Education as capital? A critical discourse analysis of the investment discourse in international research on Chinese rural education

This article examines the rise of human capital theory and the investment discourse in education with a focus on Chinese rural education. We carry out Critical Discourse Analysis on 38 research articles published in highly cited English-language social science journals between 1978 and 2022. We demonstrate that Chinese rural education boomed as a topic of international research in the 21st century due to intensified academic internationalisation in China, which is intertwined with China's pursuit of global influence and rising nationalism. The articles in our sample respond more to mainstream discourses dominated by the Global North than to the concerns of local communities, thereby reinforcing the dominance of western social theories and discourses like the human capital theory and the investment discourse. Amidst increasingly antagonistic global politics, we call for the critical 'double negation' (this issue) of both coloniality and nationalism to open up possibilities of plural knowledges.