Written by: Liming Liu, Haiming Zhao
Introduction
The COVID-19 pandemic is becoming a global catastrophe, damaging daily routines and most offline activities. Multiple professions and industries are facing permanent effects, including education. China was the first country to shut down all offline educational institutions to cut the spread of the virus (UNESCO, 2020b), causing large numbers of students to adapt to remote education. However, China is a developing country with a huge population, with almost 600 million people earning a medium or low income (Yang, 2020). Online education raises difficulties for these people. It is vital that we pay attention to the phenomenon of digital inequality and the ways in which many people cannot access the technology and network devices necessary for joining in on online education. It is also necessary to examine the impact of the use of the Internet to access online education on digital inequity. This essay analyses the relationship between information and communication technologies (ICT) and digital inequality in Chinese society and the Chinese context, and explores the generational mechanism and social roots of digital inequality in online education in mainland China. Secondary data drawn from media reports are used to analyse educational sources of inequality and social structures in Chinese digital society, exploring the digital inequality through a focus on capitalistic perspectives. We aim to address the following questions:
What are the main challenges in online education for poor Chinese students?
What does the performance of Chinese social class structures in the online education look like?
Economic capital and digital capital
Economic capital can refer to material assets, as Bourdieu (1983: 242) states “immediately and directly convertible into money and may be institutionalized in the form of property rights”. Economic capital includes all kinds of material resources that could be used to acquire or maintain digital capital. Digital Capital is the accumulation of “a set of internalised abilities and aptitudes” (digital competencies), and “externalised resources” (digital technology) (Ragnedda et al., 2020).
The interaction between economic capital and digital capital is clear due to the benefits from using the internet. Economic capital can influence digital capital in turn improving the social position, such as the opportunity to use the internet for capital enhancing activities or use valuable digital resources (Ragnedda, 2018). The interaction also influences digital connection and quality usage during online education.
From digital divide to digital inequality
The ‘digital divide’ refers to the gap between individuals, households, businesses and geographic areas at different socio-economic levels regarding their opportunities to access ICT and to use the Internet for a wide variety of activities. From a macro-level public policy and economic perspective, the digital divide focuses on the differences in the level of digitisation between countries and regions. For the individuals, it mainly manifests in issues of access, skill, and usage levels (Sparks, 2013). Despite it’s usefulness, the digital divide in this macro framing focuses largely on technology and puts too much emphasis on the material, such as people's access to and use of technology, ignoring media technology literacy, education level, and social resources. The digital divide is also based on a dichotomy which too simply divides the population into ICT owners and ICT deprived people, and does not pay attention to the differences within these groups. In addition, research conclusions around the digital divide unilaterally emphasise the improvements needed around access for technology-poor people, ignoring the influence of multiple factors such as society, politics, and economy. Issues of access are no longer considered once a country has developed primary connection conditions, with the second- and third-level digital divides concentrating on benefits from the internet (Scheerder et al., 2019).
At a micro-level, digital inequality is generally discussed in the context of social inequality, with attention paid to aspects of digital skills and usage differences. Focusing on individual factors such as socioeconomic status and other mechanisms for generating digital inequality, and examining digital inequality from a social perspective helps in researching the structural roots of digital inequality from a broader theoretical perspective. For instance, some scholars have analysed digital inequality using Bourdieu's social/culture capital theory (Tan and Chan, 2018) and Latour's actor network theory (Fernandez, 2006; Zhu, 2009), incorporating these into a social stratification system, to understand digital inequality from the theory of network social stratification, proposing, for example a "middle and lower class of Information'' and other concepts (Qiu, 2013: 27).
Based on the above, this essay positions digital inequality as the difference in digital capital due to economic and social inequality, and digital inequality as a reflection of social structural inequality. Digital inequality has the following characteristics:
First, based on Newman Custer's network society theory (Zhu, 2009), the traditional social class relationship caused by the difference in the degree of social capital is being transformed into a digital class relationship caused by the difference in the degree of digital capital to access and use ICT.
Second, the information/digital social stratification phenomenon is prominent. That is, digital inequality transcends the dichotomy of the digital divide by constructing a spectrum of differences to analyse the complex group distribution between the two extreme digital polarities, accounting for different regions, technologies, groups, and internal diversity differences.
