Wealth inequality is a serious issue in China. According to data published by Shijiazhuang University of Economics, the top 20 percent of the population earns roughly 30 times more than the bottom 20 percent (Jia Hua, Qingxia, Mengnan Zhang, 2015), and the first month Covid-19 lockdown caused low-skill migrant workers’ income to lose 100 billion USD right after Xi Jinping declared successfully reduce national poverty problems (2021, China Power Project). Ever since Xi became Chairman, he has aimed to elevate the working-class as a means of eliminating this wealth discrepancy. In 2021, the government approached these solutions through access to education and economic reform. This paper will analyse government education reform of socioeconomic, academic and liberal values within Xi Jinping’s nationalist agenda.
1. Tutoring centres and real estate
After school, a vast number of Chinese students do not go back home; instead, they go to tutoring centres to continue to enrich their academic learning. However, tutoring centres create wealth inequality through knowledge discrepancy. Wealthy parents are able to provide a variety of additional extracurricular learning opportunities to their children. For instance, these children can review school work and learn ahead of their peers. They can also study other subjects that the public school cannot provide such as the US Advanced Placement curriculum, and advanced mathematics. Working-class parents cannot provide these opportunities for their children, so working-class students are at a significant disadvantage in competing with their wealthy peers. This disadvantage is particularly significant when they sit the national college entry examination, known as the gaokao, which determines which universities they can attend and what they may study there. In addition, Chinese universities only look at gaokao results; they do not use personal statements, recommendation letters, or interviews to consider students’ individual merits. This is because the applicant pool is enormous. Thus are students and parents willing to pay to hire tutors to prepare for these momentous exams. In most cases, wealthy students perform better than working-class students. This phenomenon is not unique to China; it is, however, on a phenomenal scale. In addition to attending tutoring centres every day, it is common to see affluent students receiving individual tuition during weekends. Wealthy parents are willing to spend in excess of 120 USD an hour for their child to receive tutoring in extracurricular subjects such as debating and music. At the start of 2021, the tutoring market was worth 120 billion USD (Elena Albert).
In July 2021, the government banned tutoring centres to prevent academic inequities between the rich and poor while promoting fairness in the gaokao exam. As a result of this policy, millions of tutors are changing their careers from teaching to working in other sectors. Most of these teachers are not qualified to become public school teachers unless they have a sufficient degree and acquire a licence. The standard to become a public school teacher is high in first- and second-tier cities, whose majority of teachers hold PhDs from prestigious universities. Thus in the near future, tutoring centre teachers will either have to switch jobs or teach private lessons for wealthy children informally.
2. Local Residents and Government
The recent educational reforms also take steps to protect the right of residents to access local schools. Before, elementary and middle schools would accept students who lived in the surrounding areas. Parents’ perception of the quality of a school affected the value of local real estate. This is particularly important in China as government-run schools are regarded as better than private schools, and foreign-run international schools are not accessible to Chinese passport-holders. As good public schools increased property prices, wealthy parents would purchase these expensive properties to ensure that their children received a high-quality education in the best public institutions. However, this has led to classism and elitism. The wealthiest families ensured their child could enter one of a handful of top schools where they would get together to form elite clubs, forming connections that would generate wealth and power once they reach adulthood.
These elite clubs are not accessible to children from working-class communities. Indeed, it offers an unfair advantage to the students who can buy their way into a local community where there is a good school. In order to address this inequality, the government has abolished this enrolment policy based on residential geography, and now accepts students via decisions made by the Education Department. The Education Department uses a points-based system which takes into account where the child was born, where their parents work, and how long the family has lived in the area. In other words, the points-based system judges exactly how ”local” a student is.
3. Western thinking creates wealth inequality
Western thinking is historically recognised as the most valuable cultural currency globally. Anglo-US colonial hegemony has dominated world culture for the 300 years since the Industrial Revolution, which standardised Westernisation as a global idealist. For colonised native people, Westernisation was equated with being “civilised.” Because of this, in the 1980s, Chairman Deng Xiaoping embraced neoliberalism to transform the Chinese domestic economy. He sent many academically promising students to the US and the UK to study modern culture and science such as the economics of consumerism and advanced engineering. English became, thereby, a mandatory requirement. It can be said that the Chinese government recognised the importance of Western liberal cultural, as well as economic, values in order to merge into the global stage in the post-Mao era. Gradually, there were more and more scholars who considered Western epistemology as a valuable resource to mobilize Chinese development.
That English literacy as a desirable cultural asset became more easily obtainable by the rich remains cemented through the following factors:
1. Wealthy parents (including government officials) can send their children to tutoring centres that teach English and also prepare students to apply to prestigious private schools in the US and UK.
