ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a preliminary exploration of the question, drawing on findings from an ethnographic study. With the founding of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, the country's Communist leader launched the project of constructing a socialist modernity, in which the education system was charged with the important task of producing the technocratic and scientific elites. The elite education in many countries is primarily associated with private schooling, and researchers in this emerging field seem thus far to have focused mainly on this type of institution, in the Chinese context, the most relevant meanings and practices of educational elitism are to be found in relation to the institution of public schooling. Private elite education in some form no doubt exists in China, but this appears to be a recent development that still remains marginal in terms of scholarly research, and so is worthy of future study.
