Dualities in the Education Factory An analysis of domestic typologies in Maotanchang town
& A pedagogical dialectic From infrastructural coercion to re-appropriations
Tzu-shuo, Wu HTS 3 Tutor: Ricardo Ruivo Pereira
DUALITIES IN THE EDUCATION FACTORY
Foreword
From ancient Greek oikos to Roman domus to Henry Robert’s seminal and influential pamphlet entitled On the Dwelling of the Labouring Classes and to modern Chinese apartments, domestic spaces have always been active reflections of their social and political contexts. In other words, the composition and the construction of domestic spaces sponsored by the government are indeed explicit physical demonstration of its political aspirations. However, even the state is imposing these domestic typologies to achieve certain political objectives; it is undeniable that amid these solid physical spaces, dwellers’ personalities and identities are infiltrating these highly symbolic and politically-charged domestic spaces. Thus, these pervasions of characters in typological spaces are suggesting new potentialities and impressions for domestic spaces that are less inundated by political ideologies
Plan of a typical Greek oikos, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS (image 1)
Chinese educational policies and Gaokao From the imperial examination matured in Sui and Tang Dynasty to the contemporary Gaokao, or Chinese Higher Education Entrance Examinations, education and examinations have always been crucial, valuable and practical instruments in promoting individual’s political and social status. The importance of Gaokao and its role as a life-decisive factor to students had been constantly increasing since it was formulated and executed in 1952. With a series of events such as the Cultural Revolution and the introduction of 9-year compulsory education law in 1986, Gaokao and higher education had turned into the only and quickest way to differentiate an intellectual from the mass[1], and thus reaching a higher social status, achieving economic prosperity, and liberating the students and their families from contemporary class struggle.[2] It is also crucial to notice that although the desires to obtain higher education come from individuals, yet it was the reformations of the state’s educational policies that stirred and stimulated individuals’ eagerness to be differentiated from the mass via higher education. These reformations were indeed believed by the socialist government as key steps to achieve the economic and social prosperities. Hence, under the accumulation of these policies, ideologies and events, Gaokao, the college examination has become a fortune-changing threshold that almost every Chinese student desire to surpass. Maotanchang Town and its high school is thus a byproduct of this this Chinese education policy.
[1] Tom, Phillips. “The Cultural Revolution: All You Need to Know about China's Political Convulsion.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 11 May 2016, www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/11/the-cultural-revolution-50-years-onall-you-need-to-know-about-chinas-political-convulsion. [2] THE STATE COUNCIL. Law of the People’s Republic of China on Compulsory Education: (Adopted on April 12, 1986 at the Fourth Session of the Sixth National People’s Congress). Beijing: Publisher Not Identified, 1986.
The first Gaokao of the PRC in 1952, SOHU, 2017 (image 2)
Introduction to Maotanchang town
Maotanchang High School became a public high school in 1952, the same year as Gaokao was introduced. In 2001, it became a model high school in Anhui Province[3]. In 2004, after the forbidding of part-time cram school for repeat students in public high schools[4], the government, responded to the increasing demand from the repeat students who had failed Gaokao, established a full-day school for more than 25,000 repeat students and their parents in Maotanchang town. These parents gave up their jobs in big cities and immigrated into and settled in Maotanchang town, taking care of their children’s daily life to the extent that students do not have to care about anything other than studying for Gaokao, forming this huge systematic production of Gaokao students.
managements and implementation of danyuan typologies, the school, and thus the town, has become an ever more exhaustive and competitive education factory. Yet among these uniform danyuans that were constructed to facilitate the Gaokao ecosystem in Maotanchang town, I will envision and extrapolate the potential instances of collective activities which emancipate dwellers from these political-charged danyuans and henceforth, argue for the duality of danyuan typology and the binary nature of this Gaokao factory.
