Family Strategies, Guanxi, and School Success in Rural China

Research in school success in contemporary China has argued that market reforms have reproduced the advantages for students from cadre and professional family backgrounds while simultaneously creating new opportunities for children of the new arising economic elites. However, it has performed less for traditional peasant families. This book places a special emphasis on how economic and cultural resources become the main influence on rural students’ school success, and investigates how families from different social backgrounds within rural society involve themselves in the schooling of their children and how this contributes to different patterns of school success.

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Research in school success in contemporary China has argued that market reforms have reproduced the advantages for children from the cadre and the professional families while simultaneously creating new opportunities for children of the new arising economic elites. However, it has performed less for traditional peasant families. This book places a special emphasis on how rural parents from different social backgrounds use guanxi (interpersonal social networks) to maintain the interconnectedness between their families and schools to create advantages for their children in school success. It investigates, by an ethnographic study in a rural county in middle China, how families from different social backgrounds within rural society get involved in the schooling of their children and how this contributes to different patterns of school success. The book argues that schools provide few formal and routine channels for rural parents to become involved in their children’s schooling. This raises the importance of family strategic initiatives to employ guanxi in the creation of advantages for their children’s school success. It concludes with discussions about guanxi as an important mechanism for social exclusion in post-socialist China.

Chapters include:

• Family Strategies, Parental Involvement, and School Success
• The Roles of Parents: Voices of Parents in Zong Regarding School Involvement
• Policy Discourses: Missing the Link between Family and School
• Peasants: Family and Kinship
• The Blurring Division between Home and School

This concise and comprehensive book is a qualitative study that will appeal to researchers and advance students in Chinese education and society.