise to a wider audience in a commercialised society.

The contrastive images given to the imagined and contemporary intellectuals further illustrate the normalised meanings ascribed to the identity of intellectuals in the Chinese contexts. Idealised intellectuals were supposed to remain an elite social class and distance themselves from market values and partisan politics.

Teachers’ sense of self-deprecation: ‘We can hardly be viewed as intellectuals’

From the interviews it became clear that most participants distanced themselves from an ideal image of intellectuals. When positioning themselves in relation to intellectuals, they always exhibited a strong sense of self-deprecation. Specifically, first, by portraying intellectuals as elites with prestige and celebrity, twelve participants pointed out that their less privileged family background and non-elite educational trajectory had excluded them from the possibility to grow into intellectuals. For example, nine participants made a comparison between education received by IRs and their own education. The former was regarded as the key for cultivating desired scholarly dispositions because of high-quality teaching and facilities. In contrast, the public school education they received became the target of criticism for its inferior teaching quality. Ironically, despite the perceived gap between ordinary people and the elites, the participants did not turn a critical gaze to the reproduction of inequality in education. Rather, some of them criticised the persecution of scholar-gentry families, which happened throughout Proletarian Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976. According to these teachers, the dispositions and tastes of their imagined intellectuals can hardly be acquired without a privileged family background.

Second, participants viewed teachers’ work as distanced from the imagined intellectual labour. As most participants noted, intellectual work was charged with the production of esoteric knowledge and cutting-edge innovations. In contrast, Chinese teachers in this study viewed their job as transmitting basic-level knowledge to children, which, they believe, can hardly claim a professional status in terms of intellectual input. Although four participants indicated that high quality teaching required erudite knowledge, intelligence, and creative thinking, they regarded such mental work as having limited intellectual rigour. Their typical comments included:

We can hardly be viewed intellectuals … Being a good teacher is much easier than being a good scientist. After undertaking a year of preparation work, you can pass the teacher qualification exam, but of course you cannot become a scientist (Teacher B).

Our job (teaching) is much more standardised than what the intellectuals do. As a Chinese teacher, I need to teach the prescribed texts according to the prescribed pace. There is limited space for me to create content or methods in teaching (Teacher D).

Five participants shared the concern that many parents of their students were more vocal and much less docile than the older generation. Consequently, their decreased teacher authority was due to the increased level of educational qualifications of the majority of parents. Additionally, six participants cited a popular saying ‘artificial intelligence will soon replace teaching by human beings’ to further account for their pessimism about future career prospects.

Notably, Chinese teachers in this study considered imparting knowledge as the key construct of a teacher’s work. This was obviously distinct from the critical theorists’ argument that teaching should be a public and politically oriented endeavour, committed to excavating and eliminating conditions that produce social inequity. Three teachers, who majored in education throughout their undergraduate and graduate studies, mentioned that they had learned some theories of Freire (1970) and Giroux (1988), including the view of teachers as transformative intellectuals. However, none of them considered this theoretical perspective applicable to the current Chinese schooling context because they did not see the imperative for seeking emancipation in their workplaces. Teacher G commented:

Isn’t this age characterised by rapid development in economy and technology? It’s not the age of great social transformation or even revolution as the older generations experienced. Against this background, I believe what is important is the quality of teaching.

Such a confined interpretation of teaching was further reinforced by the current school administrative system, which is characterised by increased measurement and accountability. Ten participants lamented that they did not have much energy to reflect on teachings as they were overwhelmed by heavy workloads and compliance requirements, such as intensive appraisals of every aspect of their work, implementing prescribed curriculum, managing student discipline, maintaining campus safety, and accomplishing educational research projects. Due to unsustainable workloads, Teacher D, the youngest participant in this research, was frustrated and decided to postpone what she aspired to do to reach the next stage of becoming a senior teacher.

When I finally become a senior teacher, with a great mastery of textbooks and a familiarity of all working requirements, I may have the space to try something alternative, beyond my job remit, something which I had imagined during my undergraduate studies but had never implemented in my everyday work. But now, I am just a machine who works routinely as it is designed.

However, these teachers’ complaints about their monotonous overwork and desire for flexibility did not lead to their aspiration for learning theories. Four participants criticised the supervisor assigned to them in this training programme. This professor mocked those who revealed their lack of theoretical knowledge and forced them to read a theorist’s work which appeared to be esoteric. They regarded him as ‘over arrogant’, as he had no idea about what teachers really needed in daily work.

