Being Modern in China: A Western cultural analysis of modernity, tradition and schooling in China today

This book gives a fascinating view on the relationship between Chinese modernity, tradition and school education.It is addressed to scholars who have an interest in contemporary Chinese culture, since the author provides an elaborate cultural analysis of Chinese modernity and school culture.Paul Willis used to work at Beijing Normal University, and the ethnographic data of this book are based on his academic visits to Chinese schools and reading diaries provided by his students.For that matter, this book is also for researchers in the field of school education, and its analytical strategy is helpful to scholars in the field of cultural sociology.Since the 1980s, China has become the world's second-largest economy.Especially in the past decade, despite economic growth decelerating, China's gross domestic product has increased by more than 6.5 per cent every year (NBS, 2019).This economic growth has simultaneously lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty and seen half of the Chinese population urbanized (Li et al., 2016).However, in the process of rapid economic development, many challenges have attracted the