ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a most contemporary and comprehensive analysis of profound economic, social, and education changes under China’s market economy. In so doing, the chapter moves towards an outline of potential parameters for a critical, reflexive sociology of Chinese education. The contributors describe the transformations that have occurred in the material and symbolic conditions of existence of China’s population as a result of the political economic settings that have accompanied Reform and Opening-Up under the regulatory hand of a strong state. The education field has seen devolution of policy, processes of marketisation and privatisation, and a shifting emphasis from ideological and moral to human capital production. With this have emerged stratification and differentiation of educational outcomes that are amenable to analysis in terms of classic sociological problematics.
