Producing the “self-abandoned youths” in the periphery: Re-understanding digital subculture production and class reproduction in China’s rural high school

Producing the “self-abandoned youths” in the periphery: Re-understanding digital subculture production and class reproduction in China’s rural high school | Research Square window.SnipcartSettings = { analytics: { enabled: false } }; (function() { var accessVector = localStorage.getItem('access_vector') || ''; window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; if (accessVector) { window.dataLayer.push({ user: { profile: { profileInfo: { snid: accessVector } } } }); } })(); (function(w,d,s,l,i){w[l]=w[l]||[];w[l].push({'gtm.start':new Date().getTime(),event:'gtm.js'});var f=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],j=d.createElement(s),dl=l!='dataLayer'?'&l='+l:'';j.async=true;j.src='https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtm.js?id='+i+dl;f.parentNode.insertBefore(j,f);})(window,document,'script','dataLayer','GTM-K279D39R'); Browse Preprints In Review Journals COVID-19 Preprints AJE Video Bytes Research Tools Research Promotion AJE Professional Editing AJE Rubriq About Preprint Platform In Review Editorial Policies Our Team Advisory Board Help Center Sign In Submit a Preprint Cite Share Download PDF Article Producing the “self-abandoned youths” in the periphery: Re-understanding digital subculture production and class reproduction in China’s rural high school Chengyun Guan, Heng Xu, Bei Guo, Hongli Zhou This is a preprint; it has not been peer reviewed by a journal. https://doi.org/ 10.21203/rs.3.rs-8055802/v1 This work is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 License Status: Under Review Version 1 posted 21 You are reading this latest preprint version Abstract To ensure survival within the Chinese education system, rural high schools in the periphery implement various strategies that sacrifice students’ recreational and social needs to create an exam-oriented educational environment. Based on ethnographic research conducted at a rural high school in Hubei Province, this article scrutinizes control of smartphone use as the confrontation site between examination-oriented schooling and rural youths’ counter-school subculture production. In addition to highlighting the resistance nature of left-behind youths’ digital subculture production, our study unveils how the discriminatory campus management in school setting stigmatizes left-behind youths as “self-abandoned youths” ought to take responsibility for their academic failure and following class status reproduction. We highlight the necessity of examining class reproduction mechanisms in county high school in relation to the marginalization of rural schools in China’s education system. Social science/Education Social science/Sociology rural left-behind youth counter-school digital subculture examination-oriented schooling marginalization rural high school in China 1. Introduction Neoliberal globalization has exacerbated education inequalities based on class, gender, and location and created the conditions for class reproduction of different disenfranchised youth groups in newly rising economies (Salas and Sáinz, 2019 ; Windle, 2019 ). In China, the neoliberal turn of public education has widened the gap between rural and urban areas, placing rural left-behind youths at a disadvantaged position characterized by limited access to quality education and high dropout rate (Postiglione, 2006 ; Xiang, 2018 ). Previous studies have attempted to account for the educational failure of rural left-behind children from various lenses, including the exclusionary hukou system, urban-biased curriculum, and the lack of cultural capital at the individual level (Koo, 2016 ; Koo, Ming, and Tsang, 2014 ). As digital transformation has rapidly expanded its impact across China’s continent-sized territory over the past decade, digital social media, predominantly facilitated by mobile phones, has deeply permeated the everyday lives of left-behind children and provided them with new avenues for cultural production (McDonald, 2016 ). The mobile technologies provide rural residents with “virtual mobility” to connect with urban world (Wallis, 2013 ) and allow rural young people to shape their individual identities and engage in cultural production (Wang and Picone, 2023 ). Recent studies have examined creation of subculture by rural left-behind youths through digital social media and its implications for their educational outcomes. Drawing on Paul Willis’s class-based analyses of working-class youths’ cultural production, Li, Tan, and Yang ( 2020 ) explored how left-behind adolescents in rural Shandong use the video-sharing app Kuaishou to produce a subculture that devalues formal schooling and emphasizes physical strength and the ability to support one’s family. Meanwhile, the subculture has influenced their decision to drop out of school and seek work opportunities. Unlike Paul Willis’ analysis of sub-cultural production of working-class youths, which focused on challenging the school system and embracing a masculine working-class identity (Willis, 2017 ), the counter-school subcultural production of Chinese rural left-behind youths represents a response to perceived failures to assimilate into an examination-oriented educational culture rather than a direct challenge to education authority (Moskowitz, She, and Xiong, 2018 ; Zhou, 2011 ). Chinese rural children and youths, along with their families, do not take pride in obtaining working-class jobs but instead adhere to the ideology of meritocracy, which emphasizes individual responsibilities for educational success and upward social mobility (Chen, 2020 ). Furthermore, Willis’ theory of cultural production has been criticized for analyzing cultural forms without considering their relations to the broader spheres of production and social reproduction (Pun and Koo, 2019 ). In China’s context, recent studies highlight various factors that range from broader exclusive education policies to teachers’ anticipation at school setting in laying the conditions for rural students’ counter-school culture production and following class reproduction. These factors are deeply embedded in China’s urban-oriented education system which marginalizes both rural schools and students (Chen, 2020 ; Xiong, 2015 ). Rural schools are allocated with limited financial support and are equipped with poor-quality teaching staffs and facilities. To survive in the education system, rural high schools implement strict regulations and create a militaristic campus environment to prepare students for the high college entrance examination (hereafter called as Gaokao ) (Huang, 2020 ). In most cases, these regulations infringe on students’ rights by restricting their use of smartphones and other digital devices. The restrictive rules and management of smartphone use create tension between students and school authorities. While recent studies have explored the meaning of and values attached to subcultural production by rural left-behind youths through smartphone use, there is still limited analysis of subcultural production and class reproduction mechanisms in rural schools within the broader context of the marginalization of rural school in China’s education system. This study aims to address this gap by examining the control of smartphone use as a site of confrontation between examination-oriented schooling and the individual needs of rural youths for socialization, and recreation. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a rural high school in central China, this study reveals the dynamic interplay between counter-school digital subculture production of rural left-behind youths and the discriminatory campus regulations, which contribute to the reproduction of their class status. Unlike previous left-behind youths collectively expressed frustration with educational failure through subculture production, our informants draw on the discourse of neoliberal individualization, in which young people are encouraged to take responsibility for their lives, challenge the oppressive campus regulations, and protect their privacy and rights by creating the counter-school culture. Additionally, our study highlights the discriminatory campus regulations implemented by rural schools to marginalize students who belong to counter-school culture and maintain dominance of examination-oriented schooling. These discriminatory regulations are put in place based on the neoliberal ideology of meritocracy embraced by school authorities, rural left-behind youths, and their families. Consequently, rural left-behind youths internalize their marginalized position and take individual responsibility for reproducing their migrant-worker class status instead of challenging the legitimacy of meritocratic ideology. Furthermore, we argue that the analysis of rural schools’ militaristic campus regulations and their implications on the reproduction of rural left-behind youths’ class status should be considered in relation to the marginalization of rural schools within China’s urban-biased, hierarchical education system. To meet performance appraisals imposed by policymakers, rural schools adopt the Gaokao factory model, sacrificing students with left-behind backgrounds as “self-abandoned youths” to maintain the dominance of examination-oriented schooling. In the following sections, we will review the literature on the marginalization of rural schools, subculture production, and class reproduction in county schools in the digital era. We will then outline the research context and methodology of this study. After summarizing the individualistic counter-school sub-culture expressed by participants through smartphone use, we will analyze the discriminatory campus regulations imposed by rural boarding schools against participants of counter-school culture and their contribution to the reproduction of rural left-behind youths’ class status. In the final section, we will offer critical reflections on the complexities of the class reproduction mechanism in rural school setting and its relation to China’s ongoing marginalization of rural education. 2. Contextualizing counter-culture subculture production and examination-oriented culture in China’s rural high school We have benefited from theories and models of class reproduction in exploring the impact of class background on students’ schooling and occupational attainments (class destination) (Brown and James, 2020 ; Huang, 2020 ; Willis, 2017 ). The term “cultural reproduction” is frequently used to describe how cultural forms (e.g. social privilege, elite status) and cultures themselves are transmitted intact from one generation to another. One of the most representative researches in this account is Paul Willis’ ( 2017 ) ethnographic classic Learning to Labour , which discusses the role of education in reproducing class inequality and illustrates how inequality could be reproduced culturally despite the best efforts of a benevolent education system. Willis argues that at school, working-class youths articulate and generate various cultural forms such as dossing, blagging, wagging, “having a laff” and so forth, to create subculture culture to confront the school authority and the conformists. By actively manipulating sexist, racist, and violent languages, male youths reproduce a masculine working-class culture transmitted from their parents and neighbourhoods. To them, manual work is an expression of masculine power and superiority. Hence, the ruthless celebration of their masculinity, violence, sexism, and racism are at the very heart of the counter-school culture. In their romanticizing of culture, resistance to conformity eventually encourages the marginalized existence in academic learning setting for youths, who in turn reproduce their class dominance (Dockx, Van den Branden, and De Fraine, 2020 ; Dinsmore, 2018 ; Hall and Jefferson, 2006 ). Willis’s account of cultural reproduction has also been widely used to understand the counter-school subculture production of rural left-behind children or youths in the context of China’s rural educational institutes. As digital media including smartphone have been integrated into all aspects of rural youths’ daily life and formed a virtual link between them and outside world, recent researches have expanded the theory of cultural production to the digital media field, focusing on the counter-school digital subculture. Li et al. ( 2020 ) documented that a group of rural left-behind youth in Zouping, a countryside area in Shandong province, constructed their imaginary of upward social mobility by acting like shehui ren (“society men”) on popular video-sharing app Kuaishou . The subculture of shehui ren provides rural left-behind children with an alternative channel to construct their identity and anchor their imagination of future rather than sticking to the traditional schooling. However, those rural left-behind children are often being marginalized by school systems or are self-marginalized, finally becoming “invisible dropouts” on school campuses. It is notable that Chinese youths, including those who originate from rural areas, are encouraged to embrace the discourse of neoliberal individualization as China is becoming radically integrated into neoliberal globalization (Koo, 2021 ). Previous studies documented rural individual demands of left-behind youths for social and entertainment activities online and offline on campuses (Zhen et al., 2020 ). Therefore, it is important to investigate further how rural left-behind youths construct subcultures through digital media in line with the discourse of neoliberal individualization. Cultural production encompasses not only the counter-school subculture but also the mainstream culture within schools, often emerging from the interplay between these two forces (Walker, 2011 ). While existing studies have predominantly attributed the class reproduction of lower-class children to their counter-school subculture, they have largely overlooked the role of mainstream school culture in class reproduction (Dinsmore, 2018 ). Willis ( 2017 ) acknowledged that his emphasis on the counter-school subculture of working-class children limited his ability to thoroughly investigate broader mainstream cultural systems, highlighting the need for future research to address this gap. In the context of class reproduction in China, Willis particularly underscored the significant impact of examination-oriented culture as a key driving force (Moskowitz, She, and Xiong, 2018 ). Few recent studies have documented the roles of meritocratic ideology and education-oriented schooling in limiting migrant children’s resistance and leading to their self-marginalization on the school campus (Chen 2020 ). Therefore, how the examination-oriented culture is manifested in rural high school campuses and its interplay with left-behind youth’s digital subculture production in reproducing their class status deserves nuanced investigation. Previous studies have documented that the prevalence of examination-oriented culture among education institutes, including those in rural areas, has been closely related to the neoliberal reforms of China’s education system in the last four decades. Since the opening and reform in the late 1970s, China has gradually transformed its egalitarian education system in Mao’s era to a meritocratic one, which relies on the examination to filter and select young talents for state competition in global economy. This transformation enables different levels of local governments to set the students’ scores in Gaokao as the ultimate parameter for school performance appraisals and enforce all formal education institutes to take various efforts to cultivate students’ potential in succeeding in examinations (Pan and Ye, 2017 ). In late 1990s, the market-oriented reform of education sector has intensified the unequal distribution of resources between urban and rural areas (Hong and Fuller, 2019 ; Huang, 2020 ; Li et al., 2015 ; Postiglione, 2006 ). Under this circumstance, experienced and qualified teachers in rural high schools were often lured away by urban institutions offering higher salaries. In addition, the prestigious provincial and municipal high schools in big cities are allowed to recruit talented students in the whole administrative region, including those in rural areas (Hong and Fuller, 2019 ). In the early 2000s, China’s government launched a School Merge Program in populated rural areas to raise the efficiency of education service delivery (Cai, Chen, and Zhu, 2017 ; Fan and Popkewitz, 2020 ). These big changes in the education system have contributed to suffocating the space for rural high schools to survive. In order to secure their survival in China’s education hierarchy, most rural high schools have prioritized graduates’ college enrollment rate in their pedagogical activities and made various efforts to turn their campuses into “ Gaokao factories” (Dockx, Van den Branden, and De Fraine, 2020 ; Huang, 2020 ; Wang, 2019 ). The adoption of “ Gaokao factory” model inevitably leads to confrontation between the school’s oppressive regulations and students’ needs for socialization and recreation. Thus, the interplay between the counter-school subculture of China’s rural left-behind youths and the examination-oriented culture should be examined in relation to China’s broader meritocratic education system and long-lasting educational inequality between rural and urban areas. 