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Counter-Discourses And Alternative Knowledge: Rural Chinese Female Students Accommodating And Resisting The Discourse Of Quality (Suzhi) At Higher Education Institutions In China, Lifang Wang

Journal of Inquiry and Action in Education

This article, based on a qualitative research study with 66 rural female students attending five public universities and one public college in China, examines how these students negotiated the dominant discourse of quality (suzhi), which represents them as lacking in capacity and knowledge. Since the 1980s when China started implementing its economic reforms, the Chinese state has constructed the discourse of quality to ascribe China’s underdevelopment to the low quality of its population, said to hinder China’s attempts to catch up with the more advanced Western economies. My research findings show how these students have been systematically marginalized and discriminated …