Educative legitimation and the nationalization of Chinese state paternalism

• In Event: Adopting socio-historical approaches towards understanding citizenship education in east Asia

Proposal

This paper examines citizenship education from the angle of its direction by the state with the intention of generating citizen attitudes supportive of the state’s legitimacy. The paper’s main purpose is to introduce and develop the concept of educative legitimation and show how educative legitimation on the part of a state contributes over time to broad changes in the ideas that constitute knowledge of the proper relationship between the state and citizens. To achieve this aim, the paper draws on and develops sociological neo-institutional theory.

Educative legitimation is defined as the activity entailing how organizations legitimate themselves by conforming simultaneously to multiple institutional logics—broad cultural rules in their social environments—while at the same time constructing and spreading knowledge of these logics and their integration to current and potential judges of legitimacy. To address this issue, the paper discusses the exemplary case of the Chinese state and how across the 20th century the state integrated the world-society institutional logic of the nation-state into the logic of paternalism, a highly institutionalized framework for state-society relations in the Chinese context.

Drawing on a scholarly recognition of underlying continuity between ancient philosophical and 20th century ideas of good governance in China, the logic of paternalism is defined in the paper as encompassing several dimensions. The paternalistic state is faithful to an orthodoxy of good governance, adhering to an ideology of proper state practice and relations between the state and people. The state is morally exemplary, with the expectation that social stability will best be achieved when the people emulate the morally upright character of the leader and officials. Not depending solely on people’s emulation of moral exemplars, the state also demonstrates its concern for the people’s spiritual livelihood through more direct means of moral education. The paternalistic state is also caring for people’s material livelihoods through various forms of direct and indirect protection of their economic well-being. Understanding the material and spiritual needs of the people requires paternalistic state personnel at all levels to be attentive to their needs and views. And to ensure the people play an active role in maintaining social stability and their own welfare, the state is actively encouraging of them fulfilling their responsibilities to the community.

An alternative formula for state-citizen relations is the world-society logic of the nation-state, a conceptual model of space and community also entailing a range of dimensions. The nation-state is conceived of as a bounded territorial community within a world society of similar entities. Boundaries demarcate the parameters of unimpeded economic activity and the reach of a common code of laws. Virtual boundaries also confer upon constituents an identity of “citizens” as opposed to “outsiders.” As citizens, the people enjoy collective sovereignty and are deemed equal in rights in and obligations to the national community. Citizens’ common identity, bolstered by the social construction of common cultural and linguistic characteristics, enhances collective rational, progress-oriented action.

The nation-state logic is posited in theories of nationalism as having originated as an 18th- and 19th-century social construction by European and North and South American intellectuals and political elites. From these origins, the standard nation-state conceptual model has diffused worldwide. It was therefore available for the newly established republican Chinese state in 1912 as a model for conceptualizing a bounded community of citizens as opposed to a universal empire of subjects, and concomitantly as a new way of conceiving of the relation between the state and citizens standing in judgment of state legitimacy.

To understand how the Chinese state simultaneously conformed to and continuously integrated these two logics in a way designed to spread this integrated knowledge to successive generations of citizens, the paper engages in discourse analysis of 250 government policy documents promulgated from 1670 to 2012 to manage the production and use of moral-political (citizenship) education curriculum and textbooks. The analysis focuses on revealing the effects of integrating the various dimensions of the two logics, constructing a “nationalized paternalism,” and how these discursive efforts contributed to state legitimation. The analysis finds that legitimation efforts have resulted in changes in both the logic of paternalism and the logic of the nation-state in the Chinese context, through their rationalization and qualitative elaboration, the management of contradictions between them, and a continuously changing discursive construction of a broad field of constituent citizens. The findings also show that these four effects accumulate over time into a densely constructed, integrated relationship between state identity and the field of legitimacy judging constituents.

The paper makes an original contribution to neo-institutional theory in its elaboration of the heretofore unexplored concept of educative legitimation. It also raises important questions about how the concept of “citizenship” has been translated in non-Western contexts through its integration with indigenous conceptions of the proper relationship between the state and its diverse constituents

Author

• Gregory Fairbrother, The Education University of Hong Kong