This Asian youth study has defined the neoliberal objectification of Chinese education through the PRC within the context of a Foucauldian and Marxists analytical perspective. Woronov’s (2004, 2009) analysis of the Chinese educational system defines the overt changes in PRC policies towards a more privatized and neoliberal vision of education for young people in China. In this perspective, Foucault defines the “power” of the government to defined on the conduct of governmental activities that illustrate the underlying Marxist view of the capitalist system and the problem of Chinese state in the professionalization of the young people in the educational process. This free market/neoliberal ideology is defined through measurement of student progress through the technological aspects of labor markets and competitive advantage for China in the global economy. The “patriotic professional” is another important theme of Zhang’s analysis of the education of Chinese students in preparation for the global labor force, which reveal a significant shift in the communist policies of education to the privatization of schools that accommodate class differentials in the neo-liberal ideology. In essence, an analysis of Asian youth culture will provide a Foucauldian and Marxist analysis of the neoliberal trends in the education of young people in the increasingly privatized and objectified systems of educational policies in the PRC. In Chinese education, the technological advances made in the 21st century define a new era of ethical systems of teaching the student through an increasingly objectivist view of learning. A focus on Woronov’s (2009) neoliberal re-conception of Foucault’s “disciplinary technology” in the objectification of education. In this new educational culture, the shift away from moral and ethical training in the liberal arts has now become more focused on the economic advantages of education under the PRC. In a Foucauldian perspective, the objectification of education is now being measured through the collectivist view of Chinese education policy as being for the greater good of all: Michel Foucault described governmentality as “the conduct of conduct,” defined as “all endeavors to shape, guide, direct the conduct of others . . . and to govern oneself.”5 Governmentality, or the “government of self and others,”6 has population as its object and “ask[s] the best ways to exercise power over conduct individually and en masse so as to secure the good of each and all” (Woronov 569). In this manner, the collectivist principles of the PRC are now directed at resolving the modernization of China by encouraging more students to pursue technologically orientated modes of education to compete in the global marketplace. Woronov (2009) defines the market ideology/objectification of the China’s education of children by applying Foucault’s system of “disciplinary technology” as part of this ideological mode of education for the measuring (via testing grids) of academic standards for young people in China: “These grids are, in Foucault’s terminology, a particularly acute disciplinary technology, one that objectives and measures children’s internal states, opening their feelings, plans, desires, and dreams to inspection and counting” (“Governing China’s children” 578). In this manner, the Foucauldian perspective provides insight into the complex array of technologically based aspects of Chinese education, which re being implemented in the learning outcomes of students. These are important aspects of Woronov’s analysis of Foucault’s theory of governance, which is being implemented into the Chinese educational system. In a governmental perspective, the objectifying “quality” of education is to represent the disciplinary training of Chinese youth in order to economically compete with the West.
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A Foucauldian analysis can also define the objectification of the PRC’s policies on education, which reinforces the institutionalization of market-based solutions to education for China’s modernization and adaption into western models of capitalist economics. In Marxist terms, the objectification of Chinese education is a primary result of Foucault’s analysis of the important social structure that the government provides in all manners of social life. In terms of the “commoditization” of Chinese education, many students are being socially affected by the market-based educational strategies that encourage young people to find satisfaction in technological professions or related labor markets: The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of
A Foucauldian analysis can also define the objectification of the PRC’s policies on education, which reinforces the institutionalization of market-based solutions to education for China’s modernization and adaption into western models of capitalist economics. In Marxist terms, the objectification of Chinese education is a primary result of Foucault’s analysis of the important social structure that the government provides in all manners of social life. In terms of the “commoditization” of Chinese education, many students are being socially affected by the market-based educational strategies that encourage young people to find satisfaction in technological professions or related labor markets: The mysterious character of the commodity-form consists therefore simply in the fact that the commodity reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labor as objective characteristics of the products of labor themselves, as the socio-natural properties of