Parental Choice of School, Class Strategies, and Educational Inequality: An Essay Review of School Choice in ChinaA Different Tale?

Given the increasingly global nature of marketized school choice policies, this makes it even more crucial to investigate how the multiple scales, forms, and emphases of school choice in different countries are influenced by particular political, economic, and cultural conditions. While much of the critical research on school choice policies has focused on examining the complex processes of school choice in the education market in Western contexts, this essay review of School Choice in China applies Bourdieu's concepts of capital and conversion strategies to demonstrate the practices of market-based parental choice in China.The essay highlights the importance of the recontextualization of school choice within the Chinese historical, political, economic, and social landscape in order to better understand how choice policy is interpreted differently in the Chinese context. Such historical and social specificities include, but are not limited to, the Chinese government's insufficient investment in education, the existing key school system, and significant social class changes in contemporary China.