The Cultural Production of the ‘Quality Citizen’: Suzhi Discourse Among Migrant Youths in Shanghai, China

Thursday, November 21

8:00 AM - 9:45 AM

Location: Vancouver CC EAST, Room 10

Presenter(s)

Ole Johannes Kaland

Associate Professor
NLA University College

This paper explores how social status is being understood and negotiated by the offspring of rural migrant workers in Shanghai, China. Although the cheap labor supplied by the migrant workforce has been key to the country’s rapid economic development, they are seen as emissaries of an underdeveloped countryside that is holding the country’s development back. State narratives about human capital stress the importance of education and a range of behaviors constituting a ‘quality’ citizen, seen to be necessary for the country’s continued progress. While the discourse on human capital and development categorizes the population into the have and have-nots of ‘quality’ (suzhi), migrant children are paradoxically not given full welfare rights to the education that is supposed to raise it in them.

Based on child and youth-focused ethnography in a charitable NGO seeking to empower migrant children and youths, the paper explores how they learn about social status through their own position in contemporary Chinese development discourse. State narratives on human capital are however quite fluid, rendering individual interpretations of what ‘quality’ (suzhi) entails possible. Following the theoretical framework of the cultural production of the educated person (Levinson et al 1996), I argue that the quality citizen is not solely defined by state campaigns, educational curricula and significant adults, but is open to resistance and negotiation by the young. I show how they internalize social status hierarchies, yet seek to challenge their positions within them, appropriate the ‘quality’ concept and reconfigure its meaning to fit positively with their own lives.