Attempting to transgress neoliberal value: Constructing a micro-foundation of social values of working-class youth in vocational schools in China

Introduction

It felt quite nice to do something charitable. I can lift myself up a bit as well as ‘warm people’s hearts’ and [benefit] society, so I started to do charity. You know there is a term called ‘positive energy’ (zheng neng liang) which I was not touched by until then. I suddenly know what it means, and I want to do something helpful for others.

The above interview quotation is from one of our respondents, Xiao-yu, a working-class student who comes from a rural family and is now in his last year of an engineering degree at a vocational school in Shanxi, China. Xiao-yu was trying his best to succeed in internship interviews when companies came to the school to recruit students. Living in a student dormitory, Xiao-yu and his roommates were preparing for interviews together for an internship in a factory when we met him. He told us that he hoped to go to the same factory as his dorm mates so that they could take care of one another. He spoke about the values of taking care of each other and strangers, explaining how his altruistic behaviours stem from ‘positive energy’, a buzzword that has spread widely in the Chinese media recently. Indeed, many of the students we met at vocational schools told us repeatedly about the social value of helping one another or strangers. Whether through voluntary activities, charity donations via social media, or helping one another to ask for fair pay from employers, our young respondents informed us during our fieldwork of their altruistic contributions. Although often socially stigmatised as ‘losers’ in China’s educational system and treated unfairly (Koo, 2016; Woronov, 2011), these young people contribute much to both in-group and out-group solidarities.

How does this happen, and why? What can we learn from the practice of these altruistic values? While individualistic values are promoted by the new market reforms in post-socialist China, how can we recapture working-class politics from the perspective of the social values that young workers make, interpret and create for solidarity?

Recent British critical studies on the theory of value have re-examined the process of ‘labour-value-capital’ from Marx’s Capital and attempted to explore the possibility of resistance in neoliberal times (Graeber, 2001, 2011; Sayer, 2011; Skeggs, 2004, 2014, 2019; Skeggs & Loveday, 2012). Specifically, instead of arguing that social values are always colonised in the realm of exchange for profit and appear as the exchange value of a commodity, these studies call for a recognition of social values such as care and mutual support that can be found in everyday practices (Skeggs, 2014). In other words, social values cannot be easily exchanged, even though they are always under the threat of market tyranny. Social activities, always embodied in the form of use value as the antithesis of exchange value and acting as a constitutive other of value, cannot be entirely monetised and their social values can be acted out for the sake of solidarity.

Our research responds to this debate by rediscovering a variety of social values – care, cooperation and solidarity – which are now perceived and practised by the Chinese working-class students of vocational schools. While we are not able to provide a comparison of how these social values are practised in middle-class high schools, we focus on the everyday practices of vocational school students, and explore a possible micro-foundation for working-class solidarity, thereby challenging the theory that legitimates the view that individualism and fragmentation have been adopted by Chinese working-class youth as guiding values. By a micro-foundation of social values, we mean sociological studies of the micro-behaviour of individual agents in schools, the workplace and in the community. Rather than exposing micro-behaviour in times of crisis, we analyse these practices in everyday life and focus on social values to highlight the dignity and solidarity of working-class youth. In contrast to focusing on the increasing temptation of individualisation and desires of consumption (Yan, 2010), an exploration of the micro-foundation of social values helps us to construe a basis of working-class solidarity with everyday practices of a collective nature.

We focus on China’s vocational education because it is a key field that produced about 20 million worker subjects in 2018, the biggest working class in the world, for the local and global markets (Hansen & Woronov, 2013; Pun & Koo, 2015; Smith & Chan, 2015). In other words, through the working-class youths’ experiences, that is, through the lens of class, we can concretely capture the most intense labour politics and explore the possibility of the social values attached to them in contemporary China. Indeed, it is well recognised that one of the most salient social transformations from China’s marketisation over the last few decades has been the aggressive reconfiguration of the working class (Pun, 2016). Facilitated by the late communist leader Deng Xiaoping in 1978, China’s speedy path to participation in global capitalism is based on the unleashing of rural workers moving to urban areas (Shen, 2016). Millions of rural-to-urban migrants have become the chief labour force, who not only shoulder the impacts of the reform of the Chinese economy, that is, marketisation and privatisation, but also, as the world’s biggest working class, underpin China’s status as the ‘world factory’ (Pun, 2016). Ironically, migrant workers cannot yet become a ‘real’ working class as their labour rights and citizenship are strictly restricted under state policy. This includes the infamous Chinese housing registration system (hukou), which largely excludes migrant workers from securing basic citizenship and rights in the city (Pun, 2016). Therefore, the new Chinese working class after Mao has experienced a long-term process of ‘unfinished proletarianisation’ (Pun & Lu, 2010), resulting in a spatial separation of production in urban areas and reproduction in the countryside, and a deepening sense of becoming incomplete, that is, of becoming a peasant-worker, or a ‘quasi’ or ‘half’ worker in the industrial world (Pun, 2016).

