Performing the Nation, Performing the Market: Hybrid Practices and Negotiated Meanings of Chinese Rural Teachers

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in two ethnic villages in Southwest China, this article examines rural teachers’ performative engagement with education reform, audit culture, and neoliberal market mandates in their daily practices. Teachers are at once pedagogical agents, street-level bureaucrats, and tourism entrepreneurs who both perform to and resist the dominant state and market ideologies. Teachers’ creative tactics and hybrid subjectivities challenge the resistance–compliance dichotomy and illuminate the persistent educational inequality in China’s rural ethnic margins.