Moving to the City: Educational Trajectories of Rural Chinese Students in an Elite University

Abstract

People tend to think and behave in particular patterns in accordance with their social categories (such as class, gender, race and region). Willis (1997) observed the regularities of social practices and attempted to discover how and why working class kids get working class jobs in the UK. The similar phenomenon has also emerged in China, in the form of sharply different attitudes towards education in a higher education expansion age. In the countryside, there is a resurgent belief that education is useless. Rural children, the heavily disadvantaged in the Chinese context, tend to drop out early and become migrant labourers (Fu and Li, 2010; Tan 2001), whereas in the city, there are anxious parents and overburdened children participating in various extra courses to acquire special skills and a placement in the best schools (Short and Sun, 2003). Yet there are neither conductors organizing their actions, nor regulations demanding their conformance. Out of curiosity, we would ask such a question: ‘How can behaviours be regulated without being the product of obedience of rules’? That is the starting point of all Bourdieu’s thinking (1984). To explain the regularities and uncover the mechanism, Bourdieu built a theoretical system that ‘may be the most comprehensive and elegant since Talcott Parsons’s’ (DiMaggio, 1979, p. 1460). Central to his social theory is the notion of habitus.