Displaying intimate friendships: Chinese children’s practices of friendships at school

Abstract

Through an intensive ethnographic fieldwork, this project explores rural Chinese children’s understandings and experiences of peer friendships at school. When talking about ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’, children tended to brag that they were friends with many peers, but at the same time to particularly highlight a very small number of peers as the most intimate friends, in other words, their ‘best friends’. Inspired by Finch’s concept of ‘display’, this article explores how these Chinese children used different approaches to highlight their intimate friends’ particularity in intimate friendship displays at school. This article, first, unpacks three commonly used approaches in these children’s displays of intimate friendships: 1) building up an exclusionary ‘intimate friends only’ policy; 2) imparting to certain objects, actions and language sentimental and specific meanings as ‘tokens’ of their friendship; and 3) giving ‘priority’ to intimate friends. Second, it discusses the importance of audiences and cooperation between actors in intimate friendship displays.

‘Friends are those who can help you out’: unpacking the understanding and experiences of friendship among young migrant workers in China

“…For different people in different situations, forms of providing emotional support and the features that are counted as emotional support could be diverse (Brownlie, 2014). For example, for some people, 'being there' to provide intimate others, such as friends, emotional support does not have to require physical presence; however, having friends around physically to provide emotional support through sympathetic talking and listening, joyful play, bodily contact (e.g., holding hands and hugging) in difficult times is highly valued by some other people, such as residential children, who are living in a boarding school away from family support (Zhu, 2019). While existing literature on migrants' friendships, especially those which focus on professional and elite migrants, tend to put more emphasis on the importance of emotional support in friendships (e.g., Walsh, 2009;Ryan, 2015), emotional support is not the only valued element in friendship.…”

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“…Similar situations also happened in Yan's fieldwork. Since the norms of "making 'good' friends" were significant among children as the key friendsmaking rule taught by their parents and teachers (Zhu 2020), children who are not categorized as 'good children' easily experienced exclusion and marginalization at school (Zhu 2019). For example, children in most Chinese schools, including Yan's fieldwork school, are required to do most school tasks as groups-therefore, each child should belong to one working group in class.…”

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“…(None did.) The consent of the children, as participants, was negotiated as an ongoing process (Vincent et al, 2018;Zhu, 2022). Throughout the fieldwork, I explained to the children what I was doing and I wrote short fieldnotes in their presence, to keep the research visible and give them opportunities to refuse to participate (Duits, 2008;Thorne, 1993).…”

“…Importantly, friends often performed intimacy with one another in front of other students, by whispering to each other or making up secret languages. This served to both affirm their chosen friendships and exclude others (Corsaro, 2018; Zhu, 2022). In doing so, the girls endowed emotional sharing with a more exclusionary meaning.…”