Sociologist Jiang Yilin: How do Chinese elites replicate the road of the elite with "learning God" children?

Interface News Reporter | Xu Luqing

Interface News Editor | Yellow Moon

Even before graduating from Cambridge, Ashley received several offers, two of which were particularly appealing to her, whether to move to Switzerland to start her career with the world's largest manufacturer, or to attend one of Europe's number one business schools. Whichever path she chooses, her starting salary after employment is at least about $100,000. ”

Ashley is one of the subjects of research by Yilin Jiang, an assistant professor of sociology at NYU Shanghai, who is part of what she defines as China's young elite.

From 2012 to 2019, Jiang followed 28 elite high school students in Beijing, starting from their sophomore and junior years of high school until they graduated from college. They go to top campuses around the world, graduate on Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and other places to work or continue their studies, and they attend five of Beijing's top 10 middle schools (out of nearly 300 in total), where their incomes are more than twice that of the top 10 percent of urban households in China. Whether it is from the perspective of their socioeconomic background or academic performance, they are all elite students in big cities in the eyes of "small-town problem-solvers".

Wall Street

Jiang Yilin noticed that with the cooperation of their parents and middle schools, who are also elites, this group of elite students entered the world's top universities and competed for a place in the global competition. What she wants to understand is what the resources of home and school give them, and how do they use their resources, both tangible and intangible, to compete for position and even succeed in the global elite competition?

In Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition, Jiang Yilin documents this field research that lasted seven years. This September, Study Gods became the first winner of the Pierre Bourdieu Book Award in Educational Sociology to focus on a non-Native American case.

Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition

In an exclusive interview with Interface Culture (ID: booksandfun), Jiang Yilin shared her experience of listening to classes in super high school classrooms and living with students in the past seven years, as well as the process of elite students completing elite replication after entering their homes: the tangible and intangible resources provided by families allow students to participate in global competition without worries. In top high schools, the micro-interaction between the principal and the students every day has accumulated the cultivation of elite consciousness. Family resources also serve as a buffer to protect children from failure, and parents will continue to play a back-up role by providing their children with a chance to succeed a second time after graduation.

Jiang Yilin believes that the reason why China's young elites can conquer the city in the global elite competition is because they know how to become "learning gods". In fact, the campus system from "learning gods" to "learning weak" permeates every aspect of high school life, and students adopt strategies to try to win in the system, forging the ability to navigate status hierarchies in the process. The "in their position" approach has continued into the workplace around the world, and she has observed that elite students interact with their bosses and colleagues in the same way they did with their teachers and classmates years ago. "In this grading system, students attribute test scores to talent, ability and genes, and don't realize that their competitive advantage is the result of unequal results," Jiang said. ”

Yilin Jiang, Assistant Professor of Sociology at NYU Shanghai (Photo courtesy of interviewee)

01 Seek out elite East Asian students who are not in the field of Western studies

Interface Culture: Why did you want to do research on Chinese elites in the first place, and do you have any theories or fields that you want to talk to?

Jiang Yilin: I first read several classics of Western educational sociology, such as Seamus Khan's "Privilege" and Peter Demerath's "Producing Success", both of which are about elite students in the United States, and both of them are about the author's visit to elite schools and studying the different faces of students as a teacher. After reading it, I liked it very much, but there was a deep dissatisfaction, because in these studies, I could not see any elite East Asian students I knew, and I did not reflect the classmates I had been in contact with—my junior high school was a private school, and most of the people who studied there were rich people, and I was a "scholar" who was admitted to help the school increase the admission rate.

For example, "Privilege" mentions "comfort", who is comfortable in our senior year of high school? It says that students are cultivated with a cultural egalitarian mentality, and can appreciate Shakespearean and "vulgar" romance novels with the same mentality. No, we need to memorize "Guwen Guanzhi", and reading romance novels in high school will only be considered a waste of time.

Therefore, I should have been dissatisfied with this research at first, and I thought that the situation in East Asia would definitely be different, so I did my own research.

Interface Culture: From 2012 to 2019, you traced the life paths of 28 elite Chinese high school students in Beijing, how would you define the new generation of Chinese elites, and what are their socioeconomic backgrounds?

Jiang Yilin: There are many definitions of "elite", and most of the elite high school students defined by East Asian societies are students from top universities, such as students from Beijing No. 4 Middle School and Renmin University High School in Beijing.      