Considering the world history of labour, a complete and mature formation of a working class usually took root in the second and third generation of rural workers who came to work in industrial cities (Thompson, 1966), but we witness no similar history in China. For the first generation of migrant workers who went to cities in the 1980s through the 1990s, most still had hopes of bringing the money they earned in factories back to their rural hometowns for establishing families (Koo, 2016). Yet the new generation of the migrant working class who were born in the 1990s or after found themselves caught in-between, as they hardly saw a hope of staying in the cities due to meagre incomes, but nor did they imagine themselves retreating to their rural hometowns, as rural life is increasingly commodified and the means of self-subsistence absent. For most rural families, vocational schools are where they can send their children to learn practical knowledge before they become new subjects of the urban working class (Pun, 2016). Overall, we argue that ‘class’ is not a self-given group designation in China, but rather it is made through contesting socio-economic relationships. We also suggest that the new Chinese labour subjects are produced and reproduced in vocational schools on a daily basis.

Vocational schools are often encouraged and funded by the government to work with companies, helping them train workers through internship programmes to serve new economies such as modern logistics, digital technology and the platform economy. Yet, the social stigma of ‘losers’ and the image of the vocational school as a place of no hope are deeply rooted in the public’s mind (Hansen & Woronov, 2013; Koo, 2016; Ling, 2015; Woronov, 2016). Thus, we will discuss how vocational education has become an important site where different dominant social values are negotiated. We first unpack the debate about values, suggesting the need to reframe how Chinese vocational school students can make and exercise social values. We then present the concept of the micro-foundation of social values, which we argue can help us better understand value production by working-class agents, who have fewer resources but are able to share more with others – in ways that go against neoliberal capitalist logic.

Research methods

This article is developed from a large-scale research project that examines the process of ‘learning-to-labour’ (Willis, 1977) among Chinese young people and their use of social media, in which we attempt to study the ‘becoming process’ of the working-class youth in China’s vocational schools. To capture macro–micro interrelationships among state, education and working-class formation, we conducted surveys and field research in schools and at the sites of internships (workplaces) to examine the role of the state and market in shaping the macro-structure of vocational schooling and the social reproduction of class.

As well as documentary studies and news reports, semi-structured in-depth interviews and participatory research were employed in eight vocational schools in four regions of China: Guangzhou and Zhuhai in southern China, Xian and Lanzhou in western China, Zhengzhou and Wuhan in central China, and Hangzhou in eastern China. We were able to gain access to the schools through a national training workshop provided to vocational school principals and teachers. Principals, teachers and students were interviewed to make sense of schooling experiences, the social status of students, internship experiences, vocation and career paths, and the future prospects of students. The unexpected findings of this project led us to reframe as well as refocus our research, in order to go beyond purely a critique of neoliberal class inequality produced through fast expansion in vocational education in China. Immersing ourselves in their lifeworld, we were increasingly impressed by the students’ ‘positive energy’, by which they are prompted to realise and actualise a variety of social values that heighten their sense of the value of their lives as working-class youth.