Meanwhile, the typological danyuan (basic dwelling unit) apartments were designed, planned and constructed in a short 2-year period from 2003 to 2005 to house these students and parents. In 2005, these coherent and uniform danyuans had replaced old single-story houses and dominated the townscape under the government’s supervision[5]. As these danyuans became the only option for new-coming parents and students to settle, the spatial typology became the mould of their behaviors and the implicit physical dogma that rules their activities in the disguise of domestic apartments. Hence, activities performed by the students and the parents in Maotanchang town are thus either directly or implicitly supporting the constant operation of this never-stopping production of Gaokao students and docile labor forces. It is interesting to notice a transitional tension between Maotanchang high school’s intention and what it truly turned out. The high school was originally designed as a cram school to provide another chance for failed students under the socialist principle of equality in education. Yet due to intensive [3] “毛坦厂中学的神话 万人高考警车开道央视航拍.” 中国文明网, June 6, 2013. http://ah.wenming.cn/jwjj/201306/t20130606_1276912.shtml. [4] Brook, Larmer. “Inside a Chinese Test-Prep Factory.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 31 Dec. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2015/01/04/magazine/inside-a-chinese-test-prep-factory.html. [5] Ibid [3]
Maotanchang High School, a modern Panopticon, CCTV 9, 2015 (image 3)
Danyuan typologies ---Socialist national forms of control National form, or perhaps more properly, nationality form, of architecture is the presentation of nationalism in the built form; as some scholars noted: “In this unprecedented situation, nationalisms are necessary, if unpalatable, instruments for controlling the destructive effects of massive social change: they provide the belief-systems that can secure a minimum of social cohesion, order and meaning in a disruptive and alienating world [even if the element of nationalism exists in domestic scale]. Moreover, they are the only popular forces that can legitimate and make sense of the activities of that most powerful modern agent of social transformation, the rational state.”[6] That is to say, the state (Chinese government) is capable of imposing implicit control over every aspect, including education, of the mass through the application and transformation of national forms in everyday domestic spaces. Since the new socialist government under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping was established in 1978 till now, a crucial question presented itself on what kind of architecture would best match the new socialist age and its lofty aspirations of creating an efficient and productive mode of education. “National form” was again chosen, and “socialist content” added to it; these two catchphrases were then unified into the single slogan, “national form, socialist content”[7]. From that point on, “national form” became a typology charged with political and social significance that carries the state’s wills and impose on the mass. Danyuans, or basic dwelling units constructed in Maotanchang town in 2003 are indeed ideal socialist domestic typologies that evolved from national forms to prompt the students and the parents towards the nation’s educational aspiration.
[6] Charlie Q. L., Xue. "Chapter Two 'National form' and Chinese identity: burden or chance?" in Building a Revolution: Chinese Architecture since 1980. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006, p13. [7] Ibid, p16.
Chinese traditional Siheyuan, the national form , ChinaGate, 2016 (image 4)
Two types of danyuan apartment typologies suited to the education agenda of the state were constructed in Maotanchang town. The first was a simple three-to-four-story rectangular dormitory style, with the dimension of 28.8 by 12 meters[8]. The composition is divided and ruled by the cruciform circulation corridor on every floor. Danyuan, or individual rooms, flank at the two longitudinal wings of the corridor. Danyuan spaces are designed to be perfectly rectangular and symmetrical: a door opens off to the corridor and a window opens on the façade directly opposing the door. Shared toilets, kitchen and washing facilities locate at the center of the compound. The second type of residential house constructed in Maotanchang town is the apartment style, with the approximate dimension of 20.4 to 10.4 meters, three danyuans (households) share the floor[9]. The shared staircase in the middle are equally accessible to all households. Space in the household is divided by an axial corridor and partition walls into rectangular rooms with similar areas. Yet, they are prescribed with unique functions and programs. A typical apartment style danyuan includes two bedrooms (one for the parents and one for the student), a bathroom, a kitchen and a dinning room. Both danyuan typologies have an explicit predominant spatial characteristic: an invariable closed space marked out by an equilateral surrounding wall. This enclosed form brings to mind the walled family compounds that constituted the dominant spatial form of traditional China.[10] Although the traditional family and the danyuan clearly belong to vastly different social orders, the bounding walls operate in both architectural formations as markers of social spaces. In traditional China, the wall defined the realm of the Confucian family, and the space within which the family patriarch ruled supreme[11]. In socialist China, especially in this case of danyuan spaces in Maotanchang town, the walls
mark the realm of individual “production unit” and the prescribed space within which the state’s educational polices reign the individuals’ activities. By defining the spatial programs through prescribed domestic infrastructures and cohesion in spatial dimension, parents’ and students’ activities are limited in individual-oriented production and assimilation of exam-oriented education knowledge rather than a collective cultivation of creativities that could only be stimulated though mutual interactions and commonings. The predominance of walled rectangular rooms and danyuans in Maotanchang town, is thus not an indicative of a certain cultural enclosure or xenophobia as some have argued, but rather shows the way in which modern social formations have redeployed an old architectural technique to achieve the political objectives of the socialist Chinese government[12]. The rectangular walled rooms thus operate as a technology for the production of docile students and individual, danyuan (household)-oriented relationship. The space is therefore limited to a small range of appropriation under the danyuan typology constructed by the government. Therefore, the walled domestic danyuans have become the physical significance through which individuals’ conducts are manipulated to fulfill the government’s political aspirations. As a technical and symbolic manifestation of Chinese socialist government’s interpretation on education and the mode of production, danyuan spaces represent the centrality of collective labor and education, as well as the egalitarian social relationships that exemplified the socialist ideal[13].
