Abstract
China’s transition from a redistributive economy to a market economy has created an evolving and intensifying social class structure that requires a class perspective and class analysis tools to capture reconfigured social relations and new patterns of social inequalities. Drawing on a three-year life-story study of working-class students at elite universities in China and working with Bourdieu’s theoretical tools, this article highlights the emotional costs of class mobility and two associated forms of ‘ontological ambivalences’. The findings show ‘mundane reflexivity’ in class struggles against classifications but more importantly, demonstrate the symbolic violence involved therein and indicate the difficulties of individual agency to achieve politically effective resistances. Although based on the specific context of China, this article contributes to reflections on neoliberal policies elsewhere by shedding light on how neoliberalism relates to and enhances class struggles and the significance of adopting a relational class perspective to understand and address social inequalities.
Introduction
It has been 43 years since China initiated its Reform and Opening-up policy in 1978. The market-oriented economic reform has boosted China’s economic growth but also widened social inequalities in China. At 99.0865 trillion Yuan, China’s 2019 GDP is 269 times larger than in 1978 (367.87 billion). 1 Yet, at the same time, the Gini coefficient for family income in China increased from 0.23 in 1980 to above 0.46 in 2010 (Wu, 2019), which ranks among the highest in the world. China’s transition from a redistributive economy to a market economy has profoundly reshaped and reformed the nation’s social structures and relations, as well as the sources and patterns of social inequalities. Although many studies still address social inequalities in China from the perspective of the rural–urban divide and define advantages and disadvantages based on hukou (household registration) origin, some authors (Li, 2019; Wu, 2019) have stressed the importance of introducing a class perspective to capture structural changes and new patterns of social inequalities in post-reform China.
The current literature has mapped out the evolving and reconstructed social class structure in post-reform China (Wu, 2019). However, very few offer a detailed discussion of class experiences, which is critical for understanding the ‘human meaning’ of post-reform structural changes (Mills, 2000), that is the impact of policy changes on individual citizens’ personal life and welfare, and the possibilities of ‘mundane reflexivity’ (Sayer, 2005) to negotiate with these changes. Discussions of class experiences in the field of education are even rarer, though a few authors have recently offered accounts of rural students’ experiences in higher education (e.g. Cheng and Kang, 2016; Xie and Reay, 2020).
This article, drawing on a three-year life-story study of a small group of working-class students at elite universities in China, aims to contribute to the small strand of studies relating to class experiences in China, with particular focus on the experience of working-class ‘exceptions’ (Bourdieu, 1996) who have achieved a degree of upward social mobility and moved across class milieus. Bourdieu (1999) used ‘divided habitus’ to capture the experience and emotional costs of social mobility, describing it as ‘a habitus divided against itself, in constant negotiation with itself and its ambivalences’ (p. 511). Working with Bourdieu’s theoretical tools, this article examines the changes of respondents’ class identification and indicates two forms of ‘ontological ambivalences’ they experienced. The findings indicate what Tyler (2015) called ‘the symbolic violence of classifications and the performative effects of classificatory practices’ (p. 500), indicating the significance of adopting a ‘relational’ class perspective (Bourdieu, 1987) to understand and address social inequalities in contemporary societies.
Structural changes in post-reform China and the necessity of introducing a social class perspective
The social structure of pre-reform China was a ‘bureaucratic rank order’ (Yan, 2010: 491) created by state-sponsored mechanisms, among which hukou and danwei (work units) were the most prominent institutions for the redistribution of resources and life chances (Wu, 2019). Chinese households were required to register in their locale of residency; this registration (hukou) was categorized as either agricultural or non-agricultural. The hukou system divided China into two societies, with the majority of the population being confined to the countryside and denied access to various social welfare benefits enjoyed by urban residents. In addition to hukou, individuals’ life chances and social identity were tied to another institution – danwei. The production and redistribution of agricultural resources in rural China were organized through rural collectives, while local authorities assigned urban adult individuals to public danwei, comprising government and public institutions, state-owned (SOEs), and collectively-owned enterprises (COEs). All danwei provided permanent employment and lifetime social welfare benefits to their employees, including housing, medical care, and pensions. Urban residents’ income varied based on their type of danwei and position therein (i.e. as cadres or workers), although the state deliberately kept the variances between and within danwei at a relatively low level (Li, 2019). As such, urban China before the marketization reforms was a relatively equal society, while the rural–urban divide, configured by central planning for socialist construction at the point of economic difficulties, constituted the most significant social inequality.
