Exploring China's education policies from the perspective of global citizenship education

• In Event: Is China up for its responsibilities to globalization? Exploring Chinese higher education policies, practices, and programs from critical perspectives

Proposal

Context and Purpose:
Rooted in, and emerging from, previous traditions of global education (GE), cosmopolitanism, development education or education for sustainable development (Tarozzi & Torres, 2016), global citizenship education (GCE) has become one of the major trends to respond to globalization (Jackson, 2016). GCE aims to be transformative, building the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that learners need to be able to contribute to a more inclusive, just and peaceful world(UNESCO, 2015a).
A feature of policy related research since 2015 has been the growing debates around the concept of global citizenship (DERC, 2018). As a part of Asia, China’s policies about GCE were studied (MGIEP, 2017). While China has made some progress in GCE during recent years, we cannot ignore the challenges. In this paper, I will systematically examine China’s development and education polices from the perspective of GCE through content analysis and text analysis.

Conceptual Framework:
In this paper, I draw upon Shultz (2007) and his three approaches of GCE: neoliberal, radical, transformative. According to Shultz (2007), the neoliberal GCE is based on the human capital theory, where education is considered as a means to build competencies to achieve individual or/and national economic prosperity. The radical GCE focuses on the “geographic North-South division”, and tries to cultivate global citizens that act against uneven globalization for their own interest. The transformative GCE focus on the socioeconomic division that cuts across nations and regions, and tries to cultivate global citizens that are able to link action at the local and global level to build authentic challenges to those forces that perpetuate oppression, poverty, and marginalization.

Methods:
In this paper, I employ content analysis and text analysis to study 18 policies since 2010, including policies of national development and policies of education. First, I explore how discourses related to GCE's are distributed in policy area. Second, descriptive statistics are made on the discourses in policy texts. Trying to answer which ideas of GCE have been integrated into China’s education policies and which are not. Third, I interpret these discourses and discuss the intent behind them from Shultz’s division of approaches within GCE.

Findings and Discussions:
Based on content analysis of the policies, this study gets the following two findings. First, National development policies (compared to education policies) and higher education policies (compared to basic education policies) put more emphasis on commitment to global responsibility. In the national opening up policies, “a community with a shared future for mankind”, “the People-to-people and Cultural Exchanges between China and Foreign Countries” and “the Belt and Road” are becoming popular. Second, some claims of GCE have been integrated into China’s education policies, such as International understanding education, Sustainable Development Education, intercultural dialogue and respect, critical thinking. However, in the overall education policy, they account for a small proportion and are not the main educational orientation. These claims directly serve the interests of the country, emphasizing the improvement of national competitiveness, and spreading Chinese culture, indirectly contributing to human development, for example, by emphasizing the individual's international competitiveness and regional activities. At last, I use Shultz’s division of approaches within GCE to further discuss the findings and talk about what kind of GCE we should put forward.

Author

• Denian Li, School of Public Affairs, Xiamen University, China