Introduction

This volume aims to develop a sociology of Chinese education through re-purposing Bourdieu’s oeuvre by researchers of education in China. Given China’s economic and political weight globally, the volume contributes to the discipline of sociology in national fields beyond China, and not only for scholars of China and of education in China. It offers particular insights for those who use the work of Bourdieu in China and other national settings. The opening chapter develops our case in three moves. First, we look in some detail at the materialist theory of knowledge by which Bourdieu, the philosophy graduate turned ethnologist and sociologist, sought to explain human existence, first under the capitalism imposed by the colonising French in Algeria, and then as capitalism morphed into the neoliberal variant which reached ever more widely and deeply into social life in France from the 1960s onwards. We write with an eye to the adequacy of that perspective for a China which has taken distinctive economic directions and done so to transformative ends and with profound ramifications for cultural and social life. Second, we zoom in on an instance of Bourdieu’s work in 1980s Japan in which he speculated about Chinese students and society. We show that the French researcher’s circulation of a model with claims to universality was socially contingent – conditional, in overt principle at least, on empirical similarity of society. Like many a liberal Westerner of the time and to this day, however, Bourdieu was mistaken in his understanding of educational phenomena in China, and thereby, in his assumptions about the adequacy of his sociology to those. In contrast, the chapters assembled in this volume prod and probe the work of Bourdieu in order to see what can be taken from it so as to shape a discipline more adequate to the empirical realities of a society which differs in some significant ways from those in which extant sociology of education was grounded. In the third section of the chapter, the subsequent chapters themselves are introduced.