Marketization reforms, starting in the 1980s, restructured social relations in China and created new patterns of social inequalities and stratifications. Radical reforms started in rural China. The state dismantled rural collectives in 1983 and replaced them with a ‘personal responsible system’ (Harvey, 2005: 128), in which individuals took responsibility for land productivity and the sale of agricultural products. Township and village enterprises (TVEs) were established to provide alternative job opportunities and additional income sources. Furthermore, the newly relaxed restrictions on rural to urban migration resulted in a large surge of rural migrants to cities. The number of rural migrant workers soared from 2 million in 1980 to more than 100 million in the 2000s (Harvey, 2005), most of whom took up low-tier positions in second- and third-sector industries. Although rural migrants are still discriminated against by the social welfare system in urban China, their life chances are no longer confined in the countryside and agriculture, and their occupations and social identity have shifted from peasants to workers (at TVEs or in cities). Therefore, many studies address rural migrants as a ‘new working class’ (e.g. Wu, 2019). The arising heterogeneity in subjectivities and life chances among people with rural origins undermines the role of rural hukou in capturing the experience of social disadvantages in contemporary China; at the same time, structural changes in urban China problematize social advantages attached to urban hukou.
With (in theory) no private sector having existed in socialist China, urban China witnessed a radical change – the rise of a new group of private entrepreneurs. These were initially self-initiating small business owners, such as street vendors and small-time traders (Yan, 2010); later, they were joined by large-business private entrepreneurs, most of whom were former cadres or managers of SOEs (Wu, 2019). The reorganization and privatization of SOEs and COEs in the late 1990s further expanded the urban private sector, with millions of laid-off workers being forced into it. More than 9 million workers were laid-off from SOEs annually between 1997 and 2000, reaching almost 40 million in total (Yan, 2010). These former workers lost the lifelong protection of the ‘social safety net’ (Harvey, 2005: 125) created by their danwei and their social identity as ‘masters’ of the socialist state. Most became self-employed or took low-income positions in the private sector, struggling economically and painfully with their new identity as urban ‘losers’ (Yan, 2010).
Marketization reforms constructed a massive urban private sector where people were granted unequal possibilities and resources to achieve competition and market-orientated transition. The proportion of urban employment in the public sector shrank from 81.5% in 1990 to only 16.0% in 2016 (Wu, 2019: 367). Correspondingly, people’s subjectivities and aspirations also shifted toward evaluations based on market value. For example, as shown earlier, workers experienced serious devaluation and negation, while private entrepreneurs rose in honor with official encouragement of a self-enterprising and competitive self (Yan, 2010). Subsequent modernization and internationalization in China further enhanced urban social stratification by introducing new ‘middle-class’ occupations (Li, 2019), such as white-collar officers at transnational companies and various professionals. Many authors point out patterns of class distinctions in areas such as housing, consuming, and childrearing that reproduce social advantages and disadvantages (e.g. Goodman, 2014).
Given the structural changes in rural and urban China over the past four decades and the rise of new patterns of social inequalities and stratifications that old state-sponsored institutions like hukou and danwei have difficulty in capturing, many authors have suggested the necessity of introducing a class perspective (e.g. Wu, 2019). Studies offer different categorizations of social classes in China. For example, Lu (2002, 2010) introduced a class scheme based on surveys of organizational, economic, and social resources associated with different occupations; and Lin and Wu (2010) offered a neo-Marxist classification based on the distribution of four types of productive assets. I referred to Lu (2002, 2010) as one indicator to define the working-class in my study, as it is the most commonly used class scheme in sociological studies in China. The working class in this article means people who are subject to conditions and conditionings of structural disadvantage (for more details, see the methodology section).
Albeit with rationales to define the working class in my study, I contemplate ‘class’ from a ‘relational’ perspective; that is, to understand ‘class as struggles’ (Tyler, 2015) over and against classifications rather than as a fixed and essentialist category in a stratification system or a self-realized group identity. Through my respondents’ struggles in constructing their senses of ‘us’ and ‘others’ (Bourdieu, 1990), we can see how the structurally disadvantaged people internalize, legitimatize, and reproduce the social order imposed and inflicting on them, indicating the nuanced and persistent effects of class domination. Furthermore, this article demonstrates how neoliberalism relates to and complicates class struggles, and enhances social inequalities.
Social stratification in China’s education
Education experiences have long been regarded by Chinese people, influenced by Confucian ideas, as the most important means for socially disadvantaged groups to work on the self and achieve upward social mobility (Wu, 2019). Yet, studies have indicated a clear pattern of social stratification in the Chinese education system and similar examples of class reproduction in other contexts. The gross college enrolment ratio in China has increased from less than 3% in 1990 to 51.6% in 2019. 2 Yet, as is the case in many other countries (Shavit and Blossfeld, 1993), social stratifications have not been weakened but strengthened by expanding educational opportunities. Middle-class students are more likely than working-class students to enter elite schools and elite universities (e.g. Li, 2019). Based on analysis of a dataset of students who took the Gaokao (National College Entrance Examination in China) in 2003, Li et al. (2015) found that rural students from poor counties were 43 times less likely than urban youth to access the top two universities in China (Peking University and Tsinghua University) and 11 times less likely to access first-tier universities in general. Considering an elite degree has increasingly become a necessity for accessing high-income and high-status occupations in China (Wu, 2019), the social stratification in education renders wider social production and reproduction in society.