2.Those who hold foreign passports or citizenships, which are more readily available to those who have the funds to spend time or invest overseas, can send their children to foreign-run international private schools in China where their children can receive a high-quality education alongside the children of the expat elite. In ‘Poor Economics’ (Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo), private schools are cited as a direct cause of wealth inequality. Many of the most prestigious private schools in China belong to, or are affiliated with British private boarding schools such as Harrow.
3. Generally speaking, a degree from a well-known overseas university seems to have more social value than a domestic degree. On top of that, exposure to global culture and familiarity with elite Western academic publishing such as the university presses can enrich domestic institutions through technological and cultural networks and innovation, which has made overseas-educated candidates extremely desirable to employers.
4. China’s new nationalism and Education
The glorification of learning English has led to a perception among Chinese people of Western thinking as a universal philosophy. When Xi became Chairman, he ascertained that the Chinese people could be independent thinkers and need not be led by Western ideologies. Xi believes that China’s autonomy is not determined by Western liberal discourse, and the China of today is not the same as that of old. His vision of Chinese nationalism is designed to confront US political interference. In fact, the 2021 US-China summit in Alaska reflected the Chinese government’s disagreement with the US’s approach to foreign policy. Yang Jiechi, a top Chinese diplomatic official and LSE-educated member of the Westernised elite, openly criticised the US as not representing the world and not having the right to intervene in Chinese domestic political problems. He also said that although Chinese people were historically oppressed by Western imperialism, the Chinese today are not the same as they were in earlier decades. He argued that Americans therefore need to change their perspective and approach to the US-China diplomatic relationship. His view is that US liberal values cannot overpower the Chinese government’s determination to act as an independent player on the global stage.
This political motivation is what the intellectual Frantz Fanon argues native intellectuals need in order to endorse their national culture to claim their legitimacy (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, 2007, Post-colonial Studies, p,154). He argues that Western colonial culture has dominated world culture. It fundamentally excludes non-Western culture as uncivilised and barbarian, and, accordingly, native cultures are made into the Other throughout world history. He believes native intellectuals’ decolonisation effort should involve praising and humanising their native cultures to resist the colonisers’ culture in global political discourse. This is exactly what we are seeing now in China.
Xi promises to hold an ironfist policy on defining Chinese nationalism, in which he argues that the country’s core values should be solely based on Chinese culture. His policy requires that national culture be defined by homegrown discourse, and makes clear that the definition of Chinese nationalism should not be influenced by Western liberal values as it is superior to both communism and capitalism. (Suisheng Zhao, 2019). His vision aims at drastic change in the Chinese education system. In recent years, universities have been required to follow rigorous guidelines on what to teach their students. Foreign instructors’ and professors’ syllabi must be approved by the government. If instructors need to use academic resources from the US or the UK, such as those from the Cambridge or Oxford University Presses, they need to have official approval (Economy, 2018, p.140). In addition, the requirement for English exams in some elementary schools has been rescinded. The government has also been considering abolishing English as a compulsory requirement of the gaokao exam. It remains to be seen whether the prioritisation of Chinese culture and values will lead to a decline in the desirability of an overseas education.
5. Westernised Elite and Liberal Values
Xi’s vision of Chinese nationalism has the potential to marginalise the minority of the population who have already been exposed to Western liberal values. According to a recent study, Chinese students constituted 35% of the international student population in the US (Xin Wang, Jan 2 2021). However, despite so many wanting to be educated there, the domestic nationalist discourse engenders a view of the US as a nation in decline and elite, Westernised students are increasingly perceived negatively by the public at large. The Chinese government’s political action seems like a Cultural Revolution 2.0. There are Chinese people who feel uncertain about their future. This is partly because Western values and engagement contributed to their economic success, and official support for continuing such an engagement is now being precipitately withdrawn.
Before the government embraced neoliberal values, the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s persecuted a minority of Westernised intellectuals. This memory deters considerable numbers of the Westernised Chinese intellectual diaspora from returning to China. The recent education reforms with their radical approach towards egalitarianism is awakening memories of past oppression, and this is causing privileged individuals to feel sceptical that their homeland still has a place for them. However, Xi is not totally opposed to the Westernised intellectual community, and does not want to fully exclude Euro-American discourses, particularly within the sciences and technological innovation, insofar as they can support China’s continued rise; hence, if not always central to the Party’s public image, he advocates a sustained appreciation of the contributions that Western-educated students can make, and has introduced an inclusion policy in Shenzhen which seeks to encourage their return from overseas.
As a consequence, the Chinese government’s recent reform approach aims to reduce the knowledge gap as a means of reducing wealth inequality. It also encompasses a populist approach to eliminating Western liberal values from the forefront of the masses’ consciousness to protect Xi’s vision for Chinese nationalism through education. Nonetheless, Xi believes that some Western values can serve the interest of the CCP for the rise of new China. These need to exist within China and continue to be integrated into its society–but gradually, cautiously, and under the Party’s full control.