The city in the school and the school in the city: ideology, imagery, and institutions in Maoist and market socialist China

摘要

Since the advent of the People's Republic, the school has served as a metonym for the city in China, both in the public imagination and in state policy. This article explores how two different ideologies (socialist and post-socialist) were manifested in two different visual images of the city and school, which in turn shaped the urban institutions and landscapes. In the socialist era, party-state propaganda offered an image of a model society which was predominantly rural, and where formal education had been marginalized by alternative forms of learning. Cities and schools were understood to be dangerous repositories of bourgeois capitalism which must be scoured of their elitist and decadent characteristics through the importation of rural practices and values. In the post-socialist era, the city is now envisioned as the centre of modernity and progress, and schools are seen as the path to development and 'quality' (suzhi). The rural is pathologized as backward. This new ideology has reshaped the Chinese urban educational landscape from one of enforced egalitarianism to one characterized by inequality and exclusion.