Nearly all of the previous research on Chinese vocational schools has been based in eastern China (Koo, 2016; Ling, 2015; Woronov, 2016). While many of the students’ experiences were shared with others around the nation, we intend to explore more of the stories from western China (a less accessible sites for researchers) to diversify the existing available data. This study mainly derives from interviews of 80 students, five teachers and two principals from four vocational schools in western China, supplemented by ethnographic observations of the students’ school lives from 2016 to 2017. While the four schools are located in urban areas, more than 80% of the students come from rural areas, and their parents are either farmers or migrants working in the cities, having monthly earnings of around 2500 to 3000 RMB each. The majority of vocational school students are defined as working-class due to their family incomes being below average for the region in which they live. Our respondents are aged between 16 and 20 years old, and around 45% are female. We employed semi-structured interview methods to focus on students’ practices of values regarding their schooling and internships. We also visited eight student societies in schools and observed students’ performance in class. At times we ate dinner with some of the students to find out more details of their school life and visited their dormitories to make sense of their lived experiences of practising social values.

Theories of the capitalistic logic of value

Critiques of neoliberal capitalism point to the total colonisation of every aspect of human life in a capitalised lifeworld. Topics such as kinship, intimacy, religion, education and employment, to name but a few, are all evaluated and incorporated by the value logic of capitalism (Hochschild, 2003; Illouz, 2007; McRobbie, 2015; Skeggs, 2004; Wilson, 2016). Through prioritising exchange value, capitalism cultivates the middle class’s ‘self of value’ (Lury, 1998), that is, the maximisation of self-value, to create competition and exclusion of those who have less human and social capital. Lury (1998) calls this new late-capitalist ‘self of value’ a ‘possessive individual’ made through property and commodity ‘he’ can earn and own. Or, this self is termed the ‘subject of value’ (Skeggs, 2004) who succeeds as the chief player in the contemporary game of capital through values they make and exchange. Skeggs’s numerous studies show how working-class subjects in the UK are devalued as unworthy subjects, represented by government and mainstream discourse that portrays the working-class individual as one who ‘lacks’ value (Skeggs, 2004). The lives of the British working class are presented and represented as negative ‘self of value’ in the media industry (Skeggs, 2011; Skeggs & Wood, 2012).

Skeggs (2004) argues that the middle classes’ success was based on the exclusion of those who have little or do not play the neoliberal game of self-optimisation or self-enterprise by marketing, exchanging and adding more value to themselves. This critique captures a conflictual politics between value and values, the mechanism that turns social values into exchange values, and the formulation of the modern neoliberal ‘self’ through capitalist competition. In this vein, Skeggs (2014) also warns that this critique of neoliberalism may risk generalising capitalism by succumbing to ‘capitalist realism or market populism’, ignoring its internal contradictions and instabilities that may open space for possibilities and comradeship (2014, p. 16).

To challenge capitalist logic, particularly by questioning the neoliberal value in shaping culture, recent critiques have initiated a re-examination of the theory of value, seeking radical imaginations of social change (Haiven, 2011). For example, David Graeber (2001, 2011) launched a critical review of Marxist value theory in order to reclaim the use value of labour, nature and work to defy the neoliberal violence of market value. Graeber argues that theories of value ‘have (at least since the ’60s) been swinging back between two equally unsatisfactory poles: on the one hand, a warmed-over economism that makes “value” simply the measure of individual desire; on the other, some variant of Saussurean “meaningful difference” ’ – the autonomy and detachment of value from a reified material base (2001, p. 46). Graeber claims that both approaches are essentially static: one is too deterministic and the other is too autonomous. Calling for an action approach to values, Graeber argues that ‘to turn something into a thing is, normally, to stop it in motion; not surprising, then, that such approaches usually have little place for creativity or even, unless forced, production’ (2001, p. 46). Graeber redefines the politics of value by stating:

Value becomes, as I’ve said, the way people represent the importance of their own actions to themselves: normally, as reflected in one or another socially recognised form. But it is not the forms themselves that are the source of value. (2001, p. 47)

Graeber (2001, 2011) disagrees that human labour as productive action is all about making material capital (material value), and he demonstrates that it is about labouring for something one regards as essential and worthy (social values). For Graeber (2001, 2011), it is in this pursuit of values that labour and social activities are motivated and put into action. In other words, the task here is to rearticulate use value or social values as a way of invigorating human desires by invoking a new politics of class and value as a constant struggle (Skeggs & Loveday, 2012). To fathom this question of moving beyond the capitalistic value of self, we thus have to restate a far more open dialectic between use value and exchange value, so as to help construct a micro-foundation of social values for working-class lives.