Construction of teachers’ imaginaries of intellectuals and sense of self

From the interviews we were able to identify the factors that have contributed to shaping participants’ imaginaries of intellectuals and their sense of self. Media images were cited most frequently (67 instances) by the participants as offering sources of information that fed their imaginaries. Specifically, participants referred to popular media representations on 41 occasions in their interview transcripts. These representations included movies and different forms of TV programmes. Among the citations of popular media representations, 24 were about a newly released movie Forever Young. This movie represented life stories of a few fictional alumni of Tsinghua University, which has been one of the leading Chinese universities since its establishment in 1911. Two of the represented life stories happened during the Republican era; the other two happened after the founding of PRC in 1949. Filmic images of IRs offered by the former two stories were frequently mentioned (24 instances) and remained unanimously positive.

In contrast, participants only mentioned intellectuals’ lives during Mao Zedong’s era and in contemporary China in three instances as being manipulated by the mainstream ideology or enslaved by market forces. These contrastive representations of intellectuals in different historical periods informed much of the participants’ admiration of IRs on the one hand, and their deprecating attitudes towards politically engaged intellectuals and current Chinese scholars on the other hand. It was notable that Forever Young was not the only movie telling stories about intellectuals during recent years. Although the participants had not explained why they selected this movie to represent their imagined intellectuals, they seemed to be more attracted by the A-list actors in the movie, and frequently used these stars’ names to refer to their idolised characters in the movie. Nine other citations of popular media representations were TV series which represented life stories of IRs. Portraits of IRs and their family members and important social ties were frequently mentioned by the participants.

Commentaries and news that were posted and disseminated via social media platforms, such as Weibo (a microblog) and WeChat Moments (similar to Facebook’s news feed), were referenced as sources for feeding the participants’ imaginaries in seventeen instances. Approximately 76.5% of the cited commentaries were positive anecdotes of IRs, while the rest comprised largely negative news concerning contemporary scholars, such as their mispronouncing a word in important public events, plagiarising others’ work, and their incredibly high incomes as celebrities. To account for the popularity of social media platforms among teachers, four participants pointed out that, since they had no time to watch completed versions of movies, TV shows or read books, they relied on reading fragments of short commentaries and watching edited videos via WeChat and Weibo in spare minutes.

Compared with popular and social media, traditional print media sources, such as newspapers and books, were rarely mentioned as ways of obtaining access to images of intellectuals. Despite the participants’ admiration of a number of intellectuals, their scholarly work, especially academic papers and books, was not popular. Educational theories were also viewed as less relevant to their teaching practice.

Participants’ daily experiences, especially negative experiences, were another source that influenced their imaginaries of intellectuals and their sense of self. In thirteen instances, participants talked about their impression of current Chinese intellectuals. Examples given in this regard involved how professors lectured in university classrooms and in in-service teacher training programmes, how their university supervisors applied for and completed research projects, and how they treated their students. In eight instances, participants complained about their classroom teaching and interactions with parents who had challenged the teachers’ authority. Interestingly, in sixteen instances, participants contrasted the desired media images with their negative personal experience. They did not question the fictional nature of media representations, nor reflected upon these idealised intellectuals’ different socio-historical contexts.

Discussions: multiple discourses underlying participants’ imaginaries

The findings suggest that Chinese teachers in this study seldom aligned themselves with images of socially involved and politically engaged intellectuals as delineated by Western critical theorists (e.g. Baert 2015; Giroux 1988; Habermas 1984; Yogev and Michaeli 2011). As a piece of critical work, this study is not intended to blame the Chinese teachers for not being organic, transformative or society-involved intellectuals as promoted by some Western critical literature (Giroux 1988; Gramsci 1971; Yogev and Michaeli 2011), but to expose the complexity of meaning articulations between discourses, which have informed the Chinese teachers’ imaginaries and their self-perceived experiences of being an intellectual.

