ABSTRACT
Drawing from Bourdieu’s model of field, habitus, and capital, this chapter investigates how the reality of academic competition in China’s secondary education is co-constructed by anxious parents and the social conditions within which they function. Our aim here is to demonstrate first how parents have formed a habitus of individuated competition in response to the rules of exchange and discourses of the emergent new market structure of Chinese education. In addition, our analysis shows how different kinds and levels of capital are linked to positioning (e.g., structural determinations) and position-taking (e.g., degrees of agency) within the field: while economic and educational capital works to provide some middle- and upper-middle-class families with levels and degrees of autonomy from the market mechanism, for others the absence and lack of capital leaves the majority of Chinese students and parents, especially those from working-class families, with seemingly no choice but to focus on test-preparation for economic survival. Our analysis also points towards a broader historical transformation in Chinese families and society: whereby long-standing cultural traditions of education as the principal ladder of social ascendancy are now being challenged by youth in the context of the emergence of variable new patterns of child-parent relationships. Our case here is that we are observing and documenting nothing less than the construction of a new Chinese habitus, Homo economicus in sociological and psychological formation