3. Methods Qualitative investigations were conducted in one rural senior high school in Gong’an County of Jingzhou Prefecture-level City, Hubei Province, from March 2022 to August 2024. Gong’an was selected as a research site due to its large rural area and outflow of rural population. Sixteen townships and 321 rural villages are under the jurisdiction of Gong’an County. In 2018, the number of rural migrants moving to urban areas for employment exceeded 130 thousand, representing 13.84% of the total population of Gong’an County. Owing to the prevalence of outward migration among rural households, most rural children or youths were left behind in rural hometowns and growing up without intensive parental support. In this study, Spring (pseudonym) High School (hereafter called as Spring School) was selected for data collection. As the biggest rural, public high school in Jingzhou, Spring School was established in 1956, and it currently accommodates 54 classes and more than 3780 students, the majority of whom are rural left-behind youths. Spring School has 264 qualified teaching staffs, including 58 senior teachers and one national key teacher, and offers three-year high school education program. However, a key high school located in the provincial capital city of Wuhan has qualified 350 teaching staffs, including 189 senior teachers and nine national key teachers. Almost all of the teaching staff have at least a bachelor’s degree issued by first-tier universities, such as Peking University. The inferiority in educational resource allocation directly undermines Spring School’s capacities to attract and enroll talented students and ensure better performance in Gaokao . To ensure the efficiency of delivering examination-oriented school, Spring School divides its students of each grade into four key classes, including one rocket class ( huojian ban ) that accommodates 50 students with the most outstanding academic performances, and 14 ordinary classes according to their examination scores. Meanwhile, Spring School is the typical boarding school under militaristic campus management. All students are only allowed to leave campus once a month. In the last five years, Spring School has taken various measures, including strict prohibitions on smartphones, to monitor and control students’ smartphone use on campus. Therefore, Spring School is expected to reflect the complexity and dynamics of tensions between Chinese rural high schools’ examination-oriented education and rural left-behind youths’ resistance against the control of smartphone use in the digital era. The study primarily relied on semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, offline observations in classrooms and student dormitories, and online observations of students’ interactions in a game-sharing WeChat group. Consent forms were obtained from 11 class teachers, three school principals or managers, and 38 students who agreed to participate in the semi-structured interviews and observations. All 38 students are left-behind youth aged from15 to 17; 21 of them are boys, and the other 17 are girls. A total of 35 classroom observations and nine dormitory visits were conducted and audio-recorded. Field notes were taken during or immediately after the observations, focusing on teacher-student interactions, student behaviors, peer interactions, student resistance to school smartphone control measures, and teachers’ reactions to student resistance. Additionally, online observations of the game-sharing WeChat group allowed for an exploration of group solidarity and the development of counter-school digital subcultures among students who resisted examination-oriented schooling. Semi-structured interviews with teachers, principals, and other school managers were conducted to understand the details of various measures Spring School has taken to monitor students’ smartphone use, punish disobedient students, and ultimately boost students’ examination performance. Individual interviews with students cover their smartphone use behavior, their attitudes toward school control measures, and opinion on examination-oriented schooling. Each research participant received a pseudonym. Following the principles of thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006 ), we analyzed the interview transcripts using open and focused coding to identify themes and similarities/differences between informants. After the data analysis, two classroom meetings with research participants were held to receive their feedback, and further ensure the reliability and openness of this research. From time to time, we kept in touch with our participants via WeChat, which enabled us to keep updated about their situations. Ethical approval for this study was obtained from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the School of Journalism and Communication, Shaanxi Normal University, which rigorously reviewed the research proposal to ensure compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The committee granted approval under Reference Number 20220207-004, with the approval period extending from 7 February 2022 to 23 September 2024. This approval confirms that the research adheres to ethical guidelines regarding participant consent, confidentiality, and overall welfare. Researchers followed all stipulated ethical procedures throughout the study duration. Written informed consent was obtained directly by the first author from all participating students and teachers, as well as from the guardians of underage students, between February 21 and February 28, 2022. This process was conducted in accordance with the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and protocol approved by the Institutional Review Board of the School of Journalism and Communication, Shaanxi Normal University. Participants signed a consent to participate declaration after reviewing a detailed explanation of the study’s purpose, procedures, and data confidentiality. For further information or inquiries regarding the ethical aspects of this research, interested parties are encouraged to contact at [email protected] . 4. Control on smartphone use and left-behind youth’s counter-school subculture as resistance In order to survive in China’s increasingly polarized education system, rural high schools in interior regions strive to create an examination-oriented learning environment to meet the admission rate targets set by local education bureaus (Doepke and Zilibotti, 2019 ; Huang, 2020 ). Spring School has adopted the “Hengshui high school model,” which is well-known in China for its high college enrollment rate. This model involves a militarized campus management approach, including enforcing uniform haircuts, dress codes, and daily routines, as well as imposing strict, examination-focused schooling on students. It is widely acknowledged that the high college enrollment rate achieved by the Hengshui model comes at the expense of students’ emotional well-being, psychological needs, and all-round development (Yang and Chen, 2017 ). Spring School followed the Hengshui model to implement militarized management measures and polish their students’ skills for the Gaokao. For example, Spring school squeezes students’ time spent on daily eating and resting to construct an environment for examination-oriented learning. In addition, Spring School strictly controls student’s use of smartphones and other digital recreational devices, such as MP4 players and iPads. According to the school’s rules, all students are required to hand in their digital devices to head teachers upon entering the campus. Additionally, Spring School attempts to diminish the importance of recreational activities through smartphone use, considering them unnecessary and even detrimental to academic learning (Li, Tan, and Yang, 2020 ). During our visit to Spring School’s daily rally, we observed school administration stigmatize smartphone use as ‘poison for academic learning and examination performance’. Spring School has implemented strict surveillance measures to prevent students from using smartphones covertly on campus. One example is the random inspections organized by the school management team. On March 12, 2023, the management team conducted a random inspection of smartphone use among students in class 10 of Grade 2. The school’s director ordered all students to leave the classroom and gather in the open space in front of the classroom. Using a metal detector, he scanned each student’s desk and backpack to check for smartphones or other digital devices. After 15 minutes, the director confiscated the smartphones he collected and handed them over to the headteacher of class 10. Students who violated school rules were taken to the director’s office and given detention as punishment. After the inspection was finished, the director sternly warned the students that he would smash all smartphones in front of them if they violated school rules again. Furthermore, the management team at Spring School employs strict punishments to deter students from challenging the school’s surveillance and control measures. The case of Weiwei, a rural left-behind student in class 10, Grade 2, who was caught using his smartphone covertly, highlights how Spring School uses punishment to discourage smartphone use on campus. On September 20, 2022, we witnessed the confrontation between Weiwei and a general education teacher who caught him playing with his smartphone during a self-study class. General education teacher: Hand over your smartphone to me! I saw you using it. Weiwei: [Yelling] You have no right to confiscate my phone! I won’t give it to you! (The general education teacher was taken aback by Weiwei’s reaction and remained silent for a few seconds. Some students laughed and began to support Weiwei with jeers. The general education teacher blushed and then took Weiwei to his office for further punishment). After several rounds of debate with the general education teacher, Weiwei still refused to apologize. The headteacher of class 10, Grade 2 then threatened Weiwei with a serious demerit if he did not apologize. In the end, Weiwei surrendered and apologized for his covert smartphone use and “misbehavior” in front of his classmates. However, the strict controls on smartphone use have not received compliance from our informants but led to their criticism of the militarized campus management for suppressing their needs of recreation and socialization. This is reflected in Xiaohui’s criticism of the education they received in Spring School. Here [in Spring School] education is simplified as preparing for examination while our all-round developments are ignored. We are enforced to devote every minute to studying and polishing ourselves as small pieces of this Gaokao factory. Sometimes I think what Spring School did to us actually deviates from the essence of education. It is nothing but torturing us to comply. In stark contrast with their description of school life as “tedious, boring, and endless torture,” our informants perceived smartphone use as “fun” and more importantly, “their individual right and freedom.” Echoing the findings of Zhang et al. ( 2023 ) and Lin et al. ( 2025 ) that smartphone use anchors Chinese young people’s negotiation for individual recreation and socialization spaces, we further observed that left-behind youths actively developed various ways to protect their recreation and socialization spaces from school surveillance and punishment. First, we observed that our informants formed different informal, mutual-support groups and expressed a strong spirit of solidarity when concealing smartphones from compulsory detection and further using them in examination cheating. This is reflected in the cooperation between Qi and Hong when coping with teachers’ irregular patrol and inspection. When Ning cleverly concealed smartphone behind books and watched the movie, his deskmate Qi stared at the window in case of being noticed by teachers. If teacher comes to the classroom, Qi will pretend to cough immediately, touched Ning’s arm with her hand, and whispered, “Watch Out!” In response, Hong quickly sat straightly and muted his phone and threw it into the desk drawer. When taking about their team work to cope with teacher’s surveillance, both Qi and Ning expressed senses of pleasure and pride in terms of successfully escaping from teacher’s random inspection and building a “mutually supportive” group with classmates. During the fieldwork, we observed that left-behind youths have formed such groups in cheating during the regular tests. The teamwork between classmates in cheating during tests enables our informants to pass examinations despite not having followed teachers’ instruction to focus on the subject learning. From our informants’ perspective, cheating on the exam is one of the strategies to challenge the teacher’s authority to define their value through examination performance. Hongyue shared his contempt for exams with us: The teachers just want to force all of us be machine to take examination. They repeatedly told us that our life would be meaningless if we do not study hard and have good examination performance. My buddies and I just dislike being judged in such arbitrary way. So we cooperated with each other in passing the examinations for avoiding the criticism from teachers. More importantly, our informants formed mutually supportive but hierarchical groups in playing the mobile game Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds on smartphone. Besides sharing experiences and successful tactics in playing the game, our informants were endowed with different statuses of this group in terms of their performance in the online game. This is reflected in Chao’s narrative: During school time, we communicated with those who also played this game and formed a game team. Within our group, those who have better “game skills” will have a higher status as they will give us successful experience and lead our team to more victories, whether familiar or unfamiliar before, forming their own social circles and game teams. This is also reflected in the sharing of Yingzi, who has excellent “game skills” and was nominated as a “leader” by his peers. Boys and a few girls around me have gradually formed relatively stable groups to play the game. The best player, like me, will be nominated as a leader while those with lower gaming skills often struggle to make friends since no one is willing to team up with them. I actually find my values there rather than the subject learning. Rather than merely challenging the school authority and questioning the oppressive nature of examination-oriented schooling, the counter-school subculture left-behind youths developed on their smartphone use, as expressed in Yingzi’s answer, endows them with a sense of belonging, self-actualization, and recognition, which they are unable to achieve in subject learning and examinations. 5. Spring School’s meritocracy-oriented strategies to marginalize counter-school subculture practitioners and differentiate students In the face of the challenges posed by left-behind youths through the production of the counter-school subculture, the administration of the Spring School adopted various segregation measures under the guise of meritocracy to marginalize the resisters, to channel them to be “invisible dropouts” who ought to take responsibility for their academic failures, and ultimately, to legitimize the examination-based education. Under this differentiation mechanism, the learning needs of students with better academic performance are prioritized in the campus management. Students who resist the regulations on mobile phone use and challenge the examination-based education are tolerated for being idle on campus as long as they do not violate school’s measures in raising other students’ examination performances. Such students are labeled as “burdens” who become invisibly abandoned by the teaching staffs. The differentiation mechanism is specifically manifested by the following measures. First, the Spring School classifies the students into key classes and regular classes. The key class consists of students with better academic performance, who are subject to the school’s examination-oriented education and, more importantly, who have the potential to be admitted to first-tier university. Students who have poor academic performance, who do not comply with the school’s militarized campus management, or who challenge the examination-oriented education are assigned to regular classes. From the perspective of school administration and management, the division arrangement is the strategy for them to prevent other students from being negatively influenced by counter-school subculture practitioners and ensure the university admission rate of their school (Chen, 2020 ; Huang, 2020 ; Liu, 2016 ; Postiglione, 2006 ). The left-behind youths of this study are perceived as “threats” to school performance and ought to be isolated and eventually be abandoned. Second, Spring School implements different teaching and management toward key and regular classes. Spring school has assigned the experienced teachers to key classes and implemented the strictest regulations, including smartphone use prohibition, for students in key classes. Meanwhile, Spring School has placed most pressure of performance evaluation on the teachers of key classes for pushing them to raise students’ academic performance. Once their students are admitted to key universities, teachers of key classes are be awarded with substantial bonuses and opportunities for promotions. By contrast, the school puts the laissez-faire management mode on students in ordinary classes. The school has reached an unspoken tacit agreement with the left-behind youths, in which students no longer blatantly challenge the