A small body of studies demonstrates that, in addition to unequal access, different social groups face unequal experiences in higher education. Various forms of painful dislocation experienced by rural students at urban elite universities have been noted, especially in the initial stage, such as a strong sense of inferiority due to their distinctive rural dispositions, inadequate social skills, and frustrations in English courses (Cheng and Kang, 2016). Rural students develop different strategies to deal with these discomforts but show a similar tendency to concentrate on academic performance and distance themselves from mainstream social activities (Xie and Reay, 2020). This pattern of experiencing university by compartmentalizing academic and social aspects echoes studies of working-class students in Western societies (e.g. Bathmaker et al., 2013). In comparison, middle-class students take various approaches, such as attending structured extra-curricular activities and career-related internships, to gain valuable ‘personal capital’ (Brown et al., 2011), which is increasingly thought as important in the high-status job market.
This article demonstrates how a few working-class students developed high-level ‘mundane reflexivity’ – everyday reflexivity and resistance – to cope with the constraints of structural disadvantage and access elite universities. Yet, the findings also point out the exhausting emotional costs of such reflexivity and the symbolic dominance involved therein.
Research methods
The data drawn on in this article come from a life-story study conducted between March 2015 and December 2017. Seventeen working-class students at four elite universities in China were interviewed three times over the study’s three years. I chose elite universities from the C9 League, a group of nine top universities in China. Regardless of their history, student and faculty recruitment standards, alumni achievements, or position in the world or national rankings, the C9 League universities are the elite of the elite in China. The four universities chosen were Fudan University, Peking University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and Tsinghua University. All are located in Beijing or Shanghai, which are China’s two largest cities and have similar economic, social, and cultural resources.
Potential participants were recruited by recommendations from my personal contacts at these four universities. I contacted them individually before the first interviews to introduce the research and confirm their consent to participate. In the first-round interviews, my respondents were final-year undergraduate students who had received National Student Loans (needs-based loans for low-income students at university). I checked their parents’ occupations, incomes, and education levels and their self-identified socio-economic position. Their accounts were also compared with national statistics on average family income and with Lu’s (2002, 2010) analysis of social class structure in China to verify their working-class status. My research respondents’ parents’ occupations included urban unemployed, factory workers, peasants, rural migrant workers, service workers, and small business owners. The 17 participants (8 males and 9 females) were diverse in their regions of origin (8 from rural villages, 5 from small towns, and 4 from cities) and subjects of study.
The first-round interviews, conducted between March and April 2015, collected the participants’ life story data and were followed by initial data analysis. Constructive grounded theory approaches informed the data analysis process. Referring to Charmaz (2014), a provisional theoretical framework was constructed that involved initial coding, focused coding, memo-writing, map drawing, constant comparison between cases, and theoretical sampling, while also being sensitized by Bourdieu’s theoretical tools. Thornberg (2012) convincingly argued about the legitimacy and usefulness of working with the existing literature when doing grounded theory. Bourdieu’s theoretical tools were used reflexively to establish dialogue, explore imaginary connections, challenge my biases, and extend my ‘sociological gaze’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). The effectiveness of this reflexive application of Bourdieu’s theoretical tools in the Chinese context has also been confirmed by other authors (see Mu et al., 2019).
Six months after the first-round interviews, I returned to conduct second-round interviews to fill the gaps in the provisional theoretical framework I had developed. In addition, I collected data related to the updates on my research participants’ life stories, who had gone on to postgraduate studies at home (12/17) or abroad (2/17) or had started work (3/17). Based on the data collected in this stage, I wrote a summary of my research findings, which I discussed with my respondents in the third-round interviews. Their updated employment destinations (5 in doctoral programs and 12 in workplaces) were also collected.
All interviews were conducted in Mandarin by the author of this article. Each interview lasted one hour or longer. Participants were informed of possible ethical risks. All participant names used in this publication are pseudonyms.
This article focuses on the dataset relating to the changes in respondents’ class identification – one’s perception and evaluation of his or her social position relative to different (the sense of distinction) and similar others (the sense of community).
Working-class identity and dis-identification
Habitus – ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions’ structured by early socialization experiences in ‘a particular class of conditions of existence’ (Bourdieu, 1990) – is a sensitive and powerful theoretical tool for understanding how objective inequalities are deeply embodied by the dominated and how this embodiment contributes to producing and reproducing objective inequalities. This section focuses on three sets of dispositions embodied by respondents in their working-class position – maturity, introversion, and dis-identification – which carry the ‘hidden injuries of class’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1993) and risks of what I call ‘ontological ambivalences’.