Rethinking use value

At the beginning of Capital Volume 1 (1867/1954), Karl Marx defines use value as follows:

The utility of a thing makes it a use value. But this utility is not a thing of air. Being limited by the physical properties of the commodity, it has no existence apart from that commodity. … Use values become a reality only by use or consumption: they also constitute the substance of all wealth, whatever may be the social form of that wealth. In the form of society we are about to consider, they are, in addition, the material depositories of exchange value. (p. 44)

In Marx’s critique of political economy, any good or product has a labour value and a use value, and if traded as a commodity in markets, it acquires an exchange value and is expressed as a money-price by subsuming the surplus value of labour (1867/1954, pp. 45–46). Hence, use value can generally be understood as the utility of consuming a good to serve a human need or want. By critically reviewing the concept of value, Skeggs (2004) states that some use values cannot always be exchanged (as we will present later), so we can find the rupture and break the symbolic dominance of capitalist exchange value: ‘This is why I suggest that we turn our perspective to use-value, to that which is praiseworthy for its own sake, to that which is not exchangeable and cannot be put to use to enhance the middle-class self’ (2004, p. 186). Skeggs concludes her defence of use value thus:

Moreover, use-values can only be known when they are put to use, so they force a focus on the uses of culture, relations and practice. This means we can explore how something has different values in different contexts, enabling us to break through the dominant symbolic understandings premised on exchange. (2004, p. 186)

We understand that use value is the ontology of human activity in Marx’s worldview, while exchange value is the constitutive other of use value and vice versa. Yet, as soon as an exchange value is formed and embodied as a commodity circulating in the market, it departs from its use value. While attached to use value, its velocity of circulation is to alienate use value for profit logic and dismiss it. As discussed above, theorists have recently attempted to claim back use value and examine the role of social values in providing a political ethic for solidarity and social protection. Empirical studies have started to provide grounded evidence of this. For example, Angela McRobbie (2015) considers the ‘organic creative labour’ initiated by young female designers in Berlin, Germany, where creativity is used to connect the local community and for cooperation. This group staunchly refuses the transformation of their creativity from use value into exchange value, instead wanting it to be of benefit for the community and for the collective good.

This article, therefore, attempts to rescue the use value of human activities and proposes a micro-foundation of social mechanisms to further construct the discourse and social context of social values. We explore how the working-class youth in our study are not simply playing the game of exchange; instead, we find altruistic values are practised and respected by our informants at the vocational schools in China. This study aims not at comparing the middle-class youth with working-class youth to assess their praxis of social values, but instead focuses exclusively on the vocational school students, the majority of whom are from working-class families.

Becoming a student-worker: Students in vocational schools

It was late autumn when we visited a mid-level vocational school in western China. The students we met, who were 16 years old, were gathered by teacher Tai and were listening to her comments about the education system in China:

We are the people seen as ‘poor quality seeds’ (pin zhong bu hao). So now you can have some basic education that can make you look better, which is good enough. If some of you can keep climbing even to the university, learning something from there, it will be brilliant. Yet if you can’t, at least you complete your obligation then. Well … students you should know this is Chinese education, it has its problems, but this is the era we live in, you understand?

This glimpse of vocational education in today’s China unveils the intricate contradictions of vocational education: where teacher Tai’s students were considered the ‘left-behind’ students of the harsh examination competition in China’s higher education system. It is a system she characterises as an ‘unfair game’ – as many researchers also claim (Koo, 2016; Kulz, 2017; Ling, 2015; Loveday, 2017; Reay, 2017; Silva, 2013; Willis, 1977; Woronov, 2011). However, teacher Tai saw her students as ‘poor quality seeds’ – who are not good enough to attend university. Also, she said to her students that she is the only one who works hard to explore any potential skills that her students might have (value of the self) – given they are not from an elite background. Working-class students’ bodies and personalities here are evaluated with a market price. For example, it is a process of ‘value-extraction’ when teacher Tai asked some tall or extrovert male students to be ‘broad-minded’ and attend a ‘modelling competition’. Tai’s contradictory teaching lays bare a historical irony in the development of vocational education in China – from training revolutionary subjects to producing labour for market use.