order of school management, while schools acquiesce to students’ use of smartphones for recreational activities on campus and even turn a blind eye to them idling away time until graduation. More importantly, Spring School organizes further division within ordinary classes to marginalize students who resist regulation on smartphone use prohibition or engage in other forms of challenges towards examination-oriented schooling. The head teachers classify the students as “good students” and “bad students” according to their academic performances and obedience to school regulations. As only a few students in these classes can be admitted to colleges each year, teachers focus their resources and attention on students with better academic performance and the potential of being enrolled in college. Teachers of ordinary classes first create the “spatial segregation” within classrooms to divide the students and marginalize members of the counter-school subculture. The head teachers arrange “good students” to sit in the first four rows of the classroom to ensure those students are under their direct supervision and guidance, while the “bad students” are placed in the back rows of the classroom or at sites near the classroom walls (Zhang 2019 ). Secondly, the head teachers label the “bad students” as “hoodies” and develop a “we-they” boundary between the two groups of students in daily pedagogical activities. The teachers frequently remind the “good students” to stay away from these “hoodies” and not to be affected by their counter-school digital subculture. During the fieldwork, we found that the differentiation strategies discussed above have led to the polarization of students regarding their school performances and educational expectations. On the one hand, most of the students who submit to the militarized campus management and the examination-oriented education still make their full efforts to become competitive test-taking machines and retain high expectations for the narrative of achieving upward social mobility through the college entrance exams despite being subject to great academic pressure. On the other hand, the left-behind youths, who are marginalized by the school administration, no longer resist the negative images imposed on them having given up the expectations of receiving higher education in metropolises. Like their counterparts in other China’s rural high schools, they have accepted the destiny of the “invisible dropout.” Xiaohang expressed her desperate feeling when siting in the classroom and being treated like an “outlier” during the interview. Basically, teachers and some classmates thought that I will definitely be a loser in the examination. It is not the case that I can reverse the situation by my own efforts. When everyone surrounding looks me down, I would more or less influenced by the judgment and think the education pathway is not for me. Therefore, I will turn to other option for the future. The observations of Zhang ( 2019 ) highlighted that the division arrangement in classroom under the guise of meritocracy has not only led to the polarization of school performance among students in rural high schools but also compelled them to take individual responsibility for the educational failure. The left-behind youths in Spring School shared the similar educational expectations and career plans. When talking about their future after high school graduation, all the left-behind youths in our study said that they planned to migrate to coastal cities and attain a temporary manufacturing or service jobs there rather than staying on the academic track. This division arrangement under the guise of meritocracy seems to legitimize the polarization of students and the invisible abandonment of underachievers, making it difficult for the left-behind youths to overcome obstacles which limit their access to high-quality educational resources. Instead, left-behind youths tend to attribute their academic failure to their counter-school digital subculture production and further self-marginalize themselves in school pedagogical activities. After graduation, those left-behind youths have to follow their parents’ footsteps to bear the heavy workload and precarious working conditions as migrant workers living in coastal cities. 6. The class reproduction mechanism in Spring School and its root in rural-urban educational inequality Unlike Paul Willis’s working-class youths who are proud of working-class masculinity and occupation, left-behind youths in our study still subscribe to the meritocracy ideology and perceive labor jobs as inferior to the white-collar jobs. Xiaoxiong, a 17-year-old boy, expressed his concern to us during the interview: From childhood, we are taught that those who do manual labor will be managed, and those who do mental labor will manage others. I want to study hard, get into a good university, and get a decent office job. Eventually, following my parents to work in a coastal city was also the way out of bad exam results. The excerpt presented above shows that the meritocracy ideology endorsed by the left-behind youths caused them to internalize the stigma imposed on them by the school administration and, more importantly, undertake self-blame for their educational failures and the reproduction of their family’s social status. Therefore, the division arrangement adopted by Spring School represents the irreplaceable parts of the mechanism to maintain the legitimacy of examination-oriented schooling. On the one hand, this division arrangement, under the guise of meritocracy, links left-behind youths’ digital sub-cultural production and their social status reproduction, and, on the other hand, it labels left-behind youths’ resistance to examination-oriented schooling as the cause for their academic failure. When being asked the intention of adopting such division arrangement in campus management, the Spring School’s administration responded that it was fully aware that these measures ran counter to the nature of education. The respondents further explained that the underlying reason is meeting the performance appraisal targets assigned by the Education Bureau and receiving financial support from the government. Principal Zhang, who has worked in Spring School for nearly 20 years, explained to us: Today’s all rural educators are overwhelmed by different sorts of performance appraisals assigned by the Educational Bureau. No matter how hard the ministry of education or general public emphasizes the importance of quality education ( suzhi jiaoyu ), the performance in Gaokao is adopted as the most important parameter to evaluate the performances of rural schools and determine the financial support they will receive from government. Therefore, we have no choice but being committed to build an environment in which students can focus on study and achieve highest examination score as possible as they can. Controlling the influences from those left-behind youths is just part of works we did for enhancing the academic performance for other students in our school. Principal Zhang’s testimony highlights that the school’s measures to control students’ smartphone use and marginalize those who engage in digital subculture production are driven by the ultimate goal of ensuring survival with China’s education system, which is increasingly aligned with neoliberal logic. Since the late 1970s, China has gradually transformed its egalitarian education system in Mao’s era to a meritocratic one, which tends to concentrate financial resources, qualified teaching staffs, and talented students at the key schools with better performances in Gaokao (Liu, 2016 ). However, owing to the persistent rural-urban dichotomy of socioeconomic development, the majority of key schools are located in cities and are equipped with better-quality facilities and teaching faculties to support students’ academic performance. At the same time, the marketization of public services in the 1990s led to the rapid expansion of urban private schools, which had more diversified sources of funding to cover daily expenditures and ensure survival. Therefore, the neoliberal turn has intensified the polarization of China’s education system and placed interior educational institutes in a further disadvantaged position regarding the amount of financial subsidies, as well as the qualities of teaching staffs and facilities (Koo, 2016 ). More importantly, two major macro-factors have made it harder for rural high schools to survive. First, China’s urban-oriented, neoliberal modernization has driven millions of rural households to migrate to the cities in search of higher occupational income and better living conditions (Hong and Fuller, 2019 ; Koo, 2016 ; Solinger, 1999 ). Thus, many rural parents have brought their children to the destination cities for education. Most of them have to study in the migrant workers’ schools, which are privately sponsored and relatively disadvantaged in education system as hukou barriers still persist in restricting their access to local public schools. The massive rural-urban migration has reduced the student population for rural high schools. Second, the survival of rural high schools has been affected by the Chinese government’s large-scale campaign to remove and consolidate educational institutes in rural areas since the beginning of the 21st century under the guise of improving the efficiency of rural education. The neoliberal institutional change has quantitatively and qualitatively decreased the education options for rural families in their hometown regions. When conducting the fieldwork, we found that Spring School, like other rural schools, faces the challenge of surviving in the Chinese education system. In recent years, families in the nearby rural and township areas have been more inclined to send their children to urban high schools in neighboring counties or even prefecture-level cities. At the same time, some of the school’s teachers have left to work in other urban high schools in the face of the higher incomes that urban high schools can offer. The suffocating situation discussed above enforces the administration of Spring School to commit to constructing its campus as the “Gaokao factory” to ensure its competitiveness in attracting local students and surviving in China’s education system. In 2018, China’s Ministry of Education issued a series of new educational policies to promote students’ all-around and individual development while emphasizing that the educational resources should be equally allocated among all students and across different areas (Ministry of Education of PRC, 2018 ). For achieving the goal, China’s Ministry of Education has required its local education bureaus to monitor and prohibit high schools from dividing students according to their academic performances. Although these policies have been generally acknowledged on surface, rural schools continue using the division arrangement under the guise of the “Pilot Reform Program of Enrollment for Basic Subjects,” in which key classes and ordinary classes are renamed as pilot classes and regular classes, to select elite students with the potential of entering elite universities (Xiang, 2018 ). Meanwhile, the Education Bureau of county turns a blind eye to Spring School’s violations of the national policies. Compared to key schools in cities, rural high schools are incapable of implementing the all-around education due to a lack of qualified teachers and relevant facilities. Training students with better school performances to stand out in the Gaokao is the only way to meet the college/university enrolment rate assigned by the Education Bureau (Bukodi and Goldthorpe, 2018 ; Hannum, An, and Cherng, 2011 ). When local education bureaus, school administrations, and rural families becomes too obsessed with constructing rural schools as Gaokao factories, the sacrifices made to the academic learning of left-behind youths pale into insignificance. When returning to field in 2024, we noticed that the administration of Spring School seldom mentioned the destiny of those left-behind youths who had actively engaged in digital counter-school subculture production. 7. Discussion and Conclusion This study discusses the interplay between China’s rural left-behind youths’ counter-school digital subculture and class reproduction within the critique of meritocracy and rural-urban educational inequalities in neoliberal China. Unlike previous studies focusing on the hukou system, urban-biased policies, or cultural capital insufficiency, our research examines micro-level campus management that divides students based on performance, linking counter-school digital subculture production with class status reproduction in marginalized rural high schools. Ethnographic data from Spring School reveals that smartphone use control is a site of conflict between left-behind youths’ counter-school digital subculture and the examination-oriented education enforced by the school administration. By resisting smartphone prohibitions, these youths create a counter-school digital subculture driven by their individualistic needs for socialization, and recreation. Instead of seeking teachers’ approval, they gain recognition from peers through smartphone-based activities. Spring School administration divides students based on adherence to militaristic regulations, preparing high performers for the Gaokao while marginalizing those involved in digital subculture as “invisible dropouts.” These divisions, justified by meritocracy, isolate and stigmatize those challenging campus rules, compelling them to internalize the “invisible dropout” label and follow their parents into migrant work. We conclude that rural high schools implement these measures to survive in an urban-oriented, meritocratic educational system. Facing declining status due to neoliberal reforms, these schools rely on limited government support tied to college admission rates. Consequently, they prioritize academic performance, turning students into examination machines at the expense of individual development. This division mechanism legitimizes militaristic regulations, maintains examination-based schooling dominance, and links subcultural production with class reproduction. Firstly, our study enriches the understanding of the processes and contents of counter-school subculture production among China’s rural left-behind youths in the digital era. Previous literature has revealed that Chinese youth, including those in rural areas, have been encouraged to embrace neoliberal individualization discourse (Liu, 2016 ) and actively use digital platforms, including smartphones, to meet their entertainment and socialization needs, and to preserve space for personal expression (McDonald, 2016 ). In our study, the counter-school digital subculture production by rural left-behind youths implies their strong demands for freedom in individual entertainment and socialization. Unlike their predecessors in England, who constructed counter-school subcultures based on working-class, masculine identities (Willis, 2017 ; Bukodi and Goldthorpe, 2018 ; Dinsmore, 2018 ), China’s rural left-behind youths draw on the social discourse of individualization to resist militaristic campus regulations and challenge the legitimacy of these regulations in intervening in their individual freedoms and rights for socialization and entertainment via smartphone use. Although rural left-behind youths formed mutual support networks during the process of subculture construction and gained recognition from these networks, the peer support was temporary and primarily aimed at retaining individual space for entertainment. Therefore, it falls short of forming a strong collective identity like that of the working-class “hammertown boys” in the Midlands. Moreover, our study reveals that the subscription of rural left-behind youths to neoliberal individualization discourse lays the groundwork for their later subordination to meritocracy ideologies. These ideologies compel individuals to take personal responsibility for their failures while obscuring the structural responsibilities inherent in China’s neoliberal education system and the urban-rural inequalities. Second, our study illuminates the role of micro-level division arrangements in rural high schools in perpetuating the class status of rural left-behind youths. Our fieldwork data reveal that all division arrangements between classes and within classrooms at Spring School closely align with meritocracy ideology, which emphasizes the necessity of filtering “talented” individuals with the potential to excel in the Gaokao and controlling those who challenge examination-oriented schooling. These division arrangements are predicated on principles of individual responsibility for success or failure in academic learning and examination competition. As Burman ( 2007 , 2016 ) comments, notions of normality and abnormality are created and perpetuated through administrative and regulatory avenues. In the context of Spring School, the legitimacy of militaristic campus management and examination-oriented education is reinforced by pathologizing individual entertainment and socialization needs via smartphones and stigmatizing counter-school digital subculture producers as “threats to a good learning environment.” Moreover, our study highlights that these division arrangements conspire with the neoliberal discourse of individualization to compel rural left-behind youths to blame themselves for academic failure and internalize a sense of fatalism. This largely obscures the impact of structural inequalities, such as the rural-urban educational dichotomy and neoliberal