Education as capital? A critical discourse analysis of the investment discourse in international research on Chinese rural education

Introduction

Since the 1960s, human capital theory has become a mainstay in educational research and policy despite continued critiques (Klees Citation2016). Employed to analyse a wide spectrum of human affairs, human capital theory utilises terms from the economics discipline to construct a framework that places education at the centre of social analysis. It claims that education contributes to economic development at the macro level and income growth at the micro level through increasing workers’ skills and productivity (Tan Citation2014). In the face of rising economic inequalities and humanitarian crises around the globe, human capital theory ‘offers the comforting illusion that for every complex social and economic problem there is one simple solution’ – education (Tan Citation2014, 432).

In this article, we examine the rise and impact of human capital theory and the related investment discourse in educational research with a focus on Chinese rural education, a marginal yet rapidly growing topic in global knowledge production (Xiang et al. Citation2023). We define the investment discourse in education as the symbolic system that constructs education as a form of investment in human capital with the potential of yielding private and public economic returns. Key discursive constructions associated with the investment discourse include human capital, skills, productivity, return to education, wage differentials and efficiency.

The goal of this paper is to unpack the asymmetric power relations and dynamic processes that undergird the spread and dominance of human capital theory and the investment discourse to open up possibilities of plural knowledges. More than half a century after the ostensible end of classic colonialism, the modernity-coloniality nexus persists in global knowledge production (Mignolo Citation2011). While scholars outside the colonial core increasingly contribute to English-language social science knowledge production, the universality and centrality of Western social theories and methodologies to a large extent remains taken-for-granted (Chen Citation2010; Mignolo Citation2011). Even fields like comparative and international education have given little attention to ‘the critical role that uneven power relations play in the constitution of its comparative knowledge’ (Takayama, Sriprakash, and Connell Citation2017, 3).

As Chinese scholars with transnational educational and professional experiences, we recognise the precarity associated with examining China through the lens of decoloniality. On the one hand, though Western powers never managed to fully colonise China, Chinese scholars encounter the persistent colonial matrix of power (Mignolo Citation2011) in global knowledge production like other Global South scholars. On the other hand, China is a rising global power eager to expand its ‘discourse power’ (Xinhua News Agency Citation2013) in increasingly antagonistic global political landscapes, which often prompts questions about whether it seeks to become the next global superpower with imperial or colonial ambitions. Therefore, we echo this special issue’s call for the ‘double-negation’ (this issue) of coloniality and nationalism. We critically examine the asymmetric power relations in global knowledge production as well as the roles of the Chinese state and Chinese scholars in maintaining, modifying or transforming them.

Toward the afore-mentioned goals, we utilise a dataset of research articles about Chinese rural education published in 40 highly-cited English language academic journals between 1978 (the start of Reform and Opening Up in China) and 2022. We described the sample selection criteria and abductive coding process in detail elsewhere (Xiang et al. Citation2023) and provide the list of included journals in the online supplement. In sum, our sample includes the most cited journals (based on Impact Factor and CiteScore) in major social science disciplines and fields related to Chinese rural education, such as sociology, economics, comparative education, child development and sinology. We focus on these journals to construct a sample of dominant voices in global knowledge production. We by no means endorse them as more legitimate or trustworthy sources of knowledge.

Of the 171 articles related to Chinese rural education published in these journals between 1978 and 2022, 52 (30%) were influenced by and 38 (22%) were primarily framed through human capital theory and the investment discourse.Footnote¹ In this article, we further carried out discourse analysis on the subsample of 38 articles to unpack the asymmetric power relations and dynamic processes underlying the growth of Chinese rural education as an area of international research and the growing prominence of the investment discourse within it. We draw inspirations from Critical Discourse Analysis (Wodak, Seale, and Gobo Citation2004) and Foucauldian Discourse Analysis (Willig Citation2013) to construct an analytic framework suitable for our mission and sample. Specifically, we analysed the 38 texts in our sample at three levels: text, discursive practice, and social practice. At the textual level, we seek to identify the key discourse constructions, subject positions and action implications embedded in sample texts, with a focus on introduction and discussion/conclusion sections where authors spell out the conceptual frameworks and implications of their work. At the level of discursive practice, we investigate intertextuality and discursive environments through tracing references, data sources and author bios. At the level of social practice, we examine how these texts interact with changing economic, political and sociocultural dynamics in China and around the globe.

