Contribution

This study examines the complex dynamics between top-down collectivist ideologies and bottom-up student practices within the context of a Chinese middle school. It highlights the processes through which collective identities are constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed.

Background

Ethnographies of contemporary Chinese schooling show state schools are central arenas where state projects of subject-making collide with student tactics. Woronov (2016) shows how vocational schools produce particular classed identities and moral economies for students routed into work, while Hansen (2016) shows how rural state boarding schools produce “authoritarian individuals” through encouraging students to become self-reliant neoliberal selves while simultaneously maintaining strict political control under the Chinese state in the context of individualisation.

In recent years the government has strengthened its authority reach over the education sector; policy such as the 2021 “Double Reduction” reform have been interpreted as measures through which the government seeks to reassert centralized authority and reconfigure the governance of schooling (Qian et al., 2024). This study examines a parallel but distinct problem at the classroom scale. My field-site vocally celebrates collectivist values, yet students frequently engage in behaviors that undermine collective life, for example, peer reporting, appropriating classmates’ homework and the widespread use of the term neijuan (a word translated from “involution”, means predatory competition, which is popular in China). Rather than moral decay, I read these acts as the micro-politics by which a strengthened collectivist rhetoric is re-negotiated and a new, fractious collective identity is forged.

Research Questions

How a class community is assembled when top-down collectivist values meet bottom-up student practices?

In what ways do institutional disciplinary and surveillance undermine that community?

How do students seek alternative forms of community to reconstruct a sense of belonging?

Objectives

To theorize the formation of class community through the lens of Anderson’s imagined community theory.

To demonstrate how discipline and surveillance operate in the school and classroom and contribute to the disintegration of the class community.

To explore how students’ cultural production rebuilds alternative forms of solidarity.

Conceptual Framework

This research is grounded in the theoretical frameworks of imagined communities (Anderson, 2006) and disciplinary power (Foucault, 1995), applied to the context of student identity and collective belonging. Anderson’s notion of the imagined community is used to analyze how students form collective identities and belonging through shared symbols, values, and narratives. Foucault’s concept of surveillance and hierarchical observation is used to explore how institutional practices—such as inspection routines, peer reporting, and stratified class systems—reshape student behavior, identity, and social relationships.

International Significance

The international significance of this study lies in its contribution to the global understanding of the dynamics between state power and student subjectivity within educational systems. The study's insights into how students negotiate collective identity in response to top-down ideologies can inform debates on educational governance, the role of surveillance in schools, and the impact of neoliberal policies on student communities. Moreover, the utilisation of fan fiction as a medium for student agency provides a distinctive viewpoint on the manner in which cultural production can function as a mechanism for students to resist and reimagine the educational spaces they inhabit.

This qualitative ethnographic study was conducted over a single semester of three months in a Chinese public middle school. The researcher worked as an intern teacher in a Grade 7 classroom and used participant observation to document daily classroom life and management. Primary data comprised in-depth interviews with fifteen participants, each lasting about two hours, which focused on experiences of class management, behavioural norms and the formation of collective identity. The analysis was further informed by close readings of four student-authored class fan fiction novels that fictionalised school life and revealed students’ emotional investments, and by online chat records and informal conversations that added contextual depth.

The class community was produced through both top-down and bottom-up processes. Official school rituals and students’ spontaneous practices collectively gave rise to shared symbols, memories, and values that served as markers of distinction between insiders and outsiders, thereby fostering an “imagined community” which can be understood as a cultural artefact (Anderson 2006). Schooling operates as a mechanism that translates collective consciousness into students’ imaginations, allowing them who remain otherwise unacquainted to imagine themselves as simultaneous participants in a unified and bounded class collective. This sense of community, however, was undermined by discipline and surveillance. Official efforts to cultivate identification with class and school took the form of strict temporal, spatial and psychological controls, including frequent lining-up routines, depersonalised classroom displays and prescriptive school audio that indoctrinates a single set of values. As Foucault (1995) argues, such practices do not simply repress; they produce the docile subject as an effect of their continuous and meticulous operation. In the classroom, homeroom teachers normalised peer reporting, organised class cadres into hierarchical tiers and prohibited the term “juan,” which students had used privately as a coded language to express mutual help and collective interests. Such micro-mechanisms constitute the field of possibility within which student subjectivity can be formed, and within which certain social relations are made unthinkable. As Waller (1961) observed, subordinates often avoid confronting the true nature of their subordinate position and compensate with a fantasy life. Students, faced with regimented classroom governance, channelled their longing for collective belonging into fan fictions. In these stories, the school was reimagined as a prison, class cadres were portrayed as exploitative corporate leaders, and non-cadre students became earnest, anime-style protagonists resisting privilege. As Barnes (2015) shows, student-authored class fan fictions operate as symbolic repair and communal rehearsal when institutional forms of belonging are eroded.

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