From water to tears: extra-curricular activities and the search for substance in China’s universities

ABSTRACT

Why do university students participate in extra-curricular activities in China? What do they seek in a meaningful education? This paper explains the rising interest in extra-curricular activities by looking into students’ frustration about classroom-bounded education in China’s universities. A transforming socio-economic landscape and increasing imagination about global modernity have inspired new neoliberal demands for practical knowledge and personal meaning. And yet, China’s universities have failed to keep up with students’ changing visions of education, success, and productive personhood. This paper explores students’ agentive pursuit of sociability and emotional sensitivity through extra-curricular activities as a lens to examine the fluidity of meaning-making in contemporary China. In the process, I discuss why self-reported aspirations in skill cultivation cannot encompass the range of motivations that have driven students to extra-curricular participation, and explain how the ethnographic method can help to address gaps of knowledge in inquiries about youthful aspirations.

KEYWORDS:

• University education
• extra-curricular activities
• aspirations
• elite youth
• ethnography
• China

Acknowledgements

Earlier drafts were presented at the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, the Annual Ethnography in Education Research Forum at the University of Pennsylvania, the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference, and FRED. I am grateful to Kimberly Arkin, Tracey Skelton, Suzanne Naafs, and two anonymous reviewers for providing helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In spite of the rapid increase in university enrollment, it remains a privilege for a few – most of whom grew up in economically well-off families from the urban areas – to secure admission to the best universities in the country. Rural students ‘tend to be at a disadvantage in the fierce competition to gain access to the best university education’ (Hansen 2015, 21).

2 The Wall Street Journal, for example, ran several stories about graduate unemployment in China. Examples are ‘Value of a Chinese College Degree: $44?’ by Josh Chin on 22 November 2010, and ‘Chinese College Graduates Play It Safe and Lose Out’ by Bob Davis on 26 March 2013.

3 All names of people, institutions, and groups used in this paper are pseudonyms.

4 Personal computer and smartphone ownership were not uncommon, but they were still a relative luxury in most of China at the time of my fieldwork.

5 47.8% of the 1499 survey respondents had no siblings. 29.7% had one.

6 I generated the list of options after six months of field research to capture common motivations for extra-curricular participation. Available options include ‘cultivate skills,’ ‘earn extra credits,’ ‘for résumé building,’ and ‘develop a sense of belonging.’

7 This is consistent with my data, which shows that dropouts from student organizations are common as soon as the novelty wears off.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by fieldwork grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation and Boston University.