reforms, on their class reproduction. Third, by relating our analysis to the broader socioeconomic structure, our study reveals that the interweaving of China’s persistent rural-urban dichotomy, hierarchical educational system, and radical neoliberal reform of public sector in complex dynamics compels rural high schools to turn their campuses into “ Gaokao ” factories for ensuring their survival in fierce competition. Our empirical evidence further underscores that rural high schools in the central and western regions face a trend of further decline brought about by the marginalization of interiors in China’s neoliberal urbanization process. This decline is manifested in two ways: First, rural high schools in the central and western regions receive limited sources of financial support compared to high schools in coastal urban areas, and the qualifications of their teachers as well as the quality of their teaching equipment are much inferior. Secondly, as a result of the expanding urban-rural migration, more and more rural families chose to send their children to study in the cities, which has further weakened the competitiveness of rural high schools. As a result, rural high schools in the interior region can only secure funding from local school boards and appeal to rural parents by taking measures to ensure college admission rates for their graduates. Therefore, sacrificing rural left-behind youths’ academic study and individual needs to ensure the delivery of examination-oriented schooling is one of the measures rural high schools undertake under the guise of meritocracy. Notably, rural left-behind youths’ experiences of digital subculture production and class reproduction may not be representative of all types of rural migrant youths in China. Unlike their predecessors who had limited channels to express their individual needs, the left-behind youths in Spring School actively utilize the smartphone as a digital platform to exert agency in constructing subculture and retaining their spaces for entertainment and socialization. In the past two decades, hundreds of small cities have been rapidly involved in China’s new wave of urbanization. More and more rural households choose to send their children to public schools in nearby county-level or prefecture-level cities for education. Meanwhile, the Education Bureau requires rural education institutes to diversify their pedagogical curriculum and deliver the quality/ suzhi education to children rather than merely polishing them for examination. The issue of how the new reconfiguration of the rural-urban relationship and its following changes in the educational sector will influence the dynamics between rural left-behind youths’ digital subculture production and their class reproduction deserves more in-depth examination in future research. Nevertheless, our study sheds light on a new research direction on the complexity of the interplay between China’s rural left-behind youths’ counter-school digital subculture production and class reproduction and potential transformations they may bring to rural education institutes. Declarations Funding Declaration This research was sponsored by the general project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers: 24BXW051). Author Contribution Chengyun Guan (CG), as the first author, was responsible for Conceptualisation, Methodology, Research design and Data collection, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing, Supervision, Project administration. Heng Xu (HX) was involved in Conceptualisation, Methodology, Data analysis, Writing - Review & Editing. Bei Guo (BG) was involved in Writing - Review & Editing. Hongli Zhou (HZ) was involved in Writing - Review & Editing. All authors reviewed the manuscript. Acknowledgement We would like to thank all the research participants for joining the study and their support in this research project. Data Availability Qualitative investigations were conducted in one rural senior high school in Gong’an County of Jingzhou Prefecture-level City, Hubei Province, from March 2022 to August 2024. The study primarily relied on semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, offline observations in classrooms and student dormitories, and online observations of students’ interactions in a game-sharing WeChat group. Consent forms were obtained from 11 class teachers, three school principals or managers, and 38 students who agreed to participate in the semi-structured interviews and observations. All 38 students are left-behind youth aged from 15 to 17; 21 of them are boys, and the other 17 are girls. A total of 35 classroom observations and nine dormitory visits were conducted and audio-recorded. Field notes were taken during or immediately after the observations, focusing on teacher-student interactions, student behaviours, peer interactions, student resistance to school smartphone control measures, and teachers’ reactions to student resistance. Additionally, online observations of the game-sharing WeChat group allowed for an exploration of group solidarity and the development of counter-school digital subcultures among students who resisted examination-oriented schooling. This study is part of the research sponsored by the general project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers: 24BXW051). Conflict of Interest The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. Ethical Consideration This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the School of Journalism and Communication, Shaanxi Normal University (Approval No. 20220207-004). Written informed consent was obtained directly by the researcher from all participating students and teachers, as well as from the guardians of underage students, between February 21 and February 28, 2022. This process was conducted in accordance with the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and protocol approved by the Institutional Review Board of the School of Journalism and Communication, Shaanxi Normal University. No oral consent was used in this study. References Braun V, Clarke V (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Res Psychol 3(2):77–101 Brown P, James D (2020) Educational expansion, poverty reduction and social mobility: Reframing the debate Phillip. 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(Accessed 6 June 2024) Wang X, Picone I (2023) Mobilized, negotiated and balanced: Chinese school vloggers’ platform engagements and layered identity construction on Bilibili. J Youth Stud 26(10):1356–1372 Willis P (2017) Learning to Labour: How Working Class Kids Get Working Class Jobs, 1st edn. Routledge, London Windle J (2019) Neoliberalism, imperialism and conservatism: Tangled logics of educational inequality in the global South. Discourse. Stud Cult Politics Educ 40(2):191–202 Xiang X (2018) My future, my family, my freedom: Meanings of schooling for poor, rural Chinese youth. Harv Educational Rev 88(1):81–102 Xiong Y (2015) The broken ladder: Why education provides no upward mobility for migrant children in China. China Quarterly 221:161–184 Yang F, Chen C (2017) Examining trends in Chinese secondary education: From test-oriented to comprehensive academic and personal student development. 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Also discoverable on Platform About Our Team In Review Editorial Policies Advisory Board Help Center Resources Author Services Accessibility API Access RSS feed Manage Cookie Preferences © Research Square 2026 | ISSN 2693-5015 (online) Privacy Policy Terms of Service Do Not Sell My Personal Information {"props":{"pageProps":{"initialData":{"identity":"rs-8055802","acceptedTermsAndConditions":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"archivedVersions":[],"articleType":"Article","associatedPublications":[],"authors":[{"id":596152331,"identity":"24113689-d3ab-46fd-8cd9-4b885cbb677d","order_by":0,"name":"Chengyun Guan","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Shaanxi Normal University","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Chengyun","middleName":"","lastName":"Guan","suffix":""},{"id":596152332,"identity":"95a96052-a71d-4dae-bc95-f947f5af8200","order_by":1,"name":"Heng Xu","email":"data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAZAAAAAyAQMAAABI0h/eAAAABlBMVEX///8AAABVwtN+AAAACXBIWXMAAA7EAAAOxAGVKw4bAAAA4klEQVRIiWNgGAWjYBACAwjFJsfADGExNjDwMBOjhc+YgZmZNC1yiQ0MxGoxZ+89/Jq3zSy9v53/mDQPg43shgO8hw3wabHsOZdmObMtLXfGYWY2oJY04w0H+JIT8DrsRo6Zwce2Y7kbmMFaDiduOMBjfACvlvtvzAwS2/6nG0C0/CdCyw0e4wcf29gSoFoOgLXgd9iZHDPGGefYDIF+MbacY5BsPPMwjzFe7xscP2P8maeMTZ6//+DDG28q7GT7jvcYS+DTAgRsMAUsEuBowh8rYMD8AZ0xCkbBKBgFowAFAADIGUNIRHb7iQAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==","orcid":"","institution":"City University of Hong Kong","correspondingAuthor":true,"prefix":"","firstName":"Heng","middleName":"","lastName":"Xu","suffix":""},{"id":596152333,"identity":"1f001416-ec3e-48b3-8abe-66503a51d3fa","order_by":2,"name":"Bei Guo","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Shaanxi Normal University","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Bei","middleName":"","lastName":"Guo","suffix":""},{"id":596152334,"identity":"132a8748-5011-49f0-88da-39148be2754b","order_by":3,"name":"Hongli Zhou","email":"","orcid":"","institution":"Henan University of Economic and Law","correspondingAuthor":false,"prefix":"","firstName":"Hongli","middleName":"","lastName":"Zhou","suffix":""}],"badges":[],"createdAt":"2025-11-07 10:08:24","currentVersionCode":1,"declarations":"","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8055802/v1","doiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8055802/v1","draftVersion":[],"editorialEvents":[],"editorialNote":"","failedWorkflow":false,"files":[],"financialInterests":"No competing interests reported.","formattedTitle":"Producing the “self-abandoned youths” in the periphery: Re-understanding digital subculture production and class reproduction in China’s rural high school","fulltext":[{"header":"1. Introduction","content":"\u003cp\u003eNeoliberal globalization has exacerbated education inequalities based on class, gender, and location and created the conditions for class reproduction of different disenfranchised youth groups in newly rising economies (Salas and S\u0026aacute;inz, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR29\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e; Windle, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR36\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). In China, the neoliberal turn of public education has widened the gap between rural and urban areas, placing rural left-behind youths at a disadvantaged position characterized by limited access to quality education and high dropout rate (Postiglione, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e; Xiang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). Previous studies have attempted to account for the educational failure of rural left-behind children from various lenses, including the exclusionary \u003cem\u003ehukou\u003c/em\u003e system, urban-biased curriculum, and the lack of cultural capital at the individual level (Koo, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR16\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e; Koo, Ming, and Tsang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR18\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2014\u003c/span\u003e). As digital transformation has rapidly expanded its impact across China\u0026rsquo;s continent-sized territory over the past decade, digital social media, predominantly facilitated by mobile phones, has deeply permeated the everyday lives of left-behind children and provided them with new avenues for cultural production (McDonald, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR23\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e). The mobile technologies provide rural residents with \u0026ldquo;virtual mobility\u0026rdquo; to connect with urban world (Wallis, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR32\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2013\u003c/span\u003e) and allow rural young people to shape their individual identities and engage in cultural production (Wang and Picone, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR34\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e). Recent studies have examined creation of subculture by rural left-behind youths through digital social media and its implications for their educational outcomes. Drawing on Paul Willis\u0026rsquo;s class-based analyses of working-class youths\u0026rsquo; cultural production, Li, Tan, and Yang (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR20\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e) explored how left-behind adolescents in rural Shandong use the video-sharing app \u003cem\u003eKuaishou\u003c/em\u003e to produce a subculture that devalues formal schooling and emphasizes physical strength and the ability to support one\u0026rsquo;s family. Meanwhile, the subculture has influenced their decision to drop out of school and seek work opportunities.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eUnlike Paul Willis\u0026rsquo; analysis of sub-cultural production of working-class youths, which focused on challenging the school system and embracing a masculine working-class identity (Willis, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR35\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e), the counter-school subcultural production of Chinese rural left-behind youths represents a response to perceived failures to assimilate into an examination-oriented educational culture rather than a direct challenge to education authority (Moskowitz, She, and Xiong, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e; Zhou, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR43\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e). Chinese rural children and youths, along with their families, do not take pride in obtaining working-class jobs but instead adhere to the ideology of meritocracy, which emphasizes individual responsibilities for educational success and upward social mobility (Chen, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). Furthermore, Willis\u0026rsquo; theory of cultural production has been criticized for analyzing cultural forms without considering their relations to the broader spheres of production and social reproduction (Pun and Koo, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR28\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). In China\u0026rsquo;s context, recent studies highlight various factors that range from broader exclusive education policies to teachers\u0026rsquo; anticipation at school setting in laying the conditions for rural students\u0026rsquo; counter-school culture production and following class reproduction. These factors are deeply embedded in China\u0026rsquo;s urban-oriented education system which marginalizes both rural schools and students (Chen, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Xiong, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR38\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e). Rural schools are allocated with limited financial support and are equipped with poor-quality teaching staffs and facilities. To survive in the education system, rural high schools implement strict regulations and create a militaristic campus environment to prepare students for the high college entrance examination (hereafter called as \u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e) (Huang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). In most cases, these regulations infringe on students\u0026rsquo; rights by restricting their use of smartphones and other digital devices. The restrictive rules and management of smartphone use create tension between students and school authorities. While recent studies have explored the meaning of and values attached to subcultural production by rural left-behind youths through smartphone use, there is still limited analysis of subcultural production and class reproduction mechanisms in rural schools within the broader context of the marginalization of rural school in China\u0026rsquo;s education system.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis study aims to address this gap by examining the control of smartphone use as a site of confrontation between examination-oriented schooling and the individual needs of rural youths for socialization, and recreation. Drawing on ethnographic research conducted in a rural high school in central China, this study reveals the dynamic interplay between counter-school digital subculture production of rural left-behind youths and the discriminatory campus regulations, which contribute to the reproduction of their class status. Unlike previous left-behind youths collectively expressed frustration with educational failure through subculture production, our informants draw on the discourse of neoliberal individualization, in which young people are encouraged to take responsibility for their lives, challenge the oppressive campus regulations, and protect their privacy and rights by creating the counter-school culture. Additionally, our study highlights the discriminatory campus regulations implemented by rural schools to marginalize students who belong to counter-school culture and maintain dominance of examination-oriented schooling. These discriminatory regulations are put in place based on the neoliberal ideology of meritocracy embraced by school authorities, rural left-behind youths, and their families. Consequently, rural left-behind youths internalize their marginalized position and take individual responsibility for reproducing their migrant-worker class status instead of challenging the legitimacy of meritocratic ideology. Furthermore, we argue that the analysis of rural schools\u0026rsquo; militaristic campus regulations and their implications on the reproduction of rural left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; class status should be considered in relation to the marginalization of rural schools within China\u0026rsquo;s urban-biased, hierarchical education system. To meet performance appraisals imposed by policymakers, rural schools adopt the \u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e factory model, sacrificing students with left-behind backgrounds as \u0026ldquo;self-abandoned youths\u0026rdquo; to maintain the dominance of examination-oriented schooling.