Competitive Comrades

Competitive Comrades: Career Incentives and Student Strategies in China provides a nuanced analysis of the complexities within China's educational institutions and examines the evolution of student behavior in response to political pressures and career incentives. Focusing on the period between 1960 and 1966, the book delves into the high-stakes world of Chinese high schools, where the distribution of opportunities—especially under Mao's virtuocratic policies—produced a unique blend of ambition and moral posturing. The book argues that Maoist policies, which sought to fuse political virtue with academic performance, created an intense atmosphere of competition that encouraged students to balance their academic and political ambitions with social strategies that would ensure their success. Unlike meritocracies or traditional hierarchies, this "virtuocratic" system intensified the stakes of student relationships and loyalty while paradoxically fostering political cynicism and alienation from the state—a contradiction at the heart of the Maoist vision of "revolutionary successors." Through detailed interviews with former students, Competitive Comrades reveals how students navigated these pressures, showing that, rather than fostering cooperation and ideological alignment, Mao's policies often drove students toward strategic adaptations aimed at self-preservation and advancement. This exploration of the social and behavioral implications of virtuocracy provides critical insights into post-revolutionary Chinese society and presents a comparative framework relevant to other regimes governed by similar principles of moral-based selection. Ideal for scholars of Chinese history, political sociology, and education studies, Competitive Comrades sheds light on the unintended consequences of revolutionary moral ambitions on youth culture and social cohesion in Communist China.

This title was originally published in 1982.

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