Our analysis reveals that the articles in our sample ask and answer questions about Chinese rural education through the lenses of neo-classical economic theories – especially human capital theory – usually without critical examination of the methodological, cultural and political assumptions baked into these theories. Therefore, though most first authors bear Chinese surnames, these articles reinforce rather than challenge the hegemony of Western economic theories and the persistent coloniality in global academic production.

The rest of the article consists of four sections. First, we briefly review the origins and the rise of human capital theory and the investment discourse in educational research and policy. Second, we examine the growth of Chinese rural education as an area of international research and the rise of the investment discourse within this expanding body of literature. Third, we describe and analyse the discursive characteristics of the four major clusters of articles among those framed through the investment discourse. Finally, we conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings for comparative and international education researchers, especially with regard to the need for ‘double-negation’ of coloniality and nationalism.

Rise of human capital and investment discourses in education

The intellectual roots of thinking about human beings as a form of capital can be traced as far back as late 17th century Britain (Brown, Lauder, and Cheung Citation2020). However, the concept of human capital and the discipline of economics in general had little to do with education until the 1960s. In the context of intensified cold-war economic competition, American economists became preoccupied with identifying the causes and levers to propel economic growth (Holden and Biddle Citation2017). A number of them – most notably Theodore Schultz, Gary Becker and Jacob Mincer – launched ambitious research agendas to demonstrate the role of education in improving workers’ productivity and earnings as well as the nation’s economic growth. The conception of education as an investment in human capital quickly found resonance among American politicians and lobbyists eager to expand the federal government’s role in education. Appearing frequently in congressional hearings, the emerging findings of human capital theorists paved the way for the passage of laws establishing permanent federal involvement in education in mid 1960s (Holden and Biddle Citation2017).

This set of discourses quickly disseminated beyond the U.S. through the activities of international organisations (Holden and Biddle Citation2017). In the 1960s, human capital theory boomed as a transnational research agenda, enabling economists to claim indispensable expertise and authority on education matters (Tan Citation2014). Political leaders in advanced capitalist countries and international organisations quickly absorbed the investment discourse into their efforts to secure increased public funding for domestic education as well as international aid for education in other countries (Brown, Lauder, and Cheung Citation2020; Mundy Citation2008).

With the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s, human capital theory and the associated investment discourse in education took on new meanings. A series of social crises and the boom of Four Asian Tigers led to the breakdown of the economic nationalism in the Global North that fuelled the development and dissemination of human capital theory in the 1960s (Brown, Lauder, and Cheung Citation2020). Business and political leaders in the Global North quickly formed alliances to promote a neoliberal world order, where inequality would be tolerated as necessary incentive and individuals and firms left to compete without the protection of trade tariffs or social safety nets (Brown, Lauder, and Cheung Citation2020). In this context, the link that human capital theorists established between education and national prosperity enabled researchers to cast failing public educational systems as national crises, evident in the landmark report A Nation at Risk (Gardner et al. Citation1983) in the U.S. The solution they advocated for, however, was privatisation rather than public investment, a sharp contrast to the 1960s (Mundy Citation2008; Shelton Citation2023). Furthermore, through international organisations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Global North pressured developing countries to carry out liberalisation reforms such as placing caps on public spending and charging user fees in the name of improving efficiency in the education sector (Alexander Citation2001; Mundy Citation2008).

The advancement of neoliberalism across the globe spurred growing appetites for educational research on how to allocate limited resources most efficiently. As a result, the investment discourse became increasingly prominent in the realm of education policies and international development. Economists launched numerous studies to measure rates of return to education, which international organisations and governments increasingly used as a guide for allocating scarce resources (Klees Citation2016; Psacharopoulos Citation1985). Research on the education production function also grew rapidly, with a focus on assessing the relations between educational inputs and outputs (Levin Citation1989). Though most studies were carried out in advanced capitalist societies in the 1970s and 1980s, international organisations drew on them heavily and uncritically to justify its recipes for education reform in developing countries (Alexander Citation2001).

