Education, class, and adaptation in China's world city

This discussion draws on a series of field-work visits to the Shanghai Television University and the Shanghai Media Group between 2003 and 2006. In that period the impact of a new economic rationale, whereby workers must skill up or ship out of the workforce, was keenly felt both in the service industries and in the lower echelons of professions. The University provided an opportunity to adapt oneself through new qualifications and thus through a constant re-figuration of the working self. At the same time as it supplied these opportunities, the University itself was a site in which these changes were played out and where workers were aware of the pressures in their own lives. In particular, the difficult relationship between media as entertainment and media as a platform for educational content demonstrates the tension between adaptation and creativity as value-laden descriptions of the processes of up-skilling and meeting market demands. Given that this case study is in Shanghai, a city with an extremely mixed reputation for both creative dynamism and the deadening hand of government power plays, the media's role in the Chinese workforce is an ambivalent one.