Jiang Yilin's field scene (photo provided by the interviewee)

But I wanted to talk to the world's mainstream literature, so I chose the same definition as them - students whose family income is in the top 10% of the country. Wealthy people often report their gross income, and their "grey income" may be many times higher than their tax income, but despite this, these families can report median incomes that are more than twice the top 10 percent of China's urban income, and they are a very wealthy group of children.

I looked at some specific indicators, such as whether they could afford their child's tuition for four years at a private university in the United States, and all parents were sure that they could afford it. Most families own at least two houses in Beijing, and some have properties in other provinces. Almost all of these students' parents were upward mobility through higher education, having attended university in the mid-to-late 1980s, many of them alumni of Tsinghua University and Peking University, some with master's degrees, and some with study abroad. Most of the 28 students have at least one parent who is a senior executive or professional.

Interface Culture: You have tracked them from the second and third years of high school to their work and graduate studies after graduating from college, what is the life development path of these elite students after middle school?

Jiang Yilin: From high school to university, there are two categories, a group of students stay in China, and a group of people go abroad to study in college, but after arriving at university, the two paths are one - almost all of them go abroad, and only 3 of the 28 people do not go abroad.

After going abroad, most of them do not return to their home countries. But people are not as good as heaven, the epidemic broke out, the group of children who graduated in 2020 did not find a job after graduating with a master's degree, the United States could not stay, all came back, and now they have been working in China for two years. I met two or three more people a while ago, and they said that they still want to go abroad, and the way may be to go out to study for a doctorate, and then see how they can continue to stay in their jobs, or let the company go out (most of them work in foreign companies). The future development of this group of children must be in line with international standards, they are very patriotic, but they also have a strong identity as a global citizen.

Of course, not everyone will be able to find a job that pays well when they graduate. Many of these young elites will go into finance, but others will go into environmental protection, technology and academia. For most people, these are enviable futures.

Beijing No. 4 High School College Entrance Examination Center

02 Parents and schools should interact with each other to cultivate elites

Interface Culture: In your observations, what kind of help did family resources provide to these elites in their upbringing?

Jiang Yilin: The tangible help is money, but I think the most important thing is the intangible help. Many of China's social systems don't cost people a lot of money, the public education system is not expensive, and now the double reduction makes the invisible influence very important.

For example, parents' understanding of the higher education system. How do they know how to recruit students from universities? Probably they've been through it themselves, and they've won and won, and they know exactly how to play the game – what we often call "cultural capital." On the one hand, parents know when to help their children, on the other hand, they know how to get to the end of the line as quickly as possible, parents are very sure and confident, and the child will be affected by the parents, so they will not be so anxious, and they will discuss with their parents if they have problems.

I wrote about a girl named Claire, who went to Yale to study, and her mother was a Ph.D. person, and Claire's family members were highly educated and well-connected in China, but they were not content to stay at the top of Chinese society and wanted their children to pursue elite status in the world. Her mother said that their family came out of Inner Mongolia to Beijing, so her daughter will go from Beijing to the world.

Her mom always told me that it didn't help Claire in any way, but it helped a lot. She said that Claire was a nervous child, and she just sat next to her when her daughter was nervous and anxious, and talked to her about her thoughts. Once, on the way to visit her mother, I heard her answer a call from Claire asking her to help make a poster, so she quickly explained to the doctoral students, and finally everyone quickly printed a human-sized poster together. But when I asked them again, no one remembered, and they didn't think it was something worth saying.

Admission to one of Jiang Yilin's field schools (photo provided by the interviewee)

Interface Culture: How long can the help of parents last? You mentioned in the book that after students go abroad, the scope of parents' rights generally does not involve the foreign region.

Jiang Yilin: This is where the world is unfair (laughs). If it's an American or British elite, their influence is likely to be in China, and he can help his child go to school somewhere in China or install a position in a cultural exchange center, but Chinese parents have a harder time doing that.

For this group of parents, if the children stay in China, they can continue to help, and it is no problem to help the children find a job in the unit, but each child eventually walks out of the greenhouse set up by the parents and goes to the world.

Parents also do a lot of filing for their children, especially in this uncertain global situation, which is very important. This filing generally means that they have the opportunity to work in China, and they can continue to apply for a foreign PhD at any time. This kind of filing is often a vision that the average middle class does not have.

Interface Culture: In interpersonal interactions, you mentioned that it is important for elites to learn to convince students of their opinions, and that teachers consciously or unconsciously cultivate a sense of elitist power in students. How does it work?

