Human Rights Education in China: Contrasting Official History and Personal Narrative

• In Event: Human Rights and Democratic Citizenship in Education in International Contexts

Abstract

Purposes
In July 2011, the China Human Rights Action Plan (2009-2010) an official report by the State Council information office, claimed the Chinese government has “made remarkable achievements in promoting the cause of China’s human rights” (China Daily, 2011:.1). One way this is realized is through a human rights education (HRE) initiative, with knowledge about law and human rights incorporated into the 9-year compulsory school curriculum. Echoing Osler and Starkey’s (2010) observation that what passes for HRE in many policy documents is inadequate, this paper critically examines possibilities for HRE in China, drawing on textbook analysis and comparing the official national story with material drawn from life history.
Perspectives
Two perspectives guided this study. The first examines curriculum ideologies, defined by Eisner (2002: 47) as “beliefs about what schools should teach, for what ends, and for what reasons”. It has been argued that textbooks and other curriculum materials are sources of “official knowledge” (Apple, 2000) reflecting the values and interests of the most powerful (Banks, 2002). History textbooks, in particular, are crucial sites for explicit political socialization (Parker, 2010).
The other perspective advocates for the use of personal narratives as a HRE tool. Narratives have potential to reveal multiple and suppressed identities, address historical and contemporary inequalities, stimulate empathy and ignite change (Osler & Starkey, 2010; Osler & Zhu, 2011).
Methodology
For this study, I collected a personal life history from a Chinese citizen and his family. Then I selected two national standardized textbooks covering China’s contemporary history. A content analysis technique (Krippendorff, 2004) was employed to investigate the treatment of the same events in the different sources.
The textbooks and narrative analysis address the following questions: 1) How are key events in P.R.China’s history, such as Down to the Countryside movement and the Cultural Revolution, presented in the official textbooks and a Chinese citizen's life history? 2) What knowledge does the Chinese government wish students to absorb regarding these events? Do textbooks make reference to human rights as claimed in the government’s press release? 3) How does the narrative challenge the official history and provide alternative insights into events, specifically viewed through a human rights lens? 4) How might personal narratives support approaches to history teaching and learning which give learners a sense of agency and potential to transform society?
Findings
The personal narrative revealed a poignant story where severe human rights violations were linked to key events in P.R.China’s early history. The same period, however, is depicted in China’s official textbooks as part of a monolithic account of the nation’s laudable transformation from an old polity to a new socialist country. Personal l tragedies are underplayed or overlooked. The findings suggest that personal narratives offer a form of transformative knowledge, which both challenge and have the potential to transform the national metanarrative (Banks, 2002). They provide a significant tool which might be incorporated into the school curriculum to enable a learner-empowering approach to HRE in China and elsewhere.

Author

• Juanjuan Zhu, Utah State University