The Unintended Consequences of Chinese Citizenship Education: Findings from a Nationwide Survey

• In Event: 1552 - Section on Asia and Asian America Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 min): Table 6: Education in East Asia

Abstract

How effective is citizenship education in authoritarian states? For decades, the primary message of Chinese citizenship education has been that good citizens obey and adore the Chinese Communist Party. It promotes a very passive understanding of citizenship. Yet the curriculum also contains other messages, and these messages are the ones that Chinese citizens are absorbing. In the process, they are arriving at more active definitions of good citizenship.

This study, based on a nationwide survey (N=1404), reveals that those who receive Chinese citizenship education do not absorb it wholesale, but pick and choose among its multiple messages to find the narrative that suits them the best. Those with lower levels of education see supporting the Communist Party as the highest form of good citizenship. However, they do not believe that cadres who serve in the party-state bureaucracy are better people than themselves. Meanwhile, those who are exposed to the most citizenship education, citizens with university degrees, claim the message that good citizens are those who are technologically advanced, critical, innovative, and globally competitive. These kinds of “high quality” citizens hold view which allow them to mobilize to push back against the state and organize to solve social problems on their own. In both cases, citizens gravitate to the definition of good citizenship that they can achieve more easily, the one that allows them to see themselves as good citizens.

Authors

• Carolyn L. Hsu, Colgate University

• Reza Hasmath, University of Alberta

• Jennifer YJ Hsu, University of New South Wales