This article examines the uptake of suzhi-roughly glossed as "quality"-in China's recent curriculum reform called suzhi jiaoyu (Education for Quality) in the rural ethnic context of Qiandongnan. It engages with three layers of analysis. First is a brief etymological overview of suzhi to map out its cultural politics in contemporary China. Agamben's theorization of People/people is invoked to elucidate how the keyword embeds the differentiation of bodies and the fabrication of the "others" through a civilizing mission. Second, the article surveys the genealogy of suzhi ideas-practices as the historical project of making the ideal personhood. It examines how suzhi's entanglement in Chinese historiography constitutes the moving target for the formation of educational subjects. Third, the article draws from my ethnographic research in southwest China to investigate suzhi's enactment in compulsory schooling and current curriculum reform. It provides nuanced empirical accounts to illuminate how suzhi/quality is understood, contested, and reappropriated in everyday pedagogical practices; how the bifurcated front-and backstage maneuvering in two village schools trouble the salvationary overtone of the suzhi-oriented curriculum reform. The lens of performativity is harnessed to move beyond the "loose coupling" theory and suggest undecidable interstices in the production of pedagogical subjectivity. Furthermore, this section explores how suzhi jiaoyu sits in a jarring relationship with indigenous cosmology to produce epistemic dissonance and disenchantment towards schooling. The article concludes with a call for provincializing the "universal" notion of quality and for a productive aporia in thinking about the limit-points of schooling.The national strength and stamina of economic development more and more depend on the suzhi of the laborers. -Deng, XiaopingEducation is fundamental to the comprehensive formation of national strength, increasingly measured by suzhi of workers and the development of talented human bs_bs_banner

This article explores the exam-oriented, ritualistic, and exemplary Chinese education system through a double-layered historical and ethnographic analysis. Firstly, I examine three aspects of the educational governing complex-exemplarity, ritual, and examination. Historically, education has been a key locus to craft exemplary subjects through rituals and imitation of models, and this is reinforced by exams to justify social hierarchy. The production of subjectivities in Chinese schools has never been too far removed from these aspects of exemplarity, ritual, and examination. Secondly, I offer an account of the contested ''quality curriculum reform'' in rural China. While the reform aims to foster creativity and criticizes the overemphasis on exams, classroom rituals, and exemplary icons, its implementation renormalizes the tripartite governing paradigm and produces a contradictory mix of subjectifying discourses in everyday school lives. The study shows that contemporary pedagogic discourse is still rooted in traditional elements, even if the reform aims to do away with, however partially, these elements. In the multi-layered field of Chinese education, pedagogical actors both abide by and react against the historical and contemporary visions of educational governing with hybrid subjectivities. The study sheds light on why China's curriculum reform is far from an easy task.

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Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in two ethnic villages in Southwest China, this article examines rural teachers’ performative engagement with education reform, audit culture, and neoliberal market mandates in their daily practices. Teachers are at once pedagogical agents, street‐level bureaucrats, and tourism entrepreneurs who both perform to and resist the dominant state and market ideologies. Teachers’ creative tactics and hybrid subjectivities challenge the resistance–compliance dichotomy and illuminate the persistent educational inequality in China’s rural ethnic margins.

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