Consent and Dissent: A Study of the Reaction of Chinese School Teachers in Guangzhou City Schools to Government Educational Reforms

Abstract This paper presents detailed qualitative evidence from a case study of teachers in five Chinese schools in one city. It explicitly seeks to show how developments in government policy towards education have altered the management of teacher labour inside schools as well as the teacher labour process as expressed by the teachers themselves in interviews and questionnaires. In this paper, we explore supervision, work intensification, and the erosion of professionalism. We conclude that some changes have taken place as predicted by the labour process model, but that the reaction of the teachers to more extensive controls has been variable. In particular senior school managers did have greater control with high levels of supervision, but that was generally welcomed as preferable to the previous system of outside control and neglect. While workload increased overall, the teachers were more likely to have to work outside of normal duties rather than experience any increase in formal contractual obligations.