Social transformation and cultural reproduction

Yang Yang from Shanghai Jiao Tong University will present to the Centre for the Study of Political Ideologies on 1 December on 'Social transformation and cultural reproduction: a Bourdieusian analysis of post-reform China'. All are welcome.

Abstract
The core of Bourdieu’s writings concerns social space and reproduction: the relationship between the different forms of capital and their relations with inequality and power are perpetuated and reproduced in and through various fields, e.g. education. Such ongoing and successful reproduction imposes a sense of cultural legitimacy and a social definition of reality. Bourdieu’s theoretical innovation contributed to a great extent to the establishment, as well as the development, of sociology as a discipline in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Along with the wide circulation of his theory, debates over ‘the specific validity of Bourdieu’s concepts in different socio-political situations’ have intensified, precisely as Robbins proposes in the introduction to this volume, leading to the ultimate question: Is Bourdieu’s sociology ‘Franco-centric’ or ‘universal’? This talk intends to firstly reflect Chinese scholars’ encounter with Bourdieu’s work, and, more importantly, to consider this very question in a Chinese context – to see whether Bourdieu’s theory can be applied to China, particularly to the post-reform era, starting from the initiation of the economic reform in 1978 and continuing to the present day. It begins with a brief presentation of Bourdieu’s sociological theorisation, outlining reproduction theory through the interrelationship between his three primary concepts, namely, capital, habitus and field. The second part provides an overview of the reception of Bourdieu’s work in China. Part Three argues that the rapid, vast and apparently crisis-ridden restructuring has led to the emergence of three ‘new’ social groups in today’s Chinese society – ‘the new middle class’, ‘the entrepreneurs’, and ‘the political elite’. The reform has left the country with a dynamic market economy, but has also contributed to the creation of a lopsided system that is unable to address the new complexes. In line with Bourdieu’s theorisation on the forms of capital, this part discusses the logic and the problematics of capital conversion and social reproduction in China’s post-reform period. Next, Part Four focuses on the issues of cultural reproduction in this continuous and accelerating material process. The functionality of education in the socialist state is explained in comparison with the social objectives of the educational system revealed in Bourdieu’s sociology. Confucianism has resurfaced since the 2000s, as an official discourse, as well as a feature of a new national identity expected to dissolve the social tensions engendered by the rapidity of development. Although a comparative analysis of Confucian thinking and Bourdieusian theorisation is not the paramount concern of this chapter, this part does briefly discuss what these two paradigms have achieved. The chapter concludes with the methodological issues at stake in reading Bourdieu in China.