The role of education in equality of opportunity and individual experience of social mobility in the Chinese context

Yiran Zhao
University of Cambridge, UK

The rise of neoliberalism in the West in late 1970s has helped entrench the politics of aspirations and individualism. During the same time, China underwent economic reform led by Deng Xiaoping. The growing autonomy in the market gave rise to increasing amount of social stratifications in society, reflected in terms of the inequalities in economic, social and cultural resources. In order to achieve better life outcomes, Chinese people are driven to move up the social ladder, primarily through investment in education. This study empirically analyses the role of education in promoting equality of opportunities and outcomes in the Chinese context. With data drawn from the 2012 Chinese General Social Survey, regression analyses are used to evaluate the impact of educational level on change in self-perceived social status. This subjective measure is argued to be a stronger indicator for one’s experience of social mobility than instruments developed in Western contexts, such as the occupational status by Blau and Dancun and the class classification measure by Goldthorpe and his colleagues. By accounting for contextually specific factors such as Guanxi (social capitals) and Hukou (rural-urban divide), this paper also evaluates their implicit and explicit influence on facilitating or undermining the impact of education on social mobility. Moreover, this study addresses an underexplored topic in the Chinese context, i.e. the emotional costs associated with the overemphasis on thriving in a competitive society by “overcoming” one’s social origin. By drawing from Bourdieu’s analysis of the hysteresis effect and making connections with the deeply rooted structural inequalities, this paper calls for rising attention on the emotional wellbeing of highly educated but socially immobile people.