Edward Vickers and Zeng Xiaodong: Education and Society in Post-Mao ChinaMariana Münning

ASIEN – Nr. 156/157 (2020) pp. 226–28

London/New York: Routledge, 2017. 408 pp., 38.99 GBP

The study of Chinese education is a vast field and both authors have been prolific contributors to said area of study, Edward Vickers in English and Zeng Xiaodong in Chinese. They have done an immense job in receiving and discussing the existing great amount of scholarship on Chinese education in both English and Chinese (it is a pity that there are no Chinese characters in the book) to provide a comprehensive view. The reader additionally profits from the extensive bibliography and the index. Their book represents the first western language all- encompassing work on the time period since Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 and extending into the 21st century. Much of the hitherto existing scholarship was limited to the 20th century (Pepper, Radicalism and Education Reform in Twentieth-Century China, 1996, and Thøgersen, Secondary Education in China after Mao, 1991). Vickers and Zeng have described the Chinese education system from all the possible crucial angles and contextualized it with political, social, economic, and historical developments and events. They show that the education system is interdependent with and representative for virtually all aspects of Chinese society. Therefore, it has a remarkable explanatory power for larger political and historical processes. The volume “focuses mainly on the formal education system as conventionally understood” (p. 2), omitting or touching only briefly on, however, adult and minority education and informal or grassroots education approaches…