Jiang Yilin: The school will always say "you are important" to the students, the teachers will often say to the students that they will "change the world", and when chatting with the students, they will often mention "we are obviously better than others" or "we are the best school in the district". When I was doing my research, the vice principal pointed to the students and proudly said to me, "Schools in the United States and Australia say that our students are geniuses!"

These are not available in most schools, only in elite high schools. Some high schools may always say "you're not good enough" to students, but these schools are constantly reminding students that they are better than students from other schools, and that everyone has infinite possibilities and can make great contributions. Listen to the students and get used to it, I'm a good student, I'm a good person, I can do a lot of things.

It's an inequality, who can go to these schools, who has the ability, who receives the same message at home and at school, and the teachers, the parents, and the classmates form this belief among each other, and finally form a very small circle. It's a growth process that only the elite have.

Harvard University

Interface Culture: The Unequal Childhood book makes a similar observation about the way middle-class Americans are educated, where communication is often negotiated rather than dictative, and children can refute the words of adults and learn a sense of elite rights. At this point, do you think this consciousness is universal?

Jiang Yilin: The belief that "I'm worth it" is common in part. They believe that I deserve to be treated so well, that I deserve so many resources.

In the book, I wrote about a boy named Tony, who was working in the United States, and on his birthday, he found a lot of friends and colleagues to come to his penthouse apartment to drink, chat, and play cards to celebrate his birthday. But he never thought that his colleagues in the company had just gone to a two-week training camp and changed three cities, and everyone was very tired, and he never thought that someone would refuse his birthday invitation.

03 "Learning God" - "Learning Weakness" despises the debugging and subversion of the chain

Interface Culture: In the book, you describe in detail the division of the status of students within elite high schools: scholars, scholars, scumbags, and weakness, which are reduced in turn. The grades are based on test scores and levels of comfort – at the top of the pyramid is "Xueshen", which refers to students who do not work hard but have high test scores, and at the bottom are "weak students", i.e., students who work hard but do not do well. When will the pyramid classification system from "learning god" to "learning weak" affect when will the classification and evaluation of students change after graduation?

Jiang Yilin: This system has continued until after work. I interviewed the same group of people who couldn't remember what they told me seven years ago, but when I went back and listened to the transcript, they used the same words they used to describe their classmates and teachers exactly the same as they did seven years ago, describing their colleagues and bosses seven years later.

For example, I ask a student why he runs to tell his boss a lot of things, and why his boss treats you so well. She said, I'm such a good employee, of course the boss likes me. I asked her a similar question seven years ago, and one day she called her teacher in the middle of the night and asked to change an essay, and it was ready to be uploaded within 30 minutes. She said exactly the same thing, of course the teacher likes me, why don't you like me as a good student? The way they get along with the boss is the same as the way they get along with the teacher.

These students felt that their personal performance would directly affect whether their boss liked them or not, that those who felt that they were not performing well would not dare to disobey their superiors, and that successful people believed that they should have some kind of privilege in front of their superiors. Although most of them are already at the top of the income pyramid, they still subscribe to the social status model that has linked privilege and performance since middle school.

For "Xueshen" and "Xueba", the world is his backyard, and what they want to do, their classmates and teachers support them, and what is there in the world that cannot be tried? But if the student's grades are not good, it is equivalent to not meeting the only requirements of the society, and the teachers, classmates, and parents will not give you any freedom. If you want to do something different, your parents will say, do you want to take care of your grades first? The teacher may say, it's a little hard for you, and his whole mentality is completely different. So I think in the long run, the two groups of students will also have different developments.

Wall Street

Interface Culture: If this is the case, will the "scholars" and "scholars" with relatively high status in middle school show more awareness of rights than the "scumbags" in interpersonal interaction when they reach the workplace?

Jiang Yilin: Not necessarily. What these students learn is to immediately distinguish where and where they are in each field. When you are in high school, you may be a "scholar" or a "scholar", but when you go to college, you have to re-distinguish it, and you find that you have become a "scumbag", and you will show different behaviors. After work, they will also be adjusted according to their status.

I wrote in the book about a student who went to the University of Pennsylvania, and when she got to the university, she did well and belonged to a group of high-status people, but when she went to work on Wall Street, she suddenly found that she was not good at work, and she was not as good as other people from Harvard, Yale, or Princeton, and her behavior suddenly changed. When I followed her in high school, she told me that she could do whatever she wanted, and when she was in college, she also said that it was okay to play as much as she wanted, but when she was working, she just didn't dare to leave her post for fear that her boss would come to her at any time. I made an appointment with her to meet her, but for five hours that afternoon, she didn't dare to leave the computer, and stayed in her room for five hours waiting for emails, for fear that her boss would suddenly come to her. She found that the world was not a backyard anymore, and she had to start paying attention to a lot of things.