[8] David, Bray. "Danwei Space" in Social Space and Governance in Urban China: the Danwei System from Origins to Reform. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005. p135. [9] Ibid, p140. [10] Ibid, p124. [11] Ibid. [12] Ibid. [13] Ibid, p125.
Floor plan for the dormitory style danyuan , Journal of Architecture 2, 1956 (image 5)
Danyuan typologies ---Spatial and social analysis Taking the apartment style danyuan as an example, one danyuan is separated into 3 rectangular rooms equal in area. To analyze the spatial composition of these danyuans, I extract the highlighted danyuan as a typical instance. A kitchen locates right beside the main entrance. Simple partition walls isolate two small cells where washing machine and sink locates. Beside the two cells, a door leads to the square kitchen. A one-meter-long kitchen counter is fixed on the back walls of two cellular rooms, the fire stove is attached onto the wall right next to it, forming an immovable L-shape configuration. The residents were only allowed to set assembled shelves and temporary stands according to their needs, leaving the basic configuration untouched and uniform. At the end of the corridor of this danyuan, a door leads to a room where dinning, living and sleeping condense in a 12-meter-square room. A set of simple furniture is provided with a uniform configuration to the family: a single bed locates at the rear corner; with a reading desk beside it; a round dinning table is surrounded by three chairs offset a bit from the center, leaving enough space to put a television stand along the opposite wall. Although the family has a greater control over this room’s configuration, yet the government’s provision of furniture brings back the coherence and harmony for all dinning rooms in the danyuan apartments. A door on the right of the dinning room guides into the parents’ bedroom where a double bed occupies the center adjoining the wall. With two bedside tables, a writing desk and a medium closet, the bedroom’s composition is relatively free to be reorganized by the family. Nevertheless, the similarities in rooms’ dimensions and furniture restore the consistency of bedroom spaces among all danyuans in the apartment. By drawing comparisons between this danyuan
and other danyuans on the same floor, we could observe a highly similar allocation of programs as an instrument to unify the spatial and living experience for every student and accompanied parents in Maotanchang town. Thus, the congruity of every domestic spaces reiterates the socialist ideals and objectives of producing homogeneous and docile students, labors and activities that do not only support the operations of this education factory in short run, but also the national economic and social production/reproduction in long run. In this respect, danyuan apartments have become a down-to-earth architectural solution for the socialist government to accomplish its aspirations.
