ABSTRACT
Bourdieu-informed research on Chinese education has been proliferating over the past four decades. Absent in this rich body of research is any analysis of Bourdieu's original engagement with China. Although the sociologist never visited the country or turned Chinese social problems into sociological problems, a careful trawl through his oeuvre helps locate crumbs of discussions of China sporadically scattered across his writings. This opening chapter of the new edited volume on Recontextualising and Recontesting Bourdieu in Chinese Education historicises Bourdieu's original discussions of China regarding (1) education and social reproduction, (2) state and power struggle, and (3) culture and distinction. Analysis of these discussions suggests the potency of Bourdieu's sociology in China—a national, cultural, and historical context different from that of Bourdieu. Enabled by the relationality characteristic of Bourdieu's theory, the analysis contributes to understandings of structural homologies between different contexts. Following the analysis is a sketch of the themes of the new volume: (1) habitus and class, (2) mobility and migration, and (3) language and postmonolingual theorising. The opening chapter of the volume aims to diachronically take stock of the historical root and the state-of-the-art of scholarship on Bourdieu and Chinese education. It foreshadows that the new volume is not simply a collection of research describing the empirical realities of Chinese education at a particular historical moment. Rather, it is a volume that aims to develop further understanding of empirical Chinese educational and social problems while recontextualising and recontesting conceptual tools hewn in other empirical worlds.
