Class Work: Vocational Schools and China's Urban Youth

Images of Chinese teens with their heads buried in books for hours on end, preparing for high-stakes exams, dominate understandings of Chinese youth in both China and the West. But what about young people who are not on the path to academic success? What happens to youth who fail the state's high-stakes exams? What many—even in China—don't realize is that up to half of the nation's youth are flunked out of the academic education system after 9th grade.

Class Work explores the consequences for youth who have failed these exams, through an examination of two urban vocational schools in Nanjing, China. Through a close look at the students' backgrounds, experiences, the schools they attend, and their trajectories into the workforce, T.E. Woronov explores the value systems in contemporary China that stigmatize youth in urban vocational schools as "failures," and the political and economic structures that funnel them into working-class futures. She argues that these marginalized students and schools provide a privileged window into the ongoing, complex intersections between the socialist and capitalist modes of production in China today and the rapid transformation of China's cities into post-industrial, service-based economies. This book advances the notion that urban vocational schools are not merely "holding tanks" for academic failures; instead they are incipient sites for the formation of a new working class.

About the author

T.E. Woronov is Senior Lecturer of Anthropology at the University of Sydney.

"With immense sympathy and curiosity, Woronov untangles the economic and political structures limiting life prospects for vocational education students in China. Refusing to see 'class sorting' as a solely Chinese problem, Class Work provides a rich critique of the neoliberal human capital model linking employment and education. Woronov sensitively enters the social world of oft-ignored young people trapped in the system—a fine ethnography by a masterful writer."

—Judith Farquhar, University of Chicago

"Combining rich ethnography with incisive analyses, Class Work is a wonderfully original account of the political economy of vocational education in contemporary China. Woronov illuminates several timely issues including the making of a new urban working class for the service sector, shifting regimes of value, flexible labor, and the fate of youth who are labeled as 'failures' in a transforming China."

—Li Zhang, University of California, Davis

"While everyone else looks the other way, Woronov draws our attention to the unglamorous experiences of millions of vocational students, who are viewed as academic and moral failures in urban China. This exemplary ethnography is full of insights into education, class formation and capitalism. It's an engaging read for anyone interested in China's complex realities and its potential futures."

—Tamara Jacka, The Australian National University

"In this deservedly ambitious book, Woronov argues for the emergence of a new working class in China, one employed in the short-term service sector. Her powerful and rich ethnography of two vocational schools reveals nothing less than the transformation of value/s in China."

—Nancy Abelmann, University of Illinois

Acknowledgments

Contents

Excerpt from the Introduction