Ant Tribes and the China Dream: The Higher Education Crisis in China

IIAS Lunch Lecture by Elisabeth Engebretsen.

Based on ongoing ethnographic research, media and theoretical research, this paper investigates the subjective and social experiences of precarious life and affective risk in postmillennial urban China. It takes as its empirical case study the everyday lives, coping strategies, dreams, but also growing indignation and frustration felt by members of the ‘ant tribe’ (yi zu) population, or irregularly employed university graduates. In recent years, the ant tribe category has emerged as a distinctive social category in Chinese society, reflecting the intense pressure to succeed through the education system, and the failure of an increasing number of young people to secure a prosperous lifestyle through higher learning and appropriate employment. It has been suggested that the ‘ant tribe’ is the new ‘weak social group’ alongside unskilled migrant laborers and the rural poor.

This situation must be understood against the China’s massive socio-economic transition, intense urbanization, and entry into the global capitalist economy. Whereas China has emerged a global powerhouse of growth, prosperity and optimism - with president Xi recently launching the ‘China Dream’ slogan - instances of injustice, violence and inequalities are intensifying, and so are the outlets of popular discontent, online and offline. The ant tribes, then, represent a new generation of marginalized people in China, but also point to a new global era of precariousness, in the context of fading desires of prosperity and dreams of ‘the good life’ through the path of education and employment. As it is, skyrocketing competition for jobs means that millions of graduates end up in irregular, low-paid work every year, and vagrancy.

This paper, part of a new major research project in progress, asks: how do marginalized ‘poor elites’ make sense of their predicament in the context of state-sponsored discourses such as the China Dream, and rising social and economic insecurity globally for the younger generations? More broadly, how can we better understand human responses and surviving through ‘ordinary’ everyday crises? And finally, how can we unpack these contemporary modes of insecurity and precariousness as lived experiences and affective strategies that aim to create well-being (e.g. Anne Allison 2013, Michael J. Jackson 2011)?

Next Lunch Lectures

8 AprilAnt Tribes and the China Dream: The Higher Education Crisis in China by Elisabeth Engebretsen

15 April Restoration or Ruination? The Politics of Timurid Architectural Heritage in Samarqand, by Elena Paskaleva (Leiden University Institute for Area Studies)

20 MayThe Returns of Faith: Engaging Sri Lankan Catholicism in an Italian Parish, by Bernardo Brown (Cornell University, NY, USA)

3 JuneTracing Absence: Work of Hope and Mediation of Transgenerational Emotional Suffering, by Ana Dragojlovic (Australian National University, Australia)

17 JuneTBA.

About IIAS Lunch Lectures

Every third Tuesday of the month (and temporarily also every first Tuesday), one of the IIAS researchers will present his or her work-in-progress in an informal setting to colleagues and other interested attendees. IIAS organises these lunch lectures to give the research community the opportunity to freely discuss ongoing research and exchange thoughts and ideas. Lunch is provided by IIAS.