Floor plan for the apartment style danyuan , Journal of Architecture 2, 1956 (image 6)
A new appropriation to danyuan typologies As Henri Lefebvre has claimed in his landmark work, The Production of Space, “A revolution that does not produce a new space has not realized its full potential, indeed it has failed in that it has not changed life itself, but has merely changed ideological superstructures, institutions or political apparatuses. A social transformation, to be truly revolutionary in character, must manifest a creative capacity in its effects on daily life, on language and space.”[14] If we take the danyuans as mere impositions and dogmatic controls on families’ life, these spaces would be reduced as failed responses to this revolutionary era when education is turning into one of the most crucial parts of economical and social production. Instead, we should also notice that apart from these gridded confined typologies on the upper floors of the danyuan apartments, there also exist open spaces and atrium courtyards on the ground floors where spaces could be re-appropriated by parents for collective commonings. These potential spaces for collective activities are often disregarded by western scholars who take these danyuan spaces as mere domestic confinement strategies by the socialist government. Yet indeed, these danyuan spaces are also the instruments of the nation to recapture and reclaim the national identity that was overwhelmed by colonizers and was diluted during the Sino-Japanese wars. An atrium with 5 meters in width and 15 meters in length locates at every ground floor of the danyuan apartment building. To contrast with the cellular danyuan spaces, these common atria are free of partitions or barriers, hence the divergence in spatial qualities directs all communal activities toward the ground floors. With a large opening on one side, the plan stretches beyond the rectangular physical boundaries and onto the streets, integrating the public spaces with the common atria. The interconnections of these ground floors with public roads
and plazas form an extended network of public and semi-public spaces that hints and promotes collective activities and re-appropriations of atria and streets by the parents and students. Moving their laundry stands and strings to the corners, accompanied parents living above and parents from nearby danyuans bring large washbasins, food materials, portable gas stoves, lunch boxes, bowls, knifes, and many other convenient cooking tools into an atrium. They occupy the ground floor with rectangular tables composed in two belt-like configurations, turning the ground floor atrium of this danyuan apartment into a temporary collective kitchen to prepare lunch for their kids. This collective cooking incorporates parents from all various regions in China and at a great range of age. Parents from different places bring their unique seasonings and share their local cuisines. They propose and discuss every day’s menu together in the atrium and they even invent new cuisines by assimilating multiple flavours from various regions. Nevertheless, these temporary collective kitchens set up in the atria are serving this education factory by providing students their dietary needs. If we consider the mere purposes and outcomes of these collective activities, these atria could be successful alternations of spatial typologies imposed by the government as ingenious and artful tactics that directs residents’ activities to fulfill the Gaokao educational scheme. However, depart from the bare food preparation purpose, these temporary kitchens also allow social interactions and creativities to emerge and thus sublimate the banality of these atria as pure spaces to facilitate the operation of this Gaokao factory. Parents engaging in collective cooking do not only aim to guarantee children’s healthy diet, they also group together to share and enrich cooking knowl-
[14] Henry, Lefebvre. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 1991. p54.
Re-appropriation of common atrium as a collective kitchen, ChinaNews.com, 2015(image 7)
edge and skills. In these collective atrium kitchens, some parents become chefs, some parents become coordinators, some parents become teachers, and some become delivery moms or dads. By forming these knowledge and resource commons, these parents could potentially explore new identities and individualities beyond mere constituents of the Gaokao factory. These exchanges of knowledge, experience, skills and emotions could neither be realized in cellular danyuans in the upper floor; nor could be feasible if the atria are not connected with public streets. That is to say, the atrium typology on the ground floor of danyuan apartments in Maotanchang town is embedded with a welcoming and approachable gesture to the public and the surrounding communities. As boundaries between public and private realms are diluted and the definition of common space extends into domestic domains, communal cooperation and mutual exchanges are further promoted. Henceforth, the ground floor atrium is not only an alternative architectural typology that conforms the socialist ideologies to achieve national aspiration as some western scholars would have interpreted. Instead, they often ignored the fact that these collective spaces are injected with vivid characteristics of collectivity, sharing and mutual solidarity which are diluted in big metropolis and isolated apartments.
Re-appropriation of common atrium as a collective kitchen, ChinaNews.com, 2015(image 8)
Beyond the banality: New potentials of danyuan apartments and Maotanchang education factory Instead of being overwhelmed by the interpretation of danyuan apartments as mere architectural typology to achieve social conformity and to accommodate the national education scheme, we should rather acknowledge the other side of these danyuan apartments with their potential to agglomerate communities, stimulate collaboration and promote sharing of knowledge and skills. It is the contradictory tension of danyuan typology that gives the duality to Maotanchang town. On the one hand, the town is an intense education factory where cellular danyuan rooms confine parents’ and students’ behavior patterns; on the other hand, the ground floors of danyuan apartments in Maotanchang town present potentials for enrichment and self-actualization through collective re-appropriation of common atria, which could be rarely found elsewhere in China. It is justifiable to describe Maotanchang town as a huge educational and social experiment. Although we cannot make an abrupt judgement on its validity now; but from the spatial and social analysis of domestic typologies, we can tell that Maotanchang town is certainly an active attempt to recapture and reclaim the communal solidarities and cultural identities which have been desaturated in many metropolis across China.
