Can civic education foster regime-supporting citizens? A comparative study between Mainland China and Hong Kong students’ political attitude and participation.

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Critical analyses of civic education and young people's sense of citizenship, civic attitudes, and participation

Proposal

This study aims to understand civic education in a non-democratic context by comparing Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong secondary students’ political attitude and intentions for future civic participation. This study adopts a quantitative and comparative methodology. There are three Research Questions. (1) What are Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong students’ intentions for future civic participation, and what, if any, are the differences between the two groups of students? (2) How strong are Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong students’ levels of political trust and political efficacy and what, if any, are the differences between the two groups of students? and (3) To what extent students political attitude and behaviors meet the expectation of civic education policy in each regime? Political efficacy and political trust are the indicators of political attitudes. Civic participation examined in this study includes both conventional participation (legal protest, electoral participation and community participation) and unconventional participation (illegal protest). Previous studies on political attitudes and civic participation have been mainly based on democratic regimes. Studies have seldom been conducted in the authoritarian or hybrid regime, such as China and Hong Kong. This study aims to fill in this gap. This study utilizes secondary data analysis with large samples. Hong Kong dataset comes from ICCS 2009 with sample size 2902 and Mainland China dataset are from CCCS 2014 with sample size 1864. This study adopts a combination of variable-centered approach and person-centered approach for data analysis.The variable-centred approach can illustrate the similarities and differences between Mainland Chinese and Hong Kong students. Students from both societies showed a weak endorsement in illegal protest but a strong endorsement in conventional participation. Mainland Chinese students demonstrated a more positive political attitude than their Hong Kong counterparts with higher political trust and political efficacy. In addition, Mainland Chinese students showed stronger endorsement of conventional participation, such as voting in the local election and contacting political representative than their Hong Kong counterparts. The Person-centered approach can identify the heterogeneity within the population. Students were clustered into four groups (Alienated-Radical Participators, Supportive-Active Participators, Loyal-Minimal Participators and Critical-Active Participators) based on their political attitudes and intentions for future participation. Results suggest that Hong Kong had more Alienated-Radical Participators while Mainland China had more Supportive-Active Participators. The regime has its preference on the type of citizens to be cultivated and the values to be passed. The preference of ‘ideal citizen’ can be reflected in its civic education policy. By analyzing students’ political attitudes and intentions for civic participation, this study can provide some implications on evaluating to what extent civic education policy fulfill the expectation of the regime in both Mainland China and Hong Kong. Civic education in Mainland China aims to foster citizen’s loyalty and support towards the regime. This purpose has been achieved to a large extent since Chinese students developed a high level of trust toward the regime. In addition, Chinese students were more inclined to regime-supporting participation but reluctant to regime-challenging participation, which meets the expectation of the regime. In contrast, civic education in Hong Kong seems to fall to meet the expectation of the regime. The ruling authorities in Hong Kong adopted a depoliticized civic education policy to maintain social stability and attempted to foster national identity among students. However, Hong Kong students illustrated a relatively low political trust towards national political institutions. Moreover, a noticeable amount of Hong Kong students were inclined to radical participation, which is regime-challenging in nature.

Author

• Yiping Wang, The Education University of Hong Kong