Founded by Mao Zedong in the 1950s, modern Chinese vocational education was employed as an essential institution during the socialist years (Hansen & Woronov, 2013). At that time, students were respected, as they were considered the subjects of the communist revolution. But now, in the post-reform era, although vocational education was claimed to be the principal actor for the state labour market, according to China’s Vocational Education Law of 1996, students are experiencing devaluation and discrimination (Ling, 2015). In contrast to the socialist period, today, Chinese vocational education is committed to working with enterprises, whether local or transnational, and schools are training workers for the service sectors and new manufacturing industries which make up the new ‘global workshop’ in China (Smith & Chan, 2015). Students are targeted as future workers to serve the labour market, and digital software curricula and internships have become the core course in schools for training students in the requisite skills (Koo, 2016). In other words, the internship has become the core programme to bridge school and the labour market – a mechanism to connect identities of ‘student’ and ‘worker’. Therefore, compared to the academically focused high schools, which demand that students go to university after graduation, students of vocational schools are often devalued as those who lack the ‘ability’ for intellectual tests or the ‘ambition’ to go to college (Hansen & Woronov, 2013).

Responding to Paul Willis’s (1977) noted ethnography of English male working-class pupils and their schooling experiences, we find that the Chinese vocational school students do not take pride in their working-class identity, nor in the culture of masculinity as the source of power (Pun & Koo, 2019). Woronov also argues that Chinese students in vocational schools are creating alternative forms of ‘resistance’ by not following the rules of schools or teachers, and through their rejection of class, learning has turned them into the ‘privileged’ marginal, who would build their own culture (Woronov, 2011, p. 97).

Our research highlights that, in addition to the privileged marginal’s resistance, working-class solidarity can be formed from the social values students practise inside and outside of schools and workplaces. Rather than limiting their solidarities to the margins of mainstream social and cultural forces and understanding them as a subculture, we bring resistance and solidarity back to students’ everyday lives as the centre of economic and cultural struggle (Willis, 1977). We argue that they are not making their own subculture outside of hegemony, but rather are actively learning to create their social values to form a circuit of solidarity. Students’ altruistic behaviours, their claims of care and helping one another or society, are fostering the substrate of their solidarity in the future. What they learn about the virtue of cooperation, the value of compassion and the ethos of selflessness from the working-class community can inform and challenge the logic of exchange value.

The social mechanism of values

This article aims to rethink and reclaim the social values that are exercised by student-workers in vocational schools in today’s China. Instead of arguing that our respondents could be exempted from the call of the neoliberal ethos, having no intention to self-invest or play at individualism, what concerns us most is to capture the social mechanism of values practised by the young Chinese working class that are not colonised by the logic of profit-making. To reiterate, if we understand that social values can be made within the existing neoliberal capitalist system, but respond to and even challenge capitalist logic, then the question is how? Could this study help build a micro-foundation of social values for the future solidarity of the working class?

To support this quest, we propose a multi-sited examination of the social mechanism of values: that is, we focus on care in schools, cooperation at workplaces and solidarity in the community practised by our respondents, which illuminates the terrain of values made by the working class in China. We argue that through this mechanism we might be able to explore the substrate of working-class subjectivity based on a solidarity that attempts to challenge marketised value and a resistance that goes against exchanging values for profit.

Cooperation in the workplace

Cooperation is not like a hermetic object, once damaged beyond recovery. … Repair work suggests other ways to relate the physical and the social. (Sennett, 2012, p. 219)

Attempting to rescue the craftsmanship of cooperation, Sennett (2012) condemns the neoliberal ethos which perverts the value of togetherness in the Western context. Sennett views contemporary capitalism as having made cooperation a shallow, money-driven, and often temporarily unstable performance. For Sennett, today’s work of cooperation is to repair broken social relationships, and the technology that he underlines is a kind of social praxis of ‘reconfiguration’, a technology to work together, step by step, to repair and reformulate the broken structure of sociality. This relates to our research in that students’ practices of cooperation can also be reassessed when they question the broken social bonds of today’s China.