Accompanied parents performing plaza dances in a public square in front of danyuan apartments, Xinhua News, 2016 (image 9)
A PEDAGOGICAL DIALECTIC
Foreword
Michel Foucault, in his lecture on power and knowledge claimed that “[T]he problem to which the theory of sovereignty was addressed were in effect confined to the general mechanisms of power, to the way in which its forms of existence at the higher level of society influenced its exercise at the lowest levels…In effect, the mode in which power was exercised could be defined in its essentials in terms of the relationship sovereign-subject. But…we have the…emergence, or rather the invention, of new mechanism of power possessed of highly specific procedural techniques…which is also, I believe, absolutely incompatible with the relations of sovereignty…It is a type of power which is constantly exercised by means of surveillance rather than in a discontinuous manner by means of a system levies or obligations distributed over time. It presupposes a tightly knit grid of material coercions rather than the physical existence of a sovereign…This non-sovereign power, which lies outside the form of sovereignty, is disciplinary power.”(15)
[15] Michel Foucault, Two Lectures, in Michael Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, 78, 104 (Colin Gordon ed. & Colin Gordon et al. trans., 1980).
Classroom in Maotanchang High School is highly rigid, Yi-photos, 2019 (image 10)
From a disciplinary town to an unorthodox home Material coercions as forms of civil domination are especially explicit throughout educational institutions across China, where inflexible cellular classrooms impose the rigidity of education and affirm the adamant importance of mechanical preachment of Gaokao knowledges; hence indoctrinating the state’s educational ideologies via the built environment. Outside of the classrooms, public infrastructures and domestic spaces have become the physical apparatus to coerce people to perform in desired modes. This form of social control via infrastructural coercion is explicitly apparent in Maotanchang High School and Maotanchang town. Facing the same impositions, students in the Maotanchang High School and parents outside of the school respond in very different manners. These almost opposing responses thus stimulate antagonistic pedagogies. Although these two pedagogies might seem to be conflicting in nature, yet I would argue that they do not exist as a duality, but a dialectic; they coexist in a symbiotic relationship in Maotanchang town, one is the root of another. Hence, we cannot simply detach them and make abrupt justification on which pedagogy is superior or inferior.
Infrastructures in Maotanchang High School are indoctrinating the state’s educational ideologies via the built environment, Zhaoliangji, 2018 (image 11)
The pedagogy in Maotanchang High School It is 7 in the morning, students of Maotanchang High School gather around the sports field. They line up in matrices along the tracks and on the basketball fields, with textbooks on their hand, students raise them to the front of their faces and read the texts. Soon when all students are gathered, this big loop of matrices begins to move: students start another day of school by jogging along the tracks while reciting the text out loud, two students on the podium lead the recitation and ensure the untrammeled rotation of this enormous gear of student. Their paces, speeds and words are homogeneous, forming an illusion of a military camp. Instead of imputing students’ conformity to the Gaokao ideology or to the pure pressure imposed upon them from their parents or teachers; I would argue the performance as a reflection of infrastructural coercion. Seven capsule-shape tracks envelope a rectangular grass field. On one side of the field, a podium is flanked by two long reviewing stands, imposing a sense of solemnity to the sports field. Continuous looped tracks guide students while aligning and jogging; forming an implicit focal point in the center of the field where students' mutual solidarity is formed and consolidated. In other words, students are completely confined by the pre-determined functions of the sports field and the surrounding infrastructures. Students’ positions and movements are manipulated by the white lines of the track, indicating the absolute boundaries that one shall not surpass or deviate. The circulatory nature of the track encourages the continuous collective jogging and recital, and condemns anyone who might quit halfway. Students on the podium and reviewing stands supervise the jogging matrices and lead the recital simultaneously, fulfilling the designed purposes of these infrastructures without any attempts to disregard the imposed rules and misuse them.
