Red Boat Spirit and Social Entrepreneurship Education in China

Abstract

Economic development and community revitalization can benefit from youth entrepreneurship; however, insufficient guidance for youths may weaken this beneficial effect. The Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China organized entrepreneurship events in China’s tertiary education institutes. With the aim of helping youths at university to clearly perceive social–entrepreneurship value and steadily form moral business motives, events were guided by the core of the Red Boat Spirit (RBS) and through the specific program Youth Red Dream Building Journey (YRDBJ). Youths have been part of the nation’s evolution via their contributions to various fields, including initiatives to improve the appearance of the countryside; modern innovations in agriculture; providing health and medicine supplies to alleviate poverty; and the cultural spread of RBS. Ten million university students have joined the program since 2017. Incorporating RBS and Social Entrepreneurship Education (SEE) into the special Ideological and Political Education (IPE) in China’s tertiary education, the program, YRDBJ, significantly influenced the Chinese youth in terms of social entrepreneurship at university. With this analytical approach, this study employed Marxist theories to analyze the relevant theoretical literature on entrepreneurship in order to discover the mechanism underlying the success of the program. This paper reveals the theoretical framework of YRDBJ and analyzes the factors that favorably formed the framework; moreover, it also proposes a new conceptual model bound with YRDBJ, which enriches the theoretical development of IPE and SEE. This paper also notes the limitations of YRDBJ and subjects it to scrutiny; then, we provide new ideas to improve the relationship between SEE and YRDBJ.