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn the following sections, we will review the literature on the marginalization of rural schools, subculture production, and class reproduction in county schools in the digital era. We will then outline the research context and methodology of this study. After summarizing the individualistic counter-school sub-culture expressed by participants through smartphone use, we will analyze the discriminatory campus regulations imposed by rural boarding schools against participants of counter-school culture and their contribution to the reproduction of rural left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; class status. In the final section, we will offer critical reflections on the complexities of the class reproduction mechanism in rural school setting and its relation to China\u0026rsquo;s ongoing marginalization of rural education.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"2. Contextualizing counter-culture subculture production and examination-oriented culture in China’s rural high school","content":"\u003cp\u003eWe have benefited from theories and models of class reproduction in exploring the impact of class background on students\u0026rsquo; schooling and occupational attainments (class destination) (Brown and James, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR2\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Huang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Willis, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR35\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e). The term \u0026ldquo;cultural reproduction\u0026rdquo; is frequently used to describe how cultural forms (e.g. social privilege, elite status) and cultures themselves are transmitted intact from one generation to another. One of the most representative researches in this account is Paul Willis\u0026rsquo; (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR35\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e) ethnographic classic \u003cem\u003eLearning to Labour\u003c/em\u003e, which discusses the role of education in reproducing class inequality and illustrates how inequality could be reproduced culturally despite the best efforts of a benevolent education system. Willis argues that at school, working-class youths articulate and generate various cultural forms such as dossing, blagging, wagging, \u0026ldquo;having a laff\u0026rdquo; and so forth, to create subculture culture to confront the school authority and the conformists. By actively manipulating sexist, racist, and violent languages, male youths reproduce a masculine working-class culture transmitted from their parents and neighbourhoods. To them, manual work is an expression of masculine power and superiority. Hence, the ruthless celebration of their masculinity, violence, sexism, and racism are at the very heart of the counter-school culture. In their romanticizing of culture, resistance to conformity eventually encourages the marginalized existence in academic learning setting for youths, who in turn reproduce their class dominance (Dockx, Van den Branden, and De Fraine, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR8\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Dinsmore, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e; Hall and Jefferson, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR12\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWillis\u0026rsquo;s account of cultural reproduction has also been widely used to understand the counter-school subculture production of rural left-behind children or youths in the context of China\u0026rsquo;s rural educational institutes. As digital media including smartphone have been integrated into all aspects of rural youths\u0026rsquo; daily life and formed a virtual link between them and outside world, recent researches have expanded the theory of cultural production to the digital media field, focusing on the counter-school digital subculture. Li et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR20\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e) documented that a group of rural left-behind youth in Zouping, a countryside area in Shandong province, constructed their imaginary of upward social mobility by acting like \u003cem\u003eshehui ren\u003c/em\u003e (\u0026ldquo;society men\u0026rdquo;) on popular video-sharing app \u003cem\u003eKuaishou\u003c/em\u003e. The subculture of \u003cem\u003eshehui ren\u003c/em\u003e provides rural left-behind children with an alternative channel to construct their identity and anchor their imagination of future rather than sticking to the traditional schooling. However, those rural left-behind children are often being marginalized by school systems or are self-marginalized, finally becoming \u0026ldquo;invisible dropouts\u0026rdquo; on school campuses. It is notable that Chinese youths, including those who originate from rural areas, are encouraged to embrace the discourse of neoliberal individualization as China is becoming radically integrated into neoliberal globalization (Koo, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR17\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2021\u003c/span\u003e). Previous studies documented rural individual demands of left-behind youths for social and entertainment activities online and offline on campuses (Zhen et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR42\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). Therefore, it is important to investigate further how rural left-behind youths construct subcultures through digital media in line with the discourse of neoliberal individualization.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eCultural production encompasses not only the counter-school subculture but also the mainstream culture within schools, often emerging from the interplay between these two forces (Walker, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR31\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e). While existing studies have predominantly attributed the class reproduction of lower-class children to their counter-school subculture, they have largely overlooked the role of mainstream school culture in class reproduction (Dinsmore, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). Willis (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR35\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e) acknowledged that his emphasis on the counter-school subculture of working-class children limited his ability to thoroughly investigate broader mainstream cultural systems, highlighting the need for future research to address this gap. In the context of class reproduction in China, Willis particularly underscored the significant impact of examination-oriented culture as a key driving force (Moskowitz, She, and Xiong, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR24\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). Few recent studies have documented the roles of meritocratic ideology and education-oriented schooling in limiting migrant children\u0026rsquo;s resistance and leading to their self-marginalization on the school campus (Chen \u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). Therefore, how the examination-oriented culture is manifested in rural high school campuses and its interplay with left-behind youth\u0026rsquo;s digital subculture production in reproducing their class status deserves nuanced investigation.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003ePrevious studies have documented that the prevalence of examination-oriented culture among education institutes, including those in rural areas, has been closely related to the neoliberal reforms of China\u0026rsquo;s education system in the last four decades. Since the opening and reform in the late 1970s, China has gradually transformed its egalitarian education system in Mao\u0026rsquo;s era to a meritocratic one, which relies on the examination to filter and select young talents for state competition in global economy. This transformation enables different levels of local governments to set the students\u0026rsquo; scores in \u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e as the ultimate parameter for school performance appraisals and enforce all formal education institutes to take various efforts to cultivate students\u0026rsquo; potential in succeeding in examinations (Pan and Ye, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR26\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e). In late 1990s, the market-oriented reform of education sector has intensified the unequal distribution of resources between urban and rural areas (Hong and Fuller, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e; Huang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Li et al., \u003cspan citationid=\"CR19\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2015\u003c/span\u003e; Postiglione, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e). Under this circumstance, experienced and qualified teachers in rural high schools were often lured away by urban institutions offering higher salaries. In addition, the prestigious provincial and municipal high schools in big cities are allowed to recruit talented students in the whole administrative region, including those in rural areas (Hong and Fuller, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). In the early 2000s, China\u0026rsquo;s government launched a School Merge Program in populated rural areas to raise the efficiency of education service delivery (Cai, Chen, and Zhu, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR6\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e; Fan and Popkewitz, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR11\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). These big changes in the education system have contributed to suffocating the space for rural high schools to survive. In order to secure their survival in China\u0026rsquo;s education hierarchy, most rural high schools have prioritized graduates\u0026rsquo; college enrollment rate in their pedagogical activities and made various efforts to turn their campuses into \u0026ldquo;\u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e factories\u0026rdquo; (Dockx, Van den Branden, and De Fraine, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR8\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Huang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Wang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR33\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). The adoption of \u0026ldquo;\u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e factory\u0026rdquo; model inevitably leads to confrontation between the school\u0026rsquo;s oppressive regulations and students\u0026rsquo; needs for socialization and recreation. Thus, the interplay between the counter-school subculture of China\u0026rsquo;s rural left-behind youths and the examination-oriented culture should be examined in relation to China\u0026rsquo;s broader meritocratic education system and long-lasting educational inequality between rural and urban areas.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"3. Methods","content":"\u003cp\u003eQualitative investigations were conducted in one rural senior high school in Gong\u0026rsquo;an County of Jingzhou Prefecture-level City, Hubei Province, from March 2022 to August 2024. Gong\u0026rsquo;an was selected as a research site due to its large rural area and outflow of rural population. Sixteen townships and 321 rural villages are under the jurisdiction of Gong\u0026rsquo;an County. In 2018, the number of rural migrants moving to urban areas for employment exceeded 130 thousand, representing 13.84% of the total population of Gong\u0026rsquo;an County. Owing to the prevalence of outward migration among rural households, most rural children or youths were left behind in rural hometowns and growing up without intensive parental support.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn this study, Spring (pseudonym) High School (hereafter called as Spring School) was selected for data collection. As the biggest rural, public high school in Jingzhou, Spring School was established in 1956, and it currently accommodates 54 classes and more than 3780 students, the majority of whom are rural left-behind youths. Spring School has 264 qualified teaching staffs, including 58 senior teachers and one national key teacher, and offers three-year high school education program. However, a key high school located in the provincial capital city of Wuhan has qualified 350 teaching staffs, including 189 senior teachers and nine national key teachers. Almost all of the teaching staff have at least a bachelor\u0026rsquo;s degree issued by first-tier universities, such as Peking University. The inferiority in educational resource allocation directly undermines Spring School\u0026rsquo;s capacities to attract and enroll talented students and ensure better performance in \u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eTo ensure the efficiency of delivering examination-oriented school, Spring School divides its students of each grade into four key classes, including one rocket class (\u003cem\u003ehuojian ban\u003c/em\u003e) that accommodates 50 students with the most outstanding academic performances, and 14 ordinary classes according to their examination scores. Meanwhile, Spring School is the typical boarding school under militaristic campus management. All students are only allowed to leave campus once a month. In the last five years, Spring School has taken various measures, including strict prohibitions on smartphones, to monitor and control students\u0026rsquo; smartphone use on campus. Therefore, Spring School is expected to reflect the complexity and dynamics of tensions between Chinese rural high schools\u0026rsquo; examination-oriented education and rural left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; resistance against the control of smartphone use in the digital era.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe study primarily relied on semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, offline observations in classrooms and student dormitories, and online observations of students\u0026rsquo; interactions in a game-sharing WeChat group. Consent forms were obtained from 11 class teachers, three school principals or managers, and 38 students who agreed to participate in the semi-structured interviews and observations. All 38 students are left-behind youth aged from15 to 17; 21 of them are boys, and the other 17 are girls. A total of 35 classroom observations and nine dormitory visits were conducted and audio-recorded. Field notes were taken during or immediately after the observations, focusing on teacher-student interactions, student behaviors, peer interactions, student resistance to school smartphone control measures, and teachers\u0026rsquo; reactions to student resistance. Additionally, online observations of the game-sharing WeChat group allowed for an exploration of group solidarity and the development of counter-school digital subcultures among students who resisted examination-oriented schooling.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSemi-structured interviews with teachers, principals, and other school managers were conducted to understand the details of various measures Spring School has taken to monitor students\u0026rsquo; smartphone use, punish disobedient students, and ultimately boost students\u0026rsquo; examination performance. Individual interviews with students cover their smartphone use behavior, their attitudes toward school control measures, and opinion on examination-oriented schooling. Each research participant received a pseudonym. Following the principles of thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR1\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e), we analyzed the interview transcripts using open and focused coding to identify themes and similarities/differences between informants. After the data analysis, two classroom meetings with research participants were held to receive their feedback, and further ensure the reliability and openness of this research. From time to time, we kept in touch with our participants via WeChat, which enabled us to keep updated about their situations.