Students are completely confined by the pre-determined functions of the sports field and the surrounding infrastructures, Zhaoliangji, 2018 (image 12)
It is 8 in the morning, with only a 10-minute rest after the morning jogging, students agglomerate in densely packed classrooms, a 11*7.6 meter cell. All 120 students in the classroom are confined around a rectangular desk on which piles of books, papers and exercise sheets are stacked. The only use of these desks is to claim and subdivide the cellular classrooms into smaller individual, isolated units, where the efficiency of study is believed to be maximized. Facing the front, the blackboards become the only place where students’ sights could converge in this narrow space. Without hesitation, students choose to abide the supremacy of these infrastructures by following their presupposed functions unconsciously. As passive receivers, students in Maotanchang High School acquiesce the infrastructural coercion to kidnap their freedom of choice, creation and invention. Like involuntary machines, their absolute obedience reflects the disciplinary power of infrastructure, an implicit and unconscious mean of control and manipulation. Through the arbitrary execution of infrastructures’ disciplinary power, a disciplined and rigid pedagogy emerges. This pedagogy constructs its base on students’ acquiescence of infrastructural domination upon their behaviors and minds. Thus, forming a mode of education that solely bases on the unilateral infusion of Gaokao knowledges from teachers. As the initiatives and potentials for spatial re-appropriation are overwhelmed by the predetermined domineering programs, the infrastructure is deprived of its liveliness and innovative nature in education as reflected through case of Maotanchang High School. There is no denying that the disciplinary power of infrastructure is a potent approach to promote a socially or politically desired model of education. Since it is students’ obedience that fulfill the designed objectives of these infrastructures, the attainment of desired controls is unstable and invertible. However, when these infrastructures are charged with Gaokao ideologies and social norms, students often choose to subsume themselves under the
dominance and supremacy of infrastructures’ disciplinary power; incubating a barren pedagogy that relies on unilateral infusion of indisputable Gaokao knowledges. Classrooms and other infrastructures in the Maotanchang High School are integrated into the systemic logic of Gaokao, which renders it as the only way to achieve success and break away from the economic and social struggles. Under this normative ideology, any appropriation of school infrastructures is thus a threat to break the architectural model, or in other words, an intimidation to the educational model (pedagogy) they represent.
All 120 students in the classroom are confined around a rectangular desk on which piles of books, papers and exercise sheets are stacked, CCTV 9, 2015 (image 13)
The pedagogy outside of Maotanchang High School Nevertheless, this highly standardized pedagogy is not solitary in Maotanchang Town. It coexists with an innovative and collaborative mode of living, sharing and learning initiates by the accompanied parents’ community outside of the high school. In the morning at 9a.m, right after these parents come back from the wet market, the ground floor atrium of the danyuan apartment buildings are transformed from storages and passage halls into collective kitchens. Moving their laundry stands and strings to the corners, accompanied parents living above and parents from nearby danyuans bring large washbasins, food materials, portable gas stoves, lunch boxes, bowls, knifes, and many other convenient cooking tools into an atrium. They occupy the ground floor with rectangular tables composed in two belt-like configurations, turning the ground floor atrium of this danyuan apartment into a temporary collective kitchen to prepare lunch for their kids. The atriums were designed as auxiliary spaces to annex danyuan apartments in molding parents’ domestic lives and thus facilitate the Gaokao education in Maotanchang High School. These parents disregard the prescribed functions of the cellular atriums. Through their re-appropriations and misuses, these originally modular spaces that were designed to regulate residents’ mode of living were transformed into flexible and responsive grounds. The social and political ideologies imbedded in these danyuan apartment atrium are diluted by parents’ interactions and reinvention of the space. Although the physical spaces of the atrium do not change; their infrastructural coercions are washed away by the new model of collaboration. Parents in the courtyard kitchen share skills, chat about anecdotes and discuss news. Through these interactions and discussions, parents thus explore new identities
and individualities beyond being mere constituents of this Gaokao factory. Throwing off the invisible constraints imposed by this infrastructural atrium, parents may obtain intimacies and senses of connections which are lost in the mere obedience to the power of infrastructures.
Accompanied parents cooking in collective kitchen for kids, ChinaNews.com, 2015 (image 14)
At noon, as soon as lunches are prepared and packed in double-layer lunch boxed, parents quickly deliver these meals to the front of the school’s gate. In front of the school’s gate, parents occupy the sidewalks and bicycle lanes to set up their portable stands, buckets and benches as dinning tables and seats. Parents array their bikes and electric motor bikes in rows and leave some gaps in between as spaces to set up the temporary dinning table. Students rush out at every noon to finish their lunch in a precious 15-minute period. This short moment has also become one of the few chances when parents and students could talk and chat face to face in the midst of the day. In this occasion, parents misappropriate the walkway and bike lanes in front of the school into a giant temporary collective dinning room. They are not confined by these infrastructures’ designed purpose as media for transportation. Instead, based on their mutual agreement, parents reuse these important public roads into a lunch hall. When parents break the infrastructural coercion, they appropriate this normative ground into a space where intimacies could be shared and connections between parents and students could be consolidated. Although it could be argued that this misappropriation of street is a reluctant response to the intense timetable of the school and the lack of a parent-student mutual space in the town. Rather interpreting this daily action as a passive solution to the status quo or a deductive result in an education factory like Maotanchang Town, I think we should instead interpret this re-appropriation as an active rebellion to the domineering power of infrastructures: dinning could not only be conducted in a domestic dinning room, a cafeteria, or a public park for picnic; but dinning can also happen on walkways and on public bike lanes. The re-appropriation is an explicit and open manifestation to the prescribed dictatorial power of infrastructures.
