This chapter examines the strategies of middle-class Chinese parents in selecting private international schools for their children across China’s Greater Bay Area. Through interviews at five international schools in Hong Kong, Macao, and Guangdong Province, it explores the motivations for choosing international schools and the perceived outcomes. Applying the “outsourced concerted cultivation” framework, the research reveals how parents outsource educational responsibilities to presumed international education experts at international schools. This outsourcing strategy is driven by aspirations for a “globalised” type of education and overseas university admission, coupled with concerns that these aspirations would not be sufficiently realised by parenting at home or the domestic education system. The participants perceived international schools as effective in cultivating global perspectives, multilingualism, intercultural understanding, and providing qualifications for global higher education. Overall, the study suggests this outsourcing strategy is more widespread than previously thought, yet it also reveals unintended consequences, such as creating a sense of cultural distance between parents and children.

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Parenting Strategies of the Middle Classes in China’s Greater Bay Area: Outsourced Concerted Cultivation and International Schooling

  • Ewan Wright,
  • Ying Ma,
  • Zhuoran Li

摘要

This chapter examines the strategies of middle-class Chinese parents in selecting private international schools for their children across China’s Greater Bay Area. Through interviews at five international schools in Hong Kong, Macao, and Guangdong Province, it explores the motivations for choosing international schools and the perceived outcomes. Applying the “outsourced concerted cultivation” framework, the research reveals how parents outsource educational responsibilities to presumed international education experts at international schools. This outsourcing strategy is driven by aspirations for a “globalised” type of education and overseas university admission, coupled with concerns that these aspirations would not be sufficiently realised by parenting at home or the domestic education system. The participants perceived international schools as effective in cultivating global perspectives, multilingualism, intercultural understanding, and providing qualifications for global higher education. Overall, the study suggests this outsourcing strategy is more widespread than previously thought, yet it also reveals unintended consequences, such as creating a sense of cultural distance between parents and children.