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e \u003cstrong\u003eEthical approval\u003c/strong\u003e for this study was obtained from the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the School of Journalism and Communication, Shaanxi Normal University, which rigorously reviewed the research proposal to ensure compliance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The committee granted approval under Reference Number 20220207-004, with the approval period extending from 7 February 2022 to 23 September 2024. This approval confirms that the research adheres to ethical guidelines regarding participant consent, confidentiality, and overall welfare. Researchers followed all stipulated ethical procedures throughout the study duration. Written informed consent was obtained directly by the first author from all participating students and teachers, as well as from the guardians of underage students, between February 21 and February 28, 2022. This process was conducted in accordance with the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and protocol approved by the Institutional Review Board of the School of Journalism and Communication, Shaanxi Normal University. Participants signed a consent to participate declaration after reviewing a detailed explanation of the study\u0026rsquo;s purpose, procedures, and data confidentiality. For further information or inquiries regarding the ethical aspects of this research, interested parties are encouraged to contact at [email protected].\u003c/p\u003e \u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"4. Control on smartphone use and left-behind youth’s counter-school subculture as resistance","content":"\u003cp\u003eIn order to survive in China\u0026rsquo;s increasingly polarized education system, rural high schools in interior regions strive to create an examination-oriented learning environment to meet the admission rate targets set by local education bureaus (Doepke and Zilibotti, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR9\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e; Huang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). Spring School has adopted the \u0026ldquo;Hengshui high school model,\u0026rdquo; which is well-known in China for its high college enrollment rate. This model involves a militarized campus management approach, including enforcing uniform haircuts, dress codes, and daily routines, as well as imposing strict, examination-focused schooling on students. It is widely acknowledged that the high college enrollment rate achieved by the Hengshui model comes at the expense of students\u0026rsquo; emotional well-being, psychological needs, and all-round development (Yang and Chen, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR39\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e). Spring School followed the Hengshui model to implement militarized management measures and polish their students\u0026rsquo; skills for the Gaokao. For example, Spring school squeezes students\u0026rsquo; time spent on daily eating and resting to construct an environment for examination-oriented learning. In addition, Spring School strictly controls student\u0026rsquo;s use of smartphones and other digital recreational devices, such as MP4 players and iPads. According to the school\u0026rsquo;s rules, all students are required to hand in their digital devices to head teachers upon entering the campus. Additionally, Spring School attempts to diminish the importance of recreational activities through smartphone use, considering them unnecessary and even detrimental to academic learning (Li, Tan, and Yang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR20\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e). During our visit to Spring School\u0026rsquo;s daily rally, we observed school administration stigmatize smartphone use as \u0026lsquo;poison for academic learning and examination performance\u0026rsquo;.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSpring School has implemented strict surveillance measures to prevent students from using smartphones covertly on campus. One example is the random inspections organized by the school management team. On March 12, 2023, the management team conducted a random inspection of smartphone use among students in class 10 of Grade 2. The school\u0026rsquo;s director ordered all students to leave the classroom and gather in the open space in front of the classroom. Using a metal detector, he scanned each student\u0026rsquo;s desk and backpack to check for smartphones or other digital devices. After 15 minutes, the director confiscated the smartphones he collected and handed them over to the headteacher of class 10. Students who violated school rules were taken to the director\u0026rsquo;s office and given detention as punishment. After the inspection was finished, the director sternly warned the students that he would smash all smartphones in front of them if they violated school rules again.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFurthermore, the management team at Spring School employs strict punishments to deter students from challenging the school\u0026rsquo;s surveillance and control measures. The case of Weiwei, a rural left-behind student in class 10, Grade 2, who was caught using his smartphone covertly, highlights how Spring School uses punishment to discourage smartphone use on campus. On September 20, 2022, we witnessed the confrontation between Weiwei and a general education teacher who caught him playing with his smartphone during a self-study class.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eGeneral education teacher: Hand over your smartphone to me! I saw you using it.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWeiwei: [Yelling] You have no right to confiscate my phone! I won\u0026rsquo;t give it to you!\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e(The general education teacher was taken aback by Weiwei\u0026rsquo;s reaction and remained silent for a few seconds. Some students laughed and began to support Weiwei with jeers. The general education teacher blushed and then took Weiwei to his office for further punishment).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eAfter several rounds of debate with the general education teacher, Weiwei still refused to apologize. The headteacher of class 10, Grade 2 then threatened Weiwei with a serious demerit if he did not apologize. In the end, Weiwei surrendered and apologized for his covert smartphone use and \u0026ldquo;misbehavior\u0026rdquo; in front of his classmates.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eHowever, the strict controls on smartphone use have not received compliance from our informants but led to their criticism of the militarized campus management for suppressing their needs of recreation and socialization. This is reflected in Xiaohui\u0026rsquo;s criticism of the education they received in Spring School.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eHere [in Spring School] education is simplified as preparing for examination while our all-round developments are ignored. We are enforced to devote every minute to studying and polishing ourselves as small pieces of this \u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e factory. Sometimes I think what Spring School did to us actually deviates from the essence of education. It is nothing but torturing us to comply.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn stark contrast with their description of school life as \u0026ldquo;tedious, boring, and endless torture,\u0026rdquo; our informants perceived smartphone use as \u0026ldquo;fun\u0026rdquo; and more importantly, \u0026ldquo;their individual right and freedom.\u0026rdquo; Echoing the findings of Zhang et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR40\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2023\u003c/span\u003e) and Lin et al. (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR21\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2025\u003c/span\u003e) that smartphone use anchors Chinese young people\u0026rsquo;s negotiation for individual recreation and socialization spaces, we further observed that left-behind youths actively developed various ways to protect their recreation and socialization spaces from school surveillance and punishment. First, we observed that our informants formed different informal, mutual-support groups and expressed a strong spirit of solidarity when concealing smartphones from compulsory detection and further using them in examination cheating. This is reflected in the cooperation between Qi and Hong when coping with teachers\u0026rsquo; irregular patrol and inspection.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWhen Ning cleverly concealed smartphone behind books and watched the movie, his deskmate Qi stared at the window in case of being noticed by teachers. If teacher comes to the classroom, Qi will pretend to cough immediately, touched Ning\u0026rsquo;s arm with her hand, and whispered, \u0026ldquo;Watch Out!\u0026rdquo; In response, Hong quickly sat straightly and muted his phone and threw it into the desk drawer.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWhen taking about their team work to cope with teacher\u0026rsquo;s surveillance, both Qi and Ning expressed senses of pleasure and pride in terms of successfully escaping from teacher\u0026rsquo;s random inspection and building a \u0026ldquo;mutually supportive\u0026rdquo; group with classmates. During the fieldwork, we observed that left-behind youths have formed such groups in cheating during the regular tests. The teamwork between classmates in cheating during tests enables our informants to pass examinations despite not having followed teachers\u0026rsquo; instruction to focus on the subject learning. From our informants\u0026rsquo; perspective, cheating on the exam is one of the strategies to challenge the teacher\u0026rsquo;s authority to define their value through examination performance. Hongyue shared his contempt for exams with us:\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe teachers just want to force all of us be machine to take examination. They repeatedly told us that our life would be meaningless if we do not study hard and have good examination performance. My buddies and I just dislike being judged in such arbitrary way. So we cooperated with each other in passing the examinations for avoiding the criticism from teachers.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMore importantly, our informants formed mutually supportive but hierarchical groups in playing the mobile game \u003cem\u003ePlayer Unknown\u0026rsquo;s Battlegrounds\u003c/em\u003e on smartphone. Besides sharing experiences and successful tactics in playing the game, our informants were endowed with different statuses of this group in terms of their performance in the online game. This is reflected in Chao\u0026rsquo;s narrative:\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDuring school time, we communicated with those who also played this game and formed a game team. Within our group, those who have better \u0026ldquo;game skills\u0026rdquo; will have a higher status as they will give us successful experience and lead our team to more victories, whether familiar or unfamiliar before, forming their own social circles and game teams.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis is also reflected in the sharing of Yingzi, who has excellent \u0026ldquo;game skills\u0026rdquo; and was nominated as a \u0026ldquo;leader\u0026rdquo; by his peers.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003e Boys and a few girls around me have gradually formed relatively stable groups to play the game. The best player, like me, will be nominated as a leader while those with lower gaming skills often struggle to make friends since no one is willing to team up with them. I actually find my values there rather than the subject learning.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eRather than merely challenging the school authority and questioning the oppressive nature of examination-oriented schooling, the counter-school subculture left-behind youths developed on their smartphone use, as expressed in Yingzi\u0026rsquo;s answer, endows them with a sense of belonging, self-actualization, and recognition, which they are unable to achieve in subject learning and examinations.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"5. Spring School’s meritocracy-oriented strategies to marginalize counter-school subculture practitioners and differentiate students","content":"\u003cp\u003eIn the face of the challenges posed by left-behind youths through the production of the counter-school subculture, the administration of the Spring School adopted various segregation measures under the guise of meritocracy to marginalize the resisters, to channel them to be \u0026ldquo;invisible dropouts\u0026rdquo; who ought to take responsibility for their academic failures, and ultimately, to legitimize the examination-based education. Under this differentiation mechanism, the learning needs of students with better academic performance are prioritized in the campus management. Students who resist the regulations on mobile phone use and challenge the examination-based education are tolerated for being idle on campus as long as they do not violate school\u0026rsquo;s measures in raising other students\u0026rsquo; examination performances. Such students are labeled as \u0026ldquo;burdens\u0026rdquo; who become invisibly abandoned by the teaching staffs. The differentiation mechanism is specifically manifested by the following measures.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFirst, the Spring School classifies the students into key classes and regular classes. The key class consists of students with better academic performance, who are subject to the school\u0026rsquo;s examination-oriented education and, more importantly, who have the potential to be admitted to first-tier university. Students who have poor academic performance, who do not comply with the school\u0026rsquo;s militarized campus management, or who challenge the examination-oriented education are assigned to regular classes. From the perspective of school administration and management, the division arrangement is the strategy for them to prevent other students from being negatively influenced by counter-school subculture practitioners and ensure the university admission rate of their school (Chen, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR7\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Huang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR15\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2020\u003c/span\u003e; Liu, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR22\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e; Postiglione, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR27\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2006\u003c/span\u003e). The left-behind youths of this study are perceived as \u0026ldquo;threats\u0026rdquo; to school performance and ought to be isolated and eventually be abandoned.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSecond, Spring School implements different teaching and management toward key and regular classes. Spring school has assigned the experienced teachers to key classes and implemented the strictest regulations, including smartphone use prohibition, for students in key classes. Meanwhile, Spring School has placed most pressure of performance evaluation on the teachers of key classes for pushing them to raise students\u0026rsquo; academic performance. Once their students are admitted to key universities, teachers of key classes are be awarded with substantial bonuses and opportunities for promotions. By contrast, the school puts the laissez-faire management mode on students in ordinary classes. The school has reached an unspoken tacit agreement with the left-behind youths, in which students no longer blatantly challenge the order of school management, while schools acquiesce to students\u0026rsquo; use of smartphones for recreational activities on campus and even turn a blind eye to them idling away time until graduation.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMore importantly, Spring School organizes further division within ordinary classes to marginalize students who resist regulation on smartphone use prohibition or engage in other forms of challenges towards examination-oriented schooling. The head teachers classify the students as \u0026ldquo;good students\u0026rdquo; and \u0026ldquo;bad students\u0026rdquo; according to their academic performances and obedience to school regulations. As only a few students in these classes can be admitted to colleges each year, teachers focus their resources and attention on students with better academic performance and the potential of being enrolled in college. Teachers of ordinary classes first create the \u0026ldquo;spatial segregation\u0026rdquo; within classrooms to divide the students and marginalize members of the counter-school subculture. The head teachers arrange \u0026ldquo;good students\u0026rdquo; to sit in the first four rows of the classroom to ensure those students are under their direct supervision and guidance, while the \u0026ldquo;bad students\u0026rdquo; are placed in the back rows of the classroom or at sites near the classroom walls (Zhang \u003cspan citationid=\"CR41\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e). Secondly, the head teachers label the \u0026ldquo;bad students\u0026rdquo; as \u0026ldquo;hoodies\u0026rdquo; and develop a \u0026ldquo;we-they\u0026rdquo; boundary between the two groups of students in daily pedagogical activities. The teachers frequently remind the \u0026ldquo;good students\u0026rdquo; to stay away from these \u0026ldquo;hoodies\u0026rdquo; and not to be affected by their counter-school digital subculture.