It was common in our interviews to learn that students are working together – even outside the school. For instance, many students do part-time jobs at weekends to support their family or earn some money, in the short term or long term. Most of them will distribute flyers on the street or work together as waiters in restaurants and hotels. As many students would emphasise when going to an internship or a part-time job, togetherness is not only helpful, but vital, because they can take care of each other in a dire market situation. They share information about job opportunities, and when exploited by employers who do not pay them for their internship or part-time work, they will go together to ask for the wages. For example, Xiao-ma, a 17-year-old male student who studies web design in Lanzhou, told us that he had a quarrel with his internship boss in a printing studio. Accompanied by his classmate, he was bold enough to fight for his labour rights:

Having less, and thus needing to cooperate more, it is vital for students to work with each other in school and the workplace to survive the severe market competition. Lili (18 years old, female), for example, who majors in garment design at a vocational school, proudly told us how she and her classmates worked together, presenting their designs in front of teachers, schoolmates and companies that come to recruit interns. Lili told us how she valued their presentation:

Everybody was so helpful and selfless. We helped each other. What I felt after our ‘catwalk’ presentation was to learn that the most beautiful thing is actually people. I knew that without my classmates’ help, I could have done nothing. I was so touched. You know, they did not have the chance to present their work. Neither could they be the audience because they had to stay backstage to help me. Helping iron clothes and dressing our models … a lot of things!

Lili stressed that everybody needed to cooperate closely to make the show a success. In another regional skills competition organised for the digital technology intern students in Xian, Lam (19 years old, male) told us that their group won the runner-up prize because they had a strong cooperative spirit. Even though none of them was regarded as ‘promising’ as those in the top schools, through selfless cooperation, they won the prize collectively. Lam, whose teacher views him as a talented student, told us:

We are not students from Tsinghua University [a top university in China]. We are not the elite students. So, we are able to share our knowledge and skills. But if I were a Tsinghua student, that would be another story. I might keep the skills secret and not be willing to share with others. Haha, here we are all students who have a poor background; we share, we cooperate, and we win!

During a meal together to celebrate with their teacher and classmates, these students were very excited about the award, which redeemed their sense of worth and recognition. Having a laugh together, they strove to overcome the hardships during their workplace internship. Many intern students reported that they really have to be very supportive of each other in the work placements as they are inexperienced. Most of them were working in a company for the first time. Cooperation is the basis for their survival in an adult world which looks harshly on them. The value of comradeship has repeatedly been exercised and practised by these Chinese working-class youth.

Solidarity for community

We met Yang at his school in Shanxi. Yang majors in Business English, but he is not only interested in business. In fact, he is deeply involved in charity and community work. In his second year of vocational study, Yang and a classmate formed a community organisation specifically for volunteer work. They co-launched a volunteering project collecting second-hand clothes in the city to donate to the poor families living in the mountain villages. They also ran environmental campaigns to raise consciousness about pollution and collect garbage from the rivers of the town where they live. More importantly, Yang tried to connect all the volunteering groups from his community to nearby cities in order to expand the coverage of their service. Through their constant endeavours, they recruited 200 student members who were involved in a variety of community work until they graduated. When asked why he was so involved in charity work, coming from a humble farmer’s family, Yang told us:

I think this makes you feel happy, particularly when offering help gives me a personal, little ‘sense of value’. Because for me, it also shows the obligation and value of being a student in vocational education. In our country, many places cannot be cared for, though. So, we do need charities.

Concerning this ‘meaningful value’ that prompts him to engage in community work, Yang also agreed that it might be his peasant family background which has nurtured him to be more sensitive and empathetic to the poor:

As a village student, I feel more blessed than those from cities. … I think they cannot understand the suffering of peasants, nor have a sort of feeling or affect for those living in the bottom of our society.

