The “Two Ways” of Citizenship Education in China

Abstract

This chapter aims to analyze the “Chinese way” of citizenship education as a meeting place between the historical lessons of Confucianism, Marxist-Leninist socialist ideology, and newer concepts of global citizenship. Furthermore, this project seeks to understand how the model of education for “global” citizenship fits within the established system of ideological and moral education. To this end, research was carried out at three different levels. Firstly, a review of the most recent and “global” literature on education for citizenship was conducted. Secondly, public government documents were studied and compared, in particular, those from the Ministry of Education and the Association for Higher Education, which is supervised by the Chinese communist party and its General Secretary, President Xi Jinping. Thirdly, surveys were conducted to gauge the degree of involvement of students in their own citizenship education at high school and university level. Finally, a field study was conducted at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangdong province (Zhuhai campus).