Interface Culture: Behavior change based on status debugging seems to be fast.

Jiang Yilin: Soon, they didn't just learn their own behavior patterns, but internalized the whole way the status system worked, so they knew what people were going to do in what position at all times. In addition to the socio-economic resources they have, elite students learn about the unspoken rules that determine each other's position in society. In a world that operates according to unspoken rules, these abilities can bring real benefits.

Interface culture: The most important indicators are "grades" and "comfort", and the book "Privilege", which studies elite high schools in the United States, also pays attention to the cultivation of "comfort" in students. Do you think it's the same kind of "cozy"?

Jiang Yilin: I've been thinking about this question for a long time, because when it comes to comfort, we need to have a dialogue with the previous concept. The sense of comfort in "Privilege" is more like a sense of comfort in cultural capital, which is felt by my body, I am very relaxed, I am not anxious when talking to anyone, and seeing my classmates is the same as meeting the principal and the chairman, which is a kind of cultural capital, which can only be obtained by having certain background or family resources.

But the comfort I mentioned in the book is purely numerical "comfort", which is how many hours of sleep and how many hours of reading are spent every day, and I don't know whether the body itself is comfortable or not. He may not be able to sleep every day because he is anxious and may gobble up his meals. This is not really the comfort of cultural capital, but a quantitative indicator of time.

Interface Culture: You have made a distinction between the main and international divisions in several secondary schools you surveyed, and in your observations, this pyramid hierarchy is applicable to both the main and international divisions, do you think the evaluation criteria for students in the main and international divisions are similar?

Jiang Yilin: It's the same, I'm also surprised, the papers are all about having a comparison unit, I originally wanted to compare the rich and the labor groups in the elite schools, but later I found that these schools have almost no labor groups, so few that there is no way to do it. If most of them are ethnic minorities, then there are more problems involved. So I thought, let's compare the main department and the international department, and the students who go abroad are exactly the same as those who don't.

I think it may be because they grew up in the same environment, from birth to 18 years old in China, the way of doing things is probably the same, except that there is a group of people who have been taking classes in English for three years, and then preparing to go abroad, and the other group of people is preparing for the college entrance examination.

The High School Affiliated to Beijing Normal University

Interface Culture: How do you think this status pyramid system differs from the status division in Western schools?

Jiang Yilin: Western schools are not a single pyramid, but have several evaluation dimensions, such as academics, sports, art and music, etc. Perhaps the most liked are students with academic performance, but it doesn't matter if their academic performance is really bad, as long as they are good at sports, or good at music and art. But the division of China's system is very simple, that is, academic performance plus comfort, in fact, even if there is no comfort, it doesn't matter, as long as the grades are high, the status is high.

Interface Culture: When you entered the university, you mentioned that many students in the Beijing area can no longer maintain their academic hegemony compared to the students who are admitted to prestigious universities in provinces with large populations. What kind of strategies will these elite students have, and in what ways will they distinguish themselves from the "small-town problem-solvers"? 

Jiang Yilin: They don't have the honorific title of "small-town subject", obviously this is no longer an honorific title, but I haven't even heard them use this word. They would tell me that the people were like crazy people, "they were all crazy", "like crazy". After these students enter the top universities, they find that they can't be "scholars", they will turn the entire rank upside down, and change it to the top is "Xueshen", the second level is "Xuescum", and then there are "Xueba" and "Xueqiang". The argument for reversing this hierarchy is that universities need to explore themselves, learn how to live, not just study.

The most interesting thing is that I asked my classmates from other provinces, and everyone obeyed this new set of rankings. If I say that the grades of college students in Beijing are not good, students from other provinces will say that they have better "quality", know what they want to do, know how to explore themselves, and are exactly the same as Beijing students who say their own words. Elite students, even with so few people, have the ability to turn the tide of things.

But for students who go abroad, even if they find themselves falling into the "scumbag", they have not been able to reverse the previous sequence. There are also gender differences, for example, girls usually do better in high school than boys, so if you go to a good school in the United States, like Princeton and Yale, you will find that your grades are not good. But boys may not be very high in school, and they find that their grades are not bad. Therefore, after a baptism abroad, boys' self-confidence has come out, but eighty percent of girls have problems such as stress and anxiety.

Interface Culture: You mention students in your book who "pretend to be comfortable". She graduated from Yale and was not satisfied with the job she was looking for, but she emphasized to the people around her that she chose this job only because she was too lazy to continue looking for it, and in fact she paid a lot to get this job, and the apparent ease disguised that she was actually secretly working hard.