Notably, the expansion of human capital theory took place despite severe criticism within and outside the economic discipline since its inception. To name a few most prominent ones, Klees (Citation2016) took apart human capital theory on its own terms by demonstrating that its conception of efficiency as well as claims about relations between earnings, productivity and social benefits are untenable. Tan (Citation2014) systematically summarises these criticisms from four different perspectives. Theoretically, its foundation – methodological individualism and rational choice theory – is weak and problematic. Empirically, its claims about the causal relations between education and income or growth often fail to bear out. Practically, it promoted ‘economic imperialism’ (Allais Citation2012), subjugated education to economic needs, and enabled the illusion that education can solve social problems. Morally, it promotes problematic definitions and descriptions of human beings as utility-drive, self-interested animals, obliterating the power relations between capital and labour by recasting labour as a form of capital. More recently, Brown, Lauder, and Cheung (Citation2020) claim the death of orthodox human capital theory and attempt to transform the field from its ashes.

In sum, the conception of education as investment in human capital emerged out of American economists’ attempt to explain and stimulate economic growth. Thanks to the active promotion of Global North governments and the international organisations under their influence, the investment discourse became prominent in educational research and policy and instrumental in justifying neoliberal educational reforms. The histories of the investment discourse in education demonstrates the persistence of the colonial matrix of power (Mignolo Citation2011) in global knowledge production as well as in educational governance: knowledge was produced in response to the concerns of elites in advanced capitalist societies and based on prior knowledge in the colonial core, and then used to justify neo-colonial agendas across the globe. It is in this context that Chinese rural education became an area of international educational research in the global knowledge production towards the end of the 20th century.

The boom of international research on Chinese rural education

While the investment discourse rose to prominence across the globe in the 1960s and 1970s, sinology grew rapidly in Europe and the U.S. as governments and international organisations sought to understand China and scholars increasingly looked to China’s unprecedented social transformations – including the education system – for inspirations to address domestic social problems (Ding Citation1996). However, due to the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), social science research in China grounded to a halt (Xu Citation2021). Therefore, sinologists of this period primarily relied on document analysis (Ding Citation1996). Despite its growing global prominence, the investment discourse was basically absent in international research on Chinese education during this period.

In 1978, China embarked on the reform era just as neoliberalism gained momentum rapidly across the globe. In the forty-five years that followed (1978–2022), Chinese rural educationFootnote² emerged and eventually boomed as an area of study in global knowledge production, as did the impact of the investment discourse within this rapidly developing field. As Table 1 shows, the number of articles about rural education in China published by the 40 journals in our sample grew from 8 between 1978 and 1989 to 124 between 2010 and 2022. The number of articles influenced by the investment discourse grew even more rapidly, its percentage increasing from 12.5% to 34.7%. The idea of ‘human capital’ became so taken-for-granted that researchers no longer needed to explain its meaning or justify its relevance in academic writing, not only in economics but also in many adjacent disciplines and fields. Thirteen articles from other disciplines – such as Hannum et al. (Citation2019) – use the term ‘human capital’ without any explicit explanation, justification, or citation.

In the early reform years, the World Bank played an important role in promoting the investment discourse in international research on Chinese rural education. In the period between 1978 and 1989, the first and only article in our sample with clear connection to the investment discourse – Jamison (Citation1986) – grew out of the World Bank’s first mission to China in 1980, as did most empirical economic analysis of Chinese society published in early and mid 1980s. The main report of this mission discussed educational issues from the perspective of ‘human resources’ (EAPRO Citation1981, xiv). A public health scientist trained at Stanford and Harvard, Dean Jamison participated in this mission as the population, health and nutrition expert. Utilising data obtained during the mission – the height, weight, age and grade-level data of over 3000 children in five different localities – Jamison (Citation1986) argued that malnutrition in rural China was ‘sufficiently prevalent in 1979 to retard the school advancement of large numbers of children’ (299) and that investing in nutrition improvement could potentially save substantial educational resources through reducing the number of students in need of repeating grades (308).