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eDuring the fieldwork, we found that the differentiation strategies discussed above have led to the polarization of students regarding their school performances and educational expectations. On the one hand, most of the students who submit to the militarized campus management and the examination-oriented education still make their full efforts to become competitive test-taking machines and retain high expectations for the narrative of achieving upward social mobility through the college entrance exams despite being subject to great academic pressure. On the other hand, the left-behind youths, who are marginalized by the school administration, no longer resist the negative images imposed on them having given up the expectations of receiving higher education in metropolises. Like their counterparts in other China\u0026rsquo;s rural high schools, they have accepted the destiny of the \u0026ldquo;invisible dropout.\u0026rdquo; Xiaohang expressed her desperate feeling when siting in the classroom and being treated like an \u0026ldquo;outlier\u0026rdquo; during the interview.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eBasically, teachers and some classmates thought that I will definitely be a loser in the examination. It is not the case that I can reverse the situation by my own efforts. When everyone surrounding looks me down, I would more or less influenced by the judgment and think the education pathway is not for me. Therefore, I will turn to other option for the future.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe observations of Zhang (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR41\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e) highlighted that the division arrangement in classroom under the guise of meritocracy has not only led to the polarization of school performance among students in rural high schools but also compelled them to take individual responsibility for the educational failure. The left-behind youths in Spring School shared the similar educational expectations and career plans. When talking about their future after high school graduation, all the left-behind youths in our study said that they planned to migrate to coastal cities and attain a temporary manufacturing or service jobs there rather than staying on the academic track. This division arrangement under the guise of meritocracy seems to legitimize the polarization of students and the invisible abandonment of underachievers, making it difficult for the left-behind youths to overcome obstacles which limit their access to high-quality educational resources. Instead, left-behind youths tend to attribute their academic failure to their counter-school digital subculture production and further self-marginalize themselves in school pedagogical activities. After graduation, those left-behind youths have to follow their parents\u0026rsquo; footsteps to bear the heavy workload and precarious working conditions as migrant workers living in coastal cities.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"6. The class reproduction mechanism in Spring School and its root in rural-urban educational inequality","content":"\u003cp\u003eUnlike Paul Willis\u0026rsquo;s working-class youths who are proud of working-class masculinity and occupation, left-behind youths in our study still subscribe to the meritocracy ideology and perceive labor jobs as inferior to the white-collar jobs. Xiaoxiong, a 17-year-old boy, expressed his concern to us during the interview:\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFrom childhood, we are taught that those who do manual labor will be managed, and those who do mental labor will manage others. I want to study hard, get into a good university, and get a decent office job. Eventually, following my parents to work in a coastal city was also the way out of bad exam results.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThe excerpt presented above shows that the meritocracy ideology endorsed by the left-behind youths caused them to internalize the stigma imposed on them by the school administration and, more importantly, undertake self-blame for their educational failures and the reproduction of their family\u0026rsquo;s social status. Therefore, the division arrangement adopted by Spring School represents the irreplaceable parts of the mechanism to maintain the legitimacy of examination-oriented schooling. On the one hand, this division arrangement, under the guise of meritocracy, links left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; digital sub-cultural production and their social status reproduction, and, on the other hand, it labels left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; resistance to examination-oriented schooling as the cause for their academic failure.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWhen being asked the intention of adopting such division arrangement in campus management, the Spring School\u0026rsquo;s administration responded that it was fully aware that these measures ran counter to the nature of education. The respondents further explained that the underlying reason is meeting the performance appraisal targets assigned by the Education Bureau and receiving financial support from the government. Principal Zhang, who has worked in Spring School for nearly 20 years, explained to us:\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eToday\u0026rsquo;s all rural educators are overwhelmed by different sorts of performance appraisals assigned by the Educational Bureau. No matter how hard the ministry of education or general public emphasizes the importance of quality education (\u003cem\u003esuzhi jiaoyu\u003c/em\u003e), the performance in \u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e is adopted as the most important parameter to evaluate the performances of rural schools and determine the financial support they will receive from government. Therefore, we have no choice but being committed to build an environment in which students can focus on study and achieve highest examination score as possible as they can. Controlling the influences from those left-behind youths is just part of works we did for enhancing the academic performance for other students in our school.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003ePrincipal Zhang\u0026rsquo;s testimony highlights that the school\u0026rsquo;s measures to control students\u0026rsquo; smartphone use and marginalize those who engage in digital subculture production are driven by the ultimate goal of ensuring survival with China\u0026rsquo;s education system, which is increasingly aligned with neoliberal logic. Since the late 1970s, China has gradually transformed its egalitarian education system in Mao\u0026rsquo;s era to a meritocratic one, which tends to concentrate financial resources, qualified teaching staffs, and talented students at the key schools with better performances in \u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e (Liu, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR22\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e). However, owing to the persistent rural-urban dichotomy of socioeconomic development, the majority of key schools are located in cities and are equipped with better-quality facilities and teaching faculties to support students\u0026rsquo; academic performance. At the same time, the marketization of public services in the 1990s led to the rapid expansion of urban private schools, which had more diversified sources of funding to cover daily expenditures and ensure survival. Therefore, the neoliberal turn has intensified the polarization of China\u0026rsquo;s education system and placed interior educational institutes in a further disadvantaged position regarding the amount of financial subsidies, as well as the qualities of teaching staffs and facilities (Koo, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR16\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e).\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eMore importantly, two major macro-factors have made it harder for rural high schools to survive. First, China\u0026rsquo;s urban-oriented, neoliberal modernization has driven millions of rural households to migrate to the cities in search of higher occupational income and better living conditions (Hong and Fuller, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR14\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2019\u003c/span\u003e; Koo, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR16\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e; Solinger, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR30\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e1999\u003c/span\u003e). Thus, many rural parents have brought their children to the destination cities for education. Most of them have to study in the migrant workers\u0026rsquo; schools, which are privately sponsored and relatively disadvantaged in education system as \u003cem\u003ehukou\u003c/em\u003e barriers still persist in restricting their access to local public schools. The massive rural-urban migration has reduced the student population for rural high schools. Second, the survival of rural high schools has been affected by the Chinese government\u0026rsquo;s large-scale campaign to remove and consolidate educational institutes in rural areas since the beginning of the 21st century under the guise of improving the efficiency of rural education. The neoliberal institutional change has quantitatively and qualitatively decreased the education options for rural families in their hometown regions. When conducting the fieldwork, we found that Spring School, like other rural schools, faces the challenge of surviving in the Chinese education system. In recent years, families in the nearby rural and township areas have been more inclined to send their children to urban high schools in neighboring counties or even prefecture-level cities. At the same time, some of the school\u0026rsquo;s teachers have left to work in other urban high schools in the face of the higher incomes that urban high schools can offer. The suffocating situation discussed above enforces the administration of Spring School to commit to constructing its campus as the \u0026ldquo;Gaokao factory\u0026rdquo; to ensure its competitiveness in attracting local students and surviving in China\u0026rsquo;s education system.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eIn 2018, China\u0026rsquo;s Ministry of Education issued a series of new educational policies to promote students\u0026rsquo; all-around and individual development while emphasizing that the educational resources should be equally allocated among all students and across different areas (Ministry of Education of PRC, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR25\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). For achieving the goal, China\u0026rsquo;s Ministry of Education has required its local education bureaus to monitor and prohibit high schools from dividing students according to their academic performances. Although these policies have been generally acknowledged on surface, rural schools continue using the division arrangement under the guise of the \u0026ldquo;Pilot Reform Program of Enrollment for Basic Subjects,\u0026rdquo; in which key classes and ordinary classes are renamed as pilot classes and regular classes, to select elite students with the potential of entering elite universities (Xiang, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR37\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e). Meanwhile, the Education Bureau of county turns a blind eye to Spring School\u0026rsquo;s violations of the national policies. Compared to key schools in cities, rural high schools are incapable of implementing the all-around education due to a lack of qualified teachers and relevant facilities. Training students with better school performances to stand out in the \u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e is the only way to meet the college/university enrolment rate assigned by the Education Bureau (Bukodi and Goldthorpe, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR3\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e; Hannum, An, and Cherng, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR13\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2011\u003c/span\u003e). When local education bureaus, school administrations, and rural families becomes too obsessed with constructing rural schools as \u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e factories, the sacrifices made to the academic learning of left-behind youths pale into insignificance. When returning to field in 2024, we noticed that the administration of Spring School seldom mentioned the destiny of those left-behind youths who had actively engaged in digital counter-school subculture production.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"7. Discussion and Conclusion","content":"\u003cp\u003eThis study discusses the interplay between China\u0026rsquo;s rural left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; counter-school digital subculture and class reproduction within the critique of meritocracy and rural-urban educational inequalities in neoliberal China. Unlike previous studies focusing on the \u003cem\u003ehukou\u003c/em\u003e system, urban-biased policies, or cultural capital insufficiency, our research examines micro-level campus management that divides students based on performance, linking counter-school digital subculture production with class status reproduction in marginalized rural high schools.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eEthnographic data from Spring School reveals that smartphone use control is a site of conflict between left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; counter-school digital subculture and the examination-oriented education enforced by the school administration. By resisting smartphone prohibitions, these youths create a counter-school digital subculture driven by their individualistic needs for socialization, and recreation. Instead of seeking teachers\u0026rsquo; approval, they gain recognition from peers through smartphone-based activities.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSpring School administration divides students based on adherence to militaristic regulations, preparing high performers for the \u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e while marginalizing those involved in digital subculture as \u0026ldquo;invisible dropouts.\u0026rdquo; These divisions, justified by meritocracy, isolate and stigmatize those challenging campus rules, compelling them to internalize the \u0026ldquo;invisible dropout\u0026rdquo; label and follow their parents into migrant work.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eWe conclude that rural high schools implement these measures to survive in an urban-oriented, meritocratic educational system. Facing declining status due to neoliberal reforms, these schools rely on limited government support tied to college admission rates. Consequently, they prioritize academic performance, turning students into examination machines at the expense of individual development. This division mechanism legitimizes militaristic regulations, maintains examination-based schooling dominance, and links subcultural production with class reproduction.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eFirstly, our study enriches the understanding of the processes and contents of counter-school subculture production among China\u0026rsquo;s rural left-behind youths in the digital era. Previous literature has revealed that Chinese youth, including those in rural areas, have been encouraged to embrace neoliberal individualization discourse (Liu, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR22\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e) and actively use digital platforms, including smartphones, to meet their entertainment and socialization needs, and to preserve space for personal expression (McDonald, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR23\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e). In our study, the counter-school digital subculture production by rural left-behind youths implies their strong demands for freedom in individual entertainment and socialization. Unlike their predecessors in England, who constructed counter-school subcultures based on working-class, masculine identities (Willis, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR35\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2017\u003c/span\u003e; Bukodi and Goldthorpe, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR3\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e; Dinsmore, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR10\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2018\u003c/span\u003e), China\u0026rsquo;s rural left-behind youths draw on the social discourse of individualization to resist militaristic campus regulations and challenge the legitimacy of these regulations in intervening in their individual freedoms and rights for socialization and entertainment via smartphone use. Although rural left-behind youths formed mutual support networks during the process of subculture construction and gained recognition from these networks, the peer support was temporary and primarily aimed at retaining individual space for entertainment. Therefore, it falls short of forming a strong collective identity like that of the working-class \u0026ldquo;hammertown boys\u0026rdquo; in the Midlands. Moreover, our study reveals that the subscription of rural left-behind youths to neoliberal individualization discourse lays the groundwork for their later subordination to meritocracy ideologies. These ideologies compel individuals to take personal responsibility for their failures while obscuring the structural responsibilities inherent in China\u0026rsquo;s neoliberal education system and the urban-rural inequalities.