This second season of the Asian Education Podcast features conversations with various contributors to a special issue of the journal Comparative Education on the theme of ‘The Politics of Education on China’s Periphery’. The special issue is devoted primarily to analysis of peripheralised communities on the geographical margins of China - in places like Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. But we’re also talking more generally about those who find themselves on China’s social and cultural margins. For example, we have one article in our collection (by Wan Yi and Edward Vickers) that looks at aspects of educational policy and practice relating to rural migrants and their children.
In this first episode, Edward Vickers, co-editor of this special issue is joined by Gairan Pamei for a discussion with Chen Sicong, the special issue’s other co-editor.
As recently as the 1970s, China was governing by a regime that explicitly dismissed many aspects of Chinese traditional culture in the name of ‘revolution’. But today, the same Communist Party regime portrays what is now termed ‘excellent traditional Chinese culture’ as central to its political legitimacy. Chen Sicong’s article for the special issue helps us understand this ideological transformation and its implications for education, and especially for teaching about citizenship.
Sicong writes very critically of the worldwide tendency over recent decades - enthusiastically embraced by many in China - to portray politics as an outgrowth of essentialised ‘cultures’. We begin by discussing why this ‘cultural turn’ has occurred, not just in China but worldwide.
With more specific reference to the Chinese situation, we then discuss why the Communist Party has become significantly keener since the 1990s on associating itself with traditional culture. We examine what aspects of Chinese ‘tradition’ have been selected by the regime for special emphasis, and why. And we ask whether (or how far) the ‘culturalisation of politics’ in China has been influenced by the ‘cultural turn’ in Western public and academic discourse.
The culturalisation of politics in China did not begin under Xi Jinping, but it has significantly intensified since his assumption of the leadership in 2012. We spend some time discussing what has changed under Xi, and the extent to which the Xi era has witnessed a significant ideological break with what came before. Here we reflect on the meaning of ‘socialism’, noting that in Asian contexts (including modern India as well as contemporary China), dominant interpretations of the concept tend to have emphasised a modernising, statist agenda, rather than prioritising the pursuit of social equality.
This leads us into a consideration of the content and meaning of ‘Xi Jinping Thought’, and its representation in China’s school curriculum. How does this draw on or interpret ideas about Chinese culture or tradition? And how is this related to Xi's signature concept, 'The Chinese Dream of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation'?
Attempts to associate the Communist Party with a particular vision of Chinese ‘tradition’ inevitably involve a drive to impose a very particular conception of ‘Chinese’ identity. Sicong argues that the idea of 'Chineseness' underpinning the Xi Jinping Thought curriculum conflates cultural with racial identity. He stresses that grasping the relationship between culture, race and national identity is key to understanding official and popular discourse on nationhood and nationalism in China today.
We briefly consider what the culturalisation of politics in China today implies for the management of relations between the dominant Han population of urban, 'Inner China', and peripheralised regions or peoples. This is a question that is central to many of the papers in the Comparative Education special issue, and one to which we will return in subsequent episodes of the podcast.
In his paper, Sicong writes that 'the culturalist and reductionist construction of politics is liable to confuse Western progressives and deflect international criticism of the CCP, given the pronounced cultural turn of postmodern and 'decolonial' scholarship in the West'. We conclude this episode by discussing the dangers of this sort of reductionism, and its relationship to the failure of much scholarship in the field of educational studies to take a properly critical approach to the analysis of education in Chinese societies.
Sicong Chen is Associate Professor of Citizenship Education at the Department of Education, Kyushu University, Japan. His research focuses on the policy, practice and politics of citizenship education in China, Japan and other East Asian societies. He is the author of The Meaning of Citizenship in Contemporary Chinese Society (Springer, 2018). He has also published articles on global citizenship education and education for social justice.
Readings:
- Chen Sicong. 2023. ‘The culturalisation of politics in contemporary Chinese citizenship education’, Comparative Education, 60 (1), DOI: 10.1080/03050068.2023.2209396
- Chen Sicong. 2023. ‘From confident subject to humble citizen: reimagining citizenship education in contemporary China’, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, DOI: 10.1080/01596306.2023.2230926
- Frank Dikötter. 1991. The Discourse of Race in Modern China. London: Hurst and Co.