In contrast, the boom of Chinese rural education as an area of international academic research and of the investment discourse in the 2010s was to a large extent driven by Chinese scholars with academic training in the Global North. Among the articles published between 2010 and 2022, 76.6% had first authors with Chinese surnames and 38.7% had first authors affiliated with institutions in mainland China, much higher than previous decades (Table 1). These two percentages were higher among the 32 articles framed through the investment discourse from the same period −78.1% and 50%, respectively. However, even in the last decade, the first authors of most articles published in the highly cited journals in our sample obtained their doctorates in the Global North, especially the US (Table 1).

The prominent contribution of Chinese scholars with experiences in the Global North reflects heightened academic internationalisation in China. From 1978 to 2019, the number of Chinese students and scholars studying abroad grew from 39,000 to 703,500 (Wang and Miao Citation2022). As the most powerful pole in global knowledge production, the US is the top destination for Chinese students and scholars, followed by other Anglophone countries such as the UK, Australia and Canada (UNESCO Institute for Statistics Citation2024).

Moreover, the Chinese state actively promoted the internationalisation of Chinese humanities and social sciences (Xu Citation2021). Under state mandate to ‘go-out’ and enhance global ‘discourse power’ (National Planning Committee of Philosophy and Social Sciences Citation2011), Chinese research universities enacted various policies to incentivise international publication beginning in the early 2000s. By 2016, 84 out of 116 Chinese top universities set up university-level incentive schemes for humanities and social science scholars to publish in international journals (Xu, Rose, and Oancea Citation2021). These incentive schemes tie monetary reward or career-advancement to publication in journals indexed by the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI) (Xu, Rose, and Oancea Citation2021).Footnote³ Under these incentive schemes, most scholars prioritised publication in English-language journals (Xu, Oancea, and Rose Citation2021). As a result, the volume of Chinese social science international publications has been growing quickly (Liu et al. Citation2015).

That the percentage of articles influenced by the investment discourse in our sample nearly triple in the past four decades reflects ‘economics imperialism’ (Allais Citation2012; Tan Citation2014) – the global expansion and dominance of economics vocabulary in social sciences. In China, the discipline of economics is more conducive to and achieved a higher level of internationalisation than most other social science disciplines (Xu, Oancea, and Rose Citation2021). Built upon universalist assumptions like the rational choice model, the investment discourse allows researchers to investigate similar sets of research questions with the same set of tools – developed in Anglo-American contexts – in different societies, without delving into local meanings and contexts.

In sum, our analysis reveals that the Chinese state and Chinese scholars were crucial agents in the boom of the international literature on Chinese rural education as well as on the growing dominance of the investment discourse within it. Attempting to gain global discourse power, the state and its research universities aggressively recruited scholars with overseas academic training and incentivised academics to publish in English-language international journals indexed by SSCI or A&HCI. Under these incentive structures, scholars adopted dominant discourses in English-language academia – like the investment discourse – to examine Chinese rural education. As we will demonstrate in the next section, this growing body of literature reinforces rather than challenges the dominance of western theories and discourses.

Unpacking Chinese rural education through the investment discourse

Among the 38 articles primarily framed through the investment discourse, we identified four major themes: 1) evaluating the return to education among different social groups, 2) analysing the various factors that influence family’s investment in education; 3) assessing the impact of migration on human capital accumulation, and 4) evaluating the impact/cost-efficiency of various interventions, especially through Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs). In the next four subsections, we describe and unpack each of these themes with a focus on the textual and discursive levels: we delineate the particular discursive and social contexts in which they emerge, deconstruct the key concepts embedded in them and examine the implications of their discursive acts.

