Volunteering for “Bitterness”: The Self-Fashioning Power of Volunteering Teaching in China

Each year, a growing number of Chinese university students volunteer in schools in the rural areas of China, participating in grassroot NGOs whose goal is to alleviate the urban-rural education gap in China. Based on a large project on educational NGOs in China, I show that a salient part of the volunteers’ experience is encountering struggles that they must overcome: they “eat bitterness” in their volunteer labor. In willingly traveling to underprivileged areas and “eating bitterness,” Chinese youths create idealistic educational projects and fashion themselves as agents who counter the structural inequality in the State’s education system. For them, the “bitterness” is a site for self-transformation and a source of hope for equitable access to cosmopolitan education in rural and urban China alike. The ethos of “eating bitterness” is critical in diverse areas of Chinese life, where it connects suffering to moral and social transformations, individually and collectively. Here, it forms an experiential nexus of a progressive theory of change that synthesizes self-development with intense personal investment in bringing about change. That this change is disconnected from politics is a crucial enabling condition, and also ennobling—at least to participants. Joining an emerging conversation on the anthropology of politics, this article hopes to potential diverse understandings about politics and ethics in a “post-political” world.