LAUSR

Twenty years into the 21st century and 40 years since the reform and opening up, China has experienced dramatic social, cultural, political, and economic changes. Along with the incredible economic development China has achieved in the past four decades, China has also grown from a fairly egalitarian society into a highly unequal one today (Jacques, 2009, p. 197; Nolan, 2004, p. 15). The growing social and economic inequality has also caused troubling inequalities in the education system. Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory is one of the most commonly used theoretical frameworks in studying educational inequality. Cultural capital, according to Bourdieu, exists in three forms: the embodied state (a process of “embodiment and incorporation” that connects to the “body and the mind”), the objectified state (the “culture goods” that can be obtained both materially and symbolically), and the institutionalized state (such as educational qualifications) (Bourdieu, 1986, p. 17). Bourdieu argued that formal education is used as a legitimatized tool to reproduce the existing social class stratification, with cultural capital playing a critical role during this reproduction process (Bourdieu, 1993; Bourdieu & Passeron, 1977). Despite the influential presence of Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory in educational stratification studies in many Western contexts, there is little consensus among Chinese education researchers and sociologists about its suitability in assessing the education system in the supposedly “egalitarian” Chinese society. In Bourdieu and Chinese Education: Inequality, Competition, and Change, Mu, Dooley, Luke, and colleagues present empirical studies on Chinese contemporary education and illustrate how education researchers have drawn on Bourdieu’s theories to create a sociology that is more appropriate and relevant to Chinese education research. To the best of my knowledge, this volume is the first attempt to systematically examine the Chinese education system, its development, status quo, and challenges using Bourdieu’s sociological theories. In the introduction, Dooley et al. use Bourdieu’s comparative work on education in late 20th-century France and Japan to argue that Chinese education research should follow the “same reflexivity” and adapt Bourdieu’s theory to study Chinese education empirically (p. 13). Guo et al. (chap. 2) present a brief history of the development of China’s market economy and the educational inequalities resulting from the economic and social changes. Given the unique social, cultural, and political contexts of China, the authors argue that to apply the Bourdieusian model to Chinese education research would require three major analyses: the role of the state in shaping the power relationships in the “field of educational institutions,” the social and material relationships and interactions among various stakeholders in schools and other educational institutions, and the emergence of “a new Chinese Homo economicus/educates” (p. 37). Shi and Li (chap. 3) give an overview of Bourdieu’s main sociological concepts and the influence of Bourdieu’s theory in Chinese education research. Bourdieu’s theory was introduced in the 1970s but was not broadly explored by education researchers until the beginning of the 21st century, in part because before the new millennium, national priorities focused exclusively on economic growth rather than equality or equity (p. 48). The most commonly discussed concepts of Bourdieu’s theory in Chinese education research include cultural capital, field (Bourdieu’s notion of society), and habitus. Bourdieu’s cultural capital theory provided an analytical tool for Chinese researchers to study educational inequality, especially for studies on rural leftbehind children and migrant children. Chinese researchers took Bourdieu’s concept of field and expanded it to redefine the nature of schooling. For example, in Ma (2003), school is defined as a field of a network of complex relationships of positions, and it is considered to be more symbolic (p. 52). Habitus, according to Bourdieu, is constituted through practice and is always practice oriented and 890330 EDRXXX10.3102/0013189X19890330Educational ResearcherEducational Researcher research-article2019