This dissertation has three intertwined aims. First, to elucidate (and defend) Weberian modernity as drastic transformations in peoples’ conceptions of normativity, which radically breaks with the past (Chapter 1), thereby illuminating how contemporary moral educational focuses in China function as a “pre-modernist” response to the effects of modernity (Chapter 2). Second, to understand how historical developments of Chinese modernity motivated mass educational migration (Chapter 3), thus identifying how top-down decisions to modernise inspired and sustained perhaps unexpected pluralistic perspectives on the Chinese nation-state (Chapter 4). Third, to examine the lived experiences of pupils within the Chinese schooling system, motivating anthropologists to rethink the “individual subject” in practical and theoretical contexts as actor (Chapter 5) and knower (Chapter 6) alike.

The title of the dissertation, “norms” and “reasons,” derive from these three related aims. I propose to understand modernity as a reversal in the direction of normative fit; while I hope to reconceptualise what it means for the individual to be the locus of both practical and theoretical reasoning qua actor and knower respectively. To these ends, I undertook ethnographic investigations of the educational paradigm within China, as well as into the effects of studying abroad on informants from China who have since left. I relied heavily on historical arguments regarding China’s transformation and development—both material and abstract—since its encounter with Western powers in the mid-1800s. Throughout this dissertation, I drew generously from philosophical discussions in epistemology, action theory, and moral philosophy to make sense of the ethnography.