Parents deliver lunch and set up dinning stands in fornt of the school gate , IFENG NEWS, 2019 (image 15)
In the evening, hours before students end their class, parents gather again in front of the school to perform plaza dances. Parents encloses the plaza in front of the gate in a semi-circular configuration. A dance leader equips one or two small speakers on his waist, with silk ribbons or fans in his/her hands, the leader guides rest of the parents to swing and jig with the music. Meanwhile, the roads and bike lanes are occupied by convenient stands and food booths to provide daily services and dinner to the dancing parents. These booths set along the separators of the road; the booth owners are all parents who are willing to contribute their specific skills to the community while compensating their living costs. Henceforth, these parents turn the roads in front of the school into a park surrounded by a night market. Although it is the same place as where parents set up the dinning stands in the noon, they transformed the space again into a new use with different equipment. At this moment, the roads have become a neutral public space with the potential to embrace multiple activities; it is no longer an infrastructure embedded with normative power, nor a prescript apparatus to guide people’s potential behaviors. Roads have become the potential where numerous ways of re-appropriation are incubated. Some parents become dance leaders; some parents become organizers; some parents build up connections and solidarities through dancing and sharing. When performing these daily rituals, parents are engaged with into a collective communing that brings them new roles and identities beyond mere accompanied parents. In the night market, parents learn to socialize, negotiate, contribute and subsume themselves into the community. Parents are obtaining much more social knowledges through misappropriations than students in the Maotanchang High School. When parents do not submit themselves to the infrastructural coercion, they become the masters of infrastructures.
Accompanied moms dancing in the school-front plaza, SINA, 2019 (image 16)
At night, come together again with incenses, silk banners, Buddhist statues and cushions to a small lane beside the school. In this narrow lane, parents move garbage bins away, put statues and incense burners on the foldable stands and set up a rough shelter with steel pipes and metal sheets as shades for the sacred ‘exam spirit’. They transform a garbage collection site into a temporary shrine to pray for their kids next-day examinations.
community that disregard the imposed functions of infrastructures to stimulate new uses.
From the classrooms, sports fields, to the school’s front plaza, public roads/lanes and danyuan apartment buildings; the institutionalization of urbanism as a biopolitical instrument is explicit. These infrastructures take as their proper scale of intervention the territorial circulation of people, commodities, timetables and, most importantly, the pedagogy[16]. These infrastructures, as suggested by Foucault, does not simply replace, but rather complements techniques of sovereignty and discipline[17]. Although these physical apparatus are embedded with the objectives to produce individual and collective disciplined bodies to facilitate the Gaokao pedagogy in the school, parents are able to break through this infrastructural biopower to establish a new pedagogy through re-appropriation of infrastructures. The new pedagogy invented by parents in Maotanchang Town is not curricular education as the Gaokao pedagogy enforced in Maotanchang High School. It radically opposes the domineering infusion of unilateral and rigid knowledge. The new pedagogy is the approach and methodology to achieve individual and collective enrichment. It refers to the practice of misuse and misappropriation of existing infrastructures to invent and initiate potential collective lifestyles that reject the idea that peoples’ life should be planned by educators, politicians or reformers. Being pedagogical means to behold submission to the institutionalized education as past and deprecating; while pursuing an unprescribed, serendipitous and flexible mode of living, sharing and thus learning. Pedagogy lies its radical on the rebellious and inventive minds of the parents
[16] Wallenstein, Sven-Olov & Nilsson Jakob. Foucault, Biopolitics and Governmentality. Edited by Jakob Nilsson. Sodertorn: Sodertorn Philosophical Studies pp. 115. [17] Ibid.
