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The Individualized, Passive yet Patriotic Citizens: Chinese High School Students’ Perspectives of Good Citizens

Mon, April 15, 3:15 to 4:45pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview B

Proposal

Citizenship education has been discussed a lot by educators and education systems around the world for many years, aiming to solve social issues happening in different societies. There is no doubt that the concepts of citizenship and citizenship education vary from one society to another. This paper mainly pays attention to Chinese high school students’ understanding of good citizens by using interviews data from an ethnography study. By constructing six types of citizens from citizenship theory and students’ perspectives, this research reveals students’ mindset of citizens- individualized, passive yet patriotic. It also shows the missing piece in Chinese students’ understanding of citizens, that is, being active to claim their rights and to have collective actions to pursue social justice.
Philosophers, historians, political scientists, and sociologists have long discussed the conceptions of citizenship. An influential debate is between the liberal scholars and the republican scholars. For liberal scholars, citizenship is a “passive” or “private citizenship” without any requirement of obligation for citizens to participate in public life (see Kymlicka & Norman, 1994; Walzer, 1970). While the republicanism inspired by Machiavelli and Rousseau advocates “active citizens” who would like to actively participate in political life (see Oldfield, 1990). Despite the ideal of liberal citizen and republican citizen (or passive citizen or active citizen), Westheimer and Kahne (2004) propose another three kinds of citizen (personally responsible, participatory, and justice-oriented), adding insights to the discussion by integrating critical theory’s emphasis on social critique and structural change into the concept of citizenship.
Although China has different social contexts with the westerns where the citizenship theories mainly come from, the discussions of liberal/republican, passive/active, or personally responsible/participatory/ justice-oriented citizens still offer insights to understand Chinese citizenship because citizenship itself is a term to describe the relationship between individuals, community, and their state. The particular framework that I develop in this paper is much based on these western concepts. But I consider the context of Chinese society at the same time.

Methods
The data presented in this paper is a part of a five-months ethnography study of two high schools in China that aimed to investigate the dynamic interactions between the state, teachers, and students in the curriculum relating to citizenship education. This paper just analyzes a part of interview data from 24 students with seven in one high school and 17 in another high school. These students were recruited from three home classes in which I conducted my fieldwork based on their volunteer wiliness and their parents’ consent. Their interviews lasted from 30 minutes to 60 minutes. Through initially analyzing students’ answers to a question: do you think what kind of people can be counted as good citizens, several themes came out: obeying the law, loving the country, and performing civility. By further investigating these themes and combining current citizenship theory, I identify six types of good citizenship which can help to make sense of Chinese citizenship.

Findings
The framework for Chinese citizens includes two dimensions. One dimension is divided by whether citizens concern individual interests, or the good of the community/society, or the state interests. They are named as the personal-oriented citizenship, the community-oriented citizenship, and the state-oriented citizenship. These three categories are not exactly excluded from each other because a citizen can concern the interests of personal, community and state at the same time. Another dimension is to describe whether the behavior is passive or active, behaving without taking too much efforts or taking active actions to make a change. The following is the six types of citizen:
Type I: The Passive Personal-oriented Citizens
• Obeying the law for self-protection; practicing rights in the law; performing responsibilities.
Type II: The Active Personal-oriented Citizens
• Claiming rights; participating in politics for self-interests.
Type III: The Passive Community/society-oriented Citizens
• Obeying the law for the good of the community; performing civility.
Type IV: The Active Community/society-oriented Citizens
• Showing empathy to other people and helping others; engaging civic affairs for the good of the community; caring for social justice and challenging social structure.
Type V: The Passive State-oriented Citizens
• Doing one’s duty; not harming the state interests.
Type VI: The Active State-oriented Citizens
• Performing civility to maintain the good image of the state; protecting the country’s interests; sacrificing individual’s interests for the state interests.

From students’ interview, these Chinese students’ understandings of good citizens mainly situate at the types of the passive personal-oriented citizens, the passive community-oriented citizens, the passive state-oriented citizens, and the active state-oriented citizens (or patriotic citizens). Three characteristics are remarkable to describe their thinking of citizenship, that is, individualized, passive yet patriotic. They valued civil rights and recognized the importance of political rights for protecting their own interests; but passively engaged in the public affairs. Nevertheless, many of them felt patriotic toward China. The individualized thinking of citizenship highly relates to the individualization of Chinese society (Yan, 2009). And it’s not a surprise that students think good citizen in a passive type, because to be active is not an easy thing, needing many individual efforts and environment supports. Particularly in China, there are many systematic difficulties to participate into politics. For the thinking of good citizens as patriotic citizens, it is much influenced by the party state and the popular discourse in the official media, which is also revealed in my fieldwork.
The six types of citizens which I develop here offer a framework to think about Chinese citizenship. Some studies reveal that the party state wants to promote socialist citizens who support the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist ideology (Law, 2011; Li, Zhong, Lin, & Zhang, 2004). But Chinese students’ thinking of citizens is few examined. This study fills the gap and shows the individualized, passive yet patriotic characteristics in students’ understanding of good citizens, which is richer than the official discourse. In addition, it reminds practitioners to be aware of the missing piece in students’ mindsets of citizenship, that is, being active to claim their rights and to have collective actions to pursue social justice.

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