The new game of choosing elite schools: parental accounts regarding China’s synchronous admission reform

Since the 1980s, school choice policies have significantly affected China’s compulsory education system. In 2019, the Chinese government launched a new school choice reform to restrict elite school admission. Inspired by Bourdieu’s social practice theory, in-depth interviews are used in this paper to examine how 10 middle-class parents navigated their school choice under the new admission mechanism. The findings reveal that the new admission reform has not overturned the neoliberalization of school choice. Rather, parents have adjusted their school choice strategies, which involve (1) buying a house and/or converting “luck”, (2) promoting intraschool distinctions, and (3) repairing the mismatch of cultural capital. In the face of a new, more subtly capital-demanding and academically segregated market, Chinese middle-class parents are adjusting their school choice strategies to consolidate their class advantage. This paper contributes to the literature by adding recent tales of Chinese parents’ school choice under anti-neoliberal school admission reform and identifying the risks and side effects of the reform.