Conclusions

We closely examine the emergence and growth of Chinese rural education as an area of international research since 1978. In the preceding sections, we have demonstrated that human capital theory and the investment discourse became a major ‘hinge’ (de SouzaLeão and Eyal Citation2019) between gatekeepers in global academic knowledge production enterprises and aspiring Chinese institutions and researchers, thanks to their alignment with neoliberalism and focus on technical rather than political problems. The articles we examined respond more to salient debates and prevalent trends in global academic discourses than to the concerns and needs of local communities. Most of them grew out of intensified academic internationalisation in China in the 21^st century, which the Chinese state considers a crucial element of the nation’s ‘soft power’ (Xu Citation2021). Authors – most of whom bear Chinese surnames and possess academic training in the Global North – collect empirical data from rural children, families and schools in China to produce articles that refine neo-classical economic theories and reinforce their hegemonic status. Written in the English language and academic economics vocabularies, these texts were produced for researchers, policy makers and international development professionals in the Global North while effectively excluding most domestic scholars, practitioners and policy makers from the conversation.

Our findings are aligned with Trahar et al. (Citation2019)’s analysis of ongoing colonisation in academic writing due to the dominance of English language in scholarly journals as well as the prevalence of ‘metropolitan’ genres of scholarly writing and discourse. This extends to the ways in which certain bodies of knowledge maintain their supremacy and privilege. Scholars from beyond the English-speaking core are compelled not only to craft their work in English for mainstream journal publication, but also to situate their work within a ‘metropolitan discourse’ that may not be suitable for their specific context. The outcome is an ‘increasing gap between ‘locally produced knowledge’ and the ‘knowledge needed by local society’ (Kang Citation2009, 198).

Therefore, it is perhaps no surprise that many original and important theoretical contributions from Chinese scholars did not make it into English-language academic publications, not to mention the highly cited journals in our sample. For instance, Wang (Citation2009) points out that human capital theory overlooks the transaction costs between educators and learners and obliterates crucial differences among different educational systems. Focusing on the perspective of education providers, Wang (Citation2009) constructs a ‘new human capital theory’ based on three different prototypes of public education – church schools (学在教堂), guild-based apprenticeships (学在行会), and imperial examination and school systems (学在庙堂). She differentiates between productive versus distributive human capital (which leads to economic productivity versus power or status in distributive systems like imperial courts and nation states) as well as between private and collective human capital (which becomes less versus more valuable when other people acquire it). Restoring the social and political nature of educational enterprises in economic analysis, this critical perspective offers compelling explanations for complex educational and social phenomena in China and beyond.

Notably, with new state mandates, Chinese humanities and social sciences began to shift away from uncritical pursuit of SSCI publications towards constructing independent knowledge systems in the past few years, with an emphasis on centring domestic problems, utilising traditional Chinese cultural resources and critical engagement with other knowledge systems (Zhai Citation2022; Teng and Wang Citation2023). In light of our findings, this move is both necessary and perilous. On the one hand, constructing – or restoring – autonomous knowledge systems that respond to the needs of local communities and build upon indigenous wisdoms is crucial for the pursuit of decoloniality in China and beyond. Scholars in Zimbabwe, for instance, engaged in an anticolonial project to challenge colonial structures in knowledge production through ‘reclaiming, rethinking, reconstituting, rewriting, and validating indigenous knowledge and languages, and repositioning them as integral parts of the academy’ (Shizha Citation2010, 115). On the other hand, the pursuit of independent knowledge system is complicated by the current Chinese leadership’s active endeavours to bolster China’s global influence and make the Chinese knowledge system a competitive, if not superior, counterpart to the Western one. Amidst precarious global politics and surging waves of nationalism, we are mindful of how these efforts may lead to dewesternisation (Mignolo Citation2011) and delinking from or denial of other knowledge systems (Shahjahan Citation2005) rather than the dynamic coexistence of plural knowledges that decolonial scholars strive towards. Therefore, for comparative educational scholars with decolonial visions in China and elsewhere, it is pivotal to grapple with the intertwined complexities of coloniality and nationalism, as this special issue emphasises.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/03057925.2024.2429836.