Jiang Yilin: She was originally a "scholar", but later when she came to Yale, her status declined, and she thought that she could become a "scholar", but she couldn't, so she hurriedly emphasized the sense of comfort. Because she can't become a "weak learner", emphasizing a sense of comfort can also keep herself in the position of "scumbag". "Learning God" will not deliberately emphasize the sense of comfort, and "learning scum" is the most emphasized, because it must be separated from the "weak learning" at the bottom.

Interface Culture: Why is it so scary to become "weak", and what is everyone afraid of?

Jiang Yilin: They are afraid that their efforts will not be rewarded, which is very difficult to accept, and it is different from the so-called "American dream" and "Chinese dream".

Students preparing for the college entrance examination

We always felt that the world was that I could succeed if I worked hard, at least there would be a little hope for hard work, a higher score, and people would like me a little more, but in the end we found that we had no chance of success if we tried everything we could. Students don't know how to explain it, they will say that "weak learning" is a genetic problem, and attribute grades and status to personal ability. Most people avoid becoming "weak learners" and take the route of not acknowledging hard work, and some will pretend not to care, but in fact they care a lot.

For those who have worked hard but have no results, there is no explanatory discourse or mechanism in this society, and there is no comfort at all, which is the problem of the whole society.

04 From an elite high school to the world

Interface Culture: A lot of research that focuses on social inequality and class duplication takes into account the situation in a country. And your Study Gods: How the New Chinese Elite Prepare for Global Competition points out that the replication of elite status is transnational, and it is entirely possible for the new generation of elites to be born in one country, go to another country to be educated, go to work in a third country, and finally retire in a fourth country. Do you think that the replication of the global survey class can bring any new horizons to the previous single-country investigation?

Jiang Yilin: If you open your horizons, the things you care about will be different. If I just look at it in China, then going to Tsinghua University and Peking University is the most important thing in the world, entering a state-owned enterprise will also be the most important thing, and even, if you are a woman, marrying a good husband is the most important thing. But if we look at globalization, what was important in our domestic vision will be reversed.

After the 2016 college entrance examination in Beijing, Zhou Zhanping of the High School Affiliated to the National People's Congress was interviewed

Interface Culture: You think that the reason why China's young elites can win in the global elite competition is because they know how to become "scholars". However, the meritocracy standards in the global elite competition are not the same as those in China, how do the Chinese elites convert the college entrance examination experience into the capital of global competition? Can the strategies they learn in the competition for higher education in China be extended to global competitive advantage?

Jiang Yilin: The most interesting thing is that Americans are not interacting with Chinese, and when there are more Chinese, they will become a country of their own, and a small number of students are very serious and try to study the United States and Britain, but without exception all of them fail. I asked students in the U.S. who they usually hang out with, where your friends are from, and most of them are Chinese.

It can be a bad thing for the average international student not to associate with other people, because it means that there are no resources and the network is not good enough, but the elite can directly copy his own circle.

Interface Culture: When China's new generation of elite students flock abroad, will there be interaction and collision between different merit standards? For example, you mentioned at the end of the book that Chinese and American education have a tendency to move closer to each other?

Jiang Yilin: Some studies have shown that there will be an impact, and there are some schools in California with a large number of Chinese, and suddenly they have become the same as China, and even white teachers evaluate students, and TA is very ordinary, just a white person. The article was titled When White is Just Alright, and it found that white people had become middle-of-the-road in this set of standards. There are also studies that say that many white people in the United States will move out when they see more Chinese or Korean children in their schools or communities. In addition to racial discrimination, it is also because the school district feels that it is difficult to get into college, because American applications are not only based on SAT scores, but also on campus rankings.  

Some studies have found that after the 2008 financial crisis in the United States, many students realized that they could not go to good schools and jobs if they did not get good grades, and they were more and more concerned about whether they had a good GPA.

There will also be a trend of closer proximity between the two countries. If you look closely, from Bush to Obama, they are talking about starting exams in elementary school, and the United States is getting closer and closer to China at least before K12 (editor's note: refers to the education system from primary school to high school, that is, elementary school, junior high school, and high school). On the other hand, there are also self-recruitment interviews in China, and colleges and universities want to recruit students from multiple aspects, rather than students who are only preparing for exams. So I think there seems to be a trend to converge, at least in terms of policy.

(Unless otherwise indicated, the pictures in this article are from Visual China)