The instrumental and technocratic approach to education

When talking about their teacher identity and work, the participants rarely referred to the role model and mentor identity highlighted in the Confucian cultural heritage. This is misaligned with existing literature (e.g. Hung 2018; Tan 2015), which emphasises the impact of the Confucian tradition on teaching in contemporary China. Notably, being less informed by Confucianism does not necessarily mean that the participants embraced the new identity as facilitator of students’ creative and critical thinking, which was advocated by the NNCR. This echoes Liu and Dune’s (2009) and Zhao’s (2020) pessimistic perspective on the unsuccessful implementation of the student-centred NNCR.

In fact, what has strongly influenced the participants’ sense of self and identity was their everyday teaching practice, transmitting prescribed knowledge with limited intellectual input, and dealing with an overwhelming workload. Their laments about the heavy workload did not lead to critical reflection on whether teaching should be standardised, routinised and intensified labour. They still considered efficiency and accountability as the unquestionable criteria for high quality teaching. This finding supports Ball and Olmedo’s (2013) observation that performativity and managerialism enact a ‘new type of teacher’ (88), who pays particular attention to ‘what works’, rather than the ‘rationale for practice’ (Ball 2003, 222). Although we cannot ascertain whether the participants’ attitudes were significantly influenced by the globalised neo-liberal agenda or by the authoritarian traditions and compliance culture in schools, the study reveals the pervasive influence of the instrumental and technocratic approach in Chinese education.

The existing literature suggests that an equal school-university partnership may facilitate teachers’ reflection on their identities (Allen and Wright 2014; Yogev and Michaeli 2011; Zeichner 2005, 2010). However, this is not affirmed by this study. To a certain degree, the participants’ criticism of marketised higher education and their suspicion of Chinese scholars’ altruistic motives of serving the public downplayed the value of professional development programmes offered by universities. The enduring theory-practice divide was further reinforced.

The elitist discourse of intellectual

The intellectual-mass divide, which conditioned the participants’ imaginaries of intellectuals and their deprecating sense of self, could be a manifestation of the elitist discourse. According to the analysis of what had fed these teachers’ imaginaries, the major source was neither the Confucian ethics nor the NNCR discourses, rather than a set of symbolic representations of well-known IRs. These media representations were widely circulated by the popular and social media. Such findings support Zhu’s (2020) observation of the recent ‘fever of the Republican period’ (minguore 民国热) in Chinese literature, film and TV programmes. With a strong visual impact of these iconic intellectuals’ refined appearances and erudite dispositions, most participants uncritically accepted the romanticised, even idolised images of intellectuals.

In line with critical literature on media (Boyd 2010; Turner 2010), this study demonstrates that symbolic resources with mere surface values can hardly facilitate critical or reflective thinking. Participants seldom questioned whether the eye-catching symbolic representations of IRs were supported by empirical evidence, to what extent the idolised images of IRs can be generalised, and how an admiration of IRs could benefit their everyday teaching. These participants’ attitudes towards media representations reminded us of Giroux’s (2015) concern, that is, by manipulating the attention economy, popular and social media platforms function as ‘a disimagination machine’ (113). It renders any reflections upon the fictional and entertaining qualities of media representations as idle and fanatical. Zhu (2020) also asserts that romanticised images of IRs in the ‘fever of the Republican period’ (民国热) are solely products of the pleasure-driven cultural industry which lead to people’s blind idolatry, rather than a reflexive past-present comparison.

A ‘politics-free’ stance towards intellectual work

Many teachers in this study believed that reliable knowledge was produced by people who existed independently of politics. Such a stance was characterised by a depoliticised nature. The participants’ attitude towards value-free knowledge could result from the continued dominance of the positivist epistemology which governs the modern system of learning. It could also be influenced by the Chinese collective remembrance of the Proletarian Cultural Revolution from 1966 to 1976, which caused significant damage to the Chinese academia. Such collective memory appeared to make participants wary of the alliance between the dominant ideology and the left-wing intellectuals (Xu 2003). Some participants extended their cynicism towards engaged scholarship in general, disapproving intellectual work outside the ‘ivory tower’.

It should be noted that in this study Chinese teachers’ antipathy to politics in intellectual work does not necessarily mean that they adopted a completely value-free and/or politics-free stance. Interestingly, an important aspect of the idolised images of IRs was their enviable family background, which helped to cultivate the intellectuals’ admirable dispositions. Although the participants did not explicitly link the cultural capital owned by these idolised intellectuals to their family’s material condition, judging from the participants’ use of vocabularies and tones in interviews, we could sense their strong admiration of those intellectuals’ families endowed with fame and social status. An association between the power of knowledge and privileged social class was evident. This way of meaning articulation may also be reinforced by the symbolic power of media representations of IRs as previously discussed.

