Individual Paper
5. Transmitting Knowledges: Institutions, Objects and Practices
In order to optimize their children’s chances of being admitted at US colleges, many parents on the Chinese mainland who can afford it often turn to education consultancy companies. With tiered services, these may run the gamut from offering mentorship in cultivating ‘western values’ and bridging cultural gaps, to the more nefarious practice of ghostwriting entire applications. Drawing on three years of fieldwork within such companies in Shanghai, the paper aims to provide first an overview of this little studied industry, situating it within the larger context of how education is being governed within the PRC, and how these fit within larger social trends such as status anxiety, high youth unemployment and declining birth rates. Secondly, through an analysis of student’s application essays and ethnographic description, it provides an account of how students negotiate what is often spoken of in highly commodified terms as the ‘marketing’ of their identities, or the construction of their ‘brand’ in order to make them culturally legible to admission officers, a task that sometimes threatens deeply held convictions or their elite status. The paper concludes with articulating ways in which parents and staff in the end attempt to reach a level of complicity in justifying the fact that the student on paper, often being admitted to top-tier institutions, bares little relation to the actual person.
Gene-George Earle
East China Normal University