Maturity and moral responsibility
As Lu et al. (2019) commented, ‘class is not a self-given group designation in China, but rather it is made through contesting socio-economic relationships’ (p. 1052). My research respondents’ working-class identity – their awareness of their structurally disadvantaged position – was constructed through their struggling with discomforts, difficulties, and constraints arising from forms of capital deficiencies, and by their clear senses of their parents’ working-class jobs and meager salaries. For example, Yun Jiang reported that her family needed to ‘borrow rice’ from others; Fang Yuan lived with her family in a hovel without a window; and Xing Guo needed to bring his own chair to his local school.
These working-class children displayed a clear sense of their family’s financial situation and an awareness of the importance of money (for comparison, see middle-class children’s laid-back attitudes toward money in Cheng and Kang, 2016). These motivated them to develop a high level of maturity from childhood and to feel a moral responsibility to their parents, as illustrated by Zhen Liang, below:
I was mature. Many kids would lie on the ground if their parents didn’t agree to buy what they wanted. My mom said when I wanted to buy something, I always asked first whether she had enough money. If she didn’t have enough, I would give up.
Why do you think you were so mature?
I knew my parents’ life wasn’t easy. It was not easy for them to make a living, but they gave me so much. I couldn’t waste their efforts.
My research respondents felt that their parents worked hard to make ends meet and scrimped and saved to support their education. Hence, they felt a filial responsibility to be self-disciplined, resilient, industrious, and dedicated in their schoolwork and to achieve on exams and in schools to reward their parents for their selfless efforts and sacrifices. These working-class children and their parents shared a ‘community of destiny’ (Cheng and Kang, 2016), in which the family’s hopes for social mobility relied on the children’s schoolwork and admission into a good university (see also in Wong, 2011).
This maturity and its resulting set of reflexive dispositions constituted ‘internal resources’ (Reay et al., 2009: 1107) these working-class students could use to, against the adversity of structural disadvantage, maintain excellent performance at school, and progress into elite universities. However, their self-enterprising academic successes were also contingent on China’s examination-performance oriented school culture (the risks of which are discussed later in this article). Yet, this enabling maturity was also afflicting, as reported by Yi Chen:
I had never been angry, and I was very polite. My classmates liked me. They voted for me in all award nominations. But I was stressed inside. Everyone wanted to be outgoing and sociable aged 15 and 16. I felt I was isolated and different. My friends made jokes with each other, but they didn’t make jokes with me.
Their sense of moral responsibility kept them serious and earnest, made them realistic and calculative, and prevented them from exploring social aspects, personal interests, and ‘useless’ passions. As dutiful working-class sons and daughters, they felt they could not, and did not deserve, to experience education as a site for ‘the care of the self’ (Jin and Ball, 2020a); they could only be practical, functional, and efficient. This tense and utilitarian way of learning and living continued throughout their university life. Entertainment, leisure activities, and casual socialization engendered shame and anxiety and were regarded as ‘bad habits’ (Ping Wang), ‘luxuries’ (Xiao Li), and ‘a waste of time’ (Zhen Liang). These ‘hidden injuries of class’ (Sennett and Cobb, 1993) associated with maturity may partly explain why working-class students tend to sideline social aspects at school and university, thus consolidating their social disadvantages in the competition for high-status occupations.
Introversion and inferiority
In addition to maturity, almost all respondents report having an ‘introverted personality’ and associate it with their working-class identity, as Yun Jiang explained:
I was very afraid of being looked at. It could be a sense of strong inferiority. It may be influenced by my family background. I felt inferior in speaking, eating, my behaviours, and dressing.
Habitus is a system of relational dispositions attuned to one’s sense of one’s place within a wider field of social relations. As Sayer (2005) explained, ‘most of the dispositions composing the habitus are relational; they are oriented to other people and objects, such as a disposition toward serving others or being served’ (p. 24). The respondents’ ‘introverted personality’ is an example of this attuning. The sense of inadequacy and inferiority they felt in comparison with different others in terms of their material wealth and inadequate dispositions delivers a conservative, precautious, timid, and nervous self-presentation and ways of interacting with others.
For some respondents, their introverted personality led to ‘internal pressures’, as reported by Yi Chen above. They wanted to be ‘sociable’ (Yi Chen and Ye Lin), ‘popular’ (Gu Yue) and eager to change who they are and become others – a form of dis-identification that will be discussed in the following section. For some other respondents, their introverted personality, as ‘the product of the internalization of objective conditions’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 156), framed and mediated their preferences, aspirations, and later choices, such as Tang Hui’s choice of subjects at university:
I didn’t like Media Studies, though many said it was a featured subject at Fudan . . . I enjoy History. It’s a subject you can do alone, which fits my personality. The only problem is it’s not a subject that makes it easy to find a good job.
