Being Modern in China

This book analyses modernity and tradition in China today and how they combine in striking ways in the Chinese school. Paul Willis – the leading ethnographer and author of Learning to Labour – shows how China has undergone an internal migration not only of masses of workers but also of a mental and ideological kind to a new cultural landscape of meaning characterized by the worship of the glorified city, devotion to consumerism and fixation with the smartphone and the internet. Massive educational expansion has been a precondition for explosive economic growth and technical development, but at the same time it provides sites where the new meets the old in the experiences,…