Third, the digital divide masks social inequality. Digital inequality attempts to tap a series of inequalities behind digital capital and the political, social, economic, cultural, and power factors that these inequalities produce.
In this essay, we suggest that online education has become the new norm during the pandemic, and that digital inequality can offer a perspective to touch the second- and third-level divides and both economies and digital capital to understand the main challenges for poor students.
The context of China
China has over 904 million internet users as of March 2020, including 255 million rural users, and a penetration rate of 46.2% in rural areas (CNNIC, 2020). Over 50% of people in rural areas have not accessed the internet, suggesting that access, skills and usage are points of struggle in rural areas in China.
China is still a developing country suffering from harsh social issues, especially the polarisation of socioeconomic levels. In 2019, China shared the Gini Coefficient at 0.465[1] (CEIC, 2020), which means China has a higher degree of income inequality than most OECD countries (OECD, 2020). China still has 600 million people whose monthly income is less than 1,000 yuan[2], as stated by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at the annual session press conference on May 28, 2020 (Caixin Global, 2020). Although China is the world’s second-largest economy and has shown rapid economic growth in the past decades with many citizens achieving social mobility to a high-income class, the fact remains that the majority of the population is in a low-income group.
The pandemic is further highlighting this polarisation. Because of the serious and sharp increase in confirmed cases, China became the first country to lockdown to curb the spread of coronavirus across the nation (Langton, 2020). Since the restrictions have been put in place there has been a suspension of educational institutions from the kindergarten to universities. During the Spring semester, the Ministry of Education launched an initiative entitled “Ensuring learning is undisrupted when classes are disrupted (停课不停学)” (UNESCO, 2020b), then transformed the traditional teaching using online platforms to continue education. For these rural areas disconnected from the internet and for students who cannot afford to access the internet, an ignored social issue surfaced in the form of digital inequality.
Visual discourse analysis
In order to address the questions posed at the beginning of the essay, we will concentrate here on visual media representation, since pictures are valuable due to the ways in which they encode an enormous amount of information in a single representation (Rose, 2016: 309). We will make use of visual discourse analysis here because discourse analysis offers a way to explore how images construct specific views of society (Rose, 2016: 192). Images contain a visual language that can be read or analysed cleanly but do not deliver more or less knowledge than the written word (Malherbe et al., 2016). Rather, visuals can provide insights into knowledge often neglected by mainstream researches (MacDougall, 2011). As an alternative form of knowledge, visuals drawn from the media can help explain the predicament that is facing poor students during the pandemic.
The data presented here comes from two media reports and 13 images to explore the current situation. The 13 images have been selected from the two media reports (Table 1), which contain similar themes and a focus on online education in rural and poor areas. Compared with visuals on social media, which represent the voices of the grassroots or an individual, media stands as an official voice in China (Li and Zhang, 2017). In this manner, these images can be help analyse the educational situation for poor students during the pandemic.
Visual discourse analysis offers a useful way to explore media images. It should be noted that Chinese media can easily be understood as the mouthpiece of the communist party. However, besides this mouthpiece role, the contemporary marketised Chinese media also offers their readers’ a form of reality (Stockmann and Gallagher, 2011). In this manner, the media cannot be considered to be fully objective nor a delivery of the government’s voice exclusively. From this perspective, we analyse media imagery as a means for demonstrating the theme of online education as presented to the people of China.
The analytical strategy employed here study involves describing the current social phenomenon. Therefore, before turning to the predicaments of digital inequality, we first have to delineate the expressions of the issues in which these are to be surfaced.
Exploring images of digital inequality in China
The images show rural students who have studied in relatively harsh surroundings. Two main issues emerge in remote learning for these students. Firstly, students who cannot afford the internet fees or who are disconnected from the internet have to study in the village government’s offices. If the offices are closed or it is outside of the work hours, they then have to study outside the offices. Secondly, lots of students suffer from a weak internet signal and low fluency of live-streaming. Several pictures show the parents building rough and humble tents around the farmlands without any heating condition in an attempt to provide spaces for students to study and seek stable a quality of the internet as most of the signal towers are built on the mountain tops and close to farmlands (Souhu, 2020).