Although Media Studies is a featured subject at Fudan University and would probably lead to a much better employment prospect than the subject of History, Hui Tang chose History because it was more suited to her introverted personality. Three other respondents also made subject choices they ‘rationally’ considered more fit for their introverted personalities. Through choices they naturally and ‘rationally’ make according to their presumed introverted personalities, my respondents in fact live out the inferior place they used to occupy and embody, and maintain and reinforce their inferior place and social disadvantages as unconscious ‘compliances’ (Bourdieu, 1996). This sort of unconscious operation of habitus through the ‘internalization of externality’ and the ‘externalization of internality’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 205), which is otherwise easy to neglect or ‘rationalize’, indicates the persistent, nuanced, and deeply rooted effects of class domination.
Dis-identification and ontological ambivalence
As mentioned above, the respondents’ working-class identity included a strong sense of ‘dis-identification’ (Skeggs, 1997) with the ordinary and expected by the working-class identity. This dis-identification involved negative evaluations of the working-class community, as illustrated by Zhen Liang:
Childhood experiences had a huge impact on me. People in the village felt envious and uncomfortable at everything good you did for yourself. My parents were building our house. Some people then came and fought with my parents. It was disgusting. First, they were poor economically and then they were poor intellectually. I felt sick to live in the community of these people.
The frustration, disapproval, hostility, and hatred toward the working-class community indicated in the account above is very different from the working-class identification documented in studies based on some other contexts. In Willis’ (1977) seminal work, working-class ‘lads’ embraced working-class features they considered ‘male’ and ‘strong’ and acted to resist school culture and avoid being disciplined and changed. More recently, studies demonstrate that some high-achieving working-class students chose to leave university or enter nonelite universities due to their need to belong in a working-class community (e.g. Ball et al., 2000). Working-class students at elite universities draw on working-class ‘positive virtues’ to form reflexive resources and build ‘moral advantages’ (Lehmann, 2009). Yet, such feelings of pride, loyalty, and ontological belonging toward the working-class community are almost absent in the narratives of my study. Working-class identity and dispositions are more stigmatized by my respondents and regarded as something ‘backward’ and ‘inferior’ that needs to be worked on and worked against, to be removed and overcome.
This, on one hand, is a reasonable product of the neoliberal nexus constructed in Chinese families, schools, media, and society by contemporary marketization and privatization reforms, which relentlessly endorse the benefits of progression and upward social mobility and emphasize self-investment, self-responsibility, and self-enterprise. As Lu et al. (2019) observed, none of the working-class students in China’s vocational schools in their study aspired to take working-class jobs; rather, they ‘are eager to enter the middle class as the neoliberal value induces them’ (p. 7). The social meanings of ‘similar others’ are denied and possibilities of class solidarity that could be developed by compassion and cooperation with working-class peers are ignored; rather, ‘different others’ are the pursuits and objectives. My respondents’ class mobility involved a form of ‘ontological ambivalence’ – one that disembeds the individual from the social and confuses what a community is.
On the other hand, the process of individualization in post-reform China enhances the ‘ontological ambivalence’ experienced by working-class ‘exceptions’. In Western countries, like the UK and France, the legacy of labor unions and class-based political parties and collective struggles fosters a clear class awareness and sense of community (although the sense of class solidarity is being decomposed by neoliberalism) working-class people can draw on to oppose neoliberal negation and rebuild working-class social value (Skeggs and Loveday, 2012). In comparison, China lacks such a class-based reference of community. One’s sense of community referred to the family in traditional China and to danwei and rural collectives in socialist China, linking the individual to state construction (Yan, 2010). When marketization reforms dismantled danwei and rural collectives, this sense of community was dissolved, and the Chinese people fell into high-level individualization. Consequently, although contemporary China sees an evolving class structure and patterns of class distinctions, these are mainly dealt with individually, without a reference of community to form collective awareness and action. In such circumstances, structural inequalities are more likely to be experienced depolitically and internalized and interpreted as ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai, 2005) – the consequences of structural disadvantages are experienced as personal failures and incompetence. As victims of structural disadvantages are blamed or blame themselves, resistances are avoided and consumed. Class domination works more insidiously and effectively in tandem with neoliberalism and individualization.
Deferred elimination, re-identification, and painful resignation
Although these working-class students, drawing on their reflexive dispositions, gained entry into elite universities, they experienced ‘deferred elimination’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 153) in the elite field, which made them painfully reidentify with their working-class identity and accept relegation to a devalorized trajectory.
