Meritocracy, Suzhi Education and the Use of Live-Streaming Technology in Rural Schools in Western China

Abstract Many rural youths in China receive a poor-quality, strict and exam-oriented education. In everyday and professional discourses, incorporating live-streaming technologies in rural schooling is tied to promises of improved educational quality and a narrowed urban‒rural education gap. Reflecting a dystopian ideology of meritocracy, this article investigates how live-streaming technologies transmit suzhi (human quality) education and downplay the exam-oriented education with which rural students and teachers are familiar. The authors argue that the two educational vehicles for meritocracy work together to channel students to a seemingly meritocratic pathway of social mobility but funnel rural students to an inferior educational track according to their rural registration and lower-class backgrounds. The online version of suzhi education complicates and even exacerbates the already fierce educational competition that rural students face. Rural students’ low aspirations and their teachers’ apathy towards live-streaming classes challenge the purportedly transformative effects of live-streaming technologies in China's rural schooling.