Some pictures were offered by reports’ subjects that are vague and low quality. Beyond the human figures shown in the pictures, the surroundings are often hard to make out in detail. In Figure 1, the student is using a mobile phone for online education on the top of the mountain which can offer him a stable internet signal. A plastic bag of fertilizer has replaced their desk, and they are sat on the ground without a chair. The reporter suggests that interview happened during early March when the weather was relatively chilled, and that the person in the photo does not have any heating equipment. Compared with multiple modern and high-end devices used in the cities, usage in rural areas suggests that users are suffering despite accessing the same online education. The comparison amongst different levels suggests class solidification among the diverse socioeconomic levels. Because upper class students can enjoy the online education in stable signal and warm condition, but some students are struggling with internet connection, stable signal and extra internet fee.
Figure 1. An student on the top of a mountain seeking stable signals (Hongxing news, Mar.10, 2020)
Realistic predicaments in China
This short look at media images and reports shows that the main predicaments that students face revolve around issues of infrastructure and individual/family capital. Because of the lack of internet infrastructure or weak internet signal areas, students cannot connect to online learning environments due to their lived realities. As discussed above, students need to seek a place with stable signals or available access to the internet to make the education continuum possible.
For students low in capital, the internet is available in the residential areas but is limited due to additional fees. Their internet usage has been held up by low-quality devices and unstable signals. Additionally, compared to on-campus education, devices and the internet are extra expenses for students and their families. More seriously, the two main predicaments are intertwined, some students struggle with compound predicaments during online education. Predicaments concentrate around four overlapping categories:
Areas without network and not enough economic and digital capital;
Areas with the network but not enough economic and digital capital;
Have some low level economic and digital capital but in areas without the network;
Areas with the network but have a only low level of economic and digital capital.
The four categories above begin to explain China's reality for poor students during the pandemic. Online education in the epidemic is a mirror to encounter digital inequality among different social classes in China, especially in regards to how the poorer students are being asked to pivot their education online whilst facing issues around economic and digital capital and infrastructure condition.
Conclusion
China’s education has been redefined since the COVID-19 pandemic transformed offline education into online education, and the education-oriented internet industry has developed considerably as humans are avoiding face-to-face social relations. Education has transformed into mediated social relations as the substitution for both avoidance and survival in pandemic (Fuchs, 2020). The multiple live-streaming platforms and online joint education applications are supporting educational routines as usual. However, the pandemic acts as a boundary to separate the digital society, especially in regards to education. Before the pandemic, education was relatively equal because on campus education gathered students in the same classroom. Education during the pandemic becomes challenging for digital connection as the extra hurdle to continue education.
The pandemic has acted as the fuse to reveal that online education is abandoning poor students in China - economic and digital capital are the impasses for them. Technology is not offering meaningful mobility for poor students and their families. China has had a class solidification issue for a long time, however, technology has amplified this issue. Digital inequality is not a new phenomenon in China, the pandemic has brought it to the surface for the general public. The boundary is related not only to fortune and capital but also to structural social issues, namely the harsh reality of social stratification in China.
In presenting this perspective, this study concedes to several limitations. Namely, while the essay focuses on two media reports and specifically on the images, an even broader material collection could be made. Therefore, we encourage future studies to use the contents and data within this essay. This may allow for better tracking of the reality of digital inequality in China and the mutual characteristics of digital inequality among different countries.
Despite the limitations, the study of poor students’ digital usage adds new layers to the understanding of digital inequality during the pandemic. In taking these findings beyond China, this essay speaks to the evolving complex reality in a global context of facing digital inequality and decreasing poorer students’ predicaments in a digital age. Traces of such a reality are evident in other contexts because education was interrupted as a global issue by over 290 million students out of school due to the COVID-19 (UNESCO, 2020a). Therefore, digital inequality at both a global and regional level should be considered an emergency in the digital age.
Bios
Liming Liu is a postgraduate student in digital media and society studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. Before coming to Sweden, he worked as product operation in the internet industry for over four years. His research interests are related to the fields of social media, Internet products, and political communication situated in the English and Chinese contexts.
Haiming Zhao is a Ph.D student, School of Journalism, Chongqing University, China. His research interests are concentrated on the philosophy of media technology, mediology, digital media, and social changes. He has worked on an academic project related to exploring how artificial intelligence technology constructs the body and human subjectivity
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Footnotes
[1] Gini coefficient, 0 = complete equality; 1 = complete inequality.
[2] 1,000 yuan is approximately $141.
[3] See more details: https://new.qq.com/omn/20200303/20200303A07OC300.html
[4] See more details: https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_6432888