False Consciousness or Rational Choice? RURAL Families Aspiring for Their Offspring’S Higher Education in China’S Remote Areas

This study explores rural (grand)parents’ conceptions and practices concerning their offspring’s education, drawing on in-depth interviews with parents/caretakers in 30 households and participant observation in 6 families in a remote area in 2023. The participants typically argue that shangdaxue (going to college/university) is of paramount importance for their children’s future welfare, or ‘the only way out’. They are doing all they can to support their offspring to achieve as much education as possible from a university/college as prestigious as possible, which entails constant toiling, self-denial, health problems, and anxiety about their children’s school performance and higher education prospects. These findings indicate that present-day rural families in remote areas typically show strong educational desire and intense educational anxiety—no less than urban (middle-class) families do—contrary to the ‘deficit discourse’ dominating previous research which highlights rural parents’ lack of higher education expectations and support for their children due to low levels of cultural, economic and social capital.

We argue that on the one hand, the remote rural families’ firm belief in higher education seems to reflect a false consciousness in the Marxist sense about social mobility in contemporary China, where it is increasing difficult, if not impossible, to achieve social mobility through educational accomplishment, especially for disadvantaged groups. On the other hand, however, it is firmly grounded in their rational conclusion that among the multiple choices seemingly available to rural youth, striving for higher education is after all the most effective way to change fate, despite the opportunity costs and slim chance to get into a good-enough university. This rational choice derives from their lived experiences of the deep-rooted rural-urban disparities. The latter perspective also allows for a much-needed actor-oriented approach to complement the deficit model.