It was also notable that some of the frequently mentioned IRs had exhibited particular political visions in their work, such as an admiration of bourgeoisie reformism (Zarrow 1997). However, their non-Marxist political orientations were seldom commented on by the participants. It seemed that being ‘Marxism-free’ was subconsciously equated with being politically independent and objective. To a certain extent, the participants’ defensive stance towards Marxism and an uncritical attitude towards non-Marxist orientations seem to suggest a gradual decay of Socialist ideology in the increasingly commercialised Chinese society as evidenced in Li’s (2015) study. The uniqueness of the contemporary Chinese ideological landscape adds more complexity to the realisation of critical pedagogy in the Chinese context.

Conclusion

The study explored a group of Chinese school teachers’ imaginaries of intellectuals and their considerations for being intellectuals. The study reveals that teachers as organic, transformative, and society-involved intellectuals appeared to be a ‘dead zone’ of imagination in the Chinese context. Similar to the technician-like teachers in Western countries as described in existing literature (Ball 2003; Simkins 2000; Takayama 2009; Tsang and Qin 2020), teachers in this study tended to comply with ‘the new management panopticism’ (Ball 2003, 219) and unreflexively adhere to the instrumental and technocratic approach to education.

Additionally, the study highlights the unique image of privileged intellectuals in the Chinese teachers’ eyes, that is, idolised social elites in the ‘ivory tower’. This further enlarged the distance between their imagined intellectual work and their own mundane experience of teaching. It is notable that their imaginary was less informed by Confucianism and the ‘Shi’ tradition, but was significantly shaped by popularised media representations and the contemporary political landscape. First, the teachers’ nostalgic admiration for idolised intellectuals prevented them from articulating a more inclusive, egalitarian, and public-oriented view of what an intellectual can be. Second, the inculcation of the CCP’s mainstream ideologies caused political alienation. The participants’ aspiration for value-free knowledge made them feel doubtful towards and detached from the politically engaged scholarship with an emancipatory aspiration. This finding underlines the need to take into account the influence of the media industry and political ideologies in research on teacher identity and critical pedagogy.

As with all studies, the present study contains some limitations. First, since teachers in the study were limited to enrolled participants in an in-service teacher training programme, it was noteworthy that imbalance characterised the research participants’ demographic features, such as gender, age, teaching subjects and teaching locations. Future studies may consider using a mixed method or investigating a more representative sample in different regions or other socio-cultural contexts.

Second, according to Gramsci’s (1971) theory on hegemony, any hegemonic power could not be viewed as absolute and fixed as they are always open to alternative perspectives and forms of resistance. It is notable that some teachers in the study exhibited indocility by questioning both politics-laden and commercialised scholarship. However, such criticisms appeared to be fragmented and lacked sufficient power to challenge the long-standing intellectual-teacher gap. What, therefore, may lead teachers’ cynicism to critical reflections on concealed but deep-rooted hegemonies? This certainly remains an open question and warrants future research. Due to limitations of time and resources, the present research was not committed to engaging teachers in critical reflection upon their cynicism. Future research may consider adopting an explicitly action-oriented stance in relation to this topic.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and members of the editorial board for their insightful comments and suggestions, which have helped to strengthen the article's argument and enhance its quality.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Education of China Humanities and Social Sciences Project (grant number 20YJC880096).

Notes on contributors

Xi Wang

Xi Wang is an Associate Professor of Education at Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University, China. She has a Master’s degree in educational leadership from Simon Fraser University, Canada. She earned her PhD at Christ College, University of Cambridge. She has a long-standing interest in sociology of education, cultural studies, and discourse analysis. Her current research projects focus on educational policy and reform from a comparative perspective.

Ting Wang

Ting Wang is a Professor of Educational Leadership and Deputy Dean of Faculty of Education, University of Canberra, Australia. Her research interests include educational administration, management and leadership, Professional Learning Communities (PLCs), comparative and cross-cultural education. She is the recipient of multiple awards, including a High-End Foreign Expert Award and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor at Faculty of Education, Beijing Normal University.