In contrast to the middle-class ‘subject of value’, Yang’s emblematic behaviour echoes Skeggs and Loveday’s concept of person-value, calling for a different political ontology to include the excluded and their social values, actions and affect (Skeggs & Loveday, 2012, p. 476). Yang’s contributions to Chinese society resounded across the many vocational school students we met across the country. We learned how students are involved in charities or team up to spend their time visiting nursing homes for the elderly, orphanages, and so on. Sometimes they spend a day or a weekend assisting the disabled or the elderly to walk across the road. Sometimes they help promote animal welfare. We also met Jun, a 17-year-old male student, majoring in modern logistics, who shared with us his extraordinarily grown-up story about transgressing the binary logic between exchange value and social values. Jun was born in a poor village in western China, and after he was born, his mother ran away. He grew up with his father and later a stepmother. He had an independent and yet caring character, and he adopted wild animals and insects from the community and took care of them:

I spend a lot of time with animals and insects instead of human beings. I have sympathy with poor creatures. We share the same fate, and so we take care of each other. Every day I talk to my frogs, cats, dogs and make them happy. Sometimes, when I need money to feed myself and my animals, I sell some of them in the market. I can get a good price because these animals are in good shape after my care. I bring food home and I share with my small creatures.

We are enlightened by Jun’s story, which does not entail ambivalence regarding the relationship between value and values. Exchanging value is not for extracting somebody else’s labour value but for feeding oneself in hunger, and the value itself is due to the social values of the working-class youth who contributes care to the living creatures he loves.

Overall, the value practices of students’ solidarity inform us that value exercises are not limited to the personal level; they can be a grounded practice, gradually developed from one’s inner circle to a larger community (Sanghera, 2016). This ‘micro-foundation of social values’ formulated by the working class is highly significant. We note that people who have little (capital) can make and give more value (social values). Particularly in a severely competitive society, their practices flag a refusal to defer to exchange value. They show that social values are not necessarily generated for profit, thus proposing a more inclusive ethos of solidarity. However, we are not implying that our informants can escape neoliberal values. Yet, we see that ruptures in this dominant practice of value could occur from time to time. Young working-class people can question the legitimacy of exchange by fostering a mechanism of social values to ‘repair’ (Sennett, 2012) the injustice caused by the capitalistic logic and to safeguard the social goodness and equality (Sanghera, 2016), from which we argue could emerge a sense of working-class solidarity in China.

Conclusion

In response to the critique of neoliberal values, this article has attempted to develop a perspective attuned to the micro-foundation of social values, or a social mechanism of values, explicitly demonstrated by students of vocational schools in China. The micro-foundation of social values is built on three terrains of value praxis – from working-class students’ schools to workplaces and then to the wider community. It highlights that the agency of the marginal is not only about sentimentalism, but is also about an ability to repair their damaged self and identity and to reunite and flourish in their solidarity in the context of an increasingly capitalised society. Recalling our Chinese students, we propose that there is an urgency to recognise and invest in this ability by crafting the meaning of social values.

Today, China is producing the newest – and perhaps the biggest – working class in the world – in which young people have become the new labour subjects to serve the state and global capitalism’s ‘digital turn’ (Pun & Koo, 2019). Significant digital software curricula and internship programmes are being rapidly propagated in vocational schools around China. Thus, the issue of how we can defend the rights of the working class and explore their social values will become a pressing question. In contrast to studies of times of crisis that may potentially create spaces of resistance when the working class engages in struggle, this article contributes to the exploration of a social mechanism of values embedded in the Chinese working-class youth’s everyday practices: care in the school, cooperation in the workplace, and solidarity for the community. In this uncertain and perilous time for the struggles of young Chinese workers, we develop this perspective of the micro-foundation of social values to initiate an exploration of social solidarity. Out of a necessity to support each other, the working-class youth is not a ‘romanticised subject’; instead, they embrace and practise social values to combat their hardship collectively. On the one hand, this micro-foundation challenges the exchange logic and the legitimacy of individualism adopted by today’s Chinese citizens. On the other, it illuminates that the values created by the working-class youth benefit not only one’s peer group but also the wider society.

Rethinking the account of ‘use value’, we thus can employ value in relation to more radical ‘imaginations’ of the economy (Haiven, 2011) to question the value of ‘exchange’, and reject a knee-jerk idea that considers all human activities as merely for profit. In other words, a new ‘imagination’ of economy, as Haiven (2011) reiterates, is necessary and should be radicalised to counter the monetary logic that blocks our imaginations of economies or the actualisation of social life through reasserting a social mechanism of values through care, cooperation and solidarity, as we claim here. In this pilot study, we demonstrate how working-class students – having less but contributing more – come together to help themselves and their community (Hui, Pun, Qiu, & Koo, 2019) and potentially lay the foundation for future working-class solidarity.