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eSecond, our study illuminates the role of micro-level division arrangements in rural high schools in perpetuating the class status of rural left-behind youths. Our fieldwork data reveal that all division arrangements between classes and within classrooms at Spring School closely align with meritocracy ideology, which emphasizes the necessity of filtering \u0026ldquo;talented\u0026rdquo; individuals with the potential to excel in the \u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e and controlling those who challenge examination-oriented schooling. These division arrangements are predicated on principles of individual responsibility for success or failure in academic learning and examination competition. As Burman (\u003cspan citationid=\"CR5\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2007\u003c/span\u003e, \u003cspan citationid=\"CR4\" class=\"CitationRef\"\u003e2016\u003c/span\u003e) comments, notions of normality and abnormality are created and perpetuated through administrative and regulatory avenues. In the context of Spring School, the legitimacy of militaristic campus management and examination-oriented education is reinforced by pathologizing individual entertainment and socialization needs via smartphones and stigmatizing counter-school digital subculture producers as \u0026ldquo;threats to a good learning environment.\u0026rdquo; Moreover, our study highlights that these division arrangements conspire with the neoliberal discourse of individualization to compel rural left-behind youths to blame themselves for academic failure and internalize a sense of fatalism. This largely obscures the impact of structural inequalities, such as the rural-urban educational dichotomy and neoliberal reforms, on their class reproduction.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThird, by relating our analysis to the broader socioeconomic structure, our study reveals that the interweaving of China\u0026rsquo;s persistent rural-urban dichotomy, hierarchical educational system, and radical neoliberal reform of public sector in complex dynamics compels rural high schools to turn their campuses into \u0026ldquo;\u003cem\u003eGaokao\u003c/em\u003e\u0026rdquo; factories for ensuring their survival in fierce competition. Our empirical evidence further underscores that rural high schools in the central and western regions face a trend of further decline brought about by the marginalization of interiors in China\u0026rsquo;s neoliberal urbanization process. This decline is manifested in two ways: First, rural high schools in the central and western regions receive limited sources of financial support compared to high schools in coastal urban areas, and the qualifications of their teachers as well as the quality of their teaching equipment are much inferior. Secondly, as a result of the expanding urban-rural migration, more and more rural families chose to send their children to study in the cities, which has further weakened the competitiveness of rural high schools. As a result, rural high schools in the interior region can only secure funding from local school boards and appeal to rural parents by taking measures to ensure college admission rates for their graduates. Therefore, sacrificing rural left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; academic study and individual needs to ensure the delivery of examination-oriented schooling is one of the measures rural high schools undertake under the guise of meritocracy.\u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eNotably, rural left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; experiences of digital subculture production and class reproduction may not be representative of all types of rural migrant youths in China. Unlike their predecessors who had limited channels to express their individual needs, the left-behind youths in Spring School actively utilize the smartphone as a digital platform to exert agency in constructing subculture and retaining their spaces for entertainment and socialization. In the past two decades, hundreds of small cities have been rapidly involved in China\u0026rsquo;s new wave of urbanization. More and more rural households choose to send their children to public schools in nearby county-level or prefecture-level cities for education. Meanwhile, the Education Bureau requires rural education institutes to diversify their pedagogical curriculum and deliver the quality/\u003cem\u003esuzhi\u003c/em\u003e education to children rather than merely polishing them for examination. The issue of how the new reconfiguration of the rural-urban relationship and its following changes in the educational sector will influence the dynamics between rural left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; digital subculture production and their class reproduction deserves more in-depth examination in future research. Nevertheless, our study sheds light on a new research direction on the complexity of the interplay between China\u0026rsquo;s rural left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; counter-school digital subculture production and class reproduction and potential transformations they may bring to rural education institutes.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"Declarations","content":" \u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eFunding Declaration\u003c/b\u003e \u003c/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThis research was sponsored by the general project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers: 24BXW051).\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eAuthor Contribution\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eChengyun Guan (CG), as the first author, was responsible for Conceptualisation, Methodology, Research design and Data collection, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review \u0026amp; Editing, Supervision, Project administration. Heng Xu (HX) was involved in Conceptualisation, Methodology, Data analysis, Writing - Review \u0026amp; Editing. Bei Guo (BG) was involved in Writing - Review \u0026amp; Editing. Hongli Zhou (HZ) was involved in Writing - Review \u0026amp; Editing. All authors reviewed the manuscript.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eAcknowledgement\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eWe would like to thank all the research participants for joining the study and their support in this research project.\u003c/p\u003e\u003ch2\u003eData Availability\u003c/h2\u003e\u003cp\u003eQualitative investigations were conducted in one rural senior high school in Gong\u0026rsquo;an County of Jingzhou Prefecture-level City, Hubei Province, from March 2022 to August 2024. The study primarily relied on semi-structured interviews with students and teachers, offline observations in classrooms and student dormitories, and online observations of students\u0026rsquo; interactions in a game-sharing WeChat group. Consent forms were obtained from 11 class teachers, three school principals or managers, and 38 students who agreed to participate in the semi-structured interviews and observations. All 38 students are left-behind youth aged from 15 to 17; 21 of them are boys, and the other 17 are girls. A total of 35 classroom observations and nine dormitory visits were conducted and audio-recorded. Field notes were taken during or immediately after the observations, focusing on teacher-student interactions, student behaviours, peer interactions, student resistance to school smartphone control measures, and teachers\u0026rsquo; reactions to student resistance. Additionally, online observations of the game-sharing WeChat group allowed for an exploration of group solidarity and the development of counter-school digital subcultures among students who resisted examination-oriented schooling. This study is part of the research sponsored by the general project of the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant Numbers: 24BXW051).\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eConflict of Interest\u0026nbsp;\u003c/strong\u003e\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eEthical Consideration\u003c/strong\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis study was approved by\u0026nbsp;the Institutional Review Board (IRB) of the School of Journalism and Communication, Shaanxi Normal University\u0026nbsp;(Approval No. 20220207-004). Written informed consent was obtained directly by the researcher from all participating students and teachers, as well as from the guardians of underage students, between February 21 and February 28, 2022. This process was conducted in accordance with the guidelines of the Declaration of Helsinki and protocol approved by the Institutional Review Board of the School of Journalism and Communication, Shaanxi Normal University. No oral consent was used in this study.\u003c/p\u003e"},{"header":"References","content":"\u003col\u003e\u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBraun V, Clarke V (2006) Using thematic analysis in psychology. Qualitative Res Psychol 3(2):77\u0026ndash;101\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBrown P, James D (2020) Educational expansion, poverty reduction and social mobility: Reframing the debate Phillip. Int J Educational Res 100:1\u0026ndash;9\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eBukodi E, Goldthorpe JH (2018) Social Mobility and Education in Britain: Research, Politics and Policy. 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Curr Psychol 42:16518\u0026ndash;16532\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eZhang M (2019) If you take learning seriously, I\u0026rsquo;ll assign you to a good seat\u0026rsquo;: moralized seating order and the making of educational success in China\u0026rsquo;s public schools. Ethnography Educ 14(4):428\u0026ndash;447\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eZhen R, Li L, Ding Y, Hong W, Liu R (2020) How does mobile phone dependency impair academic engagement among Chinese left-behind children? Child Youth Serv Rev 116:105169\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e \u003cli\u003e\u003cspan\u003eZhou X (2011) Counter-school Culture: A comparative study of Lads and Zidi. Chin J Sociol 31(5):70\u0026ndash;92\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/li\u003e\u003c/ol\u003e"}],"fulltextSource":"","fullText":"","funders":[],"hasAdminPriorityOnWorkflow":false,"hasManuscriptDocX":true,"hasOptedInToPreprint":true,"hasPassedJournalQc":"","hasAnyPriority":false,"hideJournal":false,"highlight":"","institution":"","isAcceptedByJournal":false,"isAuthorSuppliedPdf":false,"isDeskRejected":"","isHiddenFromSearch":false,"isInQc":false,"isInWorkflow":false,"isPdf":false,"isPdfUpToDate":true,"isWithdrawnOrRetracted":false,"journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"humanities-and-social-sciences-communications","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"palcomms","sideBox":"Learn more about [Humanities \u0026 Social Sciences Communications](http://www.nature.com/palcomms/)","snPcode":"41599","submissionUrl":"https://submission.springernature.com/new-submission/41599/3","title":"Humanities and Social Sciences Communications","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"stoa","reportingPortfolio":"Nature AJ","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false},"keywords":"rural left-behind youth, counter-school digital subculture, examination-oriented schooling, marginalization, rural high school in China","lastPublishedDoi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8055802/v1","lastPublishedDoiUrl":"https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-8055802/v1","license":{"name":"CC BY 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/"},"manuscriptAbstract":"\u003cp\u003eTo ensure survival within the Chinese education system, rural high schools in the periphery implement various strategies that sacrifice students\u0026rsquo; recreational and social needs to create an exam-oriented educational environment. Based on ethnographic research conducted at a rural high school in Hubei Province, this article scrutinizes control of smartphone use as the confrontation site between examination-oriented schooling and rural youths\u0026rsquo; counter-school subculture production. In addition to highlighting the resistance nature of left-behind youths\u0026rsquo; digital subculture production, our study unveils how the discriminatory campus management in school setting stigmatizes left-behind youths as \u0026ldquo;self-abandoned youths\u0026rdquo; ought to take responsibility for their academic failure and following class status reproduction. We highlight the necessity of examining class reproduction mechanisms in county high school in relation to the marginalization of rural schools in China\u0026rsquo;s education system.\u003c/p\u003e","manuscriptTitle":"Producing the “self-abandoned youths” in the periphery: Re-understanding digital subculture production and class reproduction in China’s rural high school","msid":"","msnumber":"","nonDraftVersions":[{"code":1,"date":"2026-02-25 06:40:12","doi":"10.21203/rs.3.rs-8055802/v1","editorialEvents":[{"type":"communityComments","content":0},{"type":"decision","content":"Revision requested","date":"2026-03-19T10:44:52+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvitedReview","content":"","date":"2026-03-18T02:46:15+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvitedReview","content":"","date":"2026-03-16T00:04:55+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvitedReview","content":"","date":"2026-03-15T04:15:13+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvitedReview","content":"","date":"2026-03-14T11:48:28+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvitedReview","content":"","date":"2026-03-03T16:25:07+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvitedReview","content":"","date":"2026-02-28T07:59:18+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"119692701693455585920985894993034265180","date":"2026-02-27T14:03:11+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"87901847299031681862444240801056225098","date":"2026-02-25T16:59:03+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"273818841609995123346847645312483993302","date":"2026-02-25T08:04:49+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvitedReview","content":"","date":"2026-02-24T08:37:09+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"257561616129173561148462474082769738092","date":"2026-02-23T13:40:47+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"19550055564068390750266915889428527607","date":"2026-02-23T11:38:13+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"188835011318787938218385593557794768760","date":"2026-02-23T10:06:54+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"5176451751365038227927625137431727425","date":"2026-02-23T09:55:00+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewerAgreed","content":"285101560906773099541044491539046032203","date":"2026-02-23T09:53:54+00:00","index":"hide","fulltext":""},{"type":"reviewersInvited","content":"","date":"2026-02-23T09:31:47+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorAssigned","content":"","date":"2025-12-10T10:28:35+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"editorInvited","content":"","date":"2025-12-10T07:12:14+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"checksComplete","content":"","date":"2025-11-25T08:44:08+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""},{"type":"submitted","content":"Humanities and Social Sciences Communications","date":"2025-11-25T08:39:58+00:00","index":"","fulltext":""}],"status":"published","journal":{"display":true,"email":"[email protected]","identity":"humanities-and-social-sciences-communications","isNatureJournal":false,"hasQc":true,"allowDirectSubmit":false,"externalIdentity":"palcomms","sideBox":"Learn more about [Humanities \u0026 Social Sciences Communications](http://www.nature.com/palcomms/)","snPcode":"41599","submissionUrl":"https://submission.springernature.com/new-submission/41599/3","title":"Humanities and Social Sciences Communications","twitterHandle":"","acdcEnabled":true,"dfaEnabled":true,"editorialSystem":"stoa","reportingPortfolio":"Nature AJ","inReviewEnabled":true,"inReviewRevisionsEnabled":false}}],"origin":"","ownerIdentity":"f66b0d14-f775-464e-93c7-aea0312ced94","owner":[],"postedDate":"February 25th, 2026","published":true,"recentEditorialEvents":[],"rejectedJournal":[],"revision":"","amendment":"","status":"under-review","subjectAreas":[{"id":63430671,"name":"Social science/Education"},{"id":63430672,"name":"Social science/Sociology"}],"tags":[],"updatedAt":"2026-05-08T12:08:10+00:00","versionOfRecord":[],"versionCreatedAt":"2026-02-25 06:40:12","video":"","vorDoi":"","vorDoiUrl":"","workflowStages":[]},"version":"v1","identity":"rs-8055802","journalConfig":"researchsquare"},"__N_SSP":true},"page":"/article/[identity]/[[...version]]","query":{"redirect":"/article/rs-8055802","identity":"rs-8055802","version":["v1"]},"buildId":"XKTyCvWXoU3ODBz1xrDgd","isFallback":false,"isExperimentalCompile":false,"dynamicIds":[84888],"gssp":true,"scriptLoader":[]}