Book Reviews 701 wherein she draws a contrived parallel between some aspects of Cuba’s “domestic food economy” and “alternative food networks” like La Via Campesina. The most ethnographically grounded chapters in Everyday Moral Economies (chs. 3, 4, and 5) provide a thought-provoking analysis of the moral underpinnings of everyday economic practice in contemporary Cuba that merits reading. Unfortunately, the overall theoretical ar- mature of the book, as well as the data mobilized to support the argument presented, fall short of expectations so that, in the end, the reader is left feeling “empty handed,” much like the generic peasant portrayed on the book’s cover. Class Work: Vocational Schools and China’s Urban Youth by T. E. Woronov Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016. 200 pp. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12633 Minhua Ling The Chinese University of Hong Kong Class Work examines the political economy of China’s often-neglected vocational education system and its implied cultural politics of class formation. Combining subtle ethnography and insightful analysis, it offers an incisive cri- tique of the hegemony of human capital accumulation. Based on field research in two vocational schools in Nanjing, this book demonstrates that the high-stakes High School Entrance Examination (HSEE) serves as a water- shed mechanism of “class sorting” in contemporary China, channeling millions of youth, mostly of working-class back- grounds, to low-end service jobs via urban vocational sec- ondary schools. It points out that half of the Chinese middle- school graduates would fail in the HSEE by state design despite individual efforts. However, Chinese youth who at- tend vocational schools instead of academic high schools are deemed “both academic and moral failures” (p. 3) and blamed “for their own failed future possibilities” (p. 62) in public discourse. This book reveals in rich ethno- graphic details how such “individualized and depoliticized notions of social causality” (p. 63) conceal structural in- equality and (re)produce class division. It coins the notion of “numeric capital” to highlight the fetish of numbers in China’s exam-oriented education system and criticizes its underlying value system of equating young people’s exam scores with their academic achievement and social value at large. In the moral economy of “numeric capital,” it is the individuals, not the system that requires almost half of middle school students to fail, who have to shoulder the responsibility for their inferior positions in China’s hi- erarchical school system. Hence the ideology of “numeric capital” is “a moral system that supports a structural one” (p. 63) and plays a crucial role in the state’s class-sorting process. The ideology of “numeric capital” extends to vocational schools and shapes their curricular designs and teaching practices (ch. 3). The problem of “devocationalization” is found in the two vocational schools, which “skew their curricula away from practical courses and skills training toward theory and academic content to appease students and parents” (p. 76) because academic study is held as more desirable in the regime of “numeric capital.” Such theoretical orientations, nevertheless, discourage vocational school students from investing time and effort in schoolwork. The incongruence between curriculum and job prospects exasperates the students’ rueful yet rational behaviors of “wasting time” in the classroom. This reifies the stereotype of vocational school students being lazy and stupid and confirms their lack of “numeric capital” in the progressive future-oriented framework of human capital accumulation embraced by postreform China. Vocational school students’ experiences of internships and job markets (ch. 5) further illuminate how the nor- mative discourse of human capital accumulation renders these students, who have neither training nor awareness to make informed choices and present progressive life sto- ries, as deviant and inferior to middle-class norms. While it is true that employment opportunities in China’s grow- ing service economy are good for vocational students, the nature of available jobs is often “precarious, possibly short- term, likely dead-end” (pp. 114–115). Frequent “jumpings” from one entry-level job to another according to “short- term, instrumental logics” (p. 134) results in horizontal rather than vertical mobility, another way of class sorting that locks these youth “out of middle-class, white-collar jobs” (p. 135). While Woronov shows clearly that the class position of vocational school graduates lies in the lower echelon of urban China’s service economy, it remains unclear whether these students have distinct identity or class consciousness. Chapters 2 and 4 show social diversities among both schools’ students in terms of family background, place of origin and native dialect, and their fluid identities that defy singular categorization. These students from “rural, urban working class, and second-generation migrant families” (p. 23) interact with each other at school and form