Accompanied parent praying for their kids at temporary shrines, LOVEFOU, 2015 (image 17)
A dialectic relationship of two pedagogies In a simple glance, these two pedagogies (in the school and out of the school) are contradictory and conflicting in nature even though they are integrated as an entity to serve the nation’s educational scheme. However, instead of degrading them as incompatible or complementary, we should consider them in a dialectic relationship. If the Gaokao pedagogy is the obedience of (infrastructural) power; the new pedagogy is the resistance to the complete dominance of that (infrastructural) power. In the early 1970s, Foucault had theorized a novel relationship between power and resistance. He eschewed the common belief in a juridical, zero-sum calculus, where power and resistance are antithetical[18]. Instead, Foucault sought to demonstrate how the operational logic of power relations establishes a dependence between power and resistance[19]. According to Foucault, resistance itself is an example of power. The reason we refer to resistance is to designate it as a non-dominant instance of power that is opposed to the present configuration of power relations[20]. Henceforth, the relationship of power and resistance is indeed dialectic and productive. This dialectic relationship applies to the two pedagogies in Maotanchang Town. Re-appropriations of infrastructures and activities performed by parents are forms of resistance to prevent themselves from capitulating to the overwhelming Gaokao pedagogy; yet the pedagogy outside of the school is also sustaining the Gaokao pedagogy inside the school; that is to say, the power incites resistance and that resistance motivate greater power[21]. We could say that resistances ‘are inscribed in the latter as an irreducible opposite’[22]; in the same way that resistance does not exist without power. Hence these two seemingly contradictory pedagogies are tangled in a dialectic power-resistance relationship. They coexist and symbiose.
[18] John, Grant. "Foucault and the logic of dialectics" in Contemporary Political Theory. 2nd ed. Vol. 9. Macmillan Publisher Ltd., 2010, pp. 27. [19] Ibid. [20] Ibid. [21] Ibid. [22] Michel, Foucault. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, Translated by R. Hurley, New York: Vintage, pp. 96.
Accompanied parents dancing in plaza in front of the school, CCTV 9, 2015 (image 18)
Infrastructural power and resistance The consequence of the resistance in Maotanchang Town is incredible: it enables a collective living, sharing and learning that is forbidden in big cities of China. In Foucault’s words, ‘…there are no relations of power without resistances; the latter are all the more real and effective because they are formed right at the point where relations of power are exercised.”[23] Parents in Maotanchang Town re-appropriate, misuse, and thus use the existing infrastructures in this highly Gaokao-intensive town, where the power is exercised to the extreme, to manifest the potential of a vivid and unique pedagogy to coexist with the disciplined and rigid Gaokao pedagogy.
should not render the socialist educational model in China abruptly as a pure top-down implementation as the inflexible power-resistance relationship; nor should we interpret it as a dead model resisting any changes that proposed by Foucault. Foucault is right that wherever there are powers, there are resistances. Yet we should always keep in mind that wherever there are resistances, there are integrations of topdown policies and bottom-up public participations.
However, Foucault considers power to be something that is always dangerous because it can produce practices that result in exploitation or injury[24]. It is to his belief that the power relation could have become so entrenched that a state of domination takes hold where resistance is foreclosed and the possibility of reversing those relations is lost[25], hence he is arguing the complex power-resistance relationship is not dialectic. Nonetheless, in Maotanchang Town’s case, the power-resistance relationship is not a simple and absolute top-down one; parents’ participations in this ecosystem are not expunged by the Gaokao pedagogy nor lost among the infrastructural coercion; yet the two pedagogies are reaching a mutually interactive state that compromises and tolerances are made by both entities. Therefore, we could say that the power-resistance relationship in Maotanchang Town surpasses Foucault’s model and interpretation; two pedagogies are reaching an equilibrium through a dialectic relationship. This dialectic relationship of the two pedagogies in Maotanchang Town is indeed an epitome of the status-quo in contemporary China. That is to say, we
[23] Michel, Foucault. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, Translated by C. Gordon, et al., New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 142. [24] Michel, Foucault. The ethics of care for the self as a practice of freedom. In: J. Bernauer and D. Rasmussen (eds.) The Final Foucault. London: The MIT Press, pp. 3. [25] Ibid.
Moms and dads waiting for kids to have lunch break under a awning , SINA (image 19)
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