Positioned and positioning in globalizing socialist China: Higher education choices, experiences and career aspirations among Chinese college students.

摘要

This dissertation contributes to the effort to bring a dialectical interaction of agency and structure into the mega-narrative of globalization, looking into how young people from different social backgrounds are positioned and positioning themselves in local and global changes. This is mainly achieved through a thorough analysis of decision making processes in three critical moments in Chinese college students' lives: higher education pathway, choice of institution and majors, and graduate plans. The decision making process and its results effectively reflect the ways social structures and human strategies interact under the new context of local and global economic restructuring.;Based on Bourdieu's theories and interview data, this dissertation develops a framework termed architecture of capital accumulation and transmission. This dissertation uses this framework to explain how the educational related choices and experiences of college students in China connect to the local and global changes in relation to the students' family and institutional habitus and availability of various capitals. By so doing, this project contributes to the understanding of the complex processes and multiple dimensions involved in university entrance patterns and social structure production/reproduction. Major methods include policy analysis and interview data from 75 students enrolled in 21 institutions in developed and less developed regions in China. In addition, six administrators and faculty from different tiers of institutions were interviewed to supplement information.;The patterns and outcome of educational choices, experiences, and individual strategies are very much contingent on the economic, social, and cultural capitals the individual possesses, and the political institutions and policies that regulate the flow of various capitals. Urban middle class students' pathways to college are linear while rural peasant students' journeys are full of uncertainty and vacillation. Middle class families' decision making reflects their "anxiety of competition", which represents the desire of China's middle class to gain competitiveness in China's new social structure that is being established in the years to come. Chinese rural peasant students and their families depict the "anxiety of being left behind". Their perceptions and coping strategies of educational and social opportunities are closely related to the structural constraints and opportunities in China's socialist market economy. Though both groups show aspiration and admiration for global culture, urbanity, and modernity, urban middle class students are found to "think and act locally and globally" while rural peasant students are "dreaming global, planning local". It is argued that youth in China are actively engaged in contemplating strategies in capital accumulation based on their situated structures, which on an aggregate level, influences the evolving new class structure in China. Theoretical and policy implications are discussed.;Key words: China, college students, Bourdieu, capital, habitus, class, higher education choice, career aspiration, social stratification, globalization, urban middle class students, rural peasant students, inequality