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An increasing number of rural youths leave their families to receive education and training in urban vocational schools before seeking employment in China. This article aims to reveal and highlight the collectivist attitudes young migrants develop during their school-to-work transitions, even though they embrace the individualisation discourse of neoliberal self-development and self-reliance. When the young people reflexively adopt the principles of the market culture and neoliberal system to fit into the labour market, they are conscious about the important role of their disadvantageous family origins in their development. To deal with an unequal and competitive society, they rely on mutual support and co-operation to combat their risk collectively. This article suggests that collective sentiments and social networks remain extremely important in these Chinese young people's moral understanding despite the overwhelming influences of individualisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contrast to the existing argument that the logic of capital has monetised almost every aspect of human relationships to the realm of exchange value, this article explores the social values that are practised by Chinese working-class youth as an alternative form of agency and everyday practice. Instead of understanding social values as a realm of value operating entirely outside the logic of exchange value, this article takes social values as the constitutive other of exchange value embodied in the neoliberalised form of capitalism. It attempts to develop a micro-foundation of social values or a social mechanism of values for understanding social protection and class solidarity. Employing in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations in vocational schools in China, at sites for the education and nurture of working-class youth, we ask what social values are, how they are perceived and exercised, and by whom. From students' practices of care in schools, cooperation in the workplace and solidarity in the community, our goal is to build a micro-foundation of social values that challenges and goes beyond the logic of exchange value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of China as the world factory in the last few decades has been accompanied by a rapid expansion in vocational education. A growing number of youth from rural backgrounds now have the chance to receive post-compulsory education in vocational training schools. Using human capital theory as an analytical focus, this study examines their strong desire to acquire educational credentials and explores the stress and frustration they experience after finding out that graduates in vocational schools are sent to factories to work as cheap labourers. This article argues that reform of the educational system in post-reform China has channelled a large group of rural youth to vocational education without granting them enough chance of upward mobility. When China relies heavily on a labour-intensive manufacturing economy to secure its place in neoliberal globalization, most of the jobs available are regarded as ‘undesirable’, dead-end and low income. Returns of human capital investment among rural youth are not guaranteed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]