China’s radical social transformation, brought about by its rapid economic growth, has placed more of its youth at risk. There has been an increase in juvenile delinquency, internet addiction, school bullying, and gang involvement. Research on this subject in China has attributed the problem to lower socioeconomic status of students’ families, faulty parenting style, academic failure, and aggressive personality. However, the dominant discourse virtually ignores the lives of young people within their context and fails to examine what a deviant lifestyle means to them. This research addresses this limitation by examining the process through which unprivileged students navigate through the problems they face in secondary schooling and construct a deviant subculture. This was accomplished through an intensive fieldwork in an urban secondary school in southeast China with participant observation and interview methods to collect data on a range of students, their parents and teachers over an eight-month period. The results of the data analysis reveal that school plays a critical role in the formation of students’ deviant identities. Its preoccupation with academic performance and bureaucratic management pushes students who bear with cumulative disadvantages inherited from their families and community to a more marginalized position. Deviancy develops from a label to a response. The key manifestation of this is the creation and development of a ‘muddling’ subculture as their strategy to survive schooling. Although the ‘muddling through’ strategy may not provide them with better chance of employment for them to jump out of working-class, nor give much hope for access to the cultural mainstream of society, it still has some positive aspects. The subculture not only offers an alternative way to safeguard their psychological well-being and hone their interpersonal skill, but also facilitates them to gain more social space and resource in the subordinate situation. This finding coincides with selected sociological studies of deviant students in the West but also aligns with the special context of contemporary China. First, the Chinese society is evolving even faster after the establishment of Deng’s economic model. It is a broadly accepted fact and a roaring public concern that the gap between the poor and rich in China is heading towards a new class structure. In this context, schooling doubtlessly plays a role in the social reproduction. This study claims that lower class students’ deviant subculture is not simply an oppositional culture to the value of school education as argued in Western literature; rather, it is a strategic negotiation with the social structure in order to ‘muddle through’ their lives. Second, the nature of this ‘muddling’ subculture has strong links with a pragmatic social ethos that glorifies monetary success. When “whatever works to become rich” is the dominant “Chinese dream”, other forms of social recognition, value and well-being attached to formal school education can appear as overwhelmingly irrelevant to the eyes of those students who inherited a social class they did not choose and an educational system that tells them little. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Based on the findings, this study posits some implications for China's overseas education policy and suggests future study directions, as well as identifies its own limitations. / Findings of this study show that mainland Chinese senior secondary students' choice of major for overseas higher education can be explained better by human capital theory. Students are more inclined to choose the major that has higher expected rate of return to overseas higher education. The choice of major is in fact a behavior looking for higher investment return, or for better overseas employment prospects which would increase the probability of capturing the expected rate of return to overseas higher education. / Over the last 50 years, overseas higher education in the world has developed rapidly. Existing literature shows that overseas higher education can promote the economic development of developing countries, and overseas higher education graduates of different majors may have different roles in economic development. / The study employs multinomial logistic regression in the statistical analysis of the data. Major findings of the study are as follows: (1) Two economic factors---senior secondary students' expected rate of return to overseas higher education, and perceived overseas employment prospects---significantly affect students' choice of major for overseas higher education; while other two factors---students' perceived domestic employment prospects, and consumption preferences---have no significant effect on students' choice of major. (2) The choice between each pair of majors are either significantly affected by students' expected rate of return to overseas higher education or perceived overseas employment prospects to overseas higher education, except for the pair of Engineering vs. Business Administration. (3) The interaction effect between students' expected rate of return to overseas higher education and family location, and the interaction effect between students' academic ability and family income, significantly affect students' choice of major for overseas higher education. (4) Some information factors also significantly affect students' choice of major. (5) Students' gender, academic ability, family income, parents' education, and family location also significantly affect their choices of major. / The study is based on the data set of a research project entitled "Seeking Higher Education Abroad: Student Choices and Reasons in China", funded by the Research Grants Council in Hong Kong and conducted by Professor Hung Fan-sing of The Chinese University of Hong Kong as the Principal Investigator. The data consists of the results of a questionnaire survey successfully conducted in early 2007 to 12,961 senior secondary students in seven cities in mainland China. / This study employs human capital theory to analyze mainland Chinese senior secondary students' choice of major for studying higher education abroad, and the main factors affecting their choices. / 劉揚. / Advisers: Fan-sing Hung; Yue-ping Chung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: A, page: 1865. / Thesis (doctoral)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 147-157). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English. / School code: 1307. / Liu Yang.

李曉東. / 論文(博士)--香港中文大學, 2000. / 參考文獻 (p. 199-210) / 中英文摘要. / Available also through the Internet via Dissertations & theses @ Chinese University of Hong Kong. / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / Li Xiaodong. / Lun wen (bo shi)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 2000. / Can kao wen xian (p. 199-210) / Zhong Ying wen zhai yao.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education