Reinforced working-class identity and deferred elimination
My respondents’ class identity and senses of inferiority were reinforced at elite universities by sharp and daily comparisons with middle-class students through such concrete symbols of class positions as clothing, mobile phones, and accents, as articulated by Yue Gu:
I bought clothes from Taobao [an online shopping website with a lot of bargains], while some other students in my class only went to shopping malls and always came back with bags and bags . . . I didn’t know of iPhone before university. When I came here, I was so confused why people were all using the same mobile phone . . . I couldn’t believe I was laughed at by my spoken English. When I was in Chongqing, I was much better than my friends.
The huge gap in economic and cultural capital between them and the ‘different others’ became concrete and direct in these sharp comparisons. Their working-class identity was dramatically heightened and their working-class dispositions acutely stood out, which constantly demarcate their differences and deficiencies. To fit in at university and remove these ‘stigmas’, my respondents, like their counterparts in the West (Abrahams and Ingram, 2013; Bathmaker et al., 2013), spent a lot of effort and time working on the self – learning the right ways to dress, consume, speak, and live. All this work was a ‘double effort’ for them, something that does not normally affect middle-class students with middle-class predispositions. The working-class students’ ‘double efforts’ were not without costs or consequences. For example, while Da Tang struggled to follow his computer classes, other students attended student societies, and when Xiang He was making adaptations to fit into the elite milieu, other students were preparing to go abroad. The respondents were players in a game in which they were always left behind.
While their working-class identity and senses of inferiority were reinforced, the respondents’ successful learner identity, on which their upward social mobility possibilities relied, was threatened by a shift in the ‘rules of the game’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) at elite universities. Different from the rural students in Xie and Reay’s (2020) study, the respondents in this study discovered that the single-minded industry they employed to achieve excellent academic performance at school was inadequate, and that it was, in some cases, impossible for them to attain similar results. Jia Peng’s frustrations illustrate this inadequacy:
At senior school, I was the first in my grade. I was very relaxed. But here everyone was a top student . . . They had read more classic books, such as Republic by Plato, at junior school, but I read it in my first year at university . . . I enjoyed reading in the library, but when you had a discussion with classmates, you felt left-behind. Your opinions were not as insightful as they had.
Similar to Lareau’s (2011) findings, middle-class cultural capital, such as classic literature literacy and comprehensive skills accumulated from access to structured extra-curricular activities, plays a significant role in enabling middle-class students to achieve a good academic performance at university. My respondents reported the effects of middle-class cultural capital on academic performance, although such effects were stronger in subjects in the humanities/social sciences than in the sciences. Considering that my respondents regarded having a successful learner identity as their ‘purpose to live in the world’ (see Jin and Ball, 2020a) and their only chance to achieve upward social mobility, the shift in academic ‘rules of the game’ at university really frustrated them. The difficulties and pressures to ‘catch up’ dismantled their learner identity, distorted their ‘imagined futures’ (Ball et al., 2000), and disrupted and even shattered their upward social mobility aspirations. Jia Peng had aspired to being a scholar since junior school, but the frustrations and difficulties he experienced at university while trying to ‘catch up’ with others made him reconsider his once clear ‘imagined future’. He became uncertain about who he was and who he might become.
Not only in academic areas, my respondents also realized the ‘rules of the game’ had shifted in the qualifications required to achieve their upward social mobility aspirations. Employers in high-status occupations increasingly emphasize extra-curricular activities and valuable internship experiences. Some professions, such as banking and business consulting, are higher ranked and more ‘successful’ than academic professions, in terms of economic returns and social prestige, as Zhen Liang illustrated:
My old beliefs were all turned over. What shocked me when I came here was, hard work can’t guarantee a success in doing research; success in doing research can’t guarantee a successful life . . . This led me to go for business consultancy as a career.
These working-class students’ accumulated academic competences were devalued by the new ‘rules of the game’. Their ‘imagined future’ – attaining high-status occupations by focusing on academic work and receiving an elite degree – was shattered and ‘turned over’. While the old beliefs and resources are denied, the new requirements for achieving upward social mobility were hard to obtain. They confronted ‘deferred elimination’ owing to the distance and dissonances between the dispositions they had accumulated and the ‘legitimate culture’ (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990: 101) and cultural capital favored in the field of elite universities. They were enticed and ensnared by false anticipations cultivated by their school successes, which amounts to ‘deferred elimination’ and an advance self-elimination.
