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<p>China’s higher education operates under a hybrid governance regime—an authoritarian neoliberal socialist amalgam that simultaneously deepens marketization while tightening ideological control. Within this contradictory logic, university educators engage in everyday pedagogical resistance that challenges both Western-centric neoliberal hegemony and domestic epistemic hierarchies. Why are such micro-practices of dissent tolerated rather than systematically suppressed? Through critical qualitative research integrating policy analysis, interviews with twenty academics and students, and forty-five hours of classroom observations across six research-intensive universities, we theorize this phenomenon as&#xa0;contained resistance: Principled, agentive acts operating within parameters tacitly set by the state’s calculated tolerance. Through a&#xa0;dual critique—synthesizing Apple’s official knowledge with Santos’s cognitive justice—we document three tactical formations: strategic curricular appropriation, Socratic questioning of structural inequalities, and student-initiated epistemic communities. These practices reveal how educators defend education’s humanistic core even in constrained environments. We conclude by theorizing contained resistance as a distinctive governance–resistance dialectic within authoritarian neoliberalism—neither heroic defiance nor mere co-optation, but a lived paradox illuminating both possibilities and limits of pedagogical agency under adaptive authoritarian governance.</p>

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Pedagogical Guerrillas: Contained Resistance and the Dual Critique in China’s Neoliberalized Higher Education

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年4月20日

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  • Ping Qu,
  • Yilong Qu,
  • Qihua Sun

摘要

China’s higher education operates under a hybrid governance regime—an authoritarian neoliberal socialist amalgam that simultaneously deepens marketization while tightening ideological control. Within this contradictory logic, university educators engage in everyday pedagogical resistance that challenges both Western-centric neoliberal hegemony and domestic epistemic hierarchies. Why are such micro-practices of dissent tolerated rather than systematically suppressed? Through critical qualitative research integrating policy analysis, interviews with twenty academics and students, and forty-five hours of classroom observations across six research-intensive universities, we theorize this phenomenon as contained resistance: Principled, agentive acts operating within parameters tacitly set by the state’s calculated tolerance. Through a dual critique—synthesizing Apple’s official knowledge with Santos’s cognitive justice—we document three tactical formations: strategic curricular appropriation, Socratic questioning of structural inequalities, and student-initiated epistemic communities. These practices reveal how educators defend education’s humanistic core even in constrained environments. We conclude by theorizing contained resistance as a distinctive governance–resistance dialectic within authoritarian neoliberalism—neither heroic defiance nor mere co-optation, but a lived paradox illuminating both possibilities and limits of pedagogical agency under adaptive authoritarian governance.