Re-identification with the working class and submission to class domination
Different from Zhen Liang’s choice to shift his way of experiencing university (see also the other five participants in Jin and Ball, 2020b), most of my respondents continued to work on their academic performance and follow the devalued route, pursuing a less promising academic career even though they were clearly as aware as Zhen Liang of the shift in the ‘rules of the game’ for achieving upward social mobility. This choice was, as asserted by Xiang He, a strategy for surviving the sense of inferiority, frustrations, and despair they experienced at university:
This is a place where you can meet many excellent people everywhere. You feel the pressures every minute. However, it won’t matter if you accept the fact. You do well, it’s your business, nothing to do with me. If I have tried my best for my choice, I can be happy about myself. You can survive in this university without trying to jump from a building if you can comfort yourself with that thought.
Such resignation involved compromises and despair, struggles and surrenders, and an acute sense of self-consciousness – specifically, consciousness of their working-class position, forms of associated disadvantages, the histories of their disposition-making, their differences from middle-class peers, and their distance from the middle-class occupations and lifestyle to which they aspired. In the last section, we have seen their strong desire to escape their working-class origins and community. With acute reflexive awareness, they clearly saw the difficulties and, to some extent, impossibilities of achieving that escape. Their choice was no longer to refuse what was expected by their place in the social order but to adjust to their condition and to ‘the order of things’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 168). Some authors (e.g. Abrahams and Ingram, 2013; Reay et al., 2009; Sayer, 2005) have pointed out the problems in Bourdieu’s emphasis on unconsciousness in the operation of habitus and have worked to introduce the possibilities of reflexivity and transformation. Yet, as seen here, the ‘post-reflexive’ (Adams, 2006) choice most of my respondents (had to) make is not necessarily liberating, but still bound with structural inequalities. The confirmation of their reflexivity is in fact a denial of their reflexivity, which constitutes the second form of ‘ontological ambivalence’ they experience and deep effects of class domination they subject to. The ‘mundane reflexivity’ of the dominated involves a complex ambivalence, incorporating resistance and submission, recognition and misrecognition, and identification and dis-identification. Reflexive responses do not necessarily generate change or challenge to the operation of habitus and class domination. They could bring about greater oppression and self-destruction, as shown by the working-class lads in Wills’ (1977) study, or reflexive and sincere submission to the order of things and class domination, as shown by my respondents’ resignation choice. Mundane reflexivity is often constrained by structural disadvantage, which makes it hard to achieve radical and politically effective resistance.
Self-exclusion choices and unconscious identification
A certain degree of reflexivity in the construction and operation of working-class habitus is indicated in the above two sections. However, unconscious identification with what is effective for the people ‘like us’ through forms of ‘self-exclusion’ choices (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1990) work constantly and powerfully, even with a certain degree or very high level of reflexivity, as will be seen in this section. I categorize self-exclusion choices into two directions: one is to ensure constancy and seek similarities; the other is to avoid crisis and refuse ‘what is anyway denied’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 54). The two directions of self-exclusion are in fact interrelated. An example of the first direction of self-exclusion in my study is some respondents’ preference for making friends with people from a similar family background, as reported by Ping Wang:
I attended the students’ union. I found it was not suitable for me. People there were all rich. I also took a part-time position in the student support centre. I was more comfortable there. We were almost all from low-income families. Finally, I found a sense of belonging, a place like home. I have the feeling now that whether or not you can get along with someone to a large extent depends on your previous experience.
‘Getting along’ has a significant relation with habitus; as Bourdieu (1996) commented, ‘everything predisposed them to “get along” give[s] a seemingly natural foundation to the solidarity of the corps’ (p. 182). This was also realized by Ping Wang, as shown in the above account. Through seeking similarities, the constancy of habitus is guaranteed, and the dispositions embodied are reinforced. As Bourdieu (1996) vividly described, ‘continuous and prolonged contact with classmates endowed with similar or related dispositions can only reinforce in each student the dispositions and values shared by all, and hence each student’s confidence in his own value’ (p. 182). The first direction of self-exclusion choices – seeking similarities – maintains and enhances boundaries and segregation between different groups, which reinforce the ‘sense of us’ and lead to a firmer, clearer rejection of others.
Self-exclusion also goes in another direction – that of avoiding crisis and refusing what is ineffective. Choices are marked as ‘impossible for us’ and excluded before they become options, as is evident in many of my respondents’ excluding the choice of overseas studies, as illustrated by Xiang He:
In places like where I was born, going abroad is seen to be way beyond our life, very high-end. None of the people around me have been abroad. My feeling was that was other people’s lives, nothing to do with me.
As Bourdieu (1990) commented regarding one’s relation to the future, ‘[t]he relation to what is possible is a relation to power; and the sense of a probable future is constituted in the prolonged relationship with a world structured according to the categories of the possible [for us] and the impossible [for us], of what is appropriated in advance by and for others and what one can reasonably expect for oneself’ (p. 64). Xiang He’s classification of overseas studies created and confirmed what was possible for a working-class person; he externalized and maintained a class-based order of possibilities through his own self-regulation. As Ball et al. (2000) described, my respondents are ‘classified and classifiers’ (p. 92).
In my study, self-exclusion happened in almost every life story, including that of Ye Lin, who demonstrated tremendous reflexive awareness and dispositions in dealing with class domination (see Jin and Ball, 2020b). Ye Lin’s avoidance of Renmin University, given its student intake of ‘many government officials’ children’, was a typical self-exclusion choice based on the consideration of matching ‘institutional habitus’ (Ball et al., 2000) with her class-positioning:
I heard Renmin was very political with many senior government officials’ children. It was such a huge gap between me and them that I couldn’t make up. And I didn’t want to be part of them either. I was watching Go Lala Go! [a popular Chinese movie about how a normal girl survived and grew up to be a senior manager in a highly competitive company]. It was filmed in Shanghai, so it gave me a very good impression of Shanghai. Lala was such an inspiring role model for me. Then I made my mind up and chose Shanghai.
A similar account appeared again when Ye Lin chose where to go for her postgraduate studies. She preferred institutions in the USA rather than in the UK, as ‘the USA is more suitable for people like me who have worked their way up from scratch’. Seeking similarities and avoiding crises work together in constituting self-exclusion choices.
Such self-exclusion choices often operate unconsciously, while ‘different others’ can help to bring about consciousness of self-exclusion, as Yuan Fang illustrated:
I have always been a celebrity fan, but it seems impossible for me to work in that industry. I need a chance, for example someone around me working in media. The feedback my roommate [who worked in the media industry] gave to me, her talking about the people she met every day, made me feel like it was not that far.
Working in the media industry seemed not to be an option for the ‘people like us’ in Yuan Fang’s mind, until she learnt more about the industry from her roommate. Also, the only two participants in my study who decided to apply for an overseas postgraduate program reported that this choice only became realistic when they learnt of the possibility from their university friends. However, as seen earlier in this section, the tendency to seek others like themselves, as shown in Ping Wang’s remarks, prevented some participants from building relationships with ‘different others’. This in turn constrained their possibilities to achieve reflexive awareness and changed their habitus and the entailed constancy of disadvantage and inequality.
Conclusion
Based on a three-year life-story study of working-class students at elite universities in China and through examining the changes in their class identification, this article demonstrates the systematic, persistent, and nuanced effects of social inequalities on the subjectivities, choices, aspirations, and life chances of socially disadvantaged students, and the limits of individual agency to challenge the class-based subjection and domination. These accounts problematize the discourse of ‘neoliberal resilience’ (e.g. Bottrell, 2009) – an emphasis on individual responsibility and competence to overcome the adversity of structural disadvantage – which was introduced to contemporary China by marketization reforms and is shared and popular in social justice policies in many other countries.
As resilient wonder-boys and -girls, the respondents in my study seem to have challenged and successfully refused what the classification system expects regarding working-class opportunities and life chances; yet, their strong dis-identification with the working-class future indicates and involves an internalization and indeed legitimization of the dominant value and evaluation system, making them betray their parents and their ‘community of destiny’, and subjecting them to disciplines and consequences of social atomization. Neoliberalism that encourages competitive individualism and market values, and China’s destruction of state-sponsored communities strengthen the dissociating risks and injuries suffered by my respondents.
Despite the emotional prices they paid, my respondents’ neoliberal resilience was partial and illusional. Individual agency took effect in coping with structural disadvantage only in certain circumstances, such as in the strongly meritocratic field of Chinese schools (Jin and Ball, 2020a). Yet, it was undermined and constrained in other more fields where the rules of the games often slickly and subtly shifted and upgraded to serve and privilege the dominant. Working-class people confront deferred eliminations due to over-confidence in individual reflexivity and its role in challenging class domination. Furthermore, the reflexivity of the dominated is always constructed and constrained in a condition of structural disadvantage, which means that it will inevitably embody and effectively enact a ‘natural’ inclination to adjust to their position and disadvantage. In this sense, the ‘mundane reflexivity’ (Sayer, 2005) of the dominated often involves symbolic violence and blends with submission and subjection.
The emotional costs and ‘ontological ambivalences’ indicated in this article are not intended to discourage working-class people from aspiring to a different life and a different social position. Rather, they are meant to challenge neoliberal interpretations of these sufferings. Instead of internalizing and painfully accommodating them as ‘ugly feelings’ (Ngai, 2005), I hope the language of class and sociological tools used in this article can help the dominated to point the reasons and reasoning to their right objects – structural disadvantage and social injustice – and take collective and politically effective action to change and challenge them.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author is grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments on the earlier drafts of this paper.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research on which this paper is based was supported by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) and Institute of Education (UCL IOE) Joint